Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/440

 404 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, people and their physical surroundings. Every element of which the national genius made use was indigenous ; nowhere else can the fruit be so easily traced to the seed, and the natural forces observed which developed the one from the other. Another point of attraction in the study of Egyptian art is that extreme antiquity which carries us back, without losing the thread of the story, to a period when other races are still in the impene- trable darkness of prehistoric times. A glance into so remote a past affords us a pleasure not unmingled with fright and bewilder- ment. Our feelings are like those of the Alpine traveller, who, standing upon some lofty summit, leans over the abyss at his feet and lets his eye wander for a moment over the immeasurable depths, in which forests and mountain streams can be dimly made out throuorh mist and shadow. Long before the earliest centuries of which other nations have preserved any tradition, Egypt, as she appears to us in her first creations, already possesses an art so advanced that it seems the end rather than the beginning of a long development. The bas- reliefs and statues which have been found in the tombs and pyramids of Meidoum, of Sakkarah and of Gizeh, are perhaps the masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture, and, as Ampere says, "the pyramid of Cheops is of all human monuments the oldest, the simplest, and the greatest." The work of the Eirst Theban Empire is no less astonishing. " Twenty-five centuries before our era, the kings of Egypt carried out works of public utility, which can only be compared, for scale and ability, to the Suez Canal and the Mont Cenis Tunnel. In the thirteenth century B.C., towards the presumed epoch of the Exodus and the Trojan war, while Greece was still In a condition similar to that of modern Albania, namely, divided up Into many small hostile clans, five centuries before Rome existed even in name, Egypt had arrived at the point reached by the Romans under Ca^^sar and the Antonines ; she carried on a continual struggle against the barbarians who, after being beaten and driven back for centuries, were at last endeavouring to cross all her frontiers at once." ^ The princes, whose achievements were sung by Pentaour, the Egyptian Homer, had artists In their service as great as those of ^ Rhone, L' Egypte Antique, extinct from I: Art A/wien a V Exposition de 1878,