Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/94

 ']2 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, The first travellers who visited Egypt in modern times were struck wath the colossal size of some buildings and of a few monoliths, and jumped to the conclusion that the Egyptians were peculiarly skilled in mechanics and engineering. They declared, and it has been often repeated, that this people possessed secrets which were afterwards lost ; that many an Archimedes flourished among them W'ho excelled his Syracusan successor. All this was a pure illusion. Their only machines seem to have been levers and perhaps a kind of elementary crane. ^ The whole secret of the Egyptians consisted in their unlimited command of individual labour, and in the unflinching way in which they made use of it. Multitudes were employed upon a single building, and kept to their work by the rod of the overseer until it was finished. The great monoliths were placed upon rafts at the foot of the mountains in which they were quarried, and floated during the inundation by river and canal to a point as near as possible to their destined sites. They were then placed upon sledges to which hundreds of men w^ere harnessed, and dragged over a w^ell-oiled wooden causeway to their allotted places. Fig. 43, which is taken from a hypogeum of the twelfth dynasty, gives an excellent idea of the way in which these masses of granite w^ere transported. In this picture we see one hundred and seventy-two men arranged in pairs and, to use a military term, in four columns, dragging the sledge of a huge seated colossus by four ropes. ^ This colossus must have been about twenty-six feet high, if the pictured proportions between the statue and its convoy may be taken as approaching the truth. Upon the pedestal stands a man, who pours water upon the planks so that they shall not catch fire from the friction of so great a mass.-*^ The engineer, who presides over the whole operation, stands upright upon the knees of the statue and " marks time " w^ith his hands. At the side of the statue walk men carrying instruments of various kinds, overseers armed with rattans, and relays of men to take the place of those who may fall out of the ranks from 1 Wn.KiNSON, Manners and Customs, etc., vol. ii. p. 309. In speaking of the pyramids Herodotus mentions what seems to have been a kind of crane, but he gives us no information as to its principle or arrangement (ii. 125). •^ The painting in question dates from the reign of Ousourtesen II. and was found at El-Bercheh, a short distance above the ruins of Antinoe. 2 The position of this man and the general probabilities of the case suggest perhaps, that his jar contains oil rather than water. — Ed.