Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/200

176 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. repeated, and that only in the debased periods of art. On the other hand, the obeHsks proper seem to have been made in truly astonishing numbers in the time of the Middle and New Empires. Egypt has supplied Rome, Constantinople, Paris, London, and even New York with these monoliths, and yet she still possesses many at home. Of these several are still standing and in good preservation, others are broken and buried beneath the ruins of the temples which they adorned. At Karnak alone the sites of some ten or twelve have been found. Some of these are still standing, some are lying on the ground, while of others nothing is left but the pedestals. At the beginning of the century the French visitors to the ruins of San, the ancient Tanis, found the fracjments of nine different obelisks.^ ^11. TJie Profession of Arcliitect. It may seem to some of our readers that we have spent too much time and labour on our analysis of Egyptian architecture. Our excuse lies in the fact that architecture was the chief of the arts in Egypt. We know nothing of her painters. The pictures in the Theban tombs often display great taste and skill, but they seem to have been the work of decorators rather than of painters in the higher sense of the word. Sculptors appear, now and then, to have been held in hicrher consideration. The names of one or two have come down to us, and we are told how dear the}^ were to the kings who employed them.^ But the only artists who had a high and well defined social position in ancient Egypt, a country where ranks were as distinctly marked as in China, were the architects or engineers, for they deserve either name. Their ^ Descriptio7i, Aniiq?iitcs, ch. 23. — M. Edouard Naville has recently (June 16, 18S2) published in the Journal de Geneve an account of a visit to these ruins, during which he counted the fragments of no less than fourteen obelisks, some of them of extraordinary size. — Ed. 2 The sculptor who made the two famous colossi of Amenophis III. had the same name as his master, Amenhotep. (Brugsch, History, ist edition, vol. i. pp. 425-6). Iritesen, who worked for Menthouthotep II. in the time of the first Theban Empire, was a worker in stone, gold, silver, ivory, and ebony. He held a place, he tells us, at the bottom of the king's heart, and was his joy from morning till night. (Maspero, la Stele C. 14 du Loiivfe, in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archceology, vol. v. part ii. 1877.)