Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/279

Sculpture under the Second Theban Empire. 249 the desire to emulate with his chisel the great deeds of his royal master, and, in his ignorance, he has passed the limits which an art innocent of perspective cannot overleap without disaster. The persistent tendency towards slightness of proportion, which we have already noticed in speaking of the First Theban Empire, is even more conspicuous in the figures of these reliefs than in the royal statues (Figs. 13, 50, 53, 84, 165, and 175, Vol. I.). Neither in these historical bas-reliefs, nor in those of the tombs, do we ever encounter the short thickset figures which are so common in the Ancient Empire. In the paintings and bas-reliefs of Thebes this slenderness is more strongly marked in the women than in the men, and every- thing goes to prove that it was considered essential to beauty in the female sex. Goddesses and queens, dancing girls and hired musicians, all have the same elongated proportions. This propensity is more clearly seen perhaps in the pictures of the Almees and Gawasi of Ancient Egypt than anywhere else. Look, for instance, at our reproduction of a bas-relief in the Boulak Museum {Fig. 217). It represents a funeral dance to a sound of tambourines, accompanied in all probability by those apologetic songs, called Ophot by the Greeks, of which M. Maspero has translated so many curious fragments.^ All these women, who are practically naked in their long transparent robes, wear their hair in thick pendent tresses. Two young girls, quite nude, seem to regulate the time with castanets. A number of men, coming from the right, appear to reprove by their gestures the energetic motions of the women. This bas-relief is an isolated fragment, and without a date. It was found in the necropolis of Memphis and from its style Prisse ascribes it to the nineteenth dynasty, " a time when artists were mannered in their treatment of the female form, combining great softness of contour with an impossible slenderness of build. The execution is careless, but the movements and attitudes are truthful enough."- Our Plate XII. shows figures of the same general proportions, though rather better drawn. ^ Maspero, Etudes siir quelques Peintures Futieraires. Mariette, in describing this bas-relief {A^otice dii Mitsee, No. 903), observes that these funeral dances are still in vogue in most of the villages of Upper Eg-pt. The bas-reliefs from Sakkarah could not, however, as he says, render the piercing shrieks with which these dances are accompanied. ^ Prisse, Histoire de VArt Egyptien. Text, p. 418. This bas-relief has also been reproduced by Mariette, Monuments Divers, pi. 68. VOL. 11. K K