Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/313

The Prinxipal Themes of Egyptian Sculpture. 28 name is an unhappy one, because they have nothing in common with a sphinx but the position. They are rams and nothing else. The Greek word acfitj^ is feminine. The sphinx with female breasts is, however, very rare in Egypt. Wilkinson only knew of one, in which the Queen Mut-neter of the eighteenth dynasty was represented.^ The Egyptians were not content with confusing the figures of men and animals in their images of the gods, they combined those of quadrupeds and birds in the same fashion. Thus we some- tim^es find wings upon the backs of gazelles and antelopes, and now and then a curious animal compounded of a hawk's head and a nondescript body (Fig. 239). Whether such fantastic quad- rupeds were consciously and deliberately invented by the Egyptian Fig. 23S. — Sphinx with human hands. Bas-relief; from Prisse. artists or not, we have no means of deciding. In a period when there was none of that scientific culture which alone enables men to distinguish the possible from the impossible, they may well have believed in winored and bird-headed animals with four lees. For the Greeks of Homer's time, and even for their children's children, the chimera and his kindred were real. They knew where they lived, and they described their habits. In a picture at Beni- Hassan, these imaginary beasts are shown flying before the hunter, and mixed up with the undoubted denizens of the mountains and 1 Upon the significance of the sphinx and its difterent varieties, see Wilkinson, Manners and Customs, etc. vol. iii. pp. 308-312. Wilkinson brings together on a single plate (vol. ii. p. 93) all the fantastic animals invented by the Egyptians. See also Maspero, Memoire sur la Mosa'ique de Palestrine {Gazette Archeologique, 1879).