Читать книгу The Art in Ancient Egypt - Perrot Georges - Страница 35
Оглавление§ 1. The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture.
The most ancient monuments which have yet been discovered in Egypt are the tombs; they have therefore a right to the first place in our sketch of Egyptian architecture.
In every country the forms and characteristics of the sepulchre are determined by the ideas of the natives as to the fate of their bodies and souls after life is over. In order to understand the Egyptian arrangements, we must begin then by inquiring into their notions upon death and its consequences; we must ask whether they believed in another life, and in what kind of life. We shall find a complete answer to our question in the collation of written texts with figured monuments.
In the first period of his intellectual development, man is unable to comprehend any life but that which he experiences in his own person. He is as yet unable to observe, to analyse or to generalize. He does not perceive the characteristics which distinguish him from things about him, and he sees nothing in nature but a repetition of himself. He is therefore incapable of distinguishing between life such as he leads it and mere existence. He dreams of no other way of being than his own. As such is the tendency of his intellect, nothing could be more natural or more logical than the conception to which it leads him in presence of the problem offered to him every time that a corpse descends into the grave. M. Maspero has so thoroughly understood the originality of the solution adopted by the Egyptians that we cannot do better, in attempting to explain the hypothesis, at once gross and subtle, to which they had recourse for consolation, than borrow his rendering of the texts which throw light upon this subject, together with some of the reflections which those texts suggested to him.[114]
J. Sulpis del. et sc.
SETI I
BAS-RELIEF AT ABYDOS
Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a long course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they became more capable of philosophic speculation the Egyptians modified their definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon another; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination.
We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of the Egyptian intellect to the subtle analysis of M. Maspero. That historian has applied himself to the apprehension of every delicate shade of meaning in a system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and illustrations he enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague notions, and how he managed to harmonize ideas which seem to us inconsistent.
We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word bâi,[115] which has been translated soul, nor the distinction between it and khou, luminousness, which the soul seems to have enveloped like a garment. We shall not follow the soul and its internal light in its subterranean journey across Ament, the Egyptian Hades, to which it entered by a cleft, Pega, to the west of Abydos, which was the only portal to the kingdom of the shades; nor shall we accompany them in the successive transformations which made them acquainted with every corner of the earth and sky in the infinite series of their becomes (to use the Egyptian expression); what we have to do is to trace out the most ancient of their religious conceptions, the conception which, like the first teachings of infancy, was so deeply engraved upon the soul and intellect of the race as to exercise a much stronger influence than the later more abstract and more philosophical theories, which were superimposed upon it. In this primitive conception we ought to find the determining cause of the Egyptian form of tomb. Its constitution was already settled in the time of the ancient Empire, and, from the Memphite dynasties until the end, it remained unchanged in principle. In this constitution we shall find embodied the essential idea adopted by the Egyptians when they first attempted to find some eternal element in man, or, at least, some element which should resist the annihilation of death for a period much longer than the few days which make up our mortal life.
The Egyptians called that which does not perish as the dying man draws his last sigh, the ka, a term which M. Maspero has rendered as the double. "This double was a duplicate of the body in a matter less dense than that of the body, a projection, coloured but aërial, of the individual, reproducing him feature for feature, a child if coming from a child, a woman if from a woman, and a man if from a man."[116]
This double had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days, brought them to the threshold of the good dwelling or the eternal dwelling, which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost godlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of his ungrateful posterity.[118]
This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The double of the Egyptian sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the εἴδωλον[119] of the Greeks and the umbra of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.[122] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to associate them with its prosperity![123]
These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, La Cité antique.[124]
