I will say nothing of the rubbish of his own fabrication. The types
are already those of present-day Egypt, and we could easily swear that
most of them were manufactured for sale to the fellahs, at most, twenty
years ago: earrings in the form of pendants or oblong rings, to the
lower part of which eight or ten metal beads are soldered in bunches;
rings with flat bezels, ornamented or left plain for a name to be
engraved; bracelets formed of a simple reed of silver foil, thinned at
each end and covered with a network of lozenges fixed by two or three
marks hollowed out by the chisel and lacking elegance, the ends, cut
off straight, nearly meet when the piece is finished, but they do not
join, and so facilitate the putting of the bracelet on the wrist. It
is the honest work of a man who did not spare his material, but only
knew just enough of his craft to please easily satisfied customers;
the taste of the good people of Bubastis who bought these things was
not of a discriminating sort, or they may have found their market only
in the people’s quarters. There are much better things of the kind in
the Cairo Museum, and if the new-found treasure had only yielded such
objects, it would have been at once despatched to the _salle de vente_
for the delight of tourists.
The contrast is striking as soon as we pass to what comes down from
the Pharaonic age. Not that it can be placed among the best we know
in that kind. The age of Ramses II is already marked by a less sure
taste than that of the ages that preceded it, and I cannot compare it
with the Dahchour objects nor with those of Queen Ahhotpou. One of the
necklaces is the common breastplate of five rows of little tubes in
stone and enamel, decorated with a fringe of gold egg-shaped ornaments
encrusted with coloured stone. Another necklace, also of gold, with its
eight rows of bottle-shaped pendants hanging to little chains of tiny
beads, would be somewhat out of keeping with the others if that was
its original form, but the parts had been separated, and we remounted
them ourselves in order to preserve them with less risk of loss. Five
lenticular earrings are formed of two convex gold pellicles closed at
the circumference and joined by a border of filigree, stamped in the
centre with a rosette, the leaves of which are grouped round a gold
or enamel button; a gold tube soldered to the inside and grooved in
the furrow of a screw passed through the lobe, and was fastened to an
invisible button which, pressed against the flesh, kept the jewel in
its place. There was also a bracelet in minute particles of metal and
enamel, like those of Ahhotpou and the princesses of Dahchour, but only
the clasp has come down to us, a sliding clasp of a most primitive
character, with no value except for the gold. The best thing in the
series was undoubtedly the pair of gold and lapis lazuli bracelets on
which may be read the cartouche name Ousimares--Osymandyas--of Ramses
II.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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