have so personal a note that we should be wrong to imagine they could
be anything but a sincere, almost a brutal likeness. The two Chephrên
of the Cairo Museum were not long ago alone in suggesting to us the
conviction that the Memphian times yielded nothing in this matter of
resemblance to ages farther removed from us; the recent discovery of
ten statues of Mycerinus prevents any further doubt.
Most of them have not left Egypt. The first that came to us was
acquired by purchase in 1888, with four statuettes of Naousirrîya,
of Mankahorou, of Chephrên, and perhaps of Cheops. According to the
information collected at the time by Grébaut, they were found together,
two or three weeks before, by fellahs of Mît-Rahineh under the ruins of
a little brick building situated at the east of what was formerly the
sacred lake of the temple of Phtah at Memphis. That was certainly not
their original place; they had probably each adorned first the funerary
chapel annexed to the pyramid of its sovereign: their transference to
the town and their reunion in the place where they were discovered are
not earlier than the reign of the last Saïtes or the first Ptolemies.
It was then, in fact, that hatred of foreign domination having exalted
the love of all that was peculiarly Egyptian in the eyes of the people,
reverence for the glorious Pharaohs of former ages revived: their
priesthoods were reorganized, and they again received the worship
to which centuries of neglect had disaccustomed them. None of our
figures are life-size, and the Mycerinus in diorite, which is not one
of the smallest, is scarcely 21⅛ inches in height. It is enthroned
on a cubical block with the impassibility that the Chephrên has made
familiar to us; the bust is stiff, the arms rest on the thighs, he
looks straight before him, his face expressionless, as was imposed on
Pharaoh by etiquette, while the crowd of courtiers and vassals filed
past at his feet: if his name, engraved on the sides of his seat to the
right and left of his legs, had not told who he was, we should have
guessed it from his bearing. The composition, although not the best
imaginable, is good: but the head makes a poor effect in relation to
the torso, a defect always at first ascribed to the heedlessness of the
sculptor. But it is to be noted that the face somewhat recalled that of
two of the other Pharaohs, a fact to be explained by the relationship,
the second, Chephrên, being the father of Mycerinus, and the third,
probably Cheops, his grandfather. That is a reason for presuming
that they are portraits, but are they authentic portraits? Several
Berlin Egyptologists whose natural ingenuity encouraged them to revise
Mariette’s criticisms on art, thought to discern in certain details of
the costume and ornamentation a proof that if they were not figures
of pure imagination, they were at least copies of ancient originals
freely executed under one of the Saïte Dynasties, and their theory,
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