although opposed by experts who had a longer experience, disconcerted
the majority. It was soon upset by facts, but, as often happens, the
consequences deduced from it survived by force of habit. Many of us
feared for some years after to be asserting too much, to declare openly
that our Mycerinus was what we had entitled him on the faith of his
inscription, the real Mycerinus.
[Illustration: THE MYCERINUS OF MÎT-RAHINEH.
Diorite. Cairo Museum.]
[Illustration: MYCERINUS (REISNER HEAD)
Alabaster. Cairo Museum.]
We did not do so until 1908, when Reisner and his Americans, excavating
at Gizeh round about the third pyramid, brought to light monuments that
with the best will in the world no one could assign to any other epoch
than that of Mycerinus. It seems that the fame of piety which popular
story ascribed to him was not wholly unmerited, at least as far as
his own divinity is concerned, for with the elements of a voluminous
funerary equipment in all kinds of stones, the workmen brought out
of the ruins of the chapel, fragments of a multitude of statues in
alabaster, schist, limestone, and rare breccia. Among them were some
unfinished or scarcely shaped out, for the sovereign having died while
they were being fashioned, the works, according to Oriental custom, had
been immediately interrupted and the workshops abandoned in confusion.
The statues which were already finished and set up in their places were
overturned at some unknown period, perhaps when Saladin dismantled
the pyramids to build the new ramparts and citadel of Cairo, and the
fragments were so ill-treated that an enormous number of them have
disappeared. Out of a hundred baskets of debris collected by the
Americans, they found at most, besides five or six intact heads, enough
to put together, almost completely, two alabaster statues. The best of
the heads is in the Cairo Museum, and it has sufficient resemblance to
our statuette for us to have no hesitation in recognizing Mycerinus,
even if the place whence it comes did not help us to guess it. The
statue that the find brought us is seated, but the block on which
it is sculptured is not perpendicular to its base, so that it leans
slightly backward. On the other hand, the two arms being cut between
the armpit and the hip, the accident makes it appear at first glance
as if the bust is too narrow for its height. But, and this is the
important point, the head is small, so small that the head-dress, in
spite of its size, is not sufficient to correct the bad effect of this
disproportion between its smallness and the amplitude of the shoulders.
The fault is not to be ascribed to the artist’s ignorance and lack of
skill, as is probably done. He was not, it must be admitted, a man of
talent, but he knew his business, and proved it by the general quality
of his work. The harmony between the trunk and the leg, the muscles
of the chest, the texture of the costume, the modelling of the knee
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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