represented him naked as a new-born infant, and painted his flesh red,
the colour of the living.
IV
The two forms of Hathor welcoming the dead are not each confined to the
province in which it was born. They gradually spread over the whole
country, not without experiencing diverse fortunes. Hathor in the tree
was reserved for papyri, stelæ, and bas-reliefs. The first idea was
scarcely suitable for statuary, and the cleverest sculptor would have
been embarrassed to derive a large tree from the stone, a goddess lost
in the branches, a person in prayer before the tree and before the
goddess. But it lent itself to painting, and some of the vignettes in
which it is expressed in the excellent copies of the “Book of the Dead”
or on the walls of the Theban hypogeums, show us the admirable way in
which the designers of the new empire used it. Nothing could be more
varied or skilful than the relations they establish between the woman
and the sycamore on the one hand and the dead person on the other. He
is sometimes accompanied by his soul, a big hawk with human head
and arms, which mimics his slightest gestures: while the _double_
receives the elixir of youth in his clasped hands, the soul turns a
runnel aside for his own benefit, and greedily drinks from it. Colour
adds its charm to the composition, and the replicas of the subject to
be seen at Cheîkh Abd-el-Gournah in the hypogeums of the XVIIIth and
XIXth Dynasties would obtain a place of honour in our museums, if it
was permitted to detach them and mount them in separate panels.
[Illustration: PETESOMTOUS AND THE COW HATHOR.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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