of Khouniatonou and his successors in company of a physician, certain
anatomical details that at the first glance we did not trouble
about--the depression of the temples, the obliquity of the eyes, the
contraction of the sides of the nostrils, the pinching of the mouth,
the attenuation of the neck--assume an etiological value that the
archæologist was far from suspecting. Dr. Baÿ, studying the faces of
Khouniatonou, Touatânkhamânou, and Harmhâbi with me, diagnosed symptoms
of consumption more or less advanced. If Khouniatonou died of the
disease when thirty years old, we need not be greatly surprised.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
The Louvre.]
I do not insist upon this kind of research, in which I am not
competent, and I leave it to the reader to decide if I have or have
not proved the identity of the person represented by our four heads
to be that of Khouniatonou, the heresiarch. One of them at least is a
masterpiece, and the others possess qualities that assure them a high
place in the estimation of connoisseurs, but to which of the great
Egyptian schools ought we to attribute them? We may hesitate between
two: the Theban, to which most of the artists who filled the royal
laboratories then belonged, and the Hermopolitan, in the province
of which was El-Amarna, the favourite residence of the sovereign.
It was certainly the latter school that worked at the hypogeums and
sculptured the pictures. We find in them its defects: harsh, rough
composition, a tendency to caricature the human form and to multiply
comic episodes; but also its good qualities: suppleness, movement,
life, freedom of execution. The few figures in alto-relievo that have
escaped destruction, those, for instance, that accompany two of the
large front stelæ, are of the same style as the bas-reliefs, but we
do not find in them any of the characteristics that we have noted as
proper to the monuments of the Louvre or to our Canopic jars. Just
as the others show an unfinished, worn aspect, these are carefully
finished in the least details: it is the perfect chiselling and high
polish of the Theban masters and their strong, dignified way of posing
the figure and expressing the physiognomy of the model. Whoever has
seen the statues of Thoutmôsis III, Amenôthes II, the so-called Taîa,
and Touatânkhamânou in the Cairo Museum will not doubt for a moment
that our four heads are from the hands of persons belonging to the same
school: they belong to the Theban school, and more particularly, I
think, to that portion of the Theban school which, a few years later,
decorated the temple of Gournah, the Memnonium of Abydos, and the
hypogeum of Setouî I.
[Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU.
Fragment of a stone statue. The Louvre.]
XIV
A HEAD OF THE PHARAOH HARMHABI
(_Boulaq Museum_)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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