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Shemitic blood, suggests the ethnologist. I do not dare to decide
this question, hut I simply state the fact, that not only in Egypt hut
likewise in Greece,; and later again at Constantinople, the archaic
representations were positively shorter; and that each successive
canon of art extended the legs as well as all the lower parts of the
body in relation to the upper ones. Thus the Selinuntian reliefs are
shorter than the statues of -¿Egina; which again are shorter than the
canon of Polycletes; whilst the canon of Lysippus is still longer.66
The barbarous figures upon the triumphal arch of Constantine are so
short that they, resemble dwarfs; at the same time that the human
body under Justinian and his successors becomes, on the reliefe, by
full one-eighth too long.
Contemporaneously with the more elegant proportions of the statues
of the Xllth Dynasty, the column makes its appearance in
Egyptian architecture. In the hypogea of Beni-Hassan we behold
even the prototype of the fluted Doric column.®7 The bas-reliefs of
this Dynasty are more beautifully and delicately carved than they
ever were at other dates in Egypt; the movement of the figures is so
truthful, and, in spite of the conventional formation of the eye, chest,
and ear, so artistically conceived, that we are led to expect much
more from the progressive development of Egyptian art than it really
accomplished. The glorious dawn was not followed hy the bright
day it promised. Art culminated under S esortasen I. [2 2 cent. b . c.],
the splendid leg of whose granite statue is at Berlin. It was delicate
and refined, but the feeling of ideal beauty remained unknown to the
Egyptian race, and the freedom of movement in the reliefs was never
transferred to the statues, nor did the relief become emancipated
from the thraldom of hieratic conventionalism in the details of the
human body. The development of art ever continued to be imperfect
and unfinished in the valley of the ETile.
There are hut very few statues of this period (X I fth Dynasty)
extant in the collections of Europe; monuments closely preceding
the invasion of the Hyksos, and therefore more exposed to their
ravages, belong to the rarest specimens of Egyptian art. The
(inedited) head of prince A menemha, [11] governor of the west of
Egypt, in the time of the X11th Dynasty, copied from his dark-basalt
statue in the British Museum, and the portrait of king N e f e r -H r t e p
p of the XHIth Dynasty [Plate VTH, jig. 2, from the Denkmaler],
may giye those interested in these minute comparisons an idea of the
beauty and delicacy of that period; whilst with A menemha even the
66 See principally K. 0. M c l l e b , Handbuch der Archasologie, g 92-4, 96, 99, and 322; and
Pbint, Bistor. Nat., xxxiv. 19, 206.
67 Lepstus, Oolmms-pilitrs m figypte, Annal. de l’Inst. ArchdoL, Rome, 1838.
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