style, has failed to reproduce the harmonious delicacy of the originals.
They can he consulted in the Denkmäler.71
Besides these four royal heads none is more interesting for the
ethnologist than a fifth (Plate ~\iA±,fig.
1], not only for the beautiful carving
of the- expressive features of the
Queen-mother of that Dynasty, hut
peculiarly because it proves with how
little foundation Noere-Ari has been
taken for a negro princess ! She was
always recorded with great veneration
by her descendants, and often portrayed
by them in company with
king Aahmès, the founder - of the
Dynasty and liberator of Egypt, and
in many of those reliefs her face is
colored black,78 owing to some reason
Fig. 16.
A k h e n -a ten . unknown to us ; her features, however,
as well in reliefs as in statues, belong
to that “ Caucasian” class termed Shemitie. In the re ign. of the
heretic Bexen-Aten, Akhenaten, the monotheistic worshipper of
the sun’s disk—whom some imagine to be Joseph’s Pharaoh. — art
is still more individual and characteristic,—so much so, as to border
on caricature and ugliness ; for instance, in the portrait of the king
himself ;73 [16] of whom a most beautiful statuette adorns the Salle
historique du Louvre.
71 Also, from R o s e l l i n i ’s copies, in Types of Mankind, pp. 145-51.
72 Thus for instance in O s b u r n , Monumental history of Egypt, II., Frontispiece—reduced
from L e p s iu s , Denkmäler aus Ægypten, Abth. III., Bl. 1.
[Compare hçr likeness in Types of Mankind, p. 134, fig. 33 ; and p. 145, fig. 45 ; | with
note 123, p. 718. N e s t o r L ’H ô t e has somewhere conjectured, that, when this sacred
queen is painted black, she appears after death in the character of “ Isis funèbre”—figurative
of her nether world espousal by the black Osiris, lord of Hades; and this idea, of a
“ black Isis,” was perpetuated, until last century, through our European middle-ages, in the
many basaltic statues of that goddess, represented suckling the new-born Horus, imported
from Egypt at great cost, which superstition consecrated in many Continental churches as
images of. the black Virgin and her Son. Cf. M a u r y ’s Légendes pieuses du Moyen-Âge,
Paris, 1843, p. 38, note 2; and M i l l i n .—G. R. G.]
73 Types of Mankind, p. 147, fig. 55; pp. 170-2; and notes Nos. 151, 193-7.
[More recent researches, here again, are removing some of the unaccountable embarrassments
which the strange personage, in his name, epoch, and physiological peculiarities, has
occasioned, for 25 years (L ’H ô t e , Lettres .écrites d'Êgypte en 1838 et 1839, Paris, 1840; pp*
53-78), among Egyptologists. It now seems certain, 1st, ( B r u g s c h , Reiseberichte, p. 188:
—Maury', Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept., 1855, p. 1068 :—M a r ie t t e ? 1 Bulletin Archéologique
de VAthenoeum Français, June, 1855, pp. 56—57), that, instead of Bexen-aten, his name
should be read Akhenaten ; through which melioration he becomes assimilated to the two
hxfivxlpK of Manetho’s lists; — and 2d, possible, that his “ anomalous features,” as N o t t
Pl. VIII
Aahmes-nofre-ari.