Egyptian sculpture

182 EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

the human form without extreme distortion. The detail of the hair and ornament is not over-emphasised.

In the well-known sculpture, in the temple of Edfu, of the king offering to the goddess Bast, where he holds out an offering and at the same time shakes a sistrum, is curious for the attitude of the king, who, though offering to the deity, turns his head in the opposite direction. In the figure of the goddess the worst faults of the Ptolemaic artist are seen; the long, narrow body, the elongated, horizontal breast, the abdomen twisted so as to show the navel, which is therefore in the wrong place, and the unformed arms and legs combine to make one of the most terrible examples of so-called decoration. The lioness-head of the goddess has, however, some redeeming features; it is more like a lioness than that at Kom Ombos, and the face of the king, which is turned away from the goddess (perhaps to represent the fear he felt at the divine power), is slightly better than that of the king in the Kom Ombos sculpture. As to the figure of the king, it is difficult to say anything of it except that it is in keeping with the rest of the sculpture. These two reliefs, the one at Kom Ombos and the other at Edfu, are of the same period; it is therefore obvious that there were, even in the Ptolemaic period, different schools of art in which some of the workers had still retained a true artistic feeling, and some had little or no idea of how to represent the human form, or to design a decorative panel.

A well-known scene from the temple of Edfu (Pl. LV. 1) shows the coronation of King Ptolemy X by the goddesses of the South and North, each of whom embraces him with one arm while with the opposite hand she holds the crown on his head. The composition is not unpleasing when viewed as a whole, the lines formed by the arms are decorative, and the scene fits in with the rest of the