Egyptian sculpture

TELL EL AMARNA 141

portraits of the ancient world; the method, the grasp of the essentials of the face, were never surpassed in ancient times, and hardly equalled even amongst the Greeks. The heads are of both men and women, and are of many types; and in every one the whole anatomy of the face is vigorous and lifelike. They are possibly all from the hands of one sculptor, and as we know that in the court of Akhenaten there was at least one genius, this is probably the remains of his studio. But throughout the whole art of Tell el Amarna the portrait studies are in a class apart. It is not unlikely that the method of taking casts both from the living and from the dead face was the cause of this amazing portraiture. Before the time of Akhenaten only one death-mask is known, that of Teti, of the VIth dynasty: the death-mask of Akhenaten, which was found by Petrie, at Tell el Amarna, shows a difference in the conception of the use of death-masks by the fact that the sculptor has cut the cast so as to make the eye appear open, an impossibility in taking a cast of either the dead or the living face.

One of the finest of the plaster casts is the head of an elderly man (Pl. XXXVI. 1). It is, in all probability, cast from a statue and not from life. The features are strongly marked, the cheek-bones protrude in a way that is seldom seen in Egyptian art; the least satisfactory part of the sculpture is the eye and its setting, the sharp edge of the brow is too strongly indicated and the form of the upper part of the orbit is so unusual as to suggest that it is not true to nature. Details have been most carefully observed and indicated, as, for example, the horizontal wrinkles across the forehead. Seeing the fine observation and execution preserved by this cast it is a matter for regret that the statue itself has not survived, or that the cast had not included the figure as Well as the head.