Egyptian sculpture

xxii EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

who were able to save their country from the horrors of invasion and civil war. These periods are: The Protodynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. In the XXVIth dynasty there was a renaissance of art, but this was hardly more than copying archaic sculpture, and there was little or no advance at that time.

Each period has its rise, its full fruition, and its more or less rapid decline; between each period sculpture sinks to a low level, then rises again with new life. After the New Kingdom, however, Egypt sank into the barbarism of decadence—a very different thing from the barbarism of ignorance. It is a form of barbarism from which no art can arise without harsh purification, and to this the Egyptian artist never submitted. A great artistic revival came in the XXVth_ dynasty, under the Ethiopian domination; this soon died, and the Egyptian contented himself with copying the antique and so evolved an archaistic school in which the faults, and not the beauties, of archaic sculpture were emphasised. At the same time, the technique which was devoted to the reproduction was brought to a far higher state of efficiency than ever before. Copying thus became ingrained in Egyptian art; though when a wave of Nationalism swept over the country in the XXXth dynasty, art struggled to express itself again as a national impulse. The impulse died, and the artist returned again to his copying when Egypt came under Ptolemaic rule. Then he copied the Greeks, a people whose artistic ideals were necessarily different from his own, as their outlook on life differed also. When the Romans occupied Egypt, the artistic degradation became greater, for the Romans themselves were copyists of the Greeks, and the Egyptians copied the Romans. Thus in servile imitation ended one of the greatest and most virile of national arts.