DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0063
SAKKARA
nothing interrupts the untroubled train of our thoughts.
Our memories take shape here not at the hands of objects
only, but also at the bidding of the tumultuous life around
us. These reliefs awaken such memories with a confidential
smile. Art and man must then have lived on very intimate
terms, and we, the late-born inhabitants of another quarter
of the globe, succeed in establishing immediate relations with
them. How does that come about? One would suppose that
in any case the cult, of which we know absolutely nothing,
must play a part in it: the mysteries, of which Joshua Dohn
talks so unintelligibly, the whole dim mass of Egyptian
mythology. And even if the cult declined later and lost its
meaning, it must have lorded it in all its might once upon a
time, as it does everywhere in the early days.
It is even odder that we never felt a trace of it in all those
pictures. Not a single detail alludes to any such mystifica-
tion and hocus-pocus. There is nothing that a child of today
couldn’t understand at a glance. Can these people have been
free of dogma? Was hocus-pocus nothing to them?
In the light of historical tradition we cannot call them
godless; and so we must infer from their emancipated art
that they were on extremely intimate terms with their god
or gods, and that the divine being lay within them and never
oppressed them at all. They overcame the fear of death.
They had no textbooks of doctrinaire moralizing. Their
pictures are quite untendencious. They seem to have known
neither heaven nor hell, neither saints nor sinners, and life
unfolded itself without miracles. There is no retribution, no
last judgement threatening them. Evidently they required no
such repressions.
I have seen relief-slabs from these tombs in European
museums. There are some of this very period in Berlin.
They come back to us afterwards, and I remember the
friendly recognition one felt for them in passing. One
ascribed it to some felicitous turn of style. In such matters
53
nothing interrupts the untroubled train of our thoughts.
Our memories take shape here not at the hands of objects
only, but also at the bidding of the tumultuous life around
us. These reliefs awaken such memories with a confidential
smile. Art and man must then have lived on very intimate
terms, and we, the late-born inhabitants of another quarter
of the globe, succeed in establishing immediate relations with
them. How does that come about? One would suppose that
in any case the cult, of which we know absolutely nothing,
must play a part in it: the mysteries, of which Joshua Dohn
talks so unintelligibly, the whole dim mass of Egyptian
mythology. And even if the cult declined later and lost its
meaning, it must have lorded it in all its might once upon a
time, as it does everywhere in the early days.
It is even odder that we never felt a trace of it in all those
pictures. Not a single detail alludes to any such mystifica-
tion and hocus-pocus. There is nothing that a child of today
couldn’t understand at a glance. Can these people have been
free of dogma? Was hocus-pocus nothing to them?
In the light of historical tradition we cannot call them
godless; and so we must infer from their emancipated art
that they were on extremely intimate terms with their god
or gods, and that the divine being lay within them and never
oppressed them at all. They overcame the fear of death.
They had no textbooks of doctrinaire moralizing. Their
pictures are quite untendencious. They seem to have known
neither heaven nor hell, neither saints nor sinners, and life
unfolded itself without miracles. There is no retribution, no
last judgement threatening them. Evidently they required no
such repressions.
I have seen relief-slabs from these tombs in European
museums. There are some of this very period in Berlin.
They come back to us afterwards, and I remember the
friendly recognition one felt for them in passing. One
ascribed it to some felicitous turn of style. In such matters
53