DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0160
CHAPTER XV
THE NEW KINGDOM
The three flowering-seasons of Egypt occur in her long
history like oases in the desert. Bald intervals of vast extent,
unexplored and, in the absence of monuments, hardly
explorable, surround luxuriant and thickly populated epochs.
The three that have been excavated may have been the
extreme limits of achievement, but certainly indicate the
main waves. Each of the three has its own spiritual nature
and its own culture; but the convenient distinctions which
are available in our epoch do not here obtain. There is no
Gothic to succeed a Romanesque age, no baroque to follow
a Gothic; religious conservatism maintained a strictly per-
manent style. The plastic forms created under the early
dynasties constantly recur. Not only do specific individual
traits remain, such as survive through our style as well, but
each epoch clings with varying success to the entire formal
apparatus of the golden age. Architecture alone shows actual
advances, since its requirements alter; yet that too is con-
cerned to preserve the severe traditional scheme. Sculpture
changes its structure only once in special and quite conscious
circumstances; it happened under Amenophis and did not
last long. In the twentieth dynasty and even later they set
to work as they had done in the Old Kingdom and remain
comparatively unaffected by the development of experience.
Just as only one river waters the land, so only one style runs
through its art. Like the Nile it bends many times and brings
forward many new aspects, but throughout its whole course
it is fundamentally the same. There is only one truly creative
144
THE NEW KINGDOM
The three flowering-seasons of Egypt occur in her long
history like oases in the desert. Bald intervals of vast extent,
unexplored and, in the absence of monuments, hardly
explorable, surround luxuriant and thickly populated epochs.
The three that have been excavated may have been the
extreme limits of achievement, but certainly indicate the
main waves. Each of the three has its own spiritual nature
and its own culture; but the convenient distinctions which
are available in our epoch do not here obtain. There is no
Gothic to succeed a Romanesque age, no baroque to follow
a Gothic; religious conservatism maintained a strictly per-
manent style. The plastic forms created under the early
dynasties constantly recur. Not only do specific individual
traits remain, such as survive through our style as well, but
each epoch clings with varying success to the entire formal
apparatus of the golden age. Architecture alone shows actual
advances, since its requirements alter; yet that too is con-
cerned to preserve the severe traditional scheme. Sculpture
changes its structure only once in special and quite conscious
circumstances; it happened under Amenophis and did not
last long. In the twentieth dynasty and even later they set
to work as they had done in the Old Kingdom and remain
comparatively unaffected by the development of experience.
Just as only one river waters the land, so only one style runs
through its art. Like the Nile it bends many times and brings
forward many new aspects, but throughout its whole course
it is fundamentally the same. There is only one truly creative
144