38 



DISCOVERY 



fellow, always responding to a joke and always ready 

 to take on any job demanding the exercise of physical 



Fig. 4.— fight BETWEEN TWO BOAT-CREWS. 



strength, for that he possesses in abundance, and is only 

 too proud and pleased to display it. 



The famous Italian sculptor Zanelli waxed en- 

 thusiastic over the Meir reliefs, and in particular, I 

 think, over that depicting the fight between two boat- 

 crews (Fig. 4). He delightedly drew my attention to 

 the man who has fallen down, and whom one of the 

 crew of the rival boat is jabbing in the throat with a 

 pimt-pole. The artist, Zanelli pointed out, has most 

 brilUantly caught off the poor fellow's attitude at the 

 ven,' moment after he had tumbled into that unenviable 

 position, for the muscles and sinews of the right leg 

 and foot are still strained in the vain effort to recover 

 the lost balance. 



But perhaps the most outstanding example of the 

 realism of the Cusite artists is the representation of 

 the Bishari herdsman (Fig. 5). He is leading along 

 three oxen and for a staff holds the branch of a tree off 

 which the twigs have been roughly lopped. About 

 his loins hangs what looks like a piece of gazelle's skin, 

 his sole gai-ment. The body is shown in actual profile, 

 not turned round full-face upon profile legs. He is the 

 typical Hamite, and the sculptor has most cleverly 

 reproduced all the facial and bodily characteristics of 

 an old man of that race — a long nose, scanty tuft-beard 

 and ahnost hairless upper lip, a scraggy neck, bony 

 chest and shoulders and sinewy arms and legs. His 

 head is crowned with a mass of tangled hair, in which 

 respect he presents a marked contrast to the Egyptian, 

 whose head was clean shaven or else closely cropped. 

 That what has been said about the realism of the Cusite 

 artists is not an exaggeration is clearly shown by a 

 comparison of tliis relief with the adjacent photograph 

 of a painting of a modem Bishari (Fig. 6), made by 

 my friend, Mr. F. F. Ogilvie, at Aswan, in 1914. This 

 Bishari of Aswan might be our old friend at Meir come 

 to life again, the chief difference being that the one 



wears a little more clothing than the other. But all 

 the physical peculiarities, also the very stick that each 

 carries, are similar ! Taken together the ancient 

 relief and modern painting wonderfully illustrate how 

 racial characteristics survive unchanged through the 

 ages. 



Ukhhotpe was succeeded first by a noble of the 

 same name, possibly his nephew, and then by his son 

 Senbi, both of whom, it would appear, administered the 

 affairs of the province for a very short time. The 

 son's tomb-chapel was never completed, and the 

 scanty decoration both of it and of the insignificant 

 chapel of his immediate predecessor is in the ordinary 

 conventional style of the period. 



The next nomarch, another Ukhhotpe, had excavated 

 for himself a large tomb-chapel decorated with bril- 

 liantly coloured, for the most part plaster, reliefs. 

 These are of the finest possible technique, the smallest 

 details being inserted with infinite care by paint-brush 

 or engraver's point. However, they display none of 

 the naturalism which characterises the work of the 

 early Twelfth Dynasty craftsmen of Cusse, and they 

 are executed in accordance with the ordinary- canons 

 of the official art, closely resembling the painted reliefs 

 which are to be seen in the tomb-chapels of the lords 

 of the Hare-nome • at El-Bersheh. On the lintel of one 

 of the doorways in this Ukhhotpe's tomb-chapel are 

 inscribed the cartouches of Amenemmes H, the third 

 kmg of the Twelfth DjTiasty, who reigned about 1935- 

 1903 B.C. This occurrence of the royal names — no 

 cartouches are to be seen in any other Twelfth Dynasty 



I 

 I 



Fig. 5.— bishari HERDSM.\N. 



tomb-chapel at Meir — and the fact, as certain of his 

 titles show, that the nomarch in question was the 



1 I.e. the fifteenth nome of Upper Egypt. Every nome or 

 province had its distinguishing heraldic emblem or badge, 

 mounted upon a pole and thus carried as a standard. These 

 emblems consist as a rule of some animal or plant, occasionally 

 of some inanimate object or objects such as weapons of war. 

 They probably represent the original local fetish or divinity of 

 the primitive inhabitants of each of these districts, subsequently 

 supplanted by a later intrusive divinity, the nome-divinity 

 of historic times. 



