Statue of Pharaoh Khafre description. A look directed into eternity. Pharaoh Khafre. Here you can buy antiques of various subjects.

It is not entirely true to say that only when we reach a certain age we are literally “covered by a wave of nostalgia” when we hear the melody of our youth or see some attributes of that time. Even a very small child begins to yearn for his favorite toy if someone took it away or hid it. We are all, to some extent, in love with old things, because they contain the spirit of an entire era. It is not enough for us to read about this in books or on the Internet. We want to have a real antique thing that we can touch and smell. Just remember your feelings when you picked up a Soviet-era book with slightly yellowed pages that emitted a sweetish aroma, especially when flipping through them, or when you looked at black and white photographs of your parents or grandparents, the same ones with an uneven white border. By the way, for many, such shots remain the most beloved to this day, despite the low quality of such images. The point here is not in the image, but in the feeling of spiritual warmth that fills us when they catch our eye.

If there are no “objects from the past” left in our lives due to endless moves and changes of place of residence, then you can buy antiques in our antique online store. Antique stores are especially popular now, because not everyone has the opportunity to visit such outlets, and they are concentrated mainly only in large cities.

Here you can buy antiques of various subjects.

To dot the i's, it should be said that antiques store is a special establishment that purchases, sells, exchanges, restores and examines antiques and provides a number of other services related to the sale of antiques.

Antiques are some old things that have a fairly high value. This could be: antique jewelry, equipment, coins, books, interior items, figurines, dishes, etc.

However, in a number of countries, different things are considered antiques: in Russia, the status of “antique thing” is given to an item that is more than 50 years old, and in the USA – items made before 1830. On the other hand, in each country, different antiques have different values. In China, antique porcelain is of greater value than in Russia or the USA.

In other words, when buying antiques It should be remembered that its price depends on the following characteristics: age, uniqueness of execution, manufacturing method (everyone knows that handmade work is valued much higher than mass production), historical, artistic or cultural value and other reasons.

Antiques store- quite a risky business. The point is not only in the laboriousness of searching for the required product and the long period of time during which the item will be sold, but also in the ability to distinguish a fake from the original.

In addition, a store selling antiques must meet a number of standards in order to gain the proper reputation in the market. If we are talking about an antique online store, then it should have a wide range of products presented. If an antiques store exists not only on the World Wide Web, then it must also be large enough for the client to feel comfortable wandering among the antiques, and, secondly, have a beautiful interior and a pleasant atmosphere.

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Antiques have magical powers: once you touch them, you will become a big fan of them, antique items will take their rightful place in the interior of your home.

In our antique online store you can buy antiques a variety of topics at affordable prices. To make searching easier, all products are divided into special groups: paintings, icons, rural life, interior items, etc. Also in the catalog you will be able to find antique books, postcards, posters, silverware, porcelain dishes and much more.

In addition, in our antique online store you can purchase original gifts, furniture and kitchen utensils that can enliven the interior of your home and make it more sophisticated.

Antiques for sale in Russia, as in many European cities, such as Paris, London and Stockholm, has its own characteristics. First of all, these are the high costs of purchasing antiques, but the responsibility of a store selling antiques is also quite high, since these things represent a certain material, cultural and historical value.

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The height of Khafre's pyramid is 136.4 meters, and the Egyptians called it "Khafre the Great." This is exactly what Khafre's name will sound like if you read the hieroglyphs. The meaning of the name is “Like Ra”, “Who is the embodiment of Ra”. Now the Pyramid of Khafre is only 2 meters lower than the Great Pyramid. It was built from local grayish-yellow limestone and was faced with light limestone from Tura. The white limestone cladding on its top is partially preserved. This is a distinctive feature of the Pyramid of Khafre, as is the Sphinx next to it. The second pyramid of the Giza complex is primarily striking in its inaccessibility. They say that even experienced climbers will need at least an hour to climb to its peak, which ends in a small platform. From here you have a simply amazing view of the Cheops Pyramid.

I have already mentioned that Egyptologists do not agree with Herodotus and claim that Khafre is not the brother, but the second son of the builder of the Great Pyramid. The eldest died and Khafre took the throne. According to the text of the papyrus kept in Turin, he ruled for 25 years, according to Herodotus - 56, and if you follow the work of the priest-historian Manetho, then all 66! Something is not particularly credible to the two learned ancient men. Herodotus also adds that the Egyptians hated Khafre as much as their predecessor Cheops. The people were still in poverty, working hard, and the sanctuaries also remained closed. Khafre and his family members feared in advance for their mummies and tombs. Perhaps they wished for their mummies and treasures to be buried in secret tombs. The Pyramid of Khafre is also empty, like the Pyramid of Cheops.

Let's move on. On the eastern side, a road leading to the Pyramid of Khafre remains from the covered corridor leading to the mortuary temple. This temple has been cleared of sand. Once upon a time, there were 23 statues of Khafre in his hall, and light fell on them through slitted windows located in the ceiling. All that remains is to imagine the extravaganza of sunlight reflected in the eyes of the statues. Alas, only one managed to survive. This is Pharaoh Khafre himself with the god Horus behind him. The statue is made of diorite - a very durable, dark green, almost black stone, with light veins. Diorite is difficult to process, but it polishes well.

Here, admire it!

Statue of Khafre with Horus

The Lord confidently sits on his throne. One hand rests on the knee, the other is clenched. A cartouche with his names is carved next to the pharaoh's bare feet. He is dressed in a short legguard - shenti, and on his head is a ritual striped scarf - nemes. Behind the pharaoh's head is a falcon, a symbol of the god Horus. The falcon of Horus hugs the ruler with its wings, protecting him from hostile forces.

The pharaoh's face is calm and dispassionate. The gaze seems to be directed into eternity.

This sculpture is certainly taller than human height. a masterpiece by an unnamed ancient Egyptian artist. Now it is kept in the Cairo Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art.

By the way, Herodotus reports that he himself measured the pyramid of Cheops and there are no underground chambers under it. Modern scientists also have not discovered any hidden voids in Khafre's pyramid. They took advantage of transillumination using cosmic rays. Saturated with the energy of atomic particles, rays from outer space are capable of penetrating through any, even dense, materials. Penetrating stone, they lose more energy than passing through the atmosphere. This means that if some rays meet voids on their way in masonry, they will lose less energy than those that passed through granite.

More about the Great Sphinx.

Khafre is credited with the construction of this colossus, although there are other hypotheses. And the one that the Sphinx is older than the pyramids, and the one that claims that it was not created by people, but by gods or aliens. There is another guess: the Great Sphinx was erected by the eldest son of Cheops, Djedefre, and this is the only thing he managed to do.

Statue of Pharaoh Khafre (Khefre), IV Dynasty, Old Kingdom

The beginning of royal power and the customs that gave it such a unique character in Ancient Egypt, as the reader has already noticed, is rooted in such distant antiquity that we can discern only faint traces of the evolution of this institution. In the era of the formation of a united nation under Menes, the institution of royal power was already very ancient, and its subsequent development of more than four hundred years meant that at the end of the Old Kingdom the rank of pharaoh was invested with prestige and extreme power, requiring the deepest reverence from a subject, be it noble or noble . Moreover, the king was now officially considered a god, and one of his most common titles was “Good God”; so great was the veneration that was due to him that when speaking about him, they avoided mentioning his name. The courtier preferred to designate it with the impersonal “They,” and “bring to Their attention” becomes the official formula replacing the phrase “report to the king.” The royal government and the monarch himself personally were designated by the word “Big House,” in Egyptian “Pen,” an expression that came to us through the Jews in the form of “Pharaoh.” There were also a number of other expressions that a scrupulous courtier might use when speaking of his divine lord. When the king died, he was numbered among the host of gods and, like them, received eternal worship in the temple in front of the huge pyramid in which he rested.

From court customs, a complex official etiquette gradually developed, the strict observance of which, even in this distant era, was monitored by many magnificent marshals and court chamberlains, who were constantly in the palace for this purpose. Thus arose court life, probably similar to that which we now find in the East. We get some idea about her already from the numerous titles of court nobles of that time. With vain pride they display their titles on the walls of the tombs interspersed with loud designations of their high duties and extraordinary privileges, which they enjoyed among those close to the king. There were many ranks, and the advantages of each with all the subtleties of seniority were strictly observed and noted by the court marshals at all ceremonial exits and royal receptions. For each need of the royal person there was a special court nobleman, whose duty it was to satisfy it, and who bore the corresponding title, for example, court physician or court bandmaster. Despite the king's comparatively simple toilet, a small army of wig makers, sandal makers, perfumers, launderers, bleachers and keepers of the royal wardrobe crowded into the pharaoh's chambers. They list their titles on their tombstones with visible satisfaction. So, to take the first example that came across, one of them calls himself “the caretaker of the cosmetics box, in charge of the art of cosmetics to the satisfaction of his lord, the keeper of the cosmetic pencil, the bearer of the royal sandals, in charge of everything related to the royal sandals, to the satisfaction of his lord.” The pharaoh's beloved wife was the official queen, and her eldest son was usually appointed heir to the royal throne during his father's lifetime. But, as with all eastern courts, there was also a royal harem with many odalisques. A mass of sons usually surrounded the monarch, and the huge income of the palace was generously distributed among them. One of the sons of the king of the IV dynasty, Khafre, left behind private property, consisting of 14 cities, one city house and two properties in the royal residence-city at the pyramid. In addition, the provision of his tomb consisted of 12 other cities. But the princes did not lead an idle and luxurious life, but helped their father in government. We will see them occupying some of the most difficult positions in the public service.

No matter how high the official position of the pharaoh was as the august god at the head of the state, he nevertheless maintained close personal relationships with the most prominent representatives of the nobility. As a prince, he was raised with a group of young men from noble families, and together they learned the noble art of swimming. The friendships and intimate relationships that began in this way in his youth were to have a powerful influence on the monarch in the subsequent years of his life. We find the Pharaoh giving his daughter in marriage to one of the nobles with whom he had been brought up in his youth, and the strict decor of the palace was disturbed for the sake of this favourite; namely, on official occasions he was not supposed to kiss the ashes at the feet of the pharaoh, but enjoyed the unprecedented honor of kissing the royal foot. As far as those close to him were concerned, this was a simple formality; in private life, the pharaoh did not think twice about sitting simply, without any embarrassment, next to one of his favorites, while the serving slaves anointed them both. The daughter of such a noble man could become the official queen and mother of the next king. We see the king inspecting a public building together with the chief architect, the vizier. While he admires the work and praises the faithful minister, he notices that he does not hear the words of royal favor. The king's cry sets the waiting courtiers in motion, and the struck minister is quickly carried into the palace itself, where the pharaoh hastily calls for priests and chief physicians. He sends to the library for a casket with medical scrolls, but all in vain. Doctors declare the vizier's condition hopeless. The king is overwhelmed with grief and retires to his chambers to pray to Ra. Then he orders that all preparations be made for the burial of the deceased nobleman, orders that a coffin be made from ebony and that the body be anointed in his presence. Finally, the eldest son of the deceased is authorized to build the tomb, which will then be furnished and endowed by the king. From this it is clear that the most powerful nobles in Egypt were connected with the pharaoh’s person by close ties of consanguinity and friendship. Such relationships were diligently maintained by the monarch, and in the era of the IV and early V dynasties we find the features of an ancient state, where the circle of people closest to the king resembles a large family. As we have seen, the king assisted all its members in the construction and arrangement of their tombs and showed the greatest concern for their welfare, both in this life and in the next.

Statue of Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops), IV Dynasty, Old Kingdom

In theory, there was no one who would limit the power of the pharaoh as the head of administration. In reality, he had to take into account the demands of this or that class, this or that powerful family, party or individuals, and finally the harem, in exactly the same way as his successors in the East at the beginning of the 20th century. These forces, which influenced his daily activities to a greater or lesser extent, can be traced to us in that distant era only because the state that was formed under their influence slowly emerges before us in its main features. Despite the luxury evidenced by the organization of the court staff, the pharaoh did not lead the life of a wasteful despot, which we often encounter under the Mamluks in Muslim Egypt. At least in the era of the Fourth Dynasty, while still a prince, he held difficult positions supervising work in quarries and mines, or helped his father, acting as vizier or first minister, and he acquired valuable experience in government affairs even before his accession to the throne. . He was an educated and enlightened monarch who knew how to read and write and often took up his pen to compose a letter of gratitude or encouragement to some honored government official. He constantly received his ministers and engineers to discuss the needs of the country, especially the conservation of water supplies and the expansion of the irrigation system. The chief architect sent plans for the construction of the royal estates, and we see the monarch discussing with him the question of digging a lake 2000 feet long in one of them. He read many tedious rolls of government papers and dictated dispatches to the commanders of the works in the Sinai Peninsula, Nubia and Punta, on the southern shore of the Red Sea. The statements of the litigating heirs passed through his hands and, probably, not always out of routine were read by his secretaries. At the end of classes in the royal offices, the monarch went on a stretcher, accompanied by the vizier and retinue, to inspect his buildings and public works, and his hand made itself felt in all the most important affairs of the country.

The location of the royal residence was determined to a large extent by the place where the pharaoh built the pyramid. As we have already seen, the palace and the city, consisting of the houses of the court and other buildings related to the court, probably lay at the foot of the desert plateau on which the pyramid grew. From dynasty to dynasty, and sometimes from reign to reign, city after pyramid followed, and the easy construction of palaces and villas did not pose any serious obstacles to such mobility. After the III dynasty, the residence was always located in the vicinity of the later Memphis. The palace itself consisted of two parts, or at least had two gates in front, corresponding to the two ancient kingdoms, the united administration of which was located in it. In the oldest images of the palace facade, such as those on the tombstone of the “snake” king Set, one can clearly distinguish both gates. Each door or gate had a special name, denoting the kingdom to which it belonged. Thus, Sneferu named one gate of his palace “The White Crown of Sneferu is Raised on the South Gate”, and the other - “The Red Crown of Sneferu is Raised on the Northern Gate”. Throughout Egyptian history, a palace façade was designated as a "double front", and when a scribe traced the word "palace", he often put the sign of two houses behind it. The royal office was often designated as a "double office", although it is unlikely that there were two such bureaus, one for the North and the other for the South. The division probably did not go beyond the purely external symbolism of the two palace gates. The same, no doubt, is true regarding central government taken as a whole. Thus we hear of the “double granary” and the “double white house” as divisions of the treasury. Both, no doubt, did not correspond to the dual organizations that no longer existed; they became a fiction, preserved from the era of the first two dynasties, but such duality in the name remained forever in later government terminology. Adjacent to the palace was an extensive courtyard, with which the “chambers” or offices of the central administration communicated. In general, the palace and the offices adjacent to it were known as the “Big House,” which, therefore, represented both the center of administration and the dwelling of the royal house. Here was the center of the entire control system, the branches of which spread throughout the country.

In the interests of local government, Upper Egypt was divided into about 20 administrative districts, and later we find as many more districts in the Delta. These nomes probably corresponded to ancient principalities whose rulers had long since disappeared. During the IV and V dynasties, the district, or nome, was headed by a crown official, known as “the first after the king.” In addition to the administrative function, as the "local governor" of the nome, he also performed judicial duties and therefore bore the title of "judge". In Upper Egypt, the "local governors" were sometimes also called "the nobles of the southern tens," as if among them there existed a group of higher rank, constituting a college of ten. Regarding the government of the North, we are not so well informed, but, apparently, there was a system of government very similar to the one described above, although perhaps there were fewer “local governors”. The nome, governed by a “local governor,” was a miniature state or administrative unit that had all the governing bodies: a treasury, a court, a land administration, an institution in charge of the safety of embankments and canals, a police detachment, and a uniform store; in these public places there were many scribes and tallies and an ever-increasing number of archives and local reports. The main administrative body that coordinated and centralized the nomes was the treasury, thanks to the functioning of which grain, livestock, poultry and artisan products annually flowed into the warehouses of the central administration; all this, in the absence of money that had not yet come into use, was collected as donation by local governors. Local land registration, or land administration, the institution in charge of the irrigation system, judicial administration and other administrative functions also had their centers in the Great House, but the most tangible link between the palace and the nomes was still the treasury. Over all financial management stood the “chief treasurer”, who lived, of course, at court. In a state where construction and extensive public works attracted so much attention, the labor of extracting vast quantities of material from the mines and quarries required the supervision of two significant officials of the treasury, whom we would call assistant treasurers. The Egyptians called them "treasurers of God", in other words, of the king. They oversaw the breaking and transportation of stone for the temples and massive pyramids of the Old Kingdom, and they led many expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula to develop local mines. As the reader may have already noticed, the judicial functions of local governors were only a side addition to their administrative work. At that time there was no specific class of professional judges, but administrative officials were knowledgeable in the laws and performed judicial duties. Like a treasury, judicial administration was generally subject to the authority of one person, namely: local judges constituted six judicial presences, and these latter, in turn, were subordinate to the supreme judge of the entire kingdom. Many judges were also called “under Nekhen” (Hierakonpolis) – an ancient title surviving from the days when Nekhen was the royal seat of the Southern Kingdom. There was a set of detailed laws, which, unfortunately, completely disappeared. Local governors boast of their impartiality and fairness in dealing with cases and often declare on the walls of their tombs:

“I have never resolved a dispute between two brothers in such a way that one of the sons was deprived of his father’s property.”

The system of submitting all cases to the court in the form of written statements, which Diodorus spoke with such approval, apparently already existed in this ancient era. The Berlin Museum is in possession of a court document concerning a dispute between an heir and an executor. This is the oldest document of this kind that has reached us. Special cases of a private nature were “heard” by the chief justice and the judge “under Nekhen”; in one case, when a conspiracy arose in the harem, the accused queen appeared before two judges “under Nekhen”, specially appointed for this purpose by the crown, and the chief judge was not among them. The fact that in those distant times a person who took part in a harem conspiracy was not immediately put to death without further consideration is a remarkable evidence of the high sense of justice and amazing judicial tolerance of that era among the pharaoh. The immediate death penalty, without the slightest attempt to establish legally the guilt of the condemned, did not seem illegal in the same country at a time less than a century removed from us. Under certain conditions, which are not yet entirely clear to us, it was possible to appeal directly to the tsar and offer relevant documents at his discretion. Such a document is the aforementioned legal papyrus of the Old Kingdom, now kept in Berlin.

The immediate head of the entire government was the first minister of the pharaoh or, as he is more often called in the East, the vizier. At the same time, he regularly served as chief judge. Thus, he was, after the pharaoh, the most powerful man in the state, and as a result, the position of vizier was held during the era of the IV dynasty by the crown prince. His chamber, or office, served as the government's archives, and he himself was the chief government archivist. State annals were called "royal writings." All lands were registered in the vizier's archive, and all local archives had their concentration here and were consistent with each other; Wills were recorded here, and after they came into force, the new titles resulting from this were promulgated here. The will of the king's son from the era of the IV dynasty has reached us almost entirely, and, in addition, another will has been preserved - from the beginning of the V dynasty. Their preservation is due to the fact that both of them were carved hieroglyphically on the stone wall of the chapel in the tomb, where they could not be reflected in the period of approximately 5,000 years that had passed since then, while the vizier's archives, consisting of papyri, perished several thousand years ago. Likewise, several other similar posthumous acts have survived. All lands granted by the pharaoh were transferred on the basis of royal decrees, recorded in the “royal writings” in the offices of the vizier.

Ptahhotep, vizier of Pharaoh Una (V Dynasty, Old Kingdom)

All institutions, like the palace, were, in theory at least, dual, a fiction preserved from predynastic times before the unification of the two kingdoms. Thus, we hear about the double granary as a department of the treasury and about the double office, or personal office of the king. These terms, in some cases perhaps signifying a real fact, were retained in later government terminology, long after the duality of institutions ceased to exist. At the head of a huge army of scribes and officials of all kinds, from the highest to the lowest, who were in charge of the affairs of the Big House, stood again the vizier. When we add to this that, apart from several minor positions, he was often also the chief architect of the pharaoh or, as the Egyptians said, “the head of all the royal works,” then we will understand that the first minister was the busiest person in the kingdom. No matter how powerful he was, the people turned to him as a person invested with the highest judicial powers and able to restore trampled justice; his position was traditionally the most popular in the long line of servants of the pharaoh. Perhaps it was precisely this that was occupied by the great sage Imhotep under King Djoser, and the wisdom of two other viziers of the Third Dynasty, Kegemni (Kajemmi) and Ptahhotep, captured in writing, lived on for many centuries after the Ancient Kingdom itself had receded into the realm of legends. So great was the respect for the people who held this high position that the words “life, prosperity, health” were sometimes added to the name of the vizier, which, in fact, should have accompanied only the name of the pharaoh or prince of the royal house.

Such was the organization of this remarkable state, as we can trace it during the first two or three centuries of the Old Kingdom. In the XXX century. BC e. State functions developed in detail in a system of local government, which was in the hands of officials of the crown, which we do not find in Europe until the later times of the Roman Empire. To summarize briefly, it should be said that it was a strictly centralized group of local government officials, each of whom was the head of all bodies of a given nome. The latter, therefore, depended primarily on the local governor, and only then on the palace. The pharaoh, who had power, strength and talents, and the loyal governors in the nomes signified a strong state, but as soon as the pharaoh showed weakness so that the governors could become independent, the whole was ready to fall apart. The maintenance of the districts as separate administrative units and the position of the governors as intermediaries between the pharaoh and the nomes were precisely the factors that made the system dangerous. Small states within a state, often each with its own special governor, could too easily become independent centers of political power. We will have a chance to consider a similar process that actually took place when we talk about the fate of the Ancient Kingdom in the next chapter. It could have been accomplished all the more easily since the central government did not have any uniform and cohesive military organization. Each nome had its own militia under the command of civilian officials, from whom compulsory military training was not required; there was no class of special officers. Temple estates had similar military detachments. The latter were used primarily for expeditions sent to quarries and mines; in other words, they supplied contingents to move the huge blocks needed by the architects. In the case of such works, they were subordinate to the “treasurer of God.” When a serious war broke out, in the absence of a permanent army, militia was hastily recruited from all nomes and temple estates, and auxiliary troops were also recruited from the Nubian tribes. The command of the assembled army, devoid of any strong organization, was entrusted by the monarch to some capable official; thanks to the fact that the local governors commanded the militia of the nomes, they held in their hands the sources of the dubious military power of the pharaoh.

The country thus governed belonged largely to the crown. Under the supervision of the local governor's subordinates, it was processed and made profitable with the help of slaves or serfs, who made up the bulk of the population. The latter belonged to the land and were inherited along with it. We do not have data to determine the population at that time. In the Roman era, as we have already said, it reached 7 million. The descendants of numerous families of the ancient kings, probably, together with the remnants of the prehistoric landed nobility, constituted a class of noble landowners, whose vast estates apparently occupied a significant part of the cultivated lands of the kingdom. These landlords did not perform obligatory public service and did not always take part in management. But noble people and serfs, the social upper and lower classes, did not exhaust all social classes. There was a free middle class in whose hands the arts and crafts reached such a high degree of perfection, but about them we know almost nothing. Its representatives did not build for themselves indestructible tombs, such as those that provided us with all the information regarding the nobility of that time, and they conducted their affairs using documents written on papyrus and therefore perished, despite the huge amount of this material, which was probably once in consumption. Later social conditions indicate the undoubted existence in the era of the Old Kingdom of a class of merchants and artisans who produced and sold their own goods. It is also very likely that there were landowners who were not members of the nobility.

The social unit, as in later human history, was the family. The man had only one legal wife, who was the mother of his heirs. She was his equal in everything, always received the greatest respect and took part in the entertainment of her husband and children; the friendly relations that existed between a nobleman and his wife are constantly and vividly depicted on the monuments of that time. Such relationships often began in the early childhood of future spouses, since in all levels of society brothers and sisters usually married each other. In addition to his legal wife, who was at the same time the mistress of the house, a wealthy man also had a harem, the inhabitants of which had no rights to their master’s property. Already in that early era, the harem was a generally recognized institution in the East, and nothing immoral was seen in it. Children showed the greatest respect for their parents, and it was the duty of each son to take care of the maintenance of his father's tomb. Mutual respect and friendship between parents and children were highly valued, and we often find the following statement in tombs:

“I was loved by my father, praised by my mother, loved by my brothers and sisters.”

As among many other peoples, the natural line of succession went through the eldest daughter, although the will may not have taken this into account. The mother determined the closest blood relationship, and a person’s natural patron, even preferably before his own father, was his maternal grandfather. The duty of a person towards his mother, who gave birth to and nursed him, caressed and cared for him during his upbringing, is strongly emphasized by the sages of that time. Although there probably existed a free form of marriage, which could easily be dissolved - a form apparently due to the precariousness of the situation among the slaves and the poorer class - yet immorality was severely condemned by the best people. A wise man advises the young man:

“Beware of a strange woman who is not known in her city. Don't look at her when she passes, and don't know her. It is like a pool, the abyss of which cannot be measured. A woman whose husband is far away writes to you every day. If there is no witness near her, she stands up and spreads her nets. O mortal sin, if anyone listens to her!

All young men are recommended to marry and start a household as the most reasonable thing to do. There can be no doubt, however, that alongside the pure ideals of wise and virtuous men there existed widespread and gross immorality.

The external conditions of life of the lower class were not such as to be conducive to moral life. In the cities, the low houses of the common people, made of unbaked brick and covered with thatch, were so closely packed together that the walls often touched each other. A rude chair, one or two bare boxes, and a few simple earthenware vessels constituted the entire furnishings of the little hovel. The barracks for workers were an endless row of small cages made of unbaked brick under a common roof, separated by open passages. According to the same plan, entire neighborhoods were built for parties of royal workers in the cities near the pyramids and near them. On large estates the life of the poor was less cramped and disorderly and, undoubtedly, more stable and healthy.

The houses of the rich, noble and service class were spacious and comfortable. A nobleman of the 3rd dynasty, Meten, built a house with an area of ​​more than 330 square meters. ft. The materials were wood and sun-dried brick; the buildings were made easily and contained, in accordance with the climate, a lot of air. They had many lattice windows, and all the walls in the living rooms were, to a large extent, simple shields, like those found in many Japanese houses. In case of wind and sandstorms, brightly colored curtains could be lowered. Even the pharaoh's palace, although, of course, fortified, was built just as easily. Therefore, the cities of Ancient Egypt completely disappeared or left behind heaps of rubbish, among which here and there are insignificant remains of collapsed walls. Beds, armchairs, chairs and ebony caskets with ivory inlays of the finest work constituted the main furnishings. Very few or even no tables were used, but precious vessels made of alabaster and other valuable stones, copper, and sometimes gold and silver, were placed on stands and stands that raised them above the floor. The floors were covered with heavy carpets, on which guests often sat, especially ladies, who preferred them to armchairs and stools. The food was delicious and varied; we find that even the deceased desired in the other world “ten different kinds of meat, five kinds of poultry, sixteen kinds of bread and biscuits, six kinds of wine, four kinds of beer, eleven kinds of fruit, not counting all kinds of sweets and many other things.” The costume of the ancient nobles was extremely simple: it consisted only of a white linen apron, which was held on the hips with a belt and often barely reached the knees or sometimes the ankle. The head was usually shaved, and on all official occasions two types of wigs were worn, one short and curled, the other with long straight locks and parted in the middle. A wide collar, often studded with precious stones, usually descended from the neck, but the rest of the body was not covered by clothing. In such decoration and with a long staff in his hand, the noble man was ready to receive visitors or survey his estates. His wives and daughters wore even simpler costumes. They were dressed in a thin, tight-fitting dress made of white linen, which hung from the chest to the ankles on two straps held on the shoulders. The hem was “missing,” a modern milliner would say, and walking was not constrained in any way. A long wig, collar, necklace and a pair of bracelets completed the lady's outfit. Neither she nor her husband liked sandals, although they wore them occasionally. The young men, as might be expected in such a climate, dispensed with any extra clothing; children were allowed to run around completely naked. Peasants wore one apron, which was often removed during field work; their wives dressed in the same long, tight-fitting dress that noble ladies wore, but they also, when engaged in hard work, such as sifting grain, took off clothes that got in the way.

The Egyptians had a passion for nature and outdoor life. Houses of noble people were always surrounded by a garden where fig trees, palms and sycamores grew, vineyards and gazebos were built, and a pond lined with stone was dug in front of the house. Many servants and slaves performed work, both in the house and in the garden; the chief steward was in charge of the entire house and estate, and the chief gardener supervised the care and cultivation of the garden. It was a nobleman's paradise. Here he spent his free hours with his family and friends, playing checkers, listening to the harp, flute and lute, watching the slow and graceful dance of his odalisques, while his children frolicked among the trees, splashed in the pond, played ball. , dolls, etc. Or in a light shuttle made of papyrus stems, accompanied by his wife and sometimes one of his children, a noble man rode with pleasure in the shade of tall reeds through flooded swamps and swamps.

The myriads of living creatures swarming and swarming from all sides around his fragile boat gave him the liveliest pleasure. While the wife was plucking water lilies and lotus flowers, and the boy was practicing his dexterity in catching hoopoes, our landlord, surrounded by a flock of wild birds that darkened the sky above his head, was swinging his club, taking pleasure in the skill of wielding the difficult weapon which he therefore preferred a more practical and lighter bow. Or he grabbed a fish spear, sharpened at both ends, and showed dexterity in the water, trying, if possible, to pierce two fish at once with one and the other point. Sometimes, when encountering a ferocious hippopotamus or a dangerous crocodile, it was necessary to use a long harpoon tied to a rope and call local fishermen and hunters for help. Often noble Egyptians indulged in more difficult sports in the desert, where they could shoot a huge wild bull with a long bow, take alive many antelopes, gazelles, roe deer, stone goats, wild bulls, donkeys, ostriches and hares, or catch the fugitive shadows of strange animals that the imagination The Egyptians inhabited the desert: the griffin, a quadruped with the head and wings of a bird, or the saga, a lioness with the head of a hawk and a tail ending in a lotus flower! In this lighter side of the life of the Egyptians - their love of nature, their sober and clear view of life, their unfailing cheerfulness, despite their constant and careful preparations for death - are expressed the dominant traits of their nature, so clearly impressed in their art that it the latter stands significantly above the gloomy heaviness that is characteristic of Asian art of that time.

About five centuries of unshakable management with centralized regulation of floods through an extensive system of dams and irrigation canals raised the productivity of the country to the highest level, for the economic basis of civilization in the era of the Old Kingdom, as in all other periods of Egyptian history, was agriculture. The social and economic organization we have sketched was due to the abundant crops of wheat and barley that the inexhaustible soil of their valley brought to the Egyptians. In addition to grain, the huge vineyards and vast fields of succulent cereals that formed part of each estate contributed significantly to the agricultural productivity of the country. Large herds of cattle, sheep, goats, oxen and donkeys (replacing the horse at that time unknown to the Egyptians) and a huge number of domestic and wild birds, the rich game of the desert, which has already been mentioned, and the countless Nile fish were far from being an insignificant addition to the field products that contributed to the welfare and prosperity of the country. Thus, in the field and in the pasture, thanks to the labor of millions of inhabitants of the kingdom, new vital benefits were created annually, supporting the economic life of the country. Other sources of wealth also required masses of labor. At the first rapids there were granite quarries; sandstone was mined in Silsila; better and harder stones are found mainly in Hammamat, between the Copt and the Red Sea. Alabaster was mined at Hatnub, beyond Amarna; limestone - in many places, especially in Ayan or Tourra, opposite Memphis. Egyptian stonemasons brought from the first rapids granite blocks twenty or thirty feet long and weighing fifty or sixty tons. They drilled through the hardest stone, such as durite, using copper tubular drills and sawed through the massive lids of granite sarcophagi with long copper saws, the action of which, like the drills, was enhanced with sand or emery. Miners were recruited in large numbers for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in order to extract copper, green and blue malachite, used for fine inlays, turquoise and lapis lazuli. It is not known exactly where the iron, which was already in use, albeit in limited quantities, for the manufacture of tools, was mined. Bronze has not yet been used. Blacksmiths made spears, nails, hooks and all kinds of fittings for artisans from copper and iron; in addition, they made wonderful copper vessels for the tables of rich people and magnificent copper weapons. As we will now see, they also did wonders in the field of plastic art. Silver was brought from abroad, probably from Cilicia and Asia Minor, so it was even more rare and valuable than gold. Quartz veins in the granite mountains along the Red Sea contained a lot of gold, and it was mined at Wadi Foakhir, along the Coptic road. Gold was also mined in large quantities in foreign lands and transported by trade from Nubia, where it was found in the eastern deserts. Of the jewelry that adorned the pharaoh and the nobility in the Old Kingdom, almost nothing has survived, but reliefs in chapels inside tombs often depict goldsmiths at work, and their descendants of the Middle Kingdom left behind works showing that taste and The skills of the 1st Dynasty continued to develop continuously in subsequent periods of the Old Kingdom.

The Nile Valley supplied almost all the materials needed for the development of all other significant types of crafts. Despite the ease of obtaining good building stone, huge quantities of sun-dried brick were produced, as in our time, by factories. We have already seen that masons built entire neighborhoods for the poor, villas for the rich, warehouses, fortifications and city walls from this cheap and convenient material. In the treeless valley, the main trees were the date palm, sycamore, tamarisk and acacia, none of which were suitable for buildings. Wood was therefore rare and expensive, but carpenters, joiners and cabinetmakers still flourished, and those who worked for the palace or on the estates of the nobility worked wonders with cedar brought from Syria and ebony obtained from the south. In every city and every large estate, shipbuilding did not stop. There were many different types of ships, ranging from heavy cargo boats for grain and livestock to the luxurious multi-oared "dahabiye" of the nobles with their huge sail. We find shipwrights building the oldest seagoing vessels known to us on the shores of the Red Sea.

Although the virtuoso stone craftsmen still made magnificent vessels, vases, jugs, bowls and dishes from alabaster, diorite, porphyry and other valuable stones, they nevertheless had to gradually give way to the potter, whose delightful blue and green earthenware could not not to win the market. Potters also made huge quantities of large, crudely made jars for storing oil, wine, meat and other food in the storehouses of the nobility and government. The production of small utensils, used among millions of the lower population, became one of the most important branches of the country's crafts. The pottery of that time is devoid of decoration and hardly represents a work of art. Glass was still used mainly in the form of glaze and did not play the role of an independent material. In a country of pastures and cattle breeding, leather production goes without saying. Furriers became proficient at dressing hides and produced thin and soft leathers, dyed in all sorts of colors, for upholstering chairs, armchairs and beds and for making pillows, colored canopies and canopies. Flax was bred in large quantities, and its collection on the land of the pharaoh was under the supervision of a high-ranking nobleman. The wives of serfs on large estates were engaged in weaving and spinning. Even the coarsest types of fabric for general use were of good quality; As for the surviving samples of royal linen fabrics, they are so thin that without the help of a magnifying glass they cannot be distinguished from silk, and the body of the people wearing them was visible through the fabric. Other plant fibers derived from marsh plants supported extensive production of coarser fabrics. Among them, papyrus was the most useful. Light shuttles were made from it by tying together long bunches of stems; From the same stems, but as from palm fibers, ropes were twisted; further, sandals and mats were woven from papyrus stems, but most importantly, split into thin strips, they could be turned into sheets of durable paper. The fact that Egyptian writing reached Phenicia and gave the classical world an alphabet is partly due to the convenient writing material, as well as the way it was written with ink. While a royal dispatch in cuneiform on a clay tablet often weighed eight or ten pounds and could not be carried by a messenger, a roll of papyrus with a surface area fifty times larger than the tablet could easily be carried in the bosom - be it a business document or book. Papyrus was imported into Phenicia already in the 12th century. BC e. The production of paper from papyrus developed into a vast and thriving craft industry already in the era of the Old Kingdom.

The Nile was covered with boats, barges and all kinds of vessels, which carried the mentioned products of artisans, as well as the products of the fields and pastures, to the treasury of the pharaoh or to the markets, where they were exhibited for sale. The usual form of trade was exchange: a simple clay pot was given for fish, a bunch of onions for a fan, a wooden box for a jar of ointment. But in some transactions, namely those where large valuables were involved, gold and copper in rings of a certain weight were used as money, and stone weights were marked with a corresponding amount of gold in the form of such rings. A coin of this kind is the oldest in circulation. Silver was rare and valued higher than gold. Trade has already reached a high degree of development. Books and records were kept, orders and receipts were written, wills were made, powers of attorney were issued, and written long-term contracts were concluded. Each noble person had his own secretaries and clerks, and the exchange of letters and official documents with his colleagues did not stop. Beneath the meager remains of sun-dried brick houses on Elephantine Island, where the nobility of the southern outskirts lived in the 26th century. BC e., the peasants found the remains of household papers and business documents that had once been compiled in the office of an important person. But the ignorant people who found them damaged the precious papyri so much that only fragments of them survived. The letters, trial reports and memoranda that can still be recognized between them were published by the Berlin museum where the find is kept.

Under such conditions, mastering the scholarship of that time was mandatory for an official career. In connection with the treasury, which required many skilled scribes to keep all kinds of records, there were schools where young men studied and practiced the art of scribes, to which they intended to devote themselves. Education had only one side for the Egyptians - practical benefit. The ideal satisfaction in the search for truth, the pursuit of science for its own sake, were unknown to him. Scientific knowledge, according to the scribe, was the advantage that elevated the young man above all other classes, and as a result of this, the boy should be sent to school from an early age and diligently monitored to ensure that he did what was assigned. The instructions constantly rang in the young man’s ears, but the teacher was not limited to them, his rule was: “The boy’s ears are on his back, and he listens when he is beaten.” Education, apart from countless moral rules, including many that were extremely sound and reasonable, consisted mainly in mastering the art of writing. The complex hieroglyphic writing, with its innumerable figures of animals and men, which the reader has no doubt seen more than once on monuments in museums or in works devoted to Egypt, was too painstaking and difficult to answer the needs of everyday business life. Thanks to the habit of writing these figures in cursive ink on papyrus, they were gradually reduced to very simplified and abbreviated outlines. This business cursive writing, which we call hieratic, arose already in the era of the most ancient dynasties and with the flowering of the culture of the Old Kingdom it developed into a beautiful and fluent writing system, closer to hieroglyphs than our cursive writing is to block letters. The introduction of this system into government administration and everyday business life caused significant changes in government and society and forever created a class distinction between the educated and the uneducated that is still a problem in modern society. Mastering cursive writing enabled the young man to devote himself to the coveted official career as a scribe, warehouse supervisor, or estate manager. In view of this, the mentor offered the student sample letters, proverbs and literary works, which he carefully copied into his scroll, which replaced his modern classroom notebook. A large number of such scrolls have been found from the imperial era, some fifteen centuries after the fall of the Old Kingdom. Thanks to these scrolls, written with the unsteady hand of a student of the clerk's school, many works have been preserved that would otherwise have been lost. They are easy to recognize by the teacher’s marks in the margins. Having learned to write well, the young man became an assistant to some official. In his office he gradually acquired the routine and duties of a professional scribe until he was able to occupy a staff position at the bottom of the bureaucratic ladder.

Consequently, education consisted exclusively of practical usefulness for an official career. Acquaintance with nature and the outside world in general was considered necessary only insofar as it contributed to the above-mentioned goal. As we have already said, the Egyptians never had the opportunity to seek truth for its own sake. The science of that time, if we can even talk about it in the proper sense of the word, consisted of getting to know natural phenomena from an angle that could make it easier for people to carry out the practical tasks that they faced every day. They had a great practical acquaintance with astronomy, developed from that knowledge which enabled their ancestors to introduce a rational calendar some thirteen centuries before the flowering of the culture of the Old Kingdom. They had already drawn up a celestial map, knew the most important fixed stars, and had developed a system of observation through instruments accurate enough to determine the positions of the stars for practical purposes. But they did not create a single theory regarding the celestial bodies taken as a whole, and it never occurred to them that such an attempt could be useful or worth the trouble. If we turn to mathematics, then all the usual arithmetic operations were required in daily business and government office work and had long been in use among scribes. But fractions presented difficulties. The scribes were able to operate only with those that had a unit in the numerator, and as a result of this, divide all other fractions into a series of those where the numerator was one. The only exception was the two-thirds, which you learned to use without dismembering them like that. Elementary algebraic questions were also solved without difficulty. In geometry, they were able to solve the simplest theorems, although determining the area of ​​a trapezoid (a trapezoid is a figure similar to a trapezoid, but without parallel sides) presented some difficulties and was accompanied by errors, while the area of ​​a circle was determined quite accurately. The need to calculate the volume of a heap of grain led to a very approximate determination of the volume of the hemispheres, and of a round barn - to the determination of the volume of a cylinder. But not a single theoretical question was discussed, and science dealt exclusively with issues that were constantly encountered in everyday life. The plan, for example, of the square base of the Great Pyramid could be drawn up with amazing precision, and orientation could be achieved with an accuracy almost rivaling that obtained with modern instruments. Thus, considerable knowledge of mechanics was at the service of the architect and the craftsman. The arch has been used in stone buildings since the 20th century and was, therefore, the oldest known to us. When moving large monuments, only the simplest technical techniques were used: the block was unknown, and probably also the roller. Medicine, which already possessed a significant store of worldly wisdom, reveals direct and accurate observation; It was customary to call a doctor, and the court physician of the pharaoh was a high-ranking and influential person. Many medical recipes were reasonable and useful, while others were naively fantastic, such as a mixture of black calf hair as a preventative against graying of hair. They were collected and written down on papyrus scrolls, and the recipes of this era were famous in later times for their power. Some of them were brought by the Greeks to Europe, where they were used by peasants for a long time. Any progress towards true science was hindered by the belief in magic, which later dominated all medical practice. There was not much difference between a doctor and a magician. All medicines were composed with greater or lesser reliance on magical spells, and in many cases the magical actions of the doctor themselves were considered more effective than any medicine. The disease was caused by hostile spirits, and only magic could cope with them.

Art flourished as never before in the ancient world. Here again the Egyptian mentality was not entirely the same as that characteristic of later Hellenic art. Art as the search and identification of the ideally beautiful alone was unknown in Egypt. The Egyptian loved beauty in nature, he wanted to be surrounded by such beauty at home and outside his walls. The lotus blossomed on the handle of his spoon, and his wine sparkled in the deep blue bowl of the same flower; muscular bull legs of carved ivory supported the bed on which he slept; the ceiling and above his head represented a starry sky, spreading over the trunks of palm trees, each crowned with a graceful tuft of hanging foliage, or stalks of papyrus rose from the floor to support the azure vault on their swaying corollas; pigeons and moths flew across the sky that spread on the ceiling in his rooms; its floors were decorated with the lush greenery of luxurious marsh grasses, at the base of which fish glided; the wild bull raised his head above the swaying heads of the grass, hearing the chirping of the birds, vainly trying to drive away the thieving weasel that was climbing up with the intention of destroying their nests. Household items in the homes of rich people everywhere reveal conscious beauty of line and subtle observance of proportions; the beauty in nature and external life, captured in jewelry, individualized to a certain extent even the most ordinary objects. The Egyptians sought to impart beauty to all objects, but these objects, from first to last, served some useful purpose. They were not inclined to make a beautiful thing solely for the sake of its beauty. The practical element predominated in sculpture. The magnificent statues of the Old Kingdom were not made to decorate the market place, but solely to be walled up in tombs - mastabas, where, as we saw in the previous chapter, they could be useful to the deceased in the afterlife. It is mainly to this motive that we owe the wonderful development of portrait sculpture of the Old Kingdom.

The sculptor could either sculpt his model with precise individual features, pursuing an intimate, personal style, or he could reproduce a conventional type in a formal, typical style. Both styles, reproducing the same person, no matter how different they were from each other, could be found in the same tomb. All techniques were used to increase the similarity in life. The statue was entirely painted according to nature, the eyes were set in rock crystal, and the liveliness inherent in the works of Memphis sculptors has never been surpassed. Of the seated figures, the most perfect is the well-known statue of Khafre (Khefre), the builder of the second pyramid at Giza. The sculptor skillfully coped with the difficulties presented to him by the unusually hard and brittle material (diorite), and although he was consequently forced to treat the subject in general terms, he nevertheless quietly emphasized the characteristic features, since otherwise the work would have suffered from uncertainty. An unknown master, destined to take his place among the world's great sculptors, despite technical difficulties unknown to any modern sculptor, captured the true, enduring image of the king and showed us with inimitable skill the divine and dispassionate calm that the people of that time attributed to their rulers. By working on softer material, the sculptor achieved greater freedom, one of the best examples of which is the seated figure of Hemseth in the Louvre. She is strikingly alive, despite the summary interpretation of the body, a flaw characteristic of the statuary sculpture of the Old Kingdom. The head seems to be the most individual element in the model, and it is on this latter that he concentrates all his virtuosity. The poses of kings and nobles on the statues are little varied; in reality there is only one other position in which a high-ranking person could be represented. The best example of it is the figure of the priest Ranofer, a living likeness of the proud nobleman of that time. Although the model essentially tells us nothing, nevertheless, one of the most striking portraits of the Old Kingdom is the sleek, well-fed, self-satisfied old overseer, whose wooden statue, like all the others we have mentioned so far, is in the Cairo Museum. Everyone, of course, knows that he is called the village headman or “village sheikh”, due to the fact that the local residents, who dug him out of the ground, discovered in his face such a striking resemblance to the headman of their village that they all shouted with one voice: “ Sheikh el-Beled! “Depicting the servants who were supposed to accompany the deceased to the afterlife, the sculptor was not bound by the tyrannical conventions that determined the posture of a noble person. With the greatest resemblance to life, he sculpted miniature figures of household servants, busy in the tomb with the same work that they were accustomed to doing for their master in his house. Even the secretary of a noble person had to accompany him to the other world. And the sculptor modeled the famous “Louvre Scribe” so vividly that, having before him this sharp face with large features, we would hardly be surprised if the reed pen again easily moved along the papyrus roll lying on his lap, at the dictation of his master , interrupted now five thousand years ago. Wonderful figures of animals were carved from the hardest stone, like the granite lion’s head from the Niuserra sun temple. It was never thought that the sculptors of that distant era could complete such a difficult task as casting a life-size metal statue, but the sculptors and foundries at the court of Piopi I, in commemoration of the king’s first anniversary, even accomplished this. On a wooden base, they made the face and torso of the king from hammered copper, inserting eyes from obsidian and white limestone. Despite its current ruined state, despite the cracks and rust, the head still represents one of the most powerful portraits preserved from antiquity. The goldsmith also mastered the field of plastic art. In the “golden house,” as his workshop was called, he sculpted ritual statues of gods for temples, such as the magnificent image of the sacred Hierakonpolis hawk, whose head was found in a local temple. The forged copper body was lost, but the head, covered with a small disk on which rise two tall feathers, all made of forged gold, was preserved completely intact. The head is made of a single piece of metal, and the eyes are the polished ends of an obsidian rod that runs inside the head from one eye socket to the other.

In reliefs, which were now in great demand for decorating temples and prayer houses inside tombs - mastabas, the Egyptians were faced with problems of foreshortening and perspective. They had to depict objects on a plane that had roundness and depth. The solution to this issue was predicted by him from the times preceding the Old Kingdom. The conventional style had been established even before the era of the Third Dynasty and was now a sacred and inviolable tradition. Although some freedom of development was preserved, this style remained in its main features throughout the entire history of Egyptian art, even after artists learned to see its limitations. The era that created it did not learn to paint scenes or objects from one angle of view; the same figure was depicted from both sides simultaneously. When drawing a person, they invariably combined the eyes and shoulders from the front with the profile of the torso and legs. This unconscious discrepancy subsequently extended to temporal relations, and successive moments of time were combined in the same scene. If we accept this limitation, then the reliefs of the Old Kingdom, which are in fact slightly modeled drawings, are often sculptures of rare beauty. From the reliefs carved by Memphis sculptors on the walls of the prayer houses inside the mastabas, we draw all our information concerning the life and customs of the Old Kingdom. The excellent modeling of which the sculptor of that time was capable is perhaps best represented on the wooden doors of Khesir. All the reliefs were painted in such a way that when sooty we can call them convex or stucco paintings; in any case, they do not belong to the sphere of plastic art, like, for example, Greek reliefs. Painting was also used independently, and the well-known string of geese from one Medum tomb eloquently testifies to the strength and freedom with which a Memphian of that time could depict animal forms well known to him. The characteristic carriage of the head, the slow gait, the sudden bend of the neck as the head bends down to grab the worm - all this testifies to the work of a strong and confident draftsman who has long practiced his art.

The sculpture of the Old Kingdom can be characterized as natural and unconscious realism, expressed with the greatest technical perfection. In his art, the sculptor of the Ancient Kingdom can with honor stand comparison with modern sculptors. He was the only artist of the Ancient East capable of depicting the human body in stone; Living in a society where he saw a naked body before him every day, he interpreted it truthfully and freely. I cannot resist quoting the words of the impartial classical archaeologist Charles Perrault, who says of the Memphis sculptors of the Old Kingdom: “It must be admitted that they created works that will not be surpassed by the greatest portraits of modern Europe.” However, Old Kingdom sculpture was artificial; she did not interpret, did not embody ideas in stone, and had little interest in mental movements and vital forces. It is characteristic of that era that we must talk about Memphis art taken as a whole. We do not know any of its greatest masters, and we know the names of only one or two artists throughout the entire period of Egyptian history.

It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that the foundations of the architecture of the Old Kingdom were revealed to us. There are too few remains of the house and palace of that time to enable us to recreate with confidence their light and airy style. Only massive stone structures have reached us. In addition to mastabas and pyramids, which we have already briefly discussed, temples were the great architectural creations of the Old Kingdom. We touched on their structure in the previous chapter. The architect reproduced only straight perpendicular and horizontal lines in a very bold and successful combination. The arch, although famous, was not used as an architectural motif. The ceiling either rested on a simple stone abutment in the form of a tetrahedral pillar made of a single piece of granite, or the architrave was supported by a magnificent complex column made of a granite monolith. These columns, the oldest in the history of architecture, were probably used earlier than the Old Kingdom, for they have a completely finished appearance in the era of the V Dynasty. The columns reproduce a palm tree, and the capitals are made in the form of a crown; or they are conceived as a bunch of papyrus stems bearing an architrave on top of interlocking buds that form a capital. The proportions are impeccable. Surrounded by such wonderful columns and bounded by walls with brightly painted reliefs, the courtyards of the temples of the Old Kingdom belong to the noblest architectural creations that have come down to us from antiquity. Egypt became the birthplace of that type of architecture where the column plays a leading role. The Babylonian builders with amazing skill achieved various architectural effects by skillfully grouping large masses, but they limited themselves to this, and the colonnade remained unknown to them; whereas the Egyptians already at the end of the 4th millennium BC. e. solved the main problem of monumental architecture by treating empty spaces with the most subtle artistic flair and the greatest technical perfection and laying the foundation for the colonnade.

The era we are considering operated with material objects and developed material resources, neither of which provided favorable conditions for the prosperity of literature. The latter was actually just in its infancy at that time. The court sages, the ancient viziers of Kegemni, Imhotep and Ptahhotep, captured in proverbs the sound worldly wisdom that their long career had taught them, and these proverbs were in circulation, probably already in written form, although the oldest manuscript of such rules that we possess is to the Middle Kingdom. The temple scribes of the V Dynasty compiled the annals of the most ancient kings, starting with the rulers of both prehistoric kingdoms, from whom only names have been preserved, and ending with the V Dynasty itself. But it was a dry list of events, deeds and donations to churches, devoid of literary form. This is the oldest surviving fragment of the royal annals. With the growing desire to immortalize distinguished lives, noble people began to carve on the walls of their tombs the chronicles of their lives, marked by naive straightforwardness, in a long series of simple sentences, identically constructed and devoid of any specific connection. Its representatives always talk about events and honors common in the life of the ruling nobility in the same terms; conventional phrases have already won their place in literature as unshakable canons in plastic art. The afterlife texts in the pyramids are sometimes marked by brute force and an almost savage fervor. They contain fragments of ancient myths, but we do not know whether these latter existed then only in oral form or in writing. Damaged religious poems, representing in form the beginnings of parallelism, are part of this literature and are undoubtedly examples of the most ancient poetry of Egypt. All this literature, both in form and content, indicates that it arose among primitive people. Folk songs, the product of the whimsical imagination of the busy peasant or the personal devotion of the household servant, were then as common as they are now; in one of the songs that has come down to us, a shepherd talks with sheep; in another, the porters assure their master that the chair is easier for them when he sits in it than when it is empty. Music also flourished, and there was a director of royal music at court. The instruments consisted of a harp, which the performer played while sitting, and two types of flutes, a longer one and a shorter one. Instrumental music was always accompanied by voice, and the full orchestra consisted of two harps and two flutes, large and small. Regarding the character and nature of the music performed, as well as the number of known octaves, we cannot say anything.

Such was, so far as we have been able to concentrate our modern knowledge, the active and energetic age which unfolds before us at the time when the rulers of the Thinis dynasties give way to the kings of Memphis. Now we must trace the fate of this ancient state, the composition of which is still discernible.

The lack of the necessary high-precision equipment with which numerous ancient Egyptian artifacts could be created, as well as the absence of traces of the industrial infrastructure for its production in Egypt itself and beyond, indicate that high technology was brought from outside. And here it would not be a bad idea to recall the mythological story widespread among various nations about the “sons of heaven” who, after completing some kind of humanitarian mission on Earth, return to “their star.”

At the turn of the 3rd millennium BC. e. In Egypt, an inexplicable technological breakthrough occurred almost out of nowhere. As if by magic, in an extremely short time, the Egyptians erected pyramids and demonstrated unprecedented skill in processing hard materials - granite, diorite, obsidian, quartz... All these miracles occur before the advent of iron, machine tools and other technical tools. Subsequently, the unique skills of the ancient Egyptians disappear just as quickly and inexplicably...

Three granite statues of Pharaoh Senusret III. British museum. London

Take, for example, the story of the Egyptian sarcophagi. They are divided into two groups, which differ strikingly in quality of execution. On the one hand, carelessly made boxes, in which uneven surfaces predominate. On the other hand, multi-ton granite and quartzite containers of unknown purpose, polished with incredible skill. Often the quality of processing of these sarcophagi is at the limit of modern machine technology.

Sarcophagi of different quality of processing

Ancient Egyptian sculptures created from super-strong materials present no less of a mystery. In the Egyptian Museum, anyone can see a statue carved from a single piece of black diorite. The surface of the statue is polished to a mirror shine. Scholars suggest that it dates from the Fourth Dynasty (2639-2506 BC) and depicts Pharaoh Khafre, who is credited with building one of the three largest pyramids of Giza.

But bad luck - in those days, Egyptian craftsmen used only stone and copper tools. Soft limestone can still be processed with such tools, but diorite, which is one of the hardest rocks, cannot be processed.

Diorite statue of Khafre. Egyptian Museum

The Colossi of Memnon are a unique sculptural composition from the times of Ancient Egypt.

Granite statue in the Ramesseum

We see the same picture with the colossi of Memnon, the age of which is determined by the remains of the funeral temple located behind them. As in the case of the Ramesseum, the quality of this structure, to put it mildly, does not shine with high technology - unfired brick and roughly fitted limestone, that’s all the masonry.

Such an incongruous juxtaposition can only be explained by the fact that the pharaohs simply attached their temple complexes to monuments left over from another, much more ancient and highly developed civilization.

Head of a statue of Pharaoh Senusret III. Obsidian. XII Dynasty. 19th century BC e. Collection Gulbenkian.

There is another mystery associated with ancient Egyptian statues. We are talking about eyes made from pieces of rock crystal, which were usually inserted into limestone or wooden sculptures. The quality of the lenses is so high that thoughts about turning and grinding machines come naturally.

The eyes of the wooden statue of Pharaoh Horus, like the eyes of a living person, look either blue or gray depending on the angle of illumination and even imitate the capillary structure of the retina! Research by Professor Jay Enoch from the University of Berkeley has shown the amazing closeness of these glass models to the shape and optical properties of a real eye.

The ancient Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote "from the words of the Egyptian priests that mortals ruled Egypt for less than 5 thousand years. The kingdom of people was preceded by the power of gods and heroes who ruled for an incredible 18 thousand years. The ancient Egyptian priest and historian Manetho also begins his list of Egyptian rulers with a dynasty of gods and demigods .

If we compare the statements of ancient authors and the facts that we currently have, it turns out that there was no technological breakthrough. Just starting from the 3rd millennium BC. e. In Egypt, artifacts left over from the first divine dynasties began to surface. It is possible that the pharaohs purposefully searched for, tried to master and, at the same time, appropriate the surviving fragments of this heritage.

Sculptural images of the daughters of the reformer pharaoh Akhenaten can tell about the appearance of the true creators of ancient masterpieces. The first thing that catches your eye is the unnaturally elongated shape of the skull, which, by the way, is also characteristic of other works of the Amarna period. This phenomenon gave rise to the hypothesis of a congenital disease in the pharaoh's family. However, there is no mention anywhere of any mental abnormalities in the ruler’s family, which such a disease would inevitably cause.

Another important and mysterious detail of the ancient Egyptian sculptural canon is the absolute symmetry of facial proportions. As you know, there are no symmetrical objects in nature. This rule also applies to the human body. Moreover, experiments have shown that photographs composed of strictly symmetrical halves of the same face cause instinctive rejection in a person.

There is something unnatural and alien to human nature in them. But perhaps in the world from which the gods came, different natural conditions reigned, thanks to which the “anomaly” became the norm? Be that as it may, we should listen carefully to the words of Plutarch: “It is not the one who denies the existence of the gods who falls into greater blasphemy, but the one who recognizes them as the superstitious believe them to be.”

Alexey KOMOGORTSEV

Khafre (in another transcription Khafre), and according to Greek tradition - Sufis II, ruler of Egypt, fourth in the IV dynasty of pharaohs.

The Turin Papyrus says that Khafre reigned for 24 years (approximately from 2558 to 2532 BC). Perhaps he was the brother of Cheops, and his heir. According to other sources, Khafra is the son of Khufu, and inherited the throne of Djedefra. Nothing can be said for sure here; this is a “blank spot” in that era. Before the beginning of the Late Kingdom period, Khafre was revered by the Egyptians as one of the gods.

Khafra the builder

During the reign of Khafre, the second largest was built in Giza. Its dimensions are 215.3 x 215.3 meters, with a height of 143 and a half meters. The pyramid was named Urt-Khafra, which translated from ancient Egyptian means: “Great Khafre”, or “Highly Honored Khafre”. Despite the fact that Khafre's pyramid is lower than the great pyramid of Khufu, its steepness and location on a hill practically negated the advantage of its “rival”.

The light cladding preserved on the top of the pyramid makes it one of the most recognizable today, which is perhaps why tourists often mistake it for the Pyramid of Cheops (the most famous).

Some experts believe that in addition to the pyramid, Khafre erected "". This is one of the most ambitious sculptures ever created by man from stone - 57.3 meters long and 20 meters high. Egyptologists suggest that the face of the Sphinx is a portrait copy of the face of Khafre, but there is no direct evidence of this.

There is another opinion that the prototype of the Sphinx was Pharaoh Khufu, and the statue was erected by Khufu’s son Djedefre, who wanted to perpetuate the memory of his father.

At the same time, it is known that Khafre built the “Temple of the Sphinx” - a monumental stone structure in which the cult of worship of the “Great Sphinx” was performed as a deity. This is the only temple that has been completely preserved to this day from the times of the Old Kingdom. Archaeologists also found several statues of Khafre himself, which, unfortunately, cannot be said about the statues of even his famous father, Cheops.

Khafre's name

The transcription of Khafra's name varies depending on the cultural reading tradition. In Greek it is read as Chephren, but Egyptologists pronounce the hieroglyphs of the name as Chaefre. Translated, this name means “Like Ra”, or “Incarnation of Ra”. However, there is evidence that the ancient Egyptians pronounced this name differently - Rafah (Rachaef), or “Ra-embodied.” This is due to the fact that in the name of the pharaoh there is a symbol of the sun god - Ra, and according to religious tradition, this symbol should be read, preceding all other symbols of the name.

Khafre in Greek tradition

Ancient Greek sources say little about Khafre. There is only a small mention of him in Herodotus's History. It’s a little bit the same with Hecatius of Abdera. Other authors barely touched on this topic, leaving only fragmentary information. In general, Khafre, like his legendary father, Cheops, was characterized by Greek authors as a cruel tyrant. It is also mentioned that for a long time it was an iconic symbol of religious worship among the Egyptians. However, you can read from Diodorus that the Egyptians, despite their worship, hated him much more than they revered him. Therefore, the real tombs of Khafren and his relatives had to be hidden from the people, out of fear for their safety.

Statue of Pharaoh Khafre

A monumental statue of Pharaoh Khafre was discovered in Giza, in his mortuary temple. Its style fully complies with all the canons of the ancient Egyptian sculptural tradition, which is based on strict symmetry and pronounced frontality. The sculptural incarnations of the pharaohs have always emphasized such properties as grandeur, solemnity and power.

The Khafre statue depicts the pharaoh sitting on a throne. The bends of the body maintain perfectly right angles. The pharaoh's hands fit tightly, without gaps, to his hips. The thighs are slightly apart and form a strict parallel with the figure’s bare feet. Khafre wears only a pleated skirt, and on his head is a klaft - a royal headdress, striped, and descending to his shoulders. A stylized image of the cobra goddess, Uraeus, is mounted in the center of the pharaoh's forehead. The god Horus, in the form of a falcon, protects the ruler's head from the back of the head with his wings. This protection demonstrates the pharaoh's divine status. The statue can now be viewed at