Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt:...the adjacent room or story an Egyptian woman is similarly teaching a companion her first steps, while two others, laying their instruments aside, partake of a meal together. In the other picture, one of the foreign women is combing out her friend's tresses; a third eats from a table, and others dance to the sound of a harp. Their Egyptian sisters are amusing themselves in much the same way. Two are dancing, one accompanying her own movements on the lute, while two companions bear their part on the lute and harp. In spite of the small scale and the defaced condition of the wall, the shuffling gait of the Oriental dancer is suggested as successfully as the lazy postures of the eunuchs outside. The Balcony.--However wearisome the repetition of this scene may have become, we could ill spare this representation of the Queen and her little daughters mutually caressing one another. For though such pictures were not exceptional, few have come down to our time in any completeness. The youngest of the three can scarcely have been old enough to walk at this time, as indeed her lack of hair suggests. Meanwhile the parents themselves are treated as nurslings of the Aten, "the Father," who supports them by his hands with even more solicitude than they themselves show for their offspring. The features of all are well preserved and are likely to be more authentic here, in the tomb of the Queen's parents, than anywhere else. An astonishing, and indeed a unique, feature of the representation is that the whole family is absolutely nude, so far as we can see. One can hardly believe that the reverence for reality with which the King is credited led him so far as this, but must suppose that he shared with his artist his admiration for the human...