- Priest
The illustration shows a priest wearing nothing but a loin cloth and a leopard skin. - Hunifer
- Toga
From Hope's "Costume of the Ancients." The material of the toga was wool, in the earlier time and for the common people; afterwards silk and other materials were used, coloured or bordered according to the `rank` or station of the wearer. - Greek Figure
- Greek Figure
From Hope's "Costume of the Ancients." With the Greeks the tunic was the principal article of attire. It was worn next to the skin, and was of a light tissue. In the earlier time it was composed of wool, in later periods of flax, and in the latest periods it was either of flax mixed with silk or of pure silk. The illustration given will serve to show its construction. It was a simple square bag, open at the two ends, made sufficiently wide to admit of the folds being ample, and sufficiently long to allow of its being gathered up about the waist and breasts. It was kept in its place by various means, either by a simple girdle round the waist or by cords drawn crosswise between the breasts, over the shoulders, looped at the back, and again drawn round the waist, or by an arrangement of cords or ribbons drawn over each shoulder and attached to the girdle. - short-sleeved coat
6th to 5th Century BC - Persian
The costume is considered to be that of a Jewish captive of the Persian conqueror and dates sixth to fifth centuries B.C - Winged Sun of Thebes
Over the portico of the Theban temple there is usually a ball or sun, ornamented with outstretched wings, representing the all-seeing Providence thus watching over and sheltering the world. From this sun hang two asps wearing the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. - An Assyrian King and His Chief Minister
It was out of those two main weaknesses of all priesthoods, namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power of secular kingship arose. The foreign enemy either prevailed and set up a king over the people, or the priesthoods who would not give way to each other set up a common fighting captain, who retained more or less power in peace time. This secular king developed a group of officials about him and began, in relation to military organization, to take a share in the priestly administration of the people’s affairs. So, growing out of priestcraft and beside the priest, the king, the protagonist of the priest,appears upon the stage of human history, and a very large amount of the subsequent experiences of mankind is only to be understood as an elaboration, complication, and distortion of the struggle, unconscious or deliberate, between these two systems of human control, the temple and the palace. And it was in the original centres of civilization that this antagonism was most completely developed. - Burning the Dead - Etruscan Ceremony
Etruscan painting of a Ceremonial Burning of the Dead - Pharaoh Akhnaton
Opinions upon Amenophis IV, or Akhnaton, differ very widely. There are those who regard him as the creature of his mother’s hatred of Ammon and the uxorious spouse of a beautiful wife. Certainly he loved his wife very passionately; he showed her great honour—Egypt honoured women, and was ruled at different times by several queens—and he was sculptured in one instance with his wife seated upon his knees, and in another in the act of kissing her in a chariot; but men who live under the sway of their womenkind do not sustain great empires in the face of the bitter hostility of the most influential organized bodies in their realm. Others write of him as a “gloomy fanatic.” Matrimonial bliss is rare in the cases of gloomy fanatics. - Pharaoh Chephren
The earlier Pharaohs were not improbably regarded as incarnations of the dominant god. The falcon god Horus sits behind the head of the great statue of Chephren. It was Cheops and Chephren and Mycerinus of this IVth Dynasty who raised the vast piles of the great and the second and the third pyramids at Gizeh. These unmeaning sepulchral piles, of an almost incredible vastness, erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely begun, exhausted the resources of Egypt through three long reigns, and left her wasted as if by a war. - Sumerian Warriors in Phalanx
Perhaps the earliest people to form real cities in this part of the world, or indeed in any part of the world, were a people of mysterious origin called the Sumerians. They were neither Semites nor Aryans, and whence they came we do not know. Whether they were dark whites of Iberian or Dravidian affinities is less certainly to be denied.[103] They used a kind of writing which they scratched upon clay, and their language has been deciphered. - From the François Vase
From the François Vase - Men’s Head-dress—Archaic
Men’s Head-dress—Archaic - Snake Goddess and Votary
The snake goddess and her votary from Knossos have, in addition, a kind of apron reaching almost to the knees in front and behind, and rising to the hips at the sides. The costume is completed by the addition of a high hat or turban. Looking at the snake goddess more in detail, we find that the jacket is cut away into a V-shape from the neck to the waist, leaving both the breasts quite bare; the two edges are laced across below the breast, the laces being fastened in a series of bows. The jacket is covered with an elaborate volute pattern, the apron with spots and bordered with a “guilloche.” - The Chlamys and Petasos
The Chlamys and Petasos - The Doric Himation
The Doric Himation - Vase-painting by Brygos
Vase-painting by Brygos - Vase-painting by Euphronios
Vase-painting by Euphronios - Vase-painting by Euxitheos
Vase-painting by Euxitheos - Vase-painting by Falerii
Vase-painting by Falerii - Vase-painting by Hieron
Vase-painting by Hieron - Vase-painting from Lucania
Vase-painting from Lucania - Vase-painting in the Polygnotan Style
Vase-painting in the Polygnotan Style - Vase-painting
Vase-painting - Vase-painting—Dress with two Overfold
Vase-painting—Dress with two Overfold - Vase-painting—Ionic Dress
Vase-painting—Ionic Dress - Women’s Head-dress
Women’s Head-dress - Raft bouyed by inflated skins (modern)
- Binding and pulling grain in the Egypt of the pharaohs
Binding and pulling grain in the Egypt of the pharaohs - Greek Dancing Girl
Their education inculcated the practice of immorality. All ideas of modesty were by a deliberate public training obliterated from their minds. Scourged with the whip when young, taught to wrestle, box, and race naked before assemblages of men, their wantonness and licentiousness passed every bound. Marriage, indeed, was an institution of the state; but no man could call his wife his own. - Head of Neco
Neco, the son of Psamatik I., from the moment that he ascended the throne, resolved to make the bold stroke for empire from which his father had held back. Regarding his mercenary army as a sufficient land force, he concentrated his energies on the enlargement and improvement of his navy, which was weak in numbers and of antiquated construction. Naval architecture had recently made great strides, first by the inventiveness of the Phœnicians, who introduced the bireme, and then by the skill of the Greeks, who, improving on the hint furnished them, constructed the trireme. Neco, by the help of Greek artificers, built two fleets, both composed of triremes, one in the ports which opened on the Red Sea, the other in those upon the Mediterranean. He then, with the object of uniting the two fleets into one, when occasion should require, made an attempt to re-open the canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, which had been originally constructed by Seti I. and Ramesses II., but had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The Nile mud and the desert sand had combined to silt it up. - Great Hall of Columns at Karnak (Restored)
The greatest of all Seti's works was his pillared hall at Karnak, the most splendid single chamber that has ever been built by any architect, and, even in its ruins, one of the grandest sights that the world contains. Seti's hall is three hundred and thirty feet long, by one hundred and seventy feet broad, having thus an internal area of fifty-six thousand square feet, and covers, together with its walls and pylons, an area of eighty-eight thousand such feet, or a larger space than that covered by the Dom of Cologne, the largest of all the cathedrals north of the Alps. It was supported by one hundred and sixty-four massive stone columns, which were divided into three groups—twelve central ones, each sixty-six feet high and thirty-three feet in circumference, formed the main avenue down its midst; while on either side, two groups of sixty-one columns, each forty-two feet high and twenty-seven round, supported the huge wings of the chamber, arranged in seven rows of seven each, and two rows of six. The whole was roofed over with solid blocks of stone, the lighting being, as in the far smaller hall of Thothmes III., by means of a clerestory. - Figures of Taourt
It was a peculiar feature of the Egyptian religion, that it contained distinctively evil and malignant gods. Set was not, originally, such a deity; but he became such in course of time, and was to the later Egyptians the very principle of evil—Evil personified. Another evil deity was Taour or Taourt, who is represented as a hippopotamus standing on its hind-legs, with the skin and tail of a crocodile dependent down its back, and a knife or a pair of shears in one hand. - Figure of Bes
Bes seems also to have been a divinity of the same class {Evil Gods]. He was represented as a hideous dwarf, with large outstanding ears, bald, or with a plume of feathers on his head, and with a lion-skin down his back, often carrying in his two hands two knives. - Tablet at Sneferu at Wady-Magharah
The first living, breathing, acting, flesh-and-blood personage, whom so-called histories of Egypt present to us, is a certain Sneferu, or Seneferu, whom the Egyptians seem to have regarded as the first monarch of their fourth dynasty. Sneferu—called by Manetho, we know not why, Soris—has left us a representation of himself, and an inscription. On the rocks of Wady Magharah, in the Sinaitic peninsula, may be seen to this day an incised tablet representing the monarch in the act of smiting an enemy, whom he holds by the hair of his head, with a mace. The action is apparently emblematic, for at the side we see the words Ta satu, "Smiter of the nations;" and it is a fair explanation of the tablet, that its intention was to signify that the Pharaoh in question had reduced to subjection the tribes which in his time inhabited the Sinaitic regions. - Gallery in the Great Pyramid
The Great Gallery is also of curious construction. Extending for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet, and rising at an angle of 26° 18', it has a width of five feet at the base and a height of above thirty feet. The side walls are formed of seven layers of stone, each projecting a few inches over that below it. The gallery thus gradually contracts towards the top, which has a width of four feet only, and is covered in with stones that reach across it, and rest on the walls at either side. The exact object of so lofty a gallery has not been ascertained; but it must have helped to keep the air of the interior pure and sweet, by increasing the space through which it had to circulate. - Head of Nefertari-Aahmes
Aahmes, in contracting his marriage with the Ethiopian princess, to whom he gave the name of Nefertari-Aahmes—or "the good companion of Aahmes"—was, we may be tolerably sure, bent on obtaining a contingent of those stalwart troops whose modern representatives are either the Blacks of the Soudan or the Gallas of the highlands of Abyssinia. - Bust of Thothmes I, the first great Egyptian Conqueror
Thothmes I. was the grandson of the Aahmes who drove out the Hyksôs. He had thus hereditary claims to valour and military distinction. The Ethiopian blood which flowed in his veins through his grandmother, Nefertari-Aahmes, may have given him an additional touch of audacity, and certainly showed itself in his countenance, where the short depressed nose and the unduly thick lips are of the Cushite rather than of the Egyptian type. His father, Amen-hotep I., was a somewhat undistinguished prince; so that here, as so often, where superior talent runs in a family, it seems to have skipped a generation, and to have leapt from the grand-sire to the grandson. - Head of Hatasu
Hasheps, or Hatasu, was the daughter of the great warrior king, Thothmes the First, and, according to some, was, during his later years, associated with him in the government. An inscription is quoted in which he assigns to her her throne-name of Ra-ma-ka, and calls her "Queen of the South and of the North," But it was not till after the death of her father that she came prominently forward, and assumed a position not previously held by any female in Egypt, unless it were Net-akret (Nitocris). Her father had left behind him two sons, as well as a daughter; and the elder of these, according to Egyptian law, succeeded him. He reigned as Thothmes-nefer-shau, and is known to moderns as Thothmes the Second. He was, however, a mere youth, of a weak and amiable temper; while Hatasu, his senior by some years, was a woman of great energy and of a masculine mind, clever, enterprizing, vindictive, and unscrupulous. The contrast of their portrait busts is remarkable, and gives a fair indication of the character of each of them. Thothmes has the appearance of a soft and yielding boy: he has a languishing eye, a short upper lip, a sensuous mouth and chin. Hatasu looks the Amazon: she holds her head erect, has a bold aquiline nose, a firmly-set mouth, and a chin that projects considerably, giving her an indescribable air of vigour and resolution. The effect is increased, no doubt, by her having attached to it the male appendage of an artificial beard; but even apart from this, her face would be a strong one, expressive of firmness, pride, and decision. It is thought that she contracted a marriage with her brother, such unions being admissible by the Egyptian marriage law, and not infrequent among the Pharaohs, whether of the earlier or the later dynasties. In any case, it is certain that she took the direction of affairs under his reign, reducing him to a cipher, and making her influence paramount in every department of the government. - Head of Thothmes II
Hasheps, or Hatasu, was the daughter of the great warrior king, Thothmes the First, and, according to some, was, during his later years, associated with him in the government. Her father had left behind him two sons, as well as a daughter; and the elder of these, according to Egyptian law, succeeded him. He reigned as Thothmes-nefer-shau, and is known to moderns as Thothmes the Second. He was, however, a mere youth, of a weak and amiable temper; while Hatasu, his senior by some years, was a woman of great energy and of a masculine mind, clever, enterprizing, vindictive, and unscrupulous. The contrast of their portrait busts is remarkable, and gives a fair indication of the character of each of them. Thothmes has the appearance of a soft and yielding boy: he has a languishing eye, a short upper lip, a sensuous mouth and chin. Hatasu looks the Amazon: she holds her head erect, has a bold aquiline nose, a firmly-set mouth, and a chin that projects considerably, giving her an indescribable air of vigour and resolution. The effect is increased, no doubt, by her having attached to it the male appendage of an artificial beard; but even apart from this, her face would be a strong one, expressive of firmness, pride, and decision. It is thought that she contracted a marriage with her brother, such unions being admissible by the Egyptian marriage law, and not infrequent among the Pharaohs, whether of the earlier or the later dynasties. In any case, it is certain that she took the direction of affairs under his reign, reducing him to a cipher, and making her influence paramount in every department of the government. - Egyptian Ships in the time of Hatasu
The legal position which Hatasu occupied during the sixteen years that followed the death of Thothmes II. was probably that of regent for Thothmes III., his (and her) younger brother; but practically she was full sovereign of Egypt. It was now that she formed her grand schemes of foreign commerce, and had them carried out by her officers. First of all, she caused to be built, in some harbour on the western coast of the Red Sea, a fleet of ships, certainly not fewer than five, each constructed so as to be propelled both by oars and sails, and each capable of accommodating some sixty or seventy passengers. Of these thirty were the rowers, whose long sweeps were to plough the waves, and bring the vessels into port, whether the wind were favourable or no; some ten or twelve formed the crew; and the remainder consisted of men-at-arms, whose services, it was felt, might be required, if the native tribes were not sufficiently impressed with the advantages of commercial dealings. - An Egyptian Stamp for impressing Bricks
In old Egypt, bricks were impressed by the same method of stamping [as the Assyrians], but not to such an extent as they were in old Assyria. . The cuts annexed represent the face and back of an old Egyptian stamp discovered in a tomb of Thebes. The stamp is five inches long, two and one-quarter inches broad, and half an inch thick, and is fitted to an arched handle. The characters are engraved below the surface of the wood, so that an impression taken from the stamp on the clay would show the engraved characters in relief. The inscription on the stamp has been translated, Amenoph, beloved of truth. Amenoph is supposed, by some authorities, to have been the king of Egypt at the period of the exodus of the Israelites. The characters on the Egyptian and Babylonian bricks are much more neatly executed than would seem necessary for inscriptions on so common a material as clay.