concentrated their efforts. It is not of the kind that strikes us by its agreeable harmony or reveals at first glance the nature of the thing that it is decorating; but solid, majestic building, in which one sees the germ of everything that the Greeks were subsequently able to discover in it. The Egyptians were unacquainted with the Orders, meaning that they were not yoked to proportions. They were inventors and did what seemed best to them; they seem to have tolerated nothing that was not useful. They employed columns and pilasters and decorated them with capitals, string courses, bases and fluting; they shaped and decorated pediments; but there is some indication that all these ornaments were merely arbitrary, since they were never repeated.
* * *
I think they saw columns not only as a sturdy and reliable means to pierce and impart a lighter appearance to the immense spaces occupied by their buildings but also found them necessary to hold up their ceilings, since the art of vaulting was completely unknown to them. The descriptions of the two labyrinths and of the ruins of Thebes, found in Herodotus and in our travellers, elevate the mind. Yet we have only inferior engravings or inadequate drawings to represent them, which are better suited to destroying than embellishing an idea. The scale of the stones that the Egyptians employed would be enough in itself to excite our admiration. What patience it must have required to carve them! What forces to set them in their places! These objects, considerable as they are, vanish, so to speak, from the mind when one recalls the idea of the pyramids or of Lake Moeris.1 Those monuments, because of the grandeur of the enterprise – always, it seems, crowned with success – are an inexhaustible source of astonishment. Thus the art of constructing vaults was unknown to the Egyptians and if any are found in their country, they must be thought to derive from their contacts with the Greeks and Romans. […]
The progress of sculpture in Egypt seems to us to have been very slow but it is possible that we are mistaken. This art, treated with the same spirit as architecture, reached, among the Egyptians, a similar degree of perfection. In this art too they sought solidity, an attribute to which they always aspired. If this fact is once accepted – and I consider it proven – the pose that they retained for so long in their statues, with the legs joined, can only be ascribed to their ambition to produce immortal works. The Colossus of Memnon is one of the most ancient figures; in fact, it has separate legs but they are integral with the block behind them; in this case, they followed nature but would not have done so if they had not found a point of solidity. When deprived of such assistance, they sought this support in the thing itself. It is a consequence of this principle that they always represented sphinxes and other animals lying down; Egypt is filled with such statues, which for the most part decorated the avenues that led to certain temples and palaces. Their taste for solidity would not allow of any part giving way and this confined them to simple attitudes, which became monotonous. This monotony may not have been a fault in their eyes and was inevitable, since their combination of attitudes was very restricted and action was absolutely ruled out. We should not on that account believe that their artists were incapable of refined detailing. It is superfluous to take this examination any further: it will be agreed that their sculptors displayed both the sentiment and the expression of grandeur and that this constitutes the first and most essential part of the art, since it alone can elevate the spirit of the spectator. It was the same desire to hand down their works to posterity that made them prefer low to higher forms of relief, since the undercutting of the latter exposes them to a greater number of accidents. Finally, they were acquainted with every department of sculpture including the engraving of stones.
There cannot, then, be any doubt that drawing, the basis of all the arts, was intensely practised in a country where the symbolic characters [hieroglyphs] forced even writers to be draughtsmen. But individuals retained the national taste, which considered only masses and neglected details. It is true that details, if they are not intelligently employed, serve only to destroy the overall effect and I believe that this was as little understood among the Egyptians as the art of composing groups. This is another reason why I have such a low opinion of their painting.
Not only was their way of drawing unfavourable to the great effects of this art, but painting also requires breaking up colour in a way that could only alter the solidity that they sought in everything they did. My judgement on this point does not depend only on the paintings that I have seen, which, bad as they are, might nevertheless have come from a country where excellent paintings existed, but on the accounts that I have read and what Père Sicard and other Travellers report of those that they have seen in a number of other places in Egypt, and above all in a ceiling at Dendera. I think that their colour was applied flat, in a continuous band and without contrasting colours. I further believe that they regarded painting with something like scorn. Let me explain: I believe that it seemed to them trivial and lacking in durability, and as such, at odds with the claims that they made on the esteem of posterity.
IIC4 Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) from Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations
Voltaire was one of the generation of thinkers who established the intellectual atmosphere enabling the French Revolution. His Essai sur les moeurs (1756), whose full title includes the phrase ‘an essay on Universal History’, took as its point of departure Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History of 1681. In that text Bossuet, writing as a Roman Catholic bishop, had argued for the pre‐eminence of Christian Europe over ‘pagan’ nations. In contrast, Voltaire offered a more nuanced account, one not driven by religious partisanship but speaking to the secular concerns of Enlightenment debate. Bossuet’s book had aspired to cover a period from the beginning of the world to the empire of Charlemagne. It was the latter that Voltaire took as his point of departure. The present short extracts include Voltaire’s initial statement of his reasons for beginning his account of world history with the East, followed by some of his observations on China, India, ancient Persia and the early Islamic state (which was approximately coeval with Charlemagne). Throughout, Voltaire’s position has two sides. On the one hand, he emphasized the much longer period of civilization in the East than in Europe. But on the other, he had to acknowledge that eighteenth‐century European civilization appeared to have advanced in significantly new and powerful ways. That said, Voltaire’s openness to non‐European civilizations did not always extend to their art; his sociocultural radicalism was balanced by something altogether more conventional when it came to matters of ‘taste’ (cf. IIC5). The term ‘moeurs’, in Voltaire’s usage, goes beyond its conventional meaning of ‘customs’ and ‘manners’ to imply something of the sense of culture as a ‘whole way of life’ that did not become widely accepted until the twentieth century. The extracts are taken from An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV. Written in French by M. de Voltaire and Translated into English by Mr. Nugent, London 1759, pp. 2–4 (Introduction), 10 and 17–19 (on China), 30 and 32–4 (on India), 37–8 (on ancient Persepolis) and 56–9 (on the early Islamic Caliphate).
The celebrated Bossuet, who in his discourse on one part of universal history has entered into the true spirit of it, went no lower than Charlemaign. Your intent is to begin at this era, and thence to form a general idea of the universe; but you will be often obliged to go back to remoter times.1 This great writer takes but a slight notice of the Arabians who founded so potent an empire and so flourishing a religion; he makes mention of them as a swarm of barbarians. He expatiates on the Egyptians; but he is silent in regard to the Indians and the Chinese, nations as antient at least, and as considerable as the people of Egypt.
Nourished with the produce of their lands, clothed with their silks, amused by the games which they invented, and even instructed by their moral fables, why should we neglect to be acquainted with the spirit of those nations, to whose coasts our European merchants did not fail to steer, as soon as the way was laid open?
When you consider this globe as a philosopher, you first direct your attention to the east, the nursery of all arts, and from whence they have been communicated to the west. […] The whole Levant from Greece to the extremity of our hemisphere, was long celebrated in history, before we knew
