Identifier: historyofartinan01perruoft Title: A history of art in ancient Egypt Year: 1883 (1880s) Authors: Perrot, Georges, 1832-1914 Chipiez, Charles, 1835-1901 Armstrong, Walter, Sir, 1850-1918 Subjects: Art -- Egypt History Egypt -- Antiquities Publisher: London : Chapman and Hall Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image: efs of earlierages. Sometimes absolutecertainty is not to be at-tained, but we may safelysay that a race is poly-theistic when we find theseabstract deities amone theirgods, such deities as thePtah, Amen, and Osiris ofthe Egyptians, and theApollo and Athene of theGreeks.^ We may, then, definepolytheism as the partitionof the highest attributes oflife between a limitednumber of agents. Theimagination of man couldnot give these agents lifewithout at the same time en-dowing them with essentialnatural characteristics andwith the human form, but,nevertheless, it wished toregard them as stronger,more beautiful and lessephemeral than man. The ^ Several of the bronzes which we reproduce may belong to the Ptolemaic epoch ;but they are repetitions of types and attributes which had been fixed for manycenturies by tradition. It is in this Capacity chiefly that we reproduce them, asexamples of those forms which seemed to the Egyptian imagination to offer the mostsatisfactory emblems of their gods.

Text Appearing After Image: Fig. 34.—Amen or Ammon, from a bronze in theLouvre. Heiijht 2204 inches. 52 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. system had said its last word and was complete, when ithad succeeded in embodying in some divine personality eachof those forces whose combined energy produces movement inthe world- or guarantees its duration. When religious evolution followsits normal course, the work ofreflection goes on, and in courseof time makes new discoveries. Itrefers, by efforts of conjecture, allphenomena to a certain number ofcauses, which it calls gods. It nextperceives that these causes, or gods,are of unequal importance, and soit constitutes them into a hierarchy.Still later it begins to comprehendthat many of these causes are butdifferent names for one thine, thatthey form but one force, the appli-cation of a single law. Thus byreduction and simplification, bylogic and analysis, is it carried onto recognize and proclaim the unityof all cause. And thus monotheismsucceeds to polytheism. In Egyp

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