Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/115

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

The Egyptian Orders. 93 who was the constructor of the building in which they are found, endowed with the head-dress and other attributes of Osiris. The motive was a favourite one with the princes of the nineteenth dynasty, and it is continuously repeated both in the great temples of the left bank at Thebes and in the rock-cut temples of Nubia. Our illustration is taken from an osiride pier in the second court of Medinet-Abou. The word caryatid cannot strictly be applied

r 

^EfiSuiuL ¥*M¥f^^in Fig. 70. — Osiride pillar. to these piers, because the statues do not help to support the mass above, they are merely affixed to the pier which actually performs that office. The Ethiopian architects borrowed the motive of these osiride pillars. They introduced into colonnaded buildings, copied from those of the Rameses, some colossal figures in which the Typhon of the Greeks has sometimes been recognized. They probably represent the god Set. They, too. are only applied to