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THE MYCERINUS OF MÎT-RAHINEH.

Diorite. Cairo Museum.

MYCERINUS (REISNER HEAD)

Alabaster. Cairo Museum.

We did not do so until 1908, when Reisner and his Americans, excavating at Gizeh round about the third pyramid, brought to light monuments that with the best will in the world no one could assign to any other epoch than that of Mycerinus. It seems that the fame of piety which popular story ascribed to him was not wholly unmerited, at least as far as his own divinity is concerned, for with the elements of a voluminous funerary equipment in all kinds of stones, the workmen brought out of the ruins of the chapel, fragments of a multitude of statues in alabaster, schist, limestone, and rare breccia. Among them were some unfinished or scarcely shaped out, for the sovereign having died while they were being fashioned, the works, according to Oriental custom, had been immediately interrupted and the workshops abandoned in confusion.

The statues which were already finished and set up in their places were overturned at some unknown period, perhaps when Saladin dismantled the pyramids to build the new ramparts and citadel of Cairo, and the fragments were so ill-treated that an enormous number of them have disappeared. Out of a hundred baskets of debris collected by the Americans, they found at most, besides five or six intact heads, enough to put together, almost completely, two alabaster statues. The best of the heads is in the Cairo Museum, and it has sufficient resemblance to our statuette for us to have no hesitation in recognizing Mycerinus, even if the place whence it comes did not help us to guess it. The statue that the find brought us is seated, but the block on which it is sculptured is not perpendicular to its base, so that it leans slightly backward. On the other hand, the two arms being cut between the armpit and the hip, the accident makes it appear at first glance as if the bust is too narrow for its height. But, and this is the important point, the head is small, so small that the head-dress, in spite of its size, is not sufficient to correct the bad effect of this disproportion between its smallness and the amplitude of the shoulders. The fault is not to be ascribed to the artist’s ignorance and lack of skill, as is probably done. He was not, it must be admitted, a man of talent, but he knew his business, and proved it by the general quality of his work. The harmony between the trunk and the leg, the muscles of the chest, the texture of the costume, the modelling of the knee and calf, conform to the æsthetics of the time; the foot and ankle are particularized with the virtuosity of a craftsman skilled in all the subtleties of his calling. So, now, returning to the statuette of Mît-Rahineh, the technique of which shows it to proceed not from a different school but from a different studio, we shall find a difficulty in imagining that two sculptors would each have fallen into so great an error, if they had not seen it themselves in their model. Since their statues are microcephalous, Mycerinus must have been microcephalous almost to deformity.