I knew how the figure of a man
should walk and the carriage of a woman, the poising of the arm to
bring the hippopotamus low, the going of the runner. I knew how to make
amulets, which enable us to go without fire burning us and without the
flood washing us away. No man could do this but I, and the eldest son
of my body. Him has the god decreed to excel in art, and I have seen
the perfections of the work of his hands in every kind of rare stone,
in gold and silver, in ivory and ebony." Now since Mertisen and his son
were the chief artists of their day, it is more than probable that they
were employed to decorate their king's funerary chapel. So that in all
probability the XIth Dynasty reliefs from Der el-Bahari are the work
of Mertisen and his son, and in them we see the actual "forms of going
forth and returning, the poising of the arm to bring the hippopotamus
low, the going of the runner," to which he refers on his tombstone. This
adds a note of personal interest to the reliefs, an interest which is
often sadly wanting in Egypt, where we rarely know the names of the
great artists whose works we admire so much. We have recovered the names
of the sculptor and painter of Seti I's temple at Abydos and that of the
sculptor of some of the tombs at Tell el-Amarna, but otherwise very few
names of the artists are directly associated with the temples and tombs
which they decorated, and of the architects we know little more.
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