Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/166

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COMMUNION WITH THE UNSEEN WORLD.
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kind of impression made upon a people who must have worked through a long course of years before they produced such marvels of life-like reality as some of the portrait sculptures of the age of the Pyramids. The art of sculpture was intimately connected with their religion, and its merits and demerits arise from this connection. It is not true, as is commonly supposed, that the Egyptians were not able, like the Greeks, to represent in sculpture motion and activity. They did this, and they did it wonderfully well, as small statues in the Museum at Bulaq abundantly show; but most of the statues of this description have perished, like the private houses to which they belonged. But the statues of the gods and ancestors were intended to represent, not the concrete activity of a single moment, but the abstraction and repose of eternity.

As the Iranian Fravishi is represented accompanying the Persian king, so is the Egyptian ka, or royal living image or genius, depicted in numberless representations. As the Roman swore by the genius of the emperor, so did the Egyptian by the ka of his king. As the Roman appeased his genius, so is the Egyptian king frequently sculptured in the act of propitiating his own ka. Votive tablets are addressed to the royal ka in company with Ptah or other gods. Each of the gods had his ka or genius. And as the Persians, Greeks and Romans, had their local genius, so had the Egyptians. The kau, like the genii, manes and lares (who