Illustration of the MacGregor box from Naville 1898.
Reverend William MacGregor (1848‒1937) was a British
industrialist and antiquities collector during the late 1800s to early 1900s. He was an active member of the Egyptian Exploration
Society and being cashed up and keen he also funded excavations in Egypt. This
naturally gave him access to archaeological finds (in the good ol’ days of
treasure hunting, sponsors got to keep many of the objects that were found). But equally the gentleman was an avid collector from other less reputable sources.
His Egyptian collection was set up in a private museum in
his mansion in the early 1900s and later dispersed through the dealer Sotheby’s
in the early 1920s. The MacGregor box that
is my topic here was at that time sold to a private collector, passing through
various hands, ultimately ending up in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston in the
USA in 1949. It has no provenience (excavation
history) and therefore no context or date.
Yet it has nonetheless managed to influence academic thought about Egyptian
art.
Below is a drawing of this cosmetic box from Reverend MacGregor’s
collection from an article by Edouard Naville in 1898‚ ‘Une boite de style
Mycénien trouvée en Égypt’. As you can
tell by the title, the article argued that this box was carved in Mycenaean
style, yet it was purchased in Egypt. For
your random piece of useless info. the article was written before Arthur Evans
reinvented the Minoans… oops, I mean rediscovered the Minoans while excavating
Knossos. So everything ‘Aegean’ was thought to be Mycenaean then due to the
activities of Schliemann and co at Mycenae.
The cultural attribution is therefore disputable.
The object is an Egyptian type of wooden semi-circular cosmetic
or toiletry box, which were popular in high status tombs in Egypt in the New
Kingdom. This one has quite an elaborate
decoration cut in relief with intricate ornamental bands that frame a figural
vignette of frolicking animals. It shows three predators, two lions and a
domestic dog, attacking three desert animals, an antelope?, a steer and an
ibex. This is in fact a reasonably common
motif on these boxes in the 18th Dynasty in Egypt.
Please note the pedestal under the rear leg of the lion on the
right … odd no?
Illustration of the MacGregor box from Naville 1898.
The next image is the same MacGregor box from an article in
the 1940s by Helene Kantor on artistic exchange between ancient Egypt and the
Aegean during the 2nd millennium. Her
drawing is basically a line drawing copied from the Naville article image that
she credits to the Sotheby’s sale catalogue.
Which is fine, really, we all need drawings for our publications. The problem here is that she did not look at
the real box (which was in a private collection at that time) and used a
drawing taken from the sale catalogue. But by doing this she has perpetuated a
myth about Egyptian art by repeating the error in the earlier drawing.
Illustration from Kantor 1947: Plate XXI E.
Kantor 1947, page 70-71
“Dangling feet, such as those possessed by dogs of Puimre
(...) and the Amenemhet who built Tomb 53 (…) were no longer acceptable, as is
demonstrated on an ointment box, formerly in the MacGregor collection, which
must be dated to the reign of Tutankhamun (…). Here the artist has been forced
to adopt a curious expedient in order to provide the attacking panther with a
firm footing. Under the one leg that does not rest upon the falling ibex a t-shaped
support has been placed. The metamorphosis of the dynamic group on the Mahirper
collar (…) into the static unit on the MacGregor box (…) is eloquent evidence
for the enduring nature of native Egyptian traditions.”
As you can see the box and its error were used by Helene Kantor to argue that
18th Dynasty artists were uncomfortable with having no ground-line in their figural
scenes. While Egyptian art became more
impressionistic and mobile (reputedly under the influence of Aegean art) in the
18th Dynasty, she argued that Egyptian artists were so uncomfortable with this
idea that their conservatism crept back in at the end of the 18th Dynasty,
around the reign of Tutankhamen.
This box and a dagger sheath from Tutankhamen were used as her visual evidence
for this knee-jerk return to traditional Egyptian artistic conservatism. The idea is that an Egyptian artist could not
deal with a back paw of a leopard (or lioness) floating in mid air, so they
placed a pedestal under its foot.
I might add that this does not actually apply to objects from Tutankhamen's time.
Detail from the sheath of a dagger from the tomb of Tutankhamen.
Drawing by A. Sinclair.
The problem is that in reality there is no pedestal under
the right hind paw of the leopard on the MacGregor Box, instead the vertical rod-like
thing is the extension of its tail and s/he is more or less floating
too, just like the lion, the hunting dog, calf and the antelopes …
Although it is not uncommon
for these scenes the lion/leopard or dog to have its paws on the antelopes rump
when it stands above it. But this
posture nonetheless still won’t be terribly naturalistic. On the dagger sheath from the tomb of
Tutankhamen that she uses to situate her date for the
return to visual conservatism there is also no groundline and all figures float alike.
However, apart from the inaccuracy, this claim that the original Egyptian
sculptor put a pedestal under the back foot of the lion because of mobility issues is entirely arbitrary and
ignores that there are no pedestals under any other figure, like the calf or the dog in the scene, and
that the other animals do tend to float with often only nominal
reference to the groundline. But
disregarding that awkward oversight, the pedestal is simply not there.
Do not get me wrong. I am in awe of Helene Kantor as a
scholar. Her knowledge of iconography
for her time was impressive (during and post WWII) and taking into account the
level of accumulated knowledge in archaeology, plus her having no
access to Egyptian and European collections. The
problem is that her thesis that Egyptian painters and sculptors could not deal
with mobility has stuck around and academics are still turning to the 1947
paper for discussions of Egyptian-Aegean cultural interconnections (we read it as undergrads). In
addition the date given to this box today still follows her lead.
Even though, as far back as the 1950s William Stevenson
Smith pointed out the original error in his own paper on this box. Which was easy for him, as he was curator of
the Boston museum at that time... He was
actually looking at it… While he went so
far as to cite Mycenaean ceramic from tombs that have similar boxes from
Sedment (inferring objects may equal actual Mycenaean people, which is incidentally equally dodgy),
he also pointed out the error in the drawing and disagreed with her conclusions.
Photograph of the box from Smith 1952.
But, all the same, this assumption has endured. Partly because, if you only refer to Egyptian
monumental art and ignore the small stuff, it works as a bald generalisation most
of the time. If however, you look at 18th
Dynasty Egyptian decorative art, particularly at objects like boxes, or
bowls and vases, the rationale that Egyptian craftsmen could not handle
mobility or ‘floaty’ animals and reverted back in defiance absolutely does not
work. They adjusted their image to take
into account scale and spatial issues.
And in the 18th Dynasty they made an art of it.
The other problem that I have with this series of old
drawings is that because copyright restrictions are (justifiably) quite rigid
to protect artists and publishers, it is not unlikely to find that an academic
will use an early image to avoid copyright complications in their publications
today. But the use of old drawings has
risks that are more than apparent from my posts now and then here in this blog. Old archaeological drawings are often faulty
and misleading.
The same criticism applies to the conclusions that are then drawn from them. To add insult to injury, you must also factor in that today very out of date academic research is much more likely to be freely available to the public to read and download on the internet than current academic research. This then facilitates the spread of outdated and faulty theories in the media and on the internet.
The same criticism applies to the conclusions that are then drawn from them. To add insult to injury, you must also factor in that today very out of date academic research is much more likely to be freely available to the public to read and download on the internet than current academic research. This then facilitates the spread of outdated and faulty theories in the media and on the internet.
Line drawing of the decoration of the box by A. Sinclair 2017.
Above is my drawing of the decoration of the box, inclusive
of some of the ornamental bands… But again … Do not assume mine is absolutely correct
either, I draw for content, not for photographic accuracy.
If you are serious about your research, or your opinion, go
to the museum or to the museum website and view the real object.
Andrea Sinclair 2018
Boston Museum database
http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/hemicylindrical-box-with-lid-148393
Sources
von Bissing, F.W. 1898. ‛Stierfang auf einem ägyptischen
Holzgefäss der XVIII. Dynastie’. Mitteilungen des KDAI, Athenische Abteilung 23.
Kantor, H.J. 1947. The Aegean and the Orient in the Second
Millennium B.C. Bloomington.
Naville, E. 1898. ‘Une boite de style Mycénien trouvée en
Égypt’. Revue archéologique 33.
Rogers, B. ‘The Reverend William MacGregor: an early
industrial collector’. Antiquity online.
Smith, W.S. 1952. ‘An Eighteenth Dynasty Toilet Box’. BMFA
50.
