The other statuette represents a well-developed woman standing on a round pedestal without a scrap of clothing or veil, but very proud of her head-dress, and especially of her big earrings. She touches the right one with her hand and makes it stand out a little in order to show it, or to assure herself that the jewel is very becoming; the head is big, the shoulders thin, the chest narrow, and the sculptor was embarrassed to render the movement of the arms; but the eyes are so wide open, the smile so contented, the expression of the whole so intelligent, that we can easily excuse that defect.
Men were as well treated as women by this art fostered by persons of small means. Scribes of subordinate rank, old retired officers, retail merchants, or men at the head of small industrial concerns, all of whom swarmed in the poorer quarters, felt as strongly as their wives, in default of the stone statue, the need of acquiring a wooden image which would show what they had been like in their lifetime. There were as many artists as they wished to model them in the attitude they preferred, in their everyday costume or in that of fête-days, bearing and likeness guaranteed. Those found in the tombs in the early years of the nineteenth century form a veritable gallery, most varied and curious, of the different types prevailing from the thirteenth to the ninth century B.C. in Thebes and its environs among the lower middle-class.[87] Some had been soldiers, and wear the light petticoat bulging at the waist of the Egyptian foot-soldier; others had spent their lives scribbling in a Government office; the greater number belonged to one of the funerary professions, guardians of mummies, decorators of hypogeums, hewers of tombs, sacristans or priests of a low order employed in the minor offices of burials or commemorative rites. They proudly exhibit their insignia: they carry long staves crowned with sacred emblems--the human head of Hathor, the hawk’s beak of Horus--and everything in their attitude betrays the pride and satisfaction of knowing themselves so fine and so important. Their bearing reveals what the inscriptions usually placed on the pedestal of their statuettes confirm: “It is I, Khâbokhni, the Servant of the ‘True’ Place,” he who poured the libations, or who, at the canonical hours, distributed a portion of bread, flowers, and fruits to each of the dead entrusted to his care. The Egyptians were admirable in observation and full of satirical humour: I would not swear that, in impressing this character of naïve vanity on their works, the sculptors were not yielding to the temptation of discreetly amusing themselves at the expense of their sitters.