Among the countless votive offerings with which a great building like that at Karnak was filled, there were a few statues of private individuals. "The right to erect statues in the temples belonged (as we should say) to the crown. We find therefore that most of the private statues found in the sacred inclosures are inscribed with a special formula: 'Granted, by the king's favour, to so and so, the son of so and so....' Permission to place a statue in a temple was only given as a reward for services rendered. The temple might be either that of the favoured individual's native town, or one for which he had peculiar veneration.... Civil and foreign wars, the decay of cities, and the destruction of idols by the Christians, have combined to render statues of private persons from public temples of very rare occurrence in our collections."[270]
[270] MASPERO, in the _Monuments de l'Art Antique_ of Rayet.
The tombs were the proper places for private statues; we have seen that at Memphis they were set up in the courtyards and hidden in the serdabs, that at Thebes they were placed, either upright or sitting, in the depths of the hypogea.[271]
[271] _Description, Antiquités_, vol. iii. p. 41.
Figures in the round, whether gods, kings, or private persons, were always isolated. They were sometimes placed one by the side of the other, but they never formed groups in the strict sense of the word. In the whole of Egyptian sculpture there is but one group, that of the father, mother, and children; and this was repeated without material change for thousands of years. The Egyptian artist can hardly be said to have composed or invented it; it was, so to speak, imposed upon him by nature. Those groups which became so numerous in Hellenic art as soon as it arrived at maturity, in which various forms and opposed or complementary movements were so combined as to produce a just equilibrium, are absolutely wanting in Egypt.
The Greeks were the first of the antique races to love the human form for itself, for the inherent beauty of its lines and attitudes. Certain traces of this sentiment are to be found in the decorative art of Egypt, in which motives that are at once ingenious and picturesque are often met with, but it is almost entirely absent from sculpture. Modelled forms are hardly ever anything more than skilful tracings from reality. In the sepulchral system the sculptor supplies relays of bodies, stone mummies which may take the place of the embalmed corpse when it is worn out; in the temples his business is to set up concrete symbols of an idea, emblems of one of the divine powers, or of the majesty of Pharaoh.