雙語+MP3|美國學生藝術史33 巨像和小雕

 
拉美西斯二世就是那位下令殺死所有以色列男嬰的法老。然而也正是他的女兒看見了蘆葦里的嬰兒摩西，救了他。阿美西斯喜歡建造神廟，刻自己的雕像。他把阿布辛貝神廟建在懸崖峭壁上，在廟前雕刻了自己的巨像。左邊那座雕像保存最好，可旁邊的那座卻所剩無幾了。雕像下巴上最有趣的那個東西是胡須。 
33 GIANTS AND PYGMIES巨像和小雕
 
THE Egyptian sculpture in the full round was usually giant size, as tall as a house, or the other extreme—tiny statues only an inch or so high. The statues of their kings and important people, the Egyptian sculptors usually made of giant size—colossal. They thought a statue the size of an ordinary man or woman was not nearly big enough for a king or a queen. 
The biggest statue in the world is the Great Sphinx which is near the three great pyramids. It is a huge lion with a king’s head. The Egyptians liked to combine men and animals in this way, but more often they put an animal’s head on a man’s body. A cat’s head or a bird’s head on a man’s body seems to us most unpleasant—a mon-strosity that makes us shudder. But a man’s head on an animal’s body seems only a myth and doesn’t shock us. 
The Great Sphinx was supposed to be the God of the Morning and so faces east— always facing the rising sun and gazing at it unblink-ingly as he has done each morning for thousands of years. His nose is as tall as a man. The triangular pieces at the sides of his head are not hair, they are a peculiar hood. 
There are many more sphinxes in Egypt, but all much smaller than the Great Sphinx, and these smaller ones usually were arranged, with many of them in a double row, to form an avenue leading up to some temple. 
Farther up the Nile, there are two colossal seated figures sitting on thrones side by side, gazing out over the plain. They are called, on account of their colossal size, the Colossi, and each is made out of a single stone. They are weather-beaten and broken, but you do not need much imagination to see in your mind’s eye what they once were. They of course are Egyptian kings—or, rather, two statues of the same king. These two also face the sun as it rises in the east and one of them is called the Vocal Memnon—that is, the singing or sounding Memnon, though Memnon was not the king’s name. His name was Amenhotep. We know the names of few of the old sculptors who made the statues, but we do know the name of this sculptor who made these statues of Amenhotep, for he had the same name as the king. Perhaps he was a slave. When we had slavery in our own country, a slave often used to take the name of his master. 
 
No.33-1　THE GREAT SPHINX AND PRRAMIDS（斯芬克斯獅身人面像和金字塔） 
For some reason that no one has ever perfectly explained, the Vocal Memnon gave forth sounds, perhaps like the tones of a great organ when the sun rose, a hymn to a new day, though the Vocal Memnon did not sing every morning or even every year. When it did sing, it was supposed to be a sign of something—an omen people called it—but an omen of what, no one knows. It is believed that about the time of Christ it was upset by an earthquake and that when it was replaced, it ceased its morning song. It has not sung for nearly two thousand years and some people doubt that it ever did, though people even at the time of Christ used to travel long distances just to hear it sing and were disappointed if it didn’t. Many who did hear it, however, have carved on the base their names and date when they did hear it. So there seems to be little doubt that it did sing once upon a time. Some scientists think the sun’s rays striking the cold stone in the morning wrought some change that made the sound. It is one of the mysteries of which there are so many in Egypt. 
It is strange that one of the oldest pieces of sculpture in the world is made of wood— strange because wood of course does not usually last as long as stone. Strange, too, that it is not the statue of a king or a queen or a god, for that is what the Egyptians usually made. What do you suppose it is? A school-teacher! 
This piece of sculpture is the figure of a rather small, fat, baldheaded man carrying a tall walking-stick. The statue is small, smaller than a real man, perhaps to show that he was not a king or any important person. By some people he is called the Schoolmaster of Boulac. So you can see what a school-teacher may have looked like thousands of years ago. But others say there were no regular schools or teachers then, and they call him the sheik or chief of a tribe. Still others say no, he looks like the boss of a gang of workmen, and they believe he was the boss of a gang that worked on the Great Pyramid. So yon can take your choice, for no one knows his name or what he was or who made him. The statue is in the great museum at Cairo, the capital of Egypt. Though it was made so long ago, it looks much more natural and lifelike than later Egyptian sculpture—like a real person. It is said that even the old Egyptians thought it so natural that they chained its feet to keep it from walking off! 
 
No.33-2　THE SCHOOLMASTER OF  
BOULAC（布拉克校長） 
Another figure made about the same time is of a man seated and holding a writing tablet on his lap. It is of stone and it was painted—not the natural color of a man but—-guess what color? Red! He was a professional writer—that is, one of the few men who knew how to write and made a business of writing for those who could not write, and most people at that time could not. Think of hiring a stranger to write your letters! Such a person was called a scribe. He was a kind of secretary who took dictation. Even kings and queens could not write and had to have scribes to write for them. This figure is now in the Louvre in Paris, to which place, of course, it was carried from Egypt. 
Often Egyptian sculptors went to the other extreme in making tiny statuettes, some only a few inches high, of their kings and queens, their gods and goddesses and sacred animals. Most of these miniature statues were cut out of the hardest kinds of stone— stone that would turn the edge of our modern tools. We suspect that they must have been cut with flint tools instead of steel tools—as, nowadays, a diamond, the very hardest of all stones, has to be cut with another diamond or shaped by being rubbed with diamond dust. 
The beetle was sacred in Egypt and called a scarab, and numberless scarabs made of clay and stone were made to be suspended from the neck, where they acted as a charm for the wearer. So popular are these charms that they are manufactured to-day in great quantities and sold to travelers as real antiques.