Early Greek Statues and the Egyptian Canon of Proportions

Jane B. Carter (Tulane University)

In a series of articles published in the American Journal of Archaeology from 1978 to 1985, Eleanor Guralnick studied the proportions of archaic Greek male and female standing statues (kouroi and korai) and compared them to the canon of proportions used by Egyptian sculptors in the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.  This was the so-called Second Canon, which came into use during the reign of Psammetichos I (664-610 BCE), the first king of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty.  The Second Canon replaced the First Canon, which had been used from the Old Kingdom up to the time of Psammetichos I.

Guralnick’s studies constitute the most systematic and thorough investigation of the relationships between the proportions of early Greek and Egyptian statues.  She was able to show a high degree of statistical correlation between some sixth-century BCE kouroi and the Egyptian Second Canon.  She likewise found close correlation between the kore of Nikandre, the earliest life-size, marble statue yet found in Greece, and the Egyptian Second Canon for male figures.  Since the Second Canon had only come into use in Egypt after 664 BCE, Guralnick concluded that Greek sculptors who began making life-size and larger standing statues in the seventh century BCE had been in contact with contemporary Egyptians and had learned from them the recently introduced Egyptian conventions for proportioning their figures.  Subsequent accounts of the emergence of Greek sculpture in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE cite Guralnick’s work as confirmation that the earliest Greek sculpture depended directly on Egyptian models and methods.

To date, no one has attempted a critique of Guralnick’s methodology.  Her procedures and results, however, are not as conclusive as they have often been supposed.  For example, in her 1978 and 1985 investigations of kouroi, Guralnick found that the proportions of five of the 24 kouroi in her sample closely resembled the Egyptian Second Canon.  If these five kouroi had grouped among the earliest of the 24 kouroi studied, then one might conclude that the Greek sculptors did rely on the Egyptian system.  However, the dates of the five kouroi span almost the whole sixth century BCE:  one dates ca. 590, one ca. 570-560, two ca. 550, and one ca. 530-520.  Guralnick acknowledges this with the explanation that Greeks sometimes used the Egyptian canon but not always.  Another problem is Guralnick’s sample.  None of the kouroi in Guralnick’s sample was made in the seventh century BCE, when the kouros type first made its appearance in Greece.  Nor does Guralnick provide evidence to show how significant her results are.  It is possible that, in a random selection of human males or naturalistic male statues from one cultural context, five out of 24 examples could on average be expected to conform to the proportions of the Egyptian Second Canon.

This paper will evaluate Guralnick’s methods and show that her conclusions do not, in fact, strongly support the direct dependence of the earliest Greek sculptors on their Egyptian counterparts.  Instead, the paper will propose that Greek sculptors began to borrow Egyptian techniques only after two or three generations of Greek artists had fully developed the kouros and kore types.