As these tombs were all upon the surface of the ground they have

suffered more than any others from the attacks of man. Those which are

reproduced among these lines of text were only recovered by Mariette

by dint of patient excavation. And although these ill constructed

edifices, so far as their materials are concerned, are still standing,

they will soon follow the many thousands which once stood in serried

ranks round the sepulchre of Osiris. The only remains of this

necropolis which are likely to be preserved are the numberless

steles which Mariette rescued from its _débris_. They form about

four-fifths of the total number of those monuments now preserved in

the museum at Boulak.[236] We figure two of them, one belonging to the

Middle, the other to the New Empire (Figs. 164 and 165).

[236] All these steles are figured in the last work published by

MARIETTE, the _Catalogue général des Monuments d'Abydos,

découverts pendant les Fouilles de cette Ville_, 1 vol. 4to.

Paris, 1880.

[Illustration: FIG. 165.--Stele of Pinahsi, priest of Ma: Abydos. New

Empire. Drawn by Bourgoin. (Boulak.)]

Whenever religious motives did not affect their choice, the Egyptians

preferred, during the period we are now considering, to cut their

tombs horizontally out of some rocky eminence. Such a tomb was called

a σπέος by the Greeks. The most interesting examples of these

constructions are offered by the tombs of the twelfth dynasty at

Beni-Hassan and at Siout, both situated between Memphis and Abydos.

Champollion was the first to appreciate the importance of the grottos

of Beni-Hassan. Ever since his time they have received, for various

reasons, much of the attention of egyptologists. We have already

referred to their inscriptions, which are as interesting to the

historian of ideas as to the student of political and social

organizations. We have alluded above to the varied scenes which cover

the walls of their chambers, the most important of which have been

reproduced by Champollion, Lepsius, and Prisse d'Avennes; we have

finally to speak of those famous protodoric columns, as they are

called, in which some have thought they saw the original model of the

oldest and most beautiful of the Grecian orders. We are at present

concerned, however, with the arrangement of the tombs themselves.

These are the same, with but slight variations, for the smallest and

most simple tombs as for those which are largest and most elaborately

decorated.

These façades are cut into the cliff-like sides of the hills of the

Arab Chain, about half-way up their total height. They are, therefore,

high above the surface of the river. When the cutting was made, two or

three columns were left to form a portico, the deep shadows of which

stand out strongly against the whiteness of the rock. This portico

leads to a chamber which is lighted only from the door. Its ceiling is

often cut into the form of a vault. A deep square niche is cut,

sometimes opposite to the door, sometimes in one of the angles. It

once contained the statue of the deceased. Most of the tombs have but

one chamber, but a few have two or three. In a corner either of the

only chamber or of that which is farthest from the door, the opening

of a square well is found; this leads to the mummy-chamber, which is

excavated at a lower level.

[Illustration: FIG. 166.--Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan.]

The chamber upon which the portico opens is the funerary chapel, the

place of reunion for the friends and relations of the dead. As

Mariette very truly remarks, from the first step which the traveller

makes in the tomb of Numhotep at Beni-Hassan, he perceives that, in

spite of all differences of situation, the traditions of the Ancient

Empire are still full of vitality. "The spirit which governed the

decorators of the tomb of Ti at Sakkarah still inspired the painters

who covered the walls of the tomb of Numhotep at Beni-Hassan. The

defunct is at home among his own possessions; he fishes and hunts, his

cattle defile before him, his people build boats, cut down trees,

cultivate the vine and gather the grapes, till the earth, or give

themselves up to gymnastics or to games of skill and chance, and among

them the figure of the dead is carried hither and thither in a

palanquin. We have already found pictures like these in the mastabas

of the Ancient Empire, and here we find them again. But at

Beni-Hassan this painted decoration becomes more personal to the

occupant of the tomb, the inscriptions enter into precise and copious

biographical details, which are never found elsewhere."[237]

[237] MARIETTE, _Voyage dans la Haute-Égypte_, vol. i. p. 51.

[Illustration: FIG. 167.--Façade of a tomb at Beni-Hassan, showing

some of the adjoining tombs.]

[Illustration: FIG. 168.--Interior of a tomb at Beni-Hassan. Drawn in

perspective from the elevation of Lepsius (i. pl. 60).]

[Illustration: FIG. 169.--Plan of the above tomb.]

The necropolis of Siout, in the Libyan chain, offers the same general

characteristics. The tomb of Hapi-Tefa, a feudal prince of the twelfth

dynasty, and consequently a contemporary of those princes of the nome

of Meh who are buried at Beni-Hassan, is the most remarkable. It is

composed of three large chambers communicating one with another, and

with the external air by a wide portico. The mummy-pit is reached from

the innermost of these chambers.

Neither statues, mummies, nor any other movable objects have been

found in these grottos. When their accessible situation and their

conspicuous appearance is remembered, this should not cause surprise.

Many centuries ago the acacia doors, which are mentioned in one of the

texts at Beni-Hassan, disappeared, and, in spite of the accumulation

of sand, the mouths of the wells could be found so easily, and could

so readily be cleared, that all objects of value and interest must

have been abstracted from the mummy-chambers in very remote times,

perhaps before the fall of the antique civilization. The inscriptions

and the painted walls alone remained practically intact down to the

commencement of the present century. The dryness of the climate, and

the difficulty of detaching them from the wall contributed to their

preservation, which was nowhere more complete than at Beni-Hassan. But

since travelling in Egypt became the fashion their sufferings have

begun. The mania for carving names upon every surface, and for

preserving souvenirs of all places of interest, has destroyed the

whole of one wall. The smoke of torches has also done its work in

reducing the brilliant tones and blunting the delicate contours.

Happily, the more interesting examples are all reproduced in those

great works to which we have already had such frequent occasion to

refer.

[Illustration: FIG. 170.--Chess players, Beni-Hassan. (Champollion,

pl. 369.)]

The rich necropolis of Thebes has not preserved any monuments from

this period in such good condition as those of Abydos, Beni-Hassan, or

Siout. M. Maspero has discovered, however, in the district known as

the _Drah-Aboul-Neggah_, some remains of the royal tombs of the

eleventh dynasty. Several of these tombs resemble in their general

arrangements those of the feudal princes of Meh and Siout. Thus the

sepulchre of the King _Ra-Anoub-Khoper-Entef_ is what the Greeks

called a _hemi-speos_, that is, it was partly built and partly

hollowed out of the living rock. Before the façade thus built against

the mountain, two obelisks were reared. The tombs of the other princes

belonging to the family of Entef were built upon the open plain. They

were structures in masonry, and seem at one time to have been crowned

by pyramids. Some idea of their shape may be obtained from our

illustrations of the tombs at Abydos.[238]

[238] MASPERO, _Rapport sur une Mission en Italie_ (in the

_Recueil de Travaux_, vol. ii. p. 166). The Abbott Papyrus gives

a list of these little pyramids.

To complete our observations upon the tombs of the first Theban

Empire, it will be sufficient to recall what we have already said

about the pyramids in the Fayoum, which were the work of the

thirteenth dynasty. It is difficult to form an accurate idea of the

appearance of those monuments when complete. Time has treated them

with great severity, and in their present state it is impossible to

verify the assertions of Herodotus as to the peculiarities of their

casing and crowning ornaments. But it is quite certain that the Middle

Empire made no original inventions in the matter of sepulchral

architecture. It appears to have discontinued some of the ancient

arrangements, but in those which it preserved its efforts were

confined to putting old elements together in a new fashion and with

new proportions. It made frequent use of one mode of sepulture which

had previously been quite exceptional. No mastaba is known which dates

from this epoch, but the kings had not ceased to confide their mummies

and the perpetuation of their glory to pyramids, but these were no

longer of such colossal dimensions as under the Ancient Empire, while

their character was complicated, to some extent, by the colossi with

which they are said to have been surmounted, and the figured

decoration of their walls. Finally, they were often employed, not as

self-contained monuments in themselves, but merely as the culminating

points in a more complex _ensemble_. They were built upon a

rectangular platform or tower with walls slightly inclined from the

perpendicular.

It would seem that the idea of this arrangement had occurred to the

primitive Egyptians. So, too, had that of the _speos_ or rock-cut

tomb; but the Memphite architects have left nothing which at all

resembles the grottos in the mountain sides of Beni-Hassan and Siout.

Neither in the neighbourhood of the pyramids nor in any other district

where the tombs of the early epoch are found, has any sepulchre been

discovered which shows the monumental façades, the large internal

development, and the simple and dignified lines of the artificial

chambers in the Arab and Libyan chains.

§4. _The Tomb under the New Empire._

The subterranean tombs for which the first Theban Empire had shown so

marked a preference, became firmly seated in public favour during the

succeeding centuries. We do not know what the funeral customs may have

been during those centuries when the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, were

masters of Egypt; but, after their expulsion, the great Theban

dynasties, the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth, by whom

the glory of Egyptian arms and culture was spread so widely, hardly

made use of any sepulchre but the chamber hollowed laboriously in the

rocky sides of that part of the Libyan chain which lies to the west of

Thebes. Every traveller visits the royal tombs which lie in the gloomy

ravine called the _Bab-el-Molouk_, or the Gate of the Kings. The

valley is about three miles in length and has a mean width of about

eleven hundred yards; its sides are riddled with galleries penetrating

more or less deeply into the mountains, and starting sometimes from

the slopes, sometimes from the base of the cliffs, which here and

there attain a height of 400 feet. The word speos seeming to the

Greeks to give an inadequate idea of the depth of these excavations

and of their narrow proportions, they called them συρίγγες or pipes;

and modern archæologists have often employed the same picturesque term

in speaking of the Theban tombs. Five-and-twenty of these tombs are

royal; the rest belong to wealthy subjects, priests, warriors, and

high officers of state. In extent and richness of ornament some of the

latter are in no way inferior to the tombs of the sovereigns.

Our studies must first, however, be directed to the royal tombs,

because in them we find the most original types, the most important

variations upon those which have gone before. In them the art of the

New Empire gives a clearer indication of all the changes which the

progress of ideas had brought about in the Egyptian conception of a

future life. In them, too, the Egyptian taste for ample dimensions and

luxuriant decoration is more freely indulged. The architects of Seti

and Rameses had resources at command far beyond those of which their

early rivals could dispose. They were, therefore, enabled to indulge

their employers' tastes for magnificence, and to give to certain

parts of the tomb a splendour which had been previously unknown. And

such parts were never those upon which the pyramid builders had

lavished most of their attention.

Nothing could be more simple than the course of proceeding of the

earlier architects, whose services and high social position are

indicated for us by more than one stele from the Ancient Empire. They

had to distinguish the royal from the private tomb, and no means to

such an end could be more obvious than to make use of a form of

construction which allowed the height and extent to be added to _ad

infinitum_ without compromising the stability of the monument. Their

one idea, therefore, was to push the apex of the pyramid as far up

into the sky as they could. The height grew as the flanks swelled, so

that it became, by one process of accretion, ever more imposing and

better fitted to safeguard the precious deposit hidden within it. In

such a system the important point was this envelope of the

mummy-chamber, an envelope composed of thousands of the most carefully

dressed and fixed blocks of stone, which, in their turn, were covered

with a cuirass of still harder and more durable materials. In order

that all access to the sarcophagus might be more safely guarded

against, the funerary chapel was separated from the mountain of hewn

stone which inclosed the mummy-chamber. Supposing the latter to be

decorated with all the taste and richness which we find in the tomb of

Ti, it would still be comparatively small and unimportant beside the

colossal mass which overshadowed it, and to which it belonged. The

disproportion is easily explained. When the pyramids were built, the

workman, the actual mason, had little more to learn. He was a thorough

master of the dressing and fixing of stone and other materials; but,

on the other hand, the art of architecture was yet in its infancy. It

had no suspicion of those rich and varied effects which the later

Egyptians were to obtain by the majesty of their orders and the

variety of their capitals. It was not till much later that it learnt

to raise the pylon before the sacred inclosures, to throw solemn

colonnades about their courts, and to greet the visitor to the temples

with long naves clothed in all the glory of colour.

Two periods of national renascence, in the thirteenth and eighteenth

dynasties, had to intervene before these marvels could be realized.

The earlier of these two periods is only known to us by a few works

of sculpture in our museums. We are forced to guess at its

architecture, as we have nothing but descriptions, which are at once

incomplete and exaggerated, to guide our imaginations.

[Illustration: FIG. 171.--General plan of Thebes.]

The second Theban Empire may be studied under very different

conditions. The architects of that epoch excelled all their

predecessors in the skill with which they used their materials, and

the artistic ability with which they laid their plans. In a word, they

realized the ideal towards which Egyptian builders had been tending

for many centuries, and their genius is still to be seen in buildings

which, even in their ruin, charm by the grandeur of their conception

and the finish of their execution.

In the century which saw the construction of the great temples of

Abydos, of Karnak, and of Luxor, the architect who was charged with

the building of the royal tombs could dispose of all the resources of

an empire which stretched from the southern boundaries of Ethiopia to

Damascus and Nineveh. He would have fulfilled the wishes of neither

prince nor people had he not found means to give an amplitude and a

beauty to those tombs which should stand a comparison with the

sumptuous edifices which the same kings had erected, in another part

of the city, in honour of the great deities of the country.

The simple and massive forms of the pyramid did not lend themselves to

success in such an enterprise. They afforded no opportunity for the

happy combinations of horizontal and vertical lines, for the contrasts

of light and shadow and splendour of decoration which distinguished

the epoch. The experience of the Middle Empire proved that it was

better to make a fresh departure than to attempt to foist upon the

pyramid a class of ornament which was destructive to the simplicity in

which so much of its grandeur consisted. The highest expression of the

new form of art was in the temple, the development of which was rather

in a horizontal than in a vertical direction; in the long avenues of

sphinxes, in the pylons and colossal statues of the kings, in

porticoes and forests of columns. The problem, therefore, was to

embody some of these elements in the design of the tomb. For this

purpose it was necessary to give increased dimensions and greater

importance to a part of the royal sepulchre which had been hitherto

comparatively neglected. The funerary chapel had to be expanded into a

temple in miniature, into a temple where the king, who had rejoined

the deities from whom he was descended, could receive the homage and

worship of his people.

The exploits of these princes, which were greater than anything of

which Egypt had to boast in the whole of its glorious past, must have

helped to suggest the temple form of their tombs. To this form the

general movement of the national art also pointed, and to give it

effect nothing more was required than the separation of the chapel

from the tomb proper, to which previous tradition had so closely

allied it. The situation of the sepulchre, after Thebes had become a

populous city and the real capital of Egypt, was no longer a matter of

question. It was in the rocky flanks of the Libyan chain that all its

inhabitants sought that asylum for their dead which the inhabitants of

Memphis found upon the eastern edge of the desert. The Libyan chain to

the west of Thebes offers no platform like that of the necropolis of

Memphis. Its cliffs and intersecting ravines offer no sites for

constructed works; hence the ordinary form of Theban tomb is the

_speos_, or the _pipe_, which is but an exaggerated form of the

_speos_.

Like the chief men among his subjects, the sovereign loved to take his

last repose in the immediate neighbourhood of the city in which he had

dwelt during his life, in which the streets had so often resounded to

the cries of triumph which greeted his return from some successful

campaign, or had seen him pass in some of those long processions which

are figured upon the walls of Medinet-Abou (Fig. 172).[239] His tomb

was a cavern like that of his subjects. Fashion and the physical

conditions of the country governed him as well as his inferiors in

rank. From the reign of Seti I. onwards, the kings chose for their

place of sepulture the wild and deserted valley in which Belzoni found

the tomb of that conqueror. In the time of the Ptolemies it contained

the bones of no less than forty Egyptian monarchs. It would be

difficult to imagine any site better calculated for the isolation and

concealment of the mummy than this valley, where the rocks split and

crumble under the sun, and the sand blown hither and thither by the

winds from the desert fills up every crevice in the cliffs.

[239] Fig. 172 reproduces only a part of the long plate given

in Wilkinson. In order to bring the more important groups within

the scope of one page, we have been compelled to omit the

central portion, which consists principally of columns of

hieroglyphs.

[Illustration: FIG. 172.--Rameses III. conducting a religious

procession, at Medinet-Abou. (Wilkinson, iii., pl. 50.)]

Nothing could be easier than to mask the entrance in such a place,

but, on the other hand, no constructed building of any importance was

possible except at a great expenditure of time and labour.[240]

[240] See the description of the Valley of the Kings in the

_Lettres d'Égypte et de Nubie_ of CHAMPOLLION (p. 183 of the

second edition).

But the plain at the foot of the range offered all that the architect

could wish. It was still within the district consecrated to the dead,

and yet its level surface presented no obstacles to an unlimited

extension of any buildings which might be placed upon it.

We have here then the facts which determined the course of the

Egyptian architects.

In the space inclosed between the left bank of the river and the first

slopes of the Libyan chain, certain edifices were raised which are

still, in great part, extant. Their funerary signification was never

completely understood, in spite of the confused hints to that effect

given by the Greek writers, until within the last few years. To

Mariette belongs the credit of having at last removed all doubt on the

subject. It is probable enough that the number of these buildings was

formerly much greater than it is at present, but those which have come

down to us are still in sufficiently good preservation to enable us to

discern and define their true character, a character which was

doubtless common to all the temples on the left bank of the Nile.

They were certainly temples. Their general arrangements do not differ

from those of other religious edifices, both in Thebes itself, and

elsewhere in Egypt. There is, however, a difference which was not

perceived until the texts which contained the history of each temple

and of the prince who claimed the credit of its erection were

deciphered. The famous buildings at Luxor and Karnak may be taken as

typical examples of the temple, properly speaking, in its richest and

most complete development. The translation of the inscriptions and

royal ovals which cover their walls has sufficed to show that they

were national monuments, public sanctuaries consecrated by the king,

as the representative of the people, to the worship of those great

deities who were at once the principles of life and the faithful

protectors of the Egyptian race. Century after century they never

ceased to found such temples, to increase and to embellish them. From

the princes of the twelfth dynasty down to the Ptolemies, and even to

the Roman emperors, every successive family which occupied the throne

held it a point of honour to add to the creations of its predecessors.

One prince built a hypostyle hall, or a court surrounded by a

colonnade; another added to the long rows of human or ram-headed

sphinxes which lined the approaches; a third added a pylon, and a

fourth a laboriously chiselled obelisk. Some kings, who reigned in

periods of recuperation after civil war or barbaric invasion, set

themselves to repair the damage caused by time and the violence of

man. They strengthened foundations, they lifted fallen columns, they

restored the faded colours of the painted decorations. The foreign

conquerors themselves, whether Ethiopians, Persians, or Greeks, as

soon as they believed themselves to have a firm hold upon the country,

set themselves with zeal to obliterate the traces of their own

violence. Each of these sovereigns, whether his contribution to any

work had been great or small, took care to inscribe his own name upon

it, and thus to call upon both posterity and his own contemporaries to

bear witness to his piety.

The temple as we see it at Karnak and Luxor is the collective and

successive work of many generations. Such, too, was the character of

the great buildings at Memphis which were consecrated to Ptah and

Neith.

But on the left bank of the Nile, and in the neighbourhood of the

Theban necropolis, we find a group of temples whose physiognomy is

peculiar to themselves. Nothing exactly like them is to be found

elsewhere;[241] and they all belong to one period, that of the three

great Theban dynasties, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and

twentieth.[242] "These temples are monuments raised by the kings

themselves to their own glory. They are not, like the temples at

Karnak and Luxor, the accumulated results of several generations.

Each temple was begun and finished by the king who planned it, so far

at least as construction was concerned. In those cases where the

decoration was left incomplete at the death of the royal builder, his

successor finished it in his name. In these decorations the founder of

the temple was represented either worshipping the gods, or in the

eventful moments of his military career, or in his great hunts; and

thus, while yet alive, he laid the foundations of an edifice destined

to carry the memory of his glory and piety down to the latest

posterity."[243]

[241] EBERS, indeed, found something of the same kind in the

temple of Abydos. He found there a cenotaph consecrated to his

own memory by Seti I. This cenotaph was near the tomb of Osiris,

while the king himself was buried in the Theban necropolis.

(_Ægypten_, pp. 234, 235.)

[242] The beautiful little temple of Dayr-el-Medinet, begun by

Ptolemy Philopator and finished by his successors, especially by

Physco, has often been considered a funerary monument. It is

alleged that the situation of the temple in the necropolis, and

the nature of the subjects represented in the interior,

particularly in the Western Chamber, prove that it was so. If we

accept this opinion, we must look upon the temple as a mere

freak of fancy, suggested to Ptolemy Philopator by a journey to

Thebes. The Greek prince was interred far from it, and it could

have formed no part of his tomb.

[243] MARIETTE, _Deir-el-Bahari_, § 1. (Atlas, folio, Leipsic,

1877, with 40 pages letterpress, 4to.)

[Illustration: FIG. 173.--Rameses III. hunting; from Medinet-Abou.]

Surrounded on all sides by tombs and packed into a comparatively

narrow space, these temples are separated from the Bab-el-Molouk only

by the slopes of the surrounding El-Assassif. The oldest of them is

that at Dayr-el-Bahari. It was built by the regent Hatasu, of whose

career we know enough to strongly excite, but too little to satisfy,

our curiosity. We know that Hatasu, the wife and sister of Thothmes

II., governed Egypt with skill and energy for seventeen years, in

trust for her brother, Thothmes III. Where does her mummy repose? Is

it in that ravine on the south-west of the Bab-el-Molouk which is

called the _Valley of the Queens_, because the tombs of many Theban

princesses have been found in it? Or is it in the slopes of the

mountain behind the temple itself? Numerous sepulchral excavations

have been found there, and many mummies have been drawn from their

recesses. The artists to whom the decoration of the temple was

committed, were charged to represent the chief actions of Hatasu as

regent, and, although their works do not give us a detailed history of

her eminently successful administration, they deal at length with the

enterprise of which the regent herself seems to have been most proud,

namely, the maritime expedition against _Punt_, a distant region which

must have been either southern Arabia, the country of the Somalis, or

the eastern coast of Africa.

Next in point of age to the building of Queen Hatasu is that which is

called the _Ramesseum_; this is no other, as the members of the

_Institut d'Égypte_ have clearly proved, than the so-called _Tomb of

Osymandias_ which is described at such length by Diodorus.[244]

Erroneous though it be, this latter designation is by no means without

interest, as it proves that, at the time of Diodorus, persistent

tradition ascribed a funerary origin to the edifice. The whole temple,

inside and out, recalled Rameses II.; the great conqueror seemed to

live and breathe on every stone; here majestic and calm, like force in

repose, there menacing and terrible, with his threatening hand raised

over the heads of his conquered enemies. His seated statue, fifty-six

feet in height, was raised in the courtyard; to-day it lies broken

upon the ground. Battle scenes are to be distinguished upon the

remains of the walls. An episode of the war against the Khetas may be

recognized, which seems to have made a great impression upon the king

and his comrades in arms. It deals with that battle fought upon the

bank of the Orontes, in which Rameses, when surrounded by the enemy,

won safety for himself by his own personal valour and presence of

mind. His prowess was celebrated by Pentaour, a contemporary poet, in

an epic canto which has survived to our day. Rameses is there made to

ascribe his safety and all the honour of his victory to his father

Amen, who heard his appeal for help and, precipitating himself into

the _mêlée_, snatched him from the very hands of his enemies.

[244] DIODORUS, i. §§ 47-49.

Medinet-Abou, which might be called _The Second Ramesseum_, is to

Rameses III. what the pretended tomb of Osymandias is to Rameses II.

His presence pervades both the temple itself and its adjoining

pavilion. Its bas-reliefs represent one of the greatest events in

Egyptian, we might almost say, in ancient, history, namely, the

victory won by Rameses over a confederation of the nations of the

north and west, of those who were called the maritime races. This

victory was mainly instrumental in driving westwards certain peoples

who were destined, in more recent times, to play a great part in the

politics of the Mediterranean.

Each of the buildings which we have just noticed had but a single

proprietor. They were each dedicated to the memory of some one

individual; but there was nothing to prevent the association in a

single temple of two sovereigns who might happen to be united by

strong ties of blood, and this course was taken in the temple of

Gournah, situated in the same district of Thebes. It was commenced by

Rameses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, continued by his

son, Seti I., and finished by his grandson, Rameses II. The first

Rameses and Seti figure in it with the attributes of Osiris. The

inscriptions enumerate the sources of revenue set aside by the king,

in each nome, for the service of the annual sacrificial celebrations;

and thus the building reveals itself as a temple to the perpetual

honour of the two first princes of a race which did so much to add to

the greatness and prosperity of Egypt.

The famous colossi of Amenophis III., known to the ancients as the

_Statues of Memnon_, no doubt formed part of a similar building (Fig.

18 and Pl. vi). The temple built by this prince near the site of the

Ramesseum has almost entirely disappeared, but the slight traces which

still exist cover a vast space, and suggest that the building must

have been one of rare magnificence.[245]

[245] This must have been the structure which STRABO calls the

_Memnonium_, and near to which he seems to place the two colossi

(xvii. p. 816). The true name of the author of both temple and

colossi might easily be confused with that of the mythical Greek

personage which the Hellenic imagination persisted in

discovering everywhere in Egypt, and the similarity of sound

must have helped to perpetuate the mistake among all the foreign

travellers who visited the country. A curious passage in

PAUSANIAS (_Attica_, 42) shows us, however, that the Egyptian

scholars of his time knew how properly to convey the name of the

prince represented in the colossi to foreigners: "I was less

struck by that marvel," he says, in speaking of some sonorous

stone which was shown to him at Megara, "than by a colossal

statue which I saw beyond the Nile in Egypt, not far from the

_pipes_. This colossus is a statue of the sun, or of Memnon,

according to the common tradition. It is said that Memnon came

from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that he penetrated as far as Susa.

But the Thebans themselves deny that it is Memnon. They declare

that it represents Phamenoph (Φάμενοφ), who was born in their

own country...." The story told by PHILOSTRATUS (_Life of

Apollonius_, l. vi. p. 232) of the visit of the sorcerer to

Memnon, shows that in his time the colossus was surrounded by

nothing but ruins, such as broken columns and architraves,

fragmentary walls and shattered statues. Even then the

monumental completeness of the "Amenophium" had vanished.

Only one of those Theban temples which rise upon the left bank of the

river is free from all trace of a funerary or commemorative purpose,

namely, the temple at Medinet-Abou which bears the ovals of Thothmes

II. and Thothmes III. It shows signs, moreover, of having been

frequently enlarged and added to, some of the additions having been

made as recently as in the time of the Roman Emperors. In this respect

it resembles, in spite of its comparatively small size, the great

temples upon the right bank of the river. Like them, its creation was

a gradual and impersonal matter. Every century added its stone, and

each successive king engraved his name upon its walls. How to account

for its exceptional situation we do not know. It is possible that

those funerary temples of which we have spoken were an original

invention of the successors of Thothmes; perhaps that constructed by

Hatasu at Dayr-el-Bahari was the first of the series.

However this may have been, the new type became a success as soon as

it was invented; all the other temples in the district may be more or

less immediately referred to it. The great deities of Egypt, and more

particularly those of Thebes, are never forgotten in them. They

contain numerous representations of the princes in whose honour they

were erected performing acts of worship before Amen-Ra, the Theban god

_par excellence_, who is often accompanied by Mout and Khons, the

other two members of the Theban triad. These temples were therefore

consecrated, like almost all the other sacred buildings of Thebes, to

those local deities which, after the establishment of that city as the

capital of the whole country, became the supreme national gods. Those

gods were as much at home in the temples of which we are speaking as

in their own peculiar sanctuaries on the right bank of the river. In

both places they received the same homage and sacrifices, but in the

funerary temples of the left bank they found themselves associated,

_paredral_ as the Greeks would say, with the princes to whose memory

the temples were raised. These princes were represented with the

attributes of Osiris, both in the statues which were placed against

the piers in the courtyard and in the bas-reliefs upon the long flat

surfaces of the walls. By these attributes they became more closely

allied with the great deity who was the common protector of the dead

and the guarantor of their future resurrection. In this capacity the

deceased prince was worshipped as a god by his own family. Thus, in

the temple of Gournah, we find Rameses I. seated in a _naos_ and

receiving the homage of his grandson, Rameses II.; and, again, the

latter worshipping Amen-Ra, Khons, and Rameses I. at one and the same

time. This presentation of offerings to the deified king, as

represented in the chambers of these temples, recalls the scene which

is carved upon almost all the steles, and with greater variety and

more detail, in the bas-reliefs on the internal walls of the mastabas.

The analogy which we are endeavouring to establish between the western

temples at Thebes and the funerary chambers of the private tombs, is

completed by the biographical nature of the pictures which form almost

the sole decoration of those temples. The images presented to our gaze

by the chamber walls of the mastaba are not, indeed, so personal and

anecdotical as those of the temples, but they contain an epitomized

representation of the every-day life, of the pleasures and the more

serious occupations of a rich Egyptian. It is easy to understand how,

with the progress of civilization, the more historic incidents in the

life of an individual, and especially when that individual was a king,

came to be figured in preference to those which were more general in

their application. To embellish the tomb of a conqueror with pictures

of his battles and victories was to surround him after death with the

images, at least, of those things which made his happiness or his

honour while alive. Pictures of some famous feat of arms would give

joy to the _double_ of him who had performed them, and would help to

relieve the _ennui_ of the monotonous life after death. Hence the

tendency which is so marked in the bas-reliefs of the first Theban

Empire, especially in those at Beni-Hassan. The constant and universal

themes which sufficed for the early centuries of the Egyptian monarchy

were not abandoned; scenes similar to those of the mastabas, are,

indeed, frequently met with in the Theban tombs; but it is evident

that in many cases scenes were sought out for reproduction which would

have a more particular application; there is an evident desire to hand

down to future generations concrete presentments of any political or

other events which might appear worthy of remembrance. History and

biography thus came in time to play an important part in sepulchral

decoration, especially when kings or other royal personages were

concerned.

Similar pictures are to be met with here and there in temples proper,

as may be seen by a glance at the bas-relief figured upon the opposite

page (Fig. 174), but in such cases they are invariably on the outer

walls. At Luxor, for instance, the campaigns of Rameses II. against

the peoples of Syria are thus displayed; and at Karnak it is upon the

external walls of the hypostyle hall that the victories of Seti I. and

Rameses II. are sculptured. In the interiors of all these courts and

halls we hardly find any subjects treated but those which are purely

religious; such as female deities assisting at the birth of a king, or

taking him upon their knees and nourishing him from their breasts, a

theme which is also found in royal tombs (Fig. 175); or one god

presenting the king to another (Fig. 33); or the king paying homage to

sometimes one, sometimes another, of his divine protectors (Figs. 14

and 176). We find such religious motives as these continually

repeated, upon wall and column alike, from the first Theban kings to

the epoch of the Ptolemies. On the right bank of the river pictures of

a mystically religious character are universal; on the left bank those

with an historical aim are more frequent.

It will be seen that the difference between the two kinds of temple,

between that of the necropolis and that of the city, is not so

striking and conspicuous as to be readily perceived by the first comer

who crosses from the one bank of the river to the other; but the

variations are quite sufficiently marked to justify the distinction

propounded by Mariette. According to him the temples in the necropolis

are funerary chapels which owe their increased size and the

richness of their decoration to the general magnificence and highly

developed taste of the century in which they were built. But it is

enough for our present purpose to have indicated the places which they

occupied in the vast architectural compositions which formed the tombs

of a Seti or a Rameses. They had each a double function to fulfil.

They were foundations made to the perpetual honour of a deceased king,

chapels in which his fête-day could be kept and the memory of his

achievements renewed; but they were at the same time temples in which

the national gods were worshipped by himself and his descendants, in

which those gods were perpetually adored for the services which they

had done him while alive and for those which they might still do him

when dead. In their latter capacity these buildings have a right to be

considered temples, and we shall defer the consideration of their

architectural arrangements, which differ only in details from those of

the purely religious buildings, until we come to speak of the

religious architecture of Egypt.

[Illustration: FIG. 174.--Rameses II. in battle; Luxor. (Champollion,

pl. 331.)]

[Illustration: FIG. 175.--Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah.

Amenophis II. upon the lap of a goddess. (Champollion, pl. 160.)]

We shall here content ourselves with remarking that the separation of

the tomb and the funerary chapel by some mile or mile and a half was a

novelty in Egypt. The different parts of the royal tomb were closely

connected under the Memphite Empire, and the change in arrangement

must have been a consequence of some modification in the Egyptian

notions as to a second life.

[Illustration: FIG. 176.--Amenophis III. presenting an offering to

Amen. Decoration of a pier at Thebes; from Prisse.]

In the mastaba the _double_ had everything within reach of his hand.

Without trouble to himself he could make use of all of the matters

which had been provided for the support of his precarious existence:

the corpse in the mummy pit, the statues in the _serdab_, the

portraits in bas-relief upon the walls of the public chamber. Through

the chinks between the pieces of stone by which the well was filled

up, and through the conduits contrived in the thickness of the walls,

the magic formulæ of the funerary prayers, the grateful scent of the

incense, and of the burnt fat of the victims (Fig. 177), reached his

attentive senses. Brought thus into juxtaposition one with another,

the elements of the tomb were mutually helpful. They lent themselves

to that intermittent act of condensation, so to speak, which from time

to time gave renewed substance and consistency to the phantom upon

which the future life of the deceased depended. This concentration of

all the acts and objects, which had for their aim the preservation of

the deceased for a second term of life, was obviously destroyed as

soon as the division of the tomb into two parts took place. The mummy,

hidden away in the depths of those horizontal wells in the flank of

the Western Range of which we have spoken, would seem to be in danger

of losing the benefit of the services held in its honour upon the

Theban plain. At such a distance it would neither hear the prayers nor

catch the scent of the offerings. And the _double_? Is it to be

supposed that he oscillated between the colossi in the temple where

the funerary sites were celebrated, and the chamber in which the

corpse reposed?

[Illustration: FIG. 177.--Flaying the funerary victim. From a tomb of

the 5th dynasty at Sakkarah. (Boulak.)]

Before they could have accepted this division of the tomb into two

parts the Egyptians must have arrived at some less childish conception

of the future life than that of their early civilization. That

primitive conception was not entirely banished from their minds;

evidence of its persistency is, indeed plentiful, but a more

intelligent and less material notion gradually superimposed itself

upon the ancient belief. The indescribable being which was the

representative of the deceased after death became gradually less

material and more spiritual; in time it escaped from its enforced

sojourn in the tomb and approached more nearly to that which we call

the soul. This soul, like the nocturnal sun, passed a period of

probation and purgation in the under world, and, thanks to the

protection of Osiris and the other deities of the shades, was at last

enabled to return to earth and rejoin the body which it had formerly

inhabited. The problem of death and a future life was resolved in much

the same way by the Greeks and by all other races who drew much of

their inspiration from the Egyptians. They all looked upon the corpse

as still alive when they expressed their hopes that the earth upon

which they poured out wine and milk would like lie lightly upon it.

After a time they added Tartarus and the Elysian Fields to their

beliefs, they introduced the heroic fathers of their race into the

councils of the gods, and they described and figured the joys which

awaited the just upon the Happy Islands.

These various hypotheses are contradictory enough from a logical point

of view; they exclude and destroy one another. But when it is a

question of notions which are essentially incapable of being strictly

defined, the human intelligence is singularly content to rest in vague

generalities. Contradictions do not embarrass it; its adaptability is

practically infinite.

The beliefs which we have just described tended for many centuries to

become more and more general. They were taught in that _Ritual of the

Dead_ which, although certain of its parts date from the most ancient

times, did not take its complete and definite form until the Theban

epoch. Being more spiritual and less material, they were less opposed

to the subdivision of the sepulchre than the more primitive idea; and

this subdivision was necessary if the public and commemorative part of

the tomb were to receive a splendour and amplitude befitting the

exploits of a Thothmes, a Seti, or a Rameses. Dayr-el-Bahari proves

that the change had already been made under the eighteenth dynasty,

but it was not until the nineteenth that it became definitely adopted.

The progress of ideas and of art had then advanced so far, that more

ambitious desires could be satisfied, and the country filled with

magnificent edifices, which, like the temples of the two Rameses, were

original in so far as they belonged at one and the same time to

religious and funerary architecture. We should call them cenotaphs,

were it not that the Egyptians, like all the other races of antiquity,

believed in the real presence of their dead in the buildings erected

in their honour.

[Illustration: FIG. 178.--Entrance to a royal tomb. (_Description de

l'Égypte_, ii., pl. 79.)]

The other division of the tomb is that which contains the well and the

mummy-chamber, the eternal dwelling-place of the illustrious dead. The

second half of the royal sepulchre had to be as sumptuous and

luxurious in its way as the first, but the problem placed before the

architect was diametrically opposed to that which he had to solve in

the other part of his task. In constructing and decorating the

funerary temple upon the plain, he was working before the eyes of the

public, for their benefit and for that of the remotest posterity.

But the task of hewing out the tomb was a very different one. For long

years together he pursued his enterprise in the mystery and shadow of

a subterranean workshop, to which all access was no doubt forbidden to

the curious. He and his assistants cut and carved the living rock by

the light of torches, and his best ingenuity was taxed to devise means

for preserving from the sight of all future generations those works of

the best artists of Egypt with which the walls were to be covered.

Those prodigies of patience and skill were executed for the benefit of

the deceased alone. Important though it was that the sepulchre of a

great man should be ornamented to the greatest extent possible, it was

of still greater moment that his last resting-place should not be

troubled by the visits of the living; and the more completely the

mummy was concealed, the greater were the deserts of the faithful

servant upon whom the task had been placed.

In order that this blessing of undisturbed peace in his eternal

dwelling should be secured, the royal tomb seems to have been

constructed without any such external show as would call attention to

its situation. The tombs of private individuals usually had a walled

courtyard in front of them to which access was obtained by a kind of

porch, or tower, with inclined sides and crowned by a small pyramid.

But the explorers, Belzoni, Bruce and others, who disengaged the

entrances to the royal tombs, found them without propylæa of any

kind.[246] The doorway, cut vertically in the rock, is of the utmost

simplicity, and we have every reason to suppose that, after the

introduction of the mummy, it was carefully masked with sand and rocky

_débris_.[247]

[246] In many cases the sites are wanting for such external

constructions. The fine tomb of Seti I., for instance, opens

upon a ravine which is filled with the waters of a mountain

torrent at certain seasons.

[247] When Belzoni's workmen found the entrance to the tomb of

Seti, they declared that they could not advance any farther,

because the passage was blocked with big stones to such an

extent as to be impracticable (_Narrative of the Operations and

Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, &c., in Egypt and

Nubia_, 1820, 4to.). Mariette also believed that as soon as the

mummy was in place, the external door was closed and earth

heaped against it in such a way as effectually to conceal it. It

is thus that the clashing between the tomb of Rameses III. and

another is accounted for. The workmen did not see the entrance

of the latter, and were, in fact, unaware of its existence until

they encountered it in the bowels of the rock. (_Voyage dans la

Haute-Égypte_, t. ii. p. 81.)

The existence of the temples in the plain made it unnecessary that the

tombs themselves should be entered after that final operation had

been performed. Some words of Diodorus are significant in this

direction. "The priests say that their registers attest the existence

of forty-seven royal tombs, but that at the time of Ptolemy the son of

Lagus, only seventeen remained."[248] This assertion cannot be

accepted literally, because twenty-one tombs have already been

discovered in the Bab-el-Molouk, some of them in a state of

semi-completion, besides four in the ravine which is called the

_Valley of the West_, which makes twenty-five in all. What the priests

meant when they spoke to Diodorus was no doubt, that at the time of

the Ptolemies, no more than seventeen of their entrances had been

discovered. If through the plans made for their construction and

preserved in the national archives there were some who knew their

situation, they preserved the secret. We know, by the inscriptions

upon their walls, that fifteen of the tombs which are now accessible,

were open in the time of the Ptolemies; several of them seem to have

been shown, to the Roman and other travellers who visited Egypt, as

national objects of interest.[249]

[248] DIODORUS, i. 46.

[249] "Above the Memnonium," says STRABO (xvii. 46), "there are

royal tombs cut in the living rock to the number of forty; their

workmanship is excellent and well worthy of attention."

The precautions taken to hide and obstruct the openings of the royal

tombs were thus successful in many cases. Some of these have only been

discovered in our own times, through the ardour and patience which

characterize modern research, and we have still good reason to suppose

that there are others which yet remain to be found. In 1872 Professor

Ebers discovered a beautiful private tomb, that of Anemenheb, which,

although situated close to one of the most frequented paths in the

necropolis, had been previously unknown. It was open, but the opening

had been carefully concealed with rough pieces of rock and general

rubbish by the fellahs, who used the tomb as a hiding-place from the

recruiting officers of the viceroy. They would remain concealed in it

for weeks at a time until the officers had left their village. The

royal cemetery of the Ramessides has possibly much more to tell us

before its secrets are exhausted.

The entrance to the tomb always ran a certain chance of being

discovered and freed from its obstacles. It was difficult, of course,

to prevent the survival of some tradition as to the whereabouts of

the burial-places of those great sovereigns whose memory was a

consolation to Egyptian pride in the days of national abasement and

decay. Provision had to be made, as in the case of the pyramids,

against a forced entry into the gallery either by an enemy or by some

robber in search of treasure, and we find that the precautions adopted

were similar to those which we have described in noticing the royal

tombs at Memphis. Let us take as an example the finest and most

complete of all the tombs of the Ramessides, that of Seti I. After

descending two flights of steps, and traversing two long and richly

decorated corridors, Belzoni arrived, without discovering either

sarcophagus or anything that looked like the site of a sarcophagus, at

an oblong chamber 13 feet 6 inches by 12 feet. A wide and deep well,

which here barred the passage, seemed to indicate that the extremity

of the excavation had been reached. Belzoni caused himself to be

lowered into the well. The walls were everywhere hard and firm, and

without resonance, and there was no sign of a passage, either open or

concealed, by which access to a lateral chamber, or to a second series

of galleries might be obtained. But Belzoni was too old an explorer to

be deceived by such appearances. On his first arrival at the edge of

the well he had perceived in the wall on the farther side of it a

small opening, about two feet wide, and two feet and a half high. This

had been made, at some unknown period, in a wall covered with stucco

and painted decorations. Across the well a beam was still lying, which

had served the purpose of some previous visitor to the tomb. A cord

hung from this beam, and it was after discovering that the well ended

in nothing that the screen of masonry on the other side had been

pierced. Belzoni had therefore only to follow the road opened for him

by earlier explorers. A plank bridge was thrown across the well, the

opening was enlarged, and a new series of galleries and chambers was

reached, which led at last to the sarcophagus-chamber itself.[250]

[250] BELZONI, _Narrative of Operations, &c._, pp. 233 _et

seq._

Belzoni remarked that throughout the whole course of the excavation

the doors of the chambers showed evidence of having been walled up,

and that upon the first steps of one of the staircases a heap of stone

rubbish had been collected, as if to discourage any one who might

penetrate beyond the well and pierce the barrier beyond its gaping

mouth. It seems likely that the first violator of the tomb knew the

secret of all these arrangements, and consequently that its first

opening took place in very ancient times, and was the work of some

native Egyptian robber.

In the sarcophagus-chamber Belzoni discovered a contrivance of the

same kind as that which had failed to stop him almost upon the

threshold of the tomb. The sarcophagus of oriental alabaster was in

place, but empty; the lid had been raised and broken.[251] From the

sound given out by the floor when struck the explorer perceived that

there must be a hollow space under the base of the sarcophagus. He cut

a hole and brought to light the first steps of a staircase, which led

to an inclined plane by which the interior of the mountain was deeply

penetrated. A wall had been raised at the foot of these steps, beyond

which a settlement of the superincumbent rock put an end to all

advance after a distance of fifty-one yards had been traversed. Is it

not possible that Belzoni only discovered a false sarcophagus, placed

to deceive unbidden visitors like himself, and that the mummy was

deposited, and still lies, in a chamber at the end of this corridor?

The point at which the fallen rock arrested his progress is four

hundred and eighty-three feet from the external opening, and about one

hundred and eighty below the level of the valley. At such a depth, in

these narrow and heated galleries, where there is no ventilation and

where the smoke of the torches rapidly becomes stifling, it is not

astonishing that, in spite of his admirable perseverance, Belzoni held

his hand before completing the exploration.[252]

[251] This beautiful sarcophagus is now in the Soane

Museum.--ED.

[252] Belzoni believed that this passage led again into the open

air; that it was, in fact, another entrance to the tomb. "I

have," he says, "reasons to think so;" but he does not give his

reasons.

These subterranean tombs are hardly less astonishing than the colossal

masses of the pyramids for the sustained effort which they imply; if

we take the trouble to reflect upon the peculiarly difficult

conditions under which they were constructed, they may even impress

our imaginations more profoundly than the artificial mountains of

Cheops and Chephren. We have already mentioned a figure which gives

some idea of the surprising length of their passages; and although no

one of the other tombs quite equals that of Seti, many approach it in

dimensions. The tomb of Rameses III. is 416 feet long, that of Siptah

370 feet, and others varied between 200 and 270 feet. For the

construction of such places an enormous number of cubic yards of rocky

_débris_ had to be cut from the interior of the mountain, and carried

up by narrow and steep corridors to be "shot" in the open air. Still

more surprising is the elegance and completeness of the decoration. In

the tombs of Seti and of Rameses III. there is not a single surface,

whether of walls, piers, or ceilings, which is not covered with the

work of the chisel and the brush, with ornamental designs, with the

figures of gods and genii, of men and animals. These figures are far

too numerous to count. They swarm like ants in an anthill; a single

chamber often contains many hundreds. Colour is everywhere; here it is

used to give salience to the delicate contours of the figures in

relief, there it is laid flat upon the carefully-prepared surfaces of

white stucco. In these sealed-up caverns, in which the air is

constantly warm and dry, the pictures have preserved their freshness

of tint in the most startling fashion. And to obtain all this

harmonious effect no light but an artificial one was available. It was

by the smoky glare of torches, or by the flickering flame of little

terra-cotta lamps, suspended from the roof by metal threads, that the

patient artists of Egypt drew these masterly contours, and elaborated

the exquisite harmony of their colour compositions. Egyptian art never

reached greater perfection than in these characteristic productions of

its genius, and yet no human eye was to enjoy them after that day upon

which the final touch was to be given to their beauties, upon which

they were to be inclosed in a night which, it was hoped, would be

eternal.

[Illustration: FIG. 179.--Plan of the tomb of Rameses II.; from

Prisse.]

[Illustration: FIG. 180.--Horizontal section of the same tomb; from

Prisse.[253]]

[253] The tomb of Seti having been so often reproduced, we have

thought it better to give the plan and section of that of

Rameses II., which is less generally known. The general

arrangements are pretty much the same as those of Seti's tomb,

but the plan is a little more complicated.

[Illustration: FIG. 181.--The smaller sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb

of Rameses VI. (From Horeau, pl. 21.)[254]]

[254] _Panorama de l'Égypte et de la Nubie_, folio.

But yet all this work was not labour lost. These pictures, in which

the details change continually from one tomb to another, were all

inspired by a single desire, and all tended to the same end. Like

those which we have found in the tombs of the Ancient Empire, they had

a sort of magic virtue, a sovereign power to save and redeem. The

personages and articles of food represented on the mastabas were

shadows of people and shadows of material sustenance, destined for the

service and the food of a shadow, the _double_ of the defunct

proprietor of the tomb. The all-powerful influence of prayer and

faith, working through Osiris, turned these shadows into realities.

[Illustration: FIG. 182.--Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III. (From

Horeau, pl. 21.)]

Representations of this kind are common enough in the royal tombs of

Thebes. It will suffice if we notice those which are still to be seen

in the sepulchre of Rameses III., in the series of small chambers in

the first two passages. Like the hunting scene which we take from the

walls of a private tomb (Fig. 183), these pictures have, beyond a

doubt, the same meaning and value as those in the mastaba. But in the

Theban tombs their significance is only secondary. Ideas had

progressed to some purpose since the days of the Memphite kings. Both

in its general arrangement and in the details of its ornamentation,

the sepulchres in the Bab-el-Molouk gave expression to the new, more

philosophical, and more moral conception which had come to overlie the

primitive beliefs.

The first conception was that of the double, inhabiting the tomb, and

kept alive in it by sacrifice and prayer. But in time the Egyptians

would appear to have realized that the double was not the only thing

that remained after the death of a human unit. Their powers of

apprehension were quickened, in all probability, by that high moral

instinct of which the oldest pages of their literature give evidence.

Good or bad, every man had a double, the continuance and prosperity of

which depended in no way upon his merits or demerits. Unless the just

and the unjust were to come to one and the same end, something more

was wanting. This something was the soul (_ba_). Instead of vegetating

in the interior of the tomb, this soul had to perform a long and

difficult subterranean journey--in imitation of the sun and almost

upon his footsteps--during which it had to undergo certain tests and

penances. From this period of trial it would emerge with more or less

honour, according to its conduct during the few short years passed by

it on earth and in company with the body to which it had belonged. It

had to appear before the tribunal of Osiris-Khent-Ament, the Sun of

Night, around whose seat the forty-two members of the infernal jury

were assembled.[255]

[255] This belief in the appearance of the dead before Osiris

and his assessors gave rise to one of the most curious errors

made by the Greeks in speaking of Egypt. The scene in question

is figured upon many of the tombs visited by the Greek

travellers, and in many of the illustrated papyri which were

unrolled for their gratification. In the fragments of some

funerary inscription or of some of these manuscripts, hastily

translated for them by the accompanying priests, they found

frequent allusions to this act of trial and judgment. They were

greatly struck by the importance attached by the Egyptians to

the sentence of this tribunal, but, always in a hurry, and

sometimes not especially intelligent, they do not seem to have

always understood what the dragoman, without whom they could not

stir from the frontier, told them as to this matter. They

believed that the judges in question were living men, and their

tribunal an earthly one, and that they were charged to decide

whether sepulture should be granted to the dead or not. One of

the early travellers, we do not know which, gave currency to

this belief, and we know how it has served as the foundation for

much fine writing, from the time of Diodorus to that of Bossuet.

We can find nothing either in the figured monuments or in the

written texts which hints at the existence of such a custom.

Ever since the key to the hieroglyphics was found, egyptologists

have been agreed upon this point. Every Egyptian was placed in a

sepulchre befitting his station and fortune; his relations and

friends had to ask no permission before they placed him in it;

it was in the other world that he was brought up for judgment,

and had to fear the sentence of an august tribunal.

[Illustration: FIG. 183.--Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah.

(Champollion, pl. 171.)]

There, before the "Lords of truth and justice," the soul had to plead

its cause, and there it had to repeat, with an amount of assurance and

success which would depend upon its conduct in the light, that

negative confession which we read in chapter cxxv. of the "_Book of

the Dead_," which contains an epitome of Egyptian morality.[256] But

those incorruptible judges were not guided solely by the testimony of

the _ba_ in its own favour. They weighed its actions in a pair of

scales and gave judgment according to their weight.[257] The impious

soul was flogged, was delivered to storm and tempest, and, after

centuries of suffering, underwent a second death, the death of

annihilation. The just soul, on the other hand, had to conquer in many

a combat before it was admitted to contemplate the supreme verities.

During its transit across the infernal regions, hideous forms of evil

sprang up before it and did their best to arrest its progress by

terrifying threats. Thanks to the help of Osiris and of other

soul-protecting gods, such as Anubis, it triumphed in the end over all

obstacles, and, as the sun reappears each morning upon the eastern

horizon, it arrived surely at last at those celestial dwellings where

it became incorporated among the gods.

[256] MASPERO gives a translation of it into French in his

_Histoire Ancienne_, pp. 44 and 45.

[257] This weighing of the actions of the deceased was

represented in the illustrated specimens of the _Ritual of the

Dead_ and upon the walls of the tombs, and perhaps upon those

monuments decorated with Egyptian motives which were sprinkled

by the Phœnicians over the whole basin of the Mediterranean.

Coming under the eyes of the Greeks, it was modified by their

lively imaginations into that ψυχοστασία, or _weighing of

souls_, which we find in the Iliad (xxii. 208-212), where

success in a combat between two heroes depends upon the result

of that operation. (See ALFRED MAURY, _Revue archéologique_,

1844, pp. 235-249, 291-307; 1845, pp. 707-717, and DE WITTE,

_ibidem_, 1844, pp. 647-656.)

[Illustration: FIG. 184.--The weighing of actions. (From an

illustrated _Ritual of the Dead_ in the British Museum.)]

The Egyptian imagination spared no effort to represent with the

greatest possible precision those mysterious regions where the soul

had to undergo its appointed tests. Such beliefs afforded a wide scope

for the individual influence of the artist and the poet, and

accordingly we find that they were modified with a rapidity which is

unique in Egyptian art. But the Egyptians were accustomed, from such

early times, to give a concrete form to all their ideas, that they

were sure to clothe the plastic expression of this theme in a richness

and brilliancy of colour which we do not find to the same degree in

any other people of antiquity. On the other hand, although they did

not escape the operation of the eternal law of change, their

temperament was sufficiently conservative to give to each of their

creations a peculiar fixity and consistency. Their _Hades_, if we may

call it so, took on a very definite form, and features which varied

but little through a long course of centuries; and this form is

practically that which we find in the sepulchres of the great Theban

kings and in some belonging to private individuals.

[Illustration: FIG. 185.--Anubis, in a funerary pavilion; from a

bas-relief. (_Description de l'Égypte_, i., pl. 74.)]

It was through long and gloomy galleries, like those of the σύριγξ,

that the perilous voyage of the soul had to be undertaken. A boat

carried it over the subterranean river, for in a country which had the

Nile for its principal highway, every journey, even that of the sun

through space, was looked upon as a navigation. Spacious saloons were

imagined to exist among those galleries, chambers where the infernal

gods and their acolytes sat enthroned in all the majesty of their

office; and so the passages of the tomb were expanded here and there

into oblong or square chambers, their roofs supported by pillars left

in the living rock. On either side of the audience chambers the

imagination placed narrow passes and defiles, in which the walls

seemed to close in upon the soul and bar its progress; tortuous

corridors and gloomy gulfs were fixed in these defiles, in which the

terrible ministers of divine vengeance held themselves in ambush,

prepared to harass the march of souls not yet absolved, and to

overwhelm with frightful tortures those against whom sentence had

already been pronounced. The tomb, therefore, had its snares and

narrow passages, its gaping depths and the mazes of its intersecting

and twisting corridors. To complete the resemblance nothing more was

required than to paint and chisel upon the walls the figures of those

gods, genii, and monsters who peopled the regions below. On one side

the pious king may be seen, escorted by Amen-Ra and the other

divinities whom he had worshipped during life, advancing to plead his

cause before Osiris; on the other, the punishment of the wicked helps

to give _éclat_ to the royal apotheosis by the contrasts which it

affords.

Thus the tombs of the Theban period embody the Egyptian solution of

the problem which has always exercised mankind. Their subterranean

corridors were a reproduction upon a small scale of the leading

characteristics of the under world, and we should commit a great

mistake were we to look upon the series of pictures which decorate its

walls as mere ornament resulting from a desire for luxury and display.

Between the ideal models of these pictures and the pictures themselves

the Egyptians established one of those mutual confusions which have

always been readily accepted by the faithful. Nothing seemed more

natural to the Egyptian, or to the Ethiopian who was his pupil, than

to ascribe the power of speech and movement to the images of the gods,

even when they had painted or carved them with their own hands. This

M. Maspero has shown by an ingenious collation of various texts.[258]

The chisel which created such tangible deities gave them something

more than the appearance of life. Each god exercised his own proper

function in that tomb which was a reproduction in small of the regions

of the other world. His gestures and the written formulæ which

appeared beside him on the walls, each had their protective

or liberating power. To represent the king in his act of

self-justification before Osiris was in some measure to anticipate

that justification. The reality and the image were so intimately

commingled in the mind of the believer that he was unable to separate

one from the other.

[258] _Recueil de Travaux_, vol. i. pp. 155-159.

Did the royal tombs contain statues of the defunct? None have been

found in any of those already opened, and yet there is a chamber in

the tomb of Rameses IV. which appears from its inscriptions to have

been called the _Statue chamber_, while another apartment in its

neighbourhood is reserved for the funerary statuettes. The tombs of

private individuals contained statues; why then should none have been

put in those of the sovereigns? The commemorative sanctuary, the

external funerary temple, was adorned with his image often repeated,

which in order that it might be in better keeping with the

magnificence of its surroundings, and should have a better chance of

duration, was colossal in its proportions. In the inclosures of the

temples of the two Rameses and upon the site of the Amenophium, the

remains of these huge figures are to be counted by dozens, most of

them are of rose granite from Syene; the smallest are from 24 to 28

feet high, and some, with their pedestals, are as much as from 55 to

more than 60 feet. The two colossi of Amenophis III., the Pharaoh

whom the Greeks called Memnon, reached the latter height. Flayed,

mutilated, dishonoured as they have been, these gigantic statues are

still in place. They should be seen in autumn and from a little

distance as they raise their solitary and imposing masses above the

inundated plain, when their size and the simplicity of their lines

will have an effect upon the traveller which he will never forget

(Fig. 20, and Plate vi.).

In the royal tombs at Thebes, as in those at Memphis, the approach to

the mummy-chamber is not by a well, but by an inclined plane. The only

wells which have been discovered in the tombs of the Bab-el-Molouk

are, if we may use the term, false wells, ingeniously contrived to

throw any would-be violator off the right scent. We have already

mentioned one of these false wells as existing in the tomb of Seti. In

the pyramids the corridor which leads to the mummy-chamber is

sometimes an ascending plane, but in the Theban tomb it is always

descending. At the end of the long descent the mummy-chamber is

reached with its sarcophagus, generally a very simple one of red

granite, which has hitherto, in every instance, been found empty.

It is doubtful whether the sarcophagus-chamber was closed by a door or

not. It is known that tombs were sometimes thus closed; some of the

doors have been found in place,[259] and in a few of the texts mention

is made of doors,[260] but not the slightest vestige of one has yet

been discovered in the royal sepulchres at Thebes. "All the doorways

have sills and grooved jambs, as if they had been closed, but no trace

of hinges or of the leaves of a door itself have been found."[261] It

is possible that they were never put in place. The exact and accurate

spirit which marks all the work of Egyptian artists would lead them to

prepare for the placing of a door at the entrance to each chamber; but

at the same time it is obvious that a few panels of sycamore would do

little to stop the progress of any one who should attempt to violate

the royal sepulchre. This latter consideration may have caused them

to abstain from expending time and trouble upon a futile precaution.

[259] One was found in a Theban tomb opened by RHIND (_Thebes_,

&c., pp. 94 and 95). In the tomb of Ti easily recognized traces

of a door were found (BÆDEKER, _Unter-Ægypten_, p. 405); nothing

but a new door was required to put the opening in its ancient

state.

[260] See one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Hassan,

interpreted by M. MASPERO (_Recueil_, etc. vol. i. p. 168).

[261] _Description de l'Égypte_, (_Antiquités_, vol. iii. p.

35).

These tombs seem to have varied greatly in size from reasons similar

to those which determined the dimensions of the pyramids, namely, the

length of reign enjoyed by their respective makers. Cheops, Chephren,

and Mycerinus continually added to the height and mass of their tombs

until death put an end to the work. In the same way, Seti and Rameses

never ceased while they lived to prolong the quarried galleries in the

Bab-el-Molouk. As these galleries were meant to be sealed from the

sight of man, this prolongation was caused, no doubt, by the desire to

develop to the utmost possible extent those pictures which were to be

so powerful for good over the fortunes of the defunct in the under

world.

Apart from the question of duration, reigns which were glorious would

give us larger and more beautiful tombs than those which were obscure

and marked by weakness in the sovereign. The three great Theban

dynasties included several of those monarchs who have been called the

Louis the Fourteenths and the Napoleons of Egypt,[262] and it was but

natural that they should employ the crowd of artificers and artists

which their enterprises gathered about them, for the excavation and

decoration of their own tombs. Either for this reason or for some

other, there is an extraordinary difference between king and king in

the matter of their tombs. Even when we admit that a certain number of

royal sepulchres have so far escaped discovery, it is difficult to

find place for all the sovereigns of the nineteenth and twentieth

dynasties in the two _Valleys of the Kings_. Many things lead us to

believe that several of those princes were content with very simple

tombs; some of them may have been merely buried in the sand. Thus

Mariette discovered, at _Drah-Abou'l-Neggah_, the mummy of Queen

Aah-hotep, of the nineteenth dynasty, some few feet beneath the

surface. The mummy chamber consisted of a few ill-adjusted stone

slabs. Like other mummies found on the same place, it seemed never to

have been disturbed since it had been placed beneath the soil. It was

gilt all over, and was decorated with jewels which now form some of

the most priceless treasures of the Boulak Museum.

[262] A. RHONÉ, _l'Égypt à petites journées_, p. 104.

The private tombs in the Theban necropolis, which are much more

numerous than those of kings, do not, like the latter, belong to a

single period in the national history. The most ancient among them

date back to the eleventh dynasty. There are some also of the Sait

period, and a few contemporary with the Ptolemies and the Roman

emperors. But by far the greater number belong to that epoch which saw

Thebes promoted to be the capital of the whole country, to the

centuries, namely, between Amosis, the conqueror of the Hyksos, and

the last of the Ramessides.

[Illustration: FIG. 186.--Plan and section of a royal tomb.

(_Description de l'Égypte_, vol. ii., pl. 79.)]

These tombs are distinguished by great variety, but, before noticing

the principal types to which they may be referred, the points which

distinguish them from the royal burying-places should be indicated.

The private sepulchre is never subdivided like those of the kings.

This subdivision is to be explained by the exceptional position of the

sovereign mid-way between his subjects and the national deities. A

funerary chapel cut in the sides of the mountain would obviously be

too small for the purposes to which the commemorative part of the tomb

of a Rameses or a Seti would be put. On the other hand, no private

individual could hope to receive royal honours nor to associate his

memory with the worship of the great Egyptian gods. We find that for

him the chapel always remains closely connected with the mummy

chamber. Sometimes it is in front of it, sometimes above it, but in

neither case does it ever fail to form an integral part of the tomb,

so that the latter preserves at once its traditional divisions and its

indissoluble unity.

We may say the same of the well, which plays the same part in the

private tombs of the New Empire as in the Mastaba and the _Speos_ of

the Ancient and Middle Empires. In almost every instance the mummy

chamber is reached by a well, whether the tomb be constructed in the

plain or in the side of the mountains. It is seldom so deep as those

of Gizeh or Sakkarah; its depth hardly exceeds from 20 to 30 feet; but

its arrangement is similar to those in the early necropolis. The mummy

chamber opens directly upon it. Sometimes there are two chambers

facing each other at the foot of the well, and of unequal

heights.[263] After the introduction of the corpse, which was

facilitated by notches cut in two faces of the well, the door of the

mummy chamber was built up--the well filled in. In a few exceptional

instances, the tombs of private individuals seem to have had no well,

and the innermost chamber, as in the case of royal tombs, received the

mummy.[264] In such cases it is very necessary to make sure that

explorers have not been deceived by appearances. In these dusty

interiors the carefully sealed opening might easily escape any but the

most careful research; and as for a sarcophagus, when one is found in

such a chamber, it may have been placed there long after the making of

the tomb. Such usurpations are by no means unknown.[265] In the time

of the Ptolemies, influential people, such as priests and military

functionaries, made them without scruple. The venerable mummies,

dating from the time of Rameses, were thrown into a corner; their

cases were made use of, sometimes for the mummy of the usurper,

sometimes for more ignoble purposes. In more than one of these

usurpations the new comer has been placed in a chamber constructed for

some other object.

[263] PASSALACQUA describes a tomb of this kind in detail in his

_Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes en

Égypte_ (8vo., 1826). This tomb had been visited and pillaged at

some unknown epoch. One of the two chambers had been opened and

stripped, but the second, which opened lower down the well, and

on the other side, escaped the notice of the violators (pp.

118-120). In the tomb opened by RHIND (_Thebes_, _its Tombs_,

etc. pl. 5, v.), the well gave access to four chambers of

different sizes arranged round it like the arms of a cross.

[264] _Description de l'Égypte_, (_Antiquités_,) plates, vol.

ii. p. 78.

[265] RHIND describes one of the most curious of these

substitutions in his chapter IV. In that case an usurper of the

time of Ptolemy established himself and all his family in the

mummy chambers at the foot of the well, after relegating the

statues and mummies of the rightful owner and his people to the

room above.

The well and mummy chamber in the rock are, then, found almost

universally, but the form of the rest of the tomb varies according to

its date and site. Those in the plain are arranged differently to

those in the hill sides. But it must be understood that when we speak

of the plain in connection with the Theban tombs, we do not mean the

space over which spread the waters of the Nile. We mean the gentle

sandy slopes which lie between the foot of the cliffs and the

cultivated fields, a narrow band which widens a little between the

long spurs which the mountains throw out towards the river. In these

land-gulfs the rock crops up here and there, and nowhere is it covered

by more than a thin layer of sand. Such a soil, being above the reach

of the annual inundation, was marvellously well-fitted both for the

construction of the tomb and for the preservation of the mummy.

[Illustration: FIGS. 187, 188.--Theban tombs from the bas-reliefs.

(From Wilkinson, ch. xvi.)]

In this, which may be called the level part of the necropolis, the

tombs have left but slight and ill-defined traces. Their

superstructures have almost entirely disappeared, and yet some which

have now completely vanished were seen by travellers to Thebes in the

first half of the present century. By comparing what they tell us with

the figured representations in bas-relief and manuscript, we may form

some idea of the aspect which this part of the cemetery must formerly

have presented. The tombs which it contained were built upon the same

principles as those of Abydos; a square or rectangular structure with

slightly sloping walls was surmounted by a small pyramid. There was,

however, an essential difference between the two. At Abydos the nature

of the subsoil compelled the architect to contrive the mummy chamber

in the interior of his own structure; at Thebes, on the other hand,

there was nothing to prevent him from being faithful to a tradition

which had manifest advantages, and to intrust the corpse to the

keeping of the earth, at a depth below the surface which would ensure

it greater safety both from violence and from natural causes of decay.

At Thebes the rock was soft enough to be cut with sufficient ease, and

yet firm enough to be free from all danger of settlement or

disintegration. The soil of all this region is honeycombed with mummy

pits, which have long ago been pillaged and are now filled up with

sand. The superstructure was built above the well and inclosed the

funerary chapel. Sometimes it was surmounted by a small pyramid;

sometimes it was a quadrangular mass standing upon a surbase, with a

pilaster at each angle and a boldly projecting cornice at the top. The

oldest of the known tombs of Apis may be taken as specimens of this

latter class, which must also have been represented at Thebes. These

are contemporary with the eighteenth dynasty, and were discovered by

M. Mariette at Sakkarah.[266]

[266] _Athenæum Français_, 1855, p. 55 (_Renseignements sur les

soixante quatre Apis trouvés dans le Sérapeum de Memphis_).

[Illustration: FIG. 189.--Theban tomb from a bas-relief. (From

Wilkinson, ch. xvi.)]

These little monuments have either been destroyed since 1851 or

covered by the sand (see Fig. 190).

The other type is that of the _Speos_. We have here seen that it dates

from the Ancient Empire, but came into general employment and obtained

its full development under the First and Second Theban Empires. We

have already given some idea of the architectural character and of the

decoration of the royal sepulchres, we must now indicate the

peculiarities which in these respects distinguish the tombs of the

kings from those of their subjects.

One of the points of difference has already been noticed; the

employment of vertical wells instead of inclined planes as approaches

to the mummy chamber. The most extensive of all the Theban catacombs

is that of a private individual, the priest Petamounoph (Fig.

191).[267] In this the galleries have not less than 895 feet of total

length, besides which there are a large number of chambers, the whole

being covered with painted reliefs. But this tomb is quite

exceptional. The great majority, those of Rekhmara, for instance, and

others excavated in the hill of _Sheikh-Abd-el-Gournah_, are composed

of two or three chambers at most, united by corridors. The mummy pit

opens sometimes upon the corridor between two of the chambers,

sometimes upon the innermost chamber, sometimes upon a corridor

opening out of the latter. Rhind tells us that he followed one of

these corridors for about 300 feet beyond the chamber without arriving

at the mummy pit, the air then became too bad for further

progress.[268]

[267] This view is obtained by a series of horizontal and

vertical sections in the rock to the right of the galleries. By

this operation we are enabled to show the subterranean parts of

the tomb.

[268] RHIND, _Thebes_, etc. p. 43.

[Illustration: FIG. 190.--A tomb of Apis. From Mariette.]

The chamber for the funerary celebration is easily recognized by its

decorations. It is sometimes the first, but more often the second in

order, in which case the first acts as a sort of vestibule. A

considerable number of tombs are very simple in arrangement. The door

gives access to a rectangular chamber, from 6 to 10 feet high and 10

to 12 wide, which extends, in a direction parallel to the wall, for

from 12 to 24 feet. This chamber is the funerary chapel. From its

posterior wall a passage opens which is nearly equal in height and

width to the chamber. It has a gentle slope and penetrates into the

rock to a distance of some 25 to 35 feet, terminating, in some cases,

in the mummy chamber itself, but more frequently in a small apartment

containing the opening of a mummy pit.[269]

[269] RHIND, _Thebes_, etc. pp. 56, 57.

[Illustration: FIG. 191.--The tomb of Petamounoph. Drawn in

perspective from the plans and elevations of Prisse.]

It must not be imagined that all the tombs were decorated; there are

many which have received neither painted nor carved ornament, and in

others the ornament has never been carried beyond the first sketch.

But even in those which are quite bare, the walls are, in nearly every

instance, covered with a coat of white stucco.

[Illustration: FIG. 192.--The most simple form of Theban tomb; from

Rhind.]

[Illustration: FIG. 193.--Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief; from

Rhind.]

As the funerary chapel was contained in the tomb itself, no effort

could be made to mask or conceal the entrance, which accordingly was

taken advantage of for the display of ornament. But no attempt was

made to cut architectural façades in the cliffs like those at

Beni-Hassan; not more than one or two sepulchres have yet been

discovered which have façades made up of those columns which have been

called _protodoric_. The makers of these tombs were usually content

with dressing the surface of the rock above and around the entrance.

The latter, with its sloping lintel above a cornice, stands in the

centre of an almost perpendicular wall which acts as its frame or

background. In the uninjured state of the sepulchre this wall was more

or less concealed by a construction similar to those which we have

described in speaking of the tombs in the plain. According to all

appearances, one of these little buildings, a cube of masonry crowned

by a pyramidion, was placed before the doorway of every tomb. It is

difficult to say whether it was of sufficient size to contain a

funerary chamber or not. It may have been no more than a solid

erection of small size, meant only to mask the entrance and to

indicate its situation to those concerned. The wealthy, indeed, may

have been only too pleased to thus call public attention to the

position of their gorgeously decorated sepulchres.

The little pyramids of crude brick which we find upon the irregular

rocky slopes of the _Kournet-el-Mourrayi_, above the little

window-shaped openings with which the rock is honeycombed, probably

answered a similar purpose. Of these some are still standing, and

others have left unmistakable traces upon, the slope. They seem to

have existed in great numbers in this part of the necropolis, which

seems to have been set apart, about the time of the eighteenth

dynasty, for the priests.

Although they hardly varied from the two or three types consecrated by

custom, these little buildings could easily have been made to present

slight differences one from another. When they existed in their

entirety, they must have given a very different aspect to the cemetery

from that which it presents with its rocky slopes burnt by the sun

into one harsh and monotonous tint, varied only by the black and

gaping mouths of the countless tombs. The sides which they turned to

the city and the river were adorned with those brilliant colours of

which the Egyptian architects were so fond, and, spaced irregularly

but never very far apart, they were sprinkled over the ground from the

edge of the plain to the topmost ridges of the hills. Nearly all of

them ended in a pyramid, but the varying dimensions of their bases and

their different levels above the plain, gave diversity to the

prospect, while here and there the slender apex of an obelisk rose

above the private tombs and signalized the sleeping-place of a king.

It has been very justly remarked, that the best idea of an Egyptian

cemetery in its best time is to be gained by a visit to one of those

Italian _Campo-Santos_, that of Naples, for example, where the tombs

of many generations lie closely together under a blazing sun.[270]

There, too, many sepulchral façades rise one above another upon the

abrupt slope of a hill into which the graves are sunk. A comparison

with the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, or with that at Constantinople,

would not be just because no trees could flourish in the Theban

rocks, at least in the higher part of the necropolis. In those

districts which border closely upon the irrigation channels, the tombs

seem to have had their gardens and fountains. Palms and sycamores

appear to have been planted about them, and here and there, perhaps,

the care of survivors succeeded in rearing flowers which would shed

their perfumes for the consolation of the dead.[271]

[270] RHIND, _Thebes_, etc. p. 55.

[271] MASPERO, _Recueil de Travaux_, vol. ii. p. 105. The

formula which is generally found upon the funerary steles of the

eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties hints at this: "That I may

walk daily upon the border of my fountain; that my soul may rest

upon the branches of the funerary garden which has been made for

me, that each day I may be out under my sycamore!" These desires

may be taken literally, as is proved by two steles in the

museums of Turin and Boulak, which bear representations of tombs

upon their lower portions. The latter, which we reproduce, comes

from the Theban necropolis.

Were there statues in the courtyards by which many of these tombs were

surrounded? There is no doubt that such statues were placed in the

rock-cut sepulchres; all the museums of Europe have specimens which

come from the Theban tombs. The latter were opened and despoiled,

however, at such an early period that very few of these figures have

been found in place by those who have visited the ruins of Egypt for

legitimate motives. We have, however, the evidence of explorers who

have penetrated into tombs which were practically intact. They tell us

that the statue of the deceased, accompanied often by that of his wife

and children, was placed against the further wall of the innermost

chamber.[272] In some tombs, a niche is cut in the wall for this

purpose,[273] in others a dais is raised three or four steps above the

floor of the chamber.[274] Here, too, is found the sarcophagus, in

basalt when the defunct was able to afford such a luxury, and the

canopic vases, which were sometimes of stone, especially alabaster,

sometimes of terra cotta, and now and then of wood, and were used to

hold the viscera of the deceased. These vases were four in number,

protected respectively by the goddesses Isis, Nephtys, Neith, and Selk

(Fig. 196).

[272] Most of these statues were of calcareous stone, but in the

_Description de l'Égypte_ (_Antiquités_, vol. iii. p. 34) two

granite ones are mentioned.

[273] In the tomb of Amenemheb, for instance, discovered by

Professor Ebers. See also _Description de l'Égypte_, vol. iii.

p. 41.

[274] _Description de l'Égypte_ (_Antiquités_, vol. iii. p.

34).

During the period of which we have just been treating, the taste for

these huge rock-cut tombs was not confined to Thebes and its

immediate vicinity; we find obvious traces of them in the city which

then held the second place in Egypt, namely, in Memphis, where a son

of the sovereign resided as viceroy. It was in the reign of Rameses

II., that the fourth of his hundred and seventy children began what is

now called the little Sérapeum, in the neighbourhood of the Great

Pyramids.[275] Until then each Apis bull had had a tomb apart, a

tomb in which everything was of small dimensions. This royal prince

was especially vowed to the worship of Ptah and Apis, for whom he

inaugurated new rites. He began the excavation of a grand gallery, and

lined it on each side with small chambers which were increased in

number as each successive Apis died and required a sepulchre. This

gallery and its chambers served for 700 years (see Figs. 197 and 198).

[275] It is no part of our plan to describe this discovery,

which did so much honour both to the perspicacity and the energy

of Mariette. We refer all those who are interested in the matter

to the article contributed by M. E. Desjardins to the _Revue des

Deux-Mondes_ of March 15, 1874, under the title: _Les

Découvertes de l'Égyptologie française, les Missions et les

Travaux de M. Mariette_. Many precious details will also be

found, some of them almost dictated by Mariette, in the

_L'Égypte à petites Journeés_ of M. ARTHUR RHONÉ (pp. 212-263).

This work includes two plans, a general plan and a detailed plan

of the subterranean galleries, which were supplied by the

illustrious author of the excavations himself; views of the

galleries are also given, and reproductions of various objects

found in the course of the exploration. We may also mention the

_Choix des Monuments du Sérapéum_, a collection of ten engraved

plates published by Mariette, and the great work, unfortunately

incomplete, which he commenced under the title: _Le Sérapéum de

Memphis_ (folio, Paris, Gide, 1858). In the second volume of

_Fouilles et Découvertes_ (Didier, 8vo., 1873, 2 vols.) BEULÉ has

given a very good description of the bold but fortunate campaign

which, begun in the month of October, 1850, brought fame to a

young man who had, until then, both open enmity and secret

intrigue to contend against.

[Illustration: FIG. 194.--Stele in the Boulak Museum, showing tombs

with gardens about them. From Maspero.]

[Illustration: FIG. 195.--The sarcophagus of a royal scribe, 19th

dynasty. Louvre.]

[Illustration: FIG. 196.--Canopic vase of alabaster. Louvre.]

[Illustration: FIG. 197.--View of the grand gallery in the Apis

Mausoleum; from Mariette.]

The funerary architecture of the Sait epoch seems to have had an

originality of its own, but we are unable to form an opinion from any

existing remains. Not a trace is extant of those tombs in which the

princes of the twenty-sixth dynasty were, according to Herodotus,

placed one after another. Here are the words of the Greek historian:

οἱ δέ (the Egyptians) μιν (Apries) ἀπέπνιξαν, καὶ ἔπειτα ἔθαψαν ἐν

τῇσι πατρῴῃσι ταφῇσι--αἱ δέ εἰσι ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ τῆς Ἀθηναίης, ἀγχοτάτω

τοῦ μεγάρου ἐσιόντι ἀριστερῆς χερός--ἔθαψαν δὲ Σαΐται πάντας τοὺς ἐκ

νομοῦ τούτου γενομένους βασιλέας ἔσω ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ. καὶ γὰρ τὸ τοῦ

Ἀμάσιος σῆμα ἑκαστέρω μέν ἐστὶ τοῦ μεγάρου ἢ τὸ τοῦ Ἀπρίεω καὶ τῶν

τούτου προπατόρων· ἔστι μέντοι καὶ τοῦτο ἐν τῇ αὐλῇ τοῦ ἱροῦ, παστὰς

λιθίνη μεγάλη, καὶ ἠσκημένη στύλοισί τε φοίνικας τὰ δένδρεα

μεμιμημένοισι, καὶ τῇ ἄλλῃ δαπάνῃ. ἔσω δὲ ἐν τῇ παστάδι διξὰ

θυρώματα ἕστηκε· ἐν δὲ τοῖσι θυρώμασι ἡ θήκη ἐστὶ.[276]

[276] HERODOTUS, ii. 169. "The Egyptians strangled Apries, but,

having done so, they buried him in the sepulchre of his fathers.

This tomb is in the temple of Athenè (_Neith_), very near the

sanctuary, on the left hand as one enters. The natives of Sais

buried all the kings which belonged to their nome within this

temple, and, in fact, it also contains the tomb of Amasis, as

well as that of Apries and his family, but the former is not so

close to the sanctuary as the former, but still it is within the

buildings of the temple, in a large chamber constructed of

stone, with columns in the shape of the trunks of palm-trees,

and richly decorated besides, which incloses a kind of niche or

shrine with folding doors, in which the mummy is placed." This

is one of the most difficult passages in Herodotus, and has

given much trouble to translators and commentators. See

Larcher's note (ii. 565), and the passage in Stobæus (serm. xli.

p. 251), which he cites in justification for the sense which is

here given to the word θυρώματα. STRABO is content with but a

line on this subject: "Sais," he says, "especially worships

Athenè (Neith). The tomb of Psammitichos is in the very temple

of that goddess" (xvii. 18).

Preceding centuries afford no example of a tomb placed within a temple

like this.[277]

[277] HERODOTUS affirms (ii. 129-132) that Mycerinus caused the

body of his daughter to be inclosed in the flank of a wooden

cow, richly gilt, and he says that "the cow in question was

never placed in the earth." In his time it was exposed to the

view of all comers in a magnificently decorated saloon of the

royal palace of Sais. We may be allowed to suggest that

Herodotus was mistaken in the name of the prince; Mycerinus is

not likely to have so far abandoned all the funerary traditions

of his time, or to have entombed the body of his daughter in a

spot so distant from his own pyramid at Gizeh. There is one

hypothesis, however, which may save us from the necessity of

once again accusing the Greek historian of misunderstanding what

was said to him; in their desire to weld together the present

with the past, and to collect into their capital such national

monuments as might appeal to the imaginations of their subjects,

the Sait princes may have transported such a curiously shaped

sarcophagus either from the pyramid of Mycerinus or from some

small pyramid in its neighbourhood.

First of all the royal mummy was entombed in the bowels of an

artificial mountain, secondly, under the Theban dynasties, in those of

a real one; but at Sais, it rests above the soil, in the precincts of

a temple, where curious visitors come and go at their will, and

nothing but a pair of wooden doors protects it from disturbance. Such

an arrangement seems inconsistent with all that we know of the

passionate desire of the Egyptians to give an eternal duration to

their mummies. We have every reason to believe that this desire had

shown no diminution at the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and we

can hardly admit that Psemethek and his successors were less impelled

by it than the meanest of their subjects.

The explanation of the apparent anomaly is to be found, we believe, in

the peculiar nature of the soil of Lower Egypt. The Sait princes were

determined to leave their mummies in the city which they had filled

with magnificent buildings and had turned into the capital of all

Egypt. Both _speos_ and mummy pit, however, were out of the question.

Sais was built in the Delta; upon an alluvial soil which was wetted

through and through, as each autumn came round, by the water of the

Nile. Neither hill nor rock existed for many miles in every direction.

It was, therefore, absolutely necessary that the tomb should be a

constructed one upon the surface of this soil. It would seem that the

pyramid would have been the best form of tomb to ensure the continued

existence of the mummy, but, to say nothing of the difficulty of

finding a satisfactory foundation for such a structure upon a soft and

yielding soil, the pyramid had, for many ages, been completely out of

fashion. Egyptian art was entirely occupied with richer and more

varied forms, forms which admitted of the play of light and shade, and

of all the splendour of carved and painted decoration. The pyramid

being rejected, no type remained but that of a building which should

inclose both mummy chamber and funerary chapel under one roof, or, at

least, within one bounding wall. There was also, it is true, the

Abydos type of sepulchre, with its mummy chamber hidden in the

thickness of its base; but it was too heavy and too plain, it was too

nearly related to the pyramid, and it did not lend itself readily to

those brilliant compositions which distinguish the last renascence of

Egyptian art. But the hypostyle hall, the fairest creation of the

national genius, was thoroughly fitted to be the medium of such

picturesque conceptions as were then required, and it was adopted as

the nucleus of the tombs at Sais. A hall divided, perhaps, into three

aisles by tall shafts covered with figures and inscriptions, afforded

a meeting-place and a place of worship for the living. The mummy

chamber was replaced by a niche, placed, doubtless, in the wall which

faced the entrance, and the well, the one essential constituent of an

early Egyptian tomb, was suppressed. Such arrangements as these

afforded much less security to the mummy than those of Memphis or

Thebes, and to compensate in some measure for their manifest

disadvantages, the tomb was placed within the precincts of the most

venerable temple in the city, and the security of the corpse was made

to depend upon the awe inspired by the sanctuary of Neith. As the

event proved, this was but a slight protection against the fury of a

victorious enemy. Less than a year after the death of Amasis, Cambyses

tore his body from its resting-place, and burnt it to ashes after

outraging it in a childish fashion.[278]

[278] HERODOTUS, iii. 16. Upon this subject see an interesting

article by M. EUGÈNE REVILLOUT, entitled: _Le Roi Amasis et les

mercenaires Grecs, selon les Donnés d'Hérodote et les

Renseignements de la Chronique Démotique de Paris_. (_Revue

Égyptologique_, first year; p. 50 _et seq._)

[Illustration: FIG. 198.--Sepulchral chamber of an Apis bull; from

Mariette.]

The tombs of these Sait kings, consisting of so many comparatively

small buildings in one sacred inclosure, remind us of what are called,

in the modern East, _turbehs_, those sepulchres of Mohammedan saints

or priests which are found in the immediate neighbourhood of the

mosques. Vast differences exist, of course, between the Saracenic and

Byzantine styles and that of Ancient Egypt, but yet the principle is

the same. At Sais, as in modern Cairo or Constantinople, iron or

wooden gratings must have barred the entrance to the persons while

they admitted the glances of visitors; rich stuffs were hung before

the niche, as the finest shawls from India and Persia veil the coffins

which lie beneath the domes of the modern burial-places. Perhaps, too,

sycamores and palm-trees cast their shadows over the external

walls.[279] The most hasty visitor to the Bosphorus and the Golden

Horn can hardly fail to remember the suburb of Eyoub, where the

_turbehs_ of the Ottoman princes stand half hidden among the cypresses

and plane trees.

[279] There are two passages in HERODOTUS (ii. 91, and 138) from

which we may infer that the Egyptians were fond of planting

trees about their temples.

The material condition which compelled the Sait princes to break with

the customs of their ancestors, affected the tombs of private

individuals also. Throughout the existence of the Egyptian monarchy

the inhabitants of the Delta were obliged to set about the

preservation of their dead in a different fashion to that followed by

their neighbours in Upper Egypt; their mummies had to be kept out of

reach of the inundation. Isolated monuments, like those of Abydos,

would soon have filled all the available space upon artificial mounds,

such as those upon which the cities of the Delta were built. The

problem to be solved was, however, a simple one. Since there could be

no question of a lateral development, like that of the Theban tombs,

or of a downward one, like that of the Memphite mummy pits, it was

obvious that the development must be upwards. A beginning was made by

constructing, at some distance from a town, a platform of crude brick,

upon which, after its surface had been raised above the level of the

highest floods, the mummies were placed in small chambers closely

packed one against another. As soon as the whole platform was

occupied, another layer of chambers was commenced above it.

Champollion discovered the remains of two such cemeteries in the

immediate neighbourhood of Sais. The larger of the two was not less

than 1,400 feet long, 500 feet wide, and 80 feet high; an enormous

mass "which resembled," he said, "a huge rock torn by lightning or

earthquake."[280] No doubt was possible as to the character of the

mass; Champollion found among the débris both canopic vases and

funerary statuettes. Within a few years of his death Mariette

undertook some fresh excavations in the same neighbourhood; they led

to no very important results, but they confirmed the justice of the

views enunciated by Champollion. Most of the objects recovered were in

a very bad state of preservation; the materials had been too soft, and

in time the dampness, which had impregnated the base of the whole

structure, had crept upwards through the porous brick, and turned the

whole mass into a gigantic sponge.

[280] _Lettres Écrites d'Égypte et de Nubie_, 2nd edition, 1868,

p. 41.

These tombs resemble those of the kings in having no well; and as for

the funerary chapel we do not as yet know whether it existed at all,

how it was arranged, or what took its place. Perhaps each of the more

carefully constructed tombs was divided into two parts, a chamber more

or less decorated and a niche contrived in the masonry, like the

rock-cut ovens of the Phœnician catacombs. As soon as the mummy was

introduced, the niche was walled up, while the chamber would remain

open for the funerary celebrations. In order that the tombs situated

at some height above the level of the soil, and in the middle of the

block of buildings, should be reached, a complicated system of

staircases and inclined planes was necessary. In the course of

centuries the tombs of the first layer and especially those in the

centre of the mass, were overwhelmed and buried from sight and access

by the continual aggregation above and around them. The families to

which they belonged, perhaps, became extinct, and no one was left to

watch over their preservation. Had it not been for the infiltration of

the Nile water, these lower strata of tombs would no doubt have

furnished many interesting objects to explorers. In any case it would

seem likely that, if deep trenches were driven through the heart of

these vast agglomerations of unbaked brick, many valuable discoveries

would be made.[281] Such a system left slight scope to individual

caprice; space must have been carefully parcelled out to each

claimant, and the architect had much less elbow room than when he was

cutting into the sides of a mountain or building upon the dry soil of

the desert. In the royal tombs alone, if time had left any for our

inspection, could we have found materials for judging of the funerary

architecture of Sais, but, as the matter stands, we are obliged to be

content with what we can gather from Theban and Memphite remains as to

the prevailing taste of the epoch.

[281] Similar structures exist in lower Chaldæa, and have

furnished many inscriptions of great interest and value to

assyriologists.

Upon the plateau of Gizeh, to the south of the Great Pyramid, Colonel

Vyse discovered and cleared, in 1837, an important tomb to which he

gave the name of Colonel Campbell, then British Consul-General in

Egypt. The external part of the tomb had entirely disappeared, but we

may conclude that it was in keeping with the subterranean portion. The

maker of the tomb had taken the trouble to define its extent by a

trench cut around it in the rock. The external measurements of this

trench are 89 feet by 74. A passage had been contrived from one of its

faces to the well, which had been covered in all probability by an

external structure. The well opens upon a point nearer to the north

than the south, and its dimensions are quite exceptional. It is 54

feet 4 inches deep, and 31 feet by 26 feet 8 inches in horizontal

section; it terminates in a chamber which is covered by a vault 11

feet 2 inches thick. It was not however in this chamber, but in small

lateral grottos that several sarcophagi in granite, basalt, white

quartz, &c., were found. The remains of two other wells were traced.

This tomb dates from the time of Psemethek I.

[Illustration: FIG. 199.--Section in perspective of "Campbell's tomb,"

from the plans and elevations of Perring.]

[Illustration: FIG. 200.--Vertical section in perspective of the

sarcophagus chamber of the above tomb; compiled from Perring.]

In the necropolis of Thebes there is a whole district, that of the

hill _El Assassif_, where most of the tombs belong to the twenty-sixth

dynasty. Their external aspect is very different from that of the

Theban sepulchres. The entrance to the subterranean galleries is

preceded by a spacious rectangular courtyard, excavated in the rock to

a depth of 10 or 12 feet. This court was from 80 to 100 feet long and

from 40 to 80 feet wide; it was surrounded by a stone or brick wall,

and reached by a flight of steps. A pylon-shaped doorway gave access

to the courtyard from the side next the rock, another door of similar

shape opened upon the plain; "but some tombs are entirely closed (see

Fig. 201) except towards the mountain, from which side they may be

entered by one or two openings."

[Illustration: FIG. 201.--A Tomb on El-Assassif (drawn in perspective

from the plans and elevations of Prisse).]

The subterranean part of these tombs varies in size. In some of them a

gallery of medium length leads to a single chamber. In others, and

these form the majority, there is a suite of rooms connected by a

continuous gallery. To this latter group belongs the largest of all

the subterranean Theban tombs, that of Petamounoph (Fig. 191). We have

already noticed the extraordinary dimensions of its galleries; there

are also two wells which lead to lower sets of chambers. All the walls

of this tomb are covered with sculptured reliefs. In the first

chambers these are in very bad condition, but they improve as we

advance, and in the farthest rooms are remarkable for their finish and

good preservation. The exterior of this sepulchre is worthy of the

interior. The open court, which acts as vestibule, is 100 feet long by

80 wide. An entrance, looking towards the plain, rises between two

massive walls of crude brick, and, to all appearance, was once crowned

by an arcade; within it a flight of steps leads down into the court.

Another door, pierced through the limestone rock, leads to a second

and smaller court which is surrounded by a portico. From this

peristyle a sculptured portal leads to the first subterranean chamber,

which is 53 feet by 23, and once had its roof supported by a double

range of columns. The next chamber is 33 feet square. With a double

vestibule and these two great saloons there was no lack of space for

gatherings of the friends and relations of the deceased.

Neither at Memphis nor at Thebes do the tombs of this late period

contain any novel elements, but they are distinguished by their size

and the luxury of their decoration. In some, the wells are much wider

than usual; in others it is upon the external courts and upon those

double gateways which play a part similar to that of the successive

pylons before a Theban temple, that extra care is bestowed. Vaults are

frequently employed and help to give variety of effect. Private tombs

become as large as those of sovereigns, and similar tendencies are to

be found in the sculpture. The Egyptian genius was becoming exhausted,

and it endeavoured to compensate for its want of invention and

creative imagination by an increase in richness and elegance.

A chronological classification is only possible in the cases of those

tombs which bear inscriptions and figures upon their walls. At

Memphis, as at Thebes, the remains of thousands of tombs are to be

found which give no indication of their date. Sometimes they are deep

mummy pits, slightly expanding at the bottom; sometimes, as at Thebes,

the rock is honeycombed with graves between the border of the

cultivated land and the foot of the Libyan chain. In the mountains

themselves there are hundreds of small chambers, with bare walls and

often extremely minute in size, cut in the sides of the cliffs.

Finally, there are the vast catacombs, in each chamber of which the

mummies of labourers and artisans were crowded, often with the

instruments of their trade by their sides.[282] Pits full of mummified

animals are also found among the human graves. Rhind saw some hundreds

of the mummies of hawks and ibises taken from a tomb at the foot of

the Drah-Abou'l-Neggah. They were each enveloped in bandages of mummy

cloth, and beside them numerous small boxes, each with a carefully

embalmed mouse inside it, were found. The lids of these boxes had

each a wooden mouse upon it, sometimes gilt.[283]

[282] RHIND, _Thebes_, etc. p. 51. BELZONI, _Narrative of the

Operations_, etc. p. 167.

[283] RHIND, p. 52. Among the mummified animals found at Thebes,

Wilkinson also mentions monkeys, sheep, cows, cats, crocodiles,

etc. See BELZONI, _Narrative_, p. 187.

* * * * *

We have endeavoured to notice all that is of importance in the

funerary architecture of Egypt, because the Egyptian civilization, as

we know it through the still existing monuments, carries us much

farther back than any other towards the first awakening of individual

thought and consciousness in mankind. The primitive conceptions of

those early periods were, of course, different enough from those to

which mankind was brought by later reflection, but nevertheless they

were the premises, they contained the germ of all the development that

has followed; and to thoroughly understand the origin and constitution

of this development it was necessary to follow it up to its source, to

the clearness and transparency of its springs.

The art of Egypt is the oldest of all the national arts, and the

oldest monuments of Egypt are its tombs. By these alone is that

earliest epoch in its history which we call the Ancient Empire known

to us.

In later ages the country was covered with magnificent temples and

sumptuous palaces, but, even then, the tomb did not lose its

pre-eminent importance. The chief care of the Egyptian in all ages was

his place of rest after death. Rich or poor, as soon as he arrived at

full age he directed all his spare resources towards the construction

and decoration of his tomb, his happy, his eternal "dwelling," with

which his thoughts were far more preoccupied than with that home in

the light, upon which, whether it were a miserable mud hut or a vast

edifice of brick or wood, he looked with comparative indifference,

regarding it as an encampment for a day or a mere hotel for a passing

traveller. The tombs, when not hollowed from the living rock, were

built with such solidity and care that they have survived in

thousands, while the palaces of great sovereigns have perished and

left no trace, and the temples which have been preserved are very few

in number.

Being mostly subterranean and hidden from the eye of man, sepulchres

preserved the deposits entrusted to them much better than buildings

upon the surface. Those among the latter which were not completely

destroyed, were, in very remote times, damaged, pillaged, stripped,

and mutilated in a thousand ways. All that subsists of their

decoration--shattered colossi and bas-reliefs often broken and

disfigured--tells us nothing beyond the pomps and triumphs of official

history. The tombs have suffered much less severely. The statues,

bas-reliefs, and paintings which have been found in them, seem, in

many instances, to have been the work of the very men whose footprints

were found in the sand which covered their floors when they were

opened.[284] The pictures offered to our eyes by the walls of the

private tombs are very different from those which we find in the

temples. All classes of the people appear in them in their every-day

occupations and customary attitudes. The whole national life is

displayed before us in a long series of scenes which comment upon and

explain each other. Almost all that we know concerning the industrial

arts of Egypt has been derived from a study of her tomb-houses. In

every hundred of such objects which our museums contain at least

ninety-nine come from those safe depositories.

[284] When Mariette discovered the tomb of the Apis which had

died in the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Rameses II., the

fingers of the Egyptian mason who laid the last stone of the

wall built across the entrance to the tomb were found marked

upon the cement, and "when I entered the sarcophagus-chamber I

found upon the thin layer of dust which covered the floor the

marks made by the naked feet of the workmen who had placed the

god in his last resting place 3,200 years before." (Quoted by

RHÔNÉ in _L'Égypte à Petites Journées_, p. 239.)

In order to give a true idea of the national character of the

Egyptians and to enable the originality of their civilization to be

thoroughly understood, it was necessary to show the place occupied in

their thoughts by the anticipation of death; it was necessary to

explain what the tomb meant to them, to what sentiments and beliefs

its general arrangements and its principal details responded; it was

necessary to follow out the various modifications which were brought

about by the development of religious conceptions, from the time of

the first six dynasties to that of the Theban Empire.

The brilliant architectural revival which distinguished the first and

second Theban Empires was mainly due to this development of religious

thought. Almost all the peculiarities of the Memphite tomb are to be

explained by the hypotheses with which primitive man is content. But

when mature reflection evolved higher types for the national gods,

when polytheism came to be superimposed upon fetishism, the hour

arrived for the temple to take its proper place in the national life,

for majestic colonnades and massive pylons to be erected on the banks

of the life-giving river. The temple was later than the tomb, but it

followed closely upon its footsteps, and the two were, in a fashion,

united by those erections on the left bank of the Nile, under the

Theban necropolis, which partook of the character of both. The temple

is the highest outcome of the native genius during those centuries

which saw Egypt supreme over all the races of the East, supreme partly

by force of arms, but mainly by the superiority of her civilization.