Volume I Part 16 (1/2)

There are many more lists of the sayptiennes a Inscriptions grecques_, p 6, 1875, 8vo)

[Illustration: FIGS 101, 102--Scarabs Louvre]

[Illustration: FIGS 103, 104--Funerary amulets _Oudja_ and _ta_

Louvre]

But those who could procure even these slight advantages were still a the favourites of fortune Many were unable to obtain even this reat cemeteries, at Thebes as well as at Memphis, corpses are found deposited in the loose sand two or three feet from the surface Some of these are packed in the leaves of the palhly enveloped in a few morsels of linen They have been hastily dipped in a bath of natron, which has dirtied rather than embalmed them[156]

Sometimes even these slender precautions have been oe of either coffin or linen swathes The sand see them, and they have been found in our days in the condition of skeletons

[156] See in the interesting work of Mr H RHIND (_Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants_, London, 1862, 8vo), the chapter headed _A Burial-place of the Poor_

[Illustration: FIG 105--Pillow, Louvre]

On the other hand, the fortunate ones of the world, those ere so easy in their circumstances in this life that they could place themselves in the sa connected with their burial They never allowed themselves to be surprised by death, as we so often do Whether kings or private individuals, they made their preparations while they were still alive, and caused their tombs to be constructed under their own eyes[157]

Their forethought when living and the piety of relations spared nothing that could add to the beauty and convenience of dwellings which were to be the eternal resting places of their inypt were so lightly built that they have left no traces upon the soil; but many of their tombs have subsisted uninjured to our day, and it is froyptian art All the other nations of the ancient world followed the good exa all penetrated with si one from the other Whenever we moderns have opened any of those ancient tombs which have happily remained intact, we have been ypt or Phnicia, in Asia Minor, Cyprus or Greece, in Etruria or Caht meets our eyes The tombs are filled with precious objects and _chefs d'uvres_ of art which their depositors had intended never again to see the light of day

[157] MARIETTE, _Toreat inscription of Beni-Hassan, the first lines of which run thus: ”The hereditary chiefKhnumhotephas made a monument for the first time to embellish his district; he has sculptured his name for ever; he has embellished it for ever by his chamber of Karneter; he has sculptured the naned their place The workst his dependants of all ranks” [BIRCH, _Records of the Past_, vol xii p

67--ED] It was, no doubt, in order to conforyptian custom that Antony and Cleopatra coustus ordered to be finished after their death (SUETONIUS, _Augustus_, 17) ”To be laid to rest in the tomb which he had reatest good which the Gods could insure to an Egyptian In Papyrus IV at Boulak we find the following phrases: 'Be found with thy dwelling finished in the funerary valley: in every enterprise which thouwhen thy body shall be hid be present to thee_'” (From the French of M MASPERO, _Journal asiatique_, 7th series, t

xv p 165, note 1)

In modern times, when piety or pride stimulates to the decoration of a tomb, all the care of the architect, the sculptor and the painter is given to the outside, to the edifice which surrave or other receptacle for the coffin is as plain and simple in the most sumptuous monuments of our cemeteries as in the most humble

Our funerary architecture is based upon our belief that the tomb is empty; that the vital part of the deposit confided to it has escaped to rejoin the current of eternal life Under such conditions the tos a commemorative structure, a rief of a fae for the loss of one of its members As for the narrow pit into which the ”mortal coil” is lowered, all that we deh and properly closed Art makes no attempt to illumine its darkness She leaves to work its walls and confines herself to the visible parts of the tomb The dead within furnishes the pretext for her activity, but it is the ad that is her real incentive

The ideas of the ancients on this matter were, as we have seen, very different They looked upon the tomb as an inhabited house; as a house in which the dead was to lead some kind of existence Rich men wished their tombs to look well outside, even to the distant spectator, but it was to the inside that their chief attention was turned They wished to find there all the necessaries, the co life So we find that the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Etruscans, illing enough, when they built their own tombs or those of their relations, to throw a _tu which was conspicuous at a distance In those sepulchres which were cut out of the side of a mountain, the fronts were carved with frieze, pediularly constructed portico; but the chief object of solicitude to the proud possessor of such a to and disposition For hiing When a man is condemned by illness or accident to keep his roo that he athers immediately about him all the comforts and luxuries which he can afford; and death is an illness from which there is no recovery

Impelled by such ideas as these, the ancients filled their tombs with precious objects and decorated theuarded against intrusion for the sake of gain

Thus the Achaeans of Mycenae (if that be the proper name of those mysterious people) buried, in the sepulchres discovered by Dr

Schlieold and silver which now fill the museum of Athens; thus the torace and delicate workra; and those of Etruria and Campania with the most beautiful painted vases ever produced by Greek taste

Identity of religious conception thus led, froements which bore a curious rese the ancients had, as a whole, a very different character froly ypt than anywhere else, and therefore we have studied it in detail The general observations to which it has given rise have been made once for all, and we shall not have to repeat them e describe the funeral customs of other ancient peoples We shall then confine ourselves to pointing out the slight differences which naturally spring up in the several interpretations of a co circuyptian toh certain modifications of form and decoration, which, however, were never of so radical a nature as to affect its general appearance and arrangeraphical expression and her venerable civilization lost its independence and originality, these latter reed

--2--_The To the tombs which date fro to the traveller are, of course, the Pyra before his arrival at Cairo he sees the su into the air above the vapours raised by the sun, and above the dust thrown up by the tee population of the city At that distance their peaks seeht above the horizon (Plate I 2)

The tourist's first visit is paid to the Pyra any other ancient building He thinks that he has qualified hiyptian architecture because a few shouting Arabs have landed him, exhausted, upon the toped and thrust hies of the interior which will ever be a all this his eyes and thoughts are entirely given to the preservation of his own equilibriu of the real constitution of the structure he has come to visit