Volume I Part 16 (2/2)
In spite of the wonderful panoraues of the ascent, and of the overpowering impression made upon the mind by their colossaltheof the sepulchral est and best preserved are not so old as some of the to-places as they are, their arrangement and ornamentation are less rich and expressive than those of many sepulchres built by private individuals Many of the latter, in their comparatively restricted diested to us by our study of the national beliefs
We shall, therefore, reserve the Pyramids for future treatment, and in our review of the successive forn the first place to those private to from the Ancient Empire, which are to be found in the necropolis of Me a few differences, to which we shall refer hereafter, these tole type, of which Lepsius was the first to perceive the interest[158] This type, which was first clearly brought to light by the many and deep excavations carried out by Mariette, has been known for some years past by the Arab term _mastaba_,[159] which means literally a _bench_, a bench of stone or wood This naiven by the labourers employed upon the excavations, and see and low shapes, which bear some resemblance to those divans, or otto
Mariette was struck by the fitness of the expression, and used it ever after to designate that particular kind of toypten_, p 23 _et seq_ Before the Prussian coypt they had studied 130 private toured in the _Denkraphers do not seein of this word; they believe it to be foreign, perhaps Persian
Mariette will be our constant guide in this part of our study After having opened many hundreds of these ique_, e may call a _theory of the mastaba_[160] In all essential matters we shall allow his words to speak for themselves; when he enters into more detail than is necessary for our purpose, we shall content ourselves with epito his descriptions
[160] Vol xix (1869), pp 1-22 and 81-89
THE MASTABAS OF THE NECROPOLIS OF MEMPHIS
The space over which the monuments which we propose to describe are spread, is on the left bank of the Nile, and extends from _Abou-Roash_ to _Dashour_; it is thus, in all probability, the largest ceth, and of an average width of from two to two and a half miles[161] It was, in a word, the burial-place for Meest city of Egypt, and to have boasted an antiquity which only Thinis could rival Excavations have failed, apparently, to confirm the assertion of Strabo, who describes the early capital of Egypt as reaching to the foot of the Libyan chain On the contrary, it seems to have been confined between the canal which is called the _Bahr Yussef_ and the Nile It would thus have for and rather narrow city, close upon the river, of which the site may still be traced by the ranite and fragments of walls, which crop up from the plain between Gizeh and Chinbab For forty centuries there was a continual procession of corpses from Memphis itself, and probably from towns on the other side of the Nile, such as Heliopolis, to the plateau which lies along the foot of the Libyan chain The formation of this plateau makes it peculiarly well adapted for the purpose to which it was put
It consists of a thick bed of soft limestone, covered by a layer of sand which varies in depth fro to the inequalities of the ground beneath it
[161] EBERS (_aegypten_, p 137) gives this necropolis a length ofit extend to Meidou
It was easy, therefore, either to lay bare the rock and to construct the to the ht be trusted to quickly cover the grave with sand which would protect it when made The same sand covered the coffinless corpse of the pauper with its kindly particles Age after age the dead were interred by reat haven of rest At first there was plenty of room, and the corpses were strewn somewhat thinly in the sand,[162] but with time economy of space had to be practised, until at last bodies were squeezed into the narrowest spaces between older inhabitants Sometimes these new coone before the the the nahtful owner[163]
[162] Upon the plateau which, at Sakkarah, extends ards of the stepped pyramid the manner in which the necropolis was developed can be readily seen In walking eastwards, that is, from the pyramid towards the cultivated land, we pass a first zone of tombs which date from the Ancient Empire, a second which possesses sculptures of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and a third which dates fro example of such usurpation the Theban tomb first opened by a Scottish traveller, HENRY RHIND, to whose interesting work (_Thebes, its Tombs and their Tenants, Ancient and Present, with a Record of Excavations in the Necropolis_, Longman, 1862, 8vo) we shall often have to refer This ton of Amenophis III by a brother and sister whose statues were found in it, but it also contained Sebau, son of Menkara, a high official of the time of the Ptolemies, with his wife and all his family (c iv)
The nuious extent by the non-employment of those family tombs which, as we shall see, were made use of by the Phnicians, the Greeks, and the Etruscans The Egyptian sepulchre was a personal appanage The husband and father of a family admitted into it only his wife and such of their children as died young The son, when he in turn becaeneration, each huh the world by the erection of a new to to the period of the Meive free play to their fancies, and to develop the structure, both above and below ground, both in arrangement and in decoration, to any extent they pleased We may therefore look upon them as the freest, the most spontaneous, and the most complete expression of the ideas for death and the life beyond the grave
The mastabas of Sakkarah will receivethem we shall often have occasion to quote the words of Mariette[164] Those which are to be found in the hbourhood of the Great Pyramid, differ only in unieneral appearance now presented by these oin has sent us of the toured by us have all been e dans la haute egypte_, p 32) thought that the word Sakkarah was an ancient name derived from _Socharis_, a Memphite form of _Osiris_
”The _ular on plan, with four faces of plain walling, each being inclined at a stated angle towards their common centre This inclination has led so more than an unfinished pyramid Such an idea is refuted, however, by the fact that the divergence froht that, were the walls prolonged upwards, their ridges, or _aretes_, would not ht be more justly compared to the space comprised between two horizontal sections of an obelisk, supposing the obelisk to have an oblong base
[Illustration: FIG 106--Actual condition of a oin]
”The le upon which these structures are planned, always runs due north and south, and at the pyraed upon a symmetrical plan so as to resemble a chess board on which all the squares are strictly oriented[165] Theto the true astronomical north All the others show the same intention, and, in those instances where an error of a few degrees is to be discovered, it is to be clearly attributed to carelessness on the part of the builder, a common fault in these tombs, and not to a difference of intention We often find that the northern face is not strictly parallel to the southern, nor that on the west to that on the east
[165] The way in which the ed with respect to each other is well shown in plates xiv and xviii of Lepsius's first volume (map of the pyramids of Gizeh and panorama taken from the summit of the second pyramid)
[Illustration: FIG 107--Three mastabas at Gizeh Perspective view, after the plan of Lepsius (_Denk much froed with the syuishes those on the south and west of the Great Pyramid[166] They are sprinkled about in a rather haphazard fashi+on Here we find them well interspaced and there actually placed one upon another It follows that the chess-board arrangement which is so conspicuous at Gizeh is not here to be noticed Even at Sakkarah there were streets between the rows of toularly placed, and they are often so narrow,more than blind alleys, that the inexperienced visitor eneral aspect of this city of the dead, and the regularity of its reat iypte” The following are the words of JOMARD (_Description_, vol v p 619): ”Fro one sees an infinite quantity of the long rectangular structures extending almost to the Pyraned one with another I counted fourteen rows of them, in each direction, on the west of the Great Pyra nearly four hundred in all The sand under which uishable” Since the tied by the excavations into ement can still be clearly followed
”The Sakkarah mastabas are built either of stone or brick
”The mastabas of stone are of two kinds: those of a very hard blue siliceous limestone and those of a softer chalky limestone which is found upon the spot This latter stone was used for the Stepped Pyramid The tombs upon which it was used seem to be much the oldest in the necropolis; they are also the least rich and important
[Illustration: FIG 108--Restoration of part of the Necropolis of Gizeh]
”Our general notion of Egyptian architecture would lead us to look for the use of huge stones in these mastabas, and, in fact, certain important monuments, such as the _Mastabat-el-Faraoun_, and parts of important es and chae blocks But the Sakkarah architects were s, architraves and other places where big stones were necessary, the blocks are of an average height of about half a yard, with a proportionate length and thickness