Volume I Part 18 (1/2)

”When the bottoe is seen in the rock which forh to allow one to walk upright, does not run quite parallel to the axis of the mastaba It is directed obliquely towards the south-east, like the chaed into a s, that is to say, the room with a viehich the whole structure has been planned and to which all its other parts are but accessories

”This mortuary chamber is vertically under the public hall above, so that the survivors who caether in the latter for the funeral ceremonies had the corpse of the deceased under their feet, at a distance which varied according to the depth of the well”

[Illustration: FIG 121--The upper chaure is a co the relation between the subterranean and constructed parts of the tomb (_Notice des principaux Monu froement which is not characteristic of the e and carefully built, but generally without ornament or inscription Of all those explored by him Mariette found but one which had its walls ornamented; in the middle of its decorations, which he does not describe, he contrived toto the _Ritual of the Dead_

The sarcophagus was placed in one corner of the charanite, and on a few occasions of opaque black basalt It was rectangular on plan with a round-topped lid squared at the angles

Mariette found none at Sakkarah with inscriptions On the other hand we find theus at Khoo-foo-Ankh, which was discovered at Gizeh and belongs to the fourth dynasty (Figs 123, 124)

[Illustration: FIG 122--Double mastaba at Gizeh, transverse section (froyptians did not always trust to theof the sarcophagus The under-side of the cover isgroove on the upper edge of the sarcophagus, and the two edges were bound still ether by a very hard cement

Finally, as if all these precautions were not enough, wooden bolts were affixed to the under-side of the lid which fitted into slots in the sarcophagus and helped to render the two inseparable”

So far as we can judge froathered from these ancient tombs, the process of embalmment was then carried on in simple and eleyptians attempted to neutralize, by the innumerable and complicated precautions which they took to insure that the corpse should not be disturbed in its envelope of stone In later times, when the preparation of the mummy was better understood, they were not so careful to seal up the sarcophagus from the outer air

”The furniture of the mummy chamber comprised neither statues, nor funerary statuettes, nor around Two or three large and pointed red vases, containing nothing but a thin deposit of clay, rest against the walls

Within the sarcophagus we find the same sobriety of sepulchral furniture Beyond a wooden or alabaster pillow (Fig 105) and half a dozen little drinking cups of alabaster, nothing has been found there but the us of Khoo-foo-Ankh Perspective after Bourgoin Red granite Height 133 metres Boulak]

These beef bones must be the remains of the quarters of meat which were placed in the tomb for the nourishment of the dead No scene is more frequently represented upon the walls of the public cha of victi 125) Like those which are found upon the roof, the vases must have held water for the double The pilloas placed under the head of thehis life As for the drinking cups, their use has not yet been determined, so far as we know

”As soon as the us sealed, and the various objects which we have described in place, the opening at the bottom of the alled up; the well itself was filled with stones, earth, and sand, and the dead was left to his eternal sleep”[173] These precautionsto reach the mummy chamber To find the entrance to the well is the first difficulty, and when it is found, many hands and no little time are required to remove the rubbish hich it is filled The only yptians have ever used in such work are those which we ourselves have seen in the hands of Mariette's labourers, namely, the wooden shovel and the little rush basket which is filled with a few handfuls of sand and pebbles, and then carried on the head to be euessed how many journeys to and fro have to be made before a few cubic yards of _debris_ are cleared by such means as this!

[173] The broken up and decayed remains of wooden boats have been found in two or three mummy pits (MARIETTE, _Les Toinally formed part, perhaps, of the boats upon which the corpse was transported across the Nile to the nearest point of the western bank to the to the the deceased Both the bas-reliefs in the tomb and the _Ritual_ contain ions of A 98) In certain Theban toed boats have been found; there are some of them in the Louvre (_Salle Civile_, case K) [There are two in the British Museum, and one, a very fine one, in the museum at Liverpool--ED]

[Illustration: FIG 124--Details of the Sarcophagus of Khoo-foo-Ankh]

[Illustration: FIG 125--Bas-relief from Sakkarah Boulak]

We have so far followed Mariette, and have frequently had to es and to the plates of the great work of Lepsius, wetold general rules but wish to know the exceptions also We shall not go into all the changes which variety of taste and the progress of art introduced into the arranges; they do not affect the general statements which we have made We shall not re-state the evidence which enabled Mariette to apportion the 142 painted and sculptured mastabas explored by him in 1869, to the first six dynasties It is certain that thoseover a space of fro the whole of that long period, the general character of Egyptian sepulchral architecture reed

We should here, perhaps, in order to make our description complete, attempt to convey a true idea of the reliefs which cover the sides of the chamber, and of the statues which fill the serdab We should, perhaps, by a judicious choice of examples, endeavour to estimate their style and composition; but we shall postpone all such examination until we come to treat of sculpture, and of the way in which the earliest Egyptian artists treated the human form A didactic and analytic method is so far despotic that it compels us, in order to marshal our facts and to make them easily understood, to separate phenomena which are intiroups We have thus been driven to separate the figured decorations of the toements which enframe and support them; with the latter, alone, areconcerned

We eneral description of the Egyptian toes of the national life, in those years when the national civilization put on the form and colour which it retained until the last days of antiquity

This to raised well above the surface of the soil, was a conspicuous object in the landscape; and (2) a subterranean part cut in the living rock which was never more than a few feet below the surface of the sand

The constructed part inclosed a chamber which was sometimes internal and sometimes external, a chamber in which the relations of the deceased deposited the funeral offerings, and in which the priests officiated before the stele, to which the iven So more than a recess in the _facade_, a mere frame for the stele The structure also contains a retreat in its thickness where the statues of the deceased alled up The subterranean part is composed of the well and the mummy cha; usually traversing its whole depth; it leads to thedepths in the bowels of the earth

Such are the constituent elements of the _mastaba_, that is to say, of those private toypt, in every one of the cemeteries, no matter where they are situated or what their date, the same elements are to be found, modified in certain particulars by the rank of the deceased, by the nature of the soil, by the size of the toes of fashi+on, but always to be easily recognized Of all these elements there is but one which does not persistently reappear in monuments other than the mastaba, and that is the _serdab_ This retreat for statues has not, as yet, been found in any of the royal tombs of the first six dynasties, neither has it been met with in the tombs of the two Theban empires, or of later epochs And yet it was connected with one of the ion It fulfilled in the happiest yptian architect by the strange conceptions of a future life which we have described Why then do we, as a rule, find the serdab only in the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis? Its absence under the Theban princes is, perhaps to be explained by the progressThe heads of more than one mummy have now been exhibited in the cases of European museums for many years, and, in spite of the dampness of our climates, they still preserve their skin, their teeth and their hair (Fig 126) When they had learnt the secret of preserving the body fro series of centuries it should be pretty much in the same condition as on the day after death, they did not indeed, cease to uard the _double_ from annihilation, but they attached less importance to their safety, and took less trouble to hide theh for their preservation by putting them in the precincts of their touardianshi+p of their venerated religion

As for the other parts of the tomb, a little attention will always suffice for their identification even in those sepulchres which differ most from the mastaba In some instances we shall find the mummy chamber contrived in the upper structure, in others the whole to rock Sometimes we find the chapel, as we may call the public chamber in which the miraculous nourishment of the _double_ took place, more or less distantly separated from the mummy chamber; sometimes the well almost disappears, so corridor with but a gentle slope As a rule all these variations are easily explained, and may be connected without difficulty with that primitive type which we have attempted to define by its most wide-spread and constant features

[Illustration: FIG 126--Head of a Mummy Louvre]

Another method of sepulture was made use of in the Ancient Eypt, we yptian Cohbourhood of the Pyramids, especially some which face the western slope of the Second Pyramid

Similar tombs are to be found near the pyrarottos declare their extreme antiquity by their imitations of wooden architecture;[174] others by their inscriptions dating fro upon these rock-cut toenerally composed of one or two small sculptured chambers, upon one of which the well opens which leads to the mummy chamber We shall postpone their study to a later chapter, as the time of the Middle Empire affords us richer and more complete examples of them than the earlier period; but, indeed, the New Empire has left us the most important examples of this kind of sepulchre We shall here content ourselves with pointing out that the architects of Menore the facilities offered by the easily cut limestone rocks, not only for construction of well and mummy chamber, but also for those open parts of the tomb where the funeral rites and the ceremonies of the Ritual of the Dead were perforypt did little ion, than develop, with variations, the theenerations which were ruled by her first six dynasties