Volume II Part 5 (1/2)

It was for siyptians did not, as a rule, care to use very large stones Their obelisks and colossal statues prove that they kne to quarry and raise blocks of enormous size, but they never ood reason to do so They did not care to exhaust thes, where they would ever after be lost to sight under the stucco In the e size of the stones hardly exceeds that of the le course was froth of the blocks varied between 5 feet and rather reat pylon of Karnak the lintel over the doorway is a stone bea In the hypostyle hall the architraves of the central aisle are at least 29 feet long[59]

It is said that soth of nearly 32 feet

[59] _Description de l'egypte_, _Antiquites_, vol ii p 437

The Egyptian architect was therefore quite ready to useof voids when they were necessary, but he did not wantonly create that necessity, as those of other nations have often done Most of the travellers who visit Egypt expect to find hugetheir lofty heads on every side, and their surprise is great when they are told that the huge colule blocks Their first illusion is fostered by the large nuranite columns which are found at Eryptian mosques When they arrive at Thebes they discover their error At Karnak and at Luxor, at Medinet-Abou and in the Ramesseum, the columns are made up of drums placed one upon another

In many cases even these drums are not monolithic, but consist of several different stones Under the Royptians deliberately chose to le stones, and most of those which are of exceptional size date from that late epoch We know but one case to which these remarks do not apply; we mean that of the monolithic supports in the chambers of the labyrinth which were mentioned by Strabo, and discovered, as some believe, by Lepsius[60]

We are told by that traveller that they were of granite, but he only saw them when broken Strabo says that the chambers were roofed in with slabs of such a size that they amazed every one who saw them, and added much to the effect which that famous structure was otherwise calculated to produce Prisse describes and figures a coluranite which he ascribes to Aht froiven in his drawing, h, including the capital[61] It belongs to the same kind of pillar as those observed by Lepsius in the Fayou in one of the Gournah to a colule exception that its proportions are ranite have been discovered to the west of the present city of Alexandria which are nearly 22 feet high Their capitals are i 42

[60] STRABO, xvii 37--LEPSIUS, _Briefe aus aegypten_, p 74

[61] PRISSE, _Histoire de l'Art egyptien_, text, p 364

[Illustration: FIG 41--Horizontal section, in perspective, of the first pylon at Karnak; by Charles Chipiez]

It would see the early centuries of the second Theban eeneral custoht, of17)[62]

[62] The columns at Luxor are constructed in courses The joints of the stone are worked carefully for only about a third of their whole diahtly hollowed out and filled in with a mortar of pounded brick which has becoypte_, _Antiquites_, vol ii p

384)

[Illustration: FIG 42--Work a monolithic column; Champollion, pl 161]

To all that concerns the quality of the building similar remarks may be applied We have mentioned a few examples of careful and scientific construction, but, as a rule, Egyptian buildings were put together in a fashi+on that was careless in the extreh nor deep enough It is not until we come to the remains of the Ptolemaic period, such as the temples at Edfou and Denderah, that we discover foundations sinking 16 or 18 feet into the ground The Pharaonic temples were laid upon the surface rather than solidly rooted in the soil Mariette attributes the destruction which has overtaken the temples at Karnak less to the violence of man or to earthquakes than to inherent faults of construction, and to the want of foresight shown by their architects in not placing them at a sufficient elevation above the inundations For many centuries the waters of the Nile have reached the walls of the teradually eaten away the sandstone of which they are composed ”Similar causes produce similar effects, and the time may be easily foreseen when the superb hypostyle hall will yield to the attacks of its eneh for three quarters of their thickness, will fall as those of the western court have fallen”[64]

[63] See p 29, vol i (Note 1) and p 170 The engineers who edited the _Description_ ard to Karnak (_Antiquites_, vol ii pp 414 and 500)

[64] MARIETTE, _Itineraire_, p 179 The paveeneral level of the surrounding plain

At the tis which were from ten to fifteen centuries old, to which the architects of the tiht have turned for infor of the valley level ht need cause us, however, no great surprise; but it is otherith the carelessness of the architects in arranging their plans, and in failing to compel the workmen to follow those plans when yptian workained for precision and care in the execution of his task

Only those who have personally ypt kno often, for instance, the opposite walls of a single chaht”[65]

[65] MARIETTE, _Les To as fast as possible and trusting to the painted decoration for the concealment of all defects, explains the ether The systee dressed stones made the employment of mortar unnecessary The Greeks, who used the same method and obtained from it such supreme effects, put no ether by tenons of metal or wood, but the builder depended for cohesion chiefly upon the way in which his materials were dressed and fixed The two surfaces were so intimately allied that the points of junction were alyptians were in like manner able to depend upon the _vis inertiae_ of their materials for the stability of their walls, and their climate was far better fitted even than that of Greece for the employment of those wooden oror settle suchwould thus be reduced to a minimum ”In consequence of a dislocation in the walls caused by the insufficiency of the foundations, it is possible, at several points of the temple walls at Abydos, to introduce the arm between the stones and feel the sycamore dovetails still in place and in an extraordinary state of preservation A few of these dovetails have been extracted, and, although walled in for eternity so far as the intentions of the Egyptians were concerned, they bear the royal ovals of Seti I, the founder of the teraved”[66]

[66] MARIETTE, _Abydos_, vol i p 8--_Catalogue general des Monuments d'Abydos_, p 585 Siypte_ in the walls of the great hall at Karnak (_Description de l'egypte, Antiquites_, vol ii

p 442--See also _Plates_, vol ii pl 57, figs 1 and 2) We took this illustration for our guide in co 69

We see, then, that in yptians employed methods which demanded no little patience, skill, and attention from the workman, but as a rule they preferred to work in a more expeditious and less careful fashi+on They used a cement made of sand and lime; traces of it are everywhere found, both in the ruins of Thebes and in the pyramids, between the blocks of limestone and sandstone[67] Still more did bricks require the use of mortar, which in their case was often little ypte, Ant_, vol v p 153 JOMARD, _Recueil d'Observations et de Meypte Ancienne et Moderne_, vol iv p 41

Areat temple at Thebes there was one which bore marks of the same tendency

Mariette tells us that traces exist in the front of the great tee crude bricks This incline was used for the construction of the pylon The great stones were dragged up its slopes, and as the pylon grew, so did the mass of crude brick