Fig. 174.—Rameses II. in battle; Luxor. (Champollion, pl. 331.)
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
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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
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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.
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.
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
275
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?
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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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]
The existence of the temples in the plain made it unnecessary that
the tombs themselves should be entered after that final
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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]
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
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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]
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
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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]
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
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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
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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.
Fig. 179.—Plan of the tomb of Rameses II.; from Prisse.
Fig. 180.—Horizontal section of the same tomb; from Prisse.[253]
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
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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.
Fig. 181.—The smaller sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb of
Rameses VI. (From Horeau, pl. 21.)[254]
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,
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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.
Fig. 182.—Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III. (From Horeau, pl.
21.)
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).