Chapter III: Sepulchral Architecture (1)

§ 1.--_The Egyptian Belief as to a Future Life and its Influence upon their Sepulchral Architecture._

The most ancient monuments which have yet been discovered in Egypt are the tombs; they have therefore a right to the first place in our sketch of Egyptian architecture.

In every country the forms and characteristics of the sepulchre are determined by the ideas of the natives as to the fate of their bodies and souls after life is over. In order to understand the Egyptian arrangements, we must begin then by inquiring into their notions upon death and its consequences; we must ask whether they believed in another life, and in what kind of life. We shall find a complete answer to our question in the collation of written texts with figured monuments.

In the first period of his intellectual development, man is unable to comprehend any life but that which he experiences in his own person. He is as yet unable to observe, to analyse or to generalize. He does not perceive the characteristics which distinguish him from things about him, and he sees nothing in nature but a repetition of himself. He is therefore incapable of distinguishing between life such as he leads it and mere existence. He dreams of no other way of being than his own. As such is the tendency of his intellect, nothing could be more natural or more logical than the conception to which it leads him in presence of the problem offered to him every time that a corpse descends into the grave. M. Maspero has so thoroughly understood the originality of the solution adopted by the Egyptians that we cannot do better, in attempting to explain the hypothesis, at once gross and subtle, to which they had recourse for consolation, than borrow his rendering of the texts which throw light upon this subject, together with some of the reflections which those texts suggested to him.[114]

[114] "_Conférence sur l'Histoire des Âmes dans l'Égypte
ancienne, d'après les Monuments du Musée du Louvre_," in the
_Bulletin hebdomadaire de l'Association scientifique de France_,
No. 594. M. Maspero has often and exhaustively treated this
subject, especially in his numerous lectures at the Collège de
France. Those lectures afforded the material for the remarkable
paper in the _Journal asiatique_ entitled, "_Étude sur quelques
Peintures et sur quelques Textes relatifs aux Funérailles_"
(numbers for May, June, 1878, for December-June, and November,
December, 1879, and May-June, 1880). These articles have been
republished in a single volume with important corrections and
additions (Maisonneuve, 1880).

J. Sulpis del et sc.
SETI I
BAS-RELIEF AT ABYDOS

]

Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a long course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they became more capable of philosophic speculation the Egyptians modified their definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon another; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination.

We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of the Egyptian intellect to the subtle analysis of M. Maspero. That historian has applied himself to the apprehension of every delicate shade of meaning in a system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and illustrations he enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague notions, and how he managed to harmonize ideas which seem to us inconsistent.

We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word _bâi_,[115] which has been translated _soul_, nor the distinction between it and _khou_, luminousness, which the soul seems to have enveloped like a garment. We shall not follow the soul and its internal light in its subterranean journey across _Ament_, the Egyptian Hades, to which it entered by a cleft, _Pega_, to the west of Abydos, which was the only portal to the kingdom of the shades; nor shall we accompany them in the successive transformations which made them acquainted with every corner of the earth and sky in the infinite series of their _becomes_ (to use the Egyptian expression); what we have to do is to trace out the most ancient of their religious conceptions, the conception which, like the first teachings of infancy, was so deeply engraved upon the soul and intellect of the race as to exercise a much stronger influence than the later more abstract and more philosophical theories, which were superimposed upon it. In this primitive conception we ought to find the determining cause of the Egyptian form of tomb. Its constitution was already settled in the time of the ancient Empire, and, from the Memphite dynasties until the end, it remained unchanged in principle. In this constitution we shall find embodied the essential idea adopted by the Egyptians when they first attempted to find some eternal element in man, or, at least, some element which should resist the annihilation of death for a period much longer than the few days which make up our mortal life.

[115] Or _ba_.--ED.

The Egyptians called that which does not perish as the dying man draws his last sigh, the _ka_, a term which M. Maspero has rendered as the _double_. "This _double_ was a duplicate of the body in a matter less dense than that of the body, a projection, coloured but aërial, of the individual, reproducing him feature for feature, a child if coming from a child, a woman if from a woman, and a man if from a man."[116]

[116] _Conférence_, p. 381. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the first
chapters of his _Principles of Sociology_, has given a curious
and plausible explanation of how this conception of a _double_
was formed. He finds its origin chiefly in the phenomena of
sleep, of dreams, and of the faintness caused by wounds or
illness. He shows how these more or less transitory suspensions
of animation led men to suppose that death was nothing but a
prolonged interruption of life. He also thinks that the actual
shadow cast by a man's body contributed to the formation of that
belief. But had it no other elements which belonged to the
general disposition of humanity in those early periods of
intellectual life? Into that question we cannot enter here
further than to say that Mr. Spencer's pages make us acquainted
with numerous facts which prove that the beliefs in question
were not confined to a single race, but were common to all
humanity.

This _double_ had to be installed in a lodging suitable to its existence, had to be surrounded by objects which it had used in its former state, had to be supplied with the food which was necessary for the sustenance of its life. And all these things it obtained from the piety of its relations, who, on fixed days, brought them to the threshold of the _good dwelling_ or the _eternal dwelling_, which were the phrases used by the Egyptians.[117] By these offerings alone could the hungry and thirsty phantom which had replaced the living man be kept alive. The first duty of the survivors was to take care that this dependent existence should not be extinguished by their neglect, to provide food and drink for the support, if we may use such a phrase, of the precarious life of the dead, who would otherwise be irritated against them and use the almost godlike power attributed to his mysterious condition for the punishment of his ungrateful posterity.[118]

[117] This expression, which is very common in the Egyptian
texts, seems to have made a great impression upon the Greek
travellers. The following passage of DIODORUS is well known:
"This refers to the beliefs of the natives, who look upon the
life upon earth as a thing of minor importance, but set a high
value upon those virtues of which the memory is perpetuated
after death. They call their houses hotels, in view of the short
time they have to spend in them, while they call their tombs
their _eternal dwellings_" (i. 51).

[118] The dead were put under the protection of, and, as it
were, combined with, Osiris; they talked of _the Osiris so and
so_ in naming one who was dead.

This conception is not peculiar to Egypt. The _double_ of the Egyptian sepulchral records corresponds exactly to the εἴδωλον[119] of the Greeks and the _umbra_ of the Latins. Both Greeks and Latins believed that when the funeral rites had been duly accomplished, this image or shadow entered upon the possession of a subterranean dwelling and began a life which was no more than the continuation of that in the light.[120] The dead thus remained in close relation with the living, on the one hand by the nourishment which they received, on the other by the protection which they afforded; even in the funeral repast they took their parts, in the strictest sense of the word, in the eating and drinking.[121] They looked impatiently forward to these supplies because, for a moment, they awoke their dormant thoughts and feelings and gave them glimpses of the true life, the life above ground and in the sunshine.[122] If they were kept waiting too long they became angry and revenged themselves upon those who had caused their sufferings. Woe to the family or city which was not careful to interest the dead in its stability and thus to associate them with its prosperity![123]

[119] Εἴδωλα καμόντων (_Il._ xxiii. 72; _Od._ xi. 476; xxiv.
14).

[120] This belief is clearly stated in a passage from Cicero
quoted by Fustel: "Sub terrâ censebant reliquam vitam agi
mortuorum" (_Tusc._ i. 16). This belief was so strong that it
subsisted even after the universal establishment of the custom
of burning the bodies of the dead.

[121] Texts to this effect abound. FUSTEL brought the more
remarkable of them together in his _Cité antique_ (p. 14). We
shall be content with quoting three: "Son of Peleus," said
Neoptolemus, "take this drink which is grateful to the dead;
come and drink this blood" (Hecuba, 536). Electra says when she
pours a libation: "This drink has penetrated the earth; my
father has received it" (Choephorœ, 162). And listen to the
prayer of Orestes to his dead father: "Oh my father, if I live
thou shalt have rich banquets; if I die thou wilt have no
portion of those smoking feasts which nourish the dead"
(Choephorœ, 482-484). Upon the strange persistence of this
belief, traces of which are still found in Eastern Europe, in
Albania, in Thessaly, and Epirus, the works of HEUZEY (_Mission
archéologique de Macédoine_, p. 156), and ALBERT DUMONT (_le
Balkan et l'Adriatique_, pp. 354-356), may be consulted. Some
curious details relating to the funeral feasts of the Chinese
are to be found in the _Comptes rendus de l'Académie des
Inscriptions_, 1877, p. 325. There are some striking points of
resemblance between the religion of China and that of ancient
Egypt; in both one and the other the same want of power to
develop may be found. Taking them as a whole, both the Chinese
and the Egyptians failed to emerge from the condition of
fetichism.

[122] In the eleventh book of the Odyssey it is only after "they
have drunk deep draughts of black blood" that the shades are
capable of recognising Ulysses, of understanding what he says
and answering. The blood they swallowed restored their
intelligence and powers of thought.

[123] The speeches of the Greek orators are full of proofs that
these beliefs had a great hold upon the popular mind, even as
late as the time of Demosthenes. In contested cases of adoption
they always laid great stress upon the dangers which would
menace the city if a family was allowed to become extinct for
want of precautions against the failure of the hereditary line;
there would then be some neglected tomb where the dead never
received the visits of gift-bringing friends, a neglect which
would be visited upon the city as a whole as the accomplice in
such abandonment. Such an argument and others like it may not
seem to us to be of great judicial value, but the talent of an
Isæus understood how to make it tell with an audience, or we
should not find it so often repeated in his pleadings (see G.
PERROT, _L'Éloquence politique et judiciare à Athènes. Les
Précurseurs de Demosthène_, pp. 359-364).

These beliefs seem to have been common to all ancient peoples during that period of their existence which is lost in the shadow of prehistoric times. From India to Italy all the primitive forms of public and private rights betray their presence. For this fact and its consequences we may refer our readers to the fine work of M. Fustel de Coulange, _La Cité antique_.[124]

[124] Seventh edition, Hachette, 18mo., 1879.

With the progress of centuries and the development of religious thought, more elevated ideas prevailed. The growth of the scientific spirit tended to make the notion of a being suspended between life and death ever more strange and inadmissible. Experience accumulated its results and it became daily more evident that death not only put an end to the activity of the organs, but that, immediately upon its occurrence, it began to dissolve and decompose their tissues. As time rolled on men must have found it very difficult to believe in a shadow thus placed outside the normal conditions of life, in a something which was not a spirit and yet survived the destruction of its organs.

It would seem then that observation and logical reflection should soon have led to the abandonment of a theory which now appears so puerile; but, even in these scientific times, those whose intellects demand well defined ideas are few indeed.[125] At a period when the diffusion of intellectual culture and the perfection of scientific methods add daily to our accumulations of positive knowledge, most men allow their souls to be stirred and their actions to be prompted by the vaguest words and notions; how much greater then must the influence of those confused beliefs and baseless images have been in antiquity when but a few rare minds, and those ill provided with means of research and analysis, attempted to think with originality, clearness and freedom.

[125] Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his ingenious and subtle analysis
of _primitive ideas_ draws our attention to their frequent
inconsistencies and even positive contradictions; but he shows
us at the same time that the most highly civilised races in
these modern days admit and combine ideas which are logically
quite as irreconcilable as those which seem to us so absurdly
inconsistent when we think of the beliefs of the ancients or of
savage races. Custom renders us insensible to contradictions
which we should perceive at once were we removed to a distance
from them. (_The Principles of Sociology_, vol. i. pp. 119,
185).

The prestige of this illusion was increased and perpetuated by its intimate connection with several of those sentiments which are most honourable to human nature. Such a worship of the dead surprises and even scandalizes us by its frank materialism, but if we seek for the source of its inspiration and its primitive meaning, we find them in the remembrance of lost objects of affection, in feelings broken by the supreme separation, in the gratitude of children to the parents who gave them birth and nourished their infancy, in the recognition by the living of the blessings which they enjoy through the long and laborious efforts of their ancestors. There was no doubt a perishable element in the funerary ideas of Egypt, an element which the progress of reason was sure to destroy, and we may be tempted to smile when we think of the Greek or Egyptian giving himself the trouble to feed his departed ancestors with blood, milk, or honey, but with all their simplicity, both one and the other were alive to a truth which the revolutionary spirit of our days, with its childish and brutal contempt for the past, is often unable to grasp. They realized the complete solidarity of one human generation with another. Guided by their hearts alone they anticipated the results at which modern thought has arrived by close and attentive study of history. From a reasoned out conviction of this truth and its consequences, philosophy now draws the principles of a high morality! but long before our days this idea and the tender, grateful, sentiments which it provoked had been a powerful instrument in the moral improvement of the first-born of civilization and a bond of union for their civil and domestic life.

We have thought it right to dwell upon this worship of the dead and to describe its character at some length, because the beliefs upon which it was based are not to be found so clearly set forth in the art of any other people. Their most complete, clear, and eloquent expression, in a plastic form, is to be seen in the tombs which border the Nile. And why is this so? It is because the Egyptian industries were already in full possession of their resources at the period when those beliefs had their strongest hold over the minds and feelings of the people. In the case of Greece, art did not arrive at its full development until the worship of the dead had lost its high place in the national conscience. When the Greek genius had arrived, after much striving, at its complete power of plastic expression, the gods of Olympus had been created for several centuries, and art was called upon to interpret the brilliant polytheism of Homer and Hesiod, to give outward image to those gods, and to construct worthy dwellings for their habitation. Sculptors, painters, and architects still worked indeed, at the decoration of the tomb. They strove to give it beauty of shape and arrangement, and to adorn its walls with bas-reliefs and pictures; they designed for it those vases and terra cottas which, in our own day, have been found in thousands in the cemeteries of Greece and Italy, but all this was only a subordinate use of their talent. Their ambition was to build temples, to model statues of Zeus, Pallas, and Apollo. On the other hand, those distant ages in which primitive and childish ideas of religion prevailed, had no art in which to manifest their beliefs with clearness and precision.

It was otherwise in the valley of the Nile. A well provided industry and an experienced art laid themselves out to interpret the popular beliefs and to defend the dead against final dissolution, or the agonies of hunger and thirst. Egypt did not differ from other nations in its opinions upon the mystery of death. In the infancy of every race the same notions on this matter are to be found, and in this respect the only difference between the Egyptians and the rest of the world is very much to the credit of the former; they rapidly attained to a degree of civilization which was only reached by other races after their religious development was comparatively mature. Thanks to this advantage, they were enabled to push their ideas to consequences which were not to be attained by tribes which were little less than barbarous, and they had no difficulty in expressing them with sufficient force and precision.

It remains for us to show the use which the Egyptians made of their superiority in doing more honour to their dead, in guarding them more safely against the chances which might shorten the duration or destroy the happiness of their life in the tomb. The fulfilment of this duty was, as the Greek travellers rightly affirmed, their chief pre-occupation. Their sepulchral architecture was, of all their creations, the most original and the most characteristic of their genius, especially in the forms which we find in the cemeteries of the Ancient Empire. In the time of the New Empire, at Thebes, it is less complete and homogeneous. In the latter the arrangement and decoration do not spring, as a whole, from a unique conception; we find traces in it of new hypotheses and novel forms of belief. These do not supersede the primitive ideas; they are added to them, and they bear witness to the restless efforts made by human thought to solve the problem of human destiny. These apparent contradictions and hesitations are of great interest to the student of the Egyptian religion, but from the art point of view the Memphite tombs are more curious and important than those of later date. They have the great merit of being complete in their unity both of artistic form and of intellectual conception. They are the offspring of a single growth, and are perfect in their clear logical expression. And again, they are the type of all the later tombs, of those at Abydos, at Beni-Hassan, and at Thebes. Certain details, indeed, are modified, but the general disposition remains the same to the end. We shall, therefore, find the ruling principle of Egyptian sepulchral architecture most clearly laid down in the cemeteries of Gizeh and Sakkarah.

The first and most obvious necessity for the obscure form of life which was supposed to commence as soon as the tomb had received its inmate, was the body. No pains, therefore, were spared which could retard its dissolution and preserve the organs to which the _double_ and the soul might one day return.[126] Embalming, practised as it was by the Egyptians, rendered a mummy almost indestructible, so long, at least, as it remained in the dry soil of Egypt. On the warm sands of Sakkarah and close to the excavations from which the fellahs of the _corvée_ were returning at the end of their day's labour, we--my travelling companions and myself--stripped a great lady of the time of Ramses of the linen cloths and bandages in which she was closely enveloped, and found her body much in the same condition as it must have been when it left the workshop of the Memphite embalmer! Her black hair was plaited into fine tresses; all her teeth were in place between the slightly contracted lips; the almond-shaped nails of her feet and hands were stained with henna. The limbs were flexible and the graceful shapes but little altered under the still firm and smooth skin, which, moreover, seemed to be still supported by flesh in some parts. Had it not been for its colour of tarred linen or scorched paper, and the smell of naphtha which arose from the body and from the numberless bandages which were strewn about, we might have shared the sentiment attributed to Lord Evandale in Theophile Gautier's brilliant _Roman de la Momie_; with an effort of good-will we could almost sympathise with those emotions of tenderness and admiration which were excited in the breast of the young Englishman at the sight of the unveiled charms of that daughter of Egypt whose perfect beauty had once troubled the heart of the proudest of the Pharaohs.[127]

[126] The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the
complicated processes of embalming were undertaken. See P.
PIERRET, _Le Dogme de la la Résurrection_, &c., p. 10. "It was
necessary that no member, no substance, should be wanting at the
final summons; resurrection depended on that." "_Thou countest
thy members which are complete and intact._" (Egyptian funerary
text.) "Arise in To-deser (the sacred region in which the
renewal of life is prepared), thou august and coffined mummy.
Thy bones and thy substance are re-united with thy flesh, and
thy flesh is again in its place; thy head is replaced upon thy
neck, thy heart is ready for thee." (Osirian statue in the
Louvre.) The dead took care to demand of the gods "_that the
earth should not bite him, that the soil should not consume
him_." (MARIETTE, _Feuilles d'Abydos_.) The preservation of the
body must therefore have been an object of solicitude at the
earliest times, but the art of embalming did not attain
perfection until the Theban period. Under the ancient empire men
were content with comparatively simple methods. Mariette says
that "more examples would have to be brought together than he
had been able to discover before the question of mummification
under the ancient empire could be decided. It is certain, first,
that no authentic piece of mummy cloth from that period is now
extant; secondly, that the bones found in the sarcophagi have
the brownish colour and the bituminous smell of mummies.

"Not more than five or six inviolate sarcophagi have been found.
On each of these occasions the corpse has been discovered in the
skeleton state. And as for linen, nothing beyond a little dust
upon the bottom of the sarcophagus, which might be the _débris_
of many other things than of a linen shroud." (_Les Tombes de
l'Ancien Empire_, p. 16.)

[127] PASSALACQUA gives the following description of the mummy
of a young woman which he discovered at Thebes: "Her hair and
the rotundity and surprising regularity of her form showed me
that she had been a beauty in her time, and that she had died in
the flower of her youth." He then gives a minute description of
her condition and ornaments, and concludes by saying that "the
peculiar beauty of the proportions of this mummy, and its
perfect preservation, had so greatly impressed the Arabs
themselves that they had exhumed it more than once to show to
their wives and neighbours." (_Catalogue raisonné et historique
des Antiquités découvertes en Égypte_, 8vo. 1826.)

In order that all the expense of embalming should not be thrown away, the mummy had to be so placed that it could not be reached by the highest inundations of the river. The cemeteries were therefore established either upon a plateau surrounded by the desert, as in the case of Memphis and Abydos, or in the sides of the mountain ranges and in the ravines by which they were pierced, as at Thebes and Beni-Hassan. In the whole valley of the Nile, no ancient tomb has been discovered which was within reach of the inundation at its highest.[128]

[128] RHIND describes several mummy-pits in the necropolis of
Thebes which receive the water of the Nile by infiltration; but,
as he himself remarks, this is because those who dug them did
not foresee the gradual raising of the valley, and,
consequently, of the level attained in recent ages by the waters
of the Nile. It is doubtless only within the last few centuries
that the water has penetrated into these tombs. (_Thebes, its
Tombs and their Tenants_, p. 153.)

The corpse was thus preserved from destruction, first by careful and scientific embalming, secondly by placing its dwelling above the highest "Nile." Besides this we shall see that the Egyptian architects made use of many curious artifices of construction in order to conceal the entrance to the tomb, and to prevent the intrusion of any one coming with evil intentions. All kinds of obstacles and pitfalls are accumulated in the path of the unbidden visitor, with a fertility and patient ingenuity of invention which has often carried despair into the minds of modern explorers, especially in the case of the pyramids. Mariette was fond of saying that there are mummies in Egypt which will never, in the strictest sense of the word, be brought to light.

But in spite of all this pious and subtle foresight, it sometimes happened that private hate or, more often, the greed of gain, upset every calculation. Enemies might succeed in penetrating to the sepulchres of the dead, in destroying their bodies, and thus inflicting a second death worse than the first; or a thief might drag the corpse from its resting place, and leave it naked and dishonoured upon the sands, that he might, with the greater ease, possess himself of the gold and jewels with which it had been adorned.

The liability of the mummy to accident had to be provided against. The idea of the unhappy condition in which the _double_ would find itself when its mummy had been destroyed, led to the provision of an artificial support for it in the shape of a statue. Art was sufficiently advanced not only to reproduce the costume and ordinary attitude of the defunct and to mark his age and sex, but even to render the individual characteristics of his physiognomy. It aspired to portraiture; and the development of writing allowed the name and qualities of the deceased to be inscribed upon his statue. Thus identified by its resemblance and its inscriptions it served to perpetuate the life of the _double_, which was in continual danger of dissolution or evaporation in the absence of a material support.

The statues were more solid than the mummy, and nothing stood in the way of their multiplication. The body gave but one chance of duration to the _double_; twenty statues represented twenty chances more. Hence the astonishing number of statues which are sometimes found in a single tomb. The images of the dead were multiplied by the piety of surviving relations, and consequently the _double_ was assured a duration which practically amounted to immortality.[129]

[129] MASPERO, _Conférence_, p. 381.

We shall see that a special recess was prepared in the thickness of the built up portion of the tomb for the reception of wooden or stone statues, so that they might be kept out of sight and safe from all indiscreet curiosity. Other effigies were placed in the chambers of the tomb or the courts in front of it. Finally, we know that persons of consideration obtained from the king permission to erect statues in the temples, where they were protected by the sanctity of the place and the vigilance of the priests.[130]

[130] MASPERO, _Notes sur différentes Points de Grammaire et
d'Histoire_, p. 155. (In the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l'Archéologie Égyptienne et Assyrienne_, vol.
i.)

From the point of view of the ancient Egyptians such precautions were by no means futile. Many of these effigies have come down to us safely through fifty or sixty centuries and have found an asylum in our museums where they have nothing to fear but the slow effects of climate and time. Those which remain intact may therefore count upon immortality. If the _double_ required nothing to preserve it from annihilation but the continued existence of the image, that of Chephren, the builder of the second great pyramid, would be still alive, preserved by the magnificent statue of diorite which is the glory of Boulak, and thanks to the durability of its material, it would have every chance of lasting as long as the world itself. But, unhappily for the shade of Pharaoh, this posthumous existence which is so difficult of comprehension to us, was only to be prolonged by attention to conditions most of which could not long continue to be observed.

It was entirely a material life. The dead-alive had need of food and drink, which he obtained from supplies placed beside him in the tomb,[131] and afterwards, when these were consumed, by the repasts which took place periodically in the tomb, of which he had his share. The first of these feasts was given upon the conclusion of the funeral ceremonies,[132] and they were repeated from year to year on days fixed by tradition and sometimes by the expressed wish of the deceased.[133] An open and public chamber was contrived in the tomb for the celebration of these anniversaries. It was a kind of chapel, or, perhaps, to speak more accurately, a saloon in which all the relations and friends of the deceased could find room. At the foot of the stele upon which the dead man was represented sacrificing to Osiris, the god of the dead, was placed a table for offerings, upon which the share intended for the _double_ was deposited and the libations poured. A conduit was reserved in the thickness of the wall by which the odour of the roast meats and perfumed fruits and the smoke of the incense might reach the concealed statues.[134]

[131] Jars, which seem to have been once filled with water, are
found in many tombs of all epochs. Different kinds of dates are
also found, together with the fruit of the sycamore, corn,
cakes, &c. See the _Catalogue_ of PASSALACQUA, pp. 123, 151, and
elsewhere. Quarters of meat have also been found in them, which
are easily recognised by their well-preserved bones.

[132] MASPERO, _Études sur quelques Peintures funéraires_, in
the _Journal Asiatique_, May-June, 1880, p. 387, _et seq._

[133] In one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Hassan, recently
translated anew both by M. Maspero and Professor Birch,
Chnoumhotep speaks thus: "I caused to prosper the name of my
father. I completed the existing temples of the Ka. I served my
statues at the great temples. I sacrificed to them their food,
bread, beer, water, vegetables, pure herbs. My priest has
verified (I chose a priest for the Ka,--Maspero). I procured
them from the irrigation of my work-people (I made him master of
fields and slaves,--Maspero). I ordered the sepulchral offerings
of bread, beer, cattle, fowl, in all the festivals of Karneter,
at the festivals of the beginning of the year, the opening of
the year, increase of the year, diminution of the year (little
year,--Brugsch and Maspero), close of the year, at the great
festival, at the festival of the great burning, at the festival
of the lesser burning, the five intercalary days, at the
festival of bread making (of the entry of grain,--Maspero) at
the twelve monthly and half monthly festivals, all the festivals
on the earth (plain), terminating on the hill (of Anubis). But
should my sepulchral priest or men conduct them wrongly may he
not exist, nor his son in his place."--BIRCH, _Records of the
Past_, vol. xii. p. 71.--ED.

[134] In each opening of the serdab in the tomb of Ti, at
Sakkarah, people, probably relatives of the deceased, are
represented in the act of burning incense in a contrivance which
resembles in form the θυμιατήριον of the Greek monuments.
(MARIETTE, _Notice des principaux Monuments de Boulak_, p. 27,
note 1.)

The Egyptians did not trust only to the piety of their descendants to preserve them from a final death by inanition in their neglected tombs. At the end of a few generations that piety might grow cold and relax its care; besides, a family might become extinct. All those who could afford it provided against such contingencies as these by giving their tombs what we now call a perpetual foundation. They devoted to the purpose the revenues of some part of their property, which was also charged with the maintenance of the priest or priests who had to perform the ceremonial rites which we have described.[135] We find that, even under the Ptolemies, special ministers were attached to the sepulchral chapel of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid.[136] It may seem difficult to believe that a "foundation" of the ancient empire should have survived so many changes of _régime_, but the honours paid to the early kings had become one of the national institutions of Egypt. Each restoring sovereign made it a point of duty to give renewed life to the worship of those remote princes who represented the first glories of the national history.

[135] See the paper by M. MASPERO upon the great inscription at
Siout, which has preserved for us a contract between Prince
Hapi-Toufi and the priests of Ap-Môtennou, by which offerings
should be regularly made to the prince's statue, which was
deposited in a temple at Siout. (_Transactions of the Society of
Biblical Archæology_, vol. vii. pp. 1-32.)

[136] It was the same in the case of a still older king,
Seneferu, the founder of the fourth dynasty. (DE ROUGÉ,
_Recherches sur les Monuments que l'on peut attribuer aux six
premières Dynasties de Manéthon_, p. 41.)

Besides which there were priests attached to each necropolis, who, for certain fees, officiated at each tomb in turn. They were identified by Mariette upon some of the bas-reliefs at Sakkarah. Their services were retained much in the same way as masses are bought in our days.[137]

[137] _Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 87.

The same sentiment led to the burial with the dead of all arms, clothes, jewels, and other objects of which they might have need in the next life. We know what treasures of this kind have been obtained from the Egyptian tombs and how they fill the cases of our museums. But neither was this habit peculiar to Egypt. It was common to all ancient people whether civilized or barbarous. Traces are to be found even in the early traditions of the Hellenic race of a time when, like those Scythians described by Herodotus,[138] the Greeks sacrificed, at the death of a chief, his wives and servants that they might accompany him to the next world. When she began to reveal herself in the arts Egypt was already too far civilized for such practices as these; thanks to the simultaneous development of science, art and religion, she found means to give the same advantages to her dead without permitting Scythian cruelties. Those personal attendants and domestic officers whose services would be so necessary in another life, were secured to them at a small expense; instead of slaying them at the door of the tomb, they were represented upon its walls in all the variety of their occupations and in the actual moment of labour. So too with all objects of luxury or necessity which the _double_ would wish to have at hand, as for instance his food and drink.[139]

[138] HERODOTUS, iv. 71, 72.

[139] In a few rare cases the objects destined for the
nourishment of the _double_ are represented in the round instead
of being painted upon the wall. In the tomb of the personage
called Atta, a wooden table, supporting terra-cotta vases and
plucked geese carved in calcareous stone, has been found.
(MARIETTE, _Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 17.) The vases must
have been full of water when they were placed in the tomb; the
stone geese may be compared to the _papier-mâché_ loaves of the
modern stage.

A custom which would seem to have established itself a little later may be referred to the same desire; we mean the habit of placing in the tomb those statuettes which we meet with in such vast numbers after the commencement of the second Theban Empire.[140] Mariette obtained some from tombs of the twelfth dynasty, and the sixth chapter of the _Book of the Dead_, which is engraved upon them, seems to be one of the most ancient. Egyptologists are now inclined to believe that the essential parts of this ritual date back as far as the Memphite period.

[140] All Egyptian collections contain coffers of painted wood,
often decorated in the most brilliant fashion, which served to
hold these statues when they were placed in the tomb. The size
and the richness of their ornament depended upon the wealth of
the deceased for who they were made.

These statuettes are of different sizes and materials. As a rule they do not exceed from eight to twelve inches, but there are a few which are three feet or more in height. Some are in wood, some in limestone, and some in granite, but as a rule they are made of that kind of terra cotta which, when covered with green or blue enamel, has been called Egyptian porcelain. They are like a mummy in appearance; their hands are crossed upon the breast and hold instruments of agriculture such as hoes and picks, and a sack meant for grain hangs from their shoulders. The meaning of all this is to be sought in the Egyptian notions of a future life; it is also explained by the picture in chapter XC. of the _Ritual_, which shows us the dead tilling, sowing and harvesting in the fields of the other world. The texts of the Ritual and of certain inscriptions call these little figures _oushebti_ or _answerers_ from the verb _ousheb_, to answer. It is therefore easy to divine the part attributed to them by the popular imagination. They answered to the name traced upon the tomb and acted as substitute for its tenant in the cultivation of the subterranean regions.[141] With the help of the attendants painted and sculptured upon the walls they saved him from fatigue and from the chance of want. This is another branch of the same old idea. In his desire to take every precaution against the misery and final annihilation which would result from abandonment, the Egyptian thought he could never go too far in furnishing, provisioning and peopling his tomb.

[141] PIETSCHMANN (_Der Egyptische Fetischdienst_, &c., p. 155),
has well grasped the character and significance of these
statuettes. Conf. PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archéologie
égyptienne_, vol. v. See also, in connection with the
personality attributed to them and to the services which were
expected from them, a note by M. MASPERO, _Sur une Tablette
appartenant à M. Rogers_. (_Recueil de Travaux_, vol. ii. p.
12.)

The ingenuity of their contrivances is extraordinary. Food in its natural state would not keep, and various accidents, might, as we have shown, lead to the death of the _double_ by inanition. It was the same with furniture and clothes; the narrow dimensions of the tomb, moreover, would forbid the accumulation there of everything which its sombre tenant might desire. On the other hand the funerary statuettes were made of the most indestructible materials and the bas-reliefs and paintings were one with the thick walls of stone or living rock. These have survived practically unaltered until our day. We visited the tomb of Ti a short time after its chambers had been opened and cleared. It was marvellous to see how form and colour had been preserved intact and fresh under the sand, and this work which was four or five thousand years old seemed to be but lately finished. By the brightness of their colours and the sharp precision of their contours these charming reliefs had the effect of a newly struck medal. Such scenes from the daily life of the people continued to be figured upon Egyptian tombs from the old empire to the new. When their study and comparison were first begun different explanations were put forward. Some believed that they were an illustrated biography of the deceased, a representation of his achievements or of those over which he had presided during the course of his mortal life; others saw in them an illustration of his future life, a setting forth of the joys and pleasures of the Egyptian Elysium.

Both these interpretations have had to give way before the critical examination of the pictures themselves and the decipherment of their accompanying inscriptions. It was soon perceived, through comparisons easily made, that these scenes were not anecdotic. On a few very rare occasions they seem to be connected with circumstances peculiar to the inhabitant of the tomb. There are a few steles and tombs upon which the dead man seems to have caused his services to be described, with the object, no doubt, of continuing in the next world his career of honour and success in this. Such an inscription is so far biographical, and a similar spirit may extend to the decorations of the stele and walls of the tomb. As an example of such narrative epigraphs we may cite the long inscription of Ouna, which gives us the life of a sort of grand-vizier to the two first Kings of the sixth dynasty;[142] also the inscriptions upon the tombs of those feudal princes who were buried at Beni-Hassan. In the latter there are historical representations as commentaries upon the text. Among these is the often reproduced painting of a band of Asiatic emigrants bringing presents to the prince and demanding, perhaps, a supply of wheat in return, like the Hebrews in the time of Jacob.

[142] DE ROUGÉ, _Mémoire sur les Monuments des six premières
Dynasties_ (p. 80 _et seq._). Conf. MASPERO, _Histoire
Ancienne_, pp. 88-92.

But all this is exceptional. As a rule the same subjects occur upon the tombs again and again, in the persistent fashion which characterizes traditional themes. The figures by which the flocks and herds and other possessions of the deceased were numbered are too great for literal truth.[143] On the other hand the pictured tradesmen and artificers, from the labourer, the baker, and the butcher up to the sculptor, seem to apply themselves to their work with an energy which excludes the notion of ideal felicity. They, one and all, labour conscientiously, and we feel that they are carrying out a task which has been imposed upon them as a duty.

[143] See MARIETTE, _Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 88.

For whose benefit do they take all this trouble? If we attempt to enter into the minds of the people who traced these images and compare the pictured representations with the texts which accompany them, we shall be enabled to answer that question. Let us take by chance any one of the inscriptions which accompany the scenes figured upon the famous tomb of Ti, and here is what we find. "To see the picking and pressing of the grape and all the labours of the country." Again, "To see the picking of the flax, the reaping of the corn, the transport upon donkeys, the stacking of the crops of the tomb." Again, "Ti sees the stalls of the oxen and of the small animals, the gutters and water-channels of the tomb."

It is for the dead that the vintage takes place, that the flax is picked, that the wheat is threshed, that oxen are driven into the fields, that the soil is ploughed and irrigated. It is for the supply of his wants that all these sturdy arms are employed.

We shall leave M. Maspero to sum up the ideas which presided at the construction of the Egyptian tomb, but first we must draw our readers' notice to the fact that he, more than once, alludes to a conception of the future life which differs somewhat from the early Egyptian notions, and belongs rather to the Second Theban Empire and its successors.

"The scenes chosen for the decoration of tomb walls had a magic intention; whether drawn from civil life in the world or from that of Hades, they were meant to preserve the dead from danger and to insure him a happy existence beyond the tomb.... Their reproduction upon the walls of the sepulchre guaranteed the performance of the acts represented. The _double_ shut up in his σύριγξ[144] saw himself going to the chase upon the surrounding walls and he went to the chase; eating and drinking with his wife, and he ate and drank with her; crossing in safety the terrible gulfs of the lower world in the barque of the gods, and he crossed them in safety. The tilling, reaping, and housing on his walls were for him real tilling, reaping, and housing. So, too, the statuettes placed in his tomb carried out for him under magic influence all the work of the fields, and, like the sorcerer's pestle in Goethe's ballad, drew water for him and carried grain. The workmen painted in his papyri made shoes for him and cooked his food; they carried him to hunt in the deserts or to fish in the marshes. And, after all, the world of vassals upon the sides of the sepulchre was as real as the _double_ for which they laboured; the picture of a slave might well satisfy the shadow of a master. The Egyptian thought that by filling his tomb with pictures he insured the reality of all the objects, people, and scenes represented in another world, and he was thus encouraged to construct his tomb while he was yet alive. Relations, too, thought that they were doing a service to the deceased when they carried out all the mysterious ceremonies which accompanied his burial. The certainty that they had been the cause of some benefit to him consoled and supported them on their return from the cemetery where they had left their regretted dead in possession of his imaginary domain."[145]

[144] This word, σύριγξ (flute), was employed by the Greeks to
designate those long subterranean galleries cut in the rock of
the necropolis at Thebes, in the valley called the _Valley of
the Kings_; modern egyptologists apply it in a more general
sense to all tombs cut deeply into the flanks of the mountain.
For the reason which led the Greeks to adopt a term which now
seems rather fantastic, see PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archéologie
égyptienne_. The chief passages in ancient authors in which the
term is applied either to the subterranean excavations of Egypt
or to other galleries of the same kind, are brought together by
Jomard in the third volume of the _Description_ (_Antiquités_,
vol. iii. pp. 12-14).

[145] _Journal asiatique_, May-June, 1880, pp. 419, 420.

Such a belief is astonishing to us; it demands an effort of the imagination to which we moderns are in no way equal. We have great difficulty in realising a state of mind so different from what ours has become after centuries of progress and thought. Those early races had neither a long enough experience of things, nor a sufficiently capable power of reflection to enable them to distinguish the possible from the impossible. They did not appreciate the difference between living things and those which we call inanimate. They endowed all things about them with souls like their own. They found no more difficulty in giving life to their carved and painted domestics, than to the mummy or statue of the deceased, or to the phantom which they called the double. Is it not natural to the child to take revenge upon the table against which he hurts himself, or to speak tenderly to the doll which he holds in his arms?

This power to endow all things with life and personality is now reserved for the poet and the infant, but in the primitive days of civilization it belonged to all people alike. Imagination had then a power over a whole race which in our days is the gift of great poets alone. In the efforts which they made to forestall the wants of the helpless dead, they were not content with providing the food and furniture which we find upon the walls. They had a secret impression that these might be insufficient for wants renewed through eternity, and they made another step upon the way upon which they had embarked. By a still more curious and still bolder fiction than those which had gone before, they attributed to prayer the power of multiplying, by the use of a few magic sentences, all objects of the first necessity to the inhabitants of the tomb.

Every sepulchre has a _stele_, that is to say, an upright stone tablet which varied in form and place in different epochs, but always served the same purpose and had the same general character. Most of these steles were adorned with painting and sculpture; all of them had more or less complicated inscriptions.[146] In the semicircle which forms the upper part of most of these inscribed slabs, the dead person, accompanied by his family, presents offerings to a god, who is usually Osiris. Under this an inscription is carved after an unchanging formula: "Offering to Osiris (or to some other deity, as the case may be) in order that he may give provision of bread, liquid, beef, geese, milk, wine, beer, clothes, perfumes, and all good and pure things upon which the god subsists, to the ka of N..., son of M...." Below this the defunct is often shown in the act of himself receiving the offerings of his family. In both divisions the objects figured are looked upon as real, as in the wall decorations. In the lower division they are offered directly to him who is to profit by them; in the upper, the god is charged to see that they are delivered to the right address. The provisions which the god is asked to pass on to the defunct are first presented to him; by the intervention of Osiris the _doubles_ of bread, meat and drink pass into the other world to nourish the double of man. But it was not essential for the gift to be effective that it should be real, or even _quasi_-real; that its image should even be given in paint or stone. The first-comer could procure all things necessary for the deceased by their enumeration in the proper form. We find therefore that many Egyptians caused the following invocation to passing strangers, to be engraved upon their tombs:

[146] See above, Figs. 87 and 91.