A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Volume I Part 24

Next in point of age to the building of Queen Hatasu is that which is called the _Ramesseum_; this is no other, as the members of the _Inst.i.tut d'egypte_ have clearly proved, than the so-called _Tomb of Osymandias_ which is described at such length by Diodorus.[244]

Erroneous though it be, this latter designation is by no means without interest, as it proves that, at the time of Diodorus, persistent tradition ascribed a funerary origin to the edifice. The whole temple, inside and out, recalled Rameses II.; the great conqueror seemed to live and breathe on every stone; here majestic and calm, like force in repose, there menacing and terrible, with his threatening hand raised over the heads of his conquered enemies. His seated statue, fifty-six feet in height, was raised in the courtyard; to-day it lies broken upon the ground. Battle scenes are to be distinguished upon the remains of the walls. An episode of the war against the Khetas may be recognized, which seems to have made a great impression upon the king and his comrades in arms. It deals with that battle fought upon the bank of the Orontes, in which Rameses, when surrounded by the enemy, won safety for himself by his own personal valour and presence of mind. His prowess was celebrated by Pentaour, a contemporary poet, in an epic canto which has survived to our day. Rameses is there made to ascribe his safety and all the honour of his victory to his father Amen, who heard his appeal for help and, precipitating himself into the _melee_, s.n.a.t.c.hed him from the very hands of his enemies.

[244] DIODORUS, i. ---- 47-49.

Medinet-Abou, which might be called _The Second Ramesseum_, is to Rameses III. what the pretended tomb of Osymandias is to Rameses II.

His presence pervades both the temple itself and its adjoining pavilion. Its bas-reliefs represent one of the greatest events in Egyptian, we might almost say, in ancient, history, namely, the victory won by Rameses over a confederation of the nations of the north and west, of those who were called the maritime races. This victory was mainly instrumental in driving westwards certain peoples who were destined, in more recent times, to play a great part in the politics of the Mediterranean.

Each of the buildings which we have just noticed had but a single proprietor. They were each dedicated to the memory of some one individual; but there was nothing to prevent the a.s.sociation in a single temple of two sovereigns who might happen to be united by strong ties of blood, and this course was taken in the temple of Gournah, situated in the same district of Thebes. It was commenced by Rameses I., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, continued by his son, Seti I., and finished by his grandson, Rameses II. The first Rameses and Seti figure in it with the attributes of Osiris. The inscriptions enumerate the sources of revenue set aside by the king, in each nome, for the service of the annual sacrificial celebrations; and thus the building reveals itself as a temple to the perpetual honour of the two first princes of a race which did so much to add to the greatness and prosperity of Egypt.

The famous colossi of Amenophis III., known to the ancients as the _Statues of Memnon_, no doubt formed part of a similar building (Fig.

18 and Pl. vi). The temple built by this prince near the site of the Ramesseum has almost entirely disappeared, but the slight traces which still exist cover a vast s.p.a.ce, and suggest that the building must have been one of rare magnificence.[245]

[245] This must have been the structure which STRABO calls the _Memnonium_, and near to which he seems to place the two colossi (xvii. p. 816). The true name of the author of both temple and colossi might easily be confused with that of the mythical Greek personage which the h.e.l.lenic imagination persisted in discovering everywhere in Egypt, and the similarity of sound must have helped to perpetuate the mistake among all the foreign travellers who visited the country. A curious pa.s.sage in PAUSANIAS (_Attica_, 42) shows us, however, that the Egyptian scholars of his time knew how properly to convey the name of the prince represented in the colossi to foreigners: "I was less struck by that marvel," he says, in speaking of some sonorous stone which was shown to him at Megara, "than by a colossal statue which I saw beyond the Nile in Egypt, not far from the _pipes_. This colossus is a statue of the sun, or of Memnon, according to the common tradition. It is said that Memnon came from Ethiopia into Egypt, and that he penetrated as far as Susa.

But the Thebans themselves deny that it is Memnon. They declare that it represents Phamenoph (F?e??f), who was born in their own country...." The story told by PHILOSTRATUS (_Life of Apollonius_, l. vi. p. 232) of the visit of the sorcerer to Memnon, shows that in his time the colossus was surrounded by nothing but ruins, such as broken columns and architraves, fragmentary walls and shattered statues. Even then the monumental completeness of the "Amenophium" had vanished.

Only one of those Theban temples which rise upon the left bank of the river is free from all trace of a funerary or commemorative purpose, namely, the temple at Medinet-Abou which bears the ovals of Thothmes II. and Thothmes III. It shows signs, moreover, of having been frequently enlarged and added to, some of the additions having been made as recently as in the time of the Roman Emperors. In this respect it resembles, in spite of its comparatively small size, the great temples upon the right bank of the river. Like them, its creation was a gradual and impersonal matter. Every century added its stone, and each successive king engraved his name upon its walls. How to account for its exceptional situation we do not know. It is possible that those funerary temples of which we have spoken were an original invention of the successors of Thothmes; perhaps that constructed by Hatasu at Dayr-el-Bahari was the first of the series.

However this may have been, the new type became a success as soon as it was invented; all the other temples in the district may be more or less immediately referred to it. The great deities of Egypt, and more particularly those of Thebes, are never forgotten in them. They contain numerous representations of the princes in whose honour they were erected performing acts of wors.h.i.+p before Amen-Ra, the Theban G.o.d _par excellence_, who is often accompanied by Mout and Khons, the other two members of the Theban triad. These temples were therefore consecrated, like almost all the other sacred buildings of Thebes, to those local deities which, after the establishment of that city as the capital of the whole country, became the supreme national G.o.ds. Those G.o.ds were as much at home in the temples of which we are speaking as in their own peculiar sanctuaries on the right bank of the river. In both places they received the same homage and sacrifices, but in the funerary temples of the left bank they found themselves a.s.sociated, _paredral_ as the Greeks would say, with the princes to whose memory the temples were raised. These princes were represented with the attributes of Osiris, both in the statues which were placed against the piers in the courtyard and in the bas-reliefs upon the long flat surfaces of the walls. By these attributes they became more closely allied with the great deity who was the common protector of the dead and the guarantor of their future resurrection. In this capacity the deceased prince was wors.h.i.+pped as a G.o.d by his own family. Thus, in the temple of Gournah, we find Rameses I. seated in a _naos_ and receiving the homage of his grandson, Rameses II.; and, again, the latter wors.h.i.+pping Amen-Ra, Khons, and Rameses I. at one and the same time. This presentation of offerings to the deified king, as represented in the chambers of these temples, recalls the scene which is carved upon almost all the steles, and with greater variety and more detail, in the bas-reliefs on the internal walls of the mastabas.

The a.n.a.logy which we are endeavouring to establish between the western temples at Thebes and the funerary chambers of the private tombs, is completed by the biographical nature of the pictures which form almost the sole decoration of those temples. The images presented to our gaze by the chamber walls of the mastaba are not, indeed, so personal and anecdotical as those of the temples, but they contain an epitomized representation of the every-day life, of the pleasures and the more serious occupations of a rich Egyptian. It is easy to understand how, with the progress of civilization, the more historic incidents in the life of an individual, and especially when that individual was a king, came to be figured in preference to those which were more general in their application. To embellish the tomb of a conqueror with pictures of his battles and victories was to surround him after death with the images, at least, of those things which made his happiness or his honour while alive. Pictures of some famous feat of arms would give joy to the _double_ of him who had performed them, and would help to relieve the _ennui_ of the monotonous life after death. Hence the tendency which is so marked in the bas-reliefs of the first Theban Empire, especially in those at Beni-Ha.s.san. The constant and universal themes which sufficed for the early centuries of the Egyptian monarchy were not abandoned; scenes similar to those of the mastabas, are, indeed, frequently met with in the Theban tombs; but it is evident that in many cases scenes were sought out for reproduction which would have a more particular application; there is an evident desire to hand down to future generations concrete presentments of any political or other events which might appear worthy of remembrance. History and biography thus came in time to play an important part in sepulchral decoration, especially when kings or other royal personages were concerned.

Similar pictures are to be met with here and there in temples proper, as may be seen by a glance at the bas-relief figured upon the opposite page (Fig. 174), but in such cases they are invariably on the outer walls. At Luxor, for instance, the campaigns of Rameses II. against the peoples of Syria are thus displayed; and at Karnak it is upon the external walls of the hypostyle hall that the victories of Seti I. and Rameses II. are sculptured. In the interiors of all these courts and halls we hardly find any subjects treated but those which are purely religious; such as female deities a.s.sisting at the birth of a king, or taking him upon their knees and nouris.h.i.+ng him from their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a theme which is also found in royal tombs (Fig. 175); or one G.o.d presenting the king to another (Fig. 33); or the king paying homage to sometimes one, sometimes another, of his divine protectors (Figs. 14 and 176). We find such religious motives as these continually repeated, upon wall and column alike, from the first Theban kings to the epoch of the Ptolemies. On the right bank of the river pictures of a mystically religious character are universal; on the left bank those with an historical aim are more frequent.

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 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 fete-day could be kept and the memory of his achievements renewed; but they were at the same time temples in which the national G.o.ds were wors.h.i.+pped by himself and his descendants, in which those G.o.ds were perpetually adored for the services which 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 174.--Rameses II. in battle; Luxor. (Champollion, pl. 331.)]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 175.--Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah.

Amenophis II. upon the lap of a G.o.ddess. (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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 c.h.i.n.ks 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 formulae 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 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?

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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. 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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.ds, 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 embarra.s.s 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 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 178.--Entrance to a royal tomb. (_Description de l'egypte_, 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 ill.u.s.trious 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.

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 a.s.sistants 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 propylaea 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 _debris_.[247]

[246] In many cases the sites are wanting for such external constructions. The fine tomb of Seti I., for instance, opens upon a ravine which is filled with the waters of a mountain torrent at certain seasons.

[247] When Belzoni's workmen found the entrance to the tomb of Seti, they declared that they could not advance any farther, because the pa.s.sage was blocked with big stones to such an extent as to be impracticable (_Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, &c., in Egypt and Nubia_, 1820, 4to.). Mariette also believed that as soon as the mummy was in place, the external door was closed and earth heaped against it in such a way as effectually to conceal it. It is thus that the clas.h.i.+ng between the tomb of Rameses III. and another is accounted for. The workmen did not see the entrance of the latter, and were, in fact, unaware of its existence until they encountered it in the bowels of the rock. (_Voyage dans la Haute-egypte_, t. ii. p. 81.)

The existence of the temples in the plain made it unnecessary that the tombs themselves should be entered after that final 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 a.s.sertion 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]

[248] DIODORUS, i. 46.

[249] "Above the Memnonium," says STRABO (xvii. 46), "there are royal tombs cut in the living rock to the number of forty; their workmans.h.i.+p is excellent and well worthy of attention."

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 whereabouts of the burial-places of those great sovereigns whose memory was a consolation to Egyptian pride in the days of national abas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sage, 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]

[250] BELZONI, _Narrative of Operations, &c._, pp. 233 _et seq._

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 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 s.p.a.ce 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 superinc.u.mbent 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 astonis.h.i.+ng that, in spite of his admirable perseverance, Belzoni held his hand before completing the exploration.[252]

[251] This beautiful sarcophagus is now in the Soane Museum.--ED.

[252] Belzoni believed that this pa.s.sage led again into the open air; that it was, in fact, another entrance to the tomb. "I have," he says, "reasons to think so;" but he does not give his reasons.

These subterranean tombs are hardly less astonis.h.i.+ng than the colossal ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sages; 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 others varied between 200 and 270 feet. For the construction of such places an enormous number of cubic yards of rocky _debris_ 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 G.o.ds 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 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 179.--Plan of the tomb of Rameses II.; from Prisse.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 180.--Horizontal section of the same tomb; from Prisse.[253]]

[253] The tomb of Seti having been so often reproduced, we have thought it better to give the plan and section of that of Rameses II., which is less generally known. The general arrangements are pretty much the same as those of Seti's tomb, but the plan is a little more complicated.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 181.--The smaller sarcophagus-chamber in the tomb of Rameses VI. (From h.o.r.eau, pl. 21.)[254]]

[254] _Panorama de l'egypte et de la Nubie_, folio.

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 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 182.--Entrance to the tomb of Rameses III. (From h.o.r.eau, pl. 21.)]