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side of him are two of the children of Horus. The scenes and inscriptions on the sarcophagi of this period show that the people of Egypt had ceased to attach any importance to their meaning, and they appear simply as funereal decorations, without which the sarcophagi would have been incomplete.

THE EGYPTIAN TOMBS.

the

tomb.

The extreme care which the Egyptians took to preserve the bodies of their dead would have been all in vain, if they had not provided secure resting places for their mummies. To guard the mummy intact and ready for the return of the Double soul, it was necessary to provide tombs which should be purpose of safe from the attacks of human beings and from the Egyptian prowlings of wild animals, and also out of the reach of the infiltration of the waters of the Nile, or of the inundation itself. If the preservation of a mummy was regarded as a sacred duty to be performed by the relatives of the deceased, who were morally bound to show all honour to it, and to spend their money freely on whatever was necessary for its adornment, it follows of a necessity that a house or tomb meet for the habitation of the ka, and for the soul after it had been decreed triumphant in the judgment hall of Osiris, must also be provided. The size and beauty of a tomb and its furniture depended, as much as the making of the mummy, upon the means at the disposal of the relatives of a deceased person. Every person in Egypt knew perfectly well that to ensure the resurrection of his body, after the pure soul had returned to inhabit it, it was necessary that every part of it should be preserved in a fitting state, but nevertheless, every person was not able to afford the costly embalming, and the still more costly furniture and tomb and procession which were, no doubt, held by the wealthy to be absolutely necessary for "living a second time." The burial of the very poor of Egypt must have been much the same in all times and in all dynasties. The body, having been salted only, was laid in the sand to a depth of three or four feet, without covering, without ornament, and even without a coffin; sometimes even the salting was

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Drying dispensed with. The drying up qualities of the sand of qualities of Egyptian Egypt are very remarkable. Some few years ago Sir C. sand. Holled Smith, K.C.B., while making some excavations among the ruins of a temple at Wâdy Halfah, on the west bank of the river, dug up a box, which, having been opened, was seen to contain the body of a European; on making inquiries he found that an English engineer had died there about a dozen years before. The hair and beard and features were unaltered as far as appearance went, but the skin had dried up like parchment, and the body had become much smaller. In tombs of the lower classes of the Ancient

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Plan of the tomb of Rameses II.

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Empire, the remains of the dead consist chiefly of light yellow bones. Sometimes the body of the dead was protected by walls of poorly made bricks, and a vaulted roof. The tombs of the wealthy were made in the shape of maṣṭabas, pyramids, and series of chambers hewn in the mountains on the eastern and western banks of the Nile.

One of the earliest forms of the building which marks taba tomb. the site of an Egyptian tomb is the maṣṭaba,' the finest examples of which were built at Sakkarah; it was called

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5. Transverse section of the chamber of a Maṣṭaba.

maṣṭaba by the Arabs because its length, in proportion to its height, is great, and reminded them of the long, low seat common in Oriental houses, and familiar to them. The maṣṭaba is a heavy massive building, of rectangular shape, the four sides of which are four walls symmetrically inclined towards their common centre. The exterior surfaces are not

1 From the Arabic a. The facts here given on the subject of mastabas are derived from the excellent articles of M. Mariette in Revue Archéologique, S. 2me, t. xix. p. 8 ff.

position of maṣṭabas.

flat, for the face of each course of masonry, formed of stones laid vertically, is a little behind the one beneath it, and if these recesses were a little deeper, the external appearance of each side of the building would resemble a flight of steps. The stones which form the mastabas are of a moderate size, and with the exception of those used for the ceiling and architrave, have an average height of 18 or 20 inches. The Plan and height and length of the mastaba vary; the largest measures about 170 feet long by 86 feet wide, and the smallest about 26 feet long by 20 feet wide; they vary in height from 13 to 30 feet. The ground at Sakkârah is formed of calcareous rock covered to the depth of a few feet with sand; the foundations of the mastabas are always on the solid rock. The plan of the maṣṭaba is a rectangle, and the greater axis of the rectangle is, without exception, in the direction from north to south. Moreover,

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6. Transverse section at the bottom of a serdâb.

at the pyramids of Gizeh,
where the maṣṭabas are ar-
ranged symmetrically, the
plan of their arrangement
is like a chess-board, the
squares of which are uni-
formly elongated towards
the north. Mastabas then
are oriented astronomically
towards the true north, and in the cases where they are a few
degrees out, this difference must be attributed not to design
but to negligence. It has been asserted that maṣṭabas are only
unfinished pyramids, but properly considered, it is evident that
they form a class of buildings by themselves, and that they
have nothing in common with the pyramid, save in respect of
being oriented towards the north, this orientation being the
result, not of a studied imitation of the pyramid, but of a
religious intention, which at this early period influenced the
construction of all tombs, whatever their external form. The
maṣṭabas at Sakkarah are built of stone and brick; the stone
employed is of two kinds, the one being very hard, and of a
bluish-grey colour, and the other being comparatively soft, and
of a yellowish colour. The bricks also are of two kinds, the

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maṣṭabas.

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