Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/111

 from another province, and all who had not succumbed to the hard and continuous work, returned to their own places. Those who died were buried in hasty graves dug in the sands of the desert by the natives of their own village.

The massive grandeur of some of the Egyptian monuments is only to be explained by this levy en masse of every available pair of hands. The kings of the ancient empire, at least, were unable to dispose of those prisoners of war captured in myriads, in whole races, by the Assyrian kings, and apparently employed by them in the construction of Nineveh. Now, it is impossible that such works as the Pyramids could have been begun and finished in the course of a single reign by free and remunerated labour, even if it had the help of numerous slaves. Certain arrangements in their design and the marvellously exact execution of the more important details of the masonry, prove that architects

of great ability and skilful workmen were, indeed, employed upon those gigantic works; but the great bulk of the task must have required the collective effort of a whole population; of a population devoting themselves night and day to complete the work when once begun, like ants over their subterranean city or bees over their comb.

Even supposing that history had been silent upon this subject, the architect could easily divine, from these monuments themselves, how they had been constructed. Cast your eyes upon the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis; their dimensions will seem to you small in the extreme if you compare them with the buildings of Egypt and Assyria; on the other hand their workmanship is equally careful throughout; it is as exact and perfect in the concealed parts of the structure as in those which