Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/119

 taken place in Turkey and Persia to the surprise of none but Europeans. When the master of all is placed so high above his fellow men that his subjects seem mere human dust about his feet, his caprice is quite sufficient to raise the most insignificant of its atoms to a level with the most illustrious.

The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army and the great civil functionaries, while they made no effort to rival the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs, however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be called sculpture. All that we

Image from page 118 of "A history of art in ancient Egypt" (1883).jpg —Netting birds. From a tomb. (Boulak. Drawn by Bourgoin.)

know of the style and methods of that art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members of the governing classes were in the habit of preparing during their lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the nomes in which they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah, at Meidoum, and at Beni-Hassan that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs; to the statues in the recesses of their massive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian civilization which remained for many centuries