Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/225

 Sepulchral Architecture. 135 m , 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.^ 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 corvde 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 ^ The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the complicated processes of embalming were undertaken. See P. Pierret, Le Dogme de la Resurrection, &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 cotnplete 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 himi" (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 debris of many other things than of a linen shroud." {Les Tombes de r And en Empire^ p. i6.)