Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/227

 Sepulchral Architecture. 137 intrusion of any one coming with evil intentions. All kinds of obstacles and pitfalls are accumulated in the path of the unbidden visitor, with a fertility and patient ingenuity of invention which has often carried despair into the minds of modern explorers, especially in the case of the pyramids. Mariette was fond of saying that there are mummies in Egypt which will never, in the strictest sense of the word, be brought to Hcrht. But in spite of all this pious and subtle foresight, it sometimes happened that private hate or, more often, the greed of gain, upset every calculation. Enemies might succeed in penetrating to the sepul- chres of the dead, in destroying their bodies, and thus inflicting a second death worse than the first ; or a thief might drag the corpse from its resting place, and leave it naked and dishonoured upon the sands, that he might, with the greater ease, possess himself of the gold and jewels with which it had been adorned. The liability of the mummy to accident had to be provided against. The idea of the unhappy condition in which the dojible would find itself w^hen its mummy had been destroyed, led to the provision of an artificial support for it in the shape of a statue. Art was sufficiently advanced not only to reproduce the costume and ordinary attitude of the defunct and to mark his age and sex, but even to render the individual characteristics of his physi- ognomy. It aspired to portraiture ; and the development of writing allowed the name and qualities of the deceased to be inscribed upon his statue. Thus identified by its resemblance and its inscriptions it served to perpetuate the life of the double, which was in continual danger of dissolution or evaporation in the absence of a material support. The statues were more solid than the mummy, and nothing stood in the way of their multiplication. The body gave but one VOL. L T Fig. 87. — Mummy case from the 1 8th dynasty. Boulak.