Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/243

 Sepulchral Architecture. 153 influence all the work of the fields, and, like the sorcerer's pestle in Goethe's ballad, drew water for him and carried grain. The workmen painted in his papyri made shoes for him and cooked his food ; they carried him to hunt in the deserts or to fish in the marshes. And, after all, the world of vassals upon the sides of the sepulchre was as real as the double for which they laboured ; the picture of a slave might well satisfy the shadow of a master. The Egyptian thought that by filling his tomb with pictures he insured the reality of all the objects, people, and scenes represented in another world, and he was thus encouraged to construct his tomb while he was yet alive. Relations, too, thought that they were doing a service to the deceased when they carried out all Fig. 98, Contimced. — Arrival in Egypt of a company of Asiatic emigrants (Champollion, pis. 362, 393). the mysterious ceremonies which accompanied his burial. The certainty that they had been the cause of some benefit to him consoled and supported them on their return from the cemetery where they had left their regretted dead in possession of his imaginary domain." ^ Such a belief is astonishing to us ; it demands an eftbrt of the imagination to which we moderns are in no way equal. We have great difficulty in realising a state of mind so different from what ours has become after centuries of progress and thought. Those early races had neither a long enough experience of things, nor a ' Journal asiatique, May-June, 18S0, pp. 419, 420. VOL. L X