Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/246

 156 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. of jars of drink, thousands of oxen, thousands of geese, thousands of garments, thousands of all good and pure things to the ka, or double, of the prince Entef." ^ Thanks to all these subtle precautions, and to the goodwill with which the Egyptian intellect lent itself to their bold fictions, the tomb deserved the name it received, the house of the double. The double, when thus installed in a dwelling furnished for his use, received the visits and offerings of his friends and relations ; " he had priests retained and paid to offer sacrifices to him ; he had slaves, beasts of burden, and estates charged with his support. He was like a great lord sojourning in a strange country and having his wants attended to by intermediary officials assigned to his service. ^ This analogy between the house and the tomb is so complete that it embraces details which do not seem very congruous. Like the house of the living, the tomb was strictly oriented, but after a mystic principle of its own. As soon as the Egyptian began to think he perceived the most obvious of the similarities between the sun's career and that of man. Man has his dawn and his setting. Man grows from the early glimmerings of infancy to the apogee of his wisdom and strength ; he then begins to decline and, like the magnified evening sun, ends by disappearing after his death into the depths of the soil. In Egypt the sun sets every evening behind the Libyan chain ; thence he penetrates into those subterranean regions of Ament across which he has to make his way before the dawn of the next day. The Egyptian cemeteries were therefore placed on the left bank of the Nile, that is, in the west of the country. All the known pyramids were built in the west, and there we find all the more important "cities of the dead," the necropolis of Memphis and those of Abydos and Thebes. A few unimportant groups of tombs have indeed been found upon the eastern bank ; but these exceptions to a general rule are doubtless to be explained by a question of distance. For any city placed near the eastern border 1 We borrow the translation of this inscription, as well as the reflections which precede it, from M. Maspero {Confirence, p. 382). According to M. de Rouge', it dates from about the twelfth dynasty. An invocation of the same kind is to be found in another epigraph of the same period, the inscription of Amoni-Amenem- hait. hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, at Beni-Hassan. See Maspero, La Grande Inscription de Beni-Hassan, p. 17 [ {Rtriieil de Travaux, etc., vol. i. 4to.). 2 Maspero, Conference, p. 282.