Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/248

 8 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. The ideas and beliefs which we have described were common to all Egyptians, irrespective of class. When he felt his last hour approaching, the humble peasant or boatman on the Nile was as anxious as Pharaoh himself to insure the survival of his double and to guard against the terrors of annihilation : Mais, jusqu'en son trepas, Le riche a des honneurs que le pauvre n'a pas. Those who, when alive, had to be content with a hut of earth or of reeds, could not, when dead, expect to have a tomb of stone or brick, a habitation for eternity ; they could not look for joys in the other world which they had been unable to procure in this. So that such tombs as those which most fully embodied the ideas we have described must always have remained the exclusive pri- vilege more or less of the governing classes. These consisted Fig. ioo. — Lid of the coffin of Entef, nth dynasty. Louvre. of the king, the princes and nobles, the priests, the military chiefs, and functionaries of every kind down to the humblest of the scribes attached to the administration. As for those Egyptians who did not belong to this aristocracy, they had to be content with less expensive arrangements. The less poor among them at least took measures to be embalmed and to be placed in a coffin of wood or papier-indchd, accompanied by scarabs and other charms to protect them against malignant spirits. The painted figures upon the coffin also helped to keep off evil influences. If they could afford it they purchased places in a common tomb, where the mummies were heaped one upon the other and confided to the care of priests who performed the funerary rites for a whole and his own life was well understood by Champollion, who used it to explain the paintings in the royal tombs at Thebes. (See his remarks on the tomb of Rameses V. on the 185th and following pages of his Lettres d' Egypte, &c.)