Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/260

 I/O A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. elaborate are of black brick, while a yellowish brick is used for the others. The yellow bricks are a mixture of sand and pebbles with a little clay ; the black bricks are of earth and straw. The former are always small {S'8 in. x 4-4 in. x 2*8 in.) ; the latter are comparatively large (15 "2 in. x 7*2 in. x 5-6 in.). Both kinds are dried simply in the sun. The yellow bricks seem to be the more ancient. Their employment begins and ends with the Ancient Empire. The black bricks, on the other hand, appear for the first time about midway through the fourth dynasty. At first they were rarely employed, but under the eighteenth dynasty and those which followed it, they came to be exclusively used." All these mastabas, whether of brick or stone, betray an amount of negligence in their construction which is astonishing. Con- sidering the ideas which the Egyptians had formed of a future life, Fig. 109. — The Mastabat-el- Faraouu. the chief preoccupation of their architects should have been to give a stability to their sepulchres which would have insured their perpetuity, and, with it, that of the deposit committed to their charge. The whole of our description will be pervaded by accounts of the minute precautions devised to that end. " Now these mastabas are constructed with care on their outsides alone. The core of their walls is composed of sand, of rubbish, of blocks of stone mingled w^ith the flakes struck off by the masons, and all this in most cases without any cement to give it coherence. The mastabas of Sakkarah are not homogeneous constructions of masonry and cement, like the pyramids and most of the mastabas of Gizeh. They are confused heaps of ill assorted materials, which would collapse but for the retaining strength of their covering of solid stone.