Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/263

 The Tomb under the Ancient Empire. 173 entrance is on the south its arrangement is sometimes the one, sometimes the other, of the two which we have described. " As for the western face, we have no evidence that it ever played any more ambitious role than that of completing the inclosure. It is always destitute of both openings and ornaments." We have thus explored, with Mariette, the outside of the mastaba. We have described its form and general aspect, we have noticed the materials of which it was constructed, the principles upon which it was oriented, and its average size. We have explained, too, how this single type of sepulchre was repeated many thousands of times with but slight variations, until, upon the plateau between Memphis and the desert there gradually arose a metropolis of the dead more populous than that of the living. It remains to describe the contents of those huge blocks of masonry. We shall begin by visiting the chambers planned by the architect in the building itself; we shall afterwards penetrate, by the paths which modern curiosity has established through the ddbris of ages and the depths of the soil, to those recesses of the tomb which were meant to be for ever inaccessible. The interior of a mastaba is composed of three parts — the chamber, the serdab, and the well. The last-named of the three is the only part which is never wanting. Many of the mastabas are, in fact, solid. In them the chamber is in a very rudimentary condition, being represented merely by one of those external niches which Mariette has described. This arrangement was the earliest, and, as long as the mastaba continued to be built, the less ambitious tenants of the necropolis were contented to reproduce it. But in these pages, as in a natural history, it is important to study the species when fully developed and provided with all its organs. When we have clearly established a general type nothing is more easy than to recognise and point out its variations. It suffices to say here that some tombs are wanting in one, some in another of those constituent parts whose meaning and uses we shall attempt to determine, and that, in a few, they are of an unaccustomed importance. It is natural that we should first turn our attention to the chamber. This was a kind of neutral ground upon which the quick and the dead could meet, the former to present, the latter to receive the funeral offerings.