Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/268

 178 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. friends and relations met together, and the conduit by which the Intervening wall was often pierced, allowed the smell of fruit and incense and the smoke of burnt fat to come to their nostrils.^ "No inscriptions have been found In a serdab except those upon the statues. And no objects other than statues have ever been found in a serdab." So that the function of the serdab was to afford a safe and final asylum to the statues. These were, no doubt, to be found in other situations also, because, not to mention the numerous bas-reliefs upon which the figure of the deceased appeared in the chamber or in the niche which sometimes took its place, he was sometimes portrayed In high relief, and of full life size, in the public hall of the tomb.^ Sometimes, also, we find a statue in one of those front courts Fig. 1 16. — Flan of a mastaba with four Serdabs. (Lepsiu';, i., pi, 24.) which, especially at the time of the fourth dynasty, seem to Fig 117. — Longitudinal section of the same mastaba. have been in great favour. But this court, as well as the chamber, was open to every chance passer by, and the statues 1 In a Theban tomb described by M. Maspero {Etude sur quelqiies Pehittires funcraires) the tenant, Harmhabi, is made to speak thus : " I have come, I have received my bread ; joining the embalmed offerings to my members, I have breathed the scent of the perfumes and incense." It is also possible that this conduit may have been intended to permit of the free circulation of the double, to allow it to pass from its supporting statues to the chapel in which it is honoured. This curious idea, that the spirit of the dead can pass through a very small hole, but that it cannot dispense with an opening altogether, is found among many nations. The Iroquois contrived an opening of very small diameter in their tombs, through which the soul of the dead could pass and repass. See Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 192. 2 There is an example of this in a mastaba at Gizeh (Fig. 120). See No. 95 of Lepsius {De7ikm(Eler, vol. i. p. 29 ; vol. iii. pi. 44).