Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/277

 The Tomb under the Ancient Empire. 187 Such are the constituent elements of the mastaba, that is to say, of those private tombs which were contemporary with the Pyramids. All over Egypt, in every one of the cemeteries, no matter where they are situated or what their date, the same elements are to be found, modified in certain particulars by the rank of the deceased, by the nature of the soil, by the size of the tomb, and by the changes of fashion, but always to be easily recognized. Of all these elements there is but one which does not persistently reappear in monuments other than the mastaba, and that is the serdab. This retreat for statues has not, as yet, been found in any of the royal tombs of the first six dynasties, neither has it been met with in the tombs of the two Theban empires, or of later epochs. And yet it was connected with one of the most vital hopes of the Egyptian religion. It fulfilled in the happiest manner, one of the conditions imposed upon the Egyptian architect by the strange conceptions of a future life which we have described. Why then do we, as a rule, find the serdab only in the mastabas of the Memphite necropolis ? Its absence under the Theban princes is, perhaps to be explained by the progress made in the science of embalming. The heads of more than one mummy have now been exhibited in the cases of European museums for many years, and, in spite of the dampness of our climates, they still preserve their skin, their teeth and their hair (Fig. 126). When they had learnt the secret of preserving the body from corruption, so that after a long series of centuries it should be pretty much in the same condition as on the day after death, they did not indeed, cease to make those images which were supposed to guard the dotible from annihilation, but they attached less importance to their safety, and took less trouble to hide them. They considered that they had done enough for their preservation by putting them in the precincts of their tombs and temples, and so under the guardianship of their venerated religion. As for the other parts of the tomb, a little attention will always suffice for their identification even in those sepulchres which differ most from the mastaba. In some instances we shall find the mummy chamber contrived in the upper structure, in others the whole tomb is cut in the living rock. Sometimes we find the chapel, as we may call the public chamber in which the miraculous nourishment of the double took place, more or less distantly separated from the mummy chamber ; sometimes the