Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/284

 194 ^^ History of Art in Ancient Egypt. pyramids themselves may have occurred to those who caused those monuments to be built ? It is obvious that no hiding-place could be more secure. No such retreats have yet been discovered in any of the galleries which have been exj^lored by modern curiosity, but it does not follow that they do not exist in some corner which has not yet been reached, which will perhaps never be reached by the most persevering explorer. Quite lately M. Maspero believed that he recognized a serdab in a subterranean chamber with three niches which he found near the mummy chamber in the Pyramid of Ounas, the last king of the fifth dynasty.^ Before we could say that such an arrangement does not exist elsewhere, we should have to take some pyramid to pieces from the first stone to the last. It might, however, be asserted that the images of the deceased would, if hidden in the pyramid, be too far removed from that public hall to which his relations brought their offerings and their pious homage. At such a distance they would not have heard the friendly voices or the magic chants ; nor would the scent of the incense have reached their nostrils. In a word, they would have been ill placed for the fulfilment of the office assigned to them by the Egyptian faith. We have hitherto spoken only of the social purposes of the pyramid, of its office as the sepulchre of the ancient kings of Egypt, or rather as the part of that sepulchre that corresponded to the least interesting parts of private tombs. In the plants of our gardens and orchards, we see cultivation develop certain organs at the expense of others. We find stamens changed into petals, giving us double flowers, and the envelope of the seeds thickened and made to shed perfume. We see the same process of development in the tombs of the early Egyptian monarchs. Under the influence of their pride of station, and as a consequence of the effort which they made to perpetuate their rank even after death, the stone hiding-place which protected the mummy took a size which is oppressive to the imagination, while the funerary chapel remained of modest dimensions. This disproportion is to be easily explained. The simple method of construction which distinguishes 1 This pyramid was opened on February 28, 1881. Circumstantial accounts of the discoveries to which it led have not yet been published. The Aloiiitcur Egyptien of March 15, 1S81, contains a short account of the opening. [Since this note was written, a full account of the entrance and exploration of this pyramid, together with the texts discovered, has been published by M. Maspero in the Recueil de Travaux, vol. iii. liv. 3 and 4, 18S2. — Ed.]