Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/300

 2IO A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. for the introduction of the sarcophagus and the mummy. The mummy-chamber is always found either upon the axis of the pyramid, or in its immediate neighbourhood, and always nearer the base than the summit. We are told that the system of construction here set forth is rendered almost certain by the fact that " the deeper we penetrate into the pyramid the more careful do we find the construction, which becomes more and more careless as the exterior is approached. In fact, as each new envelope was commenced, the chances of its being completed became less." The mass of stone to be worked and placed was greater, while the king, upon whose life the whole operation depended, was older and nearer his death. The builders became less sure of the morrow ; they pressed on so as to increase, at all hazards, the size of the monu- ment, and trusted to the final casing to conceal all defects of workmanship. This system of pyramid building would explain the curious shapes which we have noticed in the Stepped Pyramid and the southern pyramid of Dashour.^ Both of those erections would thus be unfinished pyramids. At Sakkarah, the angles left by the successive stages would be waitinof for their fillinsf in ; at Dashour, the upper part of a pyramid of gentle slope would have been constructed upon the nucleus which was first erected, but the continuation of the slope to the ground would have been pre- vented by the stoppage of the works at the point of intersection of the upper pyramid and its provisional substructure. Hence the broken slope which has such a strange efiect, an effect which could not have entered into the orio-inal calculations of the architect. But although this theory seems satisfactorily to explain some puzzling appearances, it also, when tested by facts, encounters some very grave objections. The explorers of the pyramids have more than once, in their search for lost galleries and hidden chambers, cut for themselves a passage through the masonry, but neither in these breaches made by violence, nor in the ancient and 1 There are other stepped pyramids besides that at Sakkarah. Jomard describes one of crude and much crumbled brick at Dashour. It is, he says, about 140 feet high. Its height is divided into five stages, each being set back about 1 1 feet behind the one below. These steps are often found, he adds, among the southern pyramids, and there is one example of such construction at Gizeh. {Descriptioii de r Egypte, vol. x., p. 5.) At Matarieh, between Sakkarah and Meidoum, there is a pyramid with a double slope like that at Dashour.