Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/302

 2 12 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. within another, and that they afterwards carved the necessary chambers and corridors out of its mass ? One of the heroes of Hoffmann, the fantastic Crespel, made use indeed of some such method in giving doors and windows to his newly-built house, but we may be sure that no architect, either in Egypt or elsewhere, ever thought of employing it. The disintegration to which it would lead may easily be imagined. We may here call attention to a circumstance which justifies all our reserves. There is but one pyramid which seems to have been built upon a system which, though much less complicated, resembled that which we are noticing in some degree, v/e mean the Stepped Pyramid of Sakkarah. Now we find that the whole of the complicated net-work of chambers and passages in that pyramid is cut out of the living rock beneath its base, and that they are approached from without by subterranean passages. The difficulty of deciding upon the position of the chambers in advance, and of constructing the galleries through the various slopes of the concentric masses which were to form the pyramid, was thus avoided, and the builder was able to devote all his attention to increasing the size of the monument, by multiplying those parallel wedges disposed around a central core of which it is composed. The observations made by Lepsius in the Stepped Pyramid and in one at Abousir seem to prove that some pyramids were con- structed in this manner. In both of those buildings all necessary precautions were taken to guard against the weaknesses of such a system. It is difficult to understand how separate slices of masonry, placed one upon the other in the fashion shown by the section which we have borrowed from Perring's work (Fig. 134), could have had sufficient adherence one to another. Lepsius made a breach in the southern face of this pyramid, and the examination which he was thus enabled to institute led him to suggest a rather more probable system of construction. Upon the external sloping face of each step he found two casing-walls, but these did not extend from the ground to the apex of the monument, they reached no higher than the single step, so that they found a true resisting base in the flat mass (see Fig. 143) upon which they rested. Moreover, the architect provided for the lateral tying of the different sections of his work, as Lepsius proves to us by a partial section of the pyramid of Abousir.