Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/327

 The Tomb under the Ancient Empire. 237 their civilization lasted. In the plain they were above the level of the highest inundations, and their gentle slope gave easy access to the western plateau. The great Sphinx, the image of Harmachis, or the Rising Sun, was placed at the threshold of the plateau. Immovable among the dead of the vast cemetery, he personified the idea of the resurrection, of that eternal life which, like the morning sun, is ever destined to triumph over darkness and death. Fig. 156. — Plan of the Pyramids of Gizeh and of that part of the necropolis which immediately surrounds them. His head alone now rises above the sand, but in the days of Herodotus his vast bulk, cut from a rock nearly 70 feet high, was well calculated to prepare the eye of the traveller for the still more colossal masses of the pyramids. His features have now been disfigured by all kinds of outrage, but in the thirteenth centurv, althouofh even then he had been mutilated, Abd-ul-Latif