Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/345

 The Tomb under the New Empire. 255 § 4.. The Tomb under the New Empire. The subterranean tombs for which the first Theban Empire had shown so marked a preference, became firmly seated in pubHc favour during the succeeding centuries. We do not know what the funeral customs may have been during those centuries when the Hyksos, or shepherd kings, were masters of Egypt ; but, after their expulsion, the great Theban dynasties, the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth, by whom the glory of Egyptian arms and culture was spread so widely, hardly made use of any sepulchre but the chamber hollowed laboriously in the rocky sides of that part of the Libyan chain which lies to the west of Thebes. Every traveller visits the royal tombs which lie in the gloomy ravine called the Bab-el-AIolouk, or the Gate of the Kings. The valley is about three miles in length and has a mean width of about eleven hundred yards ; its sides are riddled with galleries penetrating more or less deeply into the mountains, and starting sometimes from the slopes, sometimes from the base of the clift's, which here and there attain a height of 400 feet. The word speos seeming to the Greeks to give an inadequate idea of the depth of these excavations and of their narrow proportions, they called them avpijyes, or pipes ; and modern archaeologists have often employed the same picturesque term in speaking of the Theban tombs. Five-and-twenty of these tombs are royal ; the rest belong to wealthy subjects, priests, warriors, and high officers of state. In extent and richness of ornament some of the latter are in no way inferior to the tombs of the sovereigns. Our studies must first, however, be directed to the royal tombs, because in them we find the most original types, the most important variations upon those which have gone before. In them the art of the New Empire gives a clearer indication of all the changes which the progress of ideas had brought about in the Egyptian conception of a future life. In them, too, the Egyptian taste for ample dimensions and luxuriant decoration is more freely indulged. The architects of Seti and Rameses had resources at command far beyond those of which their early rivals could dispose. They were, therefore, enabled to indulge their employers' tastes for magnificence, and to give to certain