Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/354

 264 A History of Art in Ancient Egyrt. Roman emperors, every successive family which occupied the throne held it a point of honour to add to the creations of its predecessors. One prince built a hypostyle hall, or a court surrounded by a colonnade ; another added to the long rows of human or ram-headed sphinxes which lined the approaches ; a third added a pylon, and a fourth a laboriously chiselled obelisk. Some kings, who reigned in periods of recuperation after civil war or barbaric invasion, set themselves to repair the damage caused by time and the violence of man. They strengthened foundations, they lifted fallen columns, they restored the faded colours of the painted decorations. The foreign conquerors themselves, whether Ethiopians, Persians, or Greeks, as soon as they believed them- selves to have a firm hold upon the country, set themselves with zeal to obliterate the traces of their own violence. Each of these sovereigns, whether his contribution to any work had been great or small, took care to inscribe his own name upon it, and thus to call upon both posterity and his own contemporaries to bear witness to his piety. The temple as we see it at Karnak and Luxor is the collective and successive work of many generations. Such, too, was the character of the great buildings at Memphis which were con- secrated to Ptah and Neith. But on the left bank of the Nile, and in the neighbourhood of the Theban necropolis, we find a group of temples whose physiognomy is peculiar to themselves. Nothing exactly like them is to be found elsewhere ; ^ and they all belong to one period, that of the three great Theban dynasties, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.^ " These temples are monuments raised by the kings themselves to their own glory. They are not, like the temples at Karnak and Luxor, the accumulated results of ^ Ebeks, indeed, found something of the same kind in the temple of Abydos. He found there a cenotaph consecrated to his own memory by Seti I. This cenotaph was near the tomb of Osiris, while the king himself was buried in the Theban necropolis. {/Egypten, pp. 234, 235.) 2 The beautiful little temple of Dayr-el-Medinet, begun by Ptolemy Philopator and finished by his successors, especially by Physco, has often been considered a funerary monument. It is alleged that the situation of the temple in the necropolis, and the nature of the subjects represented in the interior, particularly in the Western Chamber, prove that it was so. If we accept this opinion, we must look upon the temple as a mere freak of fancy, suggested to Ptolemy Philopator by a journey to Thebes. The Greek prince was interred far from it, and it could have formed no l^art of his tomb.