Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/367

 The Tomb under the New Empire. 2/7 ambitious desires could be satisfied, and the country filled with magnificent edifices, which, like the temples of the two Rameses, were original in so far as they belonged at one and the same time to religious and funerary architecture. We should call them cenotaphs, were it not that the Egyptians, like all the other races of antiquity, believed in the real presence of their dead in the buildings erected in their honour. ■ "''V^1(»?^Sii m^^M& mm I '■ ■ ^ '^1 1 .' ' ■ ■'■i^ "'mm ip.: Fig. 178. — Entrance to a royal tomb. {DcscripUon de TEgyptc, ii., A. 79.) The other division of the tomb is that which contains the well and the mummy-chamber, the eternal dwelling-place of the illustrious dead. The second half of the royal sepulchre had ,to be as sumptuous and luxurious in its way as the first, but the problem placed before the architect was diametrically opposed to that which he had to solve in the other part of his task. In con- structing and decorating the funerary temple upon the plain, he was working before the eyes of the pubKc, for their benefit and for that of the remotest posterity.