Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/389

 The Tomb under the New. Empire. 299 equal in height and width to the chamber. It has a gentle slope and penetrates into the rock to a distance of some 25 to 35 feet, terminating, in some cases, in the mummy chamber itself, but more frequently in a small apartment containing the opening of a mummy pit.^ It must not be imagined that all the tombs were decorated ; there are many which have received neither painted nor carved ornament, and in others the ornament has never been carried beyond the first sketch. But even in those which are quite bare, the walls are, in nearly every instance, covered with a coat of white stucco. As the funerary chapel was contained in the tomb itself, no effort could be made to mask or conceal the entrance, which accordingly was taken advantage of for the display of ornament. Fig. 192. — The most simple form of Theban tomb ; from Rhind. Fig. 193. — Tomb as represented upon a bas-relief ; from Rhind. But no attemjjt was made to cut architectural facades in the cliffs like those at Beni- Hassan ; not more than one or two sepulchres have yet been discovered which have facades made up of those columns which have been called protodoric. The makers of these tombs were usually content with dressing the surface of the rock above and around the entrance. The latter, with its sloping lintel above a cornice, stands in the centre of an almost perpendicular wall which acts as its frame or background. In the uninjured state of the sepulchre this wall was more or less concealed by a construction similar to those which we have described in speaking of the tombs in the plain. According to all appearances, one of these little buildings, a cube of masonry crowned by a pyramidion, was placed before the doorway of ' Rhixd, Thebes, etc. pp. 56, 57.