Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/390

 300 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. every tomb. It is difficult to say whether it was of sufficient size to contain a funerary chamber or not. It may have been no more than a sohd erection of small size, meant only to mask the entrance and to indicate its situation to those concerned. The wealthy, indeed, may have been only too pleased to thus call public attention to the position of their gorgeously decorated selpulchres. The little pyramids of crude brick which we find upon the irregular rocky slopes of the Koiirnet-el-Mourrayi, above the little window-shaped openings with which the rock is honeycombed, probably answered a similar purpose. Of these some are still standing, and others have left unmistakable traces upon, the slope. They seem to have existed in great numbers in this part of the necropolis, which seems to have been set apart, about the time of the eighteenth dynasty, for the priests. Although they hardly varied from the two or three types consecrated by custom, these little buildings could easily have been made to present slight differences one from another. When they existed in their entirety, they must have given a very different aspect to the cemetery from that which it presents with its rocky slopes burnt by the sun into one harsh and monotonous tint, varied only by the black and gaping mouths of the countless tombs. The sides which they turned to the city and the river were adorned with those brilliant colours of which the Egyptian architects were so fond, and, spaced irregularly but never very far apart, they were sprinkled over the ground from the edge of the plain to the topmost ridges of the hills. Nearly all of them ended in a pyramid, but the varying dimensions of their bases and their different levels above the plain, gave diversity to the prospect, while here and there the slender apex of an obelisk rose above the private tombs and signalized the sleeping-place of a king. It has been very justly remarked, that the best idea of an Egyptian cemetery in its best time is to be gained by a visit to one of those Italian Campo-Santos, that of Naples, for example, where the tombs of many generations lie closely together under a blazing sun,^ There, too, many sepulchral facades rise one above another upon the abrupt slope of a hill into which the graves are sunk. A comparison with the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, or with that at Constantinople, would not be
 * Rhind, Thebes, etc. p. 55.