Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/397

 The Tomb under the New Empire. i o 07 Preceding centuries afford no example of a tomb placed within a temple like this.^ First of all the royal mummy was entombed in the bowels of an artificial mountain, secondly, under the Theban dynasties, in those of a real one ; but at Sais, it rests above the soil, in the precincts of a temple, where curious visitors come and go at their will, and nothing but a pair of wooden doors protects it from disturbance. Such an arrangement seems inconsistent with all that we know of the passionate desire of the Egyptians to give an eternal duration to their mummies. We have every reason to believe that this desire had shown no diminution at the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and we can hardly admit that Psemethek and his successors were less impelled by it than the meanest of their subjects. The explanation of the apparent anomaly is to be found, we believe, in the peculiar nature of the soil of Lower Egypt. The Sait princes were determined to leave their mummies in the city which they had filled with magnificent buildings and had turned into the capital of all Egypt. Both speos and mummy pit, how- ever, were out of the question. Sais was built in the Delta ; upon an alluvial soil which was wetted through and through, as each autumn came round, by the water of the Nile. Neither hill nor rock existed for many miles in every direction. It was, therefore, a kind of niche or shrine with folding doors, in which the mummy is placed." This is one of the most difficult passages in Herodotus, and has given much trouble to translators and commentators. See Larcher's note (ii. 565), and the j)assage in Stobjeus (serm. xli. p. 251), which he cites in justification for the sense which is here given to the word dypw/jLara. Strabo is content with but a line on this subject : " Sais," he says, " especially worships Athene (Neith). The tomb of Psammitichos is in the very temple of that goddess" (xvii. 18). ' Herodotus affirms (ii. 129-132) that Mycerinus caused the body of his daughter to be inclosed in the flank of a wooden cow, richly gilt, and he says that " the cow in question was never placed in the earth." In his time it was exposed to the view of all comers in a magnificently decorated saloon of the royal palace of Sais. We may be allowed to suggest that Herodotus was mistaken in the name of the prince ; Mycerinus is not likely to have so far abandoned all the funerary traditions of his time, or to have entombed the body of his daughter in a spot so distant from his own pyramid at Gizeh. There is one hypothesis, however, which may save us from the necessity of once again accusing the Greek historian of misunderstanding what was said to him ; in their desire to weld together the present with the past, and to collect into their capital such national monuments as might appeal to the imagina- tions of their subjects, the Sait jirinces may have transported such a curiously shaped sarcophagus either from the pyramid of Mycerinus or from some small pyramid in its neighbourhood.