Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/406

 3i6 A History of Art i.v Ancient Egypt. were not completely destroyed, were, in very remote times, damaged, pillaged, stripped, and mutilated in. a thousand ways. All that subsists of their decoration — shattered colossi and bas- reliefs often broken and disfigured — tells us nothing beyond the pomps and triumphs of official history. The tombs have suffered much less severely. The statues, bas-reliefs, and paintings which have been found in them, seem, in many instances, to have been the work of the very men whose footprints were found in the sand which covered their floors when they were opened.^ The pictures offered to our eyes by the walls of the private tombs are very different from those which we find in the temples. All classes of the people appear in them in their every-day occupa- tions and customary attitudes. The whole national life is displayed before us in a long series of scenes which comment upon and explain each other. Almost all that we know concerning the industrial arts of Egypt has been derived from a study of her tomb-houses. In every hundred of such objects which our museums contain at least ninety-nine come from those safe depositories. In order to give a true idea of the national character of the Egyptians and to enable the originality of their civilization to be thoroughly understood, it was necessary to show the place occupied in their thoughts by the anticipation of death ; it was necessary to explain what the tomb meant to them, to what sentiments and beliefs its general arrangements and its principal details responded ; it was necessary to follow out the various modifications which were brought about by the development of religious conceptions, from the time of the first six dynasties to that of the Theban Empire. The brilliant architectural revival which distinguished the first and second Theban Empires was mainly due to this develop- ment of religious thought. Almost all the peculiarities of the Memphite tomb are to be explained by the hypotheses with which primitive man is" content. But when mature reflection evolved 1 When jSIariette discovered the tomb of the Apis which had died in the twenty- sixth year of the reign of Rameses II., the fingers of the Egyptian mason who laid the last stone of the wall built across the entrance to the tomb were found marked upon the cement, and " when I entered the sarcophagus-chamber I found upon the thin layer of dust which covered the floor the marks made by the naked feet of the workmen who had placed the god in his last resting place 3,200 years before." (Quoted by RHOXfc; in L Egypte a Petites Journees, p. 239.)