Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/410

 320 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. architectural work in their country, the scribes may have allowed themselves to add figures treated in the style of their own day to the ancient text. It is equally doubtful, moreover, whether the text itself dates back to the earlier period, and we need, perhaps, accept as fact only this : that Cheops restored an already existing temple, assigned to it certain sacred offerings as revenues, and restored the statues of gold, silver, bronze, and wood, which adorned the sanctuary. It may be that the divine effigies were abundant even in those early days, but that they have failed to survive to our day. The portraits of so many private individuals have been preserved because, in their desire to afford a proper support to their double, they multiplied their own images to as great an extent as their means would allow. Between the third and the sixth dynasties the multiplication of these portrait statues went on at a prodigious rate, and their number may be judged from the fact that twenty were taken from the scrdab alone of the tomb of Ti. The greater their number, the greater was the chance that one of them would escape destruction. The ingenuity of man combined with the process of nature to preserve these figures to generations in the remote future, to a time when they could excite interest enough to save them from, destruction and to ensure them a chance of eternal existence. To the thick walls of the mastabas, to the well-concealed serdabs, and, more than all, to the constantly increasing mask of sand laid upon the cemeteries of Gizeh and Sakkarah by the winds from the desert, did they owe their preservation through the troublous times which were in store for Egypt. In their more exposed situations in the temples and private houses, the ima2fes of the crods ran far crreater risks than the private statues. The material of those which were of gold, silver, or bronze, would excite dangerous cupidity, while the wooden ones were pretty sure, sooner or later, to be destroyed or damaged by fire. The stone statues mieht be overthrown and broken and replaced by others of a later fashion, besides which a vast number of them have, perished in the lime-kilns. We see, then, that supposing Cheops and Chephren to have paid their devotions before statues of I sis and Osiris, Ptah and Hathor, there is nothing very astonishing in the total disappearance of those figures. To argue from their absence