Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/418

 328 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. however, to have done his best to express the distinction. In none of the Memphite mastabas do we find such spacious chambers or so many large and well-wrought monolithic columns. Many hypotheses have been put forward in the attempt to reconcile these two explanations of the " Temple of the Sphinx." but we cannot discuss them here. " Why," asks Mariette, in his recently published memoir, " should not the temple of the Sphinx be the tomb of the king who made the Sphinx itself ? " This question we may answer by two more : Why did not that king decorate the walls of his tomb ? and why did he have neither sarcophagus nor sarcophagus chamber ? Others have seen in it the chapel in which the funerary rites of Chephren were performed ; ^ a theory which was of course suggested by the discovery of that king's statues in the well. These statues, we are told, must formerly have been arranged in one of the chambers, and, in some moment of political tumult, they must have been cast into the well either by foreign enemies or by the irritated populace. In all probability we shall never learn the true cause of this insult to the memory of Chephren, and it seems to us to be hazarding too much to affirm that, because the statues of that king were found in it, the building we are discussing must have been his funerary chapel. It is very near the Sphinx, and it is a considerable distance from the second pyramid,^ which, moreover, had a temple of its own. According to all analogy, the funerary chapel would be in the immediate neighbourhood of the mummy for whose benefit it was erected. In the absence of any decisive evidence either one way or the other, the most reasonable course is to look upon this building as the temple in which the worship of the neighbouring Colossus was carried on : as the temple of Harmachis, in a word. This solution derives confirmation from the following facts mentioned by Mariette: "The granite stele, erected by Thothmes IV. to commemorate the works of restoration undertaken by him, was placed against the right shoulder of the Sphinx, that is to say, at the point nearest to the building which we are discussing. In later years this stele and some others representing scenes of adoration which were added by Rameses II., were combined into ' B^DEKER, Guide to Lo7cer Egypt, p. 350. - The actual distance is about 670 yards.