Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/514

 Ai8 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. great change from the obscurity caused by the thick walls and heavy roofs of the edifices in the plain. In the case of a hemi- speos the internal effect must have been almost identical with that of any other religious building. In the great temple of Ipsam- boul the daylight does not penetrate beyond the second hall ; from that point onwards artificial light is necessary to distinguish objects, but the Egyptians were so thoroughly accustomed to a mysterious solemnity of shadow, to a " dim religious light," in their temples, that the darkness of the speos would seem no drawback in their eyes. The column occurs very seldom in these subterranean temples.^ Even those chambers which correspond to the hypostyle hall by their places in the excavation and the general characteristics of their form, are hardly ever supported by anything but the rectangular piers in use in the early ages of the monarchy ; but these piers are often clothed with an elaborate decoration which is unknown in the works of the primitive architects. This preference for the pier is easily to be explained by the necessity for having supports of sufficient strength and solidity to bear the weight of the super- incumbent mountain. Another and more constant peculiarity of the underground temples, is the existence in them of one or more seated statues carved from masses of rock expressly left in the furthest recesses of the excavation. These statues, which represent the presiding deity of the place and his acolytes, do not occur in the constructed temples. In the latter the tabernacle which stood in the secos was too small to hold anything larger than a statuette or emblem. We think that the cause of this difference may be guessed. At the time these rock temples were cut, the Pharaohs to whom they owed their existence no doubt assigned a priest or priests to each. But their position, sometimes in desert solitudes, as in the case of the Speos Artemidos, sometimes in places only inhabited for an intermittent period, in the quarries at Silsilis for instance, or in provinces which had been conquered by Egypt and might be lost to her again, rendered it impossible that they could be served and guarded in the ample fashion which was easy enough in the temples of Memphis, Abydos and Thebes. All these considerations suggested that, instead of a shrine containing ^ There are two polygonal columns resembling those at Beni-Hassan in the small speos at Beit-el-Wali (Fig. 237).