Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/517

 The Temple under the New Empire. 421 some small figure or emblem, statues of a considerable size, from six to eight or ten feet high, should be employed, and that they should be actually chiselled in the living rock itself and left attached to it by the whole of their posterior surfaces. By their size and by their incorporation with the rock out of which both they and their surroundings were cut, such statues would defend themselves efficiently against all attempts on the part of enemies. In spite of their age several of these statues came down to us in a sufficiently good state of preservation to allow Champollion and his predecessors to recognize with certainty the divine personages whom they represented. During the last fifty years they have suffered as much at the hands of ignorant and stupid tourists as they did in the whole of the many centuries during which they were exposed to all the vicissitudes of Egyptian history.^ Our study of the Egyptian temple would not be complete without a few words upon the buildings called Dayr-el-BahariP' By their extent, their picturesqueness, and the peculiar nature of their situation, these ruins have always had a great effect upon foreign visitors. Those who know Thebes will, perhaps, be surprised at our having said so little about them hitherto, especially as they are older than most of the buildings over which we have been occupied. We have not yet described them because they do not belong to any of the categories which we have been treating ; they form a class by themselves ; their general arrangement has no parallel in Egypt, and therefore we have reserved them to the last. The building in question is situated at the foot of the Libyan chain, in a deep amphitheatre hollowed out by nature in the yellow limestone rocks which rise on the north-west of the necropolis. On two sides, on the right and at the back, it rests against perpendicular walls of rock cut by the pickaxe and dominating over the built part of the temple. On the left this natural wall is absent and is replaced by an inclosure of bricks (Figs. 250 and 251). ^ For Beit-el-Wali and Girc/ie/i, see plates 13, 30 and 31 in Gau, Antiquites de la Ntibie. It seems that the statues, when they were drawn by him, were in a fairly good state. 2 These words mean Convent of the North. The name is derived from an abandoned Coptic convent which existed among the ruins of the ancient building.