Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/182

 158 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. instances in which these secondary entrances have been preserved together with the walls through which they provided openings, and they fully confirm our conjectures. One of these is the gateway to the outer court of the Temple of Thothmes at Medinet- Abou (Fig. 146). This gateway certainly belongs to the Ptolemaic part of the building, but we have no reason to suppose that the architects of the Macedonian period deserted the ancient forms. The propylons were decorated with masts like the pylons, as we see by a figure in a painting in one of the royal tombs at Thebes, which was reproduced by Champollion ^ (Fig- i47)- Judging from the scenes and inscriptions which accompany it, Champollion thought this represented a propylon at the ETT-'S H /fmm. Fk;. 146. — Gateway to the court-yard of the small Temple at Medinet-Abou, Description, ii. 4. QEinnHi^ Fig. 147. — A propylon with its masts. Ramesseum. That the artist should, as usual, have omitted the wall, need not surprise us when we remember how mono- tonous and free from incident those great brick inclosures must have been. The second type of propylon differs from the first in having a very much smaller doorway in comparison with its total mass. In the former the door reaches almost to the cornice, in the latter it occupies but a very small part of the front. This is seen in Fig. 147, and, still more conspicuously, in Fig. 148, which was also copied by Champollion from a tomb at Thebes.^ In one of these examples the walls are nearly vertical, in another they have a considerable slope, but the arrangement is the same and the ' Monuments de VEgypte et dc la N'ubie^ Notices Descriptives, p. 504. Notices Descriptii'es, p. 431.