Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/47

Rh condemned to return to earth and do penance in long cycles of lives in the bodies of various animals. This is what is known as the transmigration of souls. The kind of animals the soul should animate, and the length of its transmigrations, were determined by the nature of its sins.

Tombs.—The Egyptians bestowed little care upon the temporary residences of the living, but the "eternal homes" of the dead were fitted up with the most lavish expenditure of labor. These were chambers, sometimes built of brick or stone, but more usually cut in the limestone cliffs that form the western rim of the Nile valley; for that, as the land of the sunset, was conceived to be the realm of darkness and of death. The cliffs opposite the ancient Egyptian capitals are honeycombed with sepulchral cells.

In the hills back of Thebes is the so-called Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the "Westminster Abbey of Egypt." Here are twenty-five magnificent sepulchres. These consist of extensive rock-cut passages and chambers richly sculptured and painted. The subjects of the decorations of many of the tombs, particularly of the oldest, are drawn from the life and manners of the times. Thus the artist has converted for us the Egyptian necropolis into a city of the living, where the Egypt of four thousand years ago seems to pass before our eyes.

The Pyramids.—The Egyptian pyramids, the tombs of the earlier Pharaohs, are the most venerable monuments that have been preserved to us from the early world. They were almost all erected before the Twelfth Dynasty. Although thus standing