Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/146

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HE five centuries which elapsed between the expulsion of the Shepherds and Exode of the Jews comprise the culminating period of the greatness and greatest artistic development of the Egyptians. It is practically within this period that all the great buildings of the "Hundred pyloned city of Thebes" were erected. Memphis was adorned within its limits with buildings as magnificent as those of the southern capital, though subsequently less fortunate in escaping the hand of the spoiler; and in every city of the Delta wherever an obelisk or sculptured stone is found, there we find almost invariably the name of one of the kings of the 18th or 19th dynasties. In Arabia, too, and above the Cataracts of the far-off Meroe, everywhere their works and names are found. At Arban, on the Khabour, we find the name of the third Thothmes; and there seems little doubt but that the Naharaina or Mesopotamia was one of the provinces conquered by them, and that all Western Asia was more or less subject to their sway. Whoever the conquering Thebans may have been, their buildings are sufticient to prove, as above mentioned, that they belong to a race differing in many essential respects from that of the Memphite kingdom they had superseded. The pyramid had disappeared as a form of royal sepulchre, to be replaced by a long gloomy corridor cut in the rock; its walls covered with wild and fetish pictures of death and judgment: a sort of magic hall, crowded with mysterious symbols, the most monstrous and complicated that any system of human superstition has yet invented.