Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/243

 The Subterranean Tomb. 233 nificant was the fa9ade of the royal necropolis of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasty ; the lavish display of chisel and brush was reserved for the interior of the monument, whose narrow entrance, as soon as the work was accomplished, was filled up with stones supplied by the blasting of the surrounding rock, so as to hide it from human gaze.' Hence the precautions taken to guard it against violation ; the Egyptians setting the greatest store to preserve the mummy eternally intact. We cannot be surprised at the Persians having felt little concern to secure at all costs a similar result. Saw they not daily the bodies of their own relatives left to be devoured by hungry animals? Little cared they if the entrance to the vault stood revealed, if the chambered grave was shallow and plain to bareness; all they aimed at was to turn out a facade that should convey a high notion of the majesty of those princes whose image was carved upon it, so as to save it from oblivion. The one thing required was that in death the new masters of the Oriental world should make as brave a figure, as the legendary Pharaohs whose effigies they had beheld from one end of Egypt to the other, whose exploits and conquests the priests of Memphis had recounted to them. Among the types of funerary architecture Egypt offered to their gaze, that which best answered a programme that was to furnish elements befitting the royal tomb, as con- ceived by the king, has now its finest examples at Beni Hassan. As Darius went up the Nile these were the hypogeia he had marked, their massive pillars standing out against the gloom of the porches and the red escarps of the chain that skirts the. river. Select for one of these porches a composition out of the many the Theban sculptor chiselled on the pylons of his temples, add thereto a historical inscription akin to those long bands of hieroglyphics explanatory of the sculptures, when, but for difference of theme and mode of writing, there will be the royal tombs of Persia. Why is there no inscription except on that of Darius ? How is it that his successors, whilst they continued to carve their name and pedig^ree on the edifices they erected hard by, suffered the stone of their sepulchres to remain mute ? Were they content with a bronze stela or an enamelled tablet, which, not being one with the rock, disappeared with the fall of the dynasty ? Who shall say ? It appears, however, reasonable to suppose that uiLjiii^ed by Google
 * HitL of Art, torn. i. p. 384, Figs. 178*180, i8a.