Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/199

 SARCOPHAGI AND SEPULCHRAL FURNITURE. 179 are the oldest of the Phoenician graves. The well into which the corpse was lowered, the gaping mouth that appeared ever to beg for more, was that mouth of the sheol (ps putei) which gave rise to the favourite image of the Hebrews, ' The mouth of the grave hath devoured him.' So, too, for the Arvadite vicghazils ; those were the horabotk, or pyramids, which the richer men caused to be raised upon their tombs in the time of Job, to the indignation of that proud nomad. 1 3. Sarcophagi and Sepulchral Furniture. We have now studied the general arrangements of Phoenician sepulchres, and shown that, although between one town and another they presented certain differences, their ruling principle was always the same ; all over the country, at Arvad as at Tyre, the tomb was a cavern or pit cut in the living rock. We have yet, however, to follow the corpse into its grave, to inquire what changes took place in the mode of sepulture as the centuries passed on, and of what the furniture with which the piety of the living filled the chamber of the dead consisted. In the first, the most remote, antiquity, the body was wrapped in a shroud and placed in a cave. In later times, when the use of tools had been learnt, niches were hollowed out in the natural walls of the grotto, or pits dug through its floor ; some- times these pits were dug in the open air on the rocky platforms above the slopes on which the hypogea opened (Fig. 118). But in time a race like the Phoenicians, whose intercourse with Egypt was so intimate, were sure to learn how to give their dead an extra guarantee of duration, in the form either of one of those stone chests which we call sarcophagi, or of a cedar coffin held together and fortified by strong metal clasps. The simplest sarcophagi are no more than huge stone boxes with lids rising into a rid^e in the centre. One of these is seen o o in our Fig. 119, which represents a tomb excavated by M. Renan at Gebal. Above and beyond it another but much more orna- mental specimen of the same class appears. As time went on, the 1 JOB iii. 14 ; xxi. 32. As to the sense in which M. REX AN interprets the word horaboth, see his Histoire generate des Langues shnitiques, p. 20.4, third edition.