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Rh with matters he did not know except on the evidence of mere gossip.

The Sphinx, true to its character in legend, has still a riddle — the date when it was carved out of the rock. An inscription in the name of the king who built the Great Pyramid, but perhaps recut at a later time, speaks of it as already extant in his remote age. It was the symbol of the god Har-em-akhu, Horus in the horizon, or the rising sun, and was thus particularly connected with the worship of Heliopolis, the city of the sun, on the opposite bank of the Nile, not far to the northward. In later times avenues of sphinxes led to the temples. This solitary sphinx has no such purpose, and was itself worshipped, a little chapel being constructed between its forepaws.

While there is much to perplex us in the great monuments of the pyramid field, the lesser ones are full of fruitful information. Around the royal mausolea lie the multitudinous sepulchres of the subjects of the kings of that time. Each has its chapel, or more rarely chapels, decorated with a great variety of scenes of daily life, which bring us face to face with the Egyptian of this distant age. It has been thought, somewhat fancifully, that these subjects relate to the occupations of the future state, but the absence of any but the most reserved representation of funereal matters, as well as of all religious pictures, forbids an allegorical view inconsistent with the simplicity of this early age.

Thus the first thing that strikes us in these oldest of contemporary pictures is their extreme reticence as to religion. There is a short prayer, characteristically not directly addressed as in later times to Osiris, but to Anubis, an inferior divinity of his family. Its purport is simply for the welfare of the chief person of the tomb in the divine underworld. We miss the appeal of later inscriptions to the voyagers up and down the beloved river, towards which most of the Egyptian tombs look, to repeat the inscribed formula for the good of the soul of the deceased. In the tomb there is but a slight indication of its purpose, the occasional representation of the occupant as a mummy. No ceremonies of sepulture are pictured, no passages of the "Ritual" inscribed. We are at an extreme limit of Egyptian usage in this respect, and it is not till the end of the monarchy that the other extreme is usual, religious subjects having gradually won a preponderance.

Still more remarkable is the absence of pictures of the king, even in tombs of members of his family, unlike the usage of the empire, in the tombs of which we sometimes see the king receiving the homage of his subject. It would seem that at this remote time the Pharaoh stood as high above his subjects in rank as his pyramid overtopped their modest sepulchres. Even a queen is spoken of as having had the honor of seeing the king. The most important priestly function seems to have been the priesthood of each king, to which was entrusted the ceremonial of his sepulchral chapel. Each great man held priestly, military, and civil power, or at least could do so. There was not at this time the distinction into classes, and the habit of hereditary transmission of functions, that made the later system from the empire downwards almost one of castes. It is also significant that nearly all the high functionaries are of the blood royal, though there is a remarkable exception in the case of an able man who probably rose from the ranks and was rewarded by a marriage with a princess, Ti, whose beautiful tomb at Sakkarah is one of the most interesting of the many sights of Memphis.

Notwithstanding the greatness of royal power, the Egyptians of this age were a light-hearted people. No one can have seen the wooden statue of a gentleman of that period which was shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1867, and is now one of the most precious monuments of early Egyptian art in the Boolák Museum, without being struck by its air of well-fed content; indeed the word "jolly" is almost the only term by which its character can be described. And this is evidently the type of man whose daily life was portrayed as a memorial in his tomb. There we see him walking afoot, for the horse was not yet known in Egypt, his staff in his hand, seeing the various occupations of the field, the garden, and the vineyard, taking stock of his asses, oxen, sheep, goats, and ducks, witnessing the various handicrafts of his folk — we do not know that they were serfs — or superintending the transport by river of his produce. We see him too watching the fishers or those who bring in game and wild fowl, more rarely himself engaged in sport. His home-life is not forgotten. He entertains his friends at feasts, while players on instruments of music and singers are present for their diversion.

These are the subjects of the wall-pictures, or, more strictly, painted sculptures, of the tombs of the age of the fourth and fifth dynasties, those of the pyramid period