Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/77

 The Story of Egypt 49 sometimes eighty or ninety feet high and weighed as much as a thousand tons. This is a burden equivalent to the load drawn by a modern freight train, but it was not cut up into small units of light weight convenient for handling and loading like the train load. Nevertheless the engineers of the Empire moved many such vast figures for hundreds of miles. They generally dragged the statue on a huge sledge to the river, and then transported it in a large boat. It is in works of this massive monumental character that the art of Egypt excelled (Fig. 30). Two of these enormous portraits of the Pharaoh still stand on the western plain of Thebes (Fig. 29). A splendid temple, now vanished, once rose behind them. In the background we see the majestic cliffs of the western valley wall. Be- hind these cliffs is a lonely valley (Fjg. 31) where the Pharaohs of the Empire were buried in tombs reached by long galleries cut far into the mountain. Some of their bodies have been preserved, and we are able to look into the very faces of these great em- The ceme- perors who lived as much as thirty-four hundred years ago Thebes; the (^TTirr -^o^ tombs of the l^rig. 32;. Pharaohs and In these cliffs (Fis:. 20), which look down upon the Theban the royal ^ ^ ^- bodies plain, are cut hundreds of tomb-chapels belonging to the great I Fig. 31. Valley at Thebes WHERE THE PhARAOHS OF THE Empire were buried In the Empire (after 1600 B.C.) the Pharaohs had ceased to erect pyra- mids. They excavated their tombs in the mountains of this valley, pen- etrating in long galleries hundreds of feet into the rock. Taken from here and concealed near by, the bodies of many of the Pharaohs, although long ago stripped of their valuables by tomb robbers, have sur- vived and now lie in the National Museum of Egypt at Cairo (Fig. 32)