Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph, by Beato, of the
tomb of Ramses IV.
They might, on the other hand, leave him and once more enter the world of the living, settling themselves where they would, but always by preference in the tombs where their bodies awaited them, and where they could enjoy the wealth which had been accumulated there: they might walk within their garden, and sit beneath the trees they had planted; they could enjoy the open air beside the pond they had dug, and breathe the gentle north breeze on its banks after the midday heat, until the time when the returning evening obliged them to repair once more to Abydos, and re-embark with the god in order to pass the anxious vigils of the night under his protection. Thus from the earliest period of Egyptian history the life beyond the tomb was an eclectic one, made up of a series of earthly enjoyments combined together.
The Pharaohs had enrolled themselves instinctively among the most ardent votaries of this complex doctrine. Their relationship to the sun made its adoption a duty, and its profession was originally, perhaps, one of the privileges of their position. Râ invited them on board because they were his children, subsequently extending this favour to those whom they should deem worthy to be associated with them, and thus become companions of the ancient deceased kings of Upper and Lower Egypt.*
* This is apparently what we gather from the picture
inserted in chapter xvii. of the “Book of the Dead,” where
we see the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt guiding the divine
bark and the deceased with them.
The idea which the Egyptians thus formed of the other world, and of the life of the initiated within it, reacted gradually on their concept of the tomb and of its befitting decoration. They began to consider the entrances to the pyramid, and its internal passages and chambers, as a conventional representation of the gates, passages, and halls of Hades itself; when the pyramid passed out of fashion, and they had replaced it by a tomb cut in the rock in one or other of the branches of the Bab el-Moluk valley, the plan of construction which they chose was an exact copy of that employed by the Memphites and earlier Thebans, and they hollowed out for themselves in the mountain-side a burying-place on the same lines as those formerly employed within the pyramidal structure. The relative positions of the tunnelled tombs along the valley were not determined by any order of rank or of succession to the throne; each Pharaoh after Ramses I. set to work on that part of the rock where the character of the stone favoured his purpose, and displayed so little respect for his predecessors, that the workmen, after having tunnelled a gallery, were often obliged to abandon it altogether, or to change the direction of their excavations so as to avoid piercing a neighbouring tomb. The architect’s design was usually a mere project which could be modified at will, and, which he did not feel bound to carry out with fidelity; the actual measurements of the tomb of Ramses IV. are almost everywhere at variance with the numbers and arrangement of the working drawing of it which has been preserved to us in a papyrus. The general disposition of the royal tombs, however, is far from being complicated; we have at the entrance the rectangular door, usually surmounted by the sun, represented by a yellow disk, before which the sovereign kneels with his hands raised in the posture of adoration; this gave access to a passage sloping gently downwards, and broken here and there by a level landing and steps, leading to a first chamber of varying amplitude, at the further end of which a second passage opened which descended to one or more apartments, the last of which, contained the coffin. The oldest rock-tombs present some noteworthy exceptions to this plan, particularly those of Seti I. and Ramses III.; but from the time of Ramses IV., there is no difference to be remarked in them except in the degree of finish of the wall-paintings or in the length of the passages. The shortest of the latter extends some fifty-two feet into the rock, while the longest never exceeds three hundred and ninety feet. The same artifices which had been used by the pyramid-builders to defeat the designs of robbers—false mummy-pits, painted and sculptured walls built across passages, stairs concealed under a movable stone in the corner of a chamber—were also employed by the Theban engineers. The decoration of the walls was suggested, as in earlier times, by the needs of the royal soul, with this difference—that the Thebans set themselves to render visible to his eyes by paintings that which the Memphites had been content to present to his intelligence in writing, so that the Pharaoh could now see what his ancestors had been able merely to read on the walls of their tombs. Where the inscribed texts in the burial-chamber of Unas state that Unas, incarnate in the Sun, and thus representing Osiris, sails over the waters on high or glides into the Elysian fields, the sculptured or painted scenes in the interior of the Theban catacombs display to the eye Ramses occupying the place of the god in the solar bark and in the fields of laid. Where the walls of Unas bear only the prayers recited over the mummy for the opening of his mouth, for the restoration of the use of his limbs, for his clothing, perfuming, and nourishment, we see depicted on those of Seti I. or Ramses IV. the mummies of these kings and the statues of their doubles in the hands of the priests, who are portrayed in the performance of these various offices. The starry ceilings of the pyramids reproduce the aspect of the sky, but without giving the names of the stars: on the ceilings of some of the Ramesside rock-tombs, on the other hand, the constellations are represented, each with its proper figure, while astronomical tables give the position of the heavenly bodies at intervals of fifteen days, so that the soul could tell at a glance into what region of the firmament the course of the bark would bring him each night. In the earlier Ramesside tombs, under Seti I. and Ramses II., the execution of these subjects shows evidence of a care and skill which are quite marvellous, and both figures and hieroglyphics betray the hand of accomplished artists. But in the tomb of Ramses III. the work has already begun to show signs of inferiority, and the majority of the scenes are coloured in a very summary fashion; a raw yellow predominates, and the tones of the reds and blues remind us of a child’s first efforts at painting. This decline is even more marked under the succeeding Ramessides; the drawing has deteriorated, the tints have become more and more crude, and the latest paintings seem but a lamentable caricature of the earlier ones.
The courtiers and all those connected with the worship of Amon-Râ—priests, prophets, singers, and functionaries connected with the necropolis—shared the same belief with regard to the future world as their sovereign, and they carried their faith in the sun’s power to the point of identifying themselves with him after death, and of substituting the name of Râ for that of Osiris; they either did not venture, however, to go further than this, or were unable to introduce into their tombs all that we find in the Bab el-Moluk. They confined themselves to writing briefly on their own coffins, or confiding to the mummies of their fellow-believers, in addition to the “Book of the Dead,” a copy of the “Book of knowing what there is in Hades,” or of some other mystic writing which was in harmony with their creed. Hastily prepared copies of these were sold by unscrupulous scribes, often badly written and almost always incomplete, in which were hurriedly set down haphazard the episodes of the course of the sun with explanatory illustrations. The representations of the gods in them are but little better than caricatures, the text is full of faults and scarcely decipherable, and it is at times difficult to recognize the correspondence of the scenes and prayers with those in the royal tombs. Although Amon had become the supreme god, at least for this class of the initiated, he was by no means the sole deity worshipped by the Egyptians: the other divinities previously associated with him still held their own beside him, or were further defined and invested with a more decided personality. The goddess regarded as his partner was at first represented as childless, in spite of the name of Maût or Mût—the mother—by which she was invoked, and Amon was supposed to have adopted Montû, the god of Hermonthis, in order to complete his triad. Montû, however, formerly the sovereign of the Theban plain, and lord over Amon himself, was of too exalted a rank to play the inferior part of a divine son.