* The Phonician symbol represents the crescent moon holding
the darkened portion in its arms, like the symbol reserved
in Egypt for the lunar gods.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Renan.
The worship, too, offered to these metamorphosed gods was as much changed as the deities themselves; the altars assumed something of the Egyptian form, and the tabernacles were turned into shrines, which were decorated at the top with a concave groove, or with a frieze made up of repetitions of the uraeus. Egyptian fashions had influenced the better classes so far as to change even their mode of dealing with the dead, of which we find in not a few places clear evidence. Travellers arriving in Egypt at that period must have been as much astonished as the tourist of to-day by the monuments which the Egyptians erected for their dead.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin. This monument was in the Louvre
Museum. Analogous figures of gods or kings holding a lion by
the tail are found on various monuments of the Theban
dynasties.
The pyramids which met their gaze, as soon as they had reached the apex of the Delta, must have far surpassed their ideas of them, no matter how frequently they may have been told about them, and they must have been at a loss to know why such a number of stones should have been brought together to cover a single corpse. At the foot of these colossal monuments, lying like a pack of hounds asleep around their master, the mastabas of the early dynasties were ranged, half buried under the sand, but still visible, and still visited on certain days by the descendants of their inhabitants, or by priests charged with the duty of keeping them up. Chapels of more recent generations extended as a sort of screen before the ancient tombs, affording examples of the two archaic types combined—the mastaba more or less curtailed in its proportions, and the pyramid with a more or less acute point. The majority of these monuments are no longer in existence, and only one of them has come down to us intact—that which Amenôthes III. erected in the Serapeum at Memphis in honour of an Apis which had died in his reign.