Fig. 127.—Plans of the temples belonging to the second and third pyramids;
from Perring.
As such vast importance was attached to the preservation of the portrait statues upon which the prolongation of life after death was made so largely to depend, is it not probable that the idea of hiding some of them in the innermost recesses of the pyramids themselves may have occurred to those who caused those monuments to be built? It is obvious that no hiding-place could be more secure. No such retreats have yet been discovered in any of the galleries which have been explored by modern curiosity, but it does not follow that they do not exist in some corner which has not yet been reached, which will perhaps never be reached by the most persevering explorer. Quite lately M. Maspero believed that he recognized a serdab in a subterranean chamber with three niches which he found near the mummy chamber in the Pyramid of Ounas, the last king of the fifth dynasty.[182] Before we could say that such an arrangement does not exist elsewhere, we should have to take some pyramid to pieces from the first stone to the last. It might, however, be asserted that the images of the deceased would, if hidden in the pyramid, be too far removed from that public hall to which his relations brought their offerings and their pious homage. At such a distance they would not have heard the friendly voices or the magic chants; nor would the scent of the incense have reached their nostrils. In a word, they would have been ill placed for the fulfilment of the office assigned to them by the Egyptian faith.
We have hitherto spoken only of the social purposes of the pyramid, of its office as the sepulchre of the ancient kings of Egypt, or rather as the part of that sepulchre that corresponded to the least interesting parts of private tombs. In the plants of our gardens and orchards, we see cultivation develop certain organs at the expense of others. We find stamens changed into petals, giving us double flowers, and the envelope of the seeds thickened and made to shed perfume. We see the same process of development in the tombs of the early Egyptian monarchs. Under the influence of their pride of station, and as a consequence of the effort which they made to perpetuate their rank even after death, the stone hiding-place which protected the mummy took a size which is oppressive to the imagination, while the funerary chapel remained of modest dimensions. This disproportion is to be easily explained. The simple method of construction which distinguishes the pyramid permitted almost indefinite extension, while architecture, properly speaking, was not yet sufficiently advanced to make use of those grandiose orders which distinguish the porticos and hypostyle temples of the Theban period.
We have now to consider the pyramids from another point of view, from that of their probable origin, of their variety of form, and of the materials of which they are composed. Descriptions of these monuments, such as those contained in the great works of Vyse[183] and Perring[184], works which gave to the world the accumulated results of long and costly explorations, must not be looked for in these volumes. We do not think it necessary that we should give even a succinct account of the more important pyramids, such as that given by Bædeker or Isambert. Such a proceeding would be a mere duplication of those excellent manuals, and would moreover, be foreign to the purpose which we have before us. We take the pyramids as known. The two books just mentioned are within the reach of all. Thanks to the precise information and the numerous figures which they contain, we may content ourselves with making a few general observations. Some of these observations will refer to the pyramids as a whole, some to the peculiarities of construction which distinguish a few, peculiarities which do not affect that general type which seems to be as old as the Egyptian monarchy itself.
As soon as a society had sprung up on the banks of the Nile which attempted to organize itself under the directing lead of chiefs or headmen, the latter seem to have been stung by the desire to make known their final resting-place by some conspicuous sign. The most simple way of arriving at the desired result was to heap up the earth over the corpse, so as to form an artificial hillock which should be visible from a distance over the level plain. This was the origin of that funerary mound which modern archæologists call a tumulus. The tumulus is to be found in most districts of the ancient as well as of the modern world. But to confine ourselves to our own province, it is to be found in pre-Christian times among the Scythians of Herodotus and our ancestors the Gauls, as well as among the Greeks of the heroic age. We all know the frequent expression of Homer, σῆμα χεύειν, which is literally to display a signal, that is to say, to accumulate over the corpse of a warrior a sufficient number of spadefuls of earth to signalize it, for the worship and admiration of posterity. Tradition ascribes those tumuli which are yet to be seen on the plain of Troy to the observance of this custom.
The funerary architecture of Egypt commenced in the same fashion, in those distant ages which were called by the Egyptians themselves the times of Hor-schesou or slaves of Horus. We cannot doubt that the pyramid sprang from the mound. Its birth must have taken place after Menes had, by uniting the various tribes under his own sceptre, caused the whole race to take a distinct step onwards in civilization. The pyramid is but a built mound. It is a tumulus in which brick and stone take the place of earth. This substitution adds very greatly to its chances of duration, and makes it a much safer place of deposit and a much more lasting monument for the body committed to its charge. The Nile mud, when moulded and dried in the sun, gave bricks which still remain good; their manufacture and their constructive use seem to have been understood by the Egyptians as soon as they emerged from primitive barbarism. Thanks to the facilities thus afforded, they were enabled to build monuments upon the graves of their rulers which could offer a better resistance to injuries of time and human enemies than a few handfuls of earth and grass. They began, perhaps, by placing a few blocks of stone upon their mounds, so as to fix them more securely, or by covering them with a thin coat of brickwork. But, after a few experiments in that direction, they found it better to construct the whole body of the tumulus in the harder material. Its size increased with the constructive skill and material appliances of its builders, until it became first a hillock and finally a mountain of stone, with the impenetrable rock for its base and flanks of solid masonry.
The built-up tumulus of masonry took a form very different, in its definite lines, from the rounded slopes of the mound. The squared forms of brick or cut stone infallibly give to the edifice upon which they are employed one of those more or less rigid forms which are defined by geometry. When they leave the hands of the builder they are either cubes or parallelopipeds, pyramids or prisms, cylinders or cones. They present the general appearance, they possess the essential properties, of one of those forms. We may say that architecture was born on the day when man began to use the unyielding materials by which definite geometrical forms can alone be given. As soon as this early development was reached he set to work to combine those elementary forms in different proportions and to add to their effect by elegance and richness of decoration, and so in the end to form national architectures.
When the first pyramid was built upon the borders of the desert man was on the threshold of the movement to which we have referred. The form adopted for the royal tomb was one of the most simple which could be chosen for a building. The most simple of all would have been the tetrahedron, or pyramid built upon a triangular base. But not a single pyramid of that kind has been discovered in Egypt. The whole of the pyramids, large or small, are built upon a right-angled base, and in most instances upon one with sides practically equal.[185] Mystic reasons for this shape have been given. It has been said that each face was dedicated to one of the four powers of Amen, which corresponded to the cardinal points of heaven.[186] We are not yet sufficiently well acquainted with the genesis of the Egyptian religion to be able to decide how far into the past the four powers of Amen may be traced: but it is quite possible that they were derived from the four faces of the strictly oriented pyramids. Were we inclined to enter into this discussion we should rather, perhaps, attribute the shape of the pyramid to the prevailing Egyptian desire to turn one face of their tombs towards the west, the abode of the dead, and another to the east, whence the hoped-for resurrection was to come. The three-sided pyramid would not have lent itself to such an arrangement.
There is also something unpleasant to the eye in the sharp angles which form the three arêtes of the tetrahedron; it looks as if there had been a lack of material, and as if the structure would suffer in consequence. The four-sided pyramid has more dignity and more amplitude; its four faces, placed back to back in pairs, seem to counterpoise and sustain each other in a fashion which is impossible in the case of the tetrahedron.
