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Updated: June 3, 2025
The one was explaining to his companion everything they saw as they went along, the signification of the emblems cut in the tablets, and the funerary customs of the Christians. "Didn't they put crosses?" asked the unlearned gentleman. "No," said the other. "It is said that for the Romans the crux represented the gallows!
In this picturesque part of Western Thebes, in many respects perhaps the most picturesque place in Egypt, the greatest king of the XIth Dynasty, Neb-hapet-Râ Mentuhetep, excavated his tomb and built for the worship of his ghost a funerary temple, which he called Akh-aset, "Glorious-is-its- Situation," a name fully justified by its surroundings.
People may differ as to the significance of this or that detail, but no one will deny that the plaque is religious and funerary in its general character, and that, whatever may have been its purpose, it is as a whole connected with the memory and worship of the dead, and therefore that this is the place for such remarks as we have to make upon it.
It was only after persistent inquiries that we found it in a store-shed with other fragments of ninth-century carving and some Roman antiquities thought of little importance, though the inscriptions and other marble fragments and the stone funerary urns are in their company.
Here he superintends the preliminary operations necessary to raise the food by which he is to be nourished in the form of funerary offerings; namely, seed-sowing, harvesting, stock-breeding, fishing, hunting, and the like. In short, "he superintends all the labour which is done for the eternal dwelling."
In Egypt we have already encountered the pyramid, but even there the tomb-chamber is in most cases cut in the rock itself, and the huge mass of stone above it is nothing more than a sort of colossal lid. Funerary architecture is not content, like that of civil or religious buildings, to borrow its materials from the rock; it cuts and chisels the living rock itself.
He must also have tables for his meals; stools, chairs, a bed to lie upon, a boat and sledge to convey him to the tomb, and sometimes even a war-chariot and a carriage in which to take the air. The boxes for canopic vases, funerary statuettes, and libation-vases, are divided in several compartments.
The sepulchral vault was the abode of the Soul, as the funerary chapel was the abode of the Double. Up to the time of the Sixth Dynasty, the walls of the vault are left bare. In 1881, I however discovered some tombs at Sakkarah, in which the vault is decorated in preference to the chapel.
The most ancient funerary statuettes yet found those, namely, of the Eleventh Dynasty are of alabaster, like the canopic vases; but from the time of the Thirteenth Dynasty, they were cut in compact limestone. The workmanship is very unequal in quality. Some are real chefs-d'oeuvre, and reproduce the physiognomy of the deceased as faithfully as a portrait statue.
The blue is splendid, and we must overleap twenty centuries before we again find so pure a colour among the funerary statuettes of Deir el Baharî. Green reappears under the Saïte dynasties, but paler than that of more ancient times, and it prevailed in the north of Egypt, at Memphis, Bubastis, and Sais, without entirely banishing the blue.
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