Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art | Page 7

and heros. The
sculpture in all is incomparably more labored and higher finished than
any I had seen in the temples; and I stood in astonishment at the high
perfection of the art, and its singular destiny to be devoted to places of
such silence and obscurity. In working these galleries, beds of a very
fine calcareous clay have occasionally been crossed, and here the lines
of the hieroglyphics have been cut with a firmness of touch and a
precision, of which marble offers but few examples. The figures have
elegance and correctness of contour, of which I never thought Egyptian
sculpture susceptible. Here, too, I could judge of the style of this people
in subjects which had neither hieroglyphic, nor historical, nor scientific;
for there were representations of small scenes taken from nature, in
which the stiff profile outlines, so common with Egyptian artists, were
exchanged for supple and natural attitudes; groups of persons were
given in perspective, and cut in deeper relief than I should have
supposed anything but metal could have been worked."
The Sepulchres of the Kings of Thebes are mentioned by Diodorus
Siculus as wonderful works, and such as could never be exceeded by
anything afterwards executed in this kind. He says that forty-seven of
them were mentioned in their history; that only seventeen of them
remained to the time of Ptolemy Lagus; adding that most of them were
destroyed in his time. Strabo says, that above the Memnonium, the
precise locality of Denon's description, were the sepulchres of the kings
of Thebes, in grottos cut out of the rock, being about forty in number,

wonderfully executed and worthy to be seen. In these, he says, were
obelisks with inscriptions on them, setting forth the riches, power, and
empire of these kings, as far as Scythia, Bactria, India, and Ionia, their
great revenues, and their immense armies, consisting of one million of
men.
In Egypt, the honors paid to the dead partook of the nature of a
religious homage. By the process of embalming, they endeavored to
preserve the body from the common laws of nature; and they provided
those magnificent and durable habitations for the dead--sublime
monuments of human folly--which have not preserved but buried the
memory of their founders. By a singular fatality, the well-adapted
punishment of pride, the extraordinary precautions by which it seemed
in a manner to triumph over death, have only led to a more humiliating
disappointment. The splendor of the tomb has but attracted the violence
of rapine; the sarcophagus has been violated; and while other bodies
have quietly returned to their native dust in the bosom of their mother
earth, the Egyptian, converted into a mummy, has been preserved only
to the insults of curiosity, or avarice, or barbarism.

THE PYRAMIDS OF EGYPT.
The pyramids of Egypt, especially the two largest of the group of Jizeh
or Gize, are the most stupendous masses of buildings in stone that
human labor has ever been known to accomplish, and have been the
wonder of ancient and modern times.--The number of the Egyptian
pyramids, large and small, is very considerable; they are situated on the
west bank of the Nile, and extend in an irregular line, and in groups at
some distance from each other, from the neighborhood of Jizeh, in 30°
N. Latitude, as far as sixty or seventy miles south of that place. The
pyramids of Jizeh are nearly opposite Cairo. They stand on a plateau or
terrace of limestone, which is a projection of the Lybian
mountain-chain. The surface of the terrace is barren and irregular, and
is covered with sand and small fragments of rock; its height, at the base
of the great pyramid, is one hundred and sixty four feet above the
ordinary level of the Nile, from which it is distant about five miles.

There are in this group three large pyramids, and several small ones.
Herodotus, who was born B.C. 484, visited these pyramids. He was
informed by the priests of Memphis, that the great pyramid was built
by Cheops, king of Egypt, about B.C. 900, and that one hundred
thousand workmen were employed twenty years in building it, and that
the body of Cheops was placed in a room beneath the bottom,
surrounded by a vault, to which the waters of the Nile were conveyed
through a subterranean tunnel. A chamber has been discovered under
the centre of the pyramid, but it is about fifty-six feet above the
low-water mark of the Nile. The second pyramid, Herodotus says, was
built by Cephren or Cephrenes, the brother and successor of Cheops,
and the third by Mycerinus, the son of Cheops. Herodotus also says that
the two largest pyramids are wholly covered with white marble;
Diodorus and Pliny, that they are built of this costly material.