Egypt -- History, Ancient; Egypt -- Social life and customs
Inside this great mountain of stone there are long passages leading to
two small rooms in the centre of the Pyramid; and in one of these rooms,
called "the King's Chamber," the body of the greatest builder the world
has ever seen was laid in its stone coffin. Then the passages were
closed with heavy plug-blocks of stone, so that no one should ever
disturb the sleep of King Khufu. But, in spite of all precautions,
robbers mined their way into the Pyramid ages ago, plundered the coffin,
and scattered to the winds the remains of the King, so that, as Byron
says, "Not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops."
The other pyramids are smaller, though, if the Great Pyramid had not
been built, the Second and Third would have been counted world's
wonders. Near the Second Pyramid sits the Great Sphinx. It is a huge
statue, human-headed and lion-bodied, carved out of limestone rock. Who
carved it, or whose face it bears, we do not certainly know; but there
the great figure crouches, as it has crouched for countless ages,
keeping watch and ward over the empty tombs where the Pharaohs of Egypt
once slept, its head towering seventy feet into the air, its vast limbs
and body stretching for two hundred feet along the sand, the strangest
and most wonderful monument ever hewn by the hands of man (Plate 11).
Later on in Egyptian history the Kings and great folk grew tired of
building pyramids, and the fashion changed. Instead of raising huge
structures above ground, they began to hew out caverns in the rocks in
which to lay their dead. Round about Thebes, the rocks on the western
side of the Nile are honeycombed with these strange houses of the
departed. Their walls, in many cases, are decorated with bright and
cheerful pictures, showing scenes of the life which the dead man lived
on earth. There he stands, or sits, placid and happy, with his wife
beside him, while all around him his servants go about their usual work.
They plough and hoe, sow and reap; they gather the grapes from the vines
and put them into the winepress; or they bring the first-fruits of the
earth to present them before their master (Plate 15). In other pictures
you see the great man going out to his amusements, fishing, hunting, or
fowling; or you are taken into the town, and see the tradesmen working,
and the merchants, and townsfolk buying and selling in the bazaars. In
fact, the whole of life in Ancient Egypt passes before your eyes as you
go from chamber to chamber, and it is from these old tomb-pictures that
we have learned the most of what we know of how people lived and worked
in those long-past days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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