If even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed--if even the lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured--it might readily be believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt, their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial caves. The dreary desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of Memphis--a vast and mouldering city of the dead--whose chief memorials are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There, under stone tumuli of enormous size,--barrows or cairns more carefully constructed,--the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging to the great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development. Those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers {162}of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal palaces of Medinet-Hâbu or the corridors of Luxor. M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the _mastabah_ or mortuary chapel for the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-Hâbu fulfilled the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.; and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins, with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.