1898.] Development of the Tomh of Egypt. 769 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, June 3, 1898. 



Sir Henry Thompson, F.R.C.S. F.R.A.S. Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



Professor W. M. Flinders Petrie. D.C.L. 

 Professor of Egy2)tology in University College, London. 



Tlie Development of the Tomh in Egypt. 



The general ideas about tlie Egyptians are so bound up with their 

 preservation of the dead, that some connected account of the develop- 

 ment of the tomb may be of interest to others beyond the group of 

 specialists ; the more so as my aim is to illustrate the sequence of 

 ideas and of gradual changes in series, rather than to deal with solely 

 archaeological matters. 



The reasons that the tomb has become so much associated in our 

 minds with the Egyptians are partly real, partly accidental. No 

 doubt the Egyptian thought much of a future state, attached great 

 importance to it, and provided for it in every way that he could devise. 

 Yet we should be taking a very one-sided view if we supposed that 

 the dead were more thought of than the living. It is owing to the 

 accidental conditions that the tombs are so far more noticeable than 

 the houses of ancient Egypt. The tomb was always placed on the 

 desert high above the inundation, and often imperishably cut in the 

 solid rock. The house was usually in the fertile plain of the NilCy 

 and is therefore now buried ten, twenty, or thirty feet in the alluvial 

 deposits left each year by the inundation. 



Ancient Egypt has all been covered up far out of sight, except 

 such works as stood on the raised desert edge of the valley ; and 

 naturally enough the greater part of these remains are for the dead 

 rather than for the living. Hence our ideas are liable to be very 

 one-sided as to the relative importance of the house and the tomb in 

 the real life of the Egyptians, and we judge of them almost as im- 

 perfectly as English life might be judged if the will office in Somerset 

 House were its only evidence. 



It is as impossible to understand the arrangement of a tomb without 

 knowing the theory of the soul, on which it was constructed, as it is 

 to understand a temple without knowing the religion, or a house 

 without the social life. The Egyptian had four theories about the 

 soul, probably belonging to successive waves of population that had 

 overflowed the country from different sources. There was the bird 



