1898.] 



on the Development of the Tomb in Egypt. 



Ill 



serious owls, with half-human expressions, which flit noiselessly up 

 and down the open tomb shafts, can readily understand whrxt the 

 Egyptian thought when he credited the fleeting soul with like action. 



Having thus before us the theory of the soul and of burial, we 

 can now turn to consider the actual tombs. 



The oldest burials that we know in Egypt are those belonging to the 

 prehistoric population, which diifered greatly from the historical Egyp- 

 tians. They belong to the age when only the bird theory and Osiris 

 theory were in force, and perhaps the sun-god theory ; but certainly 

 when the mummy theory was quite unknown. Instead of preserving 

 the body by mummifying, they often cut it up and buried only the 

 bonesj or only a part of the bones. The bodies, moreover, are always 



Fig. 2. — Typical early tomb, plan and ssction. 



buried in a contracted position, and not laid out like the mummy. 

 The graves are open square pits, lined with mats, and roofed over 

 with beams and brushwood. Thus they were quite different from the 

 later type of Egyptian tombs. It is well to see thus that the actual 

 remains that we find reach back to a time before the general soul- 

 tbeory of later ages had yet been brought in. 



But it is the later time of the historical development of the tomb 

 that we have mainly to consider at present. The tombs that we 

 actually have for study range continuously from about 4000 b.c. down 

 to Roman times ; but the principal age of consecutive development 

 is from about 4000 to 2500 b.c. or the IVth to the Xllth dynasty. 

 After that time no new ideas were introduced in the ordinary tombs, 

 and only gradual decay and simplification is to be seen. 



