Manchester Memoirs, Vol. IxvL (1922), No. 4 13 



in the case of the tombs. The later kings were bent on 

 entirely different ends from those pursued by their ancestors. 

 Men were being educated in the practice of war, and attention 

 was given to plunder and to fighting, and not to the construc- 

 tion of elaborate tombs for the dead. In Europe, as elsewhere, 

 what is known of the matter goes to show that the decay in 

 the use of stone was due, not to natural, but to social causes. 

 For some reason or other, certain communities gave up the 

 use of stone, which only persisted continuously in the 

 Mediterranean, and only appeared in Western Europe under 

 the influence of the Eastern Mediterranean peoples. 



It is possible, in Egypt, to watch the effect of social and 

 political transformations on the use of stone. The Egyptian 

 grave developed from the simple hollow scooped out in the 

 sand, of early pre-dynastic days, to the massive pyramid of 

 stone of the Fourth Dynasty, which marks the culminating 

 point of the use of stone in that country. The earliest 

 Egyptian tombs were of brick, and thus correspond to those 

 of Sumer. But, in the early dynasties, the gradual deepening 

 of the tomb finally caused the solid rock to be reached. One 

 great difficulty that the Egyptian tomb-makers had to over- 

 come was that of forming a satisfactory roof to the grave. 

 But when they got down to the solid rock, in days after the 

 copper chisel had been invented, it seems to have struck some 

 bright genius that, if the tomb itself were cut out of the rock, 

 this would solve the problem of roofing ; so thus arose the 

 custom of rock-cut tombs. In the early tombs with a rock-cut 

 grave the superstructure was of brick. But eventually stone 

 was used for the superstructure, probably as a direct result of 

 the making of rock-cut tombs. It does not seem to have 

 occurred to the Egyptians to use stone for the superstructures 

 of their graves until they had actually begun to cut into the 

 rock to make tombs. Then the idea seems to have come, and 

 the kings thenceforth had stone worked for their tombs and 

 temples. But the building of stone pyramids did not last 

 indefinitely in Egypt. For from the Eleventh Dynasty 

 onwards B.C. the pyramids degenerate in size and once again 

 begin to be made of brick (1, 198). Thus in Egypt the con- 

 struction of tombs began with brick and it ended with brick, 

 with the exception of' rock-cut tombs, which continued to be 

 made during many centuries. 



What is the cause of this gradual development and decline ? 

 It obviously has nothing to do with the supply of stone : for 

 the stone was there all the time. It was simply a matter of 

 the internal political condition of Egypt. In the times when 



