Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/317

The Tomb under the Ancient Empire. 227 pedestals, or if he had heard from his dragomans — ■ whose exaggerations he has elsewhere so naively reproduced — that they had formerly existed, would he not have made some allusion to them in that passage, at least, where he explains how they raised such huge stones to so great a height, and describes the successive stages in the construction of a pyramid ? ^ Would he not have found room, in the elaborate antithetical passage in which he contrasts the virtues of Mycerinus with the imaginary wickedness of Cheops and Chephren, for moral and critical reflections called up by the sight of their statues upon their respective pyramids ; still more if one of them had happened to be missing ? Would he not have attempted, through some popular tradition, to have ac- counted for the presence of one statue and the absence of another ? It is evident, therefore, that Herodotus neither saw any statues upon the Pyramids of Memphis nor had he any reason to suppose those structures had ever been crowned in such a fashion. He lays stress upon the seated statues of the pyramids in Lake Mneris because they were new to him, because he had seen nothing of the same kind in the neighbourhood of the ancient" capital. Unless we are very much mistaken, this superposition of a colossus upon a pyramid was a novelty devised by the architects of the middle empire, when, under the Ousourtesens and Amenemhats, it was proposed to revive the pyramidal form of tomb with which the early Pharaohs had obtained such imposing results. Although most conservative on the whole, the art of Egypt attempted, at each period of renascence, to introduce new combinations into the details, at least, of the ancient forms, and this was one of the number. Another innovation of the same kind is to be found in the decoration which covered, again according to Herodotus,^ another ^ M. Maspero has given in the Annuaire de F Association pour F Encouragement des Etudes Grecques and elsewhere, several extracts from a commentary upon the second book of Herodotus, which we should like to see published in its entirety. We may point out more particularly his remarks upon the text of the Greek historian in the matter of the 1,600 talents of silver which, he says, was the value of the onions, radishes, and garlic consumed by the workmen employed upon the Great Pyramid (ii. 125). He has no difficulty in showing that Herodotus made a mistake, for which he gives an ingenious and probable explanation. {Annuaire de 1875, p. 16.) 2 Herodotus, ii. 148. Diodorus (1. 89) speaks of the same pyramid, and Strabo, who also appears to have seen it, asserts its funerary character (p. 11 65, c). He says it was four plethra (393 feet) both in width and height. This last dimension