Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/523

The Temple under the New Emph-ie. 427 Whether Hatasu's architect was Inspired by those artistic crea- tions of the Chaldees which, as time went on, were miiltiphed over the whole basin of the Euphrates and even spread as far as northern Syria, or whether he drew his ideas entirely from his own brain, his work was, in either case, deserving of high praise. In most parts of the Nile Valley sites are to be found which lend them- selves readily to such a building. The soil has a gentle slope, upon which the erection of successive terraces would involve no architectural difficulties, and there is no lack of rocky walls against which porticoes could be erected, and in which subterranean chambers could be excavated. Upon a series of wide platforms and easy gradients like these, the pompous processions, which played such an important part in the Egyptian ritual, could defile with great effect, while under every portico and upon every landing place they could find resting places and the necessary shelter from the sun. Why did such a model find no imitators ? Must we seek for the reason in the apparent reaction against her memory which followed the death of Hatasu ? " The Egyptian people chose to look upon her as an usurper ; they defaced the inscriptions which celebrated her campaigns ; they effaced her cartouches and replaced her titles with those of her brothers." ^ It is certain that nowhere In Egypt has any building of con- siderable dimensions been discovered in which the peculiar arrano;ements of Dayr-el-Bahari are repeated. At most it may be said that somethinof of the same kind Is to be found in those rock-cut temples of Nubia which are connected with the river bank by a dromos and flights of steps. When the princes of the nineteenth dynasty wished to raise funerary temples to their memory in their own capital, it would have been easy, had they chosen, to find sites upon the slopes of the western chain similar to that which Hatasu had employed with such happy results ; but they preferred a different combination. They erected their ceno- taphs in the plain, at som.e distance from the hills, and they chose a form which did not essentially differ from that of the great temples on the opposite bank' of the Nile. The religious architecture of Egypt, in all Its richness and variety, is known to us only through the monuments of the second Theban Empire, through the great works of the kings belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. We are ^ Maspero, Histoire Ancicnue, p. 203.