Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/42

2 2 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. May we not seek the explanation which the arrangements of the building fail to suggest, in this perpetual recurrence of the royal image, figured in all the public and private occupations in which the life of the monarch was passed ? The way in which it per- vades the whole structure ought to be enough to convince us that the pavilion, like the adjoining temple, is nothing but a monument to his prowess. It is an ingenious and brilliant addition to the public part of the tomb, to the cenotaph. In other buildings of the same kind the temple, with its courts and pylons, is everything ; but here, as if to distinguish his cenotaph from those of his predecessors and to impress posterity with a higher notion of his power and magnificence, Rameses has chosen to add a building which groups happily with it and serves as a kind of vestibule. It is difficult to say whence he borrowed the form of this unique edifice. Perhaps from one of the numerous pavilions which went to make up a pharaonic palace. Such, however, was not the opinion of Mariette, who discusses the question more than once. His final opinion was as follows : " The general architectural lines of this pavilion of Rameses, especially when seen from some distance, agree with those of the triumphal towers {^nigdol) which are represented in the bas-reliefs of Karnak, Luxor, the Ramesseum, and Medinet-ibou. These towers were erected on the frontiers of the country by the Egyptian mionarchs, where they served both as defensive works and as memorials of the national victories. The royal pavilion of Medinet-Abou was, therefore, a work of military rather than of civil architecture." ^ The warrior-king par excellence could not have preserved his memory green in the minds of his subjects by any more characteristic monument.^ But whether it is to be considered a palace or a fortress, this is the proper place to study the details of this curious edifice. It forms, indeed, part of an assemblage of funerary buildings, and its situation is immediately in front of a temple, facts which might suggest that its arrangements ought to have been discussed in an earlier chapter. But these arrangements are in fact imitated from those of the ordinary dwellings of the living. Its economy is not that of either tomb or temple. The superposition of one story upon another is found in neither of those classes of buildings ' Itinera hr, p. 213. 2 See the curious extracts from the Papyrus Anastasi JIL, given by Maspero, Histoire Aficie?ine, pp. 267-269.