Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/43

The Palace. 23 but it is found both in military and domestic architecture. So. too, with the mode of h'ghting the various apartments. The darkness of the tomb is complete, the illumination of the temple is far from brilliant, in its more sacred parts it is almost as dark as the tomb. Prayers could be said to Osiris without inconvenience by the scanty daylight which found its way through the narrow doorway of the sepulchral chapel, but the active pleasures of life required a broader day. We find, therefore, that the pavilion was lighted by windows, real windows, and some of them very large. Nothing is more rare, in the buildings which have come down to us from Fig. 10. — Brackets in the courtyard of the Royal Pa-ilion. the pharaonic epochs, than such windows : but then most of those buildings are either tombs or temples. Civil architecture in Egypt had to fulfil pretty much the same requirements as in other countries. It was, therefore, obliged to employ the means which have been found necessary in every other countr- and at every other period. The employment of the window is not the only structural peculiarity in the pavilion of Medinet-Abou : upon the walls which surround the small court, and between the first and second stories, there are carved stone brackets or consoles, supporting flat slabs of stone. It has sometimes been asserted that these brackets formed