DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55201#0095
82 EXCAVATIONS AT DEIR EL BAHRI
hundred-year-old Eleventh Dynasty tombs on the hillside, ordered
his engineers to make the like for him.
He chose the broadest Eleventh Dynasty court and ramp in the row
and appropriated the eastern half of it. The brick fajade of the older
tomb was cut away, and a sort of pylon and porch were built in its
stead, with an ornate sandstone doorway leading to a long and lofty
vaulted chapel tunneled in the rock. Behind this there was a dark
room flanked by little closets for funeral furniture, and a precipitous
stairway down into the subterranean burial crypts below. The pylon
was an elaboration of the austere simplicity of the Eleventh Dynasty
tombs, but something of their effect at a distant view was obtained by
grading a ramp up the hillside on their model. The limestone chips
thrown out from quarrying the inner chambers were heaped in a long
pile down the center of the original ramp, whose eastern side was now
re-walled, and a narrow alley was thus created up to Nesy-pe-ka-
shuti’s tomb.
The decoration of the chapel walls was done in the characteristic
taste of the day, from copies of tombs as old as the pyramids (pl. 91).
Just such files of men and women laden with baskets of food, or butch-
ers slaughtering beeves, carved almost two thousand years before
Nesy-pe-ka-shuti’s day, can be seen in the chapels of the mastabas in
the Metropolitan Museum. But here and there scenes far later than
the pyramid age obtrude into their archaistic surroundings. A frag-
ment of women wailing at a funeral with hands fluttering above their
heads in an abandon of grief—paid for according to oriental custom,
at so much per day—was a scene that no Old Kingdom artist would
have known how to draw, but upon which Nesy-pe-ka-shuti’s artists
lavished all their ingenuity.
In fact, we found very amusing evidences that the artists took far
more interest in trying to draw such subjects than in making the slav-
ish copies they were hired to produce. In their off times they amused
themselves sketching snatches of life on flakes of the paper-white
limestone which littered the ground (pl. 92). One did in a few pen
strokes an old blind singer crouched over his harp with his fingers
plucking the strings, or experimented with a calf, and another tried
a leaping lion, or showed how a horse could be drawn rubbing his
muzzle against his outstretched foreleg. This last is surely a pure
experiment, for probably no scene in the tomb contained any such
figure. In fact, that it was merely a demonstration of skill in draught-
ing is practically proved by a faint charcoal copy on the back by some
heavy-fisted imitator who has produced a dubious quadruped that
hundred-year-old Eleventh Dynasty tombs on the hillside, ordered
his engineers to make the like for him.
He chose the broadest Eleventh Dynasty court and ramp in the row
and appropriated the eastern half of it. The brick fajade of the older
tomb was cut away, and a sort of pylon and porch were built in its
stead, with an ornate sandstone doorway leading to a long and lofty
vaulted chapel tunneled in the rock. Behind this there was a dark
room flanked by little closets for funeral furniture, and a precipitous
stairway down into the subterranean burial crypts below. The pylon
was an elaboration of the austere simplicity of the Eleventh Dynasty
tombs, but something of their effect at a distant view was obtained by
grading a ramp up the hillside on their model. The limestone chips
thrown out from quarrying the inner chambers were heaped in a long
pile down the center of the original ramp, whose eastern side was now
re-walled, and a narrow alley was thus created up to Nesy-pe-ka-
shuti’s tomb.
The decoration of the chapel walls was done in the characteristic
taste of the day, from copies of tombs as old as the pyramids (pl. 91).
Just such files of men and women laden with baskets of food, or butch-
ers slaughtering beeves, carved almost two thousand years before
Nesy-pe-ka-shuti’s day, can be seen in the chapels of the mastabas in
the Metropolitan Museum. But here and there scenes far later than
the pyramid age obtrude into their archaistic surroundings. A frag-
ment of women wailing at a funeral with hands fluttering above their
heads in an abandon of grief—paid for according to oriental custom,
at so much per day—was a scene that no Old Kingdom artist would
have known how to draw, but upon which Nesy-pe-ka-shuti’s artists
lavished all their ingenuity.
In fact, we found very amusing evidences that the artists took far
more interest in trying to draw such subjects than in making the slav-
ish copies they were hired to produce. In their off times they amused
themselves sketching snatches of life on flakes of the paper-white
limestone which littered the ground (pl. 92). One did in a few pen
strokes an old blind singer crouched over his harp with his fingers
plucking the strings, or experimented with a calf, and another tried
a leaping lion, or showed how a horse could be drawn rubbing his
muzzle against his outstretched foreleg. This last is surely a pure
experiment, for probably no scene in the tomb contained any such
figure. In fact, that it was merely a demonstration of skill in draught-
ing is practically proved by a faint charcoal copy on the back by some
heavy-fisted imitator who has produced a dubious quadruped that