It will at once be noticed that the decoration of the
royal tombs is of a totally different type from that with which we have become
familiar in the mastabas of the Old Kingdom, and the rock-tombs of the Middle
Kingdom, or that which we shall shortly see in the mortuary chapels of the
Theban nobles .
In these it had been and was the custom to cover the walls of
the tomb-chapel with scenes representing the routine of daily life, its labours
and pleasures, the idea being that the presence of these representations on the
walls secured the continuance to the dead man of all his activities . But in
the tombs of the kings at Biban el-Meluke, all this is changed entirely, and,
instead of the lively pictures of life in Egypt which have helped us so greatly
to realize and understand the Egyptian and his conception of what life should
be, we are confronted with an endless series of gloomy and often monstrous
texts of a sacred nature, which were supposed to ensure for the Pharaoh a
complete and triumphant life in the underworld .
By the time of the 18th Dynasty, the
ancient funerary texts, such as the Pyramid Texts, which had been
inscribed within the pyramids of the later days of the Old Kingdom, had been
superseded by the much more elaborate formulae of The Book of the Dead and its kindred
volumes, The Book of That which [ or Him Who ] is in
the Underworld, The Book of Gates, and The Sun's Journey through the Underworld ; while recourse was
also had, to make assurance doubly sure, to two other magical books, The Book of the Litanies of Rê, and The Book of
the Opening of the Mouth . The scenes on the walls of the royal tombs consist
almost entirely of representations of the incidents in these books, and
especially from The Book of the Underworld, The Book of
Gates, and The Sun's Journey ; The Book of the Dead being only used as an additional security in a few
cases such as the tomb of Seti I and that of Tuthmosis III, where several
chapters of the book were inscribed, in the former case, upon the sarcophagus,
and in the latter one important chapter was written upon the swathing of the
mummy .
The reason for this departure from ordinary Egyptian
funerary practice is twofold . In the first place, Pharaoh, being himself a
god, " The Good God ", had no need, as his subjects had, for pictured
representations of earthly life, to secure for him the continuance of these
creature comforts in the underworld . All that he needed was the complete ritual
and mythology of the spirit world into which he was now entering as upon his
own inheritance ; and therefore he had no pictures of his ordinary life painted
upon his tomb . It has been held that this confidence went to the extent of not
having any material comforts of life, such as are often found in the tombs of
commoners, buried along with him ; but the finding of the chariot of Tuthmosis
IV, and the bow of Amenhotep II indicates that this was not so, and the
opposite has been conclusively proved by the discovery of the extraordinarily
rich provision in the tomb of Tutankhamun . Egyptian religious practice was
obviously not entirely consistent in this detail, any more than in other
aspects of belief and practice .
The other reason is that the rock-tombs of the Valley
of the Kings do not correspond to the tomb-chapels of the nobles in any manner
. What they really correspond to is the actual burial-shafts of the tombs of
the nobles, which are not decorated at all . The royal mortuary temple on the
plain is the thing which corresponds to the mortuary chapel of the courtier ;
and on the walls of the mortuary temple, the royal hero is represented either
in his warlike aspect, as on the outside walls, or as communing with his
fellow-gods on the inside . So that there is no really vital discrepancy
between the two systems, the real difference being that the Pharaoh's needs in
the underworld are of a more heroic type, as might be expected from his divine
nature, and are therefore met by the more sacred scenes of the temple, while his
security in the underworld is more thoroughly secured by his pictured tomb,
whereas the burial-shaft of his noble contained no such provision, and he had
to secure himself by carrying with him a manuscript of The Book of the Dead or some kindred volume .
Accordingly the pictures which we meet with in the
royal tombs are simply the translation into pictorial form of the religious
conceptions and theories of the books which have been mentioned . They relate
in the main to two ideas : first a solar belief, in which the dead king is
identified with Rê the sun-god, and, second an Osirian belief, in which he is identified
with Osiris . As the sun disappeared at night beneath the horizon, so the
Pharaoh on his death disappeared from the world ; as the sun was believed to
journey in his barque by night through the twelve divisions of the underworld,
which were marked by the twelve hours, so that dead Pharaoh, absorbed into or
identified with the sun, journeyed in the solar barque through the twelve
realms of the dead, bringing life and light to them as he passed ; finally, as
the sun rose again in the morning, so, in theory, the Pharaoh would return to
life when the eternal morning came . In the meantime he had to be possessed of
all the knowledge and all the magical formulae which would enable him to pass
the twelve portals of the divisions of the underworld, and to overcome the
serpents by which they were guarded ; and the easiest way to secure this was to
depict and inscribe it all upon the walls of his tomb .
The other belief was that of the Pharaoh's
identification with Osiris, a belief which was gradually democratized till it
applied, not only to royalty, but to every dead person . Osiris was unjustly
slain, and after his death unjustly accused before the gods, and justified in
their presence . So the king passed under the power of death, and was justified
( of course merely a formality in his case, as he was a god already ) ; and
thereafter he entered, as Osiris, into his eternal kingdom . It is to satisfy
this latter conception that we find some of the chapters of the Book of the Dead inscribed in the tombs, insisting on the Osirian
view, rather than on the solar .
While all this has its own interest from the point of
view of the development of Egyptian religious, it must be confessed that it
makes the walls of the royal tombs singularly dull and monotonous, a sad
contrast to the abounding life and interest of the mortuary chapels of the
nobles . Nor is the dullness any way lessened by the quite obvious fact that
the ancient scribes who were responsible for the transcription of the religious
texts and the choice of the scenes very often had not the least conception of
the meaning of what they were writing or causing to be depicted, but regarded
the meaningless jargon merely as a part of the magical hocus-pocus, all the
more potent if unintelligible, which infallibly secured the royal blessedness
in the world beyond .
There is much that is of extreme interest in Egyptian
religious conceptions ; but the Valley of the Kings is not the place to seek
it, and the endless repetitions of uncomprehended and incomprehensible
formulae, and of scenes which are as unintelligible as the texts they are
supposed to illustrate induce a feeling of deadly monotony very different from
the impression of vitality and human interest produced by the chapels of the
nobles .
A kind of morbid interest may be created for a while
by the grim and weird representations of monsters, serpents, demons, headless
enemies, and all the other paraphernalia of a world which never was nor will be
; but it soon gives place to mere weariness, and even the beautiful workmanship
of a tomb such as that of Seti I cannot altogether atone for the uninteresting
character of the subjects upon which it has been bestowed .
The Valley is now kept in a state of complete order, which,
while undoubtedly adding to the comfort of the visitor and the security of the
priceless relics of antiquity which it contains, detracts no less certainly
from the impression of wild and desolate loneliness which it formerly gave . It
is not altogether easy to reconcile dreams of the romance of the grim valley of
the past with trim paths, sentry-boxes and iron gateways ; yet such things are
necessities of the case, and help to preserve for the future such a mass of
extraordinary and wonderful work as is unparalleled elsewhere in the world .
The lighted tombs are lit for visitors all weekdays .
If possible, it would be well for those whose time is limited to take the tombs
which they desire to see in the order in which they have already been
classified, so that the progress of the development of the royal tomb of the
Empire may be followed consecutively .
If it is desired to visit any other tombs than those
which have been mentioned as accessible, now, this is possible . But the
average visitor will probably find enough to satisfy, if not to satiate
curiosity within the limits of the accessible seventeen, if not within those of
the eight tombs .
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