The last of the important tombs of the northern group
is No. 6, that of Penehsy . its architectural features must have been almost
exactly like those of Meryra I, consisting of a large hall, a second hall (
both columned ), and a shrine .
A. Architectural Features
The Exterior ( Plates 2, 5, 6 ) .
The tomb is excavated at the foot of the boldest of
the rock-faces hereabout, though the full effect is lost by the base being
buried under several feet of debris . As the tomb was at some period a place of
Christian worship, there has been a considerable amount of Coptic building
round its door . The wall of rock has been dressed to a fairly smooth surface
for some distance to right and left of the doorway, a bank of rock being left
along the foot . The entrance is adorned by a portal of the type already
familiar . Both lintel and jambs are sculptured, but the latter are half cut
away, and on the right an apse-shaped niche has been cut out by the Copts .
The Hall ( Plates 2, 3, 4 ) .
The exterior wall is of the customary solidity, and the
thickness has been used for decorative purposes . The interior fulfils the
Egyptian ideal by affording a suite of three chambers, the outer hall as a
place of public gathering and worship, an inner chamber containing the place of
interment, and a smaller shrine as a place of privacy for the deceased . If the
plans be compared with those of Meryra it will be seen that, but for the
addition of an antechamber to that tomb and the unfinished state of its inner
rooms, the two are closely alike, the tomb of Penehsy having evidently been
taken as a general model .
The first hall has been grievously injured through
having been used as a church by the Copts, who have removed the two western
columns of its four columns and substituted a kind of apse for the false door
on the one side of the north wall which once balanced its fellow on the east
side . This violence, combined with minor injuries and the wash of grey plaster
with which the Copts obliterated the sculptures, has given a very sorry aspect
to a hall which the bats, that pest of Egyptian tombs, have, on their part, not
spared .
When fresh from the hands of the designers the hall
was divided by two rows of two columns each, leaving about half the area of the
hall between them . The walls were free for sculpture on all but the north
side, where two false doors occupy half the space . This latter feature does
not recur in any other of these tombs, unless the uncut doors in Meryra's
ante-chamber and the false doors in the inner room of Ahmose represent it . Whether
the portal now destroyed contained such a figure cannot be determined .
The columns differ little essentially, though a good
deal in appearance, from those in Tomb of Meryra ( Plate 2-a ), for in the
latter that detail was probably shown in paint which is here marked by the
chisel . They are much more squat in appearance, being greater in girth though
less in height . Here, too, each of the eight bundles of papyri which the
column represents is again broken up above the sheathing leaves ( not
sculptured here ) into four stems . About halfway between the foot and the
bands under the capital there is a break, the thirty-two stems of which the
column is now built up seeming to be shifted round by half a stem's breadth ( see
drawing of east side ) . This, however, is due in reality to the customary
insertion of shorter papyrus stems, three to each of the eight bundles . Each
of these inserted stalks lies between the original stems and covers them . One
out of the four stems in each of the eight bundles, however, is left visible
and differentiated by being coloured yellow, while the inserted stems are
painted conventionally, blue, red, blue . Thus there are thirty-two divisions,
above as below, twenty-four of them representing the overlaid stems and eight
those underlying . The representation, however, is not congruous with the
conditions ; for it is a division between two stems, and not the surface of one
stem, which forms the centre of a bundle of four and would be left uncovered by
the inserted stems . This error appears plainly on the upper part of the
capital, where the thirty-two original stems again become visible ; for that
stem which was left uncovered is seen not to coincide with any of the
thirty-two, but with a division between them . As the swelling capital represents
the heads of the papyrus, the leaves of the calyx are represented like
sheathing ( red lines on yellow ) on the eight underlying stems which are
visible just above the bands . That the inserted stems consist of eight bundles
of three is plain from the four bands which unite them ( coloured conventionally
blue, red, green, blue, whereas the band of the column itself is a natural
yellow ) . The colouring of these overlaid stems and their bands suggests that
the architect was ignorant of their raison d'etre .
The details of the columns on the West face are
interrupted by a blank space representing an affixed placard . The device on
these tablets is similar to that on the lintels of the doorways, except that
here a space below the cartouches is occupied by a design representing the
union of the Southern and Northern kingdoms, under the symbol of their
representative plants . The sign for " union " occupies the centre .
The whole device on the North column is shown on Plate 4 and the ends of that
on the South column .
It may be well to compare at this point the picture of
a papyrus column from the temple on the West wall ( Plate 4 ) . It will be seen
that the typical column of the artist was of very different proportions from
those in the tomb . In reality the columns when built, not excavated, may have
approached this pattern .
As will be seen from the photograph ( below ), even
the remaining columns have been greatly mutilated . A number of cups have been
cut in the base of the South column, to hold porous water-jars, with ducts for
draining off the overflow into a basin in the floor. Of the destroyed columns
only the abaci remain . The floor of the West half of the hall is very rough .
The gloom of the hall was once relieved by the
brilliant colouring of the walls, the columns, the frieze of cartouches, the
pediment and the ceiling . Of this but little now remains, but the ceiling
designs have been recovered as far as possible . The scheme can be gathered
from Plate 3, and the patterns identified from Plate 9 . Pattern B seems to be
identical with pattern B of Plate 39-a, the blue centre, perhaps, excepted .
What remains of the columns of hieroglyphs between the patterns will be found
on Plate 21 .
The Inner Chamber
This is of the same shape, and almost of the same size
as the outer hall . The ceiling is supported by four columns carrying
architraves . These columns are of the papyrus-bud type like those of the hall,
but no detail at all is shown, and even the contracting foot is not represented
. A small pit in the centre of the room is obviously a subsequent addition .
The place of burial is reached by a stairway of
forty-three steps, which descends along the East wall of the room . After
reaching a landing some distance below, it turns at a sharp angle to the left,
and descends as a curving stairway with a sharp return upon itself at the end .
The chamber is merely a level length of passage . The depth below floor-level
is shown on Plate 3 . The winding stairway is borrowed from the earlier tombs,
and is not repeated in this necropolis .
The Shrine
The third room, conformably to practice, is inscribed,
while the second hall ( theoretically only a passage to the burial chamber ) is
not . The little chamber contained, according to custom, a sitting statue of Penehsy,
but it has been completely perished .
The Sculpture
The work in the tomb, it must be confessed, was not
good, and was, therefore, less able to bear injury . The figures have been
executed for the most part in the stone itself, so that, despite the falling
away of the thin coating of plaster, the sculpture still retains the general
outline and, in places, almost the full measure of the original outline . Scarcely
any plaster is left on the thickness of the outer walls, for instance, yet the
scenes there are the best in the tomb . The plaster must have been a mere
overlay, giving smoothness to the whole and filling up irregularities, as well
as enabling details to be elaborated or supplied in colour . The stiff
treatment of the designs also detracts from the value of the scenes, but this
unattractiveness has been their salvation, the injury shown in Plate 7 being
the only modern mutilation .
As the architecture, so the scheme of subjects also
was taken over for the hall of Meryra ( with an exchange between the East and
West walls ), but carried out there with much individuality and greatly
superior technique . The two efforts show how varied was the skill of the
artists, or the success of their methods of working in plaster .
Coptic Remains
When the Copts sought a place of assembly, the West
false door, which they saw could be adapted to their needs with but little
labour, seems to have drawn them to this tomb . Retaining the cornice of the
original construction, they fashioned an apse having a moulded arch resting on
pilasters with decorated capitals . The apse seems to have been designed with a
view to baptismal immersion, for a font five feet deep occupies nearly the
whole space . Two rough steps would enable a person to scramble from the edge
into the inner room through a narrow aperture which has been cut in the back
wall . But it is not easy to see how any one could be immersed in, or himself
emerge from, the font with any dignity . There is a shallow niche in the walls
of the apse on each side .
The apse having been made, it was impossible to leave
the pagan sculptures close by it in naked assertiveness . Yet the earliest
worshippers seem to have thought it enough to daub the sacred cross and an
Alpha and Omega in red paint over the figure of the Queen . A later generation,
however, was more particular, and, having covered the whole wall with plaster,
( now largely fallen away again ), decorated the surface with the picture of a
saint and floral designs . The decorations in the apse, too, are not original,
but have been renewed on a second coating of plaster from very similar designs .
All the walls on this side of the hall have been covered in like manner with a
thin wash of plaster, which on the West wall has adhered with deplorable
tenacity . Above the cornice there seems to have been a bird with outspread
wings, not, perhaps, without reminiscences of the winged scarab, disc, or
vulture . On each side of the apse are decorated staves (?) .
The wall of the apse is painted gray, with darker
marbling . Separating it from the dome are two borders, the lower showing two
inter-twisted bands ( Plate 6,c ), the upper a branching spray of leaf and
fruit (d) . The latter design is also applied to the soffit of the arch (a, b) .
The moulding of the arch is coloured yellow with a band of white splotches on a
black background . The dome is occupied by the figure of a soaring eagle (?)
sketched in browns of various shades . Its outstretched wings are tripartite ( in
allusion to the seraph of Isaiah's vision ? ), and on its head is a halo or
disc ( perhaps also a reminiscence of the solar hawk ) . It is much broken, and
none of the graffiti here can be read. The lower of the two borders is
continued on the wall to the left of the apse . Below this a singular
decoration, viz. a disc of deep blue glass about five inches across, was added,
set in a bedding of mud-plaster, but at a later time was covered over again . A
cupboard has been cut out in the wall hard by .
Having made their apse in the extreme corner of the
hall, the unsuitability of such a position became evident, and to make it
central to the congregation the tomb was considerably enlarged on this side for
half its height, and the two columns broken away to admit light . Several
grooves in the wall and floor suggest that a partition was erected outside the
line of the architrave . Other relics of this occupation are the arched recess in
the South wall near the entrance and a similar one outside . To judge by the
putlog holes and a deep recess in the East wall, the stairway was bridged over
and the space behind the columns put to some special use . It may be added that
the spectacle of a Christian church thus quartered in a heathen tomb may still
be seen under very similar conditions at Deir Rifeh .
On the South wall of the inner room are painted two
crosses with the Alpha and Omega in the corners, and one or two indecipherable
words or symbols . To the Copts is probably also due a strange squaring out of
the West side of the South wall, and a still more irregular marking out of the
West wall . All this is in black paint .
Part ( 17 ) The
Sculptured Scenes in the Tomb of Penehsy .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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