The Ancient Egyptian Tombs

The Egyptian tomb had two parts ; the burial chamber down below, which contained the body and was never to be disturbed; and the chapel above, which has meant to be entered by the living, where the spirit of the deceased could meet with his relatives and the officiating priests at a funeral feast. Let us extend this principle to the greatest of the tombs, the pyramids. 

Giza Pyramids Complex

They were made to be the graves of something more than mere men ; the king was to be worshiped by all his people on earth and to be received among the gods above, so the kings had devised for themselves a building on a much grander scheme, but not departing from the invariable principle, that a tomb consisted of two parts, one for the living and one for the dead. The pyramid itself is the funeral vault. Its dark recesses, once the king had been laid to rest within, were never to be violated by the foot of the living, but the funerary ritual in his honor was carried on in a temple outside.


 At the end of the temple, up against the west wall of the pyramid, there was a granite "stela" or false door, just as in a private grave, before which the offerings were placed. The temple of the Great Pyramid has been entirely destroyed, except for a few square feet of its black basalt pavement, which we cross on the way to the Sphinx, but there are considerable remains of the temples of the Second and Third Pyramids.

SPHINX

 A causeway led up to the temple from the desert and at the lower end of it there was another temple a sort of magnificent gateway where processions arriving on foot, on donkey, or by boat across the flooded fields in the inundation time, met, went through some preliminary ritual and passed along up the causeway to the temple itself.
The lines of these causeways can be traced from the desert edge both to the Second and Third Pyramids, and are very distinctly to be seen at Abusir, where the entire groups of temple, valley temple and causeway, are in much better preservation than at Giza. But at Giza there is the finest of all the "valley" or "gateway" temples. This is the granite temple near the Sphinx, which is often called the Temple of the Sphinx, but which really is the great entrance to the Second Pyramid.

 No one should fail to go into this temple, which, in its massive simplicity, is one of the most remarkable things in Egypt. When we consider that the granite blocks of which it is built must have come from Aswan, nearly 600 miles up the Nile, we are filled with amazement at the mechanical skill that had already been arrived at 5000 years ago.

The weight of some of the stones in the walls is estimated at 12 or 14 tons, while that of the large columns at the intersection of the aisles cannot be less than 18 tons. This is one of the grandest and simplest of all buildings; it has no ornament whatever on the walls, but originally the unpaved spaces which we see on the floor were occupied by statues of king Chephren. Several of these statues are in Cairo Museum : the finest, which must have been placed at the end of the central aisle, is a superb piece of sculpture in black diorite, one of the toughest of stones and one of the most difficult to carve. This splendid royal portrait ought to be seen by everyone ; it stands in the first of the Old Empire Rooms, directly opposite to the door, in the Cairo Museum. The Great Sphinx itself belongs to the Second Pyramid group, but it is an accidental adjunct, so to speak, and not an essential part of the pyramid plan.

CAUSEWAY

We can see that it is a spur of natural rock which must originally have had some resemblance to a couching lion. The Sphinx is a mythical animal, compounded of the head of a man with the body of a lion and signifying the union of strength and wisdom. King Chephren conceived the grand idea of carving this huge rock into a representation of himself in this symbolical form, which should stand, like a guardian god, watching over the entrance to his temple. This idea of his was forgotten in after ages and the later Egyptians worshiped the Sphinx as a form of the Sun god without reference to any king or to the neighboring buildings, and it is only in very recent years that systematic research has discovered what was its original, purpose.