[Illustration: 320.jpg SIGNS, ARMS AND INSTRUMENTS]
All the knowledge of the Egyptian painters, and all the technical skill of their artificers in ceramic, must have been employed to compose such harmoniously balanced decorations, with their free handling of line and colour, and their thousands of rosettes, squares, stars, and buttons of varicoloured pastes.
* This temple has been known since the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the Louvre is in possession of some fragments from it which came from Salts collection; it was rediscovered in 1870, and some portions of it were transferred by Mariette to the Boulaq Museum. The remainder was destroyed by the fellahîn, at the instigation of the enlightened amateurs of Cairo, and fragments of it have passed into various private collections. The decoration has been attributed to Chaldoan influence, but it is a work purely Egyptian, both in style and in technique.
[Illustration: 321.jpg THE COLOSSAL OSIRIAN FIGURES in THE FIRST COURT AT MEDINET-HABU]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.
The difficulties to overcome were so appalling, that when the marvellous work was once accomplished, no subsequent attempt was made to construct a second like it: all the remaining structures of Ramses III., whether at Memphis, in the neighbourhood of Abydos, or at Karnak, were in the conventional style of the Pharaohs. He determined, nevertheless, to give to the exterior of the Memnonium, which he built near Medinet-Habu for the worship of himself, the proportions and appearance of an Asiatic Migdol, influenced probably by his remembrance of similar structures which he had seen during his Syrian campaign. The chapel itself is of the ordinary type, with its gigantic pylons, its courts surrounded by columns--each supporting a colossal Osirian statue--its hypostyle hall, and its mysterious cells for the deposit of spoils taken from the peoples of the sea and the cities of Asia. His tomb was concealed at a distant spot in the Biban-el-Moluk, and we see depicted on its walls the same scenes that we find in the last resting-place of Seti I. or Ramses II., and in addition to them, in a series of supplementary chambers, the arms of the sovereign, his standards, his treasure, his kitchen, and the preparation of offerings which were to be made to him. His sarcophagus, cut out of an enormous block of granite, was brought for sale to Europe at the beginning of this century, and Cambridge obtained possession of its cover, while the Louvre secured the receptacle itself.