. A history of art in ancient Egypt . e place and his acolytes, do not occur in the constructedtemples. In the latter the tabernacle which stood in the secoswas too small to hold anything larger than a statuette or think that the cause of this difference may be guessed. Atthe time these rock temples were cut, the Pharaohs to whom theyowed their existence no doubt assigned a priest or priests to their position, sometimes in desert solitudes, as in the caseof the Speos Artemidos, sometimes in places only inhabited for anintermittent period, in the quarries at Silsilis for inst
. A history of art in ancient Egypt . e place and his acolytes, do not occur in the constructedtemples. In the latter the tabernacle which stood in the secoswas too small to hold anything larger than a statuette or think that the cause of this difference may be guessed. Atthe time these rock temples were cut, the Pharaohs to whom theyowed their existence no doubt assigned a priest or priests to their position, sometimes in desert solitudes, as in the caseof the Speos Artemidos, sometimes in places only inhabited for anintermittent period, in the quarries at Silsilis for instance, or inprovinces which had been conquered by Egypt and might belost to her again, rendered it impossible that they could be servedand guarded in the ample fashion which was easy enough inthe temples of Memphis, Abydos and Thebes. All theseconsiderations suggested that, instead of a shrine containing ^ There are two polygonal columns resembling those at Beni-Hassan in the smallspeos at Beit-el-Wali (Fig. 237). PF. /. 0 J to so Jo -fo I I 1 I I l_ so Fig. 250.—Dayr-el-Bahari ; according to M. liiuii. The Temple under the New Empire. 421 some small figure or emblem, statues of a considerable size, fromsix to eight or ten feet high, should be employed, and that theyshould be actually chiselled in the living rock itself and leftattached to it by the whole of their posterior surfaces. By theirsize and by their incorporation with the rock out of which boththey and their surroundings were cut, such statues would defendthemselves efficiently against all attempts on the part of spite of their age several of these statues came down to us ina sufficiently good state of preservation to allow Champollion andhis predecessors to recognize with certainty the divine personageswhom they represented. During the last fifty years they havesuffered as much at the hands of ignorant and stupid tourists asthey did in the whole of the many centuries during which theywere e
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