ON ROYAL ARCHITECTURE
On the reverse of this copying stone was a drawing of
the special scarab placed over the heart of the eviscerated corpse during
mummification. Nebre had a careful copy of the correct text for this amulet
too, its spell precisely the same as it appears in the Book of the Dead:
'May nothing oppose me in the judgement in the presence of the Lord of
the trial, Osiris. Let it be said of me, of what I have done, "his deeds
are right and true", may nothing happen against me in the presence of the
great god Osiris.' The prayer had been composed by Thoth, a god who, when
Nebre made his copy, was at least zooo years old and, for its full power
to become manifest, it had to be carved in hieroglyphs on the flat underside
of a large green-stone scarab set in gold.points for the lay-out of the
tomb's decorations. Thus, using the simplest quarrying tools - hammers
of hard stone bound into wooden hefts and copper adzes and spikes - the
villagers were able to make tombs that were marvels of precision. The architecture
of King Ramesses' tomb, for example, was accurate to within a hundredth
of an inch, and King Merneptah's was almost as fine: an absolute precision
to last throughout eternity.
This exact architecture was carefully reproduced from
reign to reign. Tradition determined the exact size, order and number of
the rooms, pillars and corridors in the tombs and even the locations of
the sacred texts, the stories of the royal progress through the underworld,
carved on the tombs' walls. The rite of constructing a royal underworld
allowed very little deviation from a primeval masterplan, the perfect original.
But despite this enormous burden of precedent, there was also room for
refinement and even, sometimes, for a little experimentation, for Egyptian
architects liked nothing better than to improve and simplify the designs
of their predecessors. One small change typical of many in Merneptah's
tomb was the relocation of scenes traditionally placed just inside the
doorway of the tomb.
KING MERNEPTAH and the GANG OF WORKERS
King Merneptah 'joined with the god who made him' and
was 'united with the sun disc' in his early sixties, in the thirteenth
year of his rule. Unfortunately, the lower sections of his tomb were still
unfinished. Quickly the gangs' carpenters filled the burial chamber with
scaffolding made of heavy beams of local wood held together with tensioned
ropes and, whilst the King's corpse was being mummified, the room was plastered
and the traditional scenes were painted, each in its proper place, in fresh
hot colours on its walls and vault. It must have been during this same
strange period, when no king ruled and the universe held its breath, that
the tomb commissioners discovered a drastic error in their plans. For the
massive black granite prism, the final outer cover of the royal coffins,
was too large to pass down through the tomb. Hurriedly, all the doorjambs
in the upper corridors, each one of which had been carefully sculpted and
painted years before, were cut away and their gaudy fragments taken out
into the sunlight and dumped at the end of the rocky bay behind the tomb.
New plans were then drawn up showing how the King would lie inside his
coffins under the three granite lids, and an attempt was made to pass the
big black stone into the burial chamber. But in the narrow corridors at
the bottom of the tomb there was precious little room for manoeuvre and
the block was abandoned half-way down the tomb, shining like a stranded
whale.
But now, after seventy days, the King's corpse had
been gutted and desiccated on its bed of patron, then basted with resins
and gums, wrapped ready for its eternal journey. Light as a blown egg,
and hard as a statue, tightly bandaged by his priests, Merneptah lay in
the pinewood cofflns that had waited five years to hold him. Time pressed
on the tombmakers, and the royal funeral, which depended on the movements
of the stars and planets, could wait no longer. So, late on a summer day,
as the sun dropped through the slot of the horizon and the evening desert
glowed, the King was carried over the western hills and down into his underworld.
Passing now under the gaze of the gods and goddess of the walls, the procession
picked its way down into the tomb through the stacks of royal possessions
that had been brought from palaces all over Egypt, then through heaps of
amulets and vases, copied in the most part from objects of temple ritual.
Then, deep in the tomb, they passed by the great black block, abandoned
in the corridor, and down, finally, to the burial chamber. There, under
the freshly-painted vault, the men of the gangs lowered the two smaller
lids over the encoffined king, each one ringing as it touched bedrock.
There, too, they left the procession's paraphernalia: the priests' jewels,
the processional statue of Anubis, the jackal-god who had guided them to
the cemetery, the King's viscera embalmed in a special casket. Then the
priests gathered the gods about the sarcophagus, installed the magic amulets
in their places and lit the golden torches that would illuminate the chamber
after all of them had gone. Sweeping their footprints away as they went,
the priests left the tomb, shutting and sealing its doorways one by one;
King Merneptah was set in his underworld, and once again the compact between
Egypt and its gods was renewed.