ABSTRACT
The oldest buildings in Egypt are Tombs, and whether large or small they reflect in every age the religious ideas of those who built them. The excavations made in recent years show that the Egyptian tomb in the first instance was an oval hollow, either dug in the sand, or roughly cut in the limestone, and when the body had been laid therein, it was covered over with sand. It was, however, soon found that the wild animals scratched away the sand, and dragged out the bodies and devoured them; to prevent this the friends of the dead laid slabs of stone loosely over the hollow in the ground. As time went on these slabs of stone were better fitted and plaster was used to keep them together, and finally the sides and bottom of the grave were lined with mud bricks or stone slabs. Thus the stone (or brick) lined grave is the oldest building in Egypt, and the Egyptians made it as a result of their belief in the resurrection of the body. But even at this early period there must have been numbers of the dead who were laid to their rest in the sand. After a further lapse of time and as a result of the development of religious ideas, men began to raise stone structures over the graves, whereon they might Jay their offerings to the dead, and hold some kind of intercourse with them. What the earliest structures were like we do not know, but in the earlier part of the historic period the kings, and nobles, and high ofticials, were buried in chambers cut in the solid rock several yards below the surface of the ground, and rectangular chambers made 01 stones were built over them. The tops of such structures were perfectly flat, and the sides sloped outwards very slightly; a building of this kind is commonly called
Ma~ta.ba, because it resembles a bench. They did not
re3emble portions of pyramids, but, as Mariette said, a l1la~taba somewhat resembles a section cut horizontally Ollt of an obelisk, supposing the obelisk to ha\'e a rectangular base. The walls are of varying thickness, and few are built in exactly the same way j it is a common characteristic of them all that the cores are made of very poor materials. It is hard to understand why the builders, who gave so much time and attention and labour to such buildings, did not go a step further and build their walls solidly throughout.
