at the earnest request of his mother Andromache, laid out upon the shield of his father and buried in the same tumbos or barrow.c Interment in the barrow, of an eminent person, appears to have been a desire commonly entertained by their family and descendants. Orestes, according to the authority of Euripides, most earnestly entreats his friend Pylades to bury the bodies of himself and his sister Electra in the barrow of his father Agamemnon. The bones and urns found in many barrows shew that this desire was commonly entertained by persons of all countries and nations, so long as barrows continued to be used for interment. The reason for this desire may be found in the persuasion that the barrow was a temple of the personage there first interred; and farther, that the spirits of the persons buried there might form a society as when resident on earth. That the spirits of the persons interred in the barrow made it the chief place of their abode after death, was a belief universal. The antiquity and confidence of this belief may be seen in the following passage in the Helena of Euripides, in which Menelaus thus addresses Theonoë the daughter of the antiquated god Proteus : Thus will I at thy father's barrow speak, No authority can be found in which this belief is more strongly affirmed than in the Erse poems of Ossian, which, however marred by foolish interpolations, teach what was believed universally to be true when they speak of the spirits constantly abiding, and sometimes speaking in shrill voices on the hill of burial. It was on this belief that men and animals, even utensils of various kinds, were buried in the © Euripid. Troad. v. 1123. d Euripid. Orest. v. 1064. barrow with the deceased. Achilles slew twelve noble Trojan youths at the pyre of his beloved Patroclus, that they might be his attendant slaves after death.f The taph or barrow of Patroclus was consecrated by abundant sacrifices, and by the celebration of games, at which, as in the Olympic of later ages, the gods were supposed to take much interest. At the Celtic barrows the relatives and friends of the persons interred were wont occasionally to perform the deasuil and other rites. At the taphs of the Grecian heroes that fell at Troy, but especially at that of Achilles, Alexander the Great invading the empire of Darius, repeated the ancient religious rites with great magnificence, in reverence of the memory of the dead. Perhaps policy may have been with him a powerful motive. The omen of victory might have no little influence on the minds of the Macedonian soldiers, and have contributed greatly to their subsequent successes and conquests. These circumstances invite notice; they shew that the taph or barrow was esteemed as a temple, for that similar rites and observances attended the consecration and dedication of both. The height and dimensions of these sacred structures were, most commonly, great in proportion to the means of the constructors, and the zealous respect entertained for the deceased. In some instances the pride and vanity of surviving relatives induced them to raise sepulchral barrows of dimensions greater than accorded with the rank or merit of the person interred; greater also than the means of surviving relatives could well supply; inconvenient also from the space they occupied in the places where they were raised. The great Roman orator notices these extravagances in his Treatise on Laws. He observes that it had been wisely provided by the laws of Solon that no one should make a sepulchre, a taph or barrow of earth being plainly in f Iliad. ¥. 152, k, t. λ.. Cic. de Leg. lib. ii. c. 26. tended, of larger dimensions than such as three men might raise in three days; and farther, that even these should not be decorated by plaster work, nor a Hermes (a pillar with the head of a Mercury) be set up on it. Hence it is evident that in the time of Solon, the famed Athenian legislator, taphs or barrows of earth were the only sepulchres used in Greece. Such was the antiquity, such the universality of these taphi, tumuli, and barrows. They were, though thus of wide and universal use, all founded upon one and the same principle-the sanctity of temples, the similitudes of the first temple in the Garden of Eden, and symbols of the divine presence. The mighty structures commonly known by the name of the Pyramids of Egypt, are three large quadrangular cones of enormous magnitude situate at Jizeh or Giza, a few miles distant from Cairo.h The height of the greatest is such as to exceed the height of the Church of St. Paul, London, by one hundred and twenty feet; the area of its base is such as would cover the whole of the square of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The two other are smaller structures, but yet of vast dimensions. These structures consist of layers of large stones, which, especially in the great pyramid, form steps by which they may be readily ascended; but it appears from the authority of Herodotus, that they were, when entire, so cased with stone as to present a smooth surface. This casing remains, though much broken, on the lesser pyramids, but is entirely gone from the greatest. The summit of the great pyramid is a platform thirty feet square; of the second, six. The two large pyramids have been found to contain passages leading to rooms containing decisive evidences that they were intended for interment; and the number of them intimates that they were intended for the reception, not of one person only, but for several, very probably all the persons of the family of the builder. h Clarke. Belzoni. Pen. Cyclop. Although this may be supposed to have been the principal purpose for which they were constructed, yet, like all other barrows, they were destined to receive some symbol of the god worshipped by the builder, which might sanctify the whole structure. Cells or chambers in the centres of the first and second pyramids appear to have been appropriated to this purpose. The sarcophagi still extant in each of these central chambers, are such as are well calculated to do honour to the symbol interred. What that may have been it is impossible to determine, the cell having been repeatedly rifled; but it may be conjectured that the embalmed body of a ram, the divine symbol adopted by the builder, was deposited in the sarcophagus to insure the presence of the divine spirit in the mighty structure. Although the mention of pyramids always leads the attention to the great pyramids of Jizeh, yet the number of similar structures situate along the western banks of the Nile is countless. The ingenious traveller Clarke exhibits forms of these which, varying from those of the British barrows, appear in all shapes, some rather whimsical, till they arrive at the vast magnitude of the mighty quadrangular structures of Jizeh. These, as well as their pigmy concomitants, are barrows: they have had interments of animals symbolical of the divine spirit; for bones supposed to have been bones of sacred animals have been deposited in them as sacred relics: their bases are found, on removing the sand, to be surrounded by encompassing areas or platforms, and their summits are calculated to receive altars of sacrifice and shrines also, as with all other barrows. Their quadrangular form, in which they differ from ordinary barrows, many of which may have become round from the decay of ages, may be ascribed to the theories of the times when an enlarged acquaintance with the different regions of the earth had led to the opinion that the earth was not a conical Clarke, Trav. vol. v. chap. 5. hill, as Adam and his immediate descendants had at first imagined, but of a square form, as the ages of later date had been led to conclude. Such were the reasons which, as in other similar instances, gave the quadrangular form to the pyramids, which, like other barrows, were temples of the gods. Who were the builders of the pyramids, or of what nation were Cheops, Cephrenes, and Mycerinus, kings of Egypt, to whom their construction has been assigned? The total opposition as to form, between the pyramids, and temples known to be Egyptian structures, is so wide, as to give assurance that the pyramids were not the work of Egyptian designers. Egyptian structures never rise to any great height, never tend to a point, but are low compared with the massiveness of their bulk, and flat, and square. The pyramids, on the contrary, like the barrow, are all the reverse of the Egyptian temple. Their height is great in proportion to their dimensions, and their form converges towards a lofty point. The Egyptian temples are adorned both within and without with hieroglyphic paintings and sculpture,—in the pyramids there are none. In some of the cells found in the lesser pyramids, a few hieroglyphics are to be seen, but they are on stones taken from some Egyptian temples, destroyed perhaps by the advocates of a different creed; they are placed in the structure of the pyramid with their figures in an inverted position, as if in contempt and derision of the people that had written them. A wide difference is also observable between the interments in the pyramids and interments properly Egyptian. This people always deposit their dead in caves and subterranean catacombs ;—the builders of the pyramids buried their dead, not below, but above the earth's surface. The builders of the pyramids and of the temples of Egyptian architecture formed their structures upon principles entirely different; the former made the raised altar the model of all their work, |