How to See the British Museum in Four Visits eBook

William Blanchard Jerrold
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 237 pages of information about How to See the British Museum in Four Visits.

How to See the British Museum in Four Visits eBook

William Blanchard Jerrold
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 237 pages of information about How to See the British Museum in Four Visits.
used by the precise Egyptian artists are still visible on the unfinished parts.  After several other tablets of the twelfth dynasty, is placed (584) a small square one of an earlier date in honour of Chen-bak, an architect, who is seated with his wife, receiving the duty of his children.  Near this is a good specimen of old Egyptian bas-relief on calcareous stone, in honour of a palace officer named Amen-ha (586); and next to it (587) is a tablet in honour of a superintendent of all the gods, named Seraunut.  Hereabouts also is the tablet from Thebes in honour of Hera, a royal scribe (588).  On this tablet the deceased is represented bearing an appropriate feather sceptre before Nameses the ninth of the twentieth dynasty, who is seated on his throne, under the particular guardianship of the God of truth.

The tablet from Thebes marked 593 is that of a judge and his wife, and is dedicated to Osiris and Anup.  Hereon, the lotus flower is represented, with corn and bread.  The next tablet (594) is one in the shape of an altar of libations, and is dedicated to Amenophis I. and the queen Aahmes-Nefer-Ari.  It is ornamented with representations of various foods, including vases of figs.  In this neighbourhood are a few more tablets, including one on which are jars, water-fowl, and bread cakes, (596) and a fragment upon which the head of a king is traceable, marked 595.  The visitor should also notice now the two early Saracenic tombstones presented by Dr. Bowring.  Having examined these, the more remarkable of the sepulchral tablets, or tombstones of the ancient Egyptians, the visitor, still lingering amid the funereal relics of long ages ago, should turn to the

Egyptian sepulchral vases.

As we explained when the visitor was in the Egyptian room, better known as the Mummy room, up stairs, in the course of his second visit, the ancient Egyptians, when they embalmed their dead, extracted the viscera, and deposited them, apart from the body, in four vases, over which the genii of the dead severally presided.  Thus every mummy had, properly, four sepulchral vases; and the collection arranged in the saloon amply illustrates the varieties of ornament expended upon them.  As the visitor has probably forgotten the particular parts assigned separately to the genii, it may be well to repeat here that Amset (who is human-headed,) had the stomach and large intestines under his especial protection Tuautmutf with his jackal-head presided over the heart and lungs; Kebhsnuf, with the fierce head of the widely worshipped hawk, took the gall, bladder, and liver, in charge; while the baboon-headed Hapi reserved to himself the care of the small intestines.  There does not appear to have been any supernatural protector of the brains, which, as we have noticed, were drawn through the nose by the embalmer.  These vases are of the most ancient times, chiefly before the advent of Alexander, after which event the people began to enclose the entrails of their dead

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How to See the British Museum in Four Visits from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.