ck; it cuts and chisels the living rock itself. In every country the
first idea that seems to occur to man, when he has the mortal remains of
his own people to make away with, is to confide them to the earth. In
mountainous countries rock is everywhere near the soil and rises through it
here and there, especially on the slopes of the hills. It is as a rule both
soft enough to be easily cut with a proper tool, and hard enough, or at
least sufficiently capable of hardening when exposed to the air, faithfully
to preserve any form that may be given to it. As soon as man emerged from
barbarism and conceived the desire to carry with him into the next world
the goods he had enjoyed in this, the hastily cut hole of the savage became
first an ample chamber and then a collection of chambers. It became a
richly furnished habitation, a real palace. But even then the features that
distinguish a house of the living from one of the dead were carefully
preserved. The largest of the tombs in the Biban-el-Molouk is no more than
the development of the primitive grave. As for those tombs in which the
sepulchral chamber is above the ground, as in the famous Mausoleum of
Halicarnassus, they are merely brilliant exceptions, embodiments of
princely caprice or architectural ambition. Funerary architecture is, in
virtue of its destination, a subterranean architecture, an architecture of
the rock. The countries in which it has been managed with the greatest
power and originality are those whose soil lent itself most kindly to the
work of excavation. The limestone and sandstone chains of the Nile valley,
the abrupt flanks of Persian ravines, of Cappadocian and Lycian hillsides,
and the rocky slopes of Greece and Etruria, were excellently fitted for the
work of the funerary architect.

If the civilization of the Mesopotamian Semites had originated in the
country above Nineveh, at the foot of those hills in which the Tigris has
its springs, the fathers of the people would perhaps have cut tomb chambers
like those of Egypt in the soft gypsum, and, in later years, their
descendants, instead of breaking entirely with the traditions of the past
would have raised _tumuli_ in the plains and constructed within them brick
chambers to take the place of vaults cut in the living rock. Chaldaea would
then have been dotted over with sepulchral mounds like those with which the
steppes of central Russia are covered. Nothing of the kind has as yet been
discovered; no