the sands of Saqāra, shows how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former. Dean Stanley[1] has described these:
"Long galleries, hewn in the rock and opening from time to time—say every fifty yards—into high-arched vaults, under each of which reposes the most magnificent black marble sarcophagus that can be conceived—a chamber rather than a coffin[2]—smooth and sculptured within and without; grander by far than ever the granite sarcophagi of the Theban king,—how much grander than any human sepulchres anywhere else! And all for the successive corpses of the bull Apis! These galleries formed part of the great temple of Serapis, in which the Apis mummies were deposited; and here they lay, not in royal, but in divine state. The walls of the entrances are covered with ex-votos. In one porch there is a painting at full length, black and white, of the Bull himself as he was in life."
No one who has seen the tombs of these strange gods can doubt the accounts given by the classical writers as to the extravagant expenses incurred at a single funeral. But if one of the funerals of an Apis cost fifty talents, not less than a hundred talents are said to have been expended by curators of other sacred
- ↑ "Sinai and Palestine," p. lii.
- ↑ A breakfast-party has been held in one of these coffins.
