tality which
left the body at death had to be restored to the statue, which
represented the deceased in the _ka_-house.[34]

In my earlier attempts[35] to interpret these problems, I adopted the
view that the making of portrait statues was the direct outcome of the
practice of mummification. But Dr. Alan Gardiner, whose intimate
knowledge of the early literature enables him to look at such problems
from the Egyptian's own point of view, has suggested a modification of
this interpretation. Instead of regarding the custom of making statues
as an outcome of the practice of mummification, he thinks that the two
customs developed simultaneously, in response to the two-fold desire to
preserve both the actual body and a representation of the features of
the dead. But I think this suggestion does not give adequate recognition
to the fact that the earliest attempts at funerary portraiture were made
upon the wrappings of the actual mummies.[36] This fact and the evidence
which I have already quoted from Junker make it quite clear that from
the beginning the embalmer's aim was to preserve the body and to convert
the mummy itself into a simulacrum of the deceased. When he realized
that his technical skill was not adequate to enable him to accomplish
this double aim, he fell back upon the device of making a more perfect
and realistic portrait statue apart from the mummy. But, as I have
already pointed out, he never completely renounced his ambition of
transforming the mummy itself; and in the time of the New Empire he
actually attained the result which he had kept in view for nearly twenty
centuries.

In these remarks I have been referring only to funerary portrait
statues. Centuries before the attempt was made to fashion them modellers
had been making of clay and stone representations of cattle and human
beings, which have been found not only in Predynastic graves in Egypt
but also in so-called "Upper Palaeolithic" deposits in Europe.

But the fashioning of realistic and life-size human portrait-statues for
funerary purposes was a new art, which gradually developed in the way I
have tried to depict. No doubt the modellers made use of the skill they
had acquired in the practice of the older art of rough impressionism.

Once the statue was made a stone-house (the _serdab_) was provided for
it above ground[37]. As the dolmen is a crude copy of the _serdab_[38]
it can be claimed as one of the ultimate results of the practice of
mum