The Natives Call This Monument Kaszr Faraoun (Arabic), Or Pharaoh’S
Castle; And Pretend That It Was The Residence Of A Prince.
But it was
rather the sepulchre of a prince, and great must have been the opulence
of a city, which could dedicate such monuments to the memory of its
rulers.
[P.426] From this place, as I before observed, the Syk widens, and the
road continues for a few hundred paces lower down through a spacious
passage between the two cliffs. Several very large sepulchres are
excavated in the rocks on both sides; they consist generally of a single
lofty apartment with a flat roof; some of them are larger than the
principal chamber in the Kaszr Faraoun. Of those which I entered, the
walls were quite plain and unornamented; in some of them are small side
rooms, with excavations and recesses in the rock for the reception of
the dead; in others I found the floor itself irregularly excavated for
the same purpose, in compartments six to eight feet deep, and of the
shape of a coffin; in the floor of one sepulchre I counted as many as
twelve cavities of this kind, besides a deep niche in the wall, where
the bodies of the principal members of the family, to whom the sepulchre
belonged, were probably deposited.
On the outside of these sepulchres, the rock is cut away perpendicularly
above and on both sides of the door, so as to make the exterior facade
larger in general than the interior apartment.
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