CARTOUCHES OF RAMESES THE GREAT.
CARTOUCHES OF RAMESES THE GREAT.
CARTOUCHES OF RAMESES THE GREAT.
This being so, the traveler is ill-equipped who goes through Egypt without something more than a mere guide-book knowledge of Rameses II. He is, as it were, content to read the argument and miss the poem. In the desolation of Memphis, in the shattered splendor of Thebes, he sees only the ordinary pathos of ordinary ruins. As for Abou Simbel, the most stupendous historical record ever transmitted from the past to the present, it tells him a but half-intelligible story. Holding to the merest thread of explanation, he wanders from hall to hall, lacking altogether that potent charm of foregone association which no Murray can furnish. Your average Frenchman, straying helplessly through Westminster Abbey under the conduct of the verger, has about as vague a conception of the historical import of the things he sees.
What is true of the traveler is equally true of those who take the Nile vicariously “in connection with Mudie.” If they are to understand any description of Abou Simbel, they must first know something about Rameses II. Let us then, while the Philæ lies moored in the shadow of the rock of Abshek,[74]review, as summarily as may be, the leading facts of this important reign; such facts, that is to say, as are recorded in inscriptions, papyri, and other contemporary monuments.
Rameses II[75]was the son of Seti I, the second Pharaohof the nineteenth dynasty and of a certain Princess Tuaa, described on the monuments as “royal wife, royal mother, and heiress and sharer of the throne.” She is supposed to have been of the ancient royal line of the preceding dynasty, and so to have had, perhaps, a better right than her husband to the double crown of Egypt. Through her, at all events, Rameses II seems to have been in some sense born a king[76]equal in rank, if not in power, with his father; his rights, moreover, were fully recognized by Seti, who accorded him royal and divine honors from the hour of his birth, or, in the language of the Egyptian historians, while he was “yet in the egg.” The great dedicatory inscription of the Temple of Osiris at Abydos,[77]relates how his father took the royal child in his arms, when he was yet little more than an infant, showed him to the people as their king, and caused him to be invested by the great officers of the palace with the double crown of the two lands. The same inscription states that he was a general from his birth, and that as a nursling he “commandedthe body-guard and the brigade of chariot-fighters”; but these titles must, of course, have been purely honorary. At twelve years of age he was formally associated with his father upon the throne, and by the gradual retirement of Seti I from the cares of active government the co-royalty of Rameses became, in the course of the next ten or fifteen years, an undivided responsibility. He was probably about thirty when his father died; and it is from this time that the years of his reign are dated. In other words, Rameses II, in his official records, counts only from the period of his sole reign, and the year of the death of Seti is the “year one” of the monumental inscriptions of his son and successor. In the second, fourth, and fifth years of his monarchy, he personally conducted campaigns in Syria, more than one of the victories then achieved being commemorated on the rock-cut tablets of Nahr-el-Kelb, near Beyrût; and that he was by this time recognized as a mighty warrior is shown by the stela of Dakkeh, which dates from the “third year,” and celebrates him as terrible in battle—“the bull powerful against Ethiopia, the griffin furious against the negroes, whose grip has put the mountaineers to flight.” The events of the campaign of his “fifth year” (undertaken in order to reduce to obedience the revolted tribes of Syria and Mesopotamia) are immortalized in the poem of Pentaur.[78]It was on this occasion that he fought his famous single-handed fight against overwhelming odds, in the sight of both armies under the walls of Kadesh. Three years later he carried fire and sword into the land of Canaan, and in his eleventh year, according to inscriptions yet extant upon the ruined pylons of the Ramesseum at Thebes, he took, among other strong places on sea and shore, the fortresses of Ascalon and Jerusalem.
The next important record transports us to the twenty-first year of his reign. Ten years have now gone by since the fall of Jerusalem, during which time a fluctuating frontier warfare has probably been carried on, to the exhaustion of both armies. Khetasira, Prince of Kheta,[79]sues for peace. An elaborate treaty is thereupon framed, whereby the said prince and “Rameses, chief of rulers,who fixes his frontiers where he pleases,” pledge themselves to a strict offensive and defensive alliance, and to the maintenance of good-will and brotherhood forever. This treaty, we are told, was engraved for the Khetan prince “upon a tablet of silver adorned with the likeness of the figure of Sutekh, the great ruler of Heaven”; while for Rameses Mer-Amen it was graven on a wall adjoining the great hall at Karnak,[80]where it remains to this day.
According to the last clause of this curious document, the contracting parties enter also into an agreement to deliver up to each other the political fugitives of both countries; providing at the same time for the personal safety of the offenders. “Whosoever shall be so delivered up,” says the treaty, “himself, his wives, his children, let him not be smitten to death; moreover, let him not suffer in his eyes, in his mouth, in his feet; moreover, let not any crime be set up against him.”[81]This is the earliest instance of an extradition treaty upon record; and it is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of the clemency with which international law was at that time administered.
Finally the convention between the sovereigns is placed under the joint protection of the gods of both countries: “Sutekh of Kheta, Amen of Egypt and all the thousand gods; the gods, male and female; the gods of the hills, of the rivers, of the great sea, of the winds and the clouds, of the land of Kheta and of the land of Egypt.”
The peace now concluded would seem to have remained unbroken throughout the rest of the long reign of Rameses II. We hear, at all events, of no more wars; and we find the king married presently to a Khetan princess, who, in deference to the gods of her adopted country, takes theofficial name of Ma-at-iri-neferu-Ra, or “Contemplating the beauties of Ra.” The names of two other queens—Nefer-t-ari and Ast-nefert—are also found upon the monuments.
These three were probably the only legitimate wives of Rameses II, though he must also have been the lord of an extensive hareem. His family, at all events, as recorded upon the walls of the Temple at Wady Sabooah, amounted to no less than one hundred and seventy children, of whom one hundred and eleven were princes. This may have been a small family for a great king three thousand years ago. It was but the other day, comparatively speaking, that Lepsius saw and talked with old Hasan, Kashef of Derr—the same petty ruler who gave so much trouble to Belzoni, Burckhardt, and other early travelers—and he, like a patriarch of old, had in his day been the husband of sixty-four wives and the father of something like two hundred children.
For forty-six years after the making of the Khetan treaty, Rameses the Great lived at peace with his neighbors and tributaries. The evening of his life was long and splendid. It became his passion and his pride to found new cities, to raise dikes, to dig canals, to build fortresses, to multiply statues, obelisks, and inscriptions, and to erect the most gorgeous and costly temples in which man ever worshiped. To the monuments founded by his predecessors he made additions so magnificent that they dwarfed the designs they were intended to complete. He caused artesian wells to be pierced in the stony bed of the desert. He carried on the canal begun by his father and opened a water-way between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.[82]No enterprise was too difficult, no project toovast, for his ambition. “As a child,” says the stela of Dakkeh, “he superintended the public works and his hands laid their foundations.” As a man, he became the supreme builder. Of his gigantic structures, only certain colossal fragments have survived the ravages of time; yet those fragments are the wonder of the world.
To estimate the cost at which these things were done is now impossible. Every temple, every palace, represented a hecatomb of human lives. Slaves from Ethiopia, captives taken in war, Syrian immigrants settled in the delta, were alike pressed into the service of the state. We know how the Hebrews suffered, and to what extremity of despair they were reduced by the tasks imposed upon them. Yet even the Hebrews were less cruelly used than some who were kidnaped beyond the frontiers. Torn from their homes, without hope of return, driven in herds to the mines, the quarries, and the brick-fields, these hapless victims were so dealt with that not even the chances of desertion were open to them. The negroes from the south were systematically drafted to the north; the Asiatic captives were transported to Ethiopia. Those who laboredunderground were goaded on without rest or respite, till they fell down in the mines and died.
That Rameses II was the Pharaoh of the captivity,[83]and that Meneptah, his son and successor, was the Pharaoh of the exodus,[84]are now among the accepted presumptions of Egyptological science. The Bible and the monuments confirm each other upon these points, while both are again corroborated by the results of recent geographical and philological research. The “treasure-cities Pithom and Raamses” which the Israelites built for Pharaoh with bricks of their own making, are the Pa-Tum and Pa-Rameses, of the inscriptions, and both have recently been identified by M. Naville, in the course of his excavations conducted in 1883 and 1886 for the Egypt Exploration Fund.
The discovery of Pithom, the ancient biblical “treasure-city” of the first chapter of Exodus, has probably attracted more public attention and been more widely discussed by European savants than any archæological event since the discovery of Nineveh. It was in February, 1883, that M. Naville opened the well-known mound of Tel-el-Maskhutah, on the south bank of the new sweet-water canal in the Wady Tûmilât, and there discovered the foundations and other remains of a fortified city of the kind known in Egyptian as abekhen, or store-fort. Thisbekhen, which was surrounded by a wall thirty feet in thickness, proved to be about twelve acres in extent. In one corner of the inclosure were found the ruins of a temple built by Rameses II. The rest of the area consisted of a labyrinth of subterraneous rectangular cellars, or store-chambers, constructed of sun-dried bricks of large size and divided by walls varying from eight to ten feet in thickness. In the ruins of the temple were discovered several statues more or less broken, a colossal hawk inscribed with the royal ovals of Rameses II, and other works of art dating from the reigns of Osorkon II, Nectanebo and Ptolemy Philadelphus. The hieroglyphic legends engraved upon the statues established the true value of the discovery by giving both the name of the city and the name of the district in which the city was situated; the first being Pa-Tum (Pithom), the “Abode of Tum,” and the second being Thuku-t (Succoth); so identifying “Pa-Tum, in the district of Thuku-t,” with Pithom, the treasure-city built by the forced labor of the Hebrews and Succoth, the region in which they made their first halt on going forth from the land of bondage. Even the bricks with which the great wall and the walls of the store-chambers are built beareloquent testimony to the toil of the suffering colonists and confirm in its minutest details the record of their oppression; some being duly kneaded with straw; others, when the straw was no longer forthcoming, being mixed with the leafage of a reed common to the marsh lands of the delta; and the remainder, when even this substitute ran short, being literally “bricks without straw,” molded of mere clay crudely dried in the sun. The researches of M. Naville further showed that the temple to Tum, founded by Rameses II, was restored, or rebuilt, by Osorkon II, of the twenty-second dynasty; while at a still higher level were discovered the remains of a Roman fortress. That Pithom was still an important place in the time of the Ptolemies is proved by a large and historically important tablet found by M. Naville in one of the store-chambers, where it had been thrown in with other sculptures and rubbish of various kinds. This tablet records repairs done to the canal, an expedition to Ethiopia and the foundation of the city of Arsinoë. Not less important from a geographical point of view was the finding of a Roman milestone which identifies Pithom with Hero (Heroöpolis), where, according to the Septuagint, Joseph went forth to meet Jacob. This milestone gives nine Roman miles as the distance from Heroöpolis to Clysma. A very curious manuscript lately discovered by Sig. Gamurrini in the library of Arezzo, shows that even so late as the fourth century of the Christian era this ancient walled inclosure—the camp, or “Ero Castra,” of the Roman period, the “Pithom” of the Bible—was still known to pious pilgrims as “the Pithom built by the children of Israel;” that the adjoining town, external to the camp, at that time established within the old Pithom boundaries, was known as “Heroöpolis;” and that the town of Rameses was distant from Pithom about twenty Roman miles.[85]
As regards Pa-Rameses, the other “treasure-city” of Exodus, it is conjecturally, but not positively, identified by M. Naville with the mound of Saft-el-Henneh, the scene of his explorations in 1886. That Saft-el-Henneh was identical with “Kes,” or Goshen, the capital town of the “Land of Goshen,” has been unequivocally demonstrated by the discoverer; and that it was also known in the time of Rameses II as “Pa-Rameses” is shown to be highly probable.[86]There are remains of a temple built of black basalt, with pillars, fragments of statues and the like, all inscribed with the cartouches of Rameses II; and the distance from Pithom is just twenty Roman miles.
It was from Pa-Rameses that Rameses II set out with his army to attack the confederate princes of Asia Minor then lying in ambush near Kadesh;[87]and it was hither that he returned in triumph after the great victory. A contemporary letter written by one Panbesa, a scribe, narrates in glowing terms the beauty and abundance of the royal city, and tells how the damsels stood at their doors in holiday apparel, with nosegays in their hands and sweet oil upon their locks, “on the day of the arrival of the war-god of the world.” This letter is in the British Museum.[88]
Other letters written during the reign of Rameses II have by some been supposed to make direct mention of the Israelites.
“I have obeyed the orders of my master,” writes the scribe Kauiser to his superior Bak-en-Ptah, “being biddento serve out the rations to the soldiers, and also to the Aperiu [Hebrews?], who quarry stone for the palace of King Rameses Mer-Amen.” A similar document written by a scribe named Keniamon and couched in almost the same words shows these Aperiu on another occasion to have been quarrying for a building on the southern side of Memphis; in which case Turra would be the scene of their labors.
These invaluable letters, written on papyrus in the hieratic character, are in good preservation. They were found in the ruins of Memphis and now form part of the treasures of the Museum of Leyden.[89]They bring home to us with startling nearness the events and actors of the Bible narrative. We see the toilers at their task and the overseers reporting them to the directors of public works. They extract from the quarry those huge blocks which are our wonder to this day. Harnessed to rude sledges, they drag them to the river side and embark them for transportto the opposite bank.[90]Some are so large and so heavy that it takes a month to get them down from the mountain to the landing-place.[91]Other laborers are elsewhere making bricks, digging canals, helping to build the great wall which reached from Pelusium to Heliopolis, and strengthening the defenses not only of Pithom and Rameses but of all the cities and forts between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Their lot is hard; but not harder than the lot of other workmen. They are well fed. They intermarry. They increase and multiply. The season of their great oppression is not yet come. They make bricks, it is true, and those who are so employed must supply a certain number daily;[92]but the straw is not yet withheld, and the task, though perhaps excessive, is not impossible. For we are here on the reign of Rameses II, and the time when Meneptah shall succeed him is yet far distant. It is not till the king dies that the children of Israel sigh, “by reason of the bondage.”
There are in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, some much older papyri than these two letters of the Leyden collection—some as old, indeed, as the time of Joseph, but none, perhaps, of such peculiar interest. In these, the scribes Kauiser and Keniamon seem still to live and speak. What would we not give for a few more of their letters! These men knew Memphis in its glory and had looked upon the face of Rameses the Great. They might even have seen Moses in his youth while yet he lived under the protection of his adopted mother, a prince among princes. Kauiser and Keniamon lived, and died, and were mummied between three and four thousand years ago; yet these frail fragments of papyrus have survived the wreck of ages, andthe quaint writing with which they are covered is as intelligible to ourselves as to the functionaries to whom it was addressed. The Egyptians were eminently business-like, and kept accurate entries of the keep and labor of their workmen and captives. From the earliest epoch of which the monuments furnish record, we find an elaborate bureaucratic system in full operation throughout the country. Even in the time of the pyramid-builders, there are ministers of public works; inspectors of lands, lakes, and quarries; secretaries, clerks, and overseers innumerable.[93]From all these, we may be sure, were required strict accounts of their expenditure, as well as reports of the work done under their supervision. Specimens of Egyptian book-keeping are by no means rare. The Louvre is rich in memoranda of the kind; some relating to the date-tax; others to the transport and taxation of corn, thepayment of wages, the sale and purchase of land for burial, and the like. If any definite and quite unmistakable news of the Hebrews should ever reach us from Egyptian sources it will almost certainly be through the medium of documents such as these.
An unusually long reign, the last forty-six years of which would seem to have been spent in peace and outward prosperity, enabled Rameses II to indulge his ruling passion without interruption. To draw up anything like an exhaustive catalogue of his known architectural works would be equivalent to writing an itinerary of Egypt and Ethiopia under the nineteenth dynasty. His designs were as vast as his means appear to have been unlimited. From the delta to Gebel Barkal, he filled the land with monuments dedicated to his own glory and the worship of the gods. Upon Thebes, Abydos, and Tanis he lavished structures of surpassing magnificence. In Nubia, at the places now known as Gerf Hossayn, Wady Sabooyah, Derr, and Abou Simbel, he was the author of temples and the founder of cities. These cities, which would probably be better described as provincial towns, have disappeared; and but for the mention of them in various inscriptions we should not even know that they had existed. Who shall say how many more have vanished, leaving neither trace nor record? A dozen cities of Rameses[94]may yet lie buried under some of these nameless mounds which follow each other in such quick succession along the banks of the Nile in Middle and Lower Egypt. Only yesterday, as it were, the remains of what would seem to have been a magnificent structure decorated in a style absolutely unique, were accidentally discovered under the mounds of Tel-el-Yahoodeh,[95]about twelve miles to the northeast of Cairo. There are probably fifty such mounds, none of which have been opened, in the delta alone; and it is no exaggeration to say that there must be some hundreds between the Mediterranean and the first cataract.
An inscription found of late years at Abydos shows that Rameses II reigned over his great kingdom for the space of sixty-seven years. “It is thou,” says Ramses IV, addressing himself to Osiris, “it is thou who wilt rejoice me with such length of reign as Ramses II, the great god, in his sixty-seven years. It is thou who wilt give me the long duration of this great reign.”[96]
If only we knew at what age Ramses II succeeded to the throne, we should, by help of this inscription, know also the age at which he died. No such record has, however, transpired, but a careful comparison of the length of time occupied by the various events of his reign, and above all the evidence of ago afforded by the mummy of this great Pharaoh, discovered in 1886, show that he must have been very nearly, if not quite, a centenarian.
“Thou madest designs while yet in the age of infancy,” says the stela of Dakkeh. “Thou wert a boy wearing the sidelock, and no monument was erected and no order was given without thee. Thou wert a youth aged ten years, and all the public works were in thy hands, laying their foundations.” These lines, translated literally, cannot, however, be said to prove much. They certainly contain nothing to show that this youth of ten was, at the time alluded to, sole king and ruler of Egypt. That he was titular king, in the hereditary sense, from his birth[97]and during the lifetime of his father, is now quite certain. That he should, as a boy, have designed public buildings and superintended their construction is extremely probable. The office was one which might well have been discharged by a crown prince who delighted in architecture and made it his peculiar study. It was, in fact, a very noble office—an office which from the earliest days of the ancient empire had constantly been confided to princes of the royal blood;[98]but it carried with it no evidence of sovereignty. The presumption, therefore,would be that the stela of Dakkeh (dating as it does from the third year of the sole reign of Rameses II) alludes to a time long since past, when the king as a boy held office under his father.
The same inscription, as we have already seen, makes reference to the victorious campaign in the south. Rameses is addressed as “the bull powerful against Ethiopia; the griffin furious against the negroes;” and that the events hereby alluded to must have taken place during the first three years of his sole reign is proved by the date of the tablet. The great dedicatory inscription of Abydos shows, in fact, that Rameses II was prosecuting a campaign in Ethiopia at the time when he received intelligence of the death of his father and that he came down the Nile, northward, in order, probably, to be crowned at Thebes.[99]
Now the famous sculptures of the commemorative chapel at Bayt-el-Welly relate expressly to the events of this expedition; and as they are executed in that refined and delicate style which especially characterizes the bas-relief work of Gourmah, of Adydos, of all those buildings which were either erected by Seti I or begun by Seti and finished during the early years of Rameses II, I venture to think we may regard them as contemporary, or very nearly contemporary, with the scenes they represent. In any case, it is reasonable to conclude that the artists employed on the work would know something about the events and persons delineated and that they would be guilty of no glaring inaccuracies.
All doubt as to whether the dates refer to the associated reigns of Seti and Rameses, or to the sole reign of the latter, vanish, however, when in these same sculptures[100]we find the conqueror accompanied by his son, Prince Amenherkhopeshef, who is of an age not only to bear his part in the field, but afterward to conduct an important ceremony of state on the occasion of the submission and tribute offering of the Ethiopian commander. Such is the unmistakable evidence of the bas-reliefs at Bayt-el-Welly, as those who cannot go to Bayt-el-Welly may see and judge for themselves by means of the admirable casts of thesegreat tableaux which line the walls of the second Egyptian room at the British Museum. To explain away Prince Amenherkhopeshef would be difficult. We are accustomed to a certain amount of courtly exaggeration on the part of those who record with pen or pencil the great deeds of the Pharaohs. We expect to see the king always young, always beautiful, always victorious. It seems only right and natural that he should be never less than twenty and sometimes more than sixty feet in height. But that any flatterer should go so far as to credit a lad of thirteen with a son at least as old as himself is surely quite incredible.
Lastly, there is the evidence of the Bible.
Joseph being dead and the Israelites established in Egypt, there comes to the throne a Pharaoh who takes alarm at the increase of this alien race and who seeks to check their too rapid multiplication. He not only oppresses the foreigners, but ordains that every male infant born to them in their bondage shall be cast into the river. This Pharaoh is now universally believed to be Rameses II. Then comes the old, sweet, familiar Bible story that we know so well. Moses is born, cast adrift in the ark of bulrushes and rescued by the king’s daughter. He becomes to her “as a son.” Although no dates are given, it is clear that the new Pharaoh has not been long upon the throne when these events happen. It is equally clear that he is no mere youth. He is old in the uses of state-craft; and he is the father of a princess of whom it is difficult to suppose that she was herself an infant.
On the whole, then, we can but conclude that Rameses II, though born a king, was not merely grown to manhood, but wedded, and the father of children already past the period of infancy, before he succeeded to the sole exercise of sovereign power. This is, at all events, the view taken by Professor Maspero, who expressly says, in the latest edition of his “Histoire Ancienne,” “that Rameses II, when he received news of the death of his father, was then in the prime of life and surrounded by a large family, some of whom were of an age to fight under his command.”[101]
Brugsch places the birth of Moses in the sixth year of the reign of Rameses II.[102]This may very well be. The fourscore years that elapsed between that time and the time of the exodus correspond with sufficient exactness to the chronological data furnished by the monuments. Moses would thus see out the sixty-one remaining years of the king’s long life, and release the Israelites from bondage toward the close of the reign of Menepthah,[103]who sat for about twenty years on the throne of his fathers. The correspondence of dates this time leaves nothing to be desired.
The Sesostris of Diodorus Siculus went blind and died by his own hand; which act, says the historian, as it conformed to the glory of his life, was greatly admired by his people. We are here evidently in the region of pure fable. Suicide was by no means an Egyptian, but a classical, virtue. Just as the Greeks hated age, the Egyptians reverenced it; and it may be doubted whether a people who seem always to have passionately desired length of days would have seen anything to admire in a willful shortening of that most precious gift of the gods. With the one exception of Cleopatra—the death of Nitocris the rosy-cheeked being also of Greek,[104]and therefore questionable, origin—no Egyptian sovereign is known to have committed suicide; and even Cleopatra, who was half Greek by birth, must have been influenced to the act by Greek and Roman example. Dismissing, then, altogether this legend of his blindness and self-slaughter, it must be admitted that of the death of Rameses II we know nothing certain.
Such are, very briefly, the leading facts of the history of this famous Pharaoh. Exhaustively treated, they would expand into a volume. Even then, however, one would ask, and ask in vain, what manner of man he was. Every attempt to evolve his personal character from these scanty data is in fact a mere exercise of fancy.[105]That he was personally valiant may be gathered with due reservation, from the poem of Pentaur; and that he was not unmerciful is shown in the extradition clause of the Khetan treaty. His pride was evidently boundless. Every temple which he erected was a monument to his own glory; every colossus was a trophy; every inscription a pæan of self-praise. At Abou Simbel, at Derr, at Gerf Hossayn, he seated his own image in the sanctuary among the images of the gods.[106]There are even instances in which he isdepicted under the twofold aspect of royalty and divinity—Rameses the Pharaoh burning incense before Rameses the Deity.
For the rest, it is safe to conclude that he was neither better nor worse than the general run of oriental despots—that he was ruthless in war, prodigal in peace, rapacious of booty and unsparing in the exercise of almost boundless power. Such pride and such despotism were, however, in strict accordance with immemorial precedent and with the temper of the age in which he lived. The Egyptians would seem beyond all doubt to have believed that their king was always in some sense divine. They wrote hymns[107]and offered up prayers to him, and regarded him as the living representative of deity. His princes and ministers habitually addressed him in the language of worship. Even his wives, who ought to have known better, are represented in the performance of acts of religious adoration before him. What wonder, then, if the man so deified believed himself a god?
Wecame to Abou Simbel on the night of the 31st of January and we left at sunset on the 18th of February. Of these eighteen clear days we spent fourteen at the foot of the rock of the great temple, called in the old Egyptian tongue the Rock of Abshek. The remaining four (taken at the end of the first week and the beginning of the second) were passed in the excursion to Wady-Halfeh and back. By thus dividing the time our long sojourn was made less monotonous for those who had no especial work to do.
Meanwhile it was wonderful to wake every morning close under the steep bank, and, without lifting one’s head from the pillow, to see that row of giant faces so close against the sky. They showed unearthly enough by moonlight, but not half so unearthly as in the gray of dawn. At that hour, the most solemn of the twenty-four, they wore a fixed and fatal look that was little less than appalling. As the sky warmed this awful look was succeeded by a flush that mounted and deepened like the rising flush of life. For a moment they seemed to glow—to smile—to be transfigured. Then came a flash, as of thought itself. It was the first instantaneous flash of the risen sun. It lasted less than a second. It was gone almost before one could say it was there. The next moment mountain, river and sky were distinct in the steady light of day; and the colossi—mere colossi now—sat serene and stony in the open sunshine.
Every morning I waked in time to witness that daily miracle. Every morning I saw those awful brethren pass from death to life, from life to sculptured stone. I brought myself almost to believe at last that there must sooner or later come some one sunrise when the ancient charm would snap asunder and the giants must arise and speak.
Stupendous as they are, nothing is more difficult than tosee the colossi properly. Standing between the rock and the river one is too near; stationed on the island opposite one is too far off; while from the sand-slope only a side view is obtainable. Hence, for want of a fitting standpoint, many travelers have seen nothing but deformity in the most perfect face handed down to us by Egyptian art. One recognizes in it the negro and one the Mongolian type;[108]while another admires the fidelity with which “the Nubian characteristics” have been seized.
Yet, in truth, the head of the young Augustus is not cast in a loftier mold. These statues are portraits—portraits of the same man four times repeated; and that man is Rameses the Great.
Now, Rameses, the Great if he was as much like his portraits as his portraits are like each other, must have been one of the handsomest men, not only of his own day, but of all history. Wheresoever we meet with him, whether in the fallen colossus at Memphis or in the syenite torso of the British Museum, or among the innumerable bas-reliefs of Thebes, Abydos, Gournah, and Bayt-el-Welly, his features (though bearing in some instances the impress of youth and in others of maturity) are always the same. The face is oval; the eyes are long, prominent, and heavy-lidded; the nose is slightly aquiline and characteristicallydepressed at the tip; the nostrils are open and sensitive; the under lip projects; the chin is short and square.
Here, for instance, is an outline from a bas-relief at Bayt-el-Welly. The subject is commemorative of the king’s first campaign. A beardless youth, fired with the rage of battle, he clutches a captive by the hair and lifts his mace to slay. In this delicate and Dantesque face, which lacks as yet the fullness and repose of the later portraits, we recognize all the distinctive traits of the older Rameses.
Here, again, is a sketch from Abydos in which the king, although he has not yet ceased to wear the side-lock of youth, is seen with a boyish beard, and looks four years older than in the previous portrait.
It is interesting to compare these heads with the accompanying profile of one of the caryatid colossi inside the great temple of Abou Simbel; and all three with one of the giant portraits of the façade. This last, whether regarded as a marvel of size or of portraiture, is the chef-d’œuvre of Egyptian sculpture. We here see the great king in his prime. His features are identical with those of the head at Bayt-el-Welly; but the contours are more amply filled in and the expression is altogether changed. The man is full fifteen or twenty years older. He has outlived that rage of early youth. He is no longer impulsive, but implacable. A godlike serenity, an almost superhuman pride, an immutable will, breathe from the sculptured stone. He has learned to believe his prowess irresistible and himself almost divine. If he now raised his arm to slay it would be with the stern placidity of a destroying angel.
The annexed wood-cut gives the profile of the southern-most colossus, which is the only perfect—or very nearly perfect—one of the four. The original can be correctly seen from but one point of view; and that point is
PROFILE OF RAMESES II.(From the southernmost colossus, Abou Simbel.)
PROFILE OF RAMESES II.(From the southernmost colossus, Abou Simbel.)
PROFILE OF RAMESES II.
(From the southernmost colossus, Abou Simbel.)
where the sand-slope meets the northern buttress of the façade, at a level just parallel with the beards of the statues. It was thence that the present outline was taken. The sand-slope is steep and loose and hot to the feet. More disagreeable climbing it would be hard to find, even in Nubia; but no traveler who refuses to encounter this small hardship need believe that he has seen the faces of the colossi.
Viewed from below, this beautiful portrait is foreshortened out of all proportion. It looks unduly wide from ear to ear, while the lips and the lower part of the nose show relatively larger than the rest of the features. The same may be said of the great cast in the British Museum. Cooped up at the end of a narrow corridor and lifted not more than fifteen feet above the ground, it is carefully placed so as to be wrong from every point of view and shown to the greatest possible disadvantage.
The artists who wrought the original statues were, however, embarrassed by no difficulties of focus, daunted by no difficulties of scale. Giants themselves, they summoned these giants from out the solid rock and endowed them with superhuman strength and beauty. They sought no quarried blocks of syenite or granite for their work. They fashioned no models of clay. They took a mountain and fell upon it like Titans and hollowed and carved it as though it were a cherry stone; and left it for the feebler men of after ages to marvel at forever. One great hall and fifteen spacious chambers they hewed out from the heart of it, then smoothed the rugged precipice toward the river, and cut four huge statues with their faces to the sunrise, two to the right and two to the left of the doorway, there to keep watch to the end of time.
These tremendous warders sit sixty-six feet high, without the platform under their feet. They measure across the chest twenty-five feet and four inches; from the shoulder to the elbow fifteen feet and six inches; from the inner side of the elbow joint to the tip of the middle finger, fifteen feet; and so on, in relative proportion. If they stood up, they would tower to a height of at least eighty-three feet, from the soles of their feet to the tops of their enormous double-crowns.
Nothing in Egyptian sculpture is perhaps quite so wonderful as the way in which these Abou Simbel artists dealt with the thousands of tons of material to which they heregave human form. Consummate masters of effect, they knew precisely what to do and what to leave undone. These were portrait statues; therefore they finished the heads up to the highest point consistent with their size. But the trunk and the lower limbs they regarded from a decorative rather than a statuesque point of view. As decoration, it was necessary that they should give size and dignity to the façade. Everything, consequently, was here subordinated to the general effect of breadth, of massiveness, of repose. Considered thus, the colossi are a triumph of treatment. Side by side they sit, placid and majestic, their feet a little apart, their hands resting on their knees. Shapely though they are, those huge legs look scarcely inferior in girth to the great columns of Karnak. The articulations of the knee-joint, the swell of the calf, the outline of theperoneus longusare indicated rather than developed. The toe-nails and toe-joints are given in the same bold and general way; but the fingers, because only the tips of them could be seen from below, are treateden bloc.
The faces show the same largeness of style. The little dimple which gives such sweetness to the corners of the mouth, and the tiny depression in the lobe of the ear, are, in fact, circular cavities as large as saucers.
How far this treatment is consistent with the most perfect delicacy and even finesse of execution may be gathered from the sketch. The nose there shown in profile is three feet and a half in length; the mouth, so delicately curved, is about the same in width; even the sensitive nostril, which looks ready to expand with the breath of life, exceeds eight inches in length. The ear (which is placed high and is well detached from the head) measures three feet and five inches from top to tip.
A recent writer,[109]who brings sound practical knowledgeto bear upon the subject, is of opinion that the Egyptian sculptors did not even “point” their work beforehand. If so, then the marvel is only so much the greater. The men who, working in so coarse and friable a material, could not only give beauty and finish to heads of this size, but could, with barbaric tools, hew them outab initio, from the natural rock, were the Michael Angelos of their age.
It has already been said that the last Rameses to the southward is the best preserved. His left arm and hand are injured, and the head of the uræus sculptured on the front of the pschent is gone; but with these exceptions the figure is as whole, as fresh in surface, as sharp in detail, as on the day it was completed. The next is shattered to the waist. His head lies at his feet, half-buried in sand. The third is nearly as perfect as the first; while the fourth has lost not only the whole beard and the greater part of the uræus, but has both arms broken away and a big, cavernous hole in the front of the body. From the double-crowns of the two last the top ornament is also missing. It looks a mere knob; but it measures eight feet in height.
Such an effect does the size of these four figures produce on the mind of the spectator that he scarcely observes the fractures they have sustained. I do not remember to have even missed the head and body of the shattered one, although nothing is left of it above the knees. Those huge legs and feet, covered with ancient inscriptions,[110]some of Greek, some of Phœnician origin, tower so high above the heads of those who look at them from below that one scarcely thinks of looking higher still.
The figures are naked to the waist and clothed in the usual striped tunic. On their heads they wear the double-crown, and on their necks rich collars of cabochon drops cut in very low relief. The feet are bare of sandals and the arms of bracelets; but in the front of the body, just where the customary belt and buckle would come, are deep holes in the stone, such as might have been made to receive rivets, supposing the belts to have been made of bronze or gold. On the breast, just below the necklace, and on the upper part of each arm, are cut in magnificent ovals, between four and five feet in length, the ordinary cartouches of the king. These were probably tattooed upon his person in the flesh.
Some have supposed that these statues were originally colored, and that the color may have been effaced by the ceaseless shifting and blowing of the sand. Yet the drift was probably at its highest when Burckhardt discovered the place in 1813; and on the two heads that were still above the surface he seems to have observed no traces of color. Neither can the keenest eye detect any vestige of that delicate film of stucco with which the Egyptians invariably prepared their surfaces for painting. Perhaps the architects were for once content with the natural color of the sandstone, which is here very rich and varied. It happens, also, that the colossi come in a light-colored vein of the rock, and so sit relieved against a darker background. Toward noon, when the level of the façade has just passed into shade and the sunlight still strikes upon the statues, the effect is quite startling. The whole thing, which is then best seen from the island, looks like a huge onyx-cameo cut in high relief.
A statue of Ra,[111]to whom the temple is dedicated, stands some twenty feet high in a niche over the doorway, and is supported on either side by a bas-relief portrait of the king in an attitude of worship. Next above these comes a superb hieroglyphic inscription reaching across the wholefront; above the inscription, a band of royal cartouches; above the cartouches, a frieze of sitting apes; above the apes, last and highest, some fragments of a cornice. The height of the whole may have been somewhat over a hundred feet. Wherever it has been possible to introduce them as decoration, we see the ovals of the king. Under those sculptured on the platform and over the door I observed the hieroglypic characterwhich, in conjunction with the sign known as the determinative of metals, signifies gold (nub); but when represented, as here, without the determinative, stands for Nubia, the Land of Gold. This addition, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in connection with the cartouches of Rameses II,[112]is here used in an heraldic sense, as signifying the sovereignty of Nubia.
The relative positions of the two temples of Abou Simbel have been already described—how they are excavated in two adjacent mountains and divided by a cataract of sand. The front of the small temple lies parallel to the course of the Nile, here flowing in a northeasterly direction. The façade of the great temple is cut in the flank of the mountain and faces due east. Thus the colossi, towering above the shoulder of the sand-drift, catch, as it were, a side view of the small temple and confront vessels coming up the river. As for the sand-drift, it curiously resembles the glacier of the Rhone. In size, in shape, in position, in all but color and substance, it is the same. Pent in between the rocks at top, it opens out like a fan at bottom. In this, its inevitable course, it slants downward across thefaçade of the great temple. Forever descending, drifting, accumulating, it wages the old stealthy war; and, unhasting, unresting, labors, grain by grain, to fill the hollowed chambers and bury the great statues and wrap the whole temple in a winding-sheet of golden sand, so that the place thereof shall know it no more.
It had very nearly come to this when Burckhardt went up (A.D.1813). The top of the doorway was then thirty feet below the surface. Whether the sand will ever reach that height again must depend on the energy with which it is combated. It can only be cleared as it accumulates. To avert it is impossible. Backed by the illimitable wastes of the Libyan desert, the supply from above is inexhaustible. Come it must; and come it will, to the end of time.
The drift rose to the lap of the northernmost colossus and half-way up the legs of the next when the Philæ lay at Abou Simbel. The doorway was clear, however, almost to the threshold, and the sand inside was not more than two feet deep in the first hall. The whole façade, we were told, had been laid bare, and the interior swept and garnished, when the Empress of the French, after opening the Suez Canal in 1869, went up the Nile as far as the second cataract. By this time, most likely, that yellow carpet lies thick and soft in every chamber, and is fast silting up the doorway again.
How well I remember the restless excitement of our first day at Abou Simbel! While the morning was yet cool, the painter and writer wandered to and fro, comparing and selecting points of view and superintending the pitching of their tents. The painter planted his on the very brink of the bank, face to face with the colossi and the open doorway. The writer perched some forty feet higher on the pitch of the sandslope; so getting a side view of the façade and a peep of distance looking up the river. To fix the tent up there was no easy matter. It was only by sinking the tent-pole in a hole filled with stones that it could be trusted to stand against the steady push of the north wind, which at this season is almost always blowing.
Meanwhile the travelers from the other dahabeeyahs were tramping backward and forward between the two temples; filling the air with laughter and waking strange echoes in the hollow mountains. As the day wore on,however, they returned to their boats, which one by one spread their sails and bore away for Wady Halfeh.
When they were fairly gone and we had the marvelous place all to ourselves we went to see the temples.
The smaller one, though it comes first in order of sailing, is generally seen last; and seen therefore to disadvantage. To eyes fresh from the “Abode of Ra,” the “Abode of Hathor” looks less than its actual size; which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Derr. A first hall, measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width, leads to a transverse corridor, two side-chambers, and a sanctuary seven feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Derr, support what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall; though the ceiling is, in truth, the superincumbent mountain.
In this arrangement, as in the general character of the bas-relief sculptures which cover the walls and pillars, there is much simplicity, much grace, but nothing particularly new. The façade, on the contrary, is a daring innovation. Here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and lifelike, seems to be walking straight out from the heart of the mountain. These statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand thirty feet high, and represent Rameses II and Nefertari, his queen. Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit and the female figures full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and disk of Hathor. The king is crowned with the pschent and with a fantastic helmet adorned with plumes and horns. They have their children with them; the queen her daughters, the king his sons—infants of ten feet high, whose heads just reach to the parental knee.
The walls of these six recesses, as they follow the slope of the mountain, form massive buttresses, the effect of which is wonderfully bold in light and shadow. The doorway gives the only instance of a porch that we saw in either Egypt or Nubia. The superb hieroglyphs which cover the faces of these buttresses and the front of this porch are cut half a foot deep into the rock and are so large that they can be read from the island in the middle of the river. The tale they tell—a tale retold in manyvaried turns of old Egyptian style upon the architraves within—is singular and interesting.
“Rameses, the Strong in Truth, the Beloved of Amen,” says the outer legend, “made this divine abode[113]for his royal wife, Nefertari, whom he loves.”
The legend within, after enumerating the titles of the king, records that “his royal wife who loves him, Nefertari the beloved of Maut, constructed for him this abode in the mountain of the pure waters.”
On every pillar, in every act of worship pictured on the walls, even in the sanctuary, we find the names of Rameses and Nefertari “coupled and inseparable.” In this double dedication and in the unwonted tenderness of the style one seems to detect traces of some event, perhaps of some anniversary, the particulars of which are lost forever. It may have been a meeting; it may have been a parting; it may have been a prayer answered or a vow fulfilled. We see, at all events, that Rameses and Nefertari desired to leave behind them an imperishable record of the affection which united them on earth and which they hoped would reunite them in Amemti. What more do we need to know? We see that the queen was fair;[114]that theking was in his prime. We divine the rest; and the poetry of the place, at all events, is ours. Even in these barren solitudes there is wafted to us a breath from the shores of old romance. We feel that Love once passed this way and that the ground is still hallowed where he trod.
We hurried on to the great temple, without waiting to examine the lesser one in detail. A solemn twilight reigned in the first hall, beyond which all was dark. Eight colossi, four to the right and four to the left, stand ranged down the center, bearing the mountain on their heads. Their height is twenty-five feet. With hands crossed on their breasts, they clasp the flail and crook—emblems of majesty and dominion. It is the attitude of Osiris, but the face is the face of Rameses II. Seen by this dim light, shadowy, mournful, majestic, they look as if they remembered the past.
Beyond the first hall lies a second hall supported on four square pillars; beyond this, again, a transverse chamber, the walls of which are covered with colored bas-reliefs of various gods; last of all, the sanctuary. Here, side by side, sit four figures larger than life—Ptah, Amen-Ra, Ra and Rameses deified. Before them stands an altar, in shape a truncated pyramid, cut from the solid rock. Traces of color yet linger on the garments of the statues; while in the walls on either side are holes and grooves such as might have been made to receive a screen of metal-work.
The air in the sanctuary was heavy with an acrid smoke, as if the priests had been burning some strange incense and were only just gone. For this illusion we were indebted to the visitors who had been there before us. They had lit the place with magnesian wire; the vapor of which lingers long in these unventilated vaults.
To settle down then and there to a steady investigation of the wall-sculptures was impossible. We did not attempt it. Wandering from hall to hall, from chamber to chamber; now trusting to the faint gleams that straggled infrom without, now stumbling along by the light of a bunch of candles tied to the end of a stick, we preferred to receive those first impressions of vastness, of mystery, of gloomy magnificence, which are the more profound for being somewhat vague and general.
Scenes of war, of triumph, of worship, passed before our eyes like the incidents of a panorama. Here the king, borne along at full gallop by plumed steeds gorgeously caparisoned, draws his mighty bow and attacks a battlemented fortress. The besieged, some of whom are transfixed by his tremendous arrows, supplicate for mercy. They are a Syrian people and are by some identified with the northern Hittites. Their skin is yellow; and they wear the long hair and beard, the fillet, the rich robe, fringed cape and embroidered baldric with which we are familiar in the Nineveh sculptures. A man driving off cattle in the foreground looks as if he had stepped out of one of the tablets in the British Museum. Rameses meanwhile towers, swift and godlike, above the crowd. His coursers are of such immortal strain as were the coursers of Achilles. His sons, his whole army, chariot and horse, follow headlong at his heels. All is movement and the splendor of battle.
Farther on we see the king returning in state, preceded by his prisoners of war. Tied together in gangs they stagger as they go, with heads thrown back and hands uplifted. These, however, are not Assyrians, but Abyssinians and Nubians, so true to the type, so thick-lipped, flat-nosed and woolly-headed, that only the pathos of the expression saves them from being ludicrous. It is naturalness pushed to the verge of caricature.
A little farther still and we find Rameses leading a string of these captives into the presence of Amen-Ra, Maut and Khons—Amen-Ra weird and unearthly, with his blue complexion and towering plumes; Maut wearing the crown of Upper Egypt; Khons, by a subtle touch of flattery, depicted with the features of the king. Again, to right and left of the entrance, Rameses, thrice the size of life, slays a group of captives of various nations. To the left Amen-Ra, to the right Ra Harmachis,[115]approve andaccept the sacrifice. In the second hall we see, as usual, the procession of the sacred bark. Ptah, Khem and Bast, gorgeous in many-colored garments, gleam dimly, like figures in faded tapestry, from the walls of the transverse corridor.
But the wonder of Abou Simbel is the huge subject on the north side of the great hall. This is a monster battle-piece which covers an area of fifty-seven feet seven inches in length, by twenty-five feet four inches in height, and contains over eleven hundred figures. Even the heraldic cornice of cartouches and asps which runs round the rest of the ceiling is omitted on this side, so that the wall is literally filled with the picture from top to bottom.
Fully to describe this huge design would take many pages. It is a picture-gallery in itself. It represents not a single action, but a whole campaign. It sets before us, with Homeric simplicity, the pomp and circumstance of war, the incidents of camp life and the accidents of the open field. We see the enemy’s city, with its battlemented towers and triple moat; the besigers’ camp and the pavilion of the king; the march of infantry; the shock of chariots; the hand-to-hand melée; the flight of the vanquished; the triumph of the Pharaoh; the bringing in of the prisoners; the counting of the hands of the slain. A great river winds through the picture from end to end and almost surrounds the invested city. The king in his chariot pursues a crowd of fugitives along the bank. Some are crushed under his wheels; some plunge into the water and are drowned.[116]Behind him, a moving wall of shields and spears, advances with rhythmic step the serried phalanx; while yonder, where the fight is thickest, we see chariots overturned, men dead and dying, and riderless horses making for the open. Meanwhile, the besieged send out mounted scouts and the country folk drive their cattle to the hills.
A grand frieze of chariots charging at full gallop divides the subject lengthwise and separates the Egyptian camp from the field of battle. The camp is square and inclosed, apparently, in a palisade of shields. It occupies less than one-sixth part of the picture and contains about a hundred figures. Within this narrow space the artist has broughttogether an astonishing variety of incidents. The horses feed in rows from a common manger, or wait their turn and impatiently paw the ground. Some are lying down. One, just unharnessed, scampers round the inclosure. Another, making off with the empty chariot at his heels, is intercepted by a couple of grooms. Other grooms bring buckets of water slung from the shoulders on wooden yokes. A wounded officer sits apart, his head resting on his hand; and an orderly comes in haste to bring him news of the battle. Another, hurt apparently in the foot, is having the wound dressed by a surgeon. Two detachments of infantry, marching out to re-enforce their comrades in action, are met at the entrance to the camp by the royal chariot returning from the field. Rameses drives before him some fugitives who are trampled down, seized and dispatched upon the spot. In one corner stands a row of objects that look like joints of meat; and near them are a small altar and a tripod brazier. Elsewhere, a couple of soldiers, with a big bowl between them, sit on their heels and dip their fingers in the mess, precisely as every fellâh does to this day. Meanwhile, it is clear that Egyptian discipline was strict and that the soldier who transgressed was as abjectly subject to the rule of stick as his modern descendant. In no less than three places do we see this time-honored institution in full operation, the superior officer energetically flourishing his staff; the private taking his punishment with characteristic disrelish. In the middle of the camp, watched over by his keeper, lies Rameses’ tame lion; while close against the royal pavilion a hostile spy is surprised and stabbed by the officer on guard. The pavilion itself is very curious. It is evidently not a tent but a building, and was probably an extemporaneous construction of crude brick. It has four arched doorways, and contains in one corner an object like a cabinet, with two sacred hawks for supporters. This object, which is in fact almost identical with the hieroglyphic emblem used to express a royal panegyry or festival, stands, no doubt, for the private oratory of the king. Five figures kneeling before it in adoration.
To enumerate all or half the points of interest in this amazing picture would ask altogether too much space. Even to see it, with time at command and all the help thatcandles and magnesian torches can give, is far from easy. The relief is unusually low, and the surface, having originally been covered with stucco, is purposely roughened all over with tiny chisel marks, which painfully confuse the details. Nor is this all. Owing to some kind of saline ooze in that part of the rock, the stucco has not only peeled off, but the actual surface is injured. It seems to have been eaten away, just as iron is eaten by rust. A few patches adhere, however, in places, and retain the original coloring. The river is still covered with blue and white zigzags, to represent water; some of the fighting groups are yet perfect; and two very beautiful royal chariots, one of which is surmounted by a richly ornamented parasol-canopy, are fresh and brilliant as ever.
The horses throughout are excellent. The chariot frieze is almost Panathenaic in its effect of multitudinous movement; while the horses in the camp of Rameses, for naturalness and variety of treatment, are perhaps the best that Egyptian art has to show. It is worth noting, also, that a horseman, thatrara avis, occurs some four or five times in different parts of the picture.
The scene of the campaign is laid in Syria. The river of blue and white zigzags is the Orontes;[117]the city of the besieged Kadesh or Kades;[118]the enemy are the Kheta. The whole is, in fact, a grand picture-epic of the events immortalized in the poem of Pentaur—that poem which M. de Rougé has described as “a sort of Egyptian Iliad.” The comparison would, however, apply to the picture with greater force than it applies to the poem. Pentaur, who was in the first place a courtier and in the second place a poet, has sacrificed everything to the prominence of his central figure. He is intent upon the glorification of the king; and his poem, which is a mere pæan of praise, begins and ends with the prowess of Rameses Mer-Amen. If, then, it is to be called an Iliad, it is an Iliadfrom which everything that does not immediately concern Achilles is left out. The picture, on the contrary, though it shows the hero in combat and in triumph, and always of colossal proportions, yet has space for a host of minor characters. The episodes in which these characters appear are essentially Homeric. The spy is surprised and slain, as Dolon was slain by Ulysses. The men feast, and fight, and are wounded, just like the long-haired sons of Achaia; while their horses, loosed from the yoke, eat white barley and oats: