TA-UR-T (SILSILIS).TA-UR-T (PHILÆ).
TA-UR-T (SILSILIS).TA-UR-T (PHILÆ).
TA-UR-T (SILSILIS).TA-UR-T (PHILÆ).
The interest of the western bank centers in its sculptures and inscriptions; the interest of the eastern bank in its quarries. We rowed over to a point nearly opposite the shrines of the Ramessides, and, climbing a steep verge of débris, came to the mouth of a narrow cutting between walls of solid rock from forty to fifty feet in height. These walls are smooth, clean-cut, and faultlessly perpendicular. The color of the sand-stone is rich amber. The passage is about ten feet in width and perhaps four hundred in length. Seen at a little after midday, with one side in shadow, the other in sunlight, and a narrow ribbon of blue sky overhead, it is like nothing else in the world; unless, perhaps, the entrance to Petra.
Following this passage we came presently to an immense area, at least as large as Belgrave Square; beyond which, separated by a thin partition of rock, opened a second and somewhat smaller area. On the walls of these huge amphitheaters, the chisel-marks and wedge-holes were as fresh as if the last blocks had been taken hence but yesterday; yet it is some two thousand years since the place last rang to the blows of the mallet, and echoed back the voices of the workmen. From the days of the Theban Pharaohs to the days of the Ptolemies and Cæsars, those echoes can never have been silent. The temples of Karnak and Luxor, of Gournah, of Medinet Habu, of Esneh and Edfu and Hermonthis, all came from here and from the quarries on the opposite side of the river.[181]
Returning, we climbed long hills of chips; looked down into valleys of débris; and came back at last to the river side by way of an ancient inclined plane, along which the blocks were slid down to the transport boats below. But the most wonderful thing about Silsilis is the way in which the quarrying has been done. In all these halls and passages and amphitheaters the sandstone has been sliced out smooth and straight, like hay from a hay-rick. Everywhere the blocks have been taken out square; and everywhere the best of the stone has been extracted and the worst left. Where it was fine in grain and even in color it has been cut with the nicest economy. Where it waswhitish, or brownish, or traversed by veins of violet, it has been left standing. Here and there we saw places where the lower part had been removed and the upper part left projecting, like the overhanging stories of our old mediæval timber houses. Compared with this pussiant and perfect quarrying, our rough-and-ready blasting looks like the work of savages.
Struggling hard against the wind, we left Silsilis that same afternoon. The wrecked steamer was now more than half under water. She had broken her back and begun filling immediately, with all Cook’s party on board. Being rowed ashore with what necessaries they could gather together these unfortunates had been obliged to encamp in tents borrowed from the mudîr of the district. Luckily for them, a couple of homeward-bound dahabeeyahs came by next morning, and took off as many as they could accommodate. The duke’s steam-tug received the rest. The tents were still there, and a gang of natives, under the superintendence of the mudîr, were busy getting off all that could be saved from the wreck.
As evening drew on, our head-wind became a hurricane; and that hurricane lasted day and night for thirty-six hours. All this time the Nile was driving up against the current in great rollers, like rollers on the Cornish coast when tide and wind set together from the west. To hear them roaring past in the darkness of the night—to feel the Philæ rocking, shivering, straining at her mooring-ropes and bumping perpetually against the bank, was far from pleasant. By day the scene was extraordinary. There were no clouds, but the air was thick with sand, through which the sun glimmered feebly. Some palms, looking gray and ghostlike on the bank above, bent as if they must break before the blast. The Nile was yeasty and flecked with brown foam, large lumps of which came swirling every now and then against our cabin windows. The opposite bank was simply nowhere. Judging only by what was visible from the deck one would have vowed that the dahabeeyah was moored against an open coast with an angry sea coming in.
The wind fell about fiveA.M.the second day; when the men at once took to their oars and by breakfast-time brought us to Edfu. Nothing now could be more delicious than the weather. It was a cool, silvery, misty morning—such a morning as one never knows in Nubia, where the sun is no sooner up than one is plunged at once into the full blaze and stress of day. There were donkeys waiting for us on the bank and our way lay for about a mile through barley flats and cotton plantations. The country looked rich; the people smiling and well conditioned. We met a troop of them going down to the dahabeeyah with sheep, pigeons, poultry and a young ox for sale. Crossing a back-water, bridged by a few rickety palm-trunks, we now approached the village, which is perched, as usual, on the mounds of the ancient city. Meanwhile the great pylons—seeming to grow larger every moment—rose, creamy in light, against a soft-blue sky.
Riding through lanes of huts we came presently to an open space and a long flight of roughly built steps in front of the temple. At the top of these steps we were standing on the level of the modern village. At the bottom we saw the massive pavement that marked the level of the ancient city. From that level rose the pylons which even from afar off had looked so large. We now found that those stupendous towers not only soared to a height of about seventy-five feet above our heads, but plunged down to a depth of at least forty more beneath our feet.
Ten years ago nothing was visible of the great Temple of Edfu save the tops of these pylons. The rest of the building was as much lost to sight as if the earth had opened and swallowed it. Its court-yards were choked with foul débris. Its sculptured chambers were buried under forty feet of soil. Its terraced roof was a maze of closely packed huts, swarming with human beings, poultry, dogs, kine, asses and vermin. Thanks to the indefatigable energy of Mariette, these Augean stables were cleansed some thirty years ago. Writing himself of this tremendous task, he says: “I caused to be demolished the sixty-four houses which encumbered the roof, as well as twenty-eight more which approached too near the outer wall of the temple. When the whole shall be isolated from its present surroundings by a massive wall, the work of restoration at Edfu will be accomplished.”[182]
That wall has not yet been built; but the encroachingmound has been cut clean away all round the building, now standing free in a deep open space, the sides of which are in some places as perpendicular as the quarried cliffs of Silsilis. In the midst of this pit, like a risen god issuing from the grave, the huge building stands before us in the sunshine, erect and perfect. The effect at first sight is overwhelming.
Through the great doorway, fifty feet in height, we catch glimpses of a grand court-yard, and of a vista of doorways, one behind another. Going slowly down, we see farther into those dark and distant halls at every step. At the same time the pylons, covered with gigantic sculptures, tower higher and higher, and seem to shut out the sky. The custode—a pigmy of six foot two, in semi-European dress—looks up grinning, expectant of backshîsh. For there is actually a custode here, and, which is more to the purpose, a good strong gate, through which neither pilfering visitors nor pilfering Arabs can pass unnoticed.
Who enters that gate crosses the threshold of the past, and leaves two thousand years behind him. In these vast courts and storied halls all is unchanged. Every pavement, every column, every stair, is in its place. The roof, but for a few roofing-stones missing just over the sanctuary, is not only uninjured, but in good repair. The hieroglyphic inscriptions are as sharp and legible as the day they were cut. If here and there a capital, or the face of a human-headed deity, has been mutilated, these are blemishes which at first one scarcely observes, and which in no wise mar the wonderful effect of the whole. We cross that great court-yard in the full blaze of the morning sunlight. In the colonnades on either side there is shade, and in the pillared portico beyond, a darkness as of night; save where a patch of deep-blue sky burns through a square opening in the roof, and is matched by a corresponding patch of blinding light on the pavement below. Hence we pass on through a hall of columns, two transverse corridors, a side chapel, a series of pitch-dark side chambers, and a sanctuary. Outside all these, surrounding the actual temple on three sides, runs an external corridor open to the sky, and bounded by a superb wall full forty feet in height. When I have said that the entrance-front, with its twin pylons and central doorway, measures two hundred and fifty feet in width by one hundred andtwenty-five feet in height; that the first court-yard measures more than one hundred and sixty feet in length by one hundred and forty in width; that the entire length of the building is four hundred and fifty feet, and that it covers an area of eighty thousand square feet, I have stated facts of a kind which convey no more than a general idea of largeness to the ordinary reader. Of the harmony of the proportions, of the amazing size and strength of the individual parts, of the perfect workmanship, of the fine grain and creamy amber of the stone, no description can do more than suggest an indefinite notion.
Edfu and Denderah may almost be called twin temples. They belong to the same period. They are built very nearly after the same plan.[183]They are even allied in a religious sense; for the myths of Horus[184]and Hathor[185]are interdependent; the one being the complement of the other. Thus, in the inscriptions of Edfu we find perpetual allusion to the cultus of Denderah, and vice versa. Both Edfu and Denderah are rich in inscriptions; but as the extent of wall-space is greater at Edfu, so is the literary wealth of this temple greater than the literary wealth of Denderah. It also seemed to me that the surface was more closely filled in at Edfu than at Denderah. Every wall, every ceiling, every pillar, every architrave, every passage and side-chamber, however dark, every staircase, every doorway, the outer wall of the temple, the inner side of the great wall of circuit, the huge pylons from top to bottom, are not only covered, but crowded, with figures and hieroglyphs. Among these we find no enormous battle-subjects as at Abou Simbel—no heroic recitals, likethe poem of Pentaur. Those went out with the Pharaohs and were succeeded by tableaux of religious rites and dialogues of gods and kings. Such are the stock subjects of Ptolemaic edifices. They abound at Denderah and Esneh, as well as at Edfu. But at Edfu there are more inscriptions of a miscellaneous character than in any temple of Egypt; and it is precisely this secular information which is so priceless. Here are geographical lists of Nubian and Egyptian gnomes, with their principal cities, their products and their tutelary gods; lists of tributary provinces and princes; lists of temples and of lands pertaining thereunto; lists of canals, of ports, of lakes; calendars of feasts and fasts; astronomical tables; genealogies and chronicles of the gods; lists of the priests and priestesses of both Edfu and Denderah, with their names; lists also of singers and assistant functionaries; lists of offerings, hymns, invocations; and such a profusion of religious legends as make of the walls of Edfu alone a complete text-book of Egyptian mythology.[186]
No great collection of these inscriptions, like the “Denderah” of Mariette, has yet been published; but every now and then some enterprising Egyptologist, such as M. Naville or M. Jacques de Rougé, plunges for awhile into the depths of the Edfu mine and brings back as much precious ore as he can carry. Some most singular and interesting details have thus been brought to light. One inscription, for instance, records exactly in what month and on what day and at what hour Isis gave birth to Horus. Another tells all about the sacred boats. We know now that Edfu possessed at least two; and that one was called Hor-Hat, or The First Horus and the other Aa-Mafek, or Great of Turquoise. These boats, it would appear, were not merely for carrying in procession, but for actual use upon the water. Another text—one of the most curious—informs us that Hathor of Denderah paid an annual visit to Horus (or Hor-Hat) of Edfu and spent some days with him in his temple. The whole ceremonial of this fantastic trip is given in detail. The goddess traveled in her boat called Neb-Mer-t, or Lady of the Lake. Horus, like a polite host, went out in his boat Hor-Hat, tomeet her. The two deities with their attendants then formed one procession and so came to Edfu, where the goddess was entertained with a succession of festivals.[187]
One would like to know whether Horus duly returned all these visits; and if the gods, like modern emperors, had a gay time among themselves.
Other questions inevitably suggest themselves, sometimes painfully, sometimes ludicrously, as one paces chamber after chamber, corridor after corridor, sculptured all over with strange forms and stranger legends. What about these gods whose genealogies are so intricate; whose mutual relations are so complicated; who wedded and became parents; who exchanged visits and who even traveled[188]at times to distant countries? What about those who served them in the temples; who robed and unrobed them; who celebrated their birthdays and paraded them in stately processions and consumed the lives of millions in erecting these mountains of masonry and sculpture to their honor? We know now with what elaborate rites the gods were adored; what jewels they wore; what hymns were sung in their praise. We know from what a subtle and philosophical core of solar myths their curious personal adventures were evolved. We may also be quite sure that the hidden meaning of these legends was almost wholly lost sight of in the later days of the religion,[189]and that the gods were accepted for what they seemed to be and not for what they were symbolized. What, then, of their worshipers? Did they really believe all these things, or were any among them tormented with doubts of the gods? Were there skeptics in those days, who wondered how two hierogrammates could look each other in the face without laughing?
The custode told us that there were two hundred and forty-two steps to the top of each tower of the propylon. We counted two hundred and twenty-four, and dispensed willingly with the remainder. It was a long pull; but had the steps been four times as many, the sight from the top would have been worth the climb. The chambers in thepylons are on a grand scale, with wide beveled windows like the mouths of monster letter boxes, placed at regular intervals all the way up. Through these windows the great flagstaffs and pennons were regulated from within. The two pylons communicate by a terrace over the central doorway. The parapet of this terrace and the parapets of the pylons above are plentifully scrawled with names, many of which were left there by the French soldiers of 1799.
The cornices of these two magnificent towers are unfortunately gone; but the total height without them is one hundred and twenty-five feet. From the top, as from the minaret of the great mosque at Damascus, one looks down into the heart of the town. Hundreds of mud huts thatched with palm-leaves, hundreds of little court-yards, lie mapped out beneath one’s feet; and as the fellah lives in his yard by day, using his hut merely as a sleeping-place at night, one looks down, like the Diable Boiteux, upon the domestic doings of a roofless world. We see people moving to and fro, unconscious of strange eyes watching them from above—men lounging, smoking, sleeping in shady corners—children playing—infants crawling on all fours—women cooking at clay ovens in the open air—cows and sheep feeding—poultry scratching and pecking—dogs basking in the sun. The huts look more like the lairs of prairie-dogs than the dwellings of human beings. The little mosque with its one dome and stunted minaret, so small, so far below, looks like a clay toy. Beyond the village, which reaches far and wide, lie barley fields, and cotton patches, and palm-groves, bounded on one side by the river, and on the other by the desert. A broad road, dotted over with moving specks of men and cattle, cleaves its way straight through the cultivated land and out across the sandy plain beyond. We can trace its course for miles where it is only a trodden track in the desert. It goes, they tell us, direct to Cairo. On the opposite bank glares a hideous white sugar factory, and, bowered in greenery, a country villa of the khedive. The broad Nile flows between. The sweet Theban hills gleam through a pearly haze on the horizon.
All at once a fitful breeze springs up, blowing in little gusts and swirling the dust in circles round our feet. At the same moment, like a beautiful specter, there rises fromthe desert close by an undulating semi-transparent stalk of yellow sand, which grows higher every moment, and begins moving northward across the plain. Almost at the same instant, another appears a long way off toward the south, and a third comes gliding mysteriously along the opposite bank. While we are watching the third, the first begins throwing off a wonderful kind of plume, which follows it, waving and melting in the air. And now the stranger from the south comes up at a smooth, tremendous pace, towering at least five hundred feet above the desert, till, meeting some cross-current, it is snapped suddenly in twain. The lower half instantly collapses; the upper, after hanging suspended for a moment, spreads and floats slowly, like a cloud. In the meanwhile, other and smaller columns form here and there—stalk a little way—waver—disperse—form again—and again drop away in dust. Then the breeze falls, and puts an abrupt end to this extraordinary spectacle. In less than two minutes there is not a sand-column left. As they came, they vanish—suddenly.
Such is the landscape that frames the temple; and the temple, after all, is the sight that one comes up here to see. There it lies far below our feet, the court-yard with its almost perfect pavement; the flat roof compact of gigantic monoliths; the wall of circuit with its panoramic sculptures; the portico, with its screen and pillars distinct in brilliant light against inner depths of dark; each pillar a shaft of ivory, each square of dark a block of ebony. So perfect, so solid, so splendid is the whole structure; so simple in unity of plan; so complex in ornament; so majestic in completeness, that one feels as if it solved the whole problem of religious architecture.
Take it for what it is—a Ptolemaic structure preserved in all its integrity of strength and finish—it is certainly the finest temple in Egypt. It brings before us, with even more completeness than Denderah, the purposes of its various parts and the kind of ceremonial for which it was designed. Every corridor and chamber tells its own story. Even the names of the different chambers are graven upon them in such wise that nothing[190]would be easier than toreconstruct the ground-plan of the whole building in hieroglyphic nomenclature. That neither the Ptolemaic building nor the Ptolemaic mythus can be accepted as strictly representative of either pure Egyptian art or pure Egyptian thought, must of course be conceded. Both are modified by Greek influences, and have so far departed from the Pharaonic model. But then we have no equally perfect specimen of the Pharaonic model. The Ramesseum is but a grand fragment. Karnak and Medinet Hadu are aggregates of many temples and many styles. Abydos is still half-buried. Amid so much that is fragmentary, amid so much that is ruined, the one absolutely perfect structure—Ptolemaic though it be—is of incalculable interest, and equally incalculable value.
While we are dreaming over these things, trying to fancy how it all looked when the sacred flotilla came sweeping up the river yonder and the procession of Hor-Hat issued forth to meet the goddess-guest—while we are half-expecting to see the whole brilliant concourse pour out, priests in their robes of panther-skin, priestesses with the tinkling sistrum, singers and harpists, and bearers of gifts and emblems, and high functionaries rearing aloft the sacred boat of the god—in this moment a turbaned Muëddin comes out upon the rickety wooden gallery of the little minaret below, and intones the call to midday prayer. That plaintive cry has hardly died away before we see men here and there among the huts turning toward the east and assuming the first posture of devotion. The women go on cooking and nursing their babies. I have seen Moslem women at prayer in the mosques of Constantinople, but never in Egypt.
Meanwhile, some children catch sight of us, and, notwithstanding that we are one hundred and twenty-five feet above their heads, burst into a frantic chorus of “backshîsh!”
And now, with a last long look at the temple and the wide landscape beyond, we come down, and go to see a dismal little Mammesi three-parts buried among a wilderness of mounds close by. These mounds, which consist almost entirely of crude-brick debris with imbedded fragments of stone and pottery, are built up like coral-reefs, and represent the dwellings of some sixty generations. When they are cut straight through, as here round about the great temple, the substance of them looks like rich plum-cake.
Wehad so long been the sport of destiny that we hardly knew what to make of our good fortune when two days of sweet south wind carried us from Edfu to Luxor. We came back to find the old mooring-place alive with dahabeeyahs and gay with English and American colors. These two flags well-nigh divide the river. In every twenty-five boats one may fairly calculate upon an average of twelve English, nine American, two German, one Belgian and one French. Of all these, our American cousins, ever helpful, ever cordial, are pleasantest to meet. Their flag stands to me for a host of brave and generous and kindly associations. It brings back memories of many lands and many faces. It calls up echoes of friendly voices, some far distant; some, alas! silent. Wherefore—be it on the Nile, or the Thames, or the high seas, or among Syrian camping-grounds, or drooping listlessly from the balconies of gloomy diplomatic haunts in continental cities—my heart warms to the stars and stripes whenever I see them.
Our arrival brought all the dealers in Luxor to the surface. They waylaid and followed us wherever we went; while some of the better sort—grave men in long black robes and ample turbans—installed themselves on our lower deck and lived there for a fortnight. Go up-stairs when one would, whether before breakfast in the morning, or after dinner in the evening, there we always found them, patient, imperturbable, ready to rise up and salaam, and produce from some hidden pocket a purseful of scarabs or a bundle of funerary statuettes. Some of these gentlemen were Arabs, some Copts—all polite, plausible and mendacious.
Where Copt and Arab drive the same doubtful trade it is not easy to define the shades of difference in their dealings. As workmen the Copts are perhaps the most artistic. Assalesmen the Arabs are perhaps the less dishonest. Both sell more forgeries than genuine antiquities. Be the demand what it may, they are prepared to meet it. Thothmes is not too heavy, nor Cleopatra too light, for them. Their carvings in old sycamore wood, their porcelain statuettes, their hieroglyphed limestone tablets, are executed with a skill that almost defies detection. As for genuine scarabs of the highest antiquity, they are turned out by the gross every season. Engraved, glazed and administered to the turkeys in the form of boluses, they acquire, by the simple process of digestion, a degree of venerableness that is really charming.
Side by side with the work of production goes on the work of excavation. The professed diggers colonize the western bank. They live rent free among the tombs; drive donkeys or work shâdûfs by day and spend their nights searching for treasure. Some hundreds of families live in this grim way, spoiling the dead-and-gone Egyptians for a livelihood.
Forgers, diggers and dealers play, meanwhile, into one another’s hands and drive a roaring trade. Your dahabeeyah, as I have just shown, is beset from the moment you moor till the moment you pole off again from shore. The boy who drives your donkey, the guide who pilots you among the tombs, the half-naked fellah who flings down his hoe as you pass and runs beside you for half a mile across the plain, have one and all an “anteekah” to dispose of. The turbaned official who comes, attended by his secretary and pipe-bearer, to pay you a visit of ceremony, warns you against imposition, and hints at genuine treasures to which he alone possesses the key. The gentlemanly native who sits next to you at dinner has a wonderful scarab in his pocket. In short, every man, woman and child about the place is bent on selling a bargain; and the bargain, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is valuable in so far as it represents the industry of Luxor—but no farther. A good thing, of course, is to be had occasionally; but the good thing never comes to the surface as long as a market can be found for the bad one. It is only when the dealer finds he has to do with an experienced customer that he produces the best he has.
Flourishing as it is, the trade of Luxor labors, however, under some uncomfortable restrictions. Private excavation being prohibited, the digger lives in dread of being found out by the governor. The forger, who has nothing to fear from the governor, lives in dread of being found out by the tourist. As for the dealer, whether he sells an antique or an imitation, he is equally liable to punishment. In the one case he commits an offense against the state; and in the other, he obtains money under false pretenses. Meanwhile, the governor deals out such even-handed justice as he can, and does his best to enforce the law on both sides of the river.
By a curious accident, L—— and the writer once actually penetrated into a forger’s workshop. Not knowing that it had been abolished, we went to a certain house in which a certain consulate had once upon a time been located and there knocked for admission. An old deaf fellâha opened the door and after some hesitation showed us into a large unfurnished room with three windows. In each window there stood a workman’s bench strewn with scarabs, amulets and funerary statuettes in every stage of progress. We examined these specimens with no little curiosity. Some were of wood; some were of limestone; some were partly colored. The colors and brushes were there; to say nothing of files, gravers and little pointed tools like gimlets. A magnifying glass of the kind used by engravers lay in one of the window recesses. We also observed a small grindstone screwed to one of the benches and worked by a treadle; while a massive fragment of mummy-case in a corner behind the door showed whence came the old sycamore wood for the wooden specimens. That three skilled workmen furnished with European tools had been busy in this room shortly before we were shown into it was perfectly clear. We concluded that they had just gone away to breakfast.
Meanwhile we waited, expecting to be ushered into the presence of the consul. In about ten minutes, however, breathless with hurrying, arrived a well-dressed Arab whom we had never seen before. Distracted between his oriental politeness and his desire to get rid of us, he bowed us out precipitately, explaining that the house had changed owners and that the power in question had ceased to be represented at Luxor. We heard him rating the old woman savagely, as soon as the door had closed behind us. I met that well-dressed Arab a day or two after, near thegovernor’s house, and he immediately vanished round the nearest corner.
The Boulak authorities keep a small gang of trained excavators always at work in the Necropolis of Thebes. These men are superintended by the governor and every mummy-case discovered is forwarded to Boulak unopened. Thanks to the courtesy of the governor, we had the good fortune to be present one morning at the opening of a tomb. He sent to summon us, just as we were going to breakfast. With what alacrity we manned the felucca and how we ate our bread and butter half in the boat and half on donkey-back, may easily be imagined. How well I remember that early-morning ride across the western plain of Thebes—the young barley rippling for miles in the sun; the little water-channel running beside the path; the white butterflies circling in couples; the wayside grave with its tiny dome and prayer-mat, its well and broken kulleh, inviting the passer-by to drink and pray; the wild vine that trailed along the wall; the vivid violet of the vetches that blossomed unbidden in the barley. We had the mounds and pylons of Medinet Habu to the left—the ruins of the Ramesseum to the right—the colossi of the plain and the rosy western mountains before us all the way. How the great statues glistened in the morning light! How they towered up against the soft blue sky! Battered and featureless, they sat in the old patient attitude, looking as if they mourned the vanished springs.
We found the new tomb a few hundred yards in the rear of the Ramesseum. The diggers were in the pit; the governor and a few Arabs were looking on. The vault was lined with brick-work above and cut square in the living rock below. We were just in time; for already, through the sand and rubble with which the grave had been filled in, there appeared an outline of something buried. The men, throwing spades and picks aside, now began scraping up the dust with their hands, and a mummy-case came gradually to light. It was shaped to represent a body lying at length with the hands crossed upon the breast. Both hands and face were carved in high relief. The ground-color of the sarcophagus was white;[191]the surface covered with hieroglyphed legends and somewhat coarsely painted figures of four lesser gods of the dead. The face, like the hands, was colored a brownish-yellow and highly varnished. But for a little dimness of the gaudy hues, and a little flaking off of the surface here and there, the thing was as perfect as when it was placed in the ground. A small wooden box roughly put together lay at the feet of the mummy. This was taken out first, and handed to the governor, who put it aside without opening it. The mummy-case was then raised upright, hoisted to the brink of the pit, and laid upon the ground.
It gave one a kind of shock to see it first of all lying just as it had been left by the mourners; then hauled out by rude hands, to be searched, unrolled, perhaps broken up as unworthy to occupy a corner of the Boulak collection. Once they are lodged and catalogued in a museum, one comes to look upon these things as “specimens,” and forgets that they once were living beings like ourselves. But this poor mummy looked startlingly human and pathetic lying at the bottom of its grave in the morning sunlight.
After the sarcophagus had been lifted out, a small blue porcelain cup, a ball of the same material, and another little object shaped like a cherry, were found in the débris. The last was hollow, and contained something that rattled when shaken. The mummy, the wooden box, and these porcelain toys, were then removed to a stable close by; and the excavators, having laid bare what looked like the mouth of a bricked-up tunnel in the side of the tomb, fell to work again immediately. A second vault—perhaps a chain of vaults—it was thought would now be discovered.
We went away, meanwhile, for a few hours, and saw some of the famous painted tombs in that part of the mountain side just above, which goes by the name of Sheik Abd-el-Koorneh.
It was a hot climb; the sun blazing overhead; the cliffs reflecting light and heat; the white débris glaring under foot. Some of the tombs up here are excavated in terraces, and look from a distance like rows of pigeon-holes; others are pierced in solitary ledges of rock; many are difficult of access; all are intolerably hot and oppressive. They were numbered half a century ago by the late Sir Gardner Wilkinson, and the numbers are there still. We went that morning into fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, and thirty-five.
As a child “The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians” had shared my affections with “The Arabian Nights.” I had read every line of the old six-volume edition over and over again. I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart. Now I suddenly found myself in the midst of old and half-forgotten friends. Every subject on these wonderful walls was already familiar to me. Only the framework, only the coloring, only the sand under foot, only the mountain slope outside, were new and strange. It seemed to me that I had met all these kindly brown people years and years ago—perhaps in some previous stage of existence; that I had walked with them in their gardens; listened to the music of their lutes and tambourines; pledged them at their feasts. Here is the funeral procession that I know so well; and the trial scene after death, where the mummy stands upright in the presence of Osiris, and sees his heart weighed in the balance. Here is that well-remembered old fowler crouching in the rushes with his basket of decoys. One withered hand is lifted to his mouth; his lips frame the call; his thin hair blows in the breeze. I see now that he has placed himself to the leeward of the game; but that subtlety escaped me in the reading days of my youth. Yonder I recognize a sculptor’s studio into which I frequently peeped at that time. His men are at work as actively as ever; but I marvel that they have not yet finished polishing the surface of that red-granite colossus. This patient angler, still waiting for a bite, is another old acquaintance; and yonder, I declare, is that evening party at which I was so often an imaginary guest! Is the feast not yet over? Has that late-comer whom we saw hurrying along just now in a neighboring corridor not yet arrived? Will the musicians never play to the end of their concerto? Are those ladiesstill so deeply interested in the patterns of one another’s ear-rings? It seems to me that the world has been standing still in here for these last five-and-thirty years.
Did I say five-and-thirty? Ah, me! I think we must multiply it by ten, and then by ten again, ere we come to the right figure. These people lived in the time of the Thothmes and the Amenhoteps—a time upon which Rameses the Great looked back as we look back to the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts.
From the tombs above we went back to the excavations below. The bricked-up opening had led, as the diggers expected, into a second vault; and another mummy-case, half-crushed by a fall of débris, had just been taken out. A third was found later in the afternoon. Curiously enough, they were all three mummies of women.
The governor was taking his luncheon with the first mummy in the recesses of the stable, which had been a fine tomb once, but reeked now with manure. He sat on a rug, cross-legged, with a bowl of sour milk before him and a tray of most uninviting little cakes. He invited me to a seat on his rug, handed me his own spoon, and did the honors of the stable as pleasantly as if it had been a palace.
I asked him why the excavators, instead of working among these second-class graves, were not set to search for the tombs of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, supposed to be waiting discovery in a certain valley called the Valley of the West. He shook his head. The way to the Valley of the West, he said, was long and difficult. Men working there must encamp upon the spot; and merely to supply them with water would be no easy matter. He was allowed, in fact, only a sum sufficient for the wages of fifty excavators; and to attack the Valley of the West with less than two hundred would be useless.
We had luncheon that morning, I remember, with the M. B.’s in the second hall of the Ramesseum. It was but one occasion among many; for the writer was constantly at work on that side of the river, and we had luncheon in one or other of the western temples every day. Yet that particular meeting stands out in my memory apart from the rest. I see the joyous party gathered together in the shade of the great columns—the Persian rugs spread on the uneven ground—the dragoman in his picturesque dressgoing to and fro—the brown and tattered Arabs, squatting a little way off, silent and hungry-eyed, each with his string of forged scarabs, his imitation gods, or his bits of mummy-case and painted cartonnage for sale—the glowing peeps of landscape framed in here and there through vistas of columns—the emblazoned architraves laid along from capital to capital overhead, each block sculptured with enormous cartouches yet brilliant with vermilion and ultramarine—the patient donkeys munching all together at a little heap of vetches in one corner—the intense depths of cloudless blue above. Of all Theban ruins, the Ramesseum is the most cheerful. Drenched in sunshine, the warm limestone of which it is built seems to have mellowed and turned golden with time. No walls inclose it. No towering pylons overshadow it. It stands high, and the air circulates freely among those simple and beautiful columns. There are not many Egyptian ruins in which one can talk and be merry; but in the Ramesseum one may thoroughly enjoy the passing hour.
Whether Rameses the Great was ever actually buried in this place is a problem which future discoveries may possibly solve; but that the Ramesseum and the tomb of Osymandias were one and the same building is a point upon which I never entertained a moment’s doubt. Spending day after day among these ruins; sketching now here, now there; going over the ground bit by bit, and comparing every detail, I came at last to wonder how an identity so obvious could ever have been doubted. Diodorus was of course inaccurate; but then one as little looks for accuracy in Diodorus as in Homer. Compared with some of his topographical descriptions, the account he gives of the Ramesseum is a marvel of exactness. He describes[192]a building approached by two vast court-yards; a hall of pillars opening by way of three entrances from the second court-yard; a succession of chambers, including a sacred library; ceilings of azure “bespangled with stars;” walls covered with sculptures representing the deeds and triumphs of the king whom he calls Osymandias,[193]amongwhich are particularly noticed the assault of a fortress “environed by a river,” a procession of captives without hands, and a series of all the gods of Egypt, to whom the king was represented in the act of making offerings; finally, against the entrance to the second court-yard, three statues of the king, one of which, being of Syenite granite and made “in a sitting posture,” is stated to be not only “the greatest in all Egypt,” but admirable above all others “for its workmanship and the excellence of the stone.”
Bearing in mind that what is left of the Ramesseum is, as it were, only the backbone of the entire structure, one can still walk from end to end of the building, and still recognize every feature of this description. We turn our backs on the wrecked towers of the first propylon; crossing what was once the first court-yard, we leave to the left the fallen colossus; we enter the second court-yard, and see before us the three entrances to the hall of pillars and the remains of two other statues; we walk up the central avenue of the great hall, and see above our heads architraves studded with yellow stars upon a ground color so luminously blue that it almost matches the sky; thence, passing through a chamber lined with sculptures, we come to the library, upon the door-jambs of which Champollion found the figures of Thoth and Saf, the lord of letters and the lady of the sacred books;[194]finally, among such fragments of sculptured decoration as yet remain, we find the king making offerings to a hieroglyphed list of gods as well as to his deified ancestors; we see the train of captives, and the piles of severed hands;[195]and we discover an immense battle-piece, which is in fact a replica of the famous battle-piece at Abou Simbel. This subject, like its Nubian prototype, yet preserves some of its color. The enemy are shown to be fair-skinned and light-haired, and wear the same Syrian robes; and the river, more green than that at Abou Simbel, is painted in zigzags in the same manner. The king, alone in hischariot, sends arrow after arrow against the flying foe. They leap into the river and swim for their lives. Some are drowned; some cross in safety, and are helped out by their friends on the opposite bank. A red-haired chief, thus rescued, is suspended head downward by his soldiers, in order to let the water that he has swallowed run out of his mouth. The river is once more the Orontes; the city is once more Kadesh; the king is once more Rameses II; and the incidents are again the incidents of the poem of Pentaur.
The one wholly unmistakable point in the narrative is, however, the colossal statue of Syenite, the largest in Egypt.”[196]The siege and the river, the troops of captives are to be found elsewhere; but nowhere, save here, a colossus which answers to that description. This statue was larger than even the twin colossi of the plain. They measure eighteen feet three inches across the shoulders; this measures twenty-two feet four inches. They sit about fifty feet high, without their pedestals; this one must have lifted his head some ten feet higher still. “The measure of his foot,” says Diodorus, “exceeded seven cubits;” the Greek cubit being a little over eighteeninches in length. The foot of the fallen Rameses measures nearly eleven feet in length by four feet ten inches in breadth. This, also, is the only very large Theban colossus sculptured in the red syenite of Assûan.[197]
Ruined almost beyond recognition as it is, one never doubts for a moment that this statue was one of the wonders of Egyptian workmanship. It most probably repeated in every detail the colossi of Abou Simbel; but it surpassed them as much in finish of carving as in perfection of material. The stone is even more beautiful in color than that of the famous obelisks of Karnak; and is so close and hard in grain that the scarab-cutters of Luxor are said to use splinters of it, as our engravers use diamonds, for the points of their graving, tools. The solid contents of the whole, when entire, are calculated at eight hundred and eighty-seven tons. How this astounding mass was transported from Assûan, how it was raised, how it was overthrown, are problems upon which a great deal of ingenious conjecture has been wasted. One traveler affirms that the wedge-marks of the destroyer are distinctly visible. Another, having carefully examined the fractured edges, declares that the keenest eye can detect neither wedge-marks nor any other evidences of violence. We looked for none of these signs and tokens. We never asked ourselves how or when the ruin had been done. It was enough that the mighty had fallen.
Inasmuch as one can clamber upon and measure these stupendous fragments, the fallen colossus is more astonishing, perhaps, as a wreck than it would have been as a whole. Here, snapped across at the waist and flung helplessly back, lie a huge head and shoulders, to climb which is like climbing a rock. Yonder, amid piles of unintelligible débris, we see a great foot, and, nearer the head, part of an enormous trunk, together with the upper halves of two huge thighs clothed in the usual shenti or striped tunic. The klaft or head-dress is also striped, and these stripes, in both instances, retain the delicate yellow color with which they were originally filled in. To judge fromthe way in which this color was applied, one would say that the statue was tinted rather than painted. The surface-work, wherever it remains, is as smooth and highly finished as the cutting of the finest gem. Even the ground of the superb cartouche, on the upper half of the arm, is elaborately polished. Finally, in the pit which it plowed out in falling, lies the great pedestal, hieroglyphed with the usual pompous titles of Rameses Mer-Amen. Diodorus, knowing nothing of Rameses or his style, interprets the inscription after his own fanciful fashion: “I am Osymandias, king of kings. If any would know how great I am and where I lie let him excel me in any of my works.”
The fragments of wall and shattered pylon that yet remain standing at the Ramesseum face northwest and southwest. Hence, it follows that some of the most interesting of the surface sculpture (being cut in very low relief) is so placed with regard to the light as to be actually invisible after midday. It was not till the occasion of my last visit, when I came early in the morning to make a certain sketch by a certain light, that I succeeded in distinguishing a single figure of that celebrated tableau,[198]on the south wall of the great hall, in which the Egyptians are seen to be making use of the testudo and scaling-ladder to assault a Syrian fortress. The wall sculptures of the second hall are on a bolder scale and can be seen at any hour. Here Thoth writes the name of Rameses on the egg-shaped fruit of the persea tree and processions of shaven priests carry on their shoulders the sacred boats of various gods. In the center of each boat is a shrine supported by winged genii, or cherubim. The veils over these shrines, the rings through which the bearing-poles were passed and all the appointments and ornaments of thebariare distinctly shown. One seems here, indeed, to be admitted to a glimpse of those original shrines upon which Moses—learned in the sacred lore of the Egyptians—modeled, with but little alteration, his ark of the covenant.
Next in importance to Karnak, and second in interest to none of the Theban ruins, is the vast group of buildings known by the collective name of Medinet Habu. To attempt to describe these would be to undertake a task ashopeless as the description of Karnak. Such an attempt lies, at all events, beyond the compass of these pages, so many of which have already been given to similar subjects. For it is of the temples as of the mountains—no two are alike, yet all sound so much alike when described that it is scarcely possible to write about them without becoming monotonous. In the present instance, therefore, I will note only a few points of special interest, referring those who wish for fuller particulars to the elaborate account of Medinet Habu in Murray’s “Hand-book of Egypt.”
In the second name of Medinet Habu—Medinet being the common Arabic for city, and Habu, Aboo, or Taboo being variously spelled—there survives almost beyond doubt the ancient name of that famous city which the Greeks called Thebes. It is the name for which many derivations[199]have been suggested, but upon which the learned are not yet agreed.
The ruins of Medinet Habu consist of a smaller temple founded by Queen Hatohepsu of the eighteenth dynasty, a large and magnificent temple entirely built by Rameses III of the twentieth dynasty, and an extremely curious and interesting building, part palace, part fortress, which is popularly known as the pavilion.
The walls of this pavilion, the walls of the great forecourt leading to the smaller temple, and a corner of the original wall of circuit, are crowned in the Egyptian style with shield-shaped battlements, precisely as the Khetan and Amorite fortresses are battlemented in the sculptured tableaux at Abou Simbel and elsewhere. From whichever side one approaches Medinet Habu these stone shields strike the eye as a new and interesting feature. They are, moreover, so far as I know, the only specimens of Egyptian battlementing which have survived destruction. Those of the wall of circuit are of the time of Rameses V; those of the pavilion, of the time of Rameses III; and the latest, which are those of the forecourt, are of the period of Roman occupation.
As biographical material, the temple and pavilion at Medinet Habu and the great Harris papyrus,[200]are to the life of Rameses III precisely what Abou Simbel, the Ramesseum, and the poem of Pentaur are to the life of Rameses II. Great wars, great victories, magnificent praises of the prowess of the king, pompous lists of enemies slain and captured, inventories of booty and of precious gifts offered by the victor to the gods of Egypt, in both instances cover the sculptured walls and fill the written pages. A comparison of the two masses of evidence—due allowance being made both ways for oriental fervor of diction—shows that in Rameses III we have to do with a king as brilliant, as valorous, and as successful as Rameses II.[201]
It may be that before the time of this Pharaoh certain temples were used also as royal residences. It is possible to believe this of temples such as Gournah and Abydus, the plan of which includes, besides the usual halls, side-chambers and sanctuary, a number of other apartments, the uses of which are unknown. It may also be that former kings dwelt in houses of brick and carved woodwork, such as we see represented in the wall-paintings of various tombs.
It is, at all events, a fact that the only building which we can assume to have been a royal palace and of which any vestiges have come down to the present day, was erected by Rameses III, namely, this little pavilion at Medinet Habu.
It may not have been a palace. It may have been only a fortified gate; but, though the chambers are small, they are well lighted and the plan of the whole is certainly domestic in character. It consists, as we now see it, of two lodges connected by zigzag wings with a centraltower. The lodges and tower stand to each other as the three points of an acute angle. These structures inclose an oblong court-yard leading by a passage under the central tower to the inclosure beyond. So far as its present condition enables us to judge, this building contained only eight rooms; namely, three—one above the other in each of the lodges and two above the gateway.[202]These three towers communicate by means of devious passages in the connecting wings. Two of the windows in the wings are adorned with balconies supported on brackets; each bracket representing the head and shoulders of a crouching captive in the attitude of a gargoyle. The heads and dresses of these captives—conceived as they are in a vein of gothic barbarism—are still bright with color.