CHAPTER VII

Thebesat its zenith was one of the glories of the old world, with some of the most marvellous temples ever imagined by the mind of man or executed by human hand. The ancient capital of Egypt was unequalled in magnificence. King after king increased the wonders of the temple of Ammon; their sculptors carved great sphinxes out of stone, which were set up in an avenue over a mile long. Building after building was added to the original one. Mighty gateways, or pylons, 142 feet high, were built, and from these projected flagstaffs on which gaily coloured banners fluttered in the breeze.

The great hall of Ammon was composed of pillars 78 feet high and 33 feet round, all carved and painted in vivid colours. Lesser halls and temples were added, and here, amid a blaze of colour and sunshine, the festivals were held, the high priests performed their sacred rites, the Pharaoh drove up in his gorgeous chariots with the harness of his horses ablaze with gold, while his subjects shielded their faces from the monarch who shared the glory ofAmmon. At intervals the high priests brought out the sacred boat of the god, raised it aloft on their shoulders, and carried it around the temple, while the populace stood silent with awe. For a brief instant the curtains were drawn aside, and the god was disclosed to the multitude before returning to the silence and sanctity of the temple, from which the common people were rigidly excluded.

About the king gathered all the wit and wisdom of the Egyptian empire. Magnificent banquets were held, at which were served to the guests fine dishes of venison, roast ducks and other fowl, and fish. Wine flowed, maidens danced. There was talk and laughter and love.

To-day Thebes has vanished. The one-time capital of Egypt is a desert ruin. Near by are the villages of Karnak and Luxor, with a few natives living in their humble dwellings, and just a big hotel for the use of travellers, who come here to gaze on the ruins of the past.

It is strange that thousands of years ago, when these islands were inhabited by a few savages who painted their bodies, threw a skin about them for warmth, and lived in the rudest of huts for shelter, far away to the south on the Nile a mighty civilization was flourishing, that would compare very favourably with the civilization of to-day.

A PARTLY-HEWN OBELISK STILL ATTACHED TO THE ROCK IN ONE OF THE ANCIENT QUARRIES

While the barbarians of Britain were building their rude huts, the Egyptians were carving colossalpillars for the Hall of the Temple of Ammon, pillars over 30 feet round, and painting them with colours which are still fresh after all this lapse of time. Even then they had been building with brick for thousands of years. The tomb paintings show the brickmakers puddling the alluvial soil with their feet, shaping the mud into bricks, and baking them hard in the fierce heat of the sun. Moreover these bricks endured for centuries, and still endure; whereas many of the red bricks made in England thirty or forty years ago are perishing fast.

Speculation is still going on as to how the Egyptians used to handle the enormous stones found in the ruins, and how they managed to place in position monuments like Cleopatra’s Needle. There is mention of certain engines having been used to lift the stones of the Pyramids, but what these engines were, nobody to-day can say with certainty.

Cleopatra’s Needle was roughly shaped on three sides in the quarry, before it was detached from the mother rock. The methods of detaching a monument from the rock show that the Egyptians were quite conversant with natural laws, that they possessed the ability to harness these laws in order to save human labour. How many modern craftsmen would succeed in separating one of these huge stones from the mountain-side, by using such simplethings as a drill, some wooden pegs, and water? With these crude implements the task would be looked upon nowadays as impossible. Yet from obelisks still attached to the rock, it is obvious that such primitive appliances were sufficient to enable the Egyptians to perform their ancient miracles.

On the exact line where they desired to sever the stone, they cut a deep groove, and at frequent intervals along this groove they drilled holes, into which they hammered wooden pegs very tightly, until the tops were a little below the surface of the stone. Then water was poured on the pegs, and as it soaked into the wood they swelled, until the expansion of them all together was so irresistible that the rock was split along the groove.

Many huge pillars and statues were also sculptured in the living rock before being detached, for areas of rock have been found all marked off in squares with figures drawn on them ready to be carved by the sculptor. Like the stones of the Pyramids, many of these figures and monoliths were transported on sleds, others were dragged over rollers. It was a common practice to send thousands of men to some distant place, to cut out a giant block of stone, and bring it back for the use of the king. Ancient drawings showing gigantic statues being dragged along on sledges by armies of slaves, reveal to us how the transport was effected.

But there was the difficulty of erecting an obelisk when it had reached the spot for which it was intended. A weight of 186 tons, like that of Cleopatra’s Needle, is a tremendous problem to handle, yet the Egyptian engineers accomplished it successfully. Such a weight was actually small compared with some of the weights they tackled, for they moved and erected single stones weighing twice and thrice as much, that is weights up to nearly 600 tons.

If our engineers to-day were given the same problem, they would still have to puzzle over it, in spite of the giant cranes that could be brought to the spot to help them. The mammoth lifting machines designed by modern engineers were unknown in the days of the Pharaohs, yet the ancients were able to do work without them which we would find it rather difficult to do with them.

Ever so many theories have been propounded as to how they set up these huge blocks of stone. One suggestion is that the stones were dragged to the site and their bases placed in position; then in some way, perhaps by the use of giant beams over which the ropes attached to the top ends of the stones were passed, they were pulled upright, a little at a time. As they were hauled up, blocks of stone may have been slipped under them to carry the weight.

Other theories abound, but the likeliest theory ofall is that the Egyptians built a big sloping embankment like that used in the construction of the Pyramids. Up this the obelisk was hauled, base first, until it reached the very top, and projected on to a bed of sand. Labourers shovelled the sand away from under the obelisk, just as ants dig the earth from beneath a mouse they want to bury, and as the sand was removed, so the base of the obelisk sank down, until it gradually tilted upright exactly in the position designed for it. No simpler, or more brilliant, way could be found of solving this difficult problem.

One of the monoliths erected by Queen Hatshepsut, at Karnak, is 109 feet high, and she records that at her bidding this mighty stone, weighing hundreds of tons, was hewn out of the quarry, the sides were properly shaped, and the stone conveyed to the site, all within seven months. The Queen gave her orders, and the people obeyed.

Such methods, if they were followed to-day, would be so expensive as to be prohibitive. In those days there were no unions, and no union rates of wages. The overseer of the works could have all the labour he needed. If he could not manage with a thousand labourers, then he could have ten thousand. The king was the lord and master of his people, as well as of his slaves. The overseer had only to say that he wanted more men, and the king would give orders for the men to be procured.If they did not come willingly, they would be seized and pressed into the service of the king. So long as they were doing the king’s work they would be fed, but wages in the present sense were unknown.

THE BEAUTIFUL TEMPLE KNOWN AS PHARAOH’S BED, CRADLED IN THE WATERS OF THE NILE, WHICH HAVE COVERED THE ISLAND OF PHILÆ AND PARTLY SUBMERGED THE NOBLE RUINS SINCE THE BUILDING OF THE ASSOUAN DAM

Those noble ruins on the island of Philæ higher up the Nile above Assouan may no more be seen in all their glory. They have been sacrificed to the Nile god and to modern necessities. Realizing that the building of the great dam at Assouan would raise the level of the river and submerge the island, the builders went to enormous trouble to underpin the ruins and make them secure against the flood. This work was carried out with great difficulty, and in a masterly manner. The completion of the Assouan dam saw the waters of the Nile slowly creep over the ruined temples, and there may now be seen peeping above the surface of the water the tops of a few columns which, owing to their peculiar resemblance to a fourpost bed, are generally known as Pharaoh’s Bed.

A wonderful work in a land of wonders is the barrage of Assouan, but the benefits that would accrue to the land by holding up and deflecting the waters of the Nile were not unrealized by the ancients. Thousands of years ago the problems of controlling the Nile were studied as carefully as they have been studied in our own time. OnePharaoh, known as Amenhotep III, ordered his engineers to work out a scheme for controlling the inundation. He desired to store up some of the Nile water when there was an excess, and draw on these surplus supplies when the river was low.

The work he undertook was in its way as wonderful as that at Assouan, but when we consider that it was started nearly four thousand years ago it appears even more marvellous. Labourers swarmed over the land, cutting channels in the rock, and driving canals connected with the great expanse of water near Fayoum known as Lake Moeris, a natural reservoir which served to store the water just as the barrage at Assouan stores the water to-day. The Pharaoh had the foresight to tap this huge supply of water to irrigate the surrounding country, and the land, no longer at the mercy of the Nile floods, prospered accordingly.

Amenhotep, like all the other Pharaohs, was anxious to protect his treasure from thieves, and he commanded his cleverest architects to design a palace in which people who went inside without permission might wander for ever without finding their way out again. The whole of the interior of the palace was composed of small rooms, in number three thousand, leading by narrow passages one into the other. The way in and out was a strict secret, and those who broke in might wanderround and in and out of the chambers until they died of starvation. This palace was the famous Labyrinth, a maze in stone to defeat thieves and robbers. No trace of it now remains.

The kings of Egypt and the chief men were obsessed with the idea that their tombs would be plundered, and that the robbers would deprive their doubles of all chance of future life. It must be admitted that they had good cause for their obsession. They knew that the same subjects who had buried previous kings and lamented their deaths, had seized the first opportunity of rifling the tombs of their treasures, and the Pharaohs were well aware that their own subjects would not be above doing the same thing.

To rifle a tomb was one of the greatest crimes that could be committed, but the thieves were quite prepared to sacrifice their chances in the next life for the prospect of gaining something in this.

The tombs indicate that for thousands of years a continual battle of wits was being fought between the kings, who wished to preserve their tombs from desecration, and the thieves who wished to plunder them. The kings built temples for themselves, and had a strong burial chamber placed at one end. The thieves broke in easily and abstracted the treasure. Then the kings made secret burial chambers in their temples for the safeguarding oftheir mummies, but the thieves located them, and robbed them just the same.

At last a queen hit on the idea of building a fine temple for herself at Thebes, with a special sanctuary for her mummy. But not for a moment did she intend her mummy to rest within the shade of the temple. She sent her priests and tried servants into the desolate valley, to seek a secret hiding-place for her mummy high up in the cliff. They cut a chamber in the rock, and made the tomb in that valley known to-day as the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

Other kings came to the valley. They erected temples, and their engineers cut into the heart of the mountains, to make chambers in which to hide their bodies. They built up the places as strongly as they could. They devised obstructions to stop any one from entering. They hid the entrances to the tombs so carefully, that it was impossible to tell whether the places had ever been disturbed.

All their labour, all their secrecy, was in vain. Not a single tomb in all Egypt has yet been found intact. Every tomb discovered has been rifled of its treasure. Even the tomb of Tutankhamen is no exception. The actual holes which the robbers made to enter the tomb were discovered, and, judging by the wealth of the furniture and other things remaining, the haul of gold and silver must have been enormous.

The high priests, horrified at the desecration of the tombs, feared so much for the royal mummies in their charge, that they went out stealthily into the deserted hills and sought a secret hiding-place. Then they brought many royal mummies to it, one by one, probably under cover of darkness, and hid them away from thievish eyes and hands.

For centuries, for thousands of years, the robbers were defeated; the ancient kings and queens of Egypt slept on undisturbed in their secret sepulchre. Yet in the end the tomb robbers triumphed. Somehow, sometime, they managed to find the tomb. They did not blazon their discovery to the world. The booty was too rich for that, so they began systematically robbing the tomb and disposing of the relics to travellers who passed that way.

The ultimate discovery of the tomb by Sir Gaston Maspero is one of the greatest romances of Egyptology. One day in 1881, a visitor showed Maspero some wonderfully illuminated pages of a royal ritual. Maspero, gazing on them in amazement, inquired whence they came, and learned that they had been bought at Thebes.

Instantly all Maspero’s suspicions crystallized into action. He had long suspected that the Arabs had found a royal tomb, and here was definite evidence. Without delay he journeyed to Thebes, and discussed the matter with the authorities.Secret inquiries pointed to four brothers, who lived in some deserted tombs, as having knowledge of the find. A decision to arrest one of them, in the hopes that he would speak, was at once carried into effect. The Arab was thrown into prison, but he said nothing, denied all knowledge of the matter for seven or eight weeks. Maspero could not wait. Offering a big reward for information of the discovery, he returned down the Nile, and ultimately his reward tempted one of the brothers to come forward and agree to lead the authorities to the tomb.

Maspero, back in Cairo, sent an Egyptologist with an assistant hot-foot to Thebes. A rendezvous was fixed at Deir-el-Bahari. Picking their way over the rocks, the Arabs led the two strangers along the foot of the escarpment which frowned bare and sinister above their heads. In a short while they came to a boulder which had fallen from the cliffs above. Screened in the most remarkable manner by this mighty rock, the entrance had escaped human eyes for three thousand years. Arabs and strangers lit their candles, a rope was uncoiled and shaken down the black shaft, and one after another they slid down 40 feet to the bottom.

The strangers groped their way along a tunnel, following the flickering candles just ahead, stooping to escape the rocky ceiling, at times almost having to go down on their hands and knees. They turneda corner, still groping and climbing along the rocky passage, down a flight of rock-cut stairs, deeper and deeper into the recesses of the mountain, kicking against bits of mummy cases, fragments of bandages. On they went, their excitement rising with every step.

At last they came to a chamber in the rock. It was like an Aladdin’s cave. Mummy cases were everywhere, standing up against the wall, lying down and piled on top of each other. Great piles of boxes, alabaster vases, statuettes—it was incredible, absolutely amazing.

Without giving the newcomers time to take in the wonderful sight, the Arabs led the way through this chamber down and down through another passage. After traversing 60 yards they came to a chamber that was even more amazing, more wonderful than the last. The strangers could hardly believe their eyes. All around the burial chamber were royal mummies, the glitter of gold and colour showing up under the flickering candles. The cases were exquisitely carved and decorated, so well preserved that it was as though they were made but yesterday.

So intensely excited was the Egyptologist, that it required an effort of will to make him realize this was not a dream, but reality, that he was the first white man in the history of the world to gaze on such a glorious sight; to see the ancient kingsand queens as they had slumbered through the centuries.

He looked around him, examined the royal names and titles. Here were SetiI, ThothmesII, ThothmesIII, RamesesII. Wherever he looked the mummy of a king or queen greeted his astonished gaze. He was literally astounded, hardly able to take it all in. The magnitude of the find overwhelmed him. He counted the mummies one by one—eleven kings, nine queens, a prince and a princess! It was unbelievable.

In a little while, when the first excitement had passed away, he became the man of action once more. Realizing to the full that only the promptest measures could save the tomb from being looted, he quickly collected three hundred Arabs, and he and his assistant began to remove the treasures. They never halted, never rested, labouring on all through that day and the next without a moment’s sleep, removing the kings and queens from their resting-place, sewing them up in sailcloth, and getting them into the open. In forty-eight hours they cleared the tomb of everything it contained, and in another three days they had conveyed the mummies over the plain of Thebes to the Nile.

The natives were ugly, threatening, angry that their kings should be disturbed—still more angry that there was no chance for them to plunder thetomb any more. Not for a moment dared the Egyptologist and his assistant leave their precious charge, not until the steamer arrived that was to take the royal mummies down to Cairo.

The news of the discovery spread like wildfire through the villages, and as the steamer passed slowly down the Nile, the Egyptian women hailed the passing with the death wail, running along the banks, tearing their hair and uttering their awful cries. Men wailed and fired their guns. It was one of the most remarkable sights ever witnessed, the natives of our own time mourning the Pharaohs who reigned thousands of years ago.

It was the triumph of a man whose whole life was wrapped up in the past life of Egypt, whose own life was as romantic as that of any man who was destined to throw a little light upon the dead civilizations of the Pharaohs. Maspero was but a boy of fourteen when he was attracted by some of the ancient picture-writing of the Egyptians. The queer little figures exercised a strange spell over him. He was quite fascinated by them, so much so, that he made up his boyish mind to learn to read them.

Probably hundreds of thousands of boys have seen pictures of the hieroglyphics and thought them very funny, but who has heard of another boy who was so anxious to read them that he studied them at any and every opportunity, as Gaston Maspero did?He who seeks knowledge will always find some way of acquiring it. Gaston Maspero studied the picture-writing to such good purpose that he learned to read it quite easily and translate it with considerable skill. He used to read the pictures to his school friends, and they were considerably impressed by this ability.

One night in 1867, some of Maspero’s fellow-students were having dinner with their tutor, and Mariette, the famous Egyptologist, was present. Naturally the talk turned on Egypt, and the students tried to impress Mariette by mentioning that Maspero could read hieroglyphics, and that he had taught himself.

Mariette was amused at the idea. “Ask him to read this for me,” he said, and gave them an inscription he had just discovered and which had not been translated.

Maspero’s companions took the inscription, and Maspero sat down and translated it. When Mariette received the translation he was far more amazed at finding this young man of twenty-one in Paris who could read hieroglyphics, than he would have been at finding some new temple on the Nile. It seemed to him simply incredible, so he gave Maspero something else to translate—lines that were all mutilated and from which a great deal was missing.

Maspero sat down to the problem, and after a fewdays managed to translate the fragments and supply the missing parts. Then Mariette realized that he had indeed found a born Egyptologist, and it is not surprising that the boy who was so interested that he taught himself to read the picture-writing should succeed Mariette in Egypt.

Who knows what Mariette thought when the translations of Maspero were brought to him? Perhaps his mind flashed back over the years to the rather unhappy time when he, a lad of eighteen, was professor of French at a school in Stratford-on-Avon, to the days when his talent for drawing was confined to designing ribbons for a Coventry manufacturer. Maybe he remembered how happily he returned to France to take his degree at Douai, those articles he wrote to add to his income, the cousin who had been dealing with Champollion’s material, and whose death brought all the material of that great man under Mariette’s own fingers.

From that period dates Mariette’s own romantic career. He was under thirty when he went to Egypt in search of manuscripts, and found instead the ruins of the Serapeum at Memphis. His diggers fought the desert, and rescued the Sphinx from the grasping sands, tore the drift of centuries from the ruins of the temples of Edfu, uncovered the glories of Karnak. The years brought more discoveries, his work was acclaimed, honours were heaped upon him. The call of Egypt to Mariette was irresistible,as it had been to Champollion, as it was to Maspero. Fate linked these three Frenchmen together to add to our knowledge of the past. They loved France, but the deserts and the debris of Egypt became part of their lives.

Often they went in the burning sun to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings—one of the most desolate places on earth. Not a tree to be seen, not a flower, not even a blade of grass. Vegetation cannot live there. It is a veritable valley of the dead, an inferno of desolation. Birds avoid it, animals shun it, only the bats haunt the tombs. There at the base of the hills is the wonderful temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with its rows of pillars standing like sentinels before the blackness which is beyond. Years ago no trace of it could be seen, but a man with a spade came along and found it, and after prodigious labours it was dug out of the overlying rubble and rock in which it was buried.

Everywhere is the eternal rubble and sand. Huge piles of debris mark the sites where the diggers have been working; broken steps leading downwards into the mountains indicate where tombs have been found.

Rain hardly ever falls there.... If you sat and waited for a shower of rain, you would have to wait on an average for five years! Perhaps twenty times in a century the clouds break over the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, but the ground is so parchedand rocky that a deluge is almost swallowed up as it falls. In an hour the valley is again as dry as a bone.

THE WONDERFUL TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATSHEPSUT AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFFS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS. THE TINY FIGURE OF A MAN, NO BIGGER THAN A PIN-HEAD, ON THE CENTRAL ROAD, SERVES TO INDICATE THE SIZE OF THE TEMPLE

The valley leads nowhere, except into the desert. There was nothing to call the natives in that direction. It was like a lonely valley in another world, and this loneliness no doubt was one of the factors which decided the Pharaohs to seek their last resting-places here. Another factor was that the limestone of the hills was an excellent stone in which to cut the chambers which were to be the eternal homes of the kings.

All their thought, all their secrecy to keep their tombs inviolate, was in vain. The most trusted men were chosen to carve out these underground chambers, but where many men are engaged on a secret mission, the secret is bound to leak out.

Some of the workers may have told their wives, who in turn may have dropped a remark in all innocence which led the robbers to the exact spot. The workers themselves, despite the faith of their masters, were not always to be trusted, and there is little doubt that some of them led the thieves to the tombs and told them exactly where and how to break in, that in some cases the very men who had built the tombs came back afterwards by night and plundered them.

It may easily have been the builders whorobbed the tomb of Tutankhamen, for Mr. Carter discovered that the thieves entered within a few years of the King’s burial, and that the tomb was then resealed by the keepers of the royal burial-places.

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