THEBES—LUXOR AND KARNAK.
For all Egyptian Thebes displays of wealth,
Whose palaces its greatest store contain:
That hundred-gated city that sends forth
Through every gate an hundred cars of war,
Well horsed, well manned.—HOMER’S _Iliad_.
Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes, are three fragments of the hundred-gated city
of Homer. The landing, to which you moor your boat, is about two hundred
yards from the great temple of Luxor. The open space, between the landing
and the temple, is a slight acclivity, and is completely covered with
sand. To the right and left of the open space are the mean buildings
of the modern town. Those on the right cluster round and conceal the
greater part of the temple, leaving only a grand colonnade visible from
the water, at the further side of the open sandy acclivity. As you enter
this colonnade, and stand in the roofed hall among the mighty pillars
that support the roof, a feeling comes over you that you have shrunk to
the dimensions and feebleness of a fly. The oldest sanctuary, of which
there are any remains still standing here, was built by Amenophis III.,
who belonged to the dynasty that expelled the Hyksos. It was now seen
that Thebes would be a safer capital than Memphis, which was too near
the Semitic border. The close connexion also that had now been formed
with Ethiopia, sometimes being that of its complete subjection, made
a more southern capital desirable. The erection of the splendid temple
of Amenophis indicates the complete triumph of the new policy. This
took place about four thousand years ago. Rameses the Great, the most
magnificent and prolific architect the world has ever seen, was not
satisfied with the original structure. Following the example of his
father, Sethos, he conceived a plan for investing Thebes with a grandeur
and a glory that none of the Empires, that have grown to greatness during
the thousands of years that have passed since his day, have done anything
to rival, or approach. And this plan he carried out to a successful
completion. Part of it was the architectural connexion of Luxor and
Karnak. For this purpose it was necessary to give additional height
and massiveness to Luxor. This he did by attaching to the extremity of
the temple of Amenophis, nearest to Karnak, a grand court, enriched
externally with colossal statues of himself and two obelisks; one of
which is now standing where he placed it; the other is in the _Place de
la Concorde_ at Paris. Having made the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, by
their height and massiveness, their lofty courts, propylæa and obelisks,
reciprocally conspicuous and imposing from each other, the direct
connexion was effected by a broad straight road, or street, nearly two
miles in length, guarded on either side by a row of sphinxes. Some of
these, at the Karnak end of the connecting street, still remain; they are
ram-headed. Fragments of others are found in the _débris_ nearer Luxor.
Along the line of this old street, which, however, except at its
northern end, is quite obliterated by rubbish mounds, cultivation, and
palm-groves, you ride to Karnak. As you pass no houses by the way the
distance seems great. Here was for many centuries the splendid centre
of the most splendid city in the world. On nothing like it did the sun
shine. The dwelling-houses, many of them Diodorus tells us four, some
even five, stories high, were, we may be sure, not allowed to approach so
near as to interfere with the solemnizing effect of the long dromos of
sphinxes. This effect was the very object of these avenues of sphinxes
and colossi, which were prefixed to the temples. They shut out the world
as the worshipper approached the temple, and prepared his mind for the
services and the influences of the house of God.
The area of the sacred enclosure at Karnak was a square of about 2,000
feet each way. The enclosing wall is still everywhere traceable. In
some parts it is but little injured by time. There were twenty-six
temples within the enclosure. It was a city of temples. The axis of the
main series points across the river to the gorge of the valley, in the
Libyan hills, at the head of which were placed the tombs of the kings.
Another series of temples reached down to the south-west entrance of the
enclosure, where was the termination of the Luxor-Karnak street. These
two series of temples may be roughly described as close and parallel to
the north-eastern and north-western sides of the enclosure. The rest of
the space was filled with more or less detached structures.
Here was, if not the sublimest—for the mass and simplicity of the Great
Pyramid may contest that—yet certainly the most magnificent architectural
effort ever made by man. What prompted it? At what did it aim? Of course
it was the embodiment of an idea, and that idea was, in its simplest
expression, the same as the idea contained in the Greek temple, and
the Christian cathedral. It was the glorification of the builders
conception of the Deity. The difference in the structures, in their
fashion and effect, arose out of the differences in the conceptions
these people had respectively formed of the Deity. In the conception of
the Egyptian awe was the predominant feature. Whatever else Deity might
be, awfulness was its first attribute. Beauty, if at all, came in a
comparatively low degree. With the Greeks and the Christians it was very
different. The gods of the Greeks were connected with and took delight in
Nature. The God of the Christians was the author of Nature. With them,
therefore, the recognition, the creation, and the exhibition of what
was beautiful, formed a part of the service of God. They felt that in
religion a sense of, and the sight of, the beautiful dispose to love. The
Egyptian beholder and worshipper was not to be attracted and charmed,
but overwhelmed. His own nothingness, and the terribleness of the power
and will of God, was what he was to feel. The soul of the Greek, and
of the Christian, was to be elevated, not crushed; to be calmed, to be
harmonized. One was the work of minds in which the instinct of freedom
was operative; the other of minds which felt the powerlessness, the
helplessness of man in the face of an unchangeable iron order alike of
Nature and of society.
Moreover, as we have already seen, in Egypt Nature herself did not
originate and nurture the thought of beauty. In Egypt were no rocky,
moss-margined streams, no hanging woods, no shady groves, no lovely
valleys. The two paramount objects in Nature, as they presented
themselves to the eye and the thought of the Egyptian, suggested to him
absolute power on the part of Nature, and absolute dependence on the
part of man. These two objects were a singularly dull and monotonous
river, but without which the Egyptian world would be a desert, and the
scorching sun, but without which all would be darkness and death. They
did everything. Without them everything was nothing.
These stupendous structures, then, expressed the feebleness of the
worshipper by magnifying the power of the object of his worship. They
awed him, as was intended, into a sense of personal nothingness, while
they called into being and fed a sense of irresistible power, external
to man, the idea of which the peculiarities of everything Egyptian gave
rise to. Moral ideas, engendered by the structure and working of Egyptian
society, and ideas of the physical forces which were ever before them,
and to which they felt their subjection, were entangled in their minds in
an inextricable knot, and that knot was their religion.
On the walls of these stupendous structures is written and sculptured
the history, as well as the religion, of Egypt, from Osirtasen I., who
reigned four thousand five hundred years ago, down to the Roman Augustus:
these are the earliest and the latest names inscribed on the lithotomes
of Karnak. The included space of time embraces the two last dynasties of
the primæval monarchy; the Hyksos period; the whole of the new monarchy,
when Egypt rose to its zenith of power, glory, art, wealth, and wisdom;
the domination of Persia; the Ptolemaic sovereignty; and a part of the
Roman rule. None inscribed so much history on these walls as the two
mightiest of Egyptian conquerors and builders, Sethos, and the stronger
son of a strong father, his successor, Rameses the Great. These two
Pharaohs themselves made more history than all who had gone before them;
and none who followed them attained to their eminence. The buildings they
erected are history, as much as their conquests.
The Coliseum is a part of Roman history. Its magnitude and its purpose
are history. It tells us that Cæsar could issue a decree that all the
world should be taxed; that Cæsar found it necessary to dazzle and amuse
the populace; that the amusements of the populace were brutal; that
amusement, not religion, was the order of the day. So in the stones
of Karnak we see the plunder and the tribute of Asia and Ethiopia.
Many a city had been made a desolate heap, and many a fair region had
been ravaged, and the silver and the gold collected, and the surviving
inhabitants swept into the Egyptian net, and carried away captive into
Egypt, to assist in building the grand hypostyle Court of Karnak,
the grandest hall ever constructed by man. In the direction of the
axis of the connected series of temples this hall is 170 ft. long.
Its width is 329 ft. It is supported by one hundred and thirty-four
columns. The central twelve are 62 ft. high in the shaft, and 36 ft.
in circumference. The remaining one hundred and twenty-two columns are
42 ft. in height, and 28 ft. in circumference. The lintel stone of the
great doorway is within 2 in. of 41 ft. in length. Every part of the
walls, the pillars, and the roof is covered with coloured sculptures
cut by the chisel of history, and of religion, which, however, as far
as we are concerned, belongs to history. The purpose of this hall was
to provide a fitting place for the great religious diets of the nation.
It must have appeared to the thoughts of those times that the gods had
assisted the king—who was already becoming their associate—in designing
and erecting such a structure. We, however, are aware that no people can
imagine, or undertake such structures, unless they are inspired with
the sentiment that they are the greatest among the nations, and at the
head of the world. Great things—it is more true of literature than of
architecture, but it is true of everything—are not done by imitation but
by inspiration, and nothing inspires great things but greatness itself.
To the north-west of this stupendous and overpowering hall is an
hypæthral court 100 ft. longer, and of the same width of 329 ft. A double
row of columns traverses its central avenue. It has corridors on each
side. It was left incomplete. This is plain from the enormous pyramidal
propylons, by which it is entered, never having been sculptured. None
who came after the Great Rameses were able to rise to the height of
his conceptions. In the unsculptured walls of these propylons are the
sockets, drilled, horizontally, through their whole thickness, for
holding the beams which supported the lofty staffs for the flags which
were used on great occasions. These lofty towers and these far-seen flags
connected the temples of Karnak with the temples on the western bank of
the river, and with the funeral processions to the catacombs of the kings
in the opposite valley of the Libyan range, just as the south-western
propylons, and the dromos of sphinxes, connected them with Luxor.
Though the name of Sesortosen, or Ositarsen I., is the first that appears
on this series of temples, it would be a mistake to suppose that the
date of the greatness of the city must be taken from his reign. This is
impossible, for he was the founder of the dynasty which came from Thebes.
Thebes, therefore, in his time—4,500 years ago—had become sufficiently
powerful to give a dynasty to Egypt. And when we look at its site, the
island in the river, the great extent of fertile land on the east bank,
with no inconsiderable extent also on the west, and the convenient
approach of the Libyan Hills to the river side, we see that this was a
spot designed by nature for one of the great cities of old Egypt. It
was great under the old monarchy, and gave to the country the two last
dynasties of that first monumentally-known period of its history. During
the succeeding 400 years of the Hyksos domination, a cloud of almost
impenetrable darkness settled down upon it, as upon everything else
Egyptian. It rose under, and with the new monarchy. The disadvantages of
the site of Memphis, and the conveniences of that of Thebes, had been
discovered. It, therefore, now became unreservedly the repository of
all the glories, and the chief shrine of the religion of the country.
The spoils of war, the tribute of subject nations, the rent of the
royal demesne, which comprised one-third of the land of Egypt, were
spent here. Next to the court came the numerous and wealthy body of the
priests; and they, too, were chiefly—though they had also other sources
of income—supported by the rents of their estates. Besides these there
was the official class, which again we know was numerous and wealthy.
Trade also must have largely contributed to the wealth of Thebes; for it
was the _emporium_ for the camel-borne produce of the interior of the
continent, and for the water-borne commerce with Egypt of the East Coast
of Africa, of Arabia, and of India. We may form an estimate of the extent
of this trade from the magnificence of the Temples, which, of old times,
in the East was generally proportionate to the amount and value of the
commerce carried on under their protection. From these sources the growth
and splendour of the new capital were fed for many centuries. We see from
the tombs that in its best days the wealthy were not afraid to use,
and to display, their wealth. The arts that embellish life, and which
had been inherited from the old monarchy, made great advances. Society
developed tastes and arrangements not altogether unlike those of our own
time.
At last the thunder-cloud, which had long been gathering in the
north-east, drifted down to Egypt, and the storm burst upon it. The
Persian had come. And the grand old ship went to pieces. In Asia the days
of Sethos and of Rameses had never been forgotten. The gods, that had in
their arks gone up with them to battle and to victory, were now defaced
and dishonoured. The temples which had been built by the captives, and
with the spoils brought out of Asia, were now sought for at Karnak,
and dilapidated. The ruthless work the Egyptians had done was repaid
ruthlessly. It was delightful to the soul of the Persian, now that his
opportunity had come, to job the iron into the soul of the Egyptian.
But such a civilization as that of old Egypt takes a great deal of
killing. It is the working of a thoroughly organized community in which
every man is born to his work, has natural instructors in his parents
and class, and so knows his work by a self-acting law of Society, which
possesses the regularity and precision of a law of Nature. It survived
the Persians. It Egyptianized the Greeks. It was not stamped out by the
Romans. Christianity gradually enfeebled, absorbed, and metamorphosed
it. At last came the Mahomedan flood, and swept away whatever germs
might have even then remained of a capacity for the maintenance of a
well-ordered and fruitful commonwealth.