THEBES—THE TEMPLE-PALACES.
Cur invidendis postibus, et novo
Sublime ritu moliar atrium?—HORACE.
We will now, having left the tombs, turn our attention to the temples.
Some we find upon the edge of the _Háger_, others a little way back upon
it. The greater number of those that were once here have been completely
razed to the ground, nothing now remaining of them except fragments of
statues, the foundations of walls, and the bases of pillars; all of
which are buried in rubbish heaps. There are, however, some singularly
interesting exceptions which demand particular notice. Fortunately,
though it hardly looks like chance, the temple-palaces of Sethos, of the
great Rameses, and of Rameses III., are still standing. These were built
by the two great conquerors of the nineteenth, and the great conqueror
of the twentieth dynasties. Why did not other Pharaohs erect similar
structures? The reason is not far to seek. It is here present in the
case of these three kings, and is absent from the cases of other kings.
The funds necessary for such structures had to be procured by looting
Asia, and a great part of the work had to be done by captives taken in
war. And we know that at this time it was the custom for those kings of
Egypt, who contemplated great works, to begin their reigns with raids
into Asia, for the express purpose of collecting the gold and the slaves
that would enable them to carry out their designs. It was the good old
rule, the simple plan, that those should take who had the power. These
great and famous expeditions, in truth, were only imperial slave hunts,
and imperial brigandage, in which not petty tribes of African negroes,
but the (for those times) civilized nations of Asia, and not a few
travellers, but the inhabitants of great cities and kingdoms, were the
victims. These great builders, administrators, and soldiers, who believed
of themselves that they had already been received into the hierarchy of
heaven, could not have understood in what sense they could have done ill
in building themselves a wide house, and large chambers, and ceiling it
with cedar, and painting it with vermilion; though they doubtless would
have thought that it would have been ill, even for an Egyptian Pharaoh,
to build his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong, to use
his neighbour’s service without wages, and to give him not for his work.
But how any question of unrighteousness and wrong could arise between
Pharaoh and strangers, people who were not Egyptians, would have been
something new and incomprehensible to Pharaoh. I once asked a fisherman’s
boy who was unconcernedly breaking up a basketful of live crabs to bait
his father’s dab-nets, if it was not cruel work that he was about? ‘No,’
he replied, ‘because it is their business to find us a living.’ Somewhat
in the same way did Pharaoh think of the outside world; and in much
the same way, too, did he treat it, when he wished to build himself a
temple-palace. In these temple-palaces one hears the groans, and sees the
blood, of those who were broken up alive to build them.
There are no buildings in the old world so full of actually written
and pictured history as these three temple-palaces, for each of them
contains records of the achievements and life of the builder, as they
were regarded by himself, and of his religion, as it was understood by
himself. The grandest of the three is the Memnonium, or, as it ought
to be called, the Rameseum. Here lived the great Rameses. He designed
it, built it, and made it his home. He built it after his great Asiatic
campaigns. How often here must he have fought his battles o’er again.
The Rameseum bears the same relation to all the other buildings of
old Egypt that the Parthenon does to all the other remains of Greek
architecture. It was built at the culminating point of Egyptian art
and greatness. The conception was an inspiration of a consciousness of
excellence and power. Everything here is grand, even for Egypt; the
lofty propylons, the Osirid court, the great halls, and, above all, the
colossal statue of the king seated on his throne, a monolith of red
granite, weighing nearly 900 tons, and which is now lying on the ground
in stupendous fragments, its overthrow having been probably the work of
the vengeful Persians. Nothing can exceed the interest of this grand
structure. It included even a spacious library, on the walls of which
were sculptured figures of the god of letters, and of the god of memory.
Over the door by which it was entered was the famous inscription, ‘The
medicine of the mind.’ And this more than three thousand years ago: and
yet we may be sure that it did not contain the first collection of books
that had been made in Egypt, but only the first of which we have any
record. We know that they had been keeping a regular register of the
annual rising of the Nile then for nearly a thousand years, and that
their written law ante-dated this library by between two and three
thousand years. Both of these facts, to some degree, indicate collections
of books. By a concurrence of happy chances, which almost make one
regret that a grateful offering can no longer be made to good fortune,
papyrus-rolls have been found dated from this library, and in the Háger
behind have been discovered the tombs of some of the Royal librarians.
The temple-palace, at Cornéh, of Sethos, the father of Rameses, though
built with all the solidity of Egyptian architecture in its best days, is
a very much smaller structure than the Rameseum. What remains of it is
in very good preservation. It stands about a mile to the north-west of
the latter building, some little way back in the Háger, and on somewhat
higher ground, near the entrance of the Valley of the Kings. On one of
the sphinxes belonging to it are inscribed the names of all the towns
in the Delta Sethos conquered. This is an important record, as it shows
either that the Semites had been able to some extent to re-establish
themselves in the Delta, or that they had never been thoroughly
subjugated, in that part of the country, before the time of Sethos. The
work, however, was now done thoroughly, for from this time we do not hear
of any troubles that can be assigned to them. The sculptures on the walls
of this palace are in the freest and boldest style. They relate chiefly
to religious acts and ceremonies. As Sethos was the designer and builder
of the chief part of the stupendous hypostyle Hall of Karnak, it was not
because his architectural ideas were less grand than those of his son
that his palace was so much smaller. I can imagine that the reason of
this was that he was desirous that none of his attention and resources
should be diverted from his great work, which was enough of itself to tax
to their utmost all the powers both of the king and of the kingdom. It
raises him in our estimation to find that his greatest work was not his
own palace, but the hall in which the ecclesiastical diets of Egypt (of
course the members were priests) were to be held; for though he was a
Pharaoh, and a conquering Pharaoh too, he could see that the kingdom was
greater than the king, and that to do great things well one thing must be
done at a time.
A little to the south of the Rameseum is the third of these
temple-places. It is that of the third Rameses. This, though not so grand
and pure in style as the Rameseum, has been better preserved. Upon it,
and within it, are the ruins of a Coptic town. The crude brick tenements
perched on the roof, and adhering to the walls of the mighty structure,
reminded me of the disfigurements of the obelisk of Heliopolis, and of
the propylons of Dendera, by the mud-cells which insect architecture had
plastered over them. So wags the world. Squalid poverty had succeeded to
imperial splendour. But the same fate had waited upon both. The towers
of kings, and the hovels of the poor, are now equally desolate and
untenanted. One of the courts of the palace had been metamorphosed by
the Copts of the neighbourhood into their church. From the expense which
must have been incurred in effecting this transformation it is evident
that they once formed here a numerous body. The community, however, has
entirely disappeared from this place, and nothing—absolutely nothing—has
come in its stead. They say in the East that where the Turk sets his foot
grass will not grow; but this is true of El Islam generally. It is great
at pulling down and destroying, but not equally great at reconstructing.
The Christian church and the Egyptian temple are alike deserted. The old
Egyptian and the Coptic Christian have both completely vanished from
this scene. It is curious as we stand here, with equal evidence before us
of the equal fate of both, to observe how little people think about the
fate of the latter in comparison with what they think about the fate of
the former; and yet there are, at all events, some reasons to dispose us
favourably, and sympathizingly, towards our Coptic co-religionists. If
the causes of the feeling could be analyzed, would it be found to have
arisen from a half-formed thought that there was no gratitude to be felt
to the poor Copt for anything he had done, and that the world had no
hope of anything from him? Or would it be because there is really little
to interest the thought in the fortunes of a community, of which we
know little more than that, by having changed the law of liberty into a
petrified doctrine, they had gone a long way towards committing moral and
intellectual suicide?
In one of the private apartments of this temple-palace of Rameses III.
the sculptures represent the king seated on a chair, which would not
be out of place at Windsor, or Schönbrunn. His daughters are standing
around him, offering him fruit and flowers, and agitating the air with
their fans. He amuses himself with a game of drafts, and with their
conversation.
Somewhat in advance of these temple-palaces of the two Rameses, stand on
the cultivated plain the two great colossi of Thebes. The space between
them is sufficient for a road or street. The easternmost of the pair
is the celebrated vocal Memnon of antiquity. It is covered with Roman
inscriptions placed upon it by travellers, who were desirous of leaving
behind them a record of the fact, that they had not been disappointed
in hearing the sound. That was an age when the love of the marvellous,
combined with ignorance of what nature could, and could not, do,
prepared, and predisposed men, for being deceived. There can be no doubt
how the sound was produced. There is in the lap of the seated figure an
excavation in which a priest was concealed, who, when the moment had
arrived, struck a stone in the figure, of a kind which rang like brass.
The Arabs now climb into the lap in a few seconds, and will for a piastre
produce the sound for you at any hour of the twenty-four you please. The
Emperor Hadrian heard three emissions of the sound on the morning he went
to listen. This is a compliment we are not surprised to find the statue
paid to the ruler of the world.
This colossus was erected by Amunoph III., a name which, by an easy
corruption, the Greeks transformed into Memnon, just as they changed
Chufu into Cheops, Amenemha into Mœris, and Sethos into Sesostris.
Behind these colossi stood a temple which had been erected by the same
Amunoph. Nothing now remains of this temple but its rubbish heap, and its
foundations. It was, however, once connected, architecturally, with the
temple he had built at Luxor, on the other side of the river. The street
that connected them was called Street Royal. This was the line Sethos,
and the two Rameses, must always have taken, in going from their palaces
on the western bank to Luxor and Karnak on the eastern side. It must have
been about three miles in length. The line of this Royal Street is marked
by the two still standing colossi. The fragments of a few others have
been found. Those that remain are sixty feet in height. This must have
been a grand street, with the two temples at its two ends, and part of
it, at all events, consisting of a dromos of such figures.
I have already mentioned that a sphinx-guarded street, about two miles
long, ran from Luxor to Karnak. I have also pointed out that the
north-west angle of the great enclosure of Karnak was connected, to the
eye, with the temples of the western Háger. The precise spot upon the
Háger where a temple had been made conspicuous to the eye from Karnak,
was what is now called Assassef. Of course from Assassef the lofty
structures of Karnak were in full view. In order to place the temple at
Assassef reciprocally in view to the spectator standing at Karnak, it
was necessary to remove a part of the natural rock wall of the eastern
side of the valley of Assassef, and this had been done. The distance
from Karnak to Assassef is somewhat over three miles. From this point
temples and temple-palaces were continuous along the edge of the Háger,
in front of the Necropolis, as far as the western extremity of the Royal
Street. Thus was completed the grand Theban Parallelogram. The circuit of
the four sides measured, I suppose, about ten miles. It included every
one of the great structures of Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes. There can be
no doubt but that the lofty propylæa, and obelisks of Luxor and Karnak
were intended to be seen from a distance. As the site of Thebes was, of
itself, somewhat elevated above the sites of Luxor and Karnak, there was
no occasion for obelisks at Thebes; as also they would have been backed
by the mountains to one looking from the other side of the river, they
would have been inconspicuous, and therefore this architectural form was
not used at Thebes: though, indeed, I believe no instance remains to show
that it was ever used on that side of the valley, on which the sun set.
The structural connexion of all the mighty, magnificent buildings
throughout these ten miles was the grand conception of Rameses the Great,
of which I spoke some way back. There never were, we may be quite sure,
ten such miles, elsewhere, on the surface of this earth. It is rash to
prophesy, but we may doubt whether there ever will be ten such miles
again. We may, I think, say there will not be, unless time give birth
to two conditions. The first of the two is, that communities should
become animated with the desire to do for themselves what these mighty
Pharaohs did for themselves in the old days of their greatness; and as
man is much the same now that he was then, and as private persons are
capable of entertaining the same ideas as kings, there is no _à priori_
reason against the possibility of this. The second condition is, that
machinery should eventually give us the power of cutting and moving large
blocks of stone at a far cheaper rate than is possible, with that already
mighty assistant, at present. For, as the world does not go back, we may
be sure that myriads of captives, and of helpless subjects, will never
again be employed in this way. It is quite conceivable that the mass of
some community may come to feel itself great, the feeling being in the
community generally, and not only in the individual at its head; and
should they at the same time entertain the desire that the magnificence
of their architecture should be in proportion to, and express, the
greatness of their ideas and sentiments, then the world may again see
hypostyle halls as grand as that of Karnak, and magnificence equal to
that of the Osirid Court of the Rameseum: with, however, the difference
that they will be constructed by, and for, the community. In this there
would be no injury in any way to any one, and there would be nothing to
regret, for those who had raised such structures, and were in the habit
of using them, would perhaps on that account be less likely to be mean,
and little, in the ordinary occurrences of life. At all events there
would be nothing demoralizing in making machinery the slave to do the
heavy drudgery required in their construction.
* * * * *
There is one source of interest which belongs to the study of the
antiquities of Egypt in a higher degree than to the study of the
antiquities of any other country. Every object on which the eye may
rest, whether great or small, from the grandest architectural monument
down to a glass bead, is thoroughly, and genuinely Egyptian. Not a tool
with which the compact limestone, or intractable granite was cut; not a
colour with which the sculptures or walls were decorated; not a form in
their architectural details; not a thought, or practice, or scene the
sculptures and paintings represent, was, as far as we know, borrowed, or
could have been borrowed, from any neighbouring people. The grand whole,
and the minutest detail, everything seen, and everything implied, was
strictly autochthonous; as completely the product of the Egyptian mind,
as Egypt itself is of the Nile.