A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
About 3,500 years ago, there reigned a great Queen in Egypt. It was not
usual for the Egyptian throne to be occupied by a woman, though great
respect was always shown to women in Egypt, and the rank of a King's
mother was considered quite as important as that of his father. But once
at least in her history Egypt had a great Queen, whose fame deserves to
be remembered, and who takes honourable rank among the great women, like
Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria, who have ruled kingdoms.
During part of her life Queen Hatshepsut was only joint sovereign along
with her husband, and in the latter part of her reign she was joint
sovereign with her half-brother or nephew, who succeeded her; but for at
least twenty years she was really the sole ruler of Egypt, and governed
the land wisely and well.
Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened in her reign was the
voyage of discovery which she caused to be made by some ships of her
fleet. Centuries before her time, when the world was young, the
Egyptians had made expeditions down the Red Sea to a land which they
sometimes called Punt, and sometimes "The Divine Land." Probably it was
part of the country that we now know as Somaliland. But for a very long
time these voyages had ceased, and people only knew by hearsay, and by
the stories of ancient days, of this wonderful country that lay away by
the Southern Sea.
One day, the Queen tells us, she was at prayers in the temple of the god
Amen at Thebes, when she felt a sudden inspiration. The god was giving
her a command to send an expedition to this almost forgotten land. "A
command was heard in the sanctuary, a behest of the god himself, that
the ways which lead to Punt should be explored, and that the roads to
the Ladders of Incense should be trodden." In obedience to this command,
the Queen at once equipped a little fleet of the quaint old galleys that
the Egyptians then used (Plate 1), and sent them out, with picked crews,
and a royal envoy in command, to sail down the Red Sea, in search of the
Divine Land. The ships were laden with all kinds of goods to barter with
the Punites, and a guard of Egyptian soldiers was placed on board.
We do not know how long it took the little squadron to reach its
destination. Sea voyages in those days were slow and dangerous. But at
last the ships safely reached the mouth of the Elephant River in
Somaliland, and went up the river with the tide till they came to the
village of the natives. They found that the Punites lived in curious
beehive-shaped houses, some of them made of wicker-work, and placed on
piles, so that they had to climb into them by ladders. The men were not
negroes, though some negroes lived among them; they were very much like
the Egyptians in appearance, wore pointed beards, and were dressed only
in loincloths, while the women wore a yellow sleeveless dress, which
reached halfway between the knee and ankle.
Nehsi, the royal envoy, landed with an officer and eight soldiers, and,
to show that he came in peace, he spread out on a table some presents
for the chief of the Punites--five bracelets, two gold necklaces, a
dagger, with belt and sheath, a battle-axe, and eleven strings of glass
beads--much such a present as a European explorer might give to-day to
an African chief. The natives came down in great excitement to see the
strangers who had brought such treasures, and were astonished at the
arrival of such a fleet. "How is it," they said, "that you have reached
this country, hitherto unknown to men? Have you come by way of the sky,
or have you sailed on the waters of the Divine Sea?" The chief, who was
called Parihu, came down with his wife Aty, and his daughter. Aty rode
down on a donkey, but dismounted to see the strangers, and, indeed, the
poor donkey must have been greatly relieved, for the chieftainess was an
exceedingly fat lady, and her daughter, though so young, showed every
intention of being as fat as her mother.
After the envoy and the chief had exchanged compliments, business began.
The Egyptians pitched a tent in which they stored their goods for
barter, and to put temptation out of the way of the natives, they drew a
guard of soldiers round the tent. For several days the market remained
open, and the country people brought down their treasures, till the
ships were laden as deeply as was safe. The cargo was a varied and
valuable one. Elephants' tusks, gold, ebony, apes, greyhounds, leopard
skins, all were crowded into the galleys, the apes sitting gravely on
the top of the bales of goods, and looking longingly at the land which
they were leaving.
But the most important part of the cargo was the incense, and the
incense-trees. Great quantities of the gum from which the incense was
made were placed on board, and also thirty-one of the incense sycamores,
their roots carefully surrounded with a large ball of earth, and
protected by baskets. Several young chiefs of the Punites accompanied
the expedition back to Thebes, to see what life was like in the strange
new world which had been revealed to them. Altogether the voyage home
must have been no easy undertaking, for the ships, with their heavy
cargoes, must have been very difficult to handle.
The arrival of the squadron at Thebes, which they must have reached by a
canal connecting the Nile with the Red Sea, was made the occasion of a
great holiday festival. Long lines of troops in gala attire came out to
meet the brave explorers, and an escort of the royal fleet accompanied
the exploring squadron up to the temple quay where the ships were to
moor. Then the Thebans feasted their eyes on the wonderful treasures
that had come from Punt, wondering at the natives, the incense, the
ivory, and, above all, at a giraffe which had been brought home. How the
poor creature was stowed away on the little Egyptian ship it is hard to
see; but there he was, with his spots and his long neck, the most
wonderful creature that the good folks of Thebes had ever seen. The
precious incense gum was stored in the temple, and the Queen herself
gave a bushel measure, made of a mixture of gold and silver, to measure
it out with.
So the voyage of discovery had ended in a great success. But Queen
Hatshepsut's purpose was only half fulfilled as yet. In a nook of the
limestone cliffs, not far from Thebes, her father before her had begun
to build a very wonderful temple, close beside the ruins of an older
sanctuary which had stood there for hundreds of years. Hatshepsut had
been gradually completing his work, and the temple was now growing into
a most beautiful building, very different from ordinary Egyptian
temples. From the desert sands in front it rose terrace above terrace,
each platform bordered with rows of beautiful limestone pillars, until
at last it reached the cliffs, and the most sacred chamber of it, the
Holy of Holies, was hewn into the solid wall of rock behind.
This temple the Queen resolved to make into what she called a Paradise
for Amen, the god who had told her to send out the ships. So she planted
on the terraces the sacred incense-trees which had been brought from
Punt; and, thanks to careful tending and watering, they flourished well
in their new home. And then, all along the walls of the temple, she
caused her artists to carve and paint the whole story of the voyage. We
do not know the names of the artists who did the work, though we know
that of the architect, Sen-mut, who planned the building. But, whoever
they were, they must have been very skilful sculptors; for the story of
the voyage is told in pictures on the walls of this wonderful temple, so
that everything can be seen just as it actually happened more than three
thousand years ago.
You can see the ships toiling along with oar and sail towards their
destination, the meeting with the natives, the palaver and the trading,
the loading of the galleys, and the long procession of Theban soldiers
going out to meet the returning explorers. Not a single detail is
missed, and, thanks to the Queen and her artists, we can go back over
all these years, and see how sailors worked, and how people lived in
savage lands in that far-off time, and realize that explorers dealt with
the natives in foreign countries in those days very much as they deal
with them now. When our explorers of to-day come back from their
journeys, they generally tell the story of their adventures in a big
book with many pictures; but no explorer ever published the account of a
voyage of discovery on such a scale as did Queen Hatshepsut, when she
carved the voyage to Punt on the walls of her great temple at
Deir-el-Bahri, and no pictures in any modern book are likely to last as
long, or to tell so much as these pictures that have come to light again
during the last few years, after being buried for centuries under the
desert sands.
[Illustration: PLATE 13.
THE BARK OF THE MOON, GUARDED BY THE DIVINE EYES.]
Queen Hatshepsut has left other memorials of her greatness besides the
temple with its story of her voyage. She has told us how one day she was
sitting in her palace, and thinking of her Creator, when the thought
came into her mind to rear two great obelisks before the Temple of Amen
at Karnak. So she gave the command, and Sen-mut, her clever architect,
went up the Nile to Aswan, and quarried two huge granite blocks, and
floated them down the river. Cleopatra's Needle, which stands on the
Thames Embankment, is 68-1/2 feet high, and it seems to us a huge stone
for men to handle. Our own engineers had trouble enough in bringing it
to this country, and setting it up. But these two great obelisks of
Queen Hatshepsut were 98-1/2 feet high, and weighed about 350 tons
apiece. Yet Sen-mut had them quarried, and set up, and carved all over
from base to summit in seven months from the time when the Queen gave
her command! One of them still stands at Karnak, the tallest obelisk in
the temple there; while the other great shaft has fallen, and lies
broken, close to its companion. They tell us their own plain story of
the wisdom and skill of those far-off days; and perhaps the great Queen
who thought of her Creator as she sat in her palace, and longed to
honour Him, found that the God whom she ignorantly worshipped was indeed
not far from His servant's heart.