THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
Of all the works of man there is none which has attained such lasting
and universal fame as the group of buildings known as the Pyramids of
Gizeh. For the best part of five thousand years this group of mighty
structures has been one of the wonders of the world, and the theories
which have been framed to account for their existence have been more
numerous than the Pyramids themselves. Egypt has many buildings far
more beautiful, and perhaps as wonderful; but the Pyramids are, to the
great majority of people, the characteristic buildings of the land, and
whenever Egypt is named there rises before the mind at once a vision of
three vast bulks of masonry squatting defiantly on the rising ground
above the Libyan desert, as though challenging Time himself to make
any impression on their stupendous mass. “All things dread Time,” it
has been said, “but Time itself dreads the Pyramids”; and the very
exaggeration testifies to the profound impression which their bulk and
strength have made upon the mind of man. The mere lapse of forty-five
centuries would seemingly of itself have made next to no impression
on them; the vandalism of man has done a little more; but even the
efforts of those who for many centuries have used the vast masses as a
convenient quarry have done little more than show more convincingly the
power and skill of the builders who reared in the beginning these huge
mausoleums around whose bases the workers of succeeding generations
have pottered and scratched like children playing with toy spades in
the sand.
Yet though the Pyramids may fairly claim to be the most famous and
the best-known buildings in the world, the ignorance in the average
mind with regard to them and the purpose for which they were reared is
still just about as general and widespread as the fame of them; and the
purpose of this chapter is, first, to tell what, and how many, and of
what kind they are; next, what was the end for which they were reared
in the beginning of history; and lastly, to recount something of the
efforts which have taught us what is really known about them.
To most people the Pyramids mean solely the great group at Gizeh; but
though these are by far the greatest and the most famous, they are by
no means the only pyramids, nor are they even the oldest. The chief
field, known as the Great Pyramid Field, begins almost opposite Cairo,
on the western side of the Nile, at Abu Roash, where is the pyramid of
Dadefra (Razedef) of the IVth Dynasty, and extends south along the bank
of the Nile for a distance of about sixty miles to the Fayum, where
lie the pyramids of the great XIIth Dynasty Pharaohs, the last of the
regular kings of Egypt to build pyramids for themselves. Far to the
south again in the country which we know as the Soudan, there lie two
other pyramid fields, the one at Gebel Barkal or Napata, near to the
Fourth Cataract, the other at Begarawiyah, the ancient Meroë, between
the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and a little more than a hundred miles
north of Khartoum. These two fields have neither the greatness of scale
nor the historic importance and interest of the Great Pyramid Field,
for they belong to the Ethiopian kings, some of whom, for a time,
reigned over Egypt in the days of its decline. The Napata group belongs
to the earlier Ethiopian monarchs, who founded the XXVth Egyptian
Dynasty, which was finally driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians in the
reign of Tanutamen, and to their successors, who after the disasters
of 661 B.C. maintained the old Ethiopian sovereignty in the south; the
Meroë group belongs to the later Ethiopian kings who reigned after 300
B.C. As things go in Egypt, therefore, these southern pyramids are
quite modern, nor do they belong to the most interesting period of
Egyptian history, and though they have been long known, they are only
now in process of being investigated by the Harvard-Boston Expedition
under G. A. Reisner, whose work at Begarawiyah is still unfinished. Our
attention, therefore, may be given solely to the Great Pyramid Field.
Beginning with Abu Roash, the next site of importance is Gizeh itself,
with all its wonders of IVth Dynasty work. Passing southwards, we
come to Abusir, with its remains of the pyramids and temples of the
Sun-worshipping Pharaohs of the Vth Dynasty, lately excavated by
the German expedition; beyond these again comes the great field of
Saqqara, with remains dating over a long period of Egyptian history.
The Step-Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd Dynasty is, of course,
the most important and imposing monument; but besides, there are
pyramids dating from the latter part of the Vth Dynasty, a number of
VIth Dynasty ones, and the splendid tombs of many of the nobles of the
early dynastic period, so that, though the Saqqara portion of the field
cannot compare with Gizeh in the size of its monuments, it is only
second to its northern rival, and surpasses it in the variety and the
pictorial interest of its minor tombs. Still travelling southwards, we
pass in succession Dahshur and Lisht with their pyramids of the great
Pharaohs of the XIIth Dynasty, Medum, with its remarkable pyramid of
King Seneferu of the IIIrd Dynasty, rising in three stages, like a
Mesopotamian Ziggurat, to a height of 114 feet, and Illahun, where
Senusert II had his pyramid, and where the exquisite jewellery of some
of the royal princesses was found recently, and reach the last of the
series at Hawara, where Amenemhat III, one of the greatest and noblest
of the long line of Egyptian Pharaohs, had his last resting-place.
In later days there were pyramid tombs at Thebes and Abydos; but the
pyramid part of these structures was comparatively unimportant, and
they have, in any case, left few traces behind. Indeed, after the
XIIth Dynasty the fashion of pyramid-burial seems to have gradually
died out, though we know from the revelations of the Abbott Papyrus
that in the XXth Dynasty there were in the Theban necropolis at least
ten royal pyramids belonging to kings of the XIIIth to the XVIIIth
Dynasty. Altogether there must be at present in Egypt something like
seventy pyramids of greater or less importance, without reckoning the
later and less important groups of Napata and Meroë.
Passing by the Abu Roash pyramid of King Razedef, we begin our survey
with the magnificent group of Gizeh, which to the ordinary man are the
Pyramids to the exclusion of all others. Everyone knows, of course,
what the Pyramids are like, and has some rough idea of their surpassing
size, and perhaps the only way to impress the sense of their vastness
on the mind is to use one or other of the comparisons which have
been worked out to illustrate the stupendous scale on which they are
built. To tell the reader that the weight of the stones built into the
Great Pyramid is over six million tons is merely to bewilder him; the
vastness of the business may be better appreciated when one realises
that a town of the size of Aberdeen might be built out of the materials
which Khufu gathered together for his monstrous tomb, or that if the
stones were divided into blocks a foot square, and these blocks placed
end to end in a straight line, the line would be long enough to reach
two-thirds of the length of the circumference of the earth at the
Equator.
[Illustration: 6. GREAT PYRAMID AND SPHINX, WITH PART OF TEMPLE OF THE
SPHINX.]
Khufu’s pyramid was originally about 481 feet in height, and each of
its sides measured at the base a matter of 755 feet 8 inches, and these
long lines were laid out and built with such wonderful accuracy that
the maximum error is not more than an inch. “The laying out of the base
of the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” says Professor Sir W. M. F. Petrie, “is
a triumph of skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be
covered by placing one’s thumb on them; and to lay out a square of more
than a furlong in the side (and with rock in the midst of it, which
prevented any diagonal checks being measured) with such accuracy shows
surprising care. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the
same class; the faces are so straight and so truly square, that when
the stones were built together the film of mortar left between them is
on an average not thicker than one’s thumb-nail, though the joint is a
couple of yards long; and the levelling of them over long distances has
not any larger errors.” “Equal to optician’s work of the present day,”
says the same authority elsewhere, “but on a scale of acres instead of
feet or yards of material.”
The Second Pyramid is slightly inferior to the first in size, its
measurements being 472 feet in height and 706 feet 3 inches on each
side; and its workmanship is also of inferior accuracy, the errors
in length being double, and those of angle quadruple those of its
predecessor, while the masonry is of poorer quality. Curiously enough,
the sarcophagus, the core of the whole vast building, was in the case
of the Great Pyramid one of the poorest pieces of work of its kind in
the period, and much inferior to that of Khafra in the Second Pyramid.
Spite of its smaller size, which most travellers scarcely notice
owing to the fact of its somewhat superior position, and its inferior
workmanship, the Second Pyramid is itself a world’s wonder.
Beside these great twin brethren, Menkaura’s Third Pyramid, with its
215 feet of height and its length on the side of 346 feet 2 inches,
seems diminutive, though its partial outer casing of granite may have
given it a richness of appearance which to some extent compensated for
its smallness.
Here, then, we have a group of buildings which, from whatever point of
view they are regarded, are among the most wonderful ever reared by the
hand of man, and which in sheer bulk are by far the greatest of all
architectural works. What was the purpose for which these stupendous
bulks were built and maintained for so long? To ask such a question
was, not so long ago, to let loose all the flood of vain imaginations
which always gathers about a subject which is great and imperfectly
understood.
The theories which have been framed about the Great Pyramid in
particular are almost as monstrous as itself, but have none of its
solidity. Of these, perhaps the favourite, because of a certain romance
attaching to it, and because of the reputation of some of those who
have supported it, is, or rather one should say, was, that it was
designed for an astronomical observatory. R. A. Proctor, to whose
advocacy the idea owes a great deal of what vogue it had, has told
us that the entrance passage is so placed that at the date which he
assumes for the erection of the pyramid (3400 B.C.) it bore directly
on the then Pole-Star, Thuban, or Theta Draconis, when the star was
on the meridian below the pole, and further, that the great gallery
which leads up to the King’s Chamber was designed to serve the purpose
of a great transit instrument, through whose open upper end the
transits of stars could be observed by astronomers occupying seats
on cross-benches laid across the gallery at different levels! Still
wilder are the fancies which would have us see in the measurements of
the Great Pyramid divinely inspired revelations as to units of length,
capacity, and so forth, and which gravely inform us that the granite
sarcophagus of Khufu is really a standard measure of capacity, of which
our British quarter is a fourth part. It seems rather a pity in view of
this wonderful theory that Professor Petrie should have just told us of
the inferiority of Khufu’s sarcophagus in accuracy to that of Khafra,
as such a fact tends to disturb the mind as to the truth of our own
measures; but it is a sufficient indication of the flimsy nature of the
foundations on which all these theories rest.
The fact is that no evidence worth consideration has been brought
forward in support of any of them, and in especial that the idea of the
great gallery having been a gigantic transit instrument (surely the
most cumbrous and inefficient ever designed) is absolutely negatived
by the knowledge which we possess of the object with which the whole
building was constructed--an object whose all-important condition was
absolute secrecy and concealment. To dream that Khufu built a pyramid
to secure his body from discovery and destruction, and then allowed its
passages to remain open to the sky for years that astronomers might
observe the stars, and tomb-robbers the plan of the pyramid, is to put
a fool’s cap on the whole business. The Great Pyramid, like all the
other pyramids, great and small, was none of the extraordinary things
which we have been told it was; it was something simpler and more
wonderful than any of them--the greatest witness ever given on earth to
the human craving for immortality!
There is no longer any doubt that all the pyramids, from the first
imperfect conception of the form in the Step-Pyramid of Saqqara,
through the giants of Gizeh, down to the crumbling heaps of brickwork
which are all that remain of some of the later fabrics, were built
simply and solely as tombs, and that their one object was to render the
resting-place of their royal tenant as secure as precautions could make
it from the attacks of dynastic enemies or mere robbers.
The pyramid was just one pathetic expression of that marvellously
persistent passion which gave us the tomb-chambers of Abydos, with
their storerooms for the supply of the dead king’s wants in the
Underworld, the Mummy with all its wonderful elaboration of means
for preserving the shape and likeness of the dead man, the Funerary
Statue, with its amazingly lifelike portrait of the man whose place
it was designed to take when time had reduced the mummy to dust, and
the soul still craved a recognisable dwelling-place, and the long,
rock-hewn galleries of the Valley of the Kings, with their pictured
representations of all that could help their owner through the dangers
and difficulties of the long journey to the Egyptian Fields of
Contentment.
No race has ever been so possessed by any religious idea as was the
ancient Egyptian by the faith that it was possible to secure immortal
life for humanity beyond the gates of death, possible, but difficult
to the last degree, and needing all the effort which could be given
to secure so great and so difficult an end; and the Great Pyramid is
just the most colossal seal ever put on that creed, expressing, as
nothing else ever could, both the intensity of the conviction and the
consciousness of the extreme difficulty of its attainment in actual
fact. The Egyptian Pharaoh built his pyramid as the expression of
his faith in life everlasting; he built it as huge and as massy as
he could, as the expression of his consciousness of the numberless
difficulties and dangers which compassed the road which led to the
attainment of immortality, and of his determination that, so far as
human effort could secure it, he would be secured against everything
which might prejudice his chance of winning eternity.
The Pyramid, then, is a tomb, or rather it is the sole surviving part
of the elaborate and complicated structure which the Egyptians of the
Pyramid period devised for the accomplishment of this end of securing
the duration of the personality of its owner. For what we see now at
Gizeh and elsewhere is by no means what the Egyptians of the early
dynasties saw when they looked upon the “eternal dwelling-places”
of their great kings, but only a fragment, which by reason of its
massiveness, and especially of its form, has survived while the rest of
the fabric has perished. The complete pyramid-complex was a development
of the normal Egyptian arrangement of tomb-chamber and tomb-chapel.
Each Egyptian of any rank or pretensions was buried in a chamber,
generally underground, which contained his coffin of stone or wood; but
he had also another chamber above ground, where the necessary rites
might be observed at the stated times, and the daily offerings of food
and drink made for his use in the other world by his relations or by
the priests who were appointed for this purpose. These two chambers
were combined in the “mastabas” of the Old Kingdom nobles, with their
shafts and their chapels. The pyramid took the place of the mastaba,
and as it developed, the chapel, instead of being within the same mass
of building as the tomb-chamber, was built outside, at the foot of the
great structure which protected the mummy of the king, as was fondly
hoped, from sacrilegious attack. This pyramid-temple lay at the east
side of the pyramid, and in close connection with it. But the pyramids
were situated on rising ground, generally at a considerable distance
from the cultivated land, and it was therefore necessary to arrange
for a convenient approach to them, instead of allowing the priests or
the royal relatives to scramble over the rough ground. Accordingly
a secondary temple, or portico, was built down on the level of the
cultivated land in a position where it could be approached by boats
during the inundation; and from this portico-temple a covered causeway
led up to the temple proper at the foot of the pyramid.
We are to conceive of the pyramid fabric, then, as consisting of
these four parts, first the part for whose sake all the rest existed,
the pyramid itself, with its concealed passages and its carefully
protected sarcophagus-chamber, in which lay the mummy of the king in
its granite coffin; then the temple crouching at the foot of the great
tomb-chamber; then the long covered causeway leading down to the lower
levels, and finally the Portico-temple on the margin of the flooded
river. One imagines the scene on the feast-day of a great Pharaoh--the
graceful and gaily decorated Egyptian river-skiffs drawing up to
the stately columned portico on the river bank, and landing their
freight of white-robed priests and gorgeous courtiers and princes of
the blood, the preliminary service within the lower temple, and then
the solemn procession up the causeway to the temple proper where the
memory of Khufu or Khafra is celebrated, and his wants for the other
world supplied under the shadow of the mighty mass of stone where the
bones of the great builder are laid. The Pyramids are impressive enough
to-day in their stripped and gaunt majesty--one wonders if they could
be more impressive even in the days of their perfected splendour.
Possibly not, but at all events the world can have seen few more
imposing sights than an Egyptian Pyramid Field such as that of Gizeh,
when its three giants were girt with all the sumptuous fabrics which
were part of their essential design as their architects planned them,
and without which we are no more seeing them as they were meant to be
seen than if we were viewing Salisbury without its spire, or the Duomo
of Florence without its campanile.
As to the sumptuousness of these subsidiary parts of the
pyramid-complex, we have fortunately first-hand evidence. Little
remains of the temple proper of the Second Pyramid, though what there
is has been completely excavated; but the causeway leading down from
it has been traced, and it terminates in a building which has been for
long familiar as one of the most striking examples of the combined
restraint and magnificence of the Egyptian architects of the early
dynasties, the so-called Temple of the Sphinx, which is in reality
the Portico-temple of Khafra’s pyramid. With its severely simple
architecture of vertical and horizontal lines, its great blocks of
stone absolutely without ornament of any sort, and the richness of
its granite monoliths and its alabaster wall-surfaces, it tells us
something of what must have been the dignity and splendour of the Gizeh
Pyramid Field when it stood intact.
So far as the fulfilment of the object for which they were erected
is concerned, the Pyramids of Gizeh are no more than a melancholy
monument of the vanity of human wishes, and an illustration of how
human cupidity or malice will in the long run break through the most
elaborate system of defence. Professor Petrie has suggested that
Sir Thomas Browne was in the wrong when he wrote that “to be but
pyramidally extant is a fallacy of duration,” and comments upon that
characteristic utterance: “Khufu has provided the grandest monument
that any man ever had, and is by this means better remembered than any
other Eastern king throughout history.”
That is so; and yet one cannot help remembering that this was not at
all Khufu’s object in the rearing of his vast mausoleum. It was not to
keep his memory green, but to keep his body intact that the greatest
builder of the world raised the Great Pyramid, and in that simple
object he utterly failed, as did all his brother pyramid-builders great
and small. The evidence shows that not in one single case has greed
or hatred failed to overcome all the obstacles placed in their way by
royal power. Every pyramid known has been rifled in ancient times,
probably not long after its builder was laid to rest in his stately
tomb, and the duration of the mass of senseless stone, which bids fair
to be as long as that of the everlasting hills, only mocks the hopes
with which it was reared. The pyramid remains; but the jewel for whose
sake so costly a casket was devised is long ages since “blown about the
desert dust.”
The story of excavation at the Pyramids of Gizeh has nothing very
exciting about it. The first excavators were, no doubt, the enemies
of the Crown, who, as Petrie has suggested, penetrated into the
burial-chambers in the troubled days between the VIIth and Xth
Dynasties and wreaked their spite on the bodies of their dead masters.
Thereafter, through the Classical period, the entrance into the
subterranean passages of the Great Pyramid was well known; but the
knowledge had been lost by the time of the Arab Conquest, and the
Khalif Mamun had laboriously to quarry his way through the masonry
into the actual passages, leaving behind him the great hole, which is
still called “Mamun’s Hole.” This was the beginning of the vandalism
which has done so much destruction at the Pyramids of Gizeh, though the
worst efforts of human stupidity have somehow only seemed to emphasise
the dignity and grandeur of the great buildings whose might mocks at
the puny attempts of the destroyer. After Mamun had showed the way,
his successors followed him, and used the pyramid as a quarry. In
1356 Sultan Hasan used part of the casing of the Great Pyramid in the
building of his mosque, and though his work may be, as it has been
called, “the finest monument in Cairo,” and “the most perfect specimen
extant of Saracenic architecture,” its beauty is sadly discounted by
the fact that it was created by the robbery of the most magnificent
example of an architecture more ancient and more noble. Hasan, or one
of his immediate successors, added to his crime by stripping part of
the casing from the Second Pyramid also, leaving it in the partially
despoiled condition in which it now appears, for one of his coins was
found by Petrie deep down in the southern foundation. Compared with
such barbarities, the indignities which the Pyramids have had to suffer
in all ages at the hands of tourists, who have insisted on disgracing
their undistinguished names by scrawling them on these great memorials
of the past, are mere trifles.
Early in the nineteenth century Caviglia succeeded in penetrating into
the centre of the Great Pyramid, and he was followed in the spring of
1818 by the redoubtable Belzoni, whose account of the manner in which
he forced an entrance into the Second Pyramid is as vivacious as the
rest of his narrative. Belzoni’s earlier efforts only resulted in the
discovery of one of the passages by which former explorers had vainly
attempted to force their way into the pyramid; but his disappointment
only quickened his desire, and as he says in his own inimitable way:
“Hope returned to cherish my pyramidical brains.” His workmen were
speedily set to work again at a new spot. “As to expectation that the
entrance might be found, they had none; and I often heard them utter,
in a low voice, the word ‘_magnoon_,’ in plain English, _madman_. I
pointed out to the Arabs the spot where they had to dig, and such
was my measurement, that I was right within two feet, in a straight
direction, as to the entrance; and I have the pleasure of reckoning
this day as fortunate.” Even after the passage was discovered, the
removal of the blocks of stone which obstructed it required several
days of hard labour; but at last, thirty days after the work began,
the explorer found himself standing in the sarcophagus chamber of
Khafra. Besides the empty sarcophagus, Belzoni found the evidence that
he had not been the first who had penetrated into the secret of the
pyramid, for in addition to many graffiti on the walls of the chamber,
which were written in charcoal and rubbed off at the slightest touch,
there was an Arabic inscription which ran: “The Master Mohammed Ahmed,
lapicide, has opened them; and the Master Othman attended this opening:
and the King Ali Mohammed, from the beginning to the closing up.”
The Third Pyramid, that of Menkaura, was opened in 1226 by
treasure-hunters. “After passing through various passages, a room was
reached wherein was found a long blue vessel [the sarcophagus] quite
empty.... They found in this basin, after they had broken the covering
of it, the decayed remains of a man, but no treasures, excepting some
golden tablets inscribed with characters of a language which nobody
could understand.” The disappointed treasure-seekers were succeeded in
1837 by Colonel Howard Vyse, some of the results of whose discoveries
are in the British Museum in the shape of a fragment of the basalt
sarcophagus, and portions of a wooden coffin, purporting to be that
of “the King of the North and South, Men-kau-Ra, living for ever,”
together with the remains of a man, wrapped in a coarse woollen cloth
of a yellow colour. “In clearing the rubbish out of the large entrance
room,” says Colonel Vyse, “after the men had been employed there
several days and had advanced some distance towards the south-eastern
corner, some bones were first discovered at the bottom of the rubbish;
and the remaining bones and part of the coffin were immediately
discovered all together. No other parts of the coffin or bones could
be found in the room; I therefore had the rubbish which had been
previously turned out of the same room carefully re-examined, when
several pieces of the coffin and of the mummy-cloth were found; but in
no other part of the pyramid were any parts of it to be discovered,
although every place was most minutely examined, to make the coffin as
complete as possible.” Unfortunately some doubt exists as to the coffin
being actually of the period which its inscription claims, and the same
doubt hangs over the remains. It has been suggested that the coffin is
a restoration of the time of the XXVIth Dynasty, and that the remains
are not those of Menkaura, but of one of the treasure-hunters who lost
his life in the attempt of 1226. Accordingly we cannot say, as might
otherwise have been the case, that Vyse actually discovered a Pharaoh
in the great tomb which he had built for his eternal abode. The fine
basalt sarcophagus was taken out of the pyramid by Vyse, and shipped
for England in 1838; but the ill-luck which has dogged the pyramid
explorations attended Menkaura’s coffin also. The ship left Leghorn on
October 12, 1838, and was never heard of again, though some bits of
wreckage were picked up off Carthagena.
Valuable work was done at Gizeh during the years after Vyse’s
researches by Perring and Piazzi Smyth, though the careful measurement
work of the latter was somewhat obscured by the fanciful theories which
possessed his mind on the subject of the purpose of the Great Pyramid;
but the most complete survey of the Gizeh field was due to Flinders
Petrie, who in 1880–1881 measured and planned the whole site with the
most scrupulous care.
Perhaps the most interesting result of his work, apart from the
evidence which he gathered as to Egyptian methods of working stone,
was his discovery, behind the Second Pyramid, of the barracks in which
the skilled masons who were permanently employed on the building lived
while the work was going on. These were capable of containing easily
about 4000 men. The rest of the 100,000, who, as Herodotus tells us,
were employed in the building of the Great Pyramid, were doubtless
merely labourers employed during the three months of high Nile, when
work on the land was impossible, to bring up the blocks of stone and
leave them ready for the skilled hewers and masons to work upon. As to
the methods of these skilled workmen, evidence of the most interesting
kind was accumulated. It was found that the great blocks of stone were
sawn by means of bronze saws over nine feet in length, and equipped
with jewelled cutting points. The sarcophagi of hard granite or basalt
were thus sawn to shape with the most remarkable accuracy, while they
were hollowed out by cutting rows of holes with tubular drills also
set with jewelled cutting points. The chief difference between this
kind of ancient Egyptian work and modern practice with diamond drills
is that the ancient work is undeniably superior to the modern. “Truth
to tell, modern drill cores cannot hold a candle to the Egyptians;
by the side of the ancient work they look wretchedly scraped out and
irregular.” “There has been no flinching or jumping of the tool,” says
Petrie again, speaking of a drill core from Gizeh, “every crystal,
quartz, or felspar has been cut through in the most equable way, with a
clean irresistible cut.”
Our wonder at the mighty mass of the Pyramids of Gizeh, then, is not to
be mere wonder at the barbaric power which summoned myriads of slaves
and forced them to toil till by sheer brute force they had piled up
these mountains of stone. Brute force, unguided and unorganised, would
never have built the Pyramids, though millions instead of thousands had
been employed, and for centuries instead of decades, but would only
have led to disaster and confusion. The wonder of the Pyramids is that
five thousand years ago there was found a race whose keen intelligence
so clearly understood the need and the marvellous power of organised
and trained human labour, architects and engineers who were capable
of directing the energies of a hundred thousand men without confusion
towards a clearly foreseen end, and craftsmen who were capable of
producing, with tools whose material seems to us pathetic in its
inadequacy, results which put to shame the best achievements of men
using the finest modern tools.
The recent excavations in the Gizeh Pyramid Field, directed by Dr.
G. A. Reisner, have added much to our knowledge of the subordinate
tombs of the period, and of the life of the times.
Moving southwards from Gizeh, we come to the pyramid field of Abusir,
passing on the way the unfinished pyramid of Zawiyet el Aryan. Of this
pyramid, designed for the Pharaoh Nefer-ka-Ra of the IIIrd Dynasty,
nothing exists above ground. The remains consist simply of the trenches
destined for the superstructure, and the inclined plane leading
down to the mortuary chamber with its fine oval libation-trough, or
sarcophagus. Yet there are few works of ancient Egypt which impress one
more with the sense of the magnificent power with which these early
architects carried out their designs. “The whole,” says Maspero, “is
merely a T-shaped ditch, some 100 feet deep; and yet the impression it
makes when one goes down into it is unforgettable. The richness and the
cutting of the materials, the perfection of the joints and sections,
the incomparable finish of the basin, the boldness of the lines and the
height of the walls all combine to make up a unique creation.”
The German excavations have resulted in the discovery at Abusir of a
curious development both of the pyramid idea and of the early Egyptian
temple. It was already known from one of the magical tales of the
Westcar Papyrus, that the kings of the Vth Dynasty were probably a
priestly line of usurpers, who claimed to be related to the Sun-god
Ra by direct descent--a relationship which was henceforth claimed
by every subsequent Pharaoh, and embodied in the royal titulary. The
German Expedition has revealed to us the unmistakable proof of the
devotion of the Vth Dynasty kings to the worship of the Sun-god, and
the unique form which their temples took. The temple of Ne-user-ra, for
example, consisted of a rectangular court, 380 feet by 280 feet, whose
main axis ran east and west. In the western half of this area rose the
pyramid, a curious combination of the idea of the mastaba-pyramid of
Seneferu at Medum and the later obelisk. On a great block of building
about 130 feet square by 100 feet in height, shaped like a truncated
pyramid, rose a squat brick obelisk whose point reached a height of
about 120 feet. Roofed corridors surrounded the enclosure on the other
three sides, and probably provided storerooms for the temple furniture,
and for the materials of the offerings. At the foot of the pyramid
an immense alabaster altar stood in a small court surrounded by low
walls. The obelisk, on its truncated pyramid, represented the Sun-god,
and outside the temple wall, near the south side, was placed the most
curious of all the furnishings of this curious temple, in the shape
of a great boat, built of brick, which bore all the sacred insignia
of the Sun-god in his voyage across the heavens. The interior of the
temple walls was covered with sculptured scenes of the life created by
the god, scenes from the river, the swamps, the fields and the desert,
these being the earliest specimens of such mural decorations in any
Egyptian temple.
The next stage of the Great Pyramid Field is at Saqqara, where the
chief feature is the most ancient, and save for the monsters of Gizeh,
the most famous of all the pyramids, the Stepped-Pyramid of King Zeser
of the IIIrd Dynasty, the earliest great stone structure in the world.
This remarkable building was probably the work of Zeser’s famous
counsellor and architect Imhotep, the typical wise man of early Egypt,
whose counsel was “as though one inquired at the oracle of God,” and
who was subsequently deified and became the patron-deity of the scribes.
The tomb which he reared for his master (who had also another great
tomb at Bet-Khallaf) was built in six stages, stands about 197 feet in
height, and has the peculiarity that its base is not a square but a
rectangle, measuring 394 by 351 feet. But though the interest attaching
to man’s first great piece of stonework must always be great, the
actually living interest at Saqqara attaches not so much to Zeser’s
hoary and imposing tomb, as to the comparatively insignificant and
decayed pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasty kings, Unas, Teti, Pepy
I, Merenra, and Pepy II. Mere heaps of rubble and sand as they seem,
with none of the splendour of construction or greatness of scale of the
Gizeh group, these monuments of the time when the royal power of the
Old Kingdom was beginning to decline are yet of supreme value; for they
are the first pyramids in which inscriptions have been found, and the
long religious texts discovered in them, and now known as the Pyramid
Texts, are unique and of infinite importance.
Up to the end of his career, Mariette believed that the pyramids were
dumb, as the Gizeh group had proved to be, and therefore looked upon
the attempt to open any of the Saqqara group as mere waste labour.
Maspero, however, believed otherwise, and the opening of the pyramid
of Pepy I in 1880 proved that he was right. The other pyramids named
proved also to be inscribed, and altogether the five pyramids give us
a series of religious texts covering a period of about one hundred
and fifty years, or perhaps one hundred and eighty, from 2825 to 2644
B.C., or, on Petrie’s dating, from 4275 to 4090 B.C. Even taking the
later dates, these Pyramid Texts form by far the earliest large body of
religious writings which have come down from any part of the ancient
East, and their importance as sources of knowledge as to the beliefs of
the earliest Dynastic period can scarcely be overrated.
Apart from the interest of its pyramids, Saqqara has proved of infinite
value to the student of ancient Egyptian life because of the richness
of its necropolis in the great mastaba tombs of the nobles of the
Old Kingdom. Since Mariette’s excavation of the tomb of Ti, who was
a great man in his day, and architect to two successive kings of the
Vth Dynasty, Nefer-ari-ka-ra and Ne-user-ra, the sculptures of this
splendid tomb, and those, scarcely less remarkable, of the tombs of
Ptah-hetep, Mereruka and Kagemni, have been recognised as among the
most precious accomplishments of ancient art.
Apart altogether from their artistic value, their importance as
first-hand documents for the reconstruction of life in ancient Egypt
five thousand years ago is supreme, for their representations, executed
with infinite vivacity and spirit, cover almost every department of
Egyptian life. The great man is represented as surrounded by all
the busy life which ministered to his comfort when he was on earth,
or engaged in the sports and diversions which were his relaxation
in the intervals of his public duties, sailing, fishing, fowling,
or hippopotamus-hunting among the Nile swamps. Farm life, with its
changing activities according to the season, and all its peaceful and
beautiful incident, is faithfully depicted, so that the crops which the
Egyptian landowner grew and the stock he kept can be perfectly known;
while all the crafts which were necessary to the upkeep of a great
estate are also depicted with abundant detail and a charming directness
and dash. The tomb-paintings of the New Empire at Thebes are much and
deservedly admired; but even they must yield in freshness and charm to
these pictures from the dawn of history, which have the dew of youth
still upon them, and all the vigour of an art which is already quite
sure of itself, but has not had the time to grow stale.
[Illustration: 7. CHASED GOLD PECTORAL ORNAMENTS OF SENUSERT II AND III
(XIIth DYNASTY).
(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]
From Dahshur down to Illahun and Hawara lie the pyramids of the great
kings of the XIIth Dynasty, who, though Thebans, realised that the
centre of gravity of the national government must be further north, and
who therefore made their royal residence between Memphis and the Fayum.
The earlier kings of the dynasty, Amenemhat I and Senusert I, had their
pyramids at Lisht; Amenemhat II and Senusert III preferred Dahshur
for their resting-place; while Senusert II chose Lahun, and Amenemhat
III Hawara, where he could sleep beside the great works which he had
wrought at Lake Moeris for the welfare of his land. The XIIth Dynasty
pyramids are not imposing externally. The ruinous piles of brickwork
at Dahshur and Lahun look more like gigantic ant-heaps than true
pyramids; yet they were the work of kings who in their own way were
quite as powerful as the pyramid-builders of the IVth Dynasty, and the
detail of the inner workmanship of the sarcophagus chambers is quite as
remarkable as anything to be seen at Gizeh. Part of the reason for the
difference is a change, not so much in the ideal for which the pyramid
was constructed (for that remained constant throughout the history of
Egypt), but in the conception of the best means towards the realising
of the ideal. “It seems,” says Petrie, describing the change which
Senusert II introduced in his pyramid at Lahun, “that the pyramids of
the earlier kings had fallen a prey to violence already, the signs of
personal spite in the destructions are evident. Therefore Senusert II
determined to abandon the old system of a north entrance in the face,
and to conceal the access to the interior by a new method.” His method
was to excavate his sarcophagus chamber entirely out of the solid rock
on which the pyramid was founded, and to place the entrance to the
passage which led to the chamber outside of the pyramid altogether.
The shaft which gives access to the passage actually opens out on the
plain, beneath the floor of the tomb of one of the princesses of the
dynasty. Inside the rock-hewn chamber which was protected with such
care, and which was splendidly lined with red granite, stood the red
granite sarcophagus, “exquisitely wrought,” says Petrie, “the errors of
flatness and straightness being matters of thousandths of an inch.”
Yet the cunning and the skill of the XIIth Dynasty architects and
masons proved as helpless as the massive power of the IVth Dynasty to
protect the dead monarchs from the ravages of hatred or greed. Nor
were the elaborate precautions of Amenemhat III any more successful
than those of his grandfather had been. Petrie’s description of the
construction of the inner passages of Amenemhat’s pyramid at Hawara
reads like something planned to be a nightmare to explorers. “The
explorer,” he says, “who had found the entrance in the unusual place
on the south side, descended a long staircase, which ended in a dumb
chamber. The roof of this, if slid aside, showed another passage, which
was filled with blocks. This was a mere blind, to divert attention
from the real passage, which stood ostentatiously open. A plunderer
has, however, fruitlessly mined his way through all these blocks. On
going down the real passage, another dumb chamber was reached; another
sliding trap-door was passed; another passage led to a third dumb
chamber; a third trap-door was passed; and now a passage led along
past one side of the real sepulchre; and to amuse explorers, two false
wells open in the passage floor, and the wrong side of the passage is
filled with masonry blocks fitted in. Yet by some means the plunderers
found a cross trench in the passage floor which led to the chamber.
Here another device was met. The chamber had no door, but was entered
solely by one of the immense roof-blocks, weighing 45 tons, being left
raised, and afterwards dropped into place on closing the pyramid.” One
would have imagined that with such precautions the sleep of Amenemhat
would surely be undisturbed; but when Petrie in 1889 tunnelled his
way through the roofing-beams of the sepulchral chamber he found that
an early plunderer had anticipated him by mining right through the
great 45-ton block. “The royal interments had been entirely burnt; and
only fired grains of diorite and pieces of lazuli inlaying showed the
splendour of the decorations of the coffins.”
Here, as in all the other cases of the pyramids, the very elaboration
of the means adopted for the preservation of the dead body of the king
had only whetted the appetite of the spoiler and destroyer, and little
has survived from the XIIth Dynasty pyramids to reward the modern
explorer. The great finds in the XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields were all
from outside the pyramids. Of these one of the most valuable, though
by no means the most spectacular, was Petrie’s discovery, near the
pyramid of Senusert II at Lahun, of the town, created specially for the
occasion, in which the workmen of Senusert had lived with their staff
of architects, overseers, and scribes, while the pyramid was under
construction.
The little town of Ha-hetep-Senusert, Kahun as it is now called, gives
us the most complete instance extant of the character of an Egyptian
town of the Middle Kingdom. It occupied an area of about 18 acres, and
the plans of the narrow streets and of the houses, mostly small and
closely crowded together, though there are exceptions to this rule,
have been completely wrought out. Much that is interesting in the way
of pottery, tools, and papyri came from the ruins of the deserted
houses of the little pyramid-town, whose existence seems to have been
a very brief one, probably not much longer than was necessary for the
erection of the pyramid.
Again it was not in Amenemhat’s elaborately devised pyramid at
Hawara, but in the Roman cemetery to the north of it, that the great
find was made which has made Hawara famous in the history of ancient
Egyptian art, and has given us one of the most valuable contributions
ever made to our knowledge of the processes and technique of ancient
painting. A cemetery which dates mostly from A.D. instead of from B.C.
has in general comparatively little attraction to the explorer in
ancient Egypt, unless he be a specialist in the Greco-Roman Period.
Accordingly, when Petrie in 1888 found that the cemetery in question
was of the first and second centuries A.D., he was on the point of
giving it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found
with a painted portrait on a wooden panel inserted above its face.
The picture was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, painted in soft
tones, and quite un-Egyptian in its style. It proved to be only the
forerunner of a whole series of similar portraits, of which about sixty
were found before the excavations closed. The work was resumed in 1911
with further success. The portraits are of varying merit, and of even
the best of them it has to be remembered that we are not dealing with
the product of the studio of a skilled artist, but only with that of
the workshop of a firm of local undertakers, who supplied funerary
portraits just as they supplied coffins. All things considered the
quality of the work is wonderfully good, and the information given
by these panel pictures as to the methods of the ancient painters is
of the highest importance. Before the Hawara discoveries, we were
left very much in the dark as to how Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus and
their companions and rivals produced the masterpieces which have only
survived in the literary descriptions of their contemporaries. The
Hawara pictures may be very far, even the best of them, from being
masterpieces; but at least they tell us what were the methods by which
the great painters of ancient Greece produced the pictures which were
considered the equals in artistic merit of the statues which are now
the wonder of the world. The manner in which they were painted is
often described as “encaustic,” but this is an incorrect description
of portraits which, so far as can be judged, were simply painted with
melted coloured wax, laid on with a free brush, each tint being laid on
as a solid body, and not subjected to subsequent glazings.
The XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields at Dahshur and Illahun have yielded
two of the most remarkable finds of Egyptian jewellery which have ever
been made, and the results of the work of de Morgan and Petrie in this
respect are such as to increase our admiration for the marvellous
skill of the craftsmen of the Middle Kingdom. It was in 1894 and 1895
that de Morgan’s workmen, clearing up the area round the XIIth Dynasty
pyramids at Dahshur, found in the tombs of the princesses of the royal
house one of the most wonderful stores of jewellery which have ever
rewarded excavation. The two most notable pieces of the treasure were
the diadems of the princess Khnumit, the most exquisite examples of the
skill of the goldsmith ever worn. “The floret crown,” says Petrie, “is
perhaps the most charmingly graceful head-dress ever seen; the fine
wavy threads of gold harmonised with the hair, and the delicate little
flowers and berries seem scattered with the wild grace of Nature. Each
floret is held by two wires crossing in an eye behind it, and each pair
of berries has likewise an eye in which the wires cross. The florets
are not stamped, but each gold socket is made by hand for the four
inserted stones. The berries are of lazuli. In no instance, however
small, was the polishing of the stone done in its cloison; it was
always finished before setting.” The other diadem is more conventional,
but scarcely less beautiful. Eight rosettes of gold and precious
stones are surmounted with motives of lyre shape terminating in golden
flowers, and the rosettes are united by long links also bearing
jewelled rosettes. The stones of the two crowns are lapis-lazuli,
carnelian, red jasper, and green felspar. Along with the diadems
were found gold pectorals of fine design and execution, bearing the
cartouches of Senusert II, Senusert III, and Amenemhat III, and various
other articles of jewellery, and even the famous jewellery of Queen
Aah-hotep, so long the typical specimen of Egyptian craftsmanship, must
yield the palm to the earlier work in beauty of design and daintiness
of execution.
The second discovery came in February, 1914, when Professor Petrie’s
workmen were clearing a rifled tomb belonging to the “Royal daughter
Sat-Hathor-ant” at Lahun near the pyramid of Senusert II. How the
treasure of Lahun had ever escaped the plunderers who had rifled the
tomb is a mystery. “The tomb had been attacked,” says Petrie; “the long
and heavy work of shifting the massive granite lid of the sarcophagus,
and breaking it away, had been achieved; yet all this gold was left
in the recess of the passage untouched.... The whole treasure seems
to have been stacked in the recess at the time of the burial, and to
have gradually dropped apart as the wooden caskets decayed in course of
years, with repeated flooding of storm water and mud slowly washed into
the pit.... The whole treasure was standing in an open recess, within
arm’s reach of the gold-seekers, while they worked at breaking open the
granite sarcophagus.” We can only be thankful that all the luck did not
go to the ancient robber, and that, like his earlier companion who
left the arm of the Ist Dynasty queen, with its jewelled bracelets, at
Abydos, he overlooked something to tell a later age of the skill and
taste of ancient Egypt.
[Illustration: 8. _Above_, CROWNS OF GOLD INLAID WITH STONES OF
KHNUMIT. _Below_, GRANULATED GOLD WORK. ALL XIIth DYNASTY.
(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]
The chief feature of the Lahun find was a perfect specimen of a royal
diadem, bearing the uræus on its front. No actual specimen of the
famous double crown of Egypt has ever come to light, familiar though
its appearance may be, probably because its materials were of a
perishable nature; but the diadem of Lahun gives us a unique specimen
of such a crown as Egyptian royalty may often have worn in preference
to the cumbrous mitre so frequently figured. “It is formed by a broad
band of highly burnished gold over an inch wide, and large enough to
pass round the bushy wig worn in the XIIth Dynasty. The uræus is of
open work, inlaid with lazuli and carnelian; the head is of lazuli,
which was found loose in the mud. Around the polished band were affixed
fifteen rosettes, each composed of four flowers with intermediate buds.
At the back a tube of gold was riveted on to the band, and into that
fitted a double plume of sheet gold, the stem of which slipped through
a flower of solid gold. The thickness of the plumes was such that
they would wave slightly with every movement of the head. At the back
and sides of the crown were streamers of gold, which hung from hinges
attached to the rosettes. The whole construction was over a foot and a
half high.” Such was an Egyptian diadem in the great days of the Middle
Kingdom, and surely never did a royal head wear a more graceful
emblem of sovereignty than that which came so strangely to light in
1914.
Along with the crown were found two pectorals, one of Senusert II, the
other of Amenemhat III, of even finer design than the famous pectorals
of Dahshur. “The earlier pectoral is inlaid with minute feathering of
lazuli and turquoise; the later with a different feathering of lazuli
and white paste, which has probably been green.... They were probably
suspended by necklaces of the very rich deep amethyst beads which were
found here.” With the pectorals went several gold and jewelled collars
and necklets, and broad armlets of golden bars with beads of carnelian
and turquoise, and inlaid clasps bearing the royal cartouche, and a
number of other articles, amulets and toilet utensils, including a
silver mirror with a handle of obsidian, inlaid with bands of plaited
gold, and bearing a cast gold head of Hathor. Another item came to
light from Lahun in 1920 in the shape of the royal uræus of Senusert
II, “a massive gold casting, with inlay of carnelian and lazuli, a
head of lazuli, and eyes of garnet in gold setting,” which was found
near the sepulchral chamber in the heart of the pyramid, amidst a heap
of dust and chips of stone. Doubtless this is the royal emblem which
adorned the brow of Senusert when he was laid to rest in his pyramid,
though how it escaped the notice of the robbers who plundered his tomb
is as great a mystery as the escape of the treasure of Sat-Hathor-ant.
Thus the pyramids of the XIIth Dynasty monarchs, insignificant as they
may seem in comparison with the gigantic piles of Gizeh, have proved
in their way no less interesting than the colossal work of Khufu,
Khafra, and Menkaura. Indeed each of the pyramid groups has its own
characteristics, and has given its own contribution to our knowledge
of the successive periods of early Egyptian history. To the mighty
structures of the IVth Dynasty we owe the revelation of the marvellous
organisation of the Egyptian kingdom, and the skill with which its
resources could be concentrated on a single gigantic task. To the less
imposing buildings of the Vth and VIth Dynasties we owe something
perhaps even more precious--the revelation of the thoughts which were
shaping themselves in the mind of man in these most ancient days with
regard to the soul and its life beyond the grave. To those of the XIIth
Dynasty we owe the evidence of the skill which shaped the marvellous
red-granite sarcophagus of Senusert II, or the great quartzite funeral
chamber of Amenemhat III, and the union of luxury with the finest taste
which created the jewellery of Dahshur and Lahun. It may be questioned
if even the tomb of Tutankhamen, with all its mass of splendour, will
have anything to show us which can surpass in grace and dignity the
diadems of Khnumit and Sat-Hathor-ant, or in exquisiteness of finish
their pectorals and armlets.
With the decline of the royal power at the close of the XIIth Dynasty,
the age of the pyramid-builders closes. Already the taste for these
huge structures was being modified, as it was continually found how
powerless they were to accomplish the great end for which they were
designed--the protection of the dead body of the king from the hatred
of his enemies or the greed of the professional tomb-robber. The
decay of the royal power which is so marked even in the beginnings of
the dark period which now ensues no doubt completed a process which
disillusionment had already begun; and when Egypt once more found
herself under a strong and stable government, the Theban kings who
delivered her from the Hyksos tyranny had recourse to another device
for securing the continuity of existence after death, and instead of
piling mountains of stone or brick above their sepulchral chambers,
were hewing in the Valley of the Kings the galleries and halls which
have been yielding up their secrets in our time for the wonder and
instruction of the world.