WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
Scarcely less famous than the pyramids, and of far greater beauty,
are the splendid temples whose ruins extend from Heliopolis, close to
the Delta, to Philæ, where the beautiful shrines of Isis, exquisite
in their setting, even if of late date for Egypt, are now becoming
only memories of a beauty which has had to yield to the claims of
present-day life. Egypt, almost equally with Greece, may claim to be
the Land of Temples; and certainly no other land of the ancient East
can rival her in the number, the scale, and the magnificence of the
shrines which she reared to her innumerable gods. The claim of the
Greek to be the supreme temple-builder of the ancient world is, of
course, unquestioned, and nothing in Egypt can bear comparison with the
serene beauty of the Parthenon; but, though the Egyptian architect knew
nothing of that exquisite balance and harmony of proportion which has
made Greek architecture the crown of human effort in sacred building,
the temples of Egypt have a grandeur and impressiveness of their own
which make a profound appeal to the mind; and the contribution of the
Egyptian to the sum of human achievement in this respect is coming to
be more and more appreciated every day.
The pyramids show him to have been one of the great master-builders of
the world in respect of the vastness of his creations; the temples,
often scarcely less impressive in this respect, show him to have been
also a master in the art of constructing stately and nobly proportioned
examples of that art of the column and architrave of which the temples
of Hellas gave the supreme demonstration. The question of how much the
Greek owed to the earlier builder may still be the subject of debate;
but there can be no question of the originality of the architects who
gave to the world such noble specimens of the builder’s art as the
great colonnades of Karnak and Luxor, the beautiful terraces of Der
el-Bahri, and the later glories of Edfu and Philæ.
In one sense there can be comparatively little to tell in the way
of a story of excavation with regard to the Egyptian temples. In
Mesopotamia and Babylonia the remains of the great temples of Anu and
Adad, of Enlil, and of Marduk, owe their restoration to the light of
day entirely to the spade of the excavator, for they were completely
buried beneath the dust of ages in the great mounds of Ashur, Nippur,
and Babylon, and almost nothing was visible to tell of their former
splendours till the modern excavator patiently stripped away the mantle
in which time had wrapped them.
But the temples of Egypt had never experienced the oblivion which
had covered their northern rivals. They had suffered, indeed, many
things at the hands of Time and of human vandalism. Sometimes they were
half-buried in the sand which had risen higher and higher, century
after century, around their columns; sometimes the shrines of a rival
faith had been thrust incongruously into their ruined courts, or an
Arab village had grown up like an ugly parasite on their roofs; but
there always remained enough to tell that the work of one of the great
master-building races of the world was there, waiting the time when
it should be stripped of these paltry accretions, and revealed in its
full beauty. Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, and their companion shrines
were never quite forgotten, and even Hatshepsut’s exquisite terraces at
Der el-Bahri, half-smothered beneath the sand, and wrecked by Coptic
fanaticism though they were, still showed enough to enable the first
European explorers who described them (MM. Jollois and Devilliers of
Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798) to be sure of the general character of
the building which lay beneath the rubbish-heaps.
Accordingly the work of the excavator in connection with the temples of
Egypt has not been so much the discovery of the unknown as the recovery
of the complete form of what was already partially known, the clearing
away of the excrescences which had attached themselves in the course
of centuries to the original structures; the preservation of the more
delicate work, such as relief-sculpture and painting, from further
injury; the re-establishment in a state of security of tottering
walls and columns; and, not least, the tracing out of the history of
the building of temples which were in general the work of centuries,
and of many kings. It has all been work which, from its very nature,
can have but little of the nature of romance about it, which has but
seldom led to any startling finds, which has involved a colossal amount
of sheer hard labour, without any very conspicuous rewards; but which
has resulted in the temples becoming intelligible to the ordinary
traveller, and safe for his interest for generations to come, and has
enabled us to trace, in the case of a great structure like Karnak, the
successive stages by which the vast building grew to a finished whole.
It is, of course, obviously impossible to attempt to tell, even in
the scantiest outline, the story of a work which has extended over
the whole length of the land from the Delta to the furthest bounds
of Egyptian influence in Nubia, and has been carried on by scores of
workers of all nationalities. Perhaps our end will best be served by
taking a typical instance of the recovery of a temple, and telling
in more or less detail the story of the work which gave it back to
present-day knowledge. We take as our example Queen Hatshepsut’s
terraced temple at Der el-Bahri, one of the most beautiful, as it is
now also one of the most famous, of Egyptian buildings.
In all Egypt there is probably no more beautiful or imposing site
than that of the “Paradise of Amen,” which the great queen reared to
the glory of the Theban god and of her own name. On the western side
of the Nile, almost exactly opposite Karnak, the limestone cliffs of
the Libyan Range sweep backwards in a great semicircle, forming a bay
across whose mouth is drawn the long line of the funerary temples of
the Theban kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties. Behind them, and
behind the innumerable tombs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh and the Northern
Assassif, there lies, close against the salmon-red cliffs, the building
which, of all Egyptian temples, makes the strongest appeal of pure
beauty, as distinguished from the impressiveness which comes from sheer
scale and mass.
[Illustration: 9. HATSHEPSUT’S TEMPLE, DER EL-BAHRI, GENERAL VIEW.]
The site is one which offers peculiar advantages, but is also
encompassed with peculiar risks. No more magnificent background for
a building could be desired; but the background is precisely of such
magnificence as to form a dangerous pitfall in which a merely mediocre
architect would have been lost. To attempt to compete with Nature,
when the work of man has to be placed in such close proximity with her
towering architecture, would be to ensure hopeless defeat and to invite
ridicule. Khufu’s mountain of stone gets its full value from contrast
with the long lines of the desert plateau on whose edge it stands. The
columns and obelisks of Karnak and Luxor are far enough from the hills
on either bank of the Nile to make the human handiwork the central
and impressive feature of the picture; but the site at Der el-Bahri
would have made what was possible elsewhere a mere derision. To have
placed the huge columns which seem so great on the Theban plain in
competition with the soaring vertical lines of the Libyan cliffs would
have been to place a fool’s cap on the most grandiose work of human
hands. What was needed at Der el-Bahri was a building which should
avoid the very idea of rivalry with Nature’s handiwork, and which
should conquer by subjection, a building where all the emphasis should
be laid on the horizontal lines of structure, so as to disclaim at once
the thought of competition with the towering buttresses and bastions
behind.
It may be questioned if ever an architect more thoroughly appreciated
the conditions of his problem, or more satisfactorily fulfilled them,
than did Senmut, when he designed for Queen Hatshepsut the three rising
courts of the Paradise of Amen, with the long slopes leading from the
one to the other, and the stately colonnades, where the shadows are so
cunningly pressed into the decorative scheme, and the vertical lines of
the columns give emphasis to the horizontality of the whole conception,
and never for one moment suggest rivalry with the cliffs above.
Excavation, which has done so much for our knowledge of Der el-Bahri,
has taught us that the originality of the XVIIIth Dynasty architect was
not quite so absolute as was once imagined, and that he owed at least
the idea of colonnaded terraces to the great man of the XIth Dynasty,
Mertisen or another, who designed the pyramid-temple, “Glorious are
the seats of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra,” for his royal master. But
Senmut was one of those great men who, though they take their blessings
where they find them, can never be accused of plagiarism, because they
give back to the world the original idea transfigured and glorified.
He has made the idea of the terraced courts and colonnades his own,
while avoiding the heavy central block, which, with its somewhat paltry
pyramid (if this was ever completed), must have been a contradiction
to the whole conception of the rest of the building; and his spacious
courts, with their almost Greek grace of surrounding colonnade, seem
touched with a spirit which is lacking in the older work.
Mr. Robert Hichens has told us how “after the terrific masculinity of
Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur
of its colossus, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon him like a
delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white
and blue and orange, standing--ever so knowingly--against a background
of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the
mountain”; and though his idea is quite too fantastically elaborated
(for the idea of conscious striving after prettiness is the last thing
one could think of in connection with Der el-Bahri), yet the idea of
femininity does occur to the mind when the temple is compared with
other Egyptian work. Hatshepsut had not much of the weak woman about
her, to all appearance, and Senmut, if his statues are any clue to the
man, was as rough-hewn and masculine a piece of granite as one might
encounter; but between them they managed to rear a temple which stands
alone in Egypt for the feminine quality of grace.
So now we may turn to the story of how this most graceful of Egyptian
temples, unique in its grace if not in its main idea, and unique also
in that it is the only temple in Egypt which came into being wholly at
the bidding of a woman, was rescued from the accumulations of two and a
half millenniums of neglect and the ravages of religious fanaticism.
Hatshepsut’s temple was first made known to the modern world, as we
have seen, by MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two of the savants attached
to Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798. The English traveller Pococke had
indeed visited the site in 1737; but the thing which chiefly interested
him was the abundance of mummies, and all that can be learned about
the temple from his mention of it is that in his day the sanctuary
was apparently accessible. “Here it seemed,” he says, “as though the
mountain had been vertically hewn out by the hand of man, and the
people of the place said that there had once been a passage through it
into the next valley”--the Valley of the Kings.
What the French explorers saw sixty years later was not a great deal
more. They traced what they believed to be the bases of a series of
sphinxes which had formerly formed an avenue, 42 feet wide and 437
yards long, leading up to the enclosure-wall of the temple, the remains
of a wall which must have formed part of one of the terraces, what they
took for the evidence of two flights of steps, leading to the higher
levels of the building, the central part of the highest platform, and
the rock-cut sanctuary which Pococke had seen. The rest of the temple
was completely covered with heaps of sand and rubbish.
The next visitor of importance was the famous Champollion, who, as
was natural in the first decipherer of the hieroglyphics, was chiefly
interested in the inscriptions which were visible, especially on the
granite trilithon portal of the upper platform; and the great scholar
at once recognised the existence in these of a puzzle which was only
to be solved later. He read the cartouche of Hatshepsut as that of a
king Amenenthe; but was surprised to see that all the nouns and verbs
referring to this unknown king were in the feminine, and that the royal
builder was addressed by Amen-Ra as “His daughter whom he loves.” He
imagined the existence of a female ruler Amense, who must have been
connected by marriage with an unknown Thothmes, and also with the
unknown Amenenthe, and his solution of the mystery, though his names
were incorrect, was, after all, not so far from the truth.
Champollion found evidence in the work of the temple of one of his
favourite theories--that Greek art found its origin in imitation
of Egyptian work; and here, again, he was only anticipating the
recognition of the fact that the colonnades of Der el-Bahri approach
nearer to the style of Greek work than almost any other work in Egypt.
[Illustration: 10. NORTH COLONNADE, DER EL-BAHRI; “PROTO-DORIC”
COLUMNS.]
Nearly thirty years after the first French explorers, and shortly after
the visit of Champollion, Wilkinson surveyed the ruins, and apparently
saw, not only the ramps of approach to the courts, but also one of
the pillared corridors whose walls were covered with sculptures of
soldiers carrying boughs and weapons, and with a scene representing
the dedication of two obelisks to Amen. His reading of the name of the
builder of the temple, Amunneitgori, or Amun-noohet, was no nearer
to the truth than that of Champollion, though he saw that the French
scholar’s unknown Thothmes was no other than Thothmes II.
Lepsius, who evidently saw more of the temple than any of his
predecessors, was the first to make a real approach to the true reading
of its builder’s name. His version of the name, “Numt Amen,” was indeed
an almost correct reading of part of Hatshepsut’s title, Khnum Amen;
and he conjectured that she was the eldest sister of Thothmes III, who
occupied the throne during the minority of her brother, but was not
permitted to rank in the regular lists of the kings of Egypt.
In 1858 the indefatigable Mariette visited the temple, and added it to
the thirty-six other sites at which he carried on excavations during
his thirty years of ceaseless toil. He was too busy with other work at
Qurneh to give to Der el-Bahri the attention which it deserved, and
his work there was carried on only with a small staff, and for a short
time, though he worked again at the place in 1862 and 1866. Nor were
his methods here such as to be helpful to his successors. Working, as
he did all his lifetime, under the lash, as it were, and with the need
of getting the largest possible results with the smallest expenditure
of money and time, it was impossible for him to make his clearances
thorough and methodical. Indeed, he seriously added to the difficulties
of subsequent excavators by the fact that instead of removing the
rubbish of his excavations completely outside the probable limits of
the temple, he was forced by stress of time and want of money simply
to dump his waste on the nearest convenient spot within the temple
area. The consequence was that when Naville came to make the systematic
clearance of the whole building, he found several of the most important
chambers completely buried, not only beneath the debris of the
centuries, but beneath that also which Mariette had heaped on the top
of everything.
All the same, it was Mariette who, as in so many other instances,
first revealed to the world the real wonder of Der el-Bahri and the
surpassing interest of its sculptured halls. His was the first plan to
give us anything like a true conception of the form of the temple, then
held to be unique in Egyptian architecture; and though his restoration
of the details, or rather the restoration of M. Brune, working on his
material, was incorrect in several points, it was a good deal less so
than some more pretentious attempts which succeeded it, and at least
gave an impression intelligible, and in the main not very far from the
actuality.
It was to this first excavation of Mariette also that we owe what has
ever since been the most picturesque, and not the least informing,
of the treasures of Der el-Bahri--the wonderful series of reliefs
representing the voyage of Hatshepsut’s squadron to Punt, which
decorates the retaining wall terminating the middle platform of the
temple. This series of sculptures, one of the priceless treasures
of New Empire Egyptian art, would of itself be the justification of
Mariette’s work.
In 1893 the Egypt Exploration Fund took up the great task of completely
excavating Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, and their work, conducted by
M. Edouard Naville and a number of assistants, only closed with the
publication, in 1908, of the sixth folio volume of plates and plans,
completing, with the introductory memoir, a present-day memorial which
even the great queen need not have disdained, and which is worthy
of her fine achievement. By the patient efforts of M. Naville and
his fellow-workers the long ramps and spacious courts of the temple
were completely cleared of the rubbish of centuries, their graceful
colonnades put in a condition of safety, and the priceless coloured
reliefs roofed over so as to protect them from the ruinous effects of
the weather, which, even in the period between the work of Mariette
and that of the Egypt Exploration Fund, had wrought more damage to the
wonderful series of scenes of the Expedition to Punt than had been done
by all the centuries of neglect.
Wisely the explorers made no attempt at restoration. Their aim was
solely one of preservation, and we owe to them the fact that the most
interesting temple of the XVIIIth Dynasty is now in a condition which
permits some realisation of its former beauty, and which promises its
endurance for centuries to come. Thanks to the explorers’ labours, and
to the complete view of the building which we owe to Mr. Somers Clarke,
the memorial temple of Egypt’s greatest queen is now as well known in
all its essential features as almost any structure in the world.
The work at Der el-Bahri, however, only ended in one aspect to begin
in another. Already in 1879 Mariette, to whose instinct for the
possibilities of the various Egyptian sites full justice has never
been done, had declared his belief, founded on his discovery of a
block of stone bearing the name of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra of the
XIth Dynasty, and of several fragments of columns, that a small temple
of the XIth Dynasty had once existed not far from Hatshepsut’s great
temple. In 1903, after the completion of the actual work of excavation
at the great temple, M. Naville began the excavation of the large
mounds to the south of the site of his former labours, and with the
assistance of Dr. H. R. Hall and others, the work was carried on till
1907, the final volume of results being published in 1913.
[Illustration: 11. RELIEFS, DER EL-BAHRI.]
The work began, as M. Naville tells us, chiefly with the view of
clearing the XIth Dynasty cemetery which the explorer was convinced lay
beneath the great mounds of rubbish; but the cemetery soon proved to
be less, and other objects more, important than had been anticipated.
Ere long the diggers made out the line of a ramp, running parallel to
the outer wall of Hatshepsut’s temple, and, following up the traces
of building which successively revealed themselves, as the mounds,
often from 15 to 20 feet in height, were cleared away, they at last
completely unearthed the remains of a building which is as unique
in the history of Egyptian architecture as Hatshepsut’s temple was
formerly thought to be. The temple was at an early stage found to
belong, as Mariette had suggested, to the XIth Dynasty, and to be the
work of one of the greatest kings of this little-known line of rulers,
the Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra who has already been mentioned.
It is by no means in such good preservation as its great companion, for
about the end of the XIXth Dynasty it appears to have been definitely
abandoned as a temple, and handed over to the tender mercies of the
masons who used it as a convenient quarry for material. Nothing is now
standing above 10 feet from the pavement level, and none of the pillars
are above 7 feet in height. Yet the remains are sufficiently complete
to allow of the understanding of the appearance which the whole must
have presented in the days when Hatshepsut’s architect took its
platform and colonnades as the inspiration of the great work on which
he was engaged at its side.
At the end of a spacious enclosure, bounded by a double temenos wall of
which the outer member was of brick and the inner of limestone, a broad
ramp, sloping somewhat steeply, rose to the level of a rectangular
platform. The retaining wall of the platform was faced, as in the
later temple, with a colonnade consisting of a double row of pillars
square on plan. The platform itself was surrounded by a double range
of similar square pillars, which was roofed over, and made a kind of
veranda completely enclosing the central mass of the temple. In the
centre of this colonnade, a door, curiously narrow and paltry for so
fine a building (it is only 3 feet wide), gave access to an almost
square hypostyle hall, whose roof was supported by a perfect forest
of octagonal columns ranged on three sides in three rows, and on the
fourth, at the back of the hall, in two. In the centre of this hall,
and probably with a narrow open space between it and the innermost row
of columns, rose the unique feature of the temple--a rectangular mass
of rubble faced with hewn stone, and surmounted by a pyramid of similar
materials. Behind the pyramid, and against the wall which separated
the pyramid-court from the rear portion of the temple, were several
shrines, corresponding to certain tombs in the court beyond.
Passing through another granite doorway, of the same meagre proportions
as the one in the front of the hall, the visitor entered an open
court surrounded by a colonnade of octagonal columns, two deep on the
southern side, but single on the east and west. In the midst of this
court the mouth of a sloping passage, which descended for 150 metres
to the rock-hewn sanctuary, lined with granite and furnished with an
alabaster shrine, where the _Ka_ of King Mentuhotep was worshipped,
formed a strange and impressive feature. Beyond the open court stood
another hypostyle hall, with eight rows of octagonal columns, ten deep,
and, last of all, a passage, bounded by two walls which reached from
the seventh of the two central rows of columns in the hall, led to a
tiny sanctuary hewn out of the cliff behind the temple.
Such was the temple of Mentuhotep as excavation has revealed it
to us--undoubtedly a most interesting memorial of Middle Kingdom
architecture, and most important as being by far the most complete
example which has survived of the work of that period. Probably we
should have thought the dominant feature of the building, the central
pyramid, rather an incongruity than otherwise, and evidently Senmut,
when he came to his great task six hundred years later, thought so
too, for he adopted the ideas of his predecessor in other respects,
but discarded what seems to us the clumsy pyramid block altogether.
One thing, however, Senmut could not do. He could not secure for
his splendid design anything like the fineness of masonry which
Mentuhotep’s architect had been able to compass in the older temple.
The XVIIIth Dynasty builders, clever though they were in many respects,
left poor work behind them compared with the magnificent masonry of the
XIth Dynasty men.
One of the most interesting features of the older building was found
in the six shrines which have been already mentioned. They belonged
to certain princesses, Aashait, Sadhe, Kauit, Kemsit, and Henhenit,
with one unnamed, who were also priestesses. These shrines were in
connection with the tombs of the ladies in question, who were buried
within the temple.
The building had been completed before either the tombs or the shrines
were inserted; and the inference has been drawn that these were the
ladies of the harem who were chosen for the honour of accompanying
King Mentuhotep on his voyage through the Underworld to the regions of
the blessed--in other words, who were killed at his funeral so that he
should not lack company in the world of the dead. The survival to so
late a period of this barbarous custom is not proved, though it has
been suggested that it continued even as late as the middle of the
XVIIIth Dynasty; but at all events the shrines of the princesses have
furnished us with some fine examples of the work of the little-known
XIth Dynasty.
In the extreme north corner of the temple, Thothmes III intruded
another shrine to the goddess Hathor, which was discovered during the
progress of the excavations in February, 1906, and has provided us with
one of the most admirable examples extant of Egyptian sculpture. The
shrine is a small chamber, 10 feet long and 8 feet high, hewn in the
rock and lined with sandstone. The slabs are sculptured with religious
scenes in which Thothmes III makes offerings to Hathor. The goddess
herself stood in the centre of the shrine in the shape of a life-sized
figure of a cow, suckling a kneeling figure of a king, while another
royal figure stands in front under her head. The name of Amenhotep II
is attached to these figures; but the probability is that they were
meant to represent Thothmes III, who dedicated the chapel, and that all
that Amenhotep II had to do with the act of piety was the engraving of
his cartouche on his father’s work. The Hathor cow of Der el-Bahri is
quite one of the masterpieces of New Empire art, quite eclipsing the
famous example of the same figure which has come from the Saite period
and has hitherto been esteemed one of the finest specimens of Egyptian
animal sculpture. “Neither Greece nor Rome,” says Maspero of the Der
el-Bahri cow, “has left us anything that can be compared with it; we
must go to the great sculptors of animals of our own day to find an
equally realistic piece of work.” Indeed the Hathor cow and the two
lions of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen, now in the British Museum,
might be safely taken as the pieces on which Egyptian sculpture might
elect to stand as an interpreter of animal figure.
Such, then, have been the main results of excavation on a single
Egyptian site; surely enough to afford ample justification of the
expenditure of time and money and labour which has been involved. Two
great temples have been given back to the knowledge of the world--one
of them, it is true, from a period otherwise fairly well known, the
other from a period which was hitherto almost a blank. Even in the case
of the later temple, where the results contained no surprises, and
only extended our already existing knowledge, the contribution of this
site to our estimate of Egyptian art was of surpassing value; while
Mentuhotep’s temple has filled a gap at one of the points where further
knowledge of Egyptian history and art was most to be desired.
There have been no marvels of buried treasure to gild the pages of
the story of excavation at Der el-Bahri; but there has been a solid
addition to the sum of human knowledge of the past. At a score of
other sites, work similar to that which has just been described has
been continually going on during the last thirty years. Mariette’s
beginnings of clearance at sites such as Edfu, Esneh, Denderah, and
Abydos have been followed by work whose thoroughness has been such as
Mariette, from the nature of the case, could never have accomplished.
To tell the story of excavation, even in the most meagre outline, would
take a volume instead of a chapter, and Der el-Bahri must suffice as a
typical example of the kind of work which has been done all up and down
the land of Egypt.
Reference must be made, however, to one piece of work, associated,
curiously enough, also with the name of the explorer of Der el-Bahri,
which has a unique interest of its own. This is the discovery of the
Pool of Osiris, which, as Strabo told us, lay beneath the great temple,
or, as he called it, the Memnonium, at Abydos. In 1914 M. Naville,
following up the work of Miss M. A. Murray and Professor Petrie in
1902–3, found a great underground chamber, 100 feet by 60 feet,
constructed of huge blocks of limestone, cased inside with hard red
sandstone. The pillars, the architraves, and the roofing-blocks of the
aisles of this chamber were all of fine granite, without adornment or
inscription, and in fact resembled almost exactly the similar work in
the so-called “Temple of the Sphinx” at Gizeh, with this difference,
that whereas the granite pillars of the Temple of the Sphinx are 3
feet square, those of the chamber at Abydos are 8½ feet square. The
wonder of the building, however, was its arrangement. In the centre
of the chamber stood two rows of these great granite monoliths, each
row consisting of five pillars. Around the central block of masonry on
which these pillars rested, ran a deep channel, which had manifestly
once been filled with water, so as to render the central block an
island.
Around this channel runs a ledge of stonework about 3 feet wide, and
from this ledge access is given to a set of seventeen cells each about
6 feet square and 6 feet high.
Manifestly this extraordinary building is Strabo’s “well,” which, as
he tells us, was below the temple, and was built like the Labyrinth,
only on a smaller scale, with passages covered by a single stone. What
may have been its use it is as yet impossible to say. The water channel
and the ledge round it suggest that the boat of Osiris may have been
towed around the pool by his priests on the great feast-days, or when
the Passion Play of Abydos, representing the death and resurrection
of Osiris, was being celebrated. Two things alone seem certain, the
first, the identity of the chamber with the pool described by the old
geographer, and the second, that we have here one of the most ancient
sacred buildings in Egypt.
Other parts of the structure are the work of the XIXth Dynasty,
which did so much at Abydos, and bear the cartouche of Merenptah and
representations of this king worshipping the gods; but the chamber of
the pool is another matter. Its construction is of such a character
as to refer it at once to a very much earlier date; and there can be
little doubt that the resemblance to the Temple of the Sphinx is only
the evidence of the fact that the two buildings are of the same period,
and that the Pool of Osiris is the earliest Egyptian building of any
size known, apart from the pyramids.
The magnificence of its masonry shows how far the Egyptians of this
early period had already carried the system of construction which they
were to use to such splendid purpose in the great temples of the land.
Never again, however, even in the great days of New Empire building,
did they put together such a piece of sumptuous massiveness as the
underground chamber of Osiris at Abydos.
Another aspect of work among the temples must be referred to, as being,
in its own way, not less important than the rescuing of the actual
structures from obscurity and neglect; and that is the interpretation
of the work thus rescued, the tracing of its history, and the
disentangling of the various periods of building which are represented,
and the different hands which have been at work in the completion of
a building whose history as a growing organism may stretch through
centuries, and involve the activities of half a dozen dynasties.
[Illustration: 12. KARNAK, AVENUE OF SPHINXES.]
To make the temples intelligible is a matter scarcely less important
than to make them visible, and it has involved scarcely less effort.
Even after all that has been accomplished in this direction, a great
Egyptian temple such as Karnak remains a sufficiently complicated
business to bewilder the ordinary sight-seer and make him turn with
relief to the clarity of Greek architecture; but at least it is now
possible to arrive at something like an understanding of how the vast
bulk of Karnak grew, century after century, to what we now see, and to
realise a little of the romance of history which is involved in the
succession of Pharaohs who have laboured to make great and splendid the
holy and beautiful house of Amen in Thebes.
Let us turn, then, to Karnak, and try to see a little of what modern
work has done in the direction of making this vastest of extant
Egyptian temples intelligible. A century ago, Belzoni wandered round
the ruins of the great temple, his mind filled with vague dreams of
Memnon, Osymandias, and Psammethes, perhaps as appreciative of the
wonder of what he saw as the most enlightened of his successors, but
absolutely in the dark as to the significance of what he saw, or the
history of how the great building had been reared; to-day the story of
Karnak is practically as well understood as that of one of our European
cathedrals, and anyone who likes to take the trouble may trace out
the evidence of its age-long growth. Indeed it is difficult for the
modern to realise how lengthy is the story which unfolds itself in the
sculptured stones of the great temple. We think with something like
awe of the long process which reared some of our cathedrals, and which
may, perhaps, have lasted for a century, or perhaps, in an extreme
case, for two; but Karnak was a growing organism for a period of time
more than twice as long, not only as any of our cathedrals took in the
building, but twice as long as any of them have been standing. Towards
the eastern end of the vast complex of Karnak there are still to be
seen the scanty relics of the earliest builders of the temple of whom
we have any knowledge--the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, who began their
work at Karnak certainly not much later than 2000 B.C. On the western
face of the great temple is the Pylon of the Ptolemies, whose dynasty
only closed with the subjection of Egypt to Roman rule in 30 B.C.
Karnak, in other words, was building for a period which was certainly
not less than seventeen hundred years, and which may have been almost
two thousand! Such a consideration makes our ideas as to duration seem
very small indeed.
Nor has the work been less complicated than it has been lengthy.
Practically every Pharaoh worth naming has left his mark on the great
building in some form or another, and often the work of the reigning
king was done without the slightest regard to that of his forerunners;
sometimes, indeed, with the deliberate design of obscuring it and
blotting out its memory. Consequently the task of disentangling the
story of Karnak has been no easy one. It has been like the reading
of a manuscript where interpolations of different writers, dealing
with different matters, continually break the thread of the main
narrative, and where, to add to the confusion, part of the writing is a
palimpsest, written over the faded script of an earlier author. Along
with the difficulty of interpreting the story of the various buildings
has gone that of preserving them from destruction.
One of the curious facts about Egyptian building is that, for a race
of master-builders such as they showed themselves to be, they were
strangely, even culpably careless about their foundations. If the
mighty halls which they reared had been built on such foundations
as modern builders would insist on for even much less important
structures, there seems no reason why, short of deliberate destruction
by the hand of man, the Egyptian temples should not stand practically
for ever. But the Egyptian architect was content to pile walls and
colonnades which are the wonder of the world on the most flimsy
foundations, and his work is in most cases literally a house built on
the sand.
The wonder is, not that there have been occasional collapses, but
that the buildings have stood so long as they have; indeed nothing
but their sheer mass and weight has enabled them to endure. Even so,
earth-tremors, and the constant and insidious work of infiltration,
have worked havoc on the badly founded buildings, and were it not
for the constant care devoted to them, and the work of practically
refounding them which has been carried out, the great halls of Karnak
would ere long be only masses of tumbled ruin. There is nothing
dramatic about the work of either the interpreter or the preserver;
neither can point, in general, to any treasure-trove which has resulted
from his efforts, though occasionally, as notably in connection with
the work of M. Legrain at Karnak, the work of preservation has resulted
in the unearthing of a mass of the most wonderful ancient statuary.
But we owe the double fact that Karnak stands to-day and is likely to
stand for centuries to come, and that its vast complex of building is
intelligible, to many years of quiet and unobtrusive work on the part
of scholars and architects.
In the great days of Egypt’s glory under the New Empire, Thebes must
have been one of the wonder-cities of the world, and one of the fairest
sights on which the sun ever shone. It may be that Babylon, in the
short-lived glory of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar,
was vaster in extent, and the German excavations have taught us how
gorgeous were some of the great buildings of the city, with their
facings of enamelled brick and their wealth of colour; but it may be
questioned if even Babylon could show anything to match the solemn
splendour of Karnak or Luxor, and beside the ordered sumptuousness
of the huge Egyptian temples, with their wonders of megalithic
construction, one imagines that Babylon’s glories would have seemed
rather cheap and tawdry. And of all the glories of Thebes, Karnak was
the centre and crown.
Petrie tells us that the pitiful remains of the Labyrinth, the great
temple of Amenemhat III of the XIIth Dynasty, show that it was big
enough to hold all the temples of Karnak and Luxor put together; but
the imagination is scarcely capable of trying to comprehend the extent
of such a building, and Karnak is quite big enough for most people.
The actual area of its buildings is about equal to that of St. Peter’s
(Rome), Milan, and Nôtre Dame (Paris); while the sacred enclosure, the
Cathedral Close, so to speak, would hold another half-dozen of the
biggest cathedrals of Europe, without crowding them unduly.
Let us try to imagine ourselves visiting the great temple in the days
when it had reached its greatest extent, though, by that time, the
glory of Thebes had in great measure departed. Still the building,
as we now see it, was practically completed only in the days of the
Ptolemies, and no survey of it would be adequate without including
their work. Unfortunately in taking the temple in the natural order of
approach, by its west front, so to speak, we reverse almost exactly
the order of its building, which was, generally speaking, from east
to west. Yet the history of the building is sufficiently intelligible
even when thus taken in reverse order, and though there are other
approaches to Karnak, and the approach by either the Eastern or the
Western Avenue of Sphinxes must have been very impressive, yet the main
front of the temple must always have been that which faced the Nile, in
the termination of the axis of the whole structure. No doubt also the
Egyptian Kings, with their fondness for using their great river as the
scene of ceremonial processions, used the western front of the temple
for their visits to the shrine of Amen.
We land, then, at a quay of hewn stone, adorned with two small obelisks
of Sety II of the XIXth Dynasty, and with two statues of couchant
lions. Passing down a short and gentle slope, we move along a broad
paved way between rows of couchant ram-headed sphinxes, which were
placed here by Ramses II. The path extends for 200 feet, and leads up
to the vastest portal to be found even in this land of vast portals.
This is the First Pylon of Karnak--first in point of approach, but last
in point of erection, for it is the work of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs who
grasped the sceptre of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great;
and indeed, as you can see, the work is not yet complete. Building is
still going on, and the ramps of crude brick by which the great stones
are dragged up to their positions are still heaped against the walls,
where they will continue to stand for more than two thousand years.
The pylon itself is gigantic. The breadth of the west front of St.
Paul’s, the greatest building familiar to English minds, is 179 feet,
and its height, to the top of the statue of St. Paul on the pediment,
is 135 feet. The Pylon of the Ptolemies measures 370 feet in breadth,
or rather more than double St. Paul’s, while its height is 142½ feet,
so that it overtops St. Paul’s head by 7½ feet. In addition its walls
are 49 feet thick. No mightier approach to a temple was ever devised.
Passing through this great gateway we find ourselves in an open court
whose dimensions are worthy of the portal which gave access to it. From
the gateway where you stand to the scarcely less imposing pylon of
Ramses I, which faces you across the open space, this court measures
275 feet, while its breadth is 338 feet. The area of St. Paul’s is
84,000 square feet, so that this single court of Karnak exceeds our
great cathedral in area by 8000 square feet. Around its walls runs a
colonnade of single columns. In the north corner of the court there
stands a little grey sandstone temple, divided into three chapels,
which are dedicated to Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the members of the Theban
Triad. The southern colonnade is broken by the intruding front of a
larger temple. This is the temple of Ramses III, the last of the great
warrior kings of Egypt, who saved the land, in the degenerate days of
the XXth Dynasty, from being overrun and ravaged by the raid of the
Sea-Peoples. His temple, though very modest in size (it measures only
170 feet in length), is important as giving one of the most perfect
examples extant of a complete Egyptian temple, built from start to
finish by one monarch, and on a straightforward and homogeneous plan.
The great court which has taken these two lesser buildings into its
sweep was the work of the Libyan Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, who
held their court at Bubastis, and is therefore often called the Court
of the Bubastites. The temple of Ramses III was cleared of rubbish in
1896–7 by M. Legrain, in the course of his great work at Karnak. Down
the central avenue of the Bubastite court the Ethiopian Pharaohs of
the XXVth Dynasty began the erection of a colonnade whose purpose has
not been quite determined. As they left it, it consisted of a double
range of huge columns, five in each row. Of the ten, only one solitary
survivor now stands, and is known as the Column of Taharqa, after the
Ethiopian king who was responsible for its erection, and for some of
the sorest disasters of Egypt in her declining days. It was Taharqa
and his successor Tanutamen who brought down upon Egypt the wrath of
the Assyrian conqueror, Ashurbanipal, whose ruthless soldiery by the
sack of Thebes dealt the imperial city a blow from which she never
recovered. Taharqa’s column stands as the memorial of a man who “began
to build, and was not able to finish” in more senses than one.
Leaving the court for a moment by the portal in the south-east corner,
we find on the wall of the second pylon one of the most interesting
records of the temple. This is the inscription in which Sheshanq, one
of the Libyan Pharaohs, records the triumph of that campaign in Syria
in the course of which he humbled the pride of Rehoboam of Judah, and
robbed Solomon’s temple of all the riches which the wise king had
accumulated. In Sheshanq’s relief a gigantic figure of Amen leads up
before the now vanished figure of the king five rows of captive towns
of Palestine, each represented by a circular wall enclosing its name,
from which emerges the upper part of a bound prisoner.
[Illustration: 13. KARNAK, NAVE OF HYPOSTYLE HALL.]
Before us, as we return to the great court, rises the second pylon, the
work of Ramses I, the founder of the XIXth Dynasty. Scarcely any part
of the temple is more eloquent of the jumble of times, and kings, and
even faiths, which goes to make up Karnak, than the neighbourhood of
this pylon. The great gateway itself is of Ramses I; but its materials
had their own story before he built them into his new approach to the
temple of Amen, and had served another god; for some of the blocks of
the pylon once belonged to one of the heretical temples of Akhenaten,
and bear his name and those of his successors, Tutankhamen and Ay. The
little vestibule before the pylon is flanked by statues of Ramses II;
but within the doorway are found the cartouches of Ramses I and Sety
II, as well as that of Ramses II, while part of the vestibule is the
work of two of the Ptolemies. Thus in this little space the work of no
fewer than eight Pharaohs, covering a period of more than a thousand
years, is represented.
The gateway of Ramses I gives access to what is perhaps the most
remarkable, though by no means the most beautiful, of the halls of
Karnak. The Hypostyle Hall, one of the hugest of human creations, was,
like so much else at Karnak, the work of several sovereigns, though
in this case the completion of the building was not so very long
protracted as in some other instances. The hall was begun by Ramses
I, whose short reign of two years only enabled him to see the work
started. The greater part of the hall as we now see it is the work of
Sety I, one of the finest of Egyptian Pharaohs, whose work everywhere
is in accordance with the nobility of his face as it can be seen at
Cairo.
Sety carried out the erection of what is by far the most imposing
feature of the hall, the nave, with its double row of gigantic
open-flower columns, the largest in existence. Each of the twelve
tremendous columns is 69 feet in height and 33 feet in circumference,
while the spreading capitals, 11 feet in height, have an area large
enough for one hundred men to stand upon. Imagine twelve versions of
the Trajan Column at Rome, or the Vendôme Column at Paris, facing
one another in two rows and supporting gigantic architraves of sixty
to a hundred tons in weight, which in their turn support the great
roofing-slabs. These form the central avenue of the great hall. On
either side of them the papyrus-bud columns of the two side aisles rise
to a height of 42½ feet. The rows nearest to the central avenue on
either side bear above their architraves rectangular pillars which make
up the difference between the height of the side columns and those of
the centre, and which bear the extremities of the roof of the nave with
its cornice. On the lower level of the side pillars, the roof of the
hall continues over the rest of the area, supported by a forest of one
hundred and twenty-two columns.
Sety I is responsible for the whole of the northern half of the hall,
as well as for the central avenue, so that the southern portion of the
building is all that Ramses II can claim as his work, if indeed even
this part was not erected by his father, and only sculptured by him.
Ramses II, however, had the knack of securing to himself the glory
of work which was done by other men, and to most people the great
Hypostyle Hall of Karnak is his work, though he had really very little
to do with it.
The architectural merits of the huge building are undoubted, up to a
certain point; but its faults are equally unquestionable. Mere size
tells here, as indeed it almost always does, unless its impression
is spoilt by sheer incapacity. There can be no question of the
impressiveness of the great building. The central avenue, with its
soaring columns, and its grated clerestory rising above the roofs
of the side-aisles, is the prototype of all subsequent cathedral
architecture. But the side-aisles do not add to the dignity of the
great chamber. Their forest of squat, shapeless columns, instead of
being impressive, is only bewildering. Here, very certainly, you cannot
see the wood for the trees, and the spaciousness of the hall is quite
destroyed by the multitude of the supports of its roof. “The size that
strikes us,” says Professor Petrie, “is not the grandeur of strength,
but the bulkiness of disease.”
The outer walls of the great hall are sculptured with reliefs
representing the wars of its two creators. The north wall bears a fine
series of scenes, covering over 200 feet of surface, in which the wars
of Sety I are depicted with great spirit. In some later instances such
war-reliefs are merely wearisome; but these of Sety are both vivacious
and well-executed, and such scenes as that of the king smiting
the Libyans are among the best examples of work in this kind, and
infinitely superior to the pretentious work of his son. The southern
wall has reliefs of Ramses II, his eternal Battle of Kadesh, which
he could never forget, or allow anyone else to forget, a copy of the
treaty of peace with the Hittites, and the so-called Poem of Pentaur,
in which the king’s valour at Kadesh is celebrated.
Behind the Hypostyle Hall comes the IIIrd Pylon, which was reared
by the most magnificent, if not the greatest, of Egyptian Pharaohs,
the gorgeous Amenhotep III, in whose glittering reign the glories of
the New Empire seemed to culminate, before the shadows of his son’s
ill-starred attempt at religious reform dimmed their splendour. When
Thebes was at the height of its fame, and when all the kings of the
ancient east were sending their ambassadors to the great city to fall
“seven times and seven times” in the dust before the golden sandals of
the man who was God visible on earth to a great part of the ancient
world, this third pylon was the main front of the great Theban temple,
which then occupied not much more than half the space which it now
covers. Its western face was used by Sety as the back wall of the
Hypostyle Hall; but on the northern tower on the eastern side can still
be seen the faint remains of a great scene in which a royal procession
on the Nile in honour of Amen is depicted. One great ship over 40
feet long has the king standing on the poop, and cabins with cornices
amidships. Thirty or forty rowers urge it along, and it tows behind it
the sacred barge of Amen, which bears in a shrine a small processional
bark of the god, and at the bow a sphinx and an altar.
[Illustration: 14. KARNAK, COLUMNS OF THE SIDE-AISLE, HYPOSTYLE HALL.]
Besides his pylon, Amenhotep wrought a vast amount of work at Karnak;
but it was not, like that of Sety and Ramses, concentrated in a single
great structure, but dispersed in various parts of the sacred
enclosure, and so does not produce the same effect. To see the work of
Amenhotep on a scale worthy of his importance in the line of Egyptian
Pharaohs, you have to go to Luxor with its fine papyrus-bud forecourt,
and its noble nave, which, had it been finished, would have almost
rivalled the Hypostyle Hall of the later kings in size and exceeded it
in beauty; or to try to think back the vanished glories of what was
probably the most gorgeous and beautiful of all the Theban temples--the
Funerary temple of Amenhotep, which was destroyed, not by the Assyrian
conqueror, but by the royal vandals of the XIXth Dynasty, Ramses II and
his son Merenptah.
All the same, Amenhotep accomplished no small amount of work, in one
way and another, within the enclosure of Karnak. Just beyond the
girdle-wall of the great temple on the north side, he built a temple to
Mentu, the Theban War-God, with a pylon, and obelisks of red granite.
This temple once contained statues in black granite of the king, and of
the goddess Sekhmet, towards whom he evidently cherished a feeling of
deep devotion, if we may judge by the number of statues to her which he
dedicated in the temple of Mut.
The temple of Mentu shared the usual fate of Amenhotep’s work, and
was meddled with by Merenptah, Ramses V, and at least four of the
Ptolemies, a fair specimen of the fashion in which the history of
Karnak is complicated by the multitude of superimposed strata, or
rather of interwoven strands, with which you have to do.
On the south side, and just at the girdle-wall, stands the beautiful
temple of Khonsu (the son of the Theban Triad), one of the finest
examples of a complete Egyptian temple of normal form. This is not
the work of Amenhotep, but of Ramses III; but apparently an earlier
temple of Amenhotep must have once occupied the site, for the king set
up before the gateway a noble avenue of one hundred and twenty-two
sandstone sphinxes bearing his name. Beyond the wall, and approached
by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, lies another of Amenhotep’s
contributions to the glories of Karnak--the temple of Mut, the
mother-goddess of the Theban Triad, which was excavated in 1895–7 by
two English ladies, Miss Margaret Benson and Miss Janet Gourlay. It is
full of Sekhmet statues, and behind it lies a sacred lake, shaped like
a horse-shoe.
But the following out of the work of Amenhotep has drawn us away from
our main quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. Returning
to the great temple by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, we pass the
girdle-wall by a pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of a
temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had reared in Thebes to his
new deity the Aten. Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a
manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed to promote peace in the state
after the religious troubles of Akhenaten’s times. The square court
behind the pylon has on its east side the ruins of a small temple of
Amenhotep II, and the walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb.
Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous condition, closes the
court on the north side, and passing through it we are faced by one
of the most ancient parts of the whole building, the pylon of Queen
Hatshepsut. The pylon bears witness both to what Professor Breasted
calls “the Feud of the Thutmosids,” and to the religious strifes of
the XVIIIth Dynasty, for Hatshepsut’s name was erased from her reliefs
by Thothmes II, and all allusions to Amen were scrupulously removed by
Akhenaten, and restored by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut’s pylon we pass a
pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and enemy, and traversing a court
whose walls bear inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor of
Ramses II, in which he describes his victories over the Libyans and the
Peoples of the Mediterranean, we find ourselves back at the point from
which our digression started, in the central court behind the great
pylon of Amenhotep III. Here was the western front of the temple in the
days of Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary remaining member
of the quartette of obelisks with which this king and Thothmes III
adorned the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins behind them. The
obelisks of the later king are both gone--the survivor of the pair of
Thothmes I is a fine shaft, 75½ feet high.
Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller one which he erected to
the east, Thothmes reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns
of cedar wood; but his work was not permitted to endure for long.
It was within this hall that the priests of Amen arranged a little
piece of play-acting in which the god Amen declared his preference
for Thothmes III as king, and it was perhaps this unpalatable fact
which determined Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece of
vandalism which was to redound to her own glory. Anyhow, as the time
for the celebration of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect,
Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great shafts of granite for
her jubilee obelisks, and when the tremendous blocks, 97½ feet high,
arrived, she stripped off the roof from part of her father’s hall and
set them up there. Apart from the filial piety of such an act, the
obelisks were things of which she might justly be proud.
With the single exception of the stone, the work of her deadly enemy
Thothmes III, which now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, and
which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft of Hatshepsut, which
still remains erect at Karnak, is the largest obelisk existing, and is
more than 20 feet higher than the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which
represents to Londoners, as its twin does to the folk of New York, the
skill of ancient Egypt.
[Illustration: 15. KARNAK, VIEW FROM THE NORTH, OBELISKS OF HATSHEPSUT,
AND THOTHMES I.]
Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement that she caused the shafts
to be engraved with an inscription in which she swears, “As Ra loves
me, as my father Amen favours me ... as I shall be unto eternity like
an Imperishable, as I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely
these two great obelisks which My Majesty hath wrought with electrum
for my father, Amen, in order that my name may abide in his temple,
enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block of enduring granite,
without seam or joining.” She goes on to say, what is still more
surprising, that the time occupied in the extraction and transportation
of the mighty shafts was seven months!
When Thothmes III came to the throne, he showed his love for his
distinguished relative by casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet
with sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not be read. As rulers,
the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very
front rank; they cannot be said to have shone as exponents of family
affection.
To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I had another court, which
was altered and added to by Thothmes III, who built also a small pylon
in front of his Halls of Records, which come next in the great complex
of building, jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which stand beside
them. In the First Hall of Records stand the two pillars which strike
everyone who sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and examples
of a type not common in Egyptian work. They are of granite, the
southern one carved with the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with
the Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was turned into the chapel
of the temple, in which the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidæus,
at the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that one of the oldest
and one of the newest parts of the building are here united.
In the open space behind the chapel lie the scanty remains of the
earliest Karnak known to us--that of the XIIth Dynasty. A few broken
polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style, for the earliest parts
of the great temple, with the work of the XIth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri;
but it is impossible to say with the least approach to certainty what
the first temple may have looked like. East again of these remnants
comes the last important part of the vast building--the great Festal
Temple of Thothmes III, with its fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and
its eastern sanctuary and complex of store-chambers.
The Festal Hall presents a feature unique in Egyptian Architecture.
Its colonnade consists of thirty-two rectangular piers ranged round
the sides, while down the centre of the hall run two rows of ten round
columns, not spaced with the piers, and of extraordinary shape. Instead
of tapering from the base to the top, their taper runs the opposite
way, and their capitals are inverted, and present the appearance of
a bell standing on its mouth. The downwards tapering column is, of
course, a familiar feature in Minoan architectural practice, and it is
within the bounds of possibility that Thothmes’ columns are an Egyptian
adaptation of a Minoan motive, for, as the tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara
show, Minoan influence was at its height in the middle of the XVIIIth
Dynasty, and intercourse between Crete and Egypt was frequent. Whether
Thothmes owed the idea to some Minoan suggestion or not, it never
established itself in Egypt. In Crete, with its regular use of wooden
pillars resting on stone bases, the downward taper was quite natural;
in Egypt, with a prevalent stone construction, it was an exotic, and
could show no reason for its existence, and it was never repeated.
One cannot say that its disappearance was any great loss to Egyptian
architecture, for the effect of the inversion is singularly clumsy.
We have thus traced the story of Karnak as one traverses the great
temple from front to rear, and the bewildering complexity of the
building is reflected in the variegated fabric of the narrative. To
call Karnak, as is often done, “the typical temple of the Egyptian
Empire,” is to create an entire misapprehension in the mind of anyone
who hears such a phrase used. Karnak is anything but a typical temple;
indeed it is not a temple, but rather an aggregate of many temples,
and above everything else an epitome of Egyptian history for at least
a millennium and a half. One would not even seek it for typical
representatives of Egyptian architecture. Karnak, in this respect,
possesses its beauties--and its monstrosities; but one would look
rather to smaller specimens of the builder’s art for an adequate
representation of Egyptian achievement in this respect.
The great temple claims, and will always claim, our attention and
wonder, by its sheer vastness, to begin with, for undoubtedly vastness
has its own effect, though it is not the highest, in the elements
of architectural impressiveness; then by the extraordinary way in
which it presents a summary in stone of the vicissitudes of Egyptian
history; last, and perhaps least, by the surprising quality, and in
some instances the beauty, of some of its detail. The main element in
its appeal will always be wonder; admiration, and even that qualified
by many reservations, is a bad second to the impression of simple
amazement, that human hands and brains should have ever wrought so vast
a thing.
The preservation of the temple is, and will continue to be, a work
almost as great, and as difficult, as its erection. It lies in the
hands of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a task as unending
as the web of Penelope. Generally speaking, such work is of the kind
which has to be its own reward, for it makes no appeal to the average
visitor, who only sees that his enjoyment of this court or that is
more or less hindered by the progress of work whose one merit is that
it will keep safe for future generations priceless treasures which
otherwise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, however, the work does
bring other prizes in its train.
[Illustration: 16. LUXOR, FORECOURT OF AMENHOTEP III.]
Such was the case when, in November, 1903, M. Legrain, in the course
of his work near the pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned to
the central court after our digression to the south, found what has
since been known as “the Karnak Cachette,” a great pit full of pieces
of sculpture of all types and periods. “For a year and eight months,”
wrote Maspero in February, 1905, “we have been fishing for statues in
the Temple of Karnak.... Seven hundred stone monuments have already
come out of the water, and we are not yet at the end.... Statues whole
and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless bodies, bodiless
heads, vases on which there were only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned,
queens standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals holding
naos, or images of gods, in front of them, crouching, kneeling,
sitting, found in all the attitudes of their profession or rank, in
limestone, in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sandstone, in
green breccia, in schist, in alabaster--indeed, a whole population
returns to the upper air and demands shelter in the galleries of the
Museum.”
The reason for the existence of this extraordinary dump of discarded
sculpture, whose richness Maspero’s vivacious sentences do not in the
least exaggerate, and which gave us, to mention only two examples, the
masterly pink granite head of Senusert III, one of the most brilliant
examples of XIIth Dynasty sculpture, and the schist Thothmes III,
equally one of the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, seems
to have been this. The Ptolemies, the presence of whose coins in the
pit sufficiently dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, and
in the course of their cleaning up of the places where they worked,
they, no doubt, came on an infinity of out-of-date _ex voto_ statues,
some of them broken, some of them whole, but all rather a nuisance and
obstruction, as the persons with whom they were associated had long
since ceased to be of importance. What was to be done with them? They
could not simply be thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedicated
to the god, and were therefore sacred; and they could not be allowed to
stand littering up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily tidying.
Accordingly the great pit was dug within the sacred enclosure, and
Senusert, Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old Egyptian notables
were consigned to its muddy depths, thence to be resurrected, more
than two thousand years later, by their degenerate descendants, who
baled out the water from the pit with old petroleum cans, and hoisted
Pharaoh, High-priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his dark
resting-place with lever and tackle. It has been a fortunate chance
for us, for Egyptian portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on
the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the pit has yielded scores
almost as good.
The work of preserving the building, and putting it in a condition of
safety for the future, has had a curious interest from the fact that
in its progress Karnak has been to some extent rebuilt, and by exactly
the same methods by means of which it was built in the beginning. For
there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk about the wonderful
mechanical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and their possession
of secrets which have been lost to our time, that Karnak, like all
the great Egyptian buildings, was built, not by means of any of these
remarkable secrets which never existed save in the imagination of those
who have talked about them, but by the disciplined and ordered use of
the very simplest means known to man, the inclined plane, the lever,
and any amount of obedient human muscle. These were the mechanical
secrets which M. Legrain found most useful and most economical in
the end of the nineteenth century A.D., as those who had gone before
him had done in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth century
B.C. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa,
Ptolemy, they all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour,
disciplined and guided by a race of builders who for thousands of
years had specialised in the training of men for such tasks, and with
no more marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest of man’s
mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the lever. M. Legrain has repeated
their miracles with the same equipment; and in an age of machinery has
shown that the human machine may still be the most adequate, the most
adaptable, and the most economical.
Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most interesting sites in
Egypt, something of the work which has been going on with the double
object of extending our knowledge of the past and of preserving its
treasures for the future. Realising something of the importance of such
buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their scores of companions
throughout the land, buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt
to us, one can feel that work such as that which has been meagrely
described in these pages, unspectacular though it may be compared with
the work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and enduring importance,
the indispensable fabric on which the glittering embroidery of the
treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere is wrought,
and without whose rich and durable substance to form a background the
golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half its meaning and beauty.