OLD THEBES AND THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS
All day long I have been wandering about through the tombs of the kings
who ruled Egypt three or four thousand years ago. I have gone into the
subterranean chambers which the Pharaohs dug out of the solid rocks for
their burial vaults, and I have visited the tombs of kings older than
they. The last resting places of more than fifty of these monarchs of
early Egypt have been discovered, and the work is still going on. Some
of the best work of excavation all along the Nile valley is being done
by Americans. While at Cairo I found the money of Harvard College and
the Boston Museum uncovering the cemeteries of the nabobs and paupers
who were buried at the time of King Cheops under the shadow of the Great
Pyramid of Gizeh. The Egyptian Exploration Fund, which is supported by
Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, has a small army of workmen
operating near Luxor, the University of Pennsylvania has made important
discoveries, and a large part of the uncovering of the valley in which
these royal tombs lie has been done by the Americans.
The Egyptologists of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Lord
Carnarvon of England are responsible for some of the most remarkable
finds of this generation. During my trip of to-day I met a young
archæologist, in charge of the American operations, who showed me
through the tombs of the kings and explained the symbols and pictures on
the walls. I went to that part of the valley where the excavation is now
going on and took pictures of a gang of one hundred and fifty Egyptian
men and boys who are working there.
Let me describe the place that the ancient Egyptian monarchs selected for
their burials, the Valley of the Kings. They wanted to hide their remains
so that posterity could never find them, and to cover them so that future
generations would have no idea that they and their treasures lay beneath.
Our cemeteries are chosen for the beauty of their surroundings. We like
to turn up our toes to the daisies and to have leafy trees whisper a
requiem over our heads. The old Egyptian kings wanted to lie under the
sterile desert waste and chose a region about as far up the Nile valley
as Cleveland is inland from the Atlantic, and fully six miles back from
the fertile strip on which their people lived. I can imagine no place
more dreary. At this point the Nile is walled on the west by limestone
mountains. As far as the moisture reaches, the valley is the greenest
of green, but beyond lies a desert as brown as any part of the Sahara.
There is not a blade of grass, nor a sprig of vegetation of any kind.
There is nothing but sand and arid mountains, the latter almost as ragged
in outline as the wildest parts of the Rockies. Some of their stony
sides are built up in great precipices while in other places there are
fort-like bluffs and similar convulsions of nature.
[Illustration: Rameses II, the greatest egoist of Egyptian history,
covered his dominions with his monuments and inscriptions. Standing
against the colossal leg of this statue is the figure of his sister,
Nefertari, who was also his favourite wife.]
[Illustration: Hatshepsut, the Queen Elizabeth of Egypt, reserved for
herself the best space in the splendid temple-tomb at Deir-el-Bahari,
tucking away in small quarters the bodies of her male relatives. A
brother later retaliated by removing her name from the inscriptions.]
[Illustration: Every great temple in ancient Egypt had its sacred lake,
where the worshippers performed their ablutions and the religious
processions of boats took place. The banks of this lake at Karnak were
originally lined with smooth-cut stone.]
To visit this valley one first comes to Luxor, which is very nearly on
the site of Old Thebes, the capital of Egypt in the days of its most
brilliant past. The ancient city lay on both sides of the Nile, but Luxor
is on the east bank. Crossing the river in a ferry boat, I rode for an
hour or more through the desert before I came into the Valley of the
Kings. My donkey boy was a good one and his donkeys were young. His name
was Joseph, and the brute I bestrode was called “Gingerbread.”
We traversed green fields, winding in and out along the canals, until
we came to the desert and entered a gorge walled with rocks of yellow
limestone and a conglomerate mixture of flint and limestone of curious
formation. The gorge shows evidences of having been cut out by some
mighty stream of the past. There are masses of débris along the sides,
and the way is rough except on the road which has been made by the
explorers.
Looking at the valley from the Nile one would not suppose it to be
anything other than a desert ravine, so I did not at first realize that
it was a cemetery. There are neither gravestones nor monuments, for the
kings obliterated every sign that might indicate their burial places.
They dug out great chambers under the bed of this dried-up river and
built cisterns for their proper drainage, but when they had finished they
did all they could to make the spot look as it was in nature. For this
reason their tombs remained for ages untouched and unknown.
From time to time, however, one or another was discovered. Strabo, the
Greek geographer, who was alive when Christ was born, speaks of forty of
them as being worthy of a visit, and others are mentioned by subsequent
writers. Later they were again lost, and not until in our generation when
some Arabs began to sell curious antiquities was it learned that the
tombs had been rediscovered and were being rifled by these vandals. The
archæologists then went to work on their explorations which resulted in
the opening up of tomb after tomb, until we now have what might almost be
called a subterranean city of the dead in the heart of the desert.
The tombs are nothing like our burial vaults. They are large rooms cut
out of the solid rock, with walls straight and smooth. They are reached
by many steps, going down inclined planes until they bring one far below
the surface of the valley and deep under the mountains. Each king had his
own tomb, which he decorated with sketches and paintings representing
the life of his time and the achievements of his reign. The ceilings
are beautiful. From some of them the figures of gods and goddesses look
down upon us. Others are decorated with geometric designs in beautiful
colours. In some, men and women are carved in bas-relief out of the
solid rock and then coloured. Many of the scenes are religious, so that
from them the Egyptologist is able to learn what the people of that
day believed. The carvings show, too, how they lived when our remotest
ancestors were savages in the wilds of Europe and Asia.
The Americans have had remarkably good luck in their finds. One of them
was the tomb of the parents of Queen Tiy in which all the objects were
in as good condition as if they had been in a house just closed for
the summer. There were armchairs beautifully carved and decorated with
gold. The cushion on one of them was stuffed with down and covered with
linen perfectly preserved. In another part of the chamber were two beds
decorated with gold, while a light chariot stood in a corner. But most
wonderful of all was the discovery in this tomb of a jar of honey, still
liquid and still fragrant after thirty-three hundred years.
In some of the tombs I saw the massive stone boxes in which lay the
mummies of the dead kings. I measured one ten feet long, six feet wide,
and eight feet high. It was hollowed out of a block of granite, and would
weigh many tons. That mighty burial casket was cut out of the quarries of
Aswan far above here, on the banks of the Nile. It must have been brought
down the river on a barge and carried to this place. When it was finally
on the ground it had to be lowered into the vault. All these feats were
done without modern machinery. As I went through the tombs I saw several
such caskets, and the archæologist who guided me showed me the holes in
the stone walls of the entrance ways where beams had been put across in
order that ropes might be used to prevent these stone masses from sliding
too far when let down. It is a difficult job for us to handle safes. One
of these stone boxes would weigh as much as several safes, yet the old
Egyptians moved them about as they pleased.
Indeed, I venture to say that the civil engineers of the Pharaohs could
teach us much. All through this region there are enormous monuments which
it would puzzle the engineers of to-day to handle. For instance, there
are the Colossi of Memnon, the two mammoth stone statues that sit upon
pedestals in the Nile valley within a few miles of where I am writing.
Each is as high as a six-story building, and the stone pedestals rise
thirteen feet above the ground. As I rode by them on my way home from the
Valley of the Kings I climbed up and ran a tape measure over their legs.
Each leg is nineteen feet from sole to knee. The feet are each over three
yards in length, so long that one would fill the box of a farm wagon from
end to end, and so wide that it could hardly be fitted within it. Each
arm from finger tips to elbow measures five yards, and the middle finger
of each hand is a yard and a half long. As I stood beside the pedestal,
with my feet on Gingerbread’s saddle, I could not reach the top.
These two colossal figures sit side by side on the edge of the Nile
valley with the desert mountains at their backs. They were set up in
honour of an Egyptian king who lived more than thirty-five centuries
ago. The temple he constructed behind them has now entirely disappeared.
The statues overlook green fields, and as I gazed at the giant shapes I
thought how they had watched the people sowing and reaping through all
these centuries.
Not far from these monuments are the ruins of the temple of Rameses II,
according to some authorities the Pharaoh who “would not let the people
go.” Among them I saw the remains of a statue of that old king, once part
of a structure at least sixty feet high. There is no granite nearer here
than in the quarries of Aswan, so this mighty monument must have been cut
there and brought down the Nile to Thebes, a distance of one hundred and
thirty-five miles.
Consider the obelisks which the Egyptians made at those quarries and
carried down the Nile to Thebes, to Cairo, and to Alexandria. There are
two of them still at this place. You may see them in the great Temple
of Karnak, which is not more than a twenty-minute walk from Luxor. They
weigh something like four hundred tons each, and if they were broken up
and loaded upon wagons it would take one thousand six hundred horses to
haul them. Each is a single block of granite, and each was carried in
that shape to this place. There are inscriptions on the Deir-el-Bahari
Temple here which show that these two shafts were dug out of the
quarries, covered with hieroglyphic carvings, brought here, and put up
all in the space of seven months. I doubt whether our engineers could do
such a job as quickly or as well.
We thought it a wonderful work to bring the Alexandria obelisk from Egypt
to New York in the hold of a steamer. To load it a hole had to be cut
in the bow of the vessel and the pillar dragged through. The Egyptian
obelisk at Paris was carried across the Mediterranean on a barge, while
that which now stands in London was taken there in an iron watertight
cylinder which was shipped to Alexandria in pieces and built around the
column as it lay upon the shore. When the great stone was thoroughly
encased, the whole was rolled into the sea and thus towed to London.
After the huge monoliths were landed, the modern engineers had great
trouble to get them where they wanted them. The New York obelisk was
rolled along upon iron balls running in iron grooves laid down for the
purpose, while that of London was hauled over greased ways to the place
where it now stands on the banks of the Thames.
The oldest temple of Egypt by five hundred years was unearthed here by
the agents of the Egyptian Exploration Fund. This lies near the famous
temple of Deir-el-Bahari, and in a valley which is a branch of that of
the tombs of the kings. When I visited it to-day the excavators were
at work, and the men in charge told me they had great hopes of making
valuable discoveries. It was with the American representative of the
Exploration Fund, that I went over the temple. I met him at the little
one-story house which forms the laboratory and home of the foreign
explorers, and had a chat with the other members as to the progress of
the work. A number of specialists from Canada, England, and the United
States, supported by the fund, are superintending the Egyptians, who do
the hard labour. They have quite an army of men at work and have been
successful. Of what they find one half goes to the museum at Cairo and
the rest to the countries which subscribe to the fund in proportion to
the amount of their subscriptions. The chief money from America has come
from Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, so that our share of
what is now being unearthed will go to the museums of those cities.
More famous than this ancient temple itself is its shrine of the cow
goddess, Hathor, from which the noted statue was excavated by the
Egyptian Exploration Fund and taken to Cairo. I saw the place whence
it came and talked to the men who dug it out of the earth. The statue,
which is life-sized, is a perfect likeness of a beautiful cow carved
out of stone. It is reddish-brown in colour, with spots shaped like a
four-leaved clover. Traces still remain of the gold that once covered the
head, neck, and horns. The head is crowned with lotus flowers and lotus
stalks hang down each side the neck almost to the ground. Beneath the
head stands the dead king whom Hathor protects, while the living king,
whom she nourishes, kneels beneath her form. That image was probably
worshipped at the time the Israelites were working in the valley of the
Nile, and it may have been after one like her that they modelled their
calf of gold.
Near the site of this oldest temple are the ruins of the great temple
of Hatshepsut, the Queen Elizabeth of Egypt, who ruled fifteen hundred
years before Christ was born. Her epitaph says that “Egypt was made to
labour with bowed head for her.” The temple is really a tomb-chapel in
memory of the royalties buried there—her father, her two brothers, and
herself. Hatshepsut took most of the space, however, and put the bodies
of her male relatives into as small quarters as she could. She called her
temple “most splendid of all” and covered its walls with engravings and
paintings showing her principal acts. Hers is a long record of kingly
deeds. She discarded the dress of a woman, wore the crown, attached an
artificial beard to her chin, and let it be known that she liked to be
addressed as _His_ Majesty by her courtiers and subjects. The New Woman
is apparently as old as civilization itself!
It was the work of Americans, again, that unearthed here the tomb of
the first great pacifist, Pharaoh Akhnaton, who reigned from 1375 to
1358 B.C. When he came to the throne Egypt, in the height of her power,
was mistress of the chief parts of the civilized world. But the country
was then ridden by the priesthood of Amon with its hosts of gods and
its degraded worship. According to the inscriptions which have been
deciphered young Akhnaton defied the priests of Amon and declared his
belief in one God, a “tender and merciful Father and Mother of all that
He had made,” the “Lord of Love,” the “Comforter of them that weep.” It
is thought that he was the Pharaoh in Egypt when the Children of Israel
came into the land and that the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm in our Bible
was written by him. He did not believe that warfare or military conquests
were consistent with his creed and when revolts broke out in his Syrian
provinces he refused to fight, though his soldiers tried desperately hard
to hold the different people of his empire faithful to their king.
Breaking entirely with the priests, Akhnaton left Thebes and set up
his capital at Aton, one hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo on the
eastern bank of the Nile. He died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving
only daughters to succeed him. They reëstablished the court at Thebes,
the city of Aton was abandoned, and its temples and palaces were left to
crumble and decay.
I had thought of the Pharaoh who forced the Israelites to make bricks
without straw as living at Memphis, near where Cairo now stands. The
truth is, he had a great city there, but his capital and favourite home
was at Thebes, over four hundred and fifty miles farther up the Nile
valley. Thebes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity. It covered
almost as much ground as Paris does now and is said to have had more than
a million people. The metropolis had walls so thick that chariots drawn
by half-a-dozen horses abreast could easily pass as they galloped along
them. It had one hundred gates, and temples and residences which were
the wonder of the world. Some of the houses were five stories high, the
skyscrapers of those days. The riches of Thebes were increased by the
successful wars which the kings waged with other nations. The monarchs
of that day had mighty armies of infantry and cavalry. Some of the kings
had twenty thousand war chariots, and ancient writers say that there were
scattered along the Nile from here to Memphis one hundred stone stables,
each large enough to accommodate two hundred horses.
[Illustration: Avenues of sphinxes guarded the approach to the ancient
Egyptian temple. Between the paws of each of the ram-headed sphinxes at
the great temple at Karnak, Rameses II placed a statue of one of his
predecessors.]
[Illustration: The Aswan Dam is a huge granite barrier a mile and a
quarter long which now controls the waters of the Nile after centuries of
alternate flood and drought, saves Egypt from famine, and adds millions
of acres to her irrigable lands.]
It brings one close to the days of the Scriptures when he can put his
hand on the very same things that were touched by old Pharaoh; and can
visit the temples in which he worshipped, or sit on the monuments erected
in his honour, and look at the tomb in which his royal bones were laid
away. One feels closer still when he can look at the royal mummy itself
and actually see the hardhearted old heathen almost as he was when alive,
as I did at the museum the other day.
This Pharaoh, Rameses II, was one of the greatest kings of ancient Egypt.
His temples are scattered throughout the Nile valley and his statues
are the largest ever discovered. One was found in the Nile delta which
measures forty-two feet in height, and there are others sixty-six feet
high at Abu Simbel in Nubia, about as far up the Nile as Chicago is
distant from the mouth of the Hudson. They are seated on thrones and are
hewn from the solid rocks. These figures stand in front of the temple,
also cut out of rock. This building is said to have been erected by him
in honour of his favourite wife, Nefertari, and there are statues of his
children about it. These show that he was very much of a family man, for
inscriptions on the various monuments mention one hundred and sixty-two
of his children by name.