Thebes at its zenith was one of the glories of the old world, with
some of the most marvellous temples ever imagined by the mind of
man or executed by human hand. The ancient capital of Egypt was
unequalled in magnificence. King after king increased the wonders
of the temple of Ammon; their sculptors carved great sphinxes out
of stone, which were set up in an avenue over a mile long. Building
after building was added to the original one. Mighty gateways,
or pylons, 142 feet high, were built, and from these projected
flagstaffs on which gaily coloured banners fluttered in the breeze.
The great hall of Ammon was composed of pillars 78 feet high and 33
feet round, all carved and painted in vivid colours. Lesser halls and
temples were added, and here, amid a blaze of colour and sunshine,
the festivals were held, the high priests performed their sacred
rites, the Pharaoh drove up in his gorgeous chariots with the harness
of his horses ablaze with gold, while his subjects shielded their
faces from the monarch who shared the glory of Ammon. At intervals
the high priests brought out the sacred boat of the god, raised it
aloft on their shoulders, and carried it around the temple, while
the populace stood silent with awe. For a brief instant the curtains
were drawn aside, and the god was disclosed to the multitude before
returning to the silence and sanctity of the temple, from which the
common people were rigidly excluded.
About the king gathered all the wit and wisdom of the Egyptian
empire. Magnificent banquets were held, at which were served to the
guests fine dishes of venison, roast ducks and other fowl, and fish.
Wine flowed, maidens danced. There was talk and laughter and love.
To-day Thebes has vanished. The one-time capital of Egypt is a desert
ruin. Near by are the villages of Karnak and Luxor, with a few
natives living in their humble dwellings, and just a big hotel for
the use of travellers, who come here to gaze on the ruins of the past.
It is strange that thousands of years ago, when these islands
were inhabited by a few savages who painted their bodies, threw a
skin about them for warmth, and lived in the rudest of huts for
shelter, far away to the south on the Nile a mighty civilization was
flourishing, that would compare very favourably with the civilization
of to-day.
[Illustration: A PARTLY-HEWN OBELISK STILL ATTACHED TO THE ROCK IN
ONE OF THE ANCIENT QUARRIES]
While the barbarians of Britain were building their rude huts, the
Egyptians were carving colossal pillars for the Hall of the
Temple of Ammon, pillars over 30 feet round, and painting them with
colours which are still fresh after all this lapse of time. Even then
they had been building with brick for thousands of years. The tomb
paintings show the brickmakers puddling the alluvial soil with their
feet, shaping the mud into bricks, and baking them hard in the fierce
heat of the sun. Moreover these bricks endured for centuries, and
still endure; whereas many of the red bricks made in England thirty
or forty years ago are perishing fast.
Speculation is still going on as to how the Egyptians used to handle
the enormous stones found in the ruins, and how they managed to place
in position monuments like Cleopatra’s Needle. There is mention of
certain engines having been used to lift the stones of the Pyramids,
but what these engines were, nobody to-day can say with certainty.
Cleopatra’s Needle was roughly shaped on three sides in the
quarry, before it was detached from the mother rock. The methods
of detaching a monument from the rock show that the Egyptians were
quite conversant with natural laws, that they possessed the ability
to harness these laws in order to save human labour. How many modern
craftsmen would succeed in separating one of these huge stones from
the mountain-side, by using such simple things as a drill, some
wooden pegs, and water? With these crude implements the task would be
looked upon nowadays as impossible. Yet from obelisks still attached
to the rock, it is obvious that such primitive appliances were
sufficient to enable the Egyptians to perform their ancient miracles.
On the exact line where they desired to sever the stone, they cut a
deep groove, and at frequent intervals along this groove they drilled
holes, into which they hammered wooden pegs very tightly, until the
tops were a little below the surface of the stone. Then water was
poured on the pegs, and as it soaked into the wood they swelled,
until the expansion of them all together was so irresistible that the
rock was split along the groove.
Many huge pillars and statues were also sculptured in the living rock
before being detached, for areas of rock have been found all marked
off in squares with figures drawn on them ready to be carved by the
sculptor. Like the stones of the Pyramids, many of these figures
and monoliths were transported on sleds, others were dragged over
rollers. It was a common practice to send thousands of men to some
distant place, to cut out a giant block of stone, and bring it back
for the use of the king. Ancient drawings showing gigantic statues
being dragged along on sledges by armies of slaves, reveal to us how
the transport was effected.
But there was the difficulty of erecting an obelisk when it had
reached the spot for which it was intended. A weight of 186 tons,
like that of Cleopatra’s Needle, is a tremendous problem to handle,
yet the Egyptian engineers accomplished it successfully. Such a
weight was actually small compared with some of the weights they
tackled, for they moved and erected single stones weighing twice and
thrice as much, that is weights up to nearly 600 tons.
If our engineers to-day were given the same problem, they would
still have to puzzle over it, in spite of the giant cranes that
could be brought to the spot to help them. The mammoth lifting
machines designed by modern engineers were unknown in the days of the
Pharaohs, yet the ancients were able to do work without them which we
would find it rather difficult to do with them.
Ever so many theories have been propounded as to how they set up
these huge blocks of stone. One suggestion is that the stones were
dragged to the site and their bases placed in position; then in some
way, perhaps by the use of giant beams over which the ropes attached
to the top ends of the stones were passed, they were pulled upright,
a little at a time. As they were hauled up, blocks of stone may have
been slipped under them to carry the weight.
Other theories abound, but the likeliest theory of all is that
the Egyptians built a big sloping embankment like that used in the
construction of the Pyramids. Up this the obelisk was hauled, base
first, until it reached the very top, and projected on to a bed of
sand. Labourers shovelled the sand away from under the obelisk, just
as ants dig the earth from beneath a mouse they want to bury, and as
the sand was removed, so the base of the obelisk sank down, until it
gradually tilted upright exactly in the position designed for it.
No simpler, or more brilliant, way could be found of solving this
difficult problem.
One of the monoliths erected by Queen Hatshepsut, at Karnak, is 109
feet high, and she records that at her bidding this mighty stone,
weighing hundreds of tons, was hewn out of the quarry, the sides were
properly shaped, and the stone conveyed to the site, all within seven
months. The Queen gave her orders, and the people obeyed.
Such methods, if they were followed to-day, would be so expensive as
to be prohibitive. In those days there were no unions, and no union
rates of wages. The overseer of the works could have all the labour
he needed. If he could not manage with a thousand labourers, then
he could have ten thousand. The king was the lord and master of his
people, as well as of his slaves. The overseer had only to say that
he wanted more men, and the king would give orders for the men to be
procured. If they did not come willingly, they would be seized and
pressed into the service of the king. So long as they were doing the
king’s work they would be fed, but wages in the present sense were
unknown.
[Illustration: THE BEAUTIFUL TEMPLE KNOWN AS PHARAOH’S BED, CRADLED
IN THE WATERS OF THE NILE, WHICH HAVE COVERED THE ISLAND OF PHILÆ AND
PARTLY SUBMERGED THE NOBLE RUINS SINCE THE BUILDING OF THE ASSOUAN
DAM]
Those noble ruins on the island of Philæ higher up the Nile above
Assouan may no more be seen in all their glory. They have been
sacrificed to the Nile god and to modern necessities. Realizing that
the building of the great dam at Assouan would raise the level of the
river and submerge the island, the builders went to enormous trouble
to underpin the ruins and make them secure against the flood. This
work was carried out with great difficulty, and in a masterly manner.
The completion of the Assouan dam saw the waters of the Nile slowly
creep over the ruined temples, and there may now be seen peeping
above the surface of the water the tops of a few columns which, owing
to their peculiar resemblance to a fourpost bed, are generally known
as Pharaoh’s Bed.
A wonderful work in a land of wonders is the barrage of Assouan,
but the benefits that would accrue to the land by holding up and
deflecting the waters of the Nile were not unrealized by the
ancients. Thousands of years ago the problems of controlling the Nile
were studied as carefully as they have been studied in our own time.
One Pharaoh, known as Amenhotep III, ordered his engineers to work
out a scheme for controlling the inundation. He desired to store up
some of the Nile water when there was an excess, and draw on these
surplus supplies when the river was low.
The work he undertook was in its way as wonderful as that at Assouan,
but when we consider that it was started nearly four thousand years
ago it appears even more marvellous. Labourers swarmed over the land,
cutting channels in the rock, and driving canals connected with the
great expanse of water near Fayoum known as Lake Moeris, a natural
reservoir which served to store the water just as the barrage at
Assouan stores the water to-day. The Pharaoh had the foresight to
tap this huge supply of water to irrigate the surrounding country,
and the land, no longer at the mercy of the Nile floods, prospered
accordingly.
Amenhotep, like all the other Pharaohs, was anxious to protect his
treasure from thieves, and he commanded his cleverest architects to
design a palace in which people who went inside without permission
might wander for ever without finding their way out again. The whole
of the interior of the palace was composed of small rooms, in number
three thousand, leading by narrow passages one into the other. The
way in and out was a strict secret, and those who broke in might
wander round and in and out of the chambers until they died of
starvation. This palace was the famous Labyrinth, a maze in stone to
defeat thieves and robbers. No trace of it now remains.
The kings of Egypt and the chief men were obsessed with the idea that
their tombs would be plundered, and that the robbers would deprive
their doubles of all chance of future life. It must be admitted that
they had good cause for their obsession. They knew that the same
subjects who had buried previous kings and lamented their deaths, had
seized the first opportunity of rifling the tombs of their treasures,
and the Pharaohs were well aware that their own subjects would not be
above doing the same thing.
To rifle a tomb was one of the greatest crimes that could be
committed, but the thieves were quite prepared to sacrifice their
chances in the next life for the prospect of gaining something in
this.
The tombs indicate that for thousands of years a continual battle
of wits was being fought between the kings, who wished to preserve
their tombs from desecration, and the thieves who wished to plunder
them. The kings built temples for themselves, and had a strong burial
chamber placed at one end. The thieves broke in easily and abstracted
the treasure. Then the kings made secret burial chambers in their
temples for the safeguarding of their mummies, but the thieves
located them, and robbed them just the same.
At last a queen hit on the idea of building a fine temple for herself
at Thebes, with a special sanctuary for her mummy. But not for a
moment did she intend her mummy to rest within the shade of the
temple. She sent her priests and tried servants into the desolate
valley, to seek a secret hiding-place for her mummy high up in the
cliff. They cut a chamber in the rock, and made the tomb in that
valley known to-day as the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.
Other kings came to the valley. They erected temples, and their
engineers cut into the heart of the mountains, to make chambers in
which to hide their bodies. They built up the places as strongly as
they could. They devised obstructions to stop any one from entering.
They hid the entrances to the tombs so carefully, that it was
impossible to tell whether the places had ever been disturbed.
All their labour, all their secrecy, was in vain. Not a single tomb
in all Egypt has yet been found intact. Every tomb discovered has
been rifled of its treasure. Even the tomb of Tutankhamen is no
exception. The actual holes which the robbers made to enter the tomb
were discovered, and, judging by the wealth of the furniture and
other things remaining, the haul of gold and silver must have been
enormous.
The high priests, horrified at the desecration of the tombs, feared
so much for the royal mummies in their charge, that they went out
stealthily into the deserted hills and sought a secret hiding-place.
Then they brought many royal mummies to it, one by one, probably
under cover of darkness, and hid them away from thievish eyes and
hands.
For centuries, for thousands of years, the robbers were defeated;
the ancient kings and queens of Egypt slept on undisturbed in their
secret sepulchre. Yet in the end the tomb robbers triumphed. Somehow,
sometime, they managed to find the tomb. They did not blazon their
discovery to the world. The booty was too rich for that, so they
began systematically robbing the tomb and disposing of the relics to
travellers who passed that way.
The ultimate discovery of the tomb by Sir Gaston Maspero is one of
the greatest romances of Egyptology. One day in 1881, a visitor
showed Maspero some wonderfully illuminated pages of a royal ritual.
Maspero, gazing on them in amazement, inquired whence they came, and
learned that they had been bought at Thebes.
Instantly all Maspero’s suspicions crystallized into action. He
had long suspected that the Arabs had found a royal tomb, and here
was definite evidence. Without delay he journeyed to Thebes, and
discussed the matter with the authorities. Secret inquiries pointed
to four brothers, who lived in some deserted tombs, as having
knowledge of the find. A decision to arrest one of them, in the hopes
that he would speak, was at once carried into effect. The Arab was
thrown into prison, but he said nothing, denied all knowledge of the
matter for seven or eight weeks. Maspero could not wait. Offering a
big reward for information of the discovery, he returned down the
Nile, and ultimately his reward tempted one of the brothers to come
forward and agree to lead the authorities to the tomb.
Maspero, back in Cairo, sent an Egyptologist with an assistant
hot-foot to Thebes. A rendezvous was fixed at Deir-el-Bahari. Picking
their way over the rocks, the Arabs led the two strangers along the
foot of the escarpment which frowned bare and sinister above their
heads. In a short while they came to a boulder which had fallen from
the cliffs above. Screened in the most remarkable manner by this
mighty rock, the entrance had escaped human eyes for three thousand
years. Arabs and strangers lit their candles, a rope was uncoiled and
shaken down the black shaft, and one after another they slid down 40
feet to the bottom.
The strangers groped their way along a tunnel, following the
flickering candles just ahead, stooping to escape the rocky ceiling,
at times almost having to go down on their hands and knees. They
turned a corner, still groping and climbing along the rocky passage,
down a flight of rock-cut stairs, deeper and deeper into the recesses
of the mountain, kicking against bits of mummy cases, fragments of
bandages. On they went, their excitement rising with every step.
At last they came to a chamber in the rock. It was like an Aladdin’s
cave. Mummy cases were everywhere, standing up against the wall,
lying down and piled on top of each other. Great piles of boxes,
alabaster vases, statuettes—it was incredible, absolutely amazing.
Without giving the newcomers time to take in the wonderful sight, the
Arabs led the way through this chamber down and down through another
passage. After traversing 60 yards they came to a chamber that was
even more amazing, more wonderful than the last. The strangers
could hardly believe their eyes. All around the burial chamber were
royal mummies, the glitter of gold and colour showing up under the
flickering candles. The cases were exquisitely carved and decorated,
so well preserved that it was as though they were made but yesterday.
So intensely excited was the Egyptologist, that it required an effort
of will to make him realize this was not a dream, but reality, that
he was the first white man in the history of the world to gaze on
such a glorious sight; to see the ancient kings and queens as they
had slumbered through the centuries.
He looked around him, examined the royal names and titles. Here were
Seti I, Thothmes II, Thothmes III, Rameses II. Wherever he looked
the mummy of a king or queen greeted his astonished gaze. He was
literally astounded, hardly able to take it all in. The magnitude of
the find overwhelmed him. He counted the mummies one by one—eleven
kings, nine queens, a prince and a princess! It was unbelievable.
In a little while, when the first excitement had passed away, he
became the man of action once more. Realizing to the full that only
the promptest measures could save the tomb from being looted, he
quickly collected three hundred Arabs, and he and his assistant began
to remove the treasures. They never halted, never rested, labouring
on all through that day and the next without a moment’s sleep,
removing the kings and queens from their resting-place, sewing them
up in sailcloth, and getting them into the open. In forty-eight hours
they cleared the tomb of everything it contained, and in another
three days they had conveyed the mummies over the plain of Thebes to
the Nile.
The natives were ugly, threatening, angry that their kings should
be disturbed—still more angry that there was no chance for them to
plunder the tomb any more. Not for a moment dared the Egyptologist
and his assistant leave their precious charge, not until the steamer
arrived that was to take the royal mummies down to Cairo.
The news of the discovery spread like wildfire through the villages,
and as the steamer passed slowly down the Nile, the Egyptian women
hailed the passing with the death wail, running along the banks,
tearing their hair and uttering their awful cries. Men wailed and
fired their guns. It was one of the most remarkable sights ever
witnessed, the natives of our own time mourning the Pharaohs who
reigned thousands of years ago.
It was the triumph of a man whose whole life was wrapped up in the
past life of Egypt, whose own life was as romantic as that of any man
who was destined to throw a little light upon the dead civilizations
of the Pharaohs. Maspero was but a boy of fourteen when he was
attracted by some of the ancient picture-writing of the Egyptians.
The queer little figures exercised a strange spell over him. He was
quite fascinated by them, so much so, that he made up his boyish mind
to learn to read them.
Probably hundreds of thousands of boys have seen pictures of the
hieroglyphics and thought them very funny, but who has heard of
another boy who was so anxious to read them that he studied them
at any and every opportunity, as Gaston Maspero did? He who seeks
knowledge will always find some way of acquiring it. Gaston Maspero
studied the picture-writing to such good purpose that he learned
to read it quite easily and translate it with considerable skill.
He used to read the pictures to his school friends, and they were
considerably impressed by this ability.
One night in 1867, some of Maspero’s fellow-students were having
dinner with their tutor, and Mariette, the famous Egyptologist,
was present. Naturally the talk turned on Egypt, and the students
tried to impress Mariette by mentioning that Maspero could read
hieroglyphics, and that he had taught himself.
Mariette was amused at the idea. “Ask him to read this for me,” he
said, and gave them an inscription he had just discovered and which
had not been translated.
Maspero’s companions took the inscription, and Maspero sat down and
translated it. When Mariette received the translation he was far
more amazed at finding this young man of twenty-one in Paris who
could read hieroglyphics, than he would have been at finding some new
temple on the Nile. It seemed to him simply incredible, so he gave
Maspero something else to translate—lines that were all mutilated and
from which a great deal was missing.
Maspero sat down to the problem, and after a few days managed to
translate the fragments and supply the missing parts. Then Mariette
realized that he had indeed found a born Egyptologist, and it is not
surprising that the boy who was so interested that he taught himself
to read the picture-writing should succeed Mariette in Egypt.
Who knows what Mariette thought when the translations of Maspero
were brought to him? Perhaps his mind flashed back over the years to
the rather unhappy time when he, a lad of eighteen, was professor
of French at a school in Stratford-on-Avon, to the days when his
talent for drawing was confined to designing ribbons for a Coventry
manufacturer. Maybe he remembered how happily he returned to France
to take his degree at Douai, those articles he wrote to add to his
income, the cousin who had been dealing with Champollion’s material,
and whose death brought all the material of that great man under
Mariette’s own fingers.
From that period dates Mariette’s own romantic career. He was under
thirty when he went to Egypt in search of manuscripts, and found
instead the ruins of the Serapeum at Memphis. His diggers fought the
desert, and rescued the Sphinx from the grasping sands, tore the
drift of centuries from the ruins of the temples of Edfu, uncovered
the glories of Karnak. The years brought more discoveries, his work
was acclaimed, honours were heaped upon him. The call of Egypt to
Mariette was irresistible, as it had been to Champollion, as it was
to Maspero. Fate linked these three Frenchmen together to add to our
knowledge of the past. They loved France, but the deserts and the
debris of Egypt became part of their lives.
Often they went in the burning sun to the Valley of the Tombs of
the Kings—one of the most desolate places on earth. Not a tree to
be seen, not a flower, not even a blade of grass. Vegetation cannot
live there. It is a veritable valley of the dead, an inferno of
desolation. Birds avoid it, animals shun it, only the bats haunt the
tombs. There at the base of the hills is the wonderful temple of
Queen Hatshepsut, with its rows of pillars standing like sentinels
before the blackness which is beyond. Years ago no trace of it could
be seen, but a man with a spade came along and found it, and after
prodigious labours it was dug out of the overlying rubble and rock in
which it was buried.
Everywhere is the eternal rubble and sand. Huge piles of debris mark
the sites where the diggers have been working; broken steps leading
downwards into the mountains indicate where tombs have been found.
Rain hardly ever falls there.... If you sat and waited for a shower
of rain, you would have to wait on an average for five years! Perhaps
twenty times in a century the clouds break over the Valley of the
Tombs of the Kings, but the ground is so parched and rocky that a
deluge is almost swallowed up as it falls. In an hour the valley is
again as dry as a bone.
[Illustration: THE WONDERFUL TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATSHEPSUT AT THE BASE
OF THE CLIFFS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS. THE TINY
FIGURE OF A MAN, NO BIGGER THAN A PIN-HEAD, ON THE CENTRAL ROAD,
SERVES TO INDICATE THE SIZE OF THE TEMPLE]
The valley leads nowhere, except into the desert. There was nothing
to call the natives in that direction. It was like a lonely valley in
another world, and this loneliness no doubt was one of the factors
which decided the Pharaohs to seek their last resting-places here.
Another factor was that the limestone of the hills was an excellent
stone in which to cut the chambers which were to be the eternal homes
of the kings.
All their thought, all their secrecy to keep their tombs inviolate,
was in vain. The most trusted men were chosen to carve out these
underground chambers, but where many men are engaged on a secret
mission, the secret is bound to leak out.
Some of the workers may have told their wives, who in turn may have
dropped a remark in all innocence which led the robbers to the exact
spot. The workers themselves, despite the faith of their masters,
were not always to be trusted, and there is little doubt that some of
them led the thieves to the tombs and told them exactly where and how
to break in, that in some cases the very men who had built the tombs
came back afterwards by night and plundered them.
It may easily have been the builders who robbed the tomb of
Tutankhamen, for Mr. Carter discovered that the thieves entered
within a few years of the King’s burial, and that the tomb was then
resealed by the keepers of the royal burial-places.