TANIS.
1884.
After a year in England, for the working out and publication of the
survey at the pyramids, described in the last chapter, I undertook to
excavate for the Egypt Exploration Fund. And as great things were then
expected from Tanis, and a special fund of £1000 was in course of being
raised for its clearance, the most desirable course was to ascertain
what prospects really existed there. A preliminary exploring trip was
made to several places in the Delta, in course of which I discovered
Naukratis; and as soon as the marshes had somewhat dried I went in
February to Tanis. It is an out-of-the-way place, inaccessible except by
water during some months, twenty miles from a post or station; on three
sides the marshy plains stretch away to the horizon, only a little
cultivation existing on the south. When I arrived the mounds were almost
impassable for the mud, and continual storms threatened my tent. But
gradually I built a house on the top of the mounds, and from thence
looked down over the work on one side, and over the village on the
other.
Tanis is a great ring of mounds, around the wide plain in which lie the
temple ruins. And the first day I went over it I saw that the temple
site was worked out; the limits of the ruins had been reached, and no
more statues or buildings should be hoped for, by the side of what was
already known. But such were the large expectations about the site, that
I had to prove the case, by a great amount of fruitless trenching in all
directions. The only monuments that we unearthed were far out of the
temple, in a Ptolemaic shrine; this contained a fine stele of Ptolemy II
and Arsinoe, which was entirely gilt when discovered, and two or three
other steles, the recess containing the large stele being flanked by two
sphinxes. The main stele and sphinxes are now in the British Museum.
But though digging was not productive in the temple, yet I found two
important monuments which had been exposed by Mariette’s excavators, and
yet were never noticed by himself, De Rougé, or others who studied the
remains. One was a part of an obelisk of the thirteenth dynasty, with an
inscription of a king’s son, Nehesi, perhaps the son of the king
Nehesi-Ra. The other was the upper part of the well-known stele of
Tirhaka: this I found lying face up; and on searching every block of the
same quality for the remainder of it, I turned up the lower half, which
Mariette had hidden; thus the unknown led me to the known.
[Illustration: 18. STELE OF PTOLEMY II.]
There was, however, plenty of work to do in examining thoroughly, and
planning, all the remains, which--as we have just noticed--were but
scantily attended to before. The fallen blocks of the granite pylon
needed to be turned over, as they were all cut out of older sculptures;
and to do this without tackle, I dug a trench on one side of the heap of
blocks, and then rolled them over one by one into it, so as to turn
them. In this way I examined every block, and discovered the fragments
of the enormous colossus of Ramessu II in red granite, which must have
been about 80 feet high, and have towered far above the temple roofs,
amid the forest of obelisks which adorned the city. The toe alone is as
large as a man’s body. Some large statues were also found by the road
leading up to the temple. And every block of the hundreds which strew
the ground here was examined on all sides, by mining beneath it where
needful; every fragment of inscription was copied; and finally a plan
was made, showing the place of each block, with numbers affixed
referring to the inscriptions. Thus any one can draw their own
conclusions as to the arrangement of the place, and the positions of the
monuments, better in their arm-chair than by wandering over the chaos of
dilapidation in the plain of Zoan.
Finding that no great discoveries could reward me in the temple, I tried
the outskirts of the town, but only found a very late cemetery of no
importance. I tried also sinking pits, in hopes of reaching the early
town of the Ramessides or the Hyksos; but in vain, as the accumulation
of Greek and Roman remains blocked the way, after descending even thirty
feet. Then the houses of the Roman period on the surface were examined.
One yielded a jar in the corner of the cellar, in which the lady had
hidden away a large silver chain, a necklace of fine stones, and a gold
ring.
[Illustration: 19. GOLD RING. 1: 2.]
But the burnt houses were the real prize of the season, as the owners
had fled and left most of their goods; and the reddened patches of earth
attracted us usually to a profitable site. In one house there was a
beautiful marble term, of Italian work; and the fragments of a very
curious zodiac, painted on a sheet of clear glass over a foot square,
each sign or month having an emblematic head to represent it; unhappily,
it was broken in a hundred and fifty pieces, and as I uncovered them it
was cruel to see the gold foil work which was on them peel off on to the
earth, leaving the glass bare in many parts. A yet more heartrending
sight was the pile of papyrus rolls, so rotted that they fell to pieces
with a touch, showing here and there a letter of the finest Greek
writing. The next house, also burnt, was the best of all. Here we found
the limestone statuette of the owner, Bakakhuiu, inscribed in demotic on
the base; a sensible, sturdy-looking, active man, who seems to have been
a lawyer or notary, to judge by his documents. Many household objects of
pottery and stone were found, jars, mortars, &c., and a beautiful
blue-glazed jar, perhaps the largest such known, and quite perfect. The
rich result, however, was in his waste; for in a recess under the cellar
stairs had been five baskets of
[Illustration: 20. BAKAKHUIU.]
old papyri. Though many had utterly perished by being burnt to white
ash, yet one basketful was only carbonized; and tenderly undermining the
precious black mass, I shifted it out and carried it up to my house with
fear and reverent joy. It took ten hours’ work to separate safely all
the documents, twisted, crushed, and squeezed together, and all as
brittle as only burnt papyrus is; a bend, or a jerk, and the piece was
ruined. At last, I had over a hundred and fifty documents separated;
and, each wrapped apart, and put in tin boxes, they travelled safely.
They have now all been opened, and glazed; and two of them already prove
to be of the greatest interest. One is a book of hieroglyphic signs in
columns, followed by their hieratic equivalents, and the school-name by
which they were learned: the greater part of this is preserved, and
shows us, for the first time, the system on which the hieroglyphics
were arranged and taught.
[Illustration: 21. HIEROGLYPHICS, WITH HIERATIC FORM AND EXPLANATION.]
The other is a geographical papyrus, forestalling Brugsch’s great work
on the geography and the nome divisions of Egypt; though defective in
part all through, it is of the greatest value. Most of the other papyri
are in demotic, and still await reading, while some are in Greek. Of
course, being carbonized, the whole mass is black, and it is only by
reflected light that it is possible to read anything; when the
illumination is properly arranged, the duller surface of the ink can be
seen on the brighter face of the papyrus. It is seldom such a treasure
as this basketful of knowledge is so narrowly saved from destruction; a
little more air in the burning, a little less care in the unearthing,
the separation, the packing, or the opening, and these documents would
have disappeared. Of course, under the usual system of leaving Arab
overseers to manage excavations, all such discoveries are utterly
destroyed.
[Illustration: 22. RUINS OF FORT, WITH ARAB CEMETERY.]