YOU need not fear that you are to have inflicted upon you a description
of Thebes, its ruins of temples, its statues, obelisks, pylons,
tombs, holes in the ground, mummy-pits and mounds, with an attempt to
reconstruct the fabric of its ancient splendor, and present you, gratis,
the city as it was thirty-five hundred years ago, when Egypt was at the
pinnacle of her glory, the feet of her kings were on the necks of
every nation, and this, her capital, gorged with the spoils of near and
distant maraudings, the spectator of triumph succeeding triumph,
the depot of all that was precious in the ancient world, at once a
treasure-house and a granary, ruled by an aristocracy of cruel and
ostentatious soldiers and crafty and tyrannical priests, inhabited
by abject Egyptians and hordes of captive slaves—was abandoned to a
sensuous luxury rivaling that of Rome in her days of greatest wealth and
least virtue in man or woman.
I should like to do it, but you would go to sleep before you were half
through it, and forget to thank the cause of your comfortable repose. We
can see, however, in a moment, the unique situation of the famous town.
We shall have to give up, at the outset, the notion of Homer's
“hundred-gated Thebes.” It is one of his generosities of speech. There
never were any walls about Thebes, and it never needed any; if it had
any gates they must have been purely ornamental structures; and perhaps
the pylons of the many temples were called gates. If Homer had been
more careful in the use of his epithets he would have saved us a deal of
trouble.
Nature prepared a place here for a vast city. The valley of the Nile,
narrow above and below, suddenly spreads out into a great circular
plain, the Arabian and Libyan ranges of mountains falling back to make
room for it. In the circle of these mountains, which are bare masses of
limestone, but graceful and bold in outline, lies the plain, with some
undulation of surface, but no hills: the rim of the setting is grey,
pink, purple, according to the position of the sun; the enclosure is
green as the emerald. The Nile cuts this plain into two unequal parts.
The east side is the broader, and the hills around it are neither so
near the stream nor so high as the Libyan range.
When the Nile first burst into this plain it seems to have been
undecided what course to take through it. I think it has been undecided
ever since, and has wandered about, shifting from bluff to bluff, in
the long ages. Where it enters, its natural course would be under the
eastern hills, and there, it seems to me, it once ran. Now, however, it
sweeps to the westward, leaving the larger portion of the plain on the
right bank.
The situation is this: on the east side of the river are the temple of
Luxor on a slight elevation and the modern village built in and around
it; a mile and a half below and further from the river, are the vast
ruins of Karnak; two or three miles north-east of Karnak are some
isolated columns and remains of temples. On the west side of the river
is the great necropolis. The crumbling Libyan hills are pierced with
tombs. The desert near them is nothing but a cemetery. In this desert
are the ruins of the great temples, Medeenet Hâboo, Dayr el Bahree, the
Memnonium (or Rameseum, built by Rameses IL, who succeeded in affixing
his name to as many things in Egypt as Michael Angelo did in Italy),
the temple of Koorneh, and several smaller ones. Advanced out upon the
cultivated plain a mile or so from the Memnonium, stand the two Colossi.
Over beyond the first range of Libyan hills, or precipices, are the
Tombs of the Kings, in a wild gorge, approached from the north by a
winding sort of canon, a defile so hot and savage that a mummy passing
through it couldn't have had much doubt of the place he was going to.
The ancient city of Thebes spread from its cemetery under and in the
Libyan hills, over the plain beyond Ivarnak. Did the Nile divide that
city? Or did the Nile run under the eastern bluff and leave the plain
and city one?
It is one of the most delightful questions in the world, for no one
knows anything about it, nor ever can know. Why, then, discuss it? Is it
not as important as most of the questions we discuss? What, then, would
become of learning and scholarship, if we couldn't dispute about the
site of Troy, and if we all agreed that the temple of Pandora Regina was
dedicated to Neptune and not to Jupiter? I am for united Thebes.
Let the objector consider. Let him stand upon one of the terraces of
Dayr el Bahree, and casting his eye over the plain and the Nile in a
straight line to Ivarnak, notice the conformity of directions of the
lines of both temples, and that their avenues of sphinxes produced would
have met; and let him say whether he does not think they did meet.
Let the objector remember that the Colossi, which now stand in an
alluvial soil that buries their bases over seven feet and is annually
inundated, were originally on the hard sand of the desert; and that all
the arable land of the west side has been made within a period easily
reckoned; that every year adds to it the soil washed from the eastern
bank.
Farther, let him see how rapidly the river is eating away the bank at
Luxor; wearing its way back again, is it not? to the old channel under
the Arabian bluff, which is still marked. The temple at Luxor is only a
few rods from the river. The English native consul, who built his house
between the pillars of the temple thirty years ago, remembers that, at
that time, he used to saddle his donkey whenever he wanted to go to the
river. Observation of the land and stream above, at Erment, favors
the impression that the river once ran on the east side and that it is
working its way back to the old channel.
The village of Erment is about eight miles above Luxor, and on the west
side of the river. An intelligent Arab at Luxor told me that one hundred
and fifty years ago Erment was on the east side. It is an ancient
village, and boasts ruins; among the remaining sculptures is an
authentic portrait of Cleopatra, who appears to have sat to all the
stone-cutters in Upper Egypt. Here then is an instance of the Nile going
round a town instead of washing it away.
One thing more: Karnak is going to tumble into a heap some day, Great
Hall of Columns and all. It is slowly having its foundations sapped by
inundations and leachings from the Nile. Now, does it stand to reason
that Osirtasen, who was a sensible king and a man of family; that the
Thothmes people, and especially Hatasoo Thothmes, the woman who erected
the biggest obelisk ever raised; and that the vain Rameses II., who
spent his life in an effort to multiply his name and features in stone,
so that time couldn't rub them out, would have spent so much money
in structures that the Nile was likely to eat away in three or four
thousand years?
The objector may say that the bed of the Nile has risen; and may ask
how the river got over to the desert of the west side without destroying
Karnak on its way. There is Erment, for an example.
Have you now any idea of the topography of the plain? I ought to say
that along the western bank, opposite Luxor, stretches a long sand
island joined to the main, in low water, and that the wide river is very
shallow on the west side.
We started for Koorneh across a luxuriant wheat-field, but soon struck
the desert and the debris of the old city. Across the river, we had our
first view of the pillars of Luxor and the pylons of Karnak, sights to
heat the imagination and set the blood dancing. But how far off they
are; on what a grand scale this Thebes is laid out—if one forgets London
and Paris and New York.
The desert we pass over is full of rifled tombs, hewn horizontally
in rocks that stand above the general level. Some of them are large
chambers, with pillars left for support. The doors are open and the sand
drifts in and over the rocks in which they are cut. A good many of them
are inhabited by miserable Arabs, who dwell in them and in huts among
them. I fancy that, if the dispossessed mummies should reappear, they
would differ little, except perhaps in being better clad, from these
bony living persons who occupy and keep warm their sepulchres.
Our guide leads us at a lively pace through these holes and heaps of
the dead, over sand hot to the feet, under a sky blue and burning, for
a mile and a half. He is the first Egyptian I have seen who can walk. He
gets over the ground with a sort of skipping lope, barefooted, and looks
not unlike a tough North American Indian. As he swings along, holding
his thin cotton robe with one hand, we feel as if we were following a
shade despatched to conduct us to some Unhappy Hunting-Grounds.
Near the temple are some sycamore-trees and a collection of hovels
called Koorneh, inhabited by a swarm of ill-conditioned creatures, who
are not too proud to beg and probably are not ashamed to steal.
They beset us there and in the ruins to buy all manner of valuable
antiquities, strings of beads from mummies, hands and legs of mummies,
small green and blue images, and the like, and raise such a clamor of
importunity that one can hold no communion, if he desires to, with the
spirits of Sethi I., and his son Rameses II., who spent the people's
money in erecting these big columns and putting the vast stones on top
of them.
We are impressed with the massiveness and sombreness of the Egyptian
work, but this temple is too squat to be effective, and is scarcely
worth visiting, in comparison with others, except for its sculptures.
Inside and out it is covered with them; either the face of the stone cut
away, leaving the figures in relief, or the figures are cut in at the
sides and left in relief in the center. The rooms are small—from the
necessary limitations of roof-stones that stretched from wall to wall,
or from column to column; but all the walls, in darkness or in light,
are covered with carving.
The sculptures are all a glorification of the Pharaohs. We should
like to know the unpronounceable names of the artists, who, in the
conventional limits set them by their religion, drew pictures of so much
expression and figures so life-like, and chiseled these stones with such
faultless execution; but there are no names here but of Pharaoh and of
the gods.
The king is in battle, driving his chariot into the thick of the fight;
the king crosses rivers, destroys walled cities, routs armies the
king appears in a triumphal procession with chained captives, sacks of
treasure, a menagerie of beasts, and a garden of exotic trees and plants
borne from conquered countries; the king is making offerings to his
predecessors, or to gods many, hawk-headed, cow-headed, ibis-headed,
man-headed. The king's scribe is taking count of the hands, piled in
a heap, of the men the king has slain in battle. The king, a gigantic
figure, the height of a pylon, grasps by the hair of the head a bunch of
prisoners, whom he is about to slay with a raised club—as one would cut
off the tops of a handful of radishes.
There is a vein of “Big Injun” running through them all. The same
swagger and boastfulness, and cruelty to captives. I was glad to see
one woman in the mythic crowd, doing the generous thing: Isis, slim
and pretty, offers her breast to her son, and Horus stretches up to
the stone opportunity and takes his supper like a little gentleman. And
there is color yet in her cheek and robe that was put on when she was
thirty-five hundred years younger than she is now.
Towards the south we saw the more extensive ruins of the Memnonium and,
more impressive still, the twin Colossi, one of them the so-called vocal
statue of Memnon, standing up in the air against the evening sky more
than a mile distant. They rose out of a calm green plain of what seemed
to be wheat, but which was a field of beans. The friendly green about
them seemed to draw them nearer to us in sympathy. At this distance we
could not see how battered they were. And the unspeakable calm of these
giant figures, sitting with hands on knees, fronting the east, like the
Sphinx, conveys the same impression of lapse of time and of endurance
that the pyramids give.
The sunset, as we went back across the plain, was gorgeous in vermilion,
crimson, and yellow. The Colossi dominated the great expanse, and loomed
up in the fading light like shapes out of the mysterious past.
Our dahabeëh had crept up to the east side of the island, and could only
be reached by passing through sand and water. A deep though not wide
channel of the Nile ran between us and the island. We were taken over
this in a deep tub of a ferryboat. Laboriously wading through the sand
and plowed fields of the island, we found our boat anchored in the
stream, and the shore so shallow that even the sandal could not land.
The sailors took us off to the row-boat on their backs.
In the evening the dahabeëh is worked across and secured to the
crumbling bank of the Luxor. And the accomplishment of a voyage of four
hundred and fifty miles in sixteen days is, of course, announced by
rockets.
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