IT NEVER rains at Thebes; you begin with that fact. But everybody is
anxious to have it rain, so that he can say, “It rained when I was at
Thebes, for the first time in four thousand years.”
It has not rained for four thousand years, and the evidence of this
is that no representation of rain is found in any of the sculptures on
temples or monuments; and all Egyptologists know that what is not found
thus represented has had no existence.
To-day, it rained for the first time in four thousand years The
circumstances were these. We were crossing at sunset from the west side
to the island, in a nasty little ferry, built like a canal-barge, its
depths being full of all uncleanliness and smell—donkeys, peasants, and
camels using it for crossing. (The getting of a camel in and out of such
a deep trough is a work of time and considerable pounding and roaring
of beast and men.) The boat was propelled by two half-clad, handsome,
laughing Egyptian boys, who rowed with some crooked limbs of trees, and
sang “Hà! Yâlesah,” and “Yah! Mohammed” as they stood and pulled the
unwieldy oars.
We were standing, above the reek, on a loose platform of sticks at the
stern, when my comrade said, “It rains, I think I felt a drop on my
hand.”
“It can't be,” I said, “it has not rained here in four thousand years;”
and I extended my hand. I felt nothing. And yet I could not swear that a
drop or two did not fall into the river.
It had that appearance, nearly. And we have seen no flies skipping on
the Nile at this season.
In the sculpture we remember that the king is often represented
extending his hand. He would not put it out for nothing, for everything
done anciently in Egypt, every scratch on a rock, has a deep and
profound meaning. Pharaoh is in the attitude of fearing that it is going
to rain. Perhaps it did rain last night. At any rate, there were light
clouds over the sky.
The morning opens with a cool west wind, which increases and whirls the
sand in great clouds over the Libyan side of the river, and envelopes
Luxor in its dry storm. Luxor is for the most part a collection of
miserable mud-hovels on a low ridge, with the half-buried temple for a
nucleus, and a few houses of a better sort along the bank, from which
float the consular flags.
The inhabitants of Luxor live upon the winter travelers. Sometimes a
dozen or twenty gay dahabeëhs and several steamboats are moored here,
and the town assumes the appearance of a fashionable watering-place. It
is the best place on the river on the whole, considering its attractions
for scholars and sightseers, to spend the winter, and I have no doubt it
would be a great resort if it had any accommodations for visitors. But
it has not; the stranger must live in his boat. There is not indeed in
the whole land of Egypt above Cairo such a thing as an inn; scarcely
a refuge where a clean Christian, who wishes to keep clean, can pass
a night, unless it be in the house of some governor or a palace of the
Khedive. The perfection of the world's climate in winter is, to be
sure, higher up, in Nubia; but that of Thebes is good enough for people
accustomed to Europe and New England. With steamboats making regular
trips and a railroad crawling up the river, there is certain to be the
Rameses Hotel at Thebes before long, and its rival a Thothmes House;
together with the Mummy Restaurant, and the Scarabæus Saloon.
You need two or three weeks to see properly the ruins of Thebes, though
Cook's “personally conducted tourists” do it in four days, and have a
soiree of the dancing-girls besides. The region to be traveled over
is not only vast (Strabo says the city was nine miles long) but it
is exceedingly difficult getting about, and fatiguing, if haste is
necessary. Crossing the swift Nile in a sandal takes time; you must wade
or be carried over shallows to the island beach; there is a weary walk
or ride over this; another stream is to be crossed, and then begins
the work of the day. You set out with a cavalcade of mules, servants,
water-carriers, and a retinue of hungry, begging Arabs, over the fields
and through the desert to the temples and tombs. The distances are long,
the sand is glaring, the incandescent sun is reflected in hot waves from
the burning Libyan chain. It requires hours to master the plan of a vast
temple in its ruins, and days to follow out the story of the wonderful
people who built it, in its marvelous sculptures—acres of inside and
outside walls of picture cut in stone.
Perhaps the easiest way of passing the time in an ancient ruin was that
of two Americans, who used to spread their rugs in some shady court, and
sit there, drinking brandy and champagne all day, letting the ancient
civilization gradually reconstruct itself in their brains.
Life on the dahabeëh is much as usual; in fact, we are only waiting
a favorable wind to pursue our voyage, expecting to see Thebes
satisfactorily on our return. Of the inhabitants and social life of
Luxor, we shall have more to say by and by. We have daily a levee of
idlers on the bank, who spend twilight hours in watching the boat; we
are visited by sharp-eyed dealers in antiquities, who pull out strings
of scarabæi from their bosoms, or cautiously produce from under their
gowns a sculptured tablet, or a stone image, or some articles from
a mummy-case—antiques really as good as new. Abd-el-Atti sits on the
forward-deck cheapening the poor chickens with old women, and surrounded
by an admiring group of Arab friends, who sit all day smoking and
sipping coffee, and kept in a lively enjoyment by his interminable
facetiae and badinage.
Our most illustrious visitors are the American consul, Ali Effendi
Noorad, and the English consul, Mustapha Aga. Ali is a well-featured,
bronze-complexioned Arab of good family (I think of the Ababdehs), whose
brother is Sheykh of a tribe at Karnak.
He cannot speak English, but he has a pleasanter smile than any other
American consul I know. Mustapha, now very old and well known to all
Nile travelers, is a venerable wise man of the East, a most suave,
courtly Arab, plausible, and soft of speech; under his bushy eyebrows
one sees eyes that are keen and yet glazed with a film of secrecy; the
sort of eye that you cannot look into, but which you have no doubt looks
into you.
Mustapha, as I said, built his house between two columns of the temple
of Luxor. These magnificent columns, with flaring lotus capitals, are
half-buried in sand, and the whole area is so built in and over by Arab
habitations that little of the once extensive and splendid structure
can be seen. Indeed, the visitor will do well to be content with the
well-known poetic view of the columns from the river. The elegant
obelisk, whose mate is in Paris, must however be seen, as well as the
statues of Rameses II. sitting behind it up to their necks in sand—as if
a sitz-bath had been prescribed. I went one day into the interior of the
huts, in order to look at some of the sculptures, especially that of a
king's chariot which is shaded by a parasol—an article which we invented
three or four thousand years after the Egyptians, who first used it, had
gone to the shades where parasols are useless. I was sorry that I went.
The private house I entered was a mud enclosure with a creaky wooden
door. Opening this I found myself in what appeared to be a private
hen-yard, where babies, chickens, old women, straw, flies, and dust,
mingled with the odors of antiquity; about this were the rooms in which
the family sleep—mere dog-kennels. Two of the women had nose-rings put
through the right nostril, hoops of gold two or three inches across. I
cannot say that a nose-ring adds to a woman's beauty, but if I had to
manage a harem of these sharp-tongued creatures I should want rings in
their noses—it would need only a slight pull of the cord in the ring to
cause the woman to cry, in Oriental language, “where thou goest, I will
go.” The parasol sculpture was half-covered by the mud-wall and the
oven; but there was Pharaoh visible, riding on in glory through all this
squalor. The Pharaohs and priests never let one of the common people
set foot inside these superb temples; and there is a sort of base
satisfaction now! in seeing the ignorant and oppressed living in their
palaces, and letting the hens roost on Pharaoh's sun-shade. But it was
difficult to make picturesque the inside of this temple-palace, even
with all the flowing rags of its occupants.
We spend a day in a preliminary visit to the Memnonium and the vast
ruins known as those of Medeenet Hâboo. Among our attendants over the
plain are half a dozen little girls, bright, smiling lasses, who salute
us with a cheery “Good morning,” and devote themselves to us the whole
day. Each one carries on her head a light, thin water-koolleh, that
would hold about a quart, balancing it perfectly as she runs along.
I have seen mere infants carrying very small koollehs, beginning thus
young to learn the art of walking with the large ones, which is to be
the chief business of their lives.
One of the girls, who says her name is Fatimeh (the name of the
Prophet's favorite daughter is in great request), is very pretty, and
may be ten or eleven years old, not far from the marriageable age. She
has black hair, large, soft, black eyes, the lids stained with kohl,
dazzling white teeth and a sweet smile. She wears cheap earrings,
a necklace of beads and metal, and a slight ring on one hand; her
finger-nails and the palms of her little hands are stained with henna.
For dress she has a sort of shawl used as a head-veil, and an ample
outer-garment, a mantle of dark-blue cotton, ornamented down the front
seams with colored beads—a coquettish touch that connects her with her
sisters of the ancient régime who seem to have used the cylindrical
blue bead even more profusely than ladies now-a-day the jet “bugles,”
in dress trimming. I fear the pretty heathen is beginning to be aware of
her attractions.
The girls run patiently beside us or wait for us at the temples all day,
bruising their feet on the stony ways, getting nothing to eat unless we
give them something, chatting cheerfully, smiling at us and using their
little stock of English to gain our good will, constantly ready with
their koollehs, and say nothing of backsheesh until they are about to
leave us at night and go to their homes. But when they begin to ask, and
get a copper or two, they beg with a mixture of pathos and anxiety and a
use of the pronouns that is irresistible.
“You tired. Plenty backsheesh for little girl. Yes.”
“Why don't you give us backsheesh? We are tired too,” we reply.
“Yes. Me give you backsheesh you tired all day.”
Fatimeh only uses her eyes, conscious already of her power. They are
satisfied with a piastre; which the dragoman says is too much, and
enough to spoil them. But, after all, five cents is not a magnificent
gift, from a stranger who has come five thousand miles, to a little girl
in the heart of Africa, who has lighted up the desert a whole day with
her charming smiles!
The donkey-boy pulls the strings of pathos for his backsheesh, having
no beauty to use; he says, “Father and mother all dead.” Seems to have
belonged to a harem.
Before we can gain space or quiet either to examine or enjoy a temple,
we have to free ourselves of a crowd of adhesive men, boys, and girls,
who press upon us their curiosities, relics of the dead, whose only
value is their antiquity. The price of these relics is of course wholly
“fancy,” and I presume that Thebes, where the influence of the antique
is most strong, is the best market in the world for these trifles; and
that however cheaply they may be bought here, they fetch a better price
than they would elsewhere.
I suppose if I were to stand in Broadway and offer passers-by such
a mummy's hand as this which is now pressed upon my notice, I could
scarcely give it away. This hand has been “doctored” to sell; the
present owner has re-wrapped its bitumen-soaked flesh in mummy-cloth,
and partially concealed three rings on the fingers. Of course the hand
is old and the cheap rings are new. It is pleasant to think of these
merchants in dried flesh prowling about among the dead, selecting a limb
here and there that they think will decorate well, and tricking out with
cheap jewelry these mortal fragments. This hand, which the rascal has
chosen, is small, and may have been a source of pride to its owner
long ago; somebody else may have been fond of it, though even he—the
lover—would not care to hold it long now. A pretty little hand; I
suppose it has in its better days given many a caress and love-pat, and
many a slap in the face; belonged to one of the people, or it would
not have been found in a common mummy-pit; perhaps the hand of a sweet
water-bearer like Fatimeh, perhaps of some slave-girl whose fatal beauty
threw her into the drag-net that the Pharaohs occasionally cast along
the Upper Nile—slave-hunting raids that appear on the monuments as great
military achievements. This hand, naked, supple, dimpled, henna-tipped,
may have been offered for nothing once; there are wanted for it four
piastres now, rings and all. A dear little hand!
Great quantities of antique beads are offered us in strings, to one end
of which is usually tied a small image of Osiris, or the winged sun, or
the scarabæus with wings. The inexhaustible supply of these beads
and images leads many to think that they are manufactured to suit the
demand. But it is not so. Their blue is of a shade that is not produced
now-a-days. And, besides, there is no need to manufacture what exists
in the mummy-pits in such abundance. The beads and bugles are of glass;
they were much used for necklaces and are found covering the breasts of
mummies, woven in a network of various patterns, like old bead purses.
The vivid blue color was given by copper.
The little blue images of Osiris which are so abundant are also genuine.
They are of porcelain, a sort of porcelain-glass, a sand-paste, glazed,
colored blue, and baked. They are found in great quantities in all
tombs; and it was the Egyptian practice to thickly strew with them the
ground upon which the foundations and floors of temples were laid. These
images found in tombs are more properly figures of the dead under the
form of Osiris, and the hieroglyphics on them sometimes give the name
and quality of the departed. They are in fact a sort of “p.p. c.”
visiting-card, which the mummy has left for future ages. The Egyptians
succeeded in handing themselves down to posterity; but the manner in
which posterity has received them is not encouraging to us to salt
ourselves down for another age.
The Memnonium, or more properly Rameseum, since it was built by Rameses
II., and covered with his deeds, writ in stone, gives you even in
its ruins a very good idea of one of the most symmetrical of Egyptian
temples; the vast columns of its great hall attest its magnificence,
while the elaboration of its sculpture, wanting the classic purity of
the earlier work found in the tombs of Geezeh and Sakkara, speaks of a
time when art was greatly stimulated by royal patronage.
It was the practice of the Pharaohs when they came to the throne to make
one or more military expeditions of conquest and plunder, slay as many
enemies as possible (all people being considered “enemies” who did not
pay tribute), cut as wide a swarth of desolation over the earth as they
were able, loot the cities, drag into captivity the pleasing women,
and return laden with treasure and slaves and the evidences of enlarged
dominion. Then they spent the remainder of their virtuous days in
erecting huge temples and chiseling their exploits on them. This is, in
a word, the history of the Pharaohs.
But I think that Rameses II., who was the handsomest and most conceited
swell of them all, was not so particular about doing the deeds as he was
about recording them. He could not have done much else in his long reign
than erect the temples, carve the hieroglyphics, and set up the statues
of himself, which proclaim his fame. He literally spread himself all
over Egypt, and must have kept the whole country busy, quarrying, and
building, and carving for his glorification. That he did a tenth of the
deeds he is represented performing, no one believes now; and I take a
vindictive pleasure in abusing him. By some historic fatality he got
the name of the Great Sesostris, and was by tradition credited with the
exploits of Thothmes III., the greatest of the Pharaohs, a real hero and
statesman, during whose reign it was no boast to say that Egypt “placed
her frontier where it pleased herself,” and with those of his father
Sethi I., a usurper in the line, but a great soldier.
However, this Rameses did not have good luck with his gigantic statues;
I do not know one that is not shattered, defaced, or thrown down. This
one at the Rameseum is only a wreck of gigantic fragments. It was a
monolith of syenite, and if it was the largest statue in Egypt, as it
is said, it must have been over sixty feet high. The arithmeticians
say that it weighed about eight hundred and eighty-seven tons, having a
solid content of three times the largest obelisk in the world, that at
Karnak. These figures convey no idea to my mind. When a stone man is as
big as a four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm
of this Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite,
the cutting polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The
polishing alone of this great mass must have been an incredible labor.
How was it moved from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles
distant? And how was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it
lies? An earthquake would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or
the use of an explosive material. But if Cambyses broke it—and Cambyses
must have been remembered in Egypt as Napoleon I. is in Italy, the one
for smashing, the other for stealing—he had something as destructive as
nitro-glycerine.
Rameses II. impressed into his service not only art but literature.
One of his achievements depicted here is his victory over the Khitas
(Hittites), an Asiatic tribe; the king is in the single-handed act of
driving the enemy over the river Orontes,—a bluish streak meandering
down the wall. This scene is the subject of a famous poem, known as
the Poem of Pentaour, which is carved in hieroglyphics at Karnak and
at Luxor. The battle is very spiritedly depicted here. On the walls are
many side-scenes and acts characteristic of the age and the people. The
booty from the enemy is collected in a heap; and the quantity of gold
is indicated by the size of a bag of it which is breaking the back of
an ass; a soldier is pulling the beard of his prisoner, and another is
beating his captives, after the brutal manner of the Egyptians.
The temples at Medeenet Haboo are to me as interesting as those at
Karnak. There are two; the smaller one is of various ages; but its
oldest portions were built by Amun-noo-het, the sister of Thothmes,
the woman who has left more monuments of her vigor than any other in
history, and, woman-like, the monuments are filial offerings, and not
erections to her own greatness; the larger temple is the work of Rameses
III. The more you visit it, the more you will be impressed with the
splendor of its courts, halls and columns, and you may spend days in the
study of its sculptures without exhausting them.
Along these high-columned halls stalk vast processions, armies going
to battle, conquerors in triumphal entry, priests and soldiers bearing
sacrifices, and rows of stone deities of the Egyptian pantheon receiving
them in a divine indifference. Again the battle rages, the chariots
drive furiously, arrows fill the air, the foot-troops press forward with
their big spears and long shields, and the king is slaying the chief,
who tumbles from his car. The alarm has spread to the country beyond;
the terrified inhabitants are in flight; a woman, such is the detail, is
seen to snatch her baby and run into the woods, leaving her pot of broth
cooking on the fire.
The carving in this temple is often very deep, cut in four or five
inches in the syenite, and beautifully polished to the bottom, as if
done with emery. The colors that once gave each figure its character,
are still fresh, red, green, blue, and black. The ceilings of some
of the chambers yet represent the blue and star-sprinkled sky. How
surpassingly brilliant these must have been once! We see how much
the figure owed to color, when the color designated the different
nationalities, the enemies or the captives, the shade of their skin,
hair, beard and garments. We recognize, even, textures of cloth, and
the spotted leopard-skins worn by the priests. How gay are the birds of
varied plumage.
There is considerable variety in sculpture here, but, after all an
endless repetition on wall after wall, in chamber after chamber of the
same royal persons, gods, goddesses, and priests. There is nothing on
earth so tiresome as a row of stone gods, in whom I doubt if anybody
ever sincerely believed, standing to receive the offerings of a
Turveydrop of a king. Occasionally the gods take turn about, and pour
oil on the head of a king, at his coronation, and with this is usually
the very pretty device of four birds flying to the four quarters of
the globe to announce the event. But whatever the scene, warlike or
religious, it is for the glorification of Pharaoh, all the same. He is
commonly represented of gigantic size, and all the other human figures
about him are small in comparison. It must have kept the Pharaoh in a
constantly inflated condition, to walk these halls and behold, on all
sides, his extraordinary apotheosis. But the Pharaoh was not only king
but high priest, and the divine representative on earth, and about to
become, in a peculiar sense, Osiris himself, at his death.
The Egyptians would have saved us much trouble if they had introduced
perspective into these pictures. It is difficult to feel that a pond of
water, a tree and a house, one above the other on a wall, are intended
to be on the same level. We have to accustom ourselves to figures always
in profile, with the eye cut in full as if seen in front, and both
shoulders showing. The hands of prisoners are tied behind them, but this
is shown by bringing both elbows, with no sort of respect for the
man's anatomy, round to the side, toward us, yet it is wonderful what
character and vivacity they gave to their figures, and how by simple
profile they represent nationalities and races, Ethiops, Nubians, Jews,
Assyrians, Europeans.
These temples are inlaid and overlaid and surrounded with heaps of
rubbish, and the débris of ancient and modern mud and unbaked-brick
dwellings; part of the great pillars are entirely covered. The
Christians once occupied the temples, and there are remains of a church,
and a large church, in one of the vast courts, built of materials at
hand, but gone to ruin more complete than the structure around it. The
early Christians hewed away the beautiful images of Osiris from the
pillars (an Osiride pillar is one upon one side of which, and the length
of it, is cut in full relief, only attached at the back, a figure of
Osiris), and covered the hieroglyphics and sculptures with plaster.
They defaced these temples as the Reformers hacked and whitewashed the
cathedrals of Germany. And sometimes the plaster which was meant to
cover forever from sight the images of a mysterious religion, has
defeated the intentions of the plasterers, by preserving, to an age that
has no fear of stone gods, the ancient pictures, sharp in outline and
fresh in color.
It is indeed marvelous that so much has been preserved, considering what
a destructive creature man is, and how it pleases his ignoble soul to
destroy the works of his forerunners on the earth. The earthquake
has shaken up Egypt time and again, but Cambyses was worse; he was an
earthquake with malice and purpose, and left little standing that he had
leisure to overturn. The ancient Christians spent a great deal of time
in rubbing out the deep-cut hieroglyphics, chiseling away the heads
of strange gods, covering the pictures of ancient ceremonies and
sacrifices, and painting on the walls their own rude conceptions of holy
persons and miraculous occurrences. And then the Moslems came, hating
all images and pictorial representations alike, and scraped away or
battered with bullets the work of pagans and Christians.
There is much discussion whether these so-called temples were not
palaces and royal residences as well as religious edifices. Doubtless
many of them served a double purpose; the great pylons and propylons
having rooms in which men might have lived, who did not know what a
comfortable house is. Certainly no palaces of the Pharaohs have been
discovered in Egypt, if these temples are not palaces in part; and it
is not to be supposed that the Pharaoh dwelt in a mud-house with a
palm-roof, like a common mortal. He was the religious as well as the
civil head, Pope and Cæsar in one, and it is natural that he should have
dwelt in the temple precincts.
The pyramidal towers of the great temple of Medeenet Haboo are thought
to be the remains of the palace of Rameses III. Here indeed the
Egyptologists point out his harem and the private apartments, when the
favored of Amun-Re unbent himself from his usual occupation of seizing a
bunch of captives by the hair and slashing off their heads at a blow,
in the society of his women and the domestic enjoyments of a family man.
Here we get an insight into the private life of the awful monarch, and
are able to penetrate the mysteries of his retirement. It is from
such sculptures as one finds here that scholars have been able to
rehabilitate old Egyptian society and tell us not only what the
Egyptians did but what they were thinking about. The scholar, to whom
we are most indebted for the reconstruction of the ancient life of the
Egyptians, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, is able not only to describe to us
a soirée, from paintings in tombs at Thebes, but to tell us what the
company talked about and what their emotions were. “In the meantime,”
he says, “the conversation became animated,” (as it sometimes does at
parties) “and the ladies fluently discussed the question of dress,” “the
maker of an earring and the shop where it was purchased was anxiously
inquired.” On one occasion when the guests were in “raptures of
admiration” over something, an awkward youth overturned a pedestal,
creating great confusion and frightening the women, who screamed;
however, no one was hurt, and harmony being restored, “the incident
afforded fresh matter for conversation, to be related in full details to
their friends when they returned home.”
This is very wonderful art, and proves that the Egyptians excelled all
who came after them in the use of the chisel and brush; since they could
not only represent in a drawing on the wall of a tomb the gaiety of an
evening party and the subject of its conversation, but could make the
picture convey as well the talk of the guests to their friends after
they returned home!
We had read a good deal about the harem of Rameses III., and it was
naturally the first object of our search at Medeenet Haboo. At the
first visit we could not find it, and all our expectation of his sweet
domestic life was unrealized. It was in vain that we read over the
description:—“Here the king is attended by his harem, some of whom
present him with flowers, or wave before him fans and flabella; and a
favorite is caressed, or invited to divert his leisure hours with a game
of draughts.” We climbed everywhere, and looked into every room, but the
king and his harem were not visible. And yet the pictures, upon which
has been built all this fair fabric of the domestic life of Rameses,
must exist somewhere in these two pyramidal towers. And what a gallery
of delights it must be, we thought. The king attended by his harem!
Upon a subsequent visit, we insisted that the guide should take us
into this harem. That was not possible, but he would show it to us. We
climbed a broken wall, from the top of which we could look up, through a
window, into a small apartment in the tower. The room might be ten feet
by twelve in size, probably smaller. There was no way of getting to it
by any interior stairway or by any exterior one, that we could see, and
I have no doubt that if Pharaoh lived there he climbed up by a ladder
and pulled his harem up after him.
But the pictures on the walls, which we made out by the help of an
opera-glass, prove this to have been one of the private apartments, they
say. There are only two pictures, only one, in fact, not defaced; but
as these are the only examples of the interior decoration of an ancient
royal palace in all Egypt, it is well to make the most of them. They are
both drawn in spirited outlines and are very graceful, the profile
faces having a Greek beauty. In one Rameses III., of colossal size, is
represented seated on an elegant fauteuil, with his feet on a stool. He
wears the royal crown, a necklace, and sandals. Before him stands a lady
of his harem, clad in a high crown of lotus-stems, a slight necklace,
and sandals turned up like skates. It must be remembered that the
weather was usually very warm in Thebes, especially on this side the
river. The lady is holding up a lotus-flower, but it is very far from
the royal nose, and indeed she stands so far off, that the king has to
stretch out his arm to chuck her under the chin. The Pharaoh's beautiful
face preserves its immortal calm, and the “favorite is caressed” in
accordance with the chastest requirements of high art.
In the other picture, the Pharaoh is seated as before, but he is playing
at draughts. In his left hand he holds some men, and his right is
extended lifting a piece from the draughtboard. His antagonist has been
unfortunate. Her legs are all gone; her head has disappeared. There
remain of this “favorite” only the outline of part of the body, the
right arm and the hand which lifts a piece, and a suggestion of the left
arm extended at full length and pushing a lotus-bud close to the king's
nose. It is an exhibition of man's selfishness-The poor woman is not
only compelled to entertain the despot at the game, but she must regale
his fastidious and scornful nose at the same time; it must have been
very tiresome to keep the left hand thus extended through a whole game.
What a passion the Egyptians had for the heavy perfume of this flower.
They are smelling it in all their pictures.
We climbed afterwards, by means of a heap of rubbish, into a room
similar to this one, in the other tower, where we saw remains of the
same sculpture. It was like the Egyptians to repeat that picture five
hundred times in the same palace.
The two Colossi stand half a mile east of the temple of Medeenet Haboo,
and perhaps are the survivors of like figures which lined an avenue
to another temple. One of them is better known to fame than any other
ancient statue, and rests its reputation on the most shadowy basis. In
a line with these statues are the remains of other colossi of nearly the
same size, buried in the alluvial deposit. These figures both represent
Amunoph III. (about 1500 or 1600 b. c.); they are seated; and on either
side of the legs of the king, and attached to the throne, are the
statues of his mother and daughter, little women, eighteen feet high.
The colossi are fifty feet high without the bases, and must have stood
sixty feet in the air before the Nile soil covered the desert on which
they were erected. The pedestal is a solid stone thirty-three feet long.
Both were monoliths. The southern one is still one piece, but shockingly
mutilated. The northern one is the famous Vocal Statue of Memnon; though
why it is called of Memnon and why “vocal” is not easily explained. It
was broken into fragments either by some marauder, or by an earthquake
at the beginning of our era, and built up from the waist by blocks
of stone, in the time of the Roman occupation, during the reign of
Septimius Severus.
There was a tradition—perhaps it was only the tradition of a
tradition—that it used to sing every morning at sunrise. No mention is
made of this singing property, however, until after it was overthrown;
and its singing ceased to be heard after the Roman Emperor put it into
the state in which we now see it. It has been assumed that it used to
sing, and many theories have been invented to explain its vocal method.
Very likely the original report of this prodigy was a Greek or Roman
fable; and the noise may have been produced by a trick for Hadrian's
benefit (who is said to have heard it) in order to keep up the
reputation of the statue.
Amunoph III. (or Amenôphis, or Amen-hotep—he never knew how to spell
his name) was a tremendous slasher-about over the territories of
other people; there is an inscription down at Samneh (above the second
cataract) which says that he brought, in one expedition, out of Soudan,
seven hundred and forty negro prisoners, half of whom were women and
children. On the records which this modest man made, he is “Lord of both
worlds, absolute master, Son of the Sun.” He is Horus, the strong bull.
“He marches and victory is gained, like Horus, son of Isis, like the
Sun in heaven.” He also built almost as extensively as Rameses II; he
covered both banks of the Nile with splendid monuments; his structures
are found from Ethiopia to the Sinaitic peninsula. He set up his image
in this Colossus, the statue which the Greeks and Romans called Memnon,
the fame of which took such possession of the imagination of poets and
historians. They heard, or said they heard, Memnon, the Ethiopian, one
of the defenders of Troy, each morning saluting his mother, Aurora.
If this sound was heard, scientists think it was produced by the action
of the sun's rays upon dew fallen in the crevices of the broken figure.
Others think the sound was produced by a priest who sat concealed in the
lap of the figure and struck a metallic stone. And the cavity and the
metallic stone exist there now. Of course the stone was put in there
and the cavity left, when the statue was repaired, it having been a
monolith. And as the sound was never heard before the statue was broken
nor after it was repaired, the noise was not produced by the metallic
stone. And if I am required to believe that the statue sang with his
head off, I begin to doubt altogether. I incline to think that we have
here only one of those beautiful myths in which the Greeks and Romans
loved to clothe the distant and the gigantic.
One of the means of accounting for a sound which may never have been
heard, is that the priests produced it in order to strike with awe the
people. Now, the Egyptian priests never cared anything about the people,
and wouldn't have taken the trouble; indeed, in the old times “people”
wouldn't have been allowed anywhere within such a sacred inclosure as
this in which the Colossus stood. And, besides, the priest could not
have got into the cavity mentioned. When the statue was a monolith, it
would puzzle him to get in; and there is no stairway or steps by which
he could ascend now. We sent an Arab up, who scaled the broken fragments
with extreme difficulty, and struck the stone. The noise produced
was like that made by striking the metallic stones we find in the
desert,—not a resonance to be heard far.
So that I doubt that there was any singing at sunrise by the so-called
Memnon (which was Amunoph), and I doubt that it was a priestly device.
This Amunoph family, whose acquaintance we have been obliged to make,
cut a wide swath in their day; they had eccentricities, and there are
told a great many stories about them, which might interest you if you
could believe that the Amunophs were as real as the Hapsburgs and the
Stuarts and the Grants.
Amunoph I. (or Amen-hotep) was the successor of Amosis (or Ahmes) who
expelled the Shepherds, and even pursued them into Canaan and knocked
their walled-towns about their heads. Amunoph I. subdued the Shasu
or Bedaween of the desert between Egypt and Syria, as much as those
hereditary robbers were ever subdued. This was in the seventeenth
century b. c. This king also made a naval expedition up the Nile into
Ethiopia, and it is said that he took captive there the “chief of
the mountaineers.” Probably then, he went into Abyssinia, and did not
discover the real source of the Nile.
The fourth Amunoph went conquering in Asia, as his predecessors had
done, for nations did not stay conquered in those days. He was followed
by his seven daughters in chariots of war. These heroic girls fought,
with their father, and may be seen now, in pictures, gently driving
their chariot-wheels over the crushed Asiatics. When Amunoph IV. came
home and turned his attention to religion, he made lively work with the
Egyptian pantheon. This had grown into vast proportions from the time of
Menes, and Amunoph did not attempt to improve it or reform it; he simply
set it aside, and established a new religion. He it was who abandoned
Thebes and built Tel-el-Amarna, and there set up the worship of a single
god, Aten, represented by the sun's disc. He shut up the old temples,
effaced the images of the ancient gods, and persecuted mercilessly their
worshippers throughout the empire.
He was prompted to all this by his mother, for he himself was little
better than an imbecile. It was from his mother that he took his foreign
religion as he did his foreign blood, for there was nothing of the
Egyptian type in his face. His mother, Queen Taia, wife of Amunoph
III., had light hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the characteristics of
northern women. She was not of royal family, and not Egyptian; but the
child of a foreign family then living in the Delta, and probably the
king married her for her beauty and cleverness.
M. Lenormant thinks she was a Hebrew. That people were then very
numerous in the Delta, where they lived unmolested keeping their own
religion, a very much corrupted and materialized monotheism. Queen Taia
has the complexion and features of the Hebrews—I don't mean of the
Jews who are now dispersed over the continents. Lenormant credits the
Hebrews, through the Queen Taia, with the overthrow of the Pharaonic
religion and the establishment of the monotheism of Amunoph IV.—a
worship that had many external likenesses to the Hebrew forms. At
Tel-el-Amarna we see, among the utensils of the worship of Aten,
the Israelitish “Table of Shew-bread.” It is also noticed that the
persecution of the Hebrews coincides with the termination of the
religious revolution introduced by the son of Taia.
Whenever a pretty woman of talent comes into history she makes mischief.
The episode of Queen Taia is however a great relief to the granite-faced
monotony of the conservative Pharaohs. Women rulers and regents always
make the world lively for the time being—and it took in this case two or
three generations to repair the damages. Smashing things and repairing
damages—that is history.
History starts up from every foot of this Theban plain, piled four or
five deep with civilizations. These temples are engulfed in rubbish;
what the Persians and the earthquake spared, Copts and Arabs for
centuries have overlaid with their crumbling habitations. It requires
a large draft upon the imagination to reinstate the edifices that once
covered this vast waste; but we are impressed with the size of the city,
when we see the long distances that the remaining temples are apart, and
the evidence, in broken columns, statues, and great hewn blocks of stone
shouldering out of the sand, of others perhaps as large.
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