THE TEMPLES OF EGYPT--DID MOSES GET HIS LAW FROM THE EGYPTIANS?
In the distribution of the monuments of Egypt, it is a curious fact
that the Pyramids are found almost wholly in Lower Egypt, and the
great Temples in Upper Egypt. It was not till we had been a week on
the Nile, that we had our first sight of the latter at Denderah. We
have since spent three days at Thebes, the great centre of historical
interest, and have made a regular campaign of sight-seeing, starting
on excursions every morning, and thus have explored the ruins on both
sides of the river--for Thebes, like many other great cities--like
London and Paris--was built on two sides of a river, but one much
greater than the Thames or the Seine, yet not so great but that it was
spanned by a bridge (at least this is inferred from some ancient
sculptures and inscriptions), over which poured a population such as
pours over London Bridge to-day. The site seems made for a great
capital, for here the mountains retire from the river, sweeping round
in a circuit of some fifty miles, leaving a broad plain to be filled
with human habitations. Here four thousand years ago was built a city
greater than that on the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates, than
Nineveh or Babylon. Here was the centre of power and dominion for two
continents--not only for Africa, but for Asia--to which flocked the
multitudinous nations of Assyria and Arabia and Persia and the
farthest East, as well as the tribes of Ethiopia--as two thousand
years later all the peoples of the earth flocked to Rome. It is easy,
from historical records and monumental inscriptions, to form some
idea of the glory of this capital of the ancient world. We can imagine
the tumult and the roar of this more ancient Rome, when the chariots
of mighty kings, and the tread of armies returning victorious from
distant wars, thundered through her hundred gates.
Then did the kings of Egypt rear temples and palaces and statues and
obelisks worthy of all that greatness. Then were built the most
gigantic temples ever raised by the hand of man--as much surpassing in
vastness and grandeur those reared centuries afterward by the Greeks,
as the latter surpass anything by the moderns. The temples of
Thebes--including Luxor and Karnac, which are parts of one city--are
as much grander than the Parthenon, as the Parthenon is grander than
the Madeleine at Paris, which is a feeble attempt to copy it.
We have now been a week--beginning with Denderah--studying these
ruins, and may give certain general impressions. We do not attempt any
detailed description, which must necessarily be inadequate, since
neither words nor figures convey an idea of them, any more than they
do of the Alps. What would be thought of an avenue nearly two miles
long, lined with over twelve hundred colossal sphinxes? Yet such was
the avenue from Luxor to Karnac--an approach worthy to lead to the
temple of the gods. What can we say of a forest of columns, each
twelve feet in diameter, stretching out in long colonnades; of the
massive walls covered with bas-reliefs; and obelisks in single shafts
of granite, of such height and weight that it is the wonder of modern
engineering how they could be cut from the side of the hills, and be
brought a hundred and forty miles, and erected on their firm bases.
But this temple--or rather cluster of temples and palaces--was not,
like the temple of Solomon, finished in a single reign. Karnac was not
the work of one man, or of one generation. It was twenty-five hundred
years in building, successive kings and dynasties adding to the mighty
whole, which was to represent all the glory of Egypt.
The general impression of these temples--and the same is true of the
Egyptian statues and sculptures--is one of grandeur rather than
beauty. They seek to overpower the senses by mere size. Sometimes they
overdo the matter. Thus in the temples at Karnac the columns seem to
me too large and too much crowded for the best effect. Ordinary trees
may be planted in a dense grove, but great, broad-spreading oaks or
elms require space around them; and if these columns were a little
more _spaced_--to use a printer's word--the architectural effect would
be still grander. So in the Egyptian sculpture, everything is
colossal. In the granite lions and sphinxes there is always an aspect
of power in repose which is very impressive, and strikes one with awe.
But in any lighter work, such as frescoes and bas-reliefs, there is a
total absence of delicacy and grace. Nothing can be more stiff. They
sometimes have a rude force of drawing, but beauty they have none.
That was born in Greece. All the sculptures on all the temples of
Egypt are not worth--except as historical monuments--the friezes of
the Parthenon.
One thing else has struck me much as to the plan of these temples,
viz.: that we see in them the types and models of much that has been
reproduced in various forms of ecclesiastical architecture. One has
but to observe with some care the construction of these vast
basilicas, to see how many features of Jewish, and even of Christian
and Moslem architecture, have been adopted from still older temples
and an earlier religion. Thus in the temple at Edfoo there is first
the vast enclosure surrounding the whole, and then within the walls an
outer court open to the sky, corresponding to the Court of the
Gentiles in the Temple at Jerusalem, to the Court of the Fountains
leading to the Mosques, and the cloister surrounding the approaches to
old abbeys and cathedrals. One might find a still closer resemblance
in forms of worship, in the vestments of priests, in the altars, and
in the burning of incense, etc., a parallel which scholars have often
traced.
And now of all this magnificence and glory of the ancient capital of
Egypt, what remains? Only these vast ruins of temples and palaces. The
"plain of Thebes" is still here, but deserted and silent. A few
columns and statues rise above the plain to mark where the city stood,
but the city itself is gone as much as the people who inhabited it
four thousand years ago. A few miserable mud huts are built against
the walls of mighty temples, and the ploughman drives his team over
the dust of the city of a hundred gates. I saw a fellah ploughing with
a cow and a camel yoked together, and a couple of half-naked Arabs
raising water with their _shadoof_ between the Memnon (the statue
which was said to sing when its stony lips were touched by the rising
of the sun) and its brother statue--the two great Colossi, between
which ran the Royal street to Luxor. Was there ever a more complete
and utter desolation? In the temple called the Rameseum once stood the
largest statue that ever was known--that of Rameses the Great (the
same who had a statue at Memphis, for he erected monuments to himself
everywhere), cut out of a single block of granite brought from the
First Cataract, and weighing nearly nine hundred tons! On this was
inscribed, as Herodotus writes, who saw it twenty-three hundred years
ago: "I am the king of kings: if any man wish to know how great I am,
and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works!" What a comment on
the emptiness of human ambition, that this colossal statue, which was
to last to the end of the world, was long ago pulled down by a later
conqueror, Cambyses, the Persian, and now lies on its back, with its
nose knocked off, and eyes put out, and all its glory in the dust!
In studying the figures and the inscriptions on the walls of temples,
there are many things which throw light on the manners and customs of
the ancient Egyptians. Here is a scene of hunting, or of fishing, or
of feasting. Here are the different trades, which show the skill of
the people in the mechanic arts, and many scenes which give us an
insight into their domestic life. These have been the subjects of two
learned and most interesting works by Wilkinson, which open the very
interior of ancient Egypt to our modern eyes. They show a very high
degree of civilization--of skill in all the useful arts, a skill fully
equal in many things, and in some greatly superior, to that of our own
day. Wendell Phillips, in his famous lecture on "The Lost Arts," finds
many of his illustrations in ancient Egypt. I could not but think that
this furnished a very effective answer to those advocates of
evolution, who hold that mankind sprung from animals, and have
gradually developed to their present state. How much progress have the
Egyptians made in four thousand years? Here the race has gone
backward, so that there is certainly no inherent tendency in our
nature to advance.
But I was less interested in studying the domestic life of the ancient
Egyptians, than their religious ideas. Herodotus says that the
Egyptians were a very religious people, excelling all others in the
honors paid to their gods; and this we can well believe, seeing the
temples that they reared for their worship. But what were the gods
they adored, and what sort of worship did they render, and how did all
this act on the life and character of the people? Here we obtain a
less exalted estimate of the ancient Egyptians. The remains which they
have left, while they illustrate the greatness of the empire, which
four thousand years ago had its seat in the valley of the Nile, do not
give a high idea of its Religion. The land was wholly given to
idolatry. The Egyptians had as many gods as the Greeks and Romans,
only baser and lower, indicating baser and lower ideas. They made
gods, not only of the sun, moon, and stars, but of beasts and birds
and reptiles--of the apis and the ibis--of the serpent and the
crocodile.
At Sakkara we visited one of the most stupendous mausoleums that we
have seen in Egypt--one which Herodotus described, but which for
centuries was so buried by the sands of the desert that its very site
was not known until brought to light by the researches of Mariette
Bey, who has done so much to restore the monuments of ancient Egypt.
The approach to it was by an avenue of sphinxes, which led to a vast
subterranean gallery--twenty feet wide and high--and leading two
thousand feet, more than a third of a mile, under the earth. This
long, vaulted passage is hewn in the solid rock--out of which open on
either side a series of chambers or recesses, like side chapels--each
containing a sarcophagus, 15 x 8 feet. These tombs, hollowed out of
the solid granite, are so huge and massive that we wonder how they
ever could have been got there. Yet these great sarcophagi--fit for
the burial places of a long line of kings--were not for the Pharaohs
or the Ptolemies, but for the Sacred Bulls! Thirty of these sarcophagi
have been found, and on the walls are tablets which record the birth,
and death, and burial of each one of these sacred beasts. These were
the gods of Egypt, mother of the arts, and civilizer of the earth!
This great repository of dead divinities is a colossal monument, at
once of the architectural skill of the ancient Egyptians, and of their
degrading superstition.
This single fact is enough to answer those who would imply, if they do
not quite dare to assert, that the inspiration of the Books of Moses
was derived from the Egyptians. It is a favorite theory of certain
writers that Moses, being brought up in Egypt, here obtained both the
Law and the Religion which he gave to the Israelites. No doubt he did
learn much from a country that was at that time the most civilized in
the world. He was brought up in a court, and enjoyed every advantage
of a royal education. He was "learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians." And it detracts not at all from his inspiration, to
suppose that he may have been instructed to embody in his new and
better code whatever was excellent in the older system, and had been
approved by the experience of centuries. The ceremonial laws--such as
those of purification--may have been adopted from the Egyptians. But
these are the mere fringes of the garment of the great Lawgiver. As
soon as we open the Hebrew Scriptures, we find traces of a wisdom such
as the Egyptians never knew. The very first sentence--"In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth"--scatters the fables
of Isis and Osiris, and substitutes for the troop of heathen deities
the worship of One Living and True God. This single declaration marks
a stupendous advance in the religious faith and worship of mankind.
The same first principle appears as the corner-stone of the law given
on Mount Sinai: "I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the
land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other
gods before me."
The second law of the first table breaks in pieces the images of the
gods of the Egyptians: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, nor any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, nor in
the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth." This was spoken
to a people that had just come out of a country where they worshipped
beasts and birds and reptiles, and where the walls of the temples were
covered with the images of all kinds of foul and creeping things.
In this age of the world, and among civilized nations, we cannot
understand the passion for idolatry. Yet it is one of the most
universal and ineradicable instincts of a half barbarous people. They
see tokens of an unseen power in the forces of nature, in clouds and
winds, in lightning and tempest, and they torment themselves with all
imaginable terrors, from which they seek relief and protection in
bowing down to gods of wood and stone.
The Israelites coming out of Egypt, were out of the house of bondage
in one sense, but they were in it in another. They were continually
relapsing into idolatry. The golden calf of Aaron was but an imitation
of the sacred bulls of Egypt. Often they pined for the products of the
fertile valley of the Nile. With nothing but the burning sands beneath
their feet, they might well long for the shade of the palm tree and
for its delicious fruit, and they said, Why hath this man Moses
brought us up to die in this wilderness? It required forty years of
wandering, and that a whole generation should leave their bones to
whiten the sands of the desert, before their children could be wholly
alienated from the worship of false gods. So not only with the
Israelites, but with all nations of men, ages of fiery discipline have
been necessary to bring back the race to this first article of our
faith: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and
earth."
We might follow the comparison through all the tables of the law, to
show how absurd is the pretence that what Moses taught to the
Israelites he first learned from the Egyptians. Tell us, ye learned
antiquaries, where on all these temples, and in all the records which
they have left us, is there any trace of the Ten Commandments?
And yet Egypt is connected very intimately, in history at least, with
the birth of our religion. No other country, except Palestine, figures
so largely in the Bible. Abraham went down into Egypt. Here came the
sons of Jacob to buy corn, and found Joseph ruling in the house of
Pharaoh. And hither centuries later fled the virgin mother with her
child from the wrath of Herod, fulfilling the prediction, "Out of
Egypt have I called my son."
But Religion--the Divine wisdom which at once instructs and saves
mankind--came not from the valley of the Nile. Abraham and Jacob and
Moses saw the Pyramids standing just as we see them now, but they did
not point them to the true God. That knowledge came from a higher
source. "History," says Bunsen, "was born on that night when Moses,
with the law of God in his heart, led the people of Israel out of
Egypt." And not History only, but Religion then came to a new birth,
that was to be the herald of new and better hopes, and of a higher
civilization than was known to the ancient world.