THE RAMESEUM, MEDINET ABOO, AND THE VOCAL MEMNON.
[Illustration: DRY FOOTING.]
The morning after the visit to Karnak an early start was made for the
other side of the river. The party was ferried across in a couple of
native boats to a sand-bank that pushed out some distance from the
shore; the boats grounded in the shallow water, and our friends were
carried on the backs of several Arabs, who gladly accepted the chance to
earn a few pennies by a temporary conversion into beasts of burden.
Everybody landed dry and unharmed with the exception of one unfortunate
individual, whose bearer stumbled just before reaching the solid earth.
Luckily the accident resulted only in a slight wetting. The Arab carrier
demanded a large backsheesh because he waited so long before falling!
There are several temples on the west bank of the Nile, the most
prominent of them being the Rameseum, or Memnonium, and Medinet Aboo.
These two were on the same general plan as the Temple of Karnak, though
less extensive; but, even when compared with Karnak, they are entitled
to very high rank as works of Egyptian art and architecture. In the
neighborhood there are half a dozen or more smaller temples, each
possessing an historical and artistic interest peculiar to itself.
It was a busy time for our friends, as they had a great deal to see in a
few hours. What they saw we will learn from their accounts:
"We had a delightful ride on the donkeys that were waiting on the bank
as we arrived, our way lying through fields such as we have already
described, and afterward passing over a stretch of barren ground--the
border of the Libyan Desert. Doctor Bronson told us while we were riding
along that this was formerly the Libyan suburb of Thebes, and that the
ancient city stood on both sides of the river. Sir Gardner Wilkinson
says it was about five miles long by three in width. It was in its most
flourishing condition during the eighteenth dynasty, and it began to
decline in the eighth century before the Christian era. There is a great
deal of dispute as to its population; but it is said that it could send
out twenty thousand horsemen to battle, and its walls were pierced with
a hundred gates. Its ruins are scattered over a large area, and its
burial-grounds are so enormous that several days would be required for
even a slight examination of them.
[Illustration: RUINS IN OLD THEBES.]
"According to some writers the greater part of the population was on the
eastern or Luxor side, while the western section was the residence of
the kings and royal households; and, consequently, many of the temples
were built there. For the same reason the tombs of the kings were on the
western side, but were placed a considerable distance from the river,
where the character of the limestone rock was such that it could be
readily excavated. Much of the site of the city is now overflowed every
year at the time of the inundation, and in this portion there are only a
few traces of the buildings that once stood there.
"We went through some of the small temples, and then came to the
Rameseum, or Memnonium. It owes its first name to the fact that it was
founded by Rameses the Great, and its second to its dedication to the
worship of Memnon. It is grand enough to have half a dozen names instead
of two, and the honor can certainly be divided between Rameses and
Memnon without any fear that either of them will suffer.
[Illustration: GRAND HALL OF THE MEMNONIUM.]
"It was in the usual form of the Egyptian temples, and its grand court
was not far from fifty yards square. Many of the columns have
disappeared, or lie in ruins, but enough of them remain to show the
magnificence of the original structure.
"The great object of curiosity here is the statue of Rameses the Great,
which stood in the court-yard, and is now overturned and broken. There
are some mysteries about it, and we will try to name them.
"In the first place, no one can guess how the Egyptians managed to take
such a huge block of granite from the quarries and convert it into a
statue. It was a single piece of stone, and represented the King sitting
on his throne (the usual position of Egyptian statues) with his hands
resting on his knees, and his face in that calm repose that a great
ruler ought to exhibit when he has everything his own way. And how large
do you suppose it was?
[Illustration: VIEW IN THE MEMNONIUM, WITH RUINED STATUE OF RAMESES THE
GREAT.]
"We used a tape-line to be sure we were right in our estimates, and
found that the figure was twenty feet across the shoulders and fifteen
feet from shoulder to elbow. The foot was eleven feet from toe to heel,
and the other parts of the statue were in proportion. The throne and
legs are a good deal broken up, but the upper part of the statue down to
the waist is in comparatively good condition. Engineers have calculated
that the whole statue, when perfect, weighed nearly nine hundred tons,
or nearly three times as much as the largest obelisk at Karnak.
Commander Gorringe says that the obelisk he transported from Egypt to
America, and set up in Central Park, New York, weighs two hundred and
twenty-four tons, so you see what a big thing was this statue of
Rameses, which the Egyptians brought down the river from Assouan and set
up in Thebes thousands of years ago.
"When the Persians conquered Egypt, and destroyed many of its cities,
they overturned the statue of Rameses the Great, and proceeded to break
it up; and another of the mysteries is how they managed to break it, as
gunpowder was not then invented, and there is nothing to show that they
possessed any powerful explosives. But break it they did; and it is only
because it was so large, or they were called away on other business,
that they left any part of it for us to open our eyes about.
"If possessing the largest statue ever known in ancient or modern times
makes one happy, Rameses ought to have been as jolly as he was great.
But perhaps he did not enjoy himself much, after all, as he seems to
have been a cruel tyrant, who oppressed his people, and compelled his
prisoners of war to build the temples that remain to mark his greatness.
The inscriptions around this and other temples show him to have been
full of cruelty: he sacrificed prisoners with his own hand, or caused
them to be put to death in his presence; and there is one picture
wherein he is putting out the eyes of several captives, who are held by
cords passed through their nostrils. On the whole, though we should have
liked to look upon Rameses in his great temple, we are not at all sorry
that he belonged to an age long past. If he was a good man for his time,
it was certainly not a good time to live in.
"We have wished ever so much that we could read the inscriptions on the
walls of the temple; but, after all, we need not feel so badly that we
cannot do so, because many learned men have made translations for us.
The pictures tell us a great deal, even without the hieroglyphics; they
make it certain that the King was the most important personage at the
time he lived, and if we believed what they represent, we should
conclude that he did all the fighting, and his army only stood and
looked on. One picture shows him sending a shower of arrows among the
enemy and putting them to flight; and in another he is pulling down the
walls of a fort, as though it was nothing but a toy house built of
corn-cobs.
[Illustration: THE PHALANX OF THE SHETA.]
"There is a picture which is called 'The Phalanx of the Sheta,' which we
could not make much of till it was explained to us, and then we saw
there was a good deal in it. We enclose a drawing of it, so that you can
see how the Egyptians represented things on a plain surface without
perspective.
"The phalanx is represented as a reserve corps close by a fortified
town, which is surrounded by double ditches for protection against an
enemy. On each side of the town there is a bridge over the ditches, and
there are men in the towers of the fort, as if they were expecting to be
attacked. The soldiers in the phalanx are armed with short swords or
knives, and with spears. Doctor Bronson says the swords have a very
close resemblance to the famous bowie-knife of the South-western States
of North America, and it is possible that the inventor of that weapon
got his idea from the ancient Egyptians. Only the front and rear ranks
have weapons, and what the men in the middle are holding out their hands
for we cannot guess.
[Illustration: MEDINET ABOO.]
"We stayed at the Rameseum as long as possible, and would gladly have
ignored the whistle of the conductor summoning us to move on, had we not
feared missing other important sights. We went next to the Temple of
Medinet Aboo, or rather to the temples, as there are two of them
together, one much smaller than the other. The small temple was the work
of several kings, and some of the later ones altered the plans of their
predecessors, so that the architecture is not altogether harmonious.
"Heaps of ruins lie all around, and there is a broken statue of Rameses
II. much smaller than the one we saw at the first temple we visited. The
sculptures on the walls are less interesting than in the Memnonium, and
we did not spend much time over them.
"The great Temple of Medinet Aboo has a raised platform in front, and we
were quite interested in the view from this platform of the plain where
Thebes once stood, and the various objects scattered over it. From the
platform we passed into the temple through a wide gate-way, and found
ourselves in a large court-yard enclosed by broken walls. From the
court-yard we went into what is said to have been the palace of the
king. The conductor called our attention to the sculptures on the walls,
which are quite peaceful in their character, and show that the place was
more a private residence than a temple.
"The pictures represent the great ruler in his retirement; in some of
them he is playing a game of draughts, similar to those at Beni-Hassan
and other places; he is receiving garlands of flowers from the hands of
the ladies of his court, or they are cooling him with fans; and in
nearly every instance he is represented seated in a chair while all
around him are standing. Nobody was allowed to sit in the presence of
the king, if we may believe these pictures, and it is quite probable
that he required all the rules of etiquette to be rigidly observed.
"In the front of the temple there are pictures of a different sort,
where the king is represented sacrificing prisoners or making war on his
enemies. In the large halls of the temple there is a series of battle
pictures which reminded us of those at Karnak, and they show the
captives brought from various countries so clearly that the conquests
of the kings may be readily traced. In one of the pictures the right
hands of the slain are cut off and piled up in order that the king may
see them, and an officer counts them while a scribe notes down their
number. Other pictures show the captured horses, and spears and other
weapons piled up and counted, and we may believe the Egyptians were
quite systematic in their mode of keeping accounts.
[Illustration: AN EGYPTIAN WAR-BOAT.]
"On one of the walls there is a picture of a fight in galleys or
war-boats, and it is said to be the only one of the kind in Egypt. There
are plenty of boats in their paintings and sculpture, but with this
exception they are all engaged in peaceful pursuits. In spite of their
cutting off the hands of the slain for the purpose of arithmetic, the
Egyptians seem to have had some humanity about them after all. The
picture of the naval engagement shows them to have been victorious, and
they are doing all they can to save the men in the sinking ships of
their enemies. Then the king distributes rewards to his officers and
soldiers, and the army marches back to Thebes.
"Perhaps you have had enough of the achievements of the kings who lived
three thousand years ago, and the monuments they left behind them. Well,
there's the whistle, and we'll say good-bye to Medinet Aboo.
"What school-boy has not read about the Vocal Memnon at Thebes--the
sitting statue that greeted the morning sun with its voice? Here it is,
on the plain, some distance in front of the Rameseum, and it is supposed
that an avenue of similar figures once led from the position of the
Vocal Memnon up to the temple. There are two statues side by side, and
they are known as 'the Sitting Colossi,' or simply 'the Colossi,' and
are sufficiently large to be seen at a long distance.
[Illustration: THE COLOSSI DURING AN INUNDATION.]
"Each statue rises about fifty feet from a pedestal at least ten feet
high, so that when they were erected they were doubtless more than sixty
feet above the ground; but the inundations of the Nile have deposited
the earth around them, and the pedestals are completely surrounded. When
the river is at its height the two figures seem to be sitting in a lake.
They were hewn from single blocks of sandstone; but one of them was
injured, either by an earthquake or by the Persian invaders, and was
reconstructed with blocks of stone of the same character as the
original.
"They were made to represent Amunoph III., and were not, as many
suppose, intended for divinities. The one nearest the north was known as
the Vocal Memnon, that uttered a sound every morning when the rays of
the sun fell upon it.
"Sometimes it was obstinate, and for several days refused to speak.
Kings, and princes, and other great men made long journeys to see, and
especially to hear it, and they waited patiently day after day, too, for
its utterance.
"Sometimes, when a very great personage like the Emperor Hadrian came,
it gave forth its utterance twice on the same morning. Then the whole of
Thebes talked of the wonder, and the Emperor was regarded with special
reverence.
"We went to see and hear it, and we did not go at sunrise, as was
necessary to do three thousand years ago.
"We went in the afternoon, and for half a franc an Arab climbed up the
statue and struck a stone that lies in the lap of the figure. We beat
the Emperor Hadrian completely, as we heard the sound a dozen times
instead of twice, and if we had given the Arab a franc he would have
been delighted to pound the stone for half an hour.
[Illustration: EGYPTIAN PRIESTS CLAD IN LEOPARD-SKINS.]
"The sound is what we call a metallic one, like that of a poorly tuned
bell. The whole trick is clearly apparent. A priest was concealed in a
niche behind the stone, where nobody could see him from the ground, and
he could strike the stone at the proper moment without fear of
discovery. Perhaps he went to sleep occasionally, and then the sound was
not heard; or it is possible he was in league with the hotel-keepers of
Thebes, and wished people to stay in town a week or two, instead of
finishing their visit in a day and taking the train to the next place.
At any rate, the Colossi have ceased to be among the wonders of the
world. For thirty centuries they have looked out on the plain of Thebes.
What a pity it is they cannot open their stony lips and tell us what has
passed around them during all that period of time--what changes they
have witnessed, and what generations have come and gone since they first
began their long vigil!"
[Illustration: REAR VIEW OF THE COLOSSI, WITH LUXOR IN THE DISTANCE.]