Chapter VI: Buried Royalties (1)

Among the most curious of ancient Egyptian documents are the two papyri, the Abbott and the Amherst, which tell the story of the robberies of the royal tombs at Thebes, which came to light in the reign of Ramses IX, about 1100 B.C. At that time the capital city was ruled, under the Governor, by a certain noble named Paser, who was called “The Prince of the Town.” Western Thebes, however, the City of the Dead, was not under the care of Paser, but was supervised by another official named Pewero, who rejoiced in the title of “Prince of the West.” Between the Prince of the Town and the Prince of the West there was no love lost, as is not uncommon with the heads of two adjacent jurisdictions; and Paser, on the eastern bank of the river, kept his ears open to all the tittle-tattle of discontented workmen from the Necropolis which drifted across the river. It so fell out in the sixteenth year of Ramses IX, that certain thefts from the Necropolis were reported by the Prince of the West to the Governor; and Paser seized the opportunity of making the most to the Council of the laxity of administration which allowed such things, and of suggesting that infinitely worse robberies, involving the Royal Tombs, were occurring under his enemy’s jurisdiction.

A special commission was appointed to investigate the charges, and the importance of the case is shown by the rank of the members of the court. These were Khaemuas, the Governor, “The Royal Vassal Nesamen, Scribe of Pharaoh,” _i.e._ the King’s private Secretary, and “The Royal Vassal Neferkara-em-per-Amen, the Speaker of Pharaoh,” doubtless the King’s Public Orator. This august court went at great length into the charges, and it is impossible to read the account of the case without feeling that Paser had right on his side, though he rather made a bungle of his case. Obviously his information was mainly derived from ill-natured gossip, for it was so inaccurate in detail that the very royal tomb which he positively declared to have been robbed was found on examination to be untouched; but equally obviously there was a great deal going on in the Necropolis which should not have gone on, and Pewero either connived at the thefts or was culpably careless.

On the whole Paser failed to establish his charges, though in one case, to be mentioned directly, there was plain evidence of the violation of a royal tomb. The Prince of the Town took his failure rather badly, and spoke wild whirling words before a riotous deputation of Necropolis workmen, which got him into trouble; but bit by bit the actual truth leaked out, though not in the Commission.

Three years later, in the reign of Ramses X, sixty persons, mainly priests and officials of the Necropolis, were arrested on the charge of complicity in the thefts; and even this big bag of robbers did not bring security to the royal dead. Ere long the priests of the dead kings were frantically hustling the mummies of their dead masters from one tomb to another in the vain attempt to put them beyond the reach of the spoilers, until at last the bulk of the great Theban Pharaohs were gathered, or rather huddled, together, in the obscure shaft of the unfinished tomb of Queen Astemkheb at Der el-Bahri, or in the tomb of Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings.

The kind of treatment which was meted out to the mighty dead by the sacrilegious rascals in the Theban Necropolis is detailed for us in the confession of one of them, a confession extracted, for the rest, by the time-honoured Eastern questionary of the bastinado. “We found the august mummy of this god,” says the thief, describing his work at the tomb of King Sebek-em-saf and his wife Queen Nub-khas, “with a long chain of golden amulets and ornaments round the neck; the head was covered with gold. The august mummy of this god was entirely overlaid with gold, and his coffin was covered both within and without with gold, and adorned with every splendid costly stone. We stripped off the gold which we found on the august mummy of this god, as well as the amulets and ornaments from around the neck, and the bandages in which the mummy was wrapped. We found the royal wife equipped in like manner, and we stripped off all that we found upon her. We burnt her bandages, and we also stole the household goods which we found with them, and the gold and silver vessels. We divided all between us; we divided into eight parts the gold which we found with this god, the mummies, the amulets, the ornaments and the bandages.”

Such was the treatment accorded to a Pharaoh of Egypt by one of his subjects three thousand years ago; a curious commentary on the present-day Egyptian protests against the opening of the royal tombs in the interests of science! But the story of the Ramesside tomb-robberies is only an illustration of two contradictory cravings which are seen working all down the long record of the Egyptian monarchy. On the one hand there is the constant attempt of royalty to secure for itself by the most elaborate precautions that age-long endurance of the physical frame which was deemed a necessary condition for the welfare of the dead king in the Underworld, an attempt which expresses itself in different ways, some of them most wonderful, in the successive periods of Egyptian history; on the other, there is the equally constant and resolute determination of the Egyptian tomb-robber that not all the divinity which doth hedge a king, and especially a Pharaoh, shall keep him from his prey. The Ramesside thief has any amount of lip-reverence for the dead king whose rest he so rudely disturbs; but all the time that he is talking about “the august mummy of this god,” he is stripping the gold and jewels from it, and his accomplices are kindling the fire which will shortly destroy, from an Egyptian point of view, King Sebek-em-saf’s hope of immortality; and the contradiction is an epitome of a good deal in the story of Egyptian royalty.

The most enduring religious feeling in the Egyptian was the craving for immortality; and the most permanent, as it was one of the earliest religious convictions, was that immortality was linked with faith in the god Osiris, who, as the legend ran, had been treacherously slain by his brother Set, had risen from the dead, had been judged and pronounced just by the tribunal of the gods, and thenceforth reigned as the god of the Underworld and the judge of the dead.

The devout Egyptian believed that after death, if the necessary conditions had been fulfilled on his behalf, he was identified with his god, and like him rose again, was justified, and admitted to the Egyptian Elysian Fields. These conditions, briefly stated, were, first, the continuance for as long a period as possible, of the body, in a state as closely as possible resembling that of life. Whether this need, which, of course, was responsible for the characteristically Egyptian practice of mummification, sprang from the belief that the spiritual essence of the dead man might find a resting-place after death in the mummified shell of its living abode, or whether the creation of the mummy was merely, as Professor Peet asserts, a counsel of despair, an attempt to deny death for as long as possible, is not certain; but the attempt to preserve the body, first by the provision of a secure tomb, and later by mummification as well, endures through the whole of Egyptian history. The second condition was the provision of food and drink, and all the comforts of life, for the dead man in his tomb. The third was the equipping of him with all the words of power which would enable him to escape the dangers which haunted the ways of the Underworld, and to pass the ordeal of the judgment, and with amulets which would prove efficacious in warding off the assaults of the demons of the Underworld. Last of all, as in the Elysian Fields there was work to be done, and it was not fitting that a king or a great noble should stoop to manual labour, the dead man had to be provided with simulacra of servants who should answer for him when he was called upon for service, and take upon themselves his burden of labour.

Out of all these conditions there arose gradually the whole wealth of Egyptian funerary equipment, as it is found in the tombs of the great men of the land, and above all in those of the Pharaohs, an equipment whose splendour has dazzled the whole world in the revelations of the tomb of Tutankhamen. From the very earliest times the kings of Egypt were laid to rest with elaborate provision for the wants of the dead monarch, and the provision grew in completeness and complexity with each successive generation, till it reached its culmination in the gorgeous tombs of the Theban Pharaohs of the New Empire, with their hundreds of feet of rock-hewn chamber and corridor, their glittering canopies, their nests of gilded coffins, their wealth of costly amulets and illuminated papyri, their stores of ushabtis, and, at the heart of all, the wonderfully preserved mummy of the man for whom all this magnificence had been prepared.

It may be questioned, however, whether all these precautions did not rather tend to defeat their own end, and whether Pharaoh might not have slumbered in greater security had his tomb been less gorgeous and less richly equipped than he could hope to do when his tomb was a wonder of the world, and when all men knew that wealth untold was stored within its dark depths. At all events we know that from the earliest days of the Egyptian kingdom to the latest the kings were few indeed whose rest was not rudely broken by the sacrilegious hands of robbers. The fate of King Sebek-em-saf, already described, is typical of that of the royal tombs in general. For five thousand years human greed has proved more powerful than human piety or even than human superstition. To-day, the professional tomb-robber of native birth, though his activities are as skilfully conducted as ever, finds a rival in the scientific explorer, whose disturbance of the rest of the royal dead, though there are still many who object to the work as a profanation of what all men should regard as sacred, is at least conducted with as much reverence as possible, and in the interests not of individual greed of gain, but of the general sum of knowledge of the human race.

In this respect the situation should be clearly understood. It is not a question of whether the dead kings of ancient Egypt shall or shall not be allowed to rest in peace in their tombs. That question has been settled, and settled in the negative, for many centuries by the persistent habit of the Egyptians themselves. Robbed the tombs of the Pharaohs (such of them as still remain undisturbed) will inevitably be. That is as sure as death itself. The only question is whether the robbery shall be conducted by ignorant fellahin for the sake of private gain, and in such a fashion that the whole of the results shall be scattered among a score of private collections, and all their historic value forever lost, or whether it shall be conducted in orderly and scientific fashion, the finds duly catalogued in their true order, and gathered together in one great assemblage in a place where they can be studied in their true relation to one another, and to other finds of similar character.

There can be no doubt as to which of these methods is preferable. To deny to the man of science the opportunity of investigating the history, the art, and the life of the past as revealed in the treasures of the royal tombs is simply to make it certain that, without securing in the least the sanctity of the tombs, all the knowledge which might have been drawn from them shall be lost forever to the world. This is the sufficient justification of those excavations which, in spite of all the interest created by their revelations, have so often created also a feeling of repugnance and protest.

The story of the royal tombs of Egypt begins with the excavation of the Sacred City of Osiris, Abydos. The work there is by no means the earliest in point of time of the series of discoveries which have been made in connection with the burial of royalty, though Abydos was one of the sites excavated by Mariette, who revealed to the world the wonderful XIXth Dynasty work of the temple of Sety I there. Much had been discovered at Thebes and at Memphis before Amélineau and Petrie began at Abydos those researches which have revolutionised our knowledge of early Egyptian history and civilisation, and have given back to us several centuries of the story of human effort which had previously been shrouded in darkness; but it seems best to follow the subject down the line of history rather than to follow the order of discovery with its consequent mixing up of all the dynasties and periods.

Up to the nineties of last century, it may be said that practically nothing was known of those earliest Kings of Egypt who reigned before the time of the IVth Dynasty. The history of Egypt began with the Pyramid-builders, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura; and so far as any real knowledge went, Egyptian civilisation sprang, like Athene, full-armed and full grown into being, and offered to the world as its firstfruits the most gigantic structures ever reared by the hand of man.

Obviously this was an impossibility, for things do not happen thus in real life, and the advance of civilisation is a business, not of leaps and bounds, but of slow and ordered progress; but before the Pyramid-builders there was nothing in Egyptian history but a gulf of misty darkness, in which a few dim and mighty shapes could be faintly discerned through the clouds. Manetho, the Egyptian historian of Sebennytos, preserved in the few fragments of his story which have survived the names, and a few more or less incredible legends, of the great men who had lived and reigned before the Pyramid-period; but they were only shadows, and the bulk of what little he told us of them was too fantastic to command any respect. The chief figure of his story was the king Menes, or Mena, who was said to have founded Memphis, and who seemed to have some semblance of reality among the pale shades of the others; but even he came to us in Manetho’s pages in such a questionable shape as to seem more a figure of romance than of fact.

The discoveries of the closing years of the nineteenth century, however, have put an end to all that vagueness, and while our knowledge about the earliest dynastic kings of Egypt is still scanty enough, it is quite solid and real as far as it goes. Not only so, but excavation has resulted in the extension of knowledge to the period before the rise of the earliest dynastic rulers, and such a mass of material has been accumulated bearing on the life of the pre-dynastic Egyptians as to justify Professor Peet’s statement, “it may reasonably be said that we are as well acquainted with the material civilisation of this era as with that of any other in Egyptian history, though at the same time it has to be admitted that our knowledge of its actual history amounts to practically nothing.”

With the pre-dynastic tombs, however, and with their comparatively meagre provision for the dead, we have not to do at present. All that need be said is that the pre-dynastic Egyptian buried his dead in a shallow pit cut in the sand or the soft rock, the body being laid on its side in a crouching posture, the knees drawn up towards the chin, and the hands placed in a supplicating attitude before the face. Around the dead man, who was often covered with a reed mat, were placed the vases for food and drink, the various utensils, flint knives, ivory tablets, and suchlike things which were held to be necessary or useful for him in the life beyond, and above all the carved slate palette which was used for grinding the green face-paint in which the early Egyptian delighted, and the material for making the paint itself.

From these early tombs we have learned that the pre-dynastic Egyptian was far from being an uncultured savage. His funerary equipment, primitive as it is in some respects, shows us that he had already acquired the rudiments of that art of representing human and animal form which was to be carried to such remarkable heights in the dynastic period; he was an accomplished potter, whose vessels, though he was as yet ignorant of the potter’s wheel, are so perfectly moulded by hand that the absence of the wheel is no loss, and who “belonged to one of those rare and happy periods when the craftsman seems incapable of an error of taste, and in consequence almost every form that leaves his hands is a thing of beauty”; and he had an inexhaustible patience and an amazing skill in the working of vessels of the hardest stone which make the pre-dynastic hard stoneware the standard of quality by which all succeeding periods are judged.

The disclosure of the tombs of the true early dynastic period, as distinguished from the earlier tombs which we have been describing, was to come from the Holy City of ancient Egypt--Abydos. The reason for the fact that the royal tombs of this period are to be found in the neighbourhood of a town which was never the capital of the land, and not at such important cities as Memphis or Thebes, is, of course, that Abydos had a sanctity to which no other place in Egypt could lay claim, as the burial-place of the head of the God of the Resurrection, Osiris, after his slaughter and dismemberment by Set. Osiris was not the original god of the dead at Abydos, for there existed, long before his supremacy, the worship of a local god Khenti--“The First of the Westerners,” whose place Osiris usurped, or rather with whom he was identified. But from a very early date Osiris was supreme at Abydos. Every devout Egyptian desired to be buried, if possible, at Abydos, and as close as might be to the burial-place of the God of the Resurrection; if actual burial was impossible, as in the vast majority of cases, the next best thing was to be allowed to set up a memorial slab in the neighbourhood, or to make a pilgrimage, even after death, to the Holy City, before being laid in the less holy ground elsewhere; while if none of these expedients was feasible, at least one could send a little votive vase of common pottery, and have it laid near to the sacred site. Accordingly the Necropolis at Abydos is full of memorials of all periods of Egyptian history, and in particular the ground is so crowded with broken pottery of all ages and types that the Arabs call the place “Umm el-Ga’ab,” “The Mother of Pots.”

It was on this site that M. Amélineau began his excavations in 1895, continuing them till the spring of 1898. He discovered several large chamber tombs, which contained many articles of exquisite workmanship, vases, and plaques in fine stone and in pottery, ebony and ivory tablets, bearing inscriptions in archaic hieroglyphics, and evidence that the tombs had belonged to kings of Egypt earlier in date than the period of the Pyramid-builders. In particular he found the tomb of a king whose name he read as Khent, and whom he identified with Osiris himself, as one of the titles of the god is “Khent-Amenti.” In January, 1898, he found in this tomb part of a skull which he conjectured to be the skull of the god, and on the same day his workmen unearthed a granite bier of familiar Egyptian shape to which he gave the name of “The Bed of Osiris.”

Had these attributions been established M. Amélineau’s discoveries, important enough in themselves, would have been absolutely unique in character. But the somewhat acrimonious discussion which followed the announcement of the finds, established the fact that though he had discovered the tomb of one of the earliest kings of Egypt it was the tomb of a man, and not of a god. The Bed of Osiris proved to be a New Empire copy of some more ancient bier placed there by Egyptians who had made the same mistake as the modern explorer, and imagined that they were restoring the actual tomb of the god of the Underworld. The great discovery thus failed to produce the effect which its importance deserved, and rather cast ridicule upon the possibility of retrieving for serious history the period of the earliest dynasties. M. Amélineau shortly afterwards abandoned his uncompleted task, believing that the site was completely worked out, and for a time Abydos remained without any further attempts to unravel its mysteries.

In the winter of 1899–1900, however, Professor Flinders Petrie began work on the abandoned site, and the results of his patient and skilful study have been of supreme importance for the reconstruction of this earliest period of the history of the ancient Egyptian kingdom. He not only found in the tombs already discovered a great quantity of valuable material, but added considerably to the number of known tombs, and planned with the utmost care all those which came to light. In the main, these royal tombs of the earliest dynasties proved to conform to a single type, though the variations in size and in the number of apartments are considerable. Generally speaking, there is a large central chamber, dug in the soil, and sometimes approached by a stairway. This chamber, which we may believe to have been the actual royal sepulchre, is lined, and sometimes floored, with wood, though in some instances the flooring is of stone, in one case of granite, the earliest known examples of stonework. Around the central chamber are grouped smaller cells, in which were stored the provision for the use of the dead king in the Underworld, or where the bodies of his favourites who were doomed to accompany him in his dark journey were laid after they had been slain during his funeral rites.

The great tomb of King Kha-sekhem of the IInd Dynasty, 223 feet by 54 feet, is unique in the fact that its central chamber, 10 feet by 17 feet, and nearly 6 feet deep, is entirely built of stone, and is the earliest known example of a piece of mason-work. Each tomb, when it was completed and occupied, was roofed with wooden beams, and above it the sand was piled in a low mound, the precursor of the great stone burial mounds which were to appear ere long when the pride of the IVth Dynasty monarchs was no longer content with anything less than a pyramid for its memorial. Above the tomb a pair of grave-steles bearing the king’s name were placed, so that the royal cemetery of Abydos must have presented an appearance not unlike that of a modern churchyard with its mounds and its headstones.

No royal bodies, of course, were found in these earliest tombs. Time and the tomb-robber had done their work too well for that, and the art of mummification was as yet unknown. At a very early date the tombs had been rifled, and some of them burned, no doubt in the process of disposing of the bodies after they had been plundered, as the Ramesside robber disposed of the mummy of Sebek-em-saf. The most unquestionably personal relic discovered was the shrivelled arm of the queen of King Zer, which had been stolen by some robber who had not time to carry off his plunder, and had thrust it into a hole in the tomb wall, where it was found, with its four beautiful bracelets still intact, by one of Petrie’s workmen. What was left in the tombs is simply what previous robbers had not deemed worth the trouble of carrying away. Yet these pieces of pottery, these broken bits of ivory furniture, these ebony and ivory plaques, with their archaic inscriptions, have proved of inestimable importance; for they have enabled us to fashion in our minds a picture, rude enough, no doubt, and sadly lacking in detail, but unquestionably true in its main outline of the earliest ordered civilisation in the history of the world.

We can see that by 3500 B.C., the very latest date to which the Ist Dynasty can be brought down (Petrie dates it from 5500 B.C.), the Egyptian state, under “The Scorpion,” Narmer, or Aha-men, the group of kings who probably stand for the Menes of Manetho’s story, had long and completely emerged from the barbarism which swathed the rest of the world save Babylonia, and possibly Crete, and was already thoroughly organised and master of all its own resources. War, which had produced the union of the two sections of the land, the Delta and the Upper Valley, was carried on, not as a matter of chance razzias, but with the movement of great armies which could sweep a whole populace into their net. The great mace-head of King Narmer records the capture of 120,000 men, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The same king has in his train a Leader of the Ceremonies, a title which shows that the etiquette of the court was already thoroughly organised, and at an early date the Commander of the Inundation shows by his presence that the Egyptian already realised the importance of this great annual event, which, indeed, was no doubt the compelling cause which resulted in the extraordinarily early growth of organisation in Egypt as compared with other lands.

(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]

That the equipment of the royal household was sumptuous and tasteful, and that the personal adornments of the glittering figures who occupied its stage were of the richest material and of the highest artistic quality, even the pitiful relics which have survived are sufficient to assure us. Pharaoh’s palace was adorned with vases and bowls of diorite, breccia, rock-crystal, and alabaster, wrought with matchless skill, and ground to translucent thinness; his furniture was of ebony and ivory exquisitely carved and adorned with hammered gold. Nor was the glow of beautiful colour wanting to the picture; for the Egyptian craftsman had already mastered that art of glazing objects with brilliant colour which his successors practised with such satisfying results. The ladies of the court found that the goldsmith was capable of meeting their desire for costly and tasteful jewellery in a fashion that has never been surpassed, and the bracelets of the Queen of Zer, of amethyst, turquoise, lazuli, and gold, are of fine design and astonishingly good workmanship; while the existence of a Court barber is attested by the plait of false hair which was found in the tomb of Zer, and was perhaps worn by the lady of the bracelets.

The art of hieroglyphic writing was already fully established, and though the hieroglyphics are archaic in form, they are quite intelligible. In many of the tombs are found small ivory plaques, “made by the king’s carpenter.” These are inscribed, each with the records of the events of a single year; so that we have evidence of a regular system of chronicling. The British Museum possesses the lid of the ivory box in which King Semti kept his Great Seal--“The Golden Seal of Judgment of King Den”--so that manifestly official documents were in existence, and had to be authenticated by the royal seal. Of art, nothing on a large scale has survived; but the artist who carved the little ivory statuette of a king (perhaps Semti) wearing the White Crown, and clothed in a long parti-coloured robe, was already, within his limits, a master; and Professor Petrie says of the statuette of Kha-sekhem of the IInd Dynasty, found at Hierakonpolis, “the art of these figures shows a complete mastery of sculpture, the face being more delicately modelled than almost any later work.” Altogether we must conceive of the Court of the earliest Dynastic Kings of Egypt as being organised on a high plane of luxury, and indeed of comparative refinement. There is little that can be called barbaric, save the possible survival of the custom of slaying the king’s favourites to accompany him in his journey through the Underworld.

The results of this exploration of the resting-places of the first buried royalties of Egypt may not in themselves be imposing, when compared with the bewildering wealth of some of the later royal interments; but their importance is not to be measured by mere quantity or richness in the precious metals, but by the fact that they have given to us a revelation of a whole period of human activity which was previously hidden beneath the mists of antiquity. Viewed in this light it becomes apparent that these poor fragments from the tombs of Abydos have a value far exceeding that of many much more gorgeous finds, and scarcely surpassed by the discoveries of any period. They stand, in this respect, on the same level with the revelation of the Minoan civilisation at Knossos, or that of the city-states of Sumer at Lagash.

The search for the buried royalties of Egypt next brings us into touch with the great age of the Pyramid-builders, beginning with Zeser and Seneferu, and extending, with gradually diminishing splendour, down to the last relics of the XIIth Dynasty--a period which has already been dealt with in detail. It is followed by the dark period which witnessed the incursion and supremacy of the Hyksos kings, and the War of Independence--a troubled period from which few relics have survived, though the account of the robbery of the tomb of King Sebek-em-saf of the XIIIth Dynasty, with which our chapter began, shows that the kings of even these dark days were laid to rest with at least something of the ancient splendour of Egyptian royalty.

When we resume our story, we find that two great changes have taken place, one in the course of the national history, the other in the burial customs with which we have to deal. The centre of gravity of the Empire has shifted from the area south of the Delta, embracing Saqqara, Memphis, and the Fayum, to the great city from which the Theban princes had been directing the struggle against the Hyksos; and henceforward, throughout all the most brilliant period of Egyptian history, Thebes remains almost exclusively the royal abode, and, particularly for our purpose, the place where the great monarchs of the New Empire were buried in the midst of all their magnificence.

Along with this political change has gone another, which has completely revolutionised the funerary customs consecrated by so long usage. The resting-place of a Pharaoh is no longer marked by a “star-y-pointing Pyramid,” with its temple and causeway. The tombs of the great nobles of the Middle Kingdom at Beni Hasan and elsewhere had already been indicating a change in the funerary ideal, and the temple of Mentuhotep at Der el-Bahri, with its combination of pyramid and rock-hewn shrine, may perhaps be looked upon as the compromise between the old ideal and the new. Henceforward the actual tomb and the funerary temple were to be separated by the necessities of the locality in which the first was situated. The Temple was to stand by itself, free in the open plain on the western bank of the Nile; the Tomb was to be hidden from human knowledge, so far as possible, in a wild and desolate valley of the Libyan hills behind the plain and its girdling cliffs.

On the western bank of the Nile, opposite Thebes, there lies a great bay of the Libyan cliffs, extending for more than two miles from the ruined palace of Amenhotep III and the temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu on the south, to Drah Abu’l Neggah and the temple of Sety I at Qurneh on the north. From cape to cape of the bay there stretches, like the string of a bow, a row of ruined funerary temples, built by most of the notable Theban Pharaohs. Beyond the line of the string towards the Nile, the two Memnon colossi still keep watch and ward--all that remains of the most gorgeous of all the western temples, reared by the most gorgeous of Theban Pharaohs--Amenhotep III; while between the string and the bow, and clinging close to the curving cliffs, lie the temples of Der el-Medinet and Der el-Bahri. Beyond the northern nock of the bow at Drah Abu’l Neggah, a rugged winding path leads north-westwards into the heart of the hills for about a mile, then turning sharply westwards, it reveals a forked valley, one branch of which is known as the West Valley, and the other and more important as the East Valley. Together these two ravines make up the Biban el-Moluk, or Valley of the Kings, the most famous place of royal sepulture in the world, where for a thousand years the kings of the earliest of world-empires were laid “all of them in glory, everyone in his own house.”

They chose for their resting-place one of the wildest and most barren scenes which it is possible to imagine, a sun-scorched wilderness of rock and tumbled stone, where the heat, reverberated from rock to rock under a sky of brass, is like that of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. But it was not beauty or richness that they were seeking when they came to the Valley of the Kings; it was the security which not even the Great Pyramid had been able to give to the mighty dead. The loneliness and desolation of the place were the very things which prompted its selection; for they sought--how vainly the future was to show--a place where human foot had never trod, and where they might expect that their long sleep would be unbroken by any intruder. The sacrilegious attempts of the type of robber who had scattered to the winds the dust of Khufu they foresaw, and tried, though with only imperfect success, to guard against; what they could not foresee was the advent of the scientific excavator, with a patience which rivals and a skill which far surpasses that of the native plunderer, whose work has put the crown on the lengthy demonstration of the futility of all their pathetic efforts at security.

The type of tomb which is characteristic of the Valley of the Kings is simple enough in its general idea, though its development is sometimes complex enough. An entrance gallery is driven into the rock sloping downwards, the passage-way being sometimes an inclined plane, sometimes a stairway. This corridor is sometimes interrupted by a deep pit, possibly meant to catch any water which might flow in through the doorway, but more probably to render the task of the robber more difficult. Beyond the pit, the passage is continued, and gives access to chambers and halls varying in number and size, until at last the sarcophagus chamber is reached. Of this general type there are all varieties, from the simplicity of such a tomb as that of Tutankhamen, with its short entrance passage, and its scanty provision of poorly decorated rooms, to the complexity of the tombs of Ramses III or Sety I, with their hundreds of feet of corridor and chamber, brilliantly decorated with the finest art which their time could produce.

The decoration of the royal tombs, though often of high quality artistically, is generally of a sombre and gloomy character, differing in this from the brilliant pictures of life which are characteristic of the Old Kingdom tombs of the nobles at Saqqara, or even from some of the private tombs, such as those of Nekht and Rekhmara at Thebes. Generally speaking, the leading conception is that the dead king, accompanied by the sun-god or identified with him, sails in the bark of Ra through the Underworld, bringing light as he passes. On his voyage he is accompanied by all manner of spirits and genii, which ward off the enemies of the soul from the divine boat. The subjects of the illustrations are largely derived from two books of funerary ritual, _The Book of Him Who is in the Duat_ (Underworld), and _The Book of the Gates_, while portions of the _Book of the Dead_ are also illustrated.

These wonderful tombs have always been more or less known in historic times. Strabo mentions that there were in his time forty tombs worthy of a visit, and we may be sure that the bulk of these had already been long rifled, or at least cleared of their contents to avoid the danger of desecration, before the Egyptian Empire ended its long course. The centuries between the visit of the old geographer and that of the scholars of the French Expedition had brought oblivion to the majority of the tombs, for the French explorers mention only eleven, the others having meanwhile got covered up and forgotten.

It is with the coming of Belzoni on his second journey in 1817 that the modern search for buried Pharaohs may be said to begin, and since his discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the work of finding Pharaohs has gone on for more than a century with more or less success, until at the present time something like sixty tombs have been found, including a few which are not royal, and some which are merely pits. The probability is that few tombs remain to be discovered in the Valley, for most of the great royalties of the Empire have now been accounted for in one way or another.

One chance of some importance, however, remains. The last king whom we know to have been buried in the Valley of the Kings is Ramses XII of the XXth Dynasty. In the great _cache_ at Der el-Bahri, which will fall to be spoken of shortly, several of the mummies of kings of the XXIst Dynasty were found, along with those of the earlier and more famous lines; but the actual tombs of the XXIst Dynasty have never yet come to light, and it is possible that some fortunate explorer may yet fall, in one of the desolate valleys among the Libyan hills, on the necropolis of a line of kings who, if they do not fill so great a place in the history of Egypt as their predecessors of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, were yet sufficiently important to make the discovery of their resting-place a matter of great moment.

It was on October 6 that Belzoni began those excavations in the Valley which resulted in the discovery of what is still the finest example of a royal tomb of the Empire. On the 9th he was fortunate enough to discover two tombs of considerable importance, one of them beautifully painted, the other undecorated, but containing some funerary furniture and two female mummies. “Their hair,” says Belzoni, whose summary method of dealing with mummies we have already noticed, “was pretty long, and well-preserved, though it was easily separated from the head by pulling it a little”! On the 11th, this amazingly fortunate man, who knew so little the greatness of his good fortune, entered another tomb, evidently one of still greater importance, which, with its contents, is dismissed in half a page of his story. “We found a sarcophagus of granite, with two mummies in it, and in a corner a statue standing erect, 6 feet 6 inches high, and beautifully cut out of sycamore wood; it is nearly perfect except the nose. We found also a number of little images of wood, well carved, representing symbolical figures. Some had a lion’s head, others a fox’s, others a monkey’s.... In the chamber on our right hand we found another statue like the first, but not perfect.” Thus summarily Belzoni dismisses a discovery which would make most present-day explorers green with envy. What became of the two mummies, the two funerary statues, and the ushabtis, we are not told, but can easily imagine.

These, however, were only the preliminaries of the great find which was awaiting the lucky excavator. On October 16 he started operations at a point about 15 yards from the tomb already mentioned (which would seem, therefore, to have been that of Ramses I), and in a spot which seemed to his workmen most unlikely to yield anything. On the 17th they struck the first indications of a cutting, and on the next day the entrance of a tomb was laid bare. Before the close of the day Belzoni had penetrated into the tomb as far as the antechamber to the first of its pillared halls, where his progress was interrupted for the time by a pit 30 feet deep, which had to be bridged before he could advance further. Crossing it on the next day, he gained access to the rest of the tomb, and the next three weeks he spent as a man in a dream wandering through the chambers of the great tomb, and recording to the best of his ability the wonders which he had been the first to see for nearly three thousand years. His attempts at representation of what he saw were imperfect enough, and his nomenclature of the various chambers is merely paltry. Titles like “The Drawing-room,” “The Room of Beauties,” “The Side-board Room,” seem ludicrously out of place amidst the sombre dignity of Sety’s sepulchre. Still Belzoni cannot be denied the merits of patience and perseverance, and it was no careless worker who spent a whole twelve-month in the stifling atmosphere of a tomb in the Valley of the Kings taking impressions in wax of all the figures on a tomb which measures 328 feet from end to end.

Belzoni attributed the tomb to Necho and Psamtek II of the XXVIth Dynasty, finding evidence to his satisfaction of the attribution in a procession on the walls, in which he saw Persians, Jews, and Ethiopians, all of whom, according to him, “Nichao and Psammethis” had conquered. He was thus a matter of seven hundred years out in his dating of his discovery, for the tomb is that of Sety I of the XIXth Dynasty, and a monument of the art of the New Empire just at that point when it had passed its zenith, and was trembling on the verge of the decadence, though still capable of the wonders of Abydos, which are rivalled by some of the work here. Sety himself, of course, he did not find in the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus which stood in one of the pillared halls of the tomb. Luckily, when we think of how the explorer would probably have treated him, that honourable king and valiant soldier had long centuries before been removed from his splendid underground palace to the obscurer but safer hiding-place where he was discovered in our own time, and treated with a little more reverence than he would have received from Belzoni; but his sarcophagus was in itself a prize more than sufficient to reward the excavator for all the labour he had spent.

“It is a sarcophagus,” says the lucky discoverer, “of the finest Oriental alabaster, 9 feet 5 inches long, and 3 feet 7 inches wide. Its thickness is only 2 inches; and it is transparent, when a light is placed in the inside of it. It is minutely sculptured within and without with several hundred figures, which do not exceed 2 inches in height.... I cannot give an idea of this beautiful and invaluable piece of antiquity, and can only say that nothing has been brought into Europe from Egypt that can be compared with it.” He was not far wrong in his enthusiastic estimate of the artistic value of his find, as anyone who has seen the exquisite piece of carving in the Soane Museum will admit.

The fame of Belzoni’s discovery was not long in reaching the ears of the Turkish officials, and ere long the chief local authority, Hamed Aga of Keneh, appeared upon the scene with a troop of cavalry, having been so eager over the find that he had made the journey in thirty-six hours instead of forty-eight. It was no love for antiquity, however, which had brought him. All the artistic wonders of the tomb were lost on him and his following; but they ransacked every corner of the tomb with great eagerness. After a long search the Aga dismissed his soldiers, and turning to Belzoni, he revealed the true object of his anxiety. “Pray, where have you put the treasure?” he said. Belzoni’s denial of the existence of any such thing was met with an incredulous smile. “I have been told,” said this characteristic specimen of Turkish officialdom, “by a person to whom I can give credit, that you have found in this place a large golden cock filled with diamonds and pearls. I must see it. Where is it?” The explorer at length succeeded in convincing the Aga that there was nothing to lay hands on, and with supreme disgust he rose to leave the tomb. Belzoni asked him what he thought of the beautiful figures which surrounded him. “He just gave a glance at them, quite unconcerned, and said, ‘This would be a good place for a harem, as the women would have something to look at.’” Thirty years later, Layard’s experience of the Turkish official was almost identical with that of Belzoni.

Forty-two years elapsed before anything of importance was added to our knowledge of the buried royalties of Egypt. It was in 1859 the beautiful jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep was rescued by Mariette from the hands of the worthy successor of Hamed Aga, as has already been told. But it was not till 1881 that there occurred the first of those amazing resurrections of the Theban Pharaohs which since then have been repeated on several occasions, culminating with the discovery of the most splendid of all royal burials in the tomb of Tutankhamen.

The story of the 1881 find is one of the romances of excavation, though the credit of it, if there is any, goes, not to the scientific explorer, but to the native practitioner of the gentle art of tomb-robbery. It was in 1876 that evidence began to accumulate, in the shape of various papyri and other articles of XXIst Dynasty date which appeared mysteriously on the market, that the fellahs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh had somehow or other gained access to some royal tomb of that period. The Service of Antiquities took the matter up, and suspicion fell on the members of a family named Abd-er-Rassoul. In April, 1881, Maspero arrested with his own hand Ahmed, one of the members of the family, and committed him to the tender mercies of Daoud Pasha, the third Mudir of Keneh who has appeared in this chapter, but who, unlike his predecessors, comes in on this occasion on the side of the angels, so to speak. Justice, in the Egypt of the eighties, had ways and means of arriving at its ends which seem strange to mere Occidentals, and Maspero covers a good deal in his simple statement that Daoud Pasha carried on the investigation “with his habitual severity.” The Ramesside inspectors, in 1100 B.C., put things more bluntly--“They were beaten with sticks both on their hands and feet”--but probably the facts were not very different in the modern trial. The only result was to produce a flood of testimony that Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul “never had excavated, and never would excavate, that he was incapable of misappropriating the tiniest antiquity, to say nothing of violating a royal tomb,” and the spotless victim of oppression had to be liberated “provisionally.” “The vigour with which the inquiry had been conducted by Daoud Pasha” had, however, impressed the mind of one of the Abd-er-Rassoul family with the conviction that there are cases where honesty, or the best possible imitation of it, is the best policy. Mohammed Ahmed Abd-er-Rassoul came secretly to the Mudir, made a clean breast, or at least a breast as clean as was convenient, to that Rhadamanthus, and on July 5, 1881, Emile Brugsch Bey, representing the Service of Antiquities, at last found the truth about the business, as usual, at the bottom of a well.

He was led by the penitent sinner Mohammed to a lonely spot at the foot of the Libyan cliffs, not far from Hatshepsut’s famous temple at Der el-Bahri. There, after a long climb up the hillside, and the scaling of a high cliff, he found behind a great rock the mouth of a black shaft about 6 feet square, the well of the unfinished tomb of Queen Astemkheb of the XXIst Dynasty; and the story of his experiences may best be told by himself.

“Finding Pharaoh was an exciting experience for me. It is true I was armed to the teeth, and my faithful rifle, full of shells, hung over my shoulder; but my assistant from Cairo, Ahmed Effendi Kemal, was the only person with me whom I could trust. Any one of the natives would have killed me willingly, had we been alone, for everyone of them knew better than I did that I was about to deprive them of a great source of revenue. But I exposed no sign of fear, and proceeded with the work. The well cleared out, I descended, and began the exploration of the underground passage.”

There are many types of courage; but surely not the least remarkable is that of the man of science who allows himself to be lowered on an Arab rope, down a 40-feet shaft, to explore a dark gallery of the dead, while the rope which is his only link with life and light is held above by a man who would cheerfully have left him to keep unending vigil beside the Pharaohs whom he was seeking.

Mohammed’s penitence, however, or perhaps we had better say, his respect for Daoud Pasha’s “habitual severity,” kept him true, and Brugsch had no other terrors to face than those of his strange task. “Soon,” he says, “we came upon cases of porcelain funeral offerings, metal and alabaster vessels, draperies and trinkets, until, reaching the turn in the passage, a cluster of mummy-cases came to view in such number as to stagger me. Collecting my senses, I made the best examination of them I could by the light of my torch, and at once saw that they contained the mummies of royal personages of both sexes; and yet that was not all. Plunging on ahead of my guide, I came to the chamber, and there, standing against the walls, or lying on the floor, I found even a greater number of mummy-cases of stupendous size and weight. Their gold coverings and their polished surfaces so plainly reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was looking into the faces of my own ancestors. The gilt face on the coffin of the amiable Queen Nefertari seemed to smile upon me like an old acquaintance.” “The fellahs,” says Maspero, “had unearthed a catacomb crammed with Pharaohs.” Among the mummies were those of several of the most famous Pharaohs of the New Empire, Seqenen-Ra, the hero of the War of Independence, Amenhotep I, and Queen Aahmes Nefertari, Thothmes II, and Thothmes III, the greatest soldier of Egyptian history, Sety I, Ramses II, and Ramses III, the most famous kings of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties, Pinezem I and Pinezem II of the XXIst Dynasty, Queen Hent-taui, Queen Nezem-Mut, and others.

The question of the removal to a place of security of this astonishing mass of dead royalty presented its own difficulties. The removal had to be as speedy as possible, for now that the secret was out every hour would add to the danger of a violent attack on the shaft, and the dispersal for ever of its previous treasures. Yet the problem of removal was no easy one. The spot where the shaft lies is lonely and difficult of access; and the coffins of some of the kings and queens were of huge size and corresponding weight. That of Queen Aahmes Nefertari, for instance, is 10 feet long, and required sixteen men to lift it.

“Early the next morning,” says Brugsch, “three hundred Arabs were employed under my direction--each one a thief. One by one the coffins were hoisted to the surface, were securely sewed up in sailcloth and matting, and then were carried across the plain of Thebes to the steamers awaiting them at Luxor.”