Chapter XXI: Thebes (1)

We had so long been the sport of destiny that we hardly knew what to make of our good fortune when two days of sweet south wind carried us from Edfu to Luxor. We came back to find the old mooring-place alive with dahabeeyahs and gay with English and American colors. These two flags well-nigh divide the river. In every twenty-five boats one may fairly calculate upon an average of twelve English, nine American, two German, one Belgian and one French. Of all these, our American cousins, ever helpful, ever cordial, are pleasantest to meet. Their flag stands to me for a host of brave and generous and kindly associations. It brings back memories of many lands and many faces. It calls up echoes of friendly voices, some far distant; some, alas! silent. Wherefore--be it on the Nile, or the Thames, or the high seas, or among Syrian camping-grounds, or drooping listlessly from the balconies of gloomy diplomatic haunts in continental cities--my heart warms to the stars and stripes whenever I see them.

Our arrival brought all the dealers in Luxor to the surface. They waylaid and followed us wherever we went; while some of the better sort--grave men in long black robes and ample turbans--installed themselves on our lower deck and lived there for a fortnight. Go up-stairs when one would, whether before breakfast in the morning, or after dinner in the evening, there we always found them, patient, imperturbable, ready to rise up and salaam, and produce from some hidden pocket a purseful of scarabs or a bundle of funerary statuettes. Some of these gentlemen were Arabs, some Copts--all polite, plausible and mendacious.

Where Copt and Arab drive the same doubtful trade it is not easy to define the shades of difference in their dealings. As workmen the Copts are perhaps the most artistic. As salesmen the Arabs are perhaps the less dishonest. Both sell more forgeries than genuine antiquities. Be the demand what it may, they are prepared to meet it. Thothmes is not too heavy, nor Cleopatra too light, for them. Their carvings in old sycamore wood, their porcelain statuettes, their hieroglyphed limestone tablets, are executed with a skill that almost defies detection. As for genuine scarabs of the highest antiquity, they are turned out by the gross every season. Engraved, glazed and administered to the turkeys in the form of boluses, they acquire, by the simple process of digestion, a degree of venerableness that is really charming.

Side by side with the work of production goes on the work of excavation. The professed diggers colonize the western bank. They live rent free among the tombs; drive donkeys or work shâdûfs by day and spend their nights searching for treasure. Some hundreds of families live in this grim way, spoiling the dead-and-gone Egyptians for a livelihood.

Forgers, diggers and dealers play, meanwhile, into one another’s hands and drive a roaring trade. Your dahabeeyah, as I have just shown, is beset from the moment you moor till the moment you pole off again from shore. The boy who drives your donkey, the guide who pilots you among the tombs, the half-naked fellah who flings down his hoe as you pass and runs beside you for half a mile across the plain, have one and all an “anteekah” to dispose of. The turbaned official who comes, attended by his secretary and pipe-bearer, to pay you a visit of ceremony, warns you against imposition, and hints at genuine treasures to which he alone possesses the key. The gentlemanly native who sits next to you at dinner has a wonderful scarab in his pocket. In short, every man, woman and child about the place is bent on selling a bargain; and the bargain, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is valuable in so far as it represents the industry of Luxor--but no farther. A good thing, of course, is to be had occasionally; but the good thing never comes to the surface as long as a market can be found for the bad one. It is only when the dealer finds he has to do with an experienced customer that he produces the best he has.

Flourishing as it is, the trade of Luxor labors, however, under some uncomfortable restrictions. Private excavation being prohibited, the digger lives in dread of being found out by the governor. The forger, who has nothing to fear from the governor, lives in dread of being found out by the tourist. As for the dealer, whether he sells an antique or an imitation, he is equally liable to punishment. In the one case he commits an offense against the state; and in the other, he obtains money under false pretenses. Meanwhile, the governor deals out such even-handed justice as he can, and does his best to enforce the law on both sides of the river.

By a curious accident, L---- and the writer once actually penetrated into a forger’s workshop. Not knowing that it had been abolished, we went to a certain house in which a certain consulate had once upon a time been located and there knocked for admission. An old deaf fellâha opened the door and after some hesitation showed us into a large unfurnished room with three windows. In each window there stood a workman’s bench strewn with scarabs, amulets and funerary statuettes in every stage of progress. We examined these specimens with no little curiosity. Some were of wood; some were of limestone; some were partly colored. The colors and brushes were there; to say nothing of files, gravers and little pointed tools like gimlets. A magnifying glass of the kind used by engravers lay in one of the window recesses. We also observed a small grindstone screwed to one of the benches and worked by a treadle; while a massive fragment of mummy-case in a corner behind the door showed whence came the old sycamore wood for the wooden specimens. That three skilled workmen furnished with European tools had been busy in this room shortly before we were shown into it was perfectly clear. We concluded that they had just gone away to breakfast.

Meanwhile we waited, expecting to be ushered into the presence of the consul. In about ten minutes, however, breathless with hurrying, arrived a well-dressed Arab whom we had never seen before. Distracted between his oriental politeness and his desire to get rid of us, he bowed us out precipitately, explaining that the house had changed owners and that the power in question had ceased to be represented at Luxor. We heard him rating the old woman savagely, as soon as the door had closed behind us. I met that well-dressed Arab a day or two after, near the governor’s house, and he immediately vanished round the nearest corner.

The Boulak authorities keep a small gang of trained excavators always at work in the Necropolis of Thebes. These men are superintended by the governor and every mummy-case discovered is forwarded to Boulak unopened. Thanks to the courtesy of the governor, we had the good fortune to be present one morning at the opening of a tomb. He sent to summon us, just as we were going to breakfast. With what alacrity we manned the felucca and how we ate our bread and butter half in the boat and half on donkey-back, may easily be imagined. How well I remember that early-morning ride across the western plain of Thebes--the young barley rippling for miles in the sun; the little water-channel running beside the path; the white butterflies circling in couples; the wayside grave with its tiny dome and prayer-mat, its well and broken kulleh, inviting the passer-by to drink and pray; the wild vine that trailed along the wall; the vivid violet of the vetches that blossomed unbidden in the barley. We had the mounds and pylons of Medinet Habu to the left--the ruins of the Ramesseum to the right--the colossi of the plain and the rosy western mountains before us all the way. How the great statues glistened in the morning light! How they towered up against the soft blue sky! Battered and featureless, they sat in the old patient attitude, looking as if they mourned the vanished springs.

We found the new tomb a few hundred yards in the rear of the Ramesseum. The diggers were in the pit; the governor and a few Arabs were looking on. The vault was lined with brick-work above and cut square in the living rock below. We were just in time; for already, through the sand and rubble with which the grave had been filled in, there appeared an outline of something buried. The men, throwing spades and picks aside, now began scraping up the dust with their hands, and a mummy-case came gradually to light. It was shaped to represent a body lying at length with the hands crossed upon the breast. Both hands and face were carved in high relief. The ground-color of the sarcophagus was white;[191] the surface covered with hieroglyphed legends and somewhat coarsely painted figures of four lesser gods of the dead. The face, like the hands, was colored a brownish-yellow and highly varnished. But for a little dimness of the gaudy hues, and a little flaking off of the surface here and there, the thing was as perfect as when it was placed in the ground. A small wooden box roughly put together lay at the feet of the mummy. This was taken out first, and handed to the governor, who put it aside without opening it. The mummy-case was then raised upright, hoisted to the brink of the pit, and laid upon the ground.

It gave one a kind of shock to see it first of all lying just as it had been left by the mourners; then hauled out by rude hands, to be searched, unrolled, perhaps broken up as unworthy to occupy a corner of the Boulak collection. Once they are lodged and catalogued in a museum, one comes to look upon these things as “specimens,” and forgets that they once were living beings like ourselves. But this poor mummy looked startlingly human and pathetic lying at the bottom of its grave in the morning sunlight.

After the sarcophagus had been lifted out, a small blue porcelain cup, a ball of the same material, and another little object shaped like a cherry, were found in the débris. The last was hollow, and contained something that rattled when shaken. The mummy, the wooden box, and these porcelain toys, were then removed to a stable close by; and the excavators, having laid bare what looked like the mouth of a bricked-up tunnel in the side of the tomb, fell to work again immediately. A second vault--perhaps a chain of vaults--it was thought would now be discovered.

* * * * *

We went away, meanwhile, for a few hours, and saw some of the famous painted tombs in that part of the mountain side just above, which goes by the name of Sheik Abd-el-Koorneh.

It was a hot climb; the sun blazing overhead; the cliffs reflecting light and heat; the white débris glaring under foot. Some of the tombs up here are excavated in terraces, and look from a distance like rows of pigeon-holes; others are pierced in solitary ledges of rock; many are difficult of access; all are intolerably hot and oppressive. They were numbered half a century ago by the late Sir Gardner Wilkinson, and the numbers are there still. We went that morning into fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, and thirty-five.

As a child “The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians” had shared my affections with “The Arabian Nights.” I had read every line of the old six-volume edition over and over again. I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart. Now I suddenly found myself in the midst of old and half-forgotten friends. Every subject on these wonderful walls was already familiar to me. Only the framework, only the coloring, only the sand under foot, only the mountain slope outside, were new and strange. It seemed to me that I had met all these kindly brown people years and years ago--perhaps in some previous stage of existence; that I had walked with them in their gardens; listened to the music of their lutes and tambourines; pledged them at their feasts. Here is the funeral procession that I know so well; and the trial scene after death, where the mummy stands upright in the presence of Osiris, and sees his heart weighed in the balance. Here is that well-remembered old fowler crouching in the rushes with his basket of decoys. One withered hand is lifted to his mouth; his lips frame the call; his thin hair blows in the breeze. I see now that he has placed himself to the leeward of the game; but that subtlety escaped me in the reading days of my youth. Yonder I recognize a sculptor’s studio into which I frequently peeped at that time. His men are at work as actively as ever; but I marvel that they have not yet finished polishing the surface of that red-granite colossus. This patient angler, still waiting for a bite, is another old acquaintance; and yonder, I declare, is that evening party at which I was so often an imaginary guest! Is the feast not yet over? Has that late-comer whom we saw hurrying along just now in a neighboring corridor not yet arrived? Will the musicians never play to the end of their concerto? Are those ladies still so deeply interested in the patterns of one another’s ear-rings? It seems to me that the world has been standing still in here for these last five-and-thirty years.

Did I say five-and-thirty? Ah, me! I think we must multiply it by ten, and then by ten again, ere we come to the right figure. These people lived in the time of the Thothmes and the Amenhoteps--a time upon which Rameses the Great looked back as we look back to the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts.

From the tombs above we went back to the excavations below. The bricked-up opening had led, as the diggers expected, into a second vault; and another mummy-case, half-crushed by a fall of débris, had just been taken out. A third was found later in the afternoon. Curiously enough, they were all three mummies of women.

The governor was taking his luncheon with the first mummy in the recesses of the stable, which had been a fine tomb once, but reeked now with manure. He sat on a rug, cross-legged, with a bowl of sour milk before him and a tray of most uninviting little cakes. He invited me to a seat on his rug, handed me his own spoon, and did the honors of the stable as pleasantly as if it had been a palace.

I asked him why the excavators, instead of working among these second-class graves, were not set to search for the tombs of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, supposed to be waiting discovery in a certain valley called the Valley of the West. He shook his head. The way to the Valley of the West, he said, was long and difficult. Men working there must encamp upon the spot; and merely to supply them with water would be no easy matter. He was allowed, in fact, only a sum sufficient for the wages of fifty excavators; and to attack the Valley of the West with less than two hundred would be useless.

We had luncheon that morning, I remember, with the M. B.’s in the second hall of the Ramesseum. It was but one occasion among many; for the writer was constantly at work on that side of the river, and we had luncheon in one or other of the western temples every day. Yet that particular meeting stands out in my memory apart from the rest. I see the joyous party gathered together in the shade of the great columns--the Persian rugs spread on the uneven ground--the dragoman in his picturesque dress going to and fro--the brown and tattered Arabs, squatting a little way off, silent and hungry-eyed, each with his string of forged scarabs, his imitation gods, or his bits of mummy-case and painted cartonnage for sale--the glowing peeps of landscape framed in here and there through vistas of columns--the emblazoned architraves laid along from capital to capital overhead, each block sculptured with enormous cartouches yet brilliant with vermilion and ultramarine--the patient donkeys munching all together at a little heap of vetches in one corner--the intense depths of cloudless blue above. Of all Theban ruins, the Ramesseum is the most cheerful. Drenched in sunshine, the warm limestone of which it is built seems to have mellowed and turned golden with time. No walls inclose it. No towering pylons overshadow it. It stands high, and the air circulates freely among those simple and beautiful columns. There are not many Egyptian ruins in which one can talk and be merry; but in the Ramesseum one may thoroughly enjoy the passing hour.

Whether Rameses the Great was ever actually buried in this place is a problem which future discoveries may possibly solve; but that the Ramesseum and the tomb of Osymandias were one and the same building is a point upon which I never entertained a moment’s doubt. Spending day after day among these ruins; sketching now here, now there; going over the ground bit by bit, and comparing every detail, I came at last to wonder how an identity so obvious could ever have been doubted. Diodorus was of course inaccurate; but then one as little looks for accuracy in Diodorus as in Homer. Compared with some of his topographical descriptions, the account he gives of the Ramesseum is a marvel of exactness. He describes[192] a building approached by two vast court-yards; a hall of pillars opening by way of three entrances from the second court-yard; a succession of chambers, including a sacred library; ceilings of azure “bespangled with stars;” walls covered with sculptures representing the deeds and triumphs of the king whom he calls Osymandias,[193] among which are particularly noticed the assault of a fortress “environed by a river,” a procession of captives without hands, and a series of all the gods of Egypt, to whom the king was represented in the act of making offerings; finally, against the entrance to the second court-yard, three statues of the king, one of which, being of Syenite granite and made “in a sitting posture,” is stated to be not only “the greatest in all Egypt,” but admirable above all others “for its workmanship and the excellence of the stone.”

Bearing in mind that what is left of the Ramesseum is, as it were, only the backbone of the entire structure, one can still walk from end to end of the building, and still recognize every feature of this description. We turn our backs on the wrecked towers of the first propylon; crossing what was once the first court-yard, we leave to the left the fallen colossus; we enter the second court-yard, and see before us the three entrances to the hall of pillars and the remains of two other statues; we walk up the central avenue of the great hall, and see above our heads architraves studded with yellow stars upon a ground color so luminously blue that it almost matches the sky; thence, passing through a chamber lined with sculptures, we come to the library, upon the door-jambs of which Champollion found the figures of Thoth and Saf, the lord of letters and the lady of the sacred books;[194] finally, among such fragments of sculptured decoration as yet remain, we find the king making offerings to a hieroglyphed list of gods as well as to his deified ancestors; we see the train of captives, and the piles of severed hands;[195] and we discover an immense battle-piece, which is in fact a replica of the famous battle-piece at Abou Simbel. This subject, like its Nubian prototype, yet preserves some of its color. The enemy are shown to be fair-skinned and light-haired, and wear the same Syrian robes; and the river, more green than that at Abou Simbel, is painted in zigzags in the same manner. The king, alone in his chariot, sends arrow after arrow against the flying foe. They leap into the river and swim for their lives. Some are drowned; some cross in safety, and are helped out by their friends on the opposite bank. A red-haired chief, thus rescued, is suspended head downward by his soldiers, in order to let the water that he has swallowed run out of his mouth. The river is once more the Orontes; the city is once more Kadesh; the king is once more Rameses II; and the incidents are again the incidents of the poem of Pentaur.

The one wholly unmistakable point in the narrative is, however, the colossal statue of Syenite, the largest in Egypt.”[196] The siege and the river, the troops of captives are to be found elsewhere; but nowhere, save here, a colossus which answers to that description. This statue was larger than even the twin colossi of the plain. They measure eighteen feet three inches across the shoulders; this measures twenty-two feet four inches. They sit about fifty feet high, without their pedestals; this one must have lifted his head some ten feet higher still. “The measure of his foot,” says Diodorus, “exceeded seven cubits;” the Greek cubit being a little over eighteen inches in length. The foot of the fallen Rameses measures nearly eleven feet in length by four feet ten inches in breadth. This, also, is the only very large Theban colossus sculptured in the red syenite of Assûan.[197]

Ruined almost beyond recognition as it is, one never doubts for a moment that this statue was one of the wonders of Egyptian workmanship. It most probably repeated in every detail the colossi of Abou Simbel; but it surpassed them as much in finish of carving as in perfection of material. The stone is even more beautiful in color than that of the famous obelisks of Karnak; and is so close and hard in grain that the scarab-cutters of Luxor are said to use splinters of it, as our engravers use diamonds, for the points of their graving, tools. The solid contents of the whole, when entire, are calculated at eight hundred and eighty-seven tons. How this astounding mass was transported from Assûan, how it was raised, how it was overthrown, are problems upon which a great deal of ingenious conjecture has been wasted. One traveler affirms that the wedge-marks of the destroyer are distinctly visible. Another, having carefully examined the fractured edges, declares that the keenest eye can detect neither wedge-marks nor any other evidences of violence. We looked for none of these signs and tokens. We never asked ourselves how or when the ruin had been done. It was enough that the mighty had fallen.

Inasmuch as one can clamber upon and measure these stupendous fragments, the fallen colossus is more astonishing, perhaps, as a wreck than it would have been as a whole. Here, snapped across at the waist and flung helplessly back, lie a huge head and shoulders, to climb which is like climbing a rock. Yonder, amid piles of unintelligible débris, we see a great foot, and, nearer the head, part of an enormous trunk, together with the upper halves of two huge thighs clothed in the usual shenti or striped tunic. The klaft or head-dress is also striped, and these stripes, in both instances, retain the delicate yellow color with which they were originally filled in. To judge from the way in which this color was applied, one would say that the statue was tinted rather than painted. The surface-work, wherever it remains, is as smooth and highly finished as the cutting of the finest gem. Even the ground of the superb cartouche, on the upper half of the arm, is elaborately polished. Finally, in the pit which it plowed out in falling, lies the great pedestal, hieroglyphed with the usual pompous titles of Rameses Mer-Amen. Diodorus, knowing nothing of Rameses or his style, interprets the inscription after his own fanciful fashion: “I am Osymandias, king of kings. If any would know how great I am and where I lie let him excel me in any of my works.”

The fragments of wall and shattered pylon that yet remain standing at the Ramesseum face northwest and southwest. Hence, it follows that some of the most interesting of the surface sculpture (being cut in very low relief) is so placed with regard to the light as to be actually invisible after midday. It was not till the occasion of my last visit, when I came early in the morning to make a certain sketch by a certain light, that I succeeded in distinguishing a single figure of that celebrated tableau,[198] on the south wall of the great hall, in which the Egyptians are seen to be making use of the testudo and scaling-ladder to assault a Syrian fortress. The wall sculptures of the second hall are on a bolder scale and can be seen at any hour. Here Thoth writes the name of Rameses on the egg-shaped fruit of the persea tree and processions of shaven priests carry on their shoulders the sacred boats of various gods. In the center of each boat is a shrine supported by winged genii, or cherubim. The veils over these shrines, the rings through which the bearing-poles were passed and all the appointments and ornaments of the _bari_ are distinctly shown. One seems here, indeed, to be admitted to a glimpse of those original shrines upon which Moses--learned in the sacred lore of the Egyptians--modeled, with but little alteration, his ark of the covenant.

Next in importance to Karnak, and second in interest to none of the Theban ruins, is the vast group of buildings known by the collective name of Medinet Habu. To attempt to describe these would be to undertake a task as hopeless as the description of Karnak. Such an attempt lies, at all events, beyond the compass of these pages, so many of which have already been given to similar subjects. For it is of the temples as of the mountains--no two are alike, yet all sound so much alike when described that it is scarcely possible to write about them without becoming monotonous. In the present instance, therefore, I will note only a few points of special interest, referring those who wish for fuller particulars to the elaborate account of Medinet Habu in Murray’s “Hand-book of Egypt.”

In the second name of Medinet Habu--Medinet being the common Arabic for city, and Habu, Aboo, or Taboo being variously spelled--there survives almost beyond doubt the ancient name of that famous city which the Greeks called Thebes. It is the name for which many derivations[199] have been suggested, but upon which the learned are not yet agreed.

The ruins of Medinet Habu consist of a smaller temple founded by Queen Hatohepsu of the eighteenth dynasty, a large and magnificent temple entirely built by Rameses III of the twentieth dynasty, and an extremely curious and interesting building, part palace, part fortress, which is popularly known as the pavilion.

The walls of this pavilion, the walls of the great forecourt leading to the smaller temple, and a corner of the original wall of circuit, are crowned in the Egyptian style with shield-shaped battlements, precisely as the Khetan and Amorite fortresses are battlemented in the sculptured tableaux at Abou Simbel and elsewhere. From whichever side one approaches Medinet Habu these stone shields strike the eye as a new and interesting feature. They are, moreover, so far as I know, the only specimens of Egyptian battlementing which have survived destruction. Those of the wall of circuit are of the time of Rameses V; those of the pavilion, of the time of Rameses III; and the latest, which are those of the forecourt, are of the period of Roman occupation.

As biographical material, the temple and pavilion at Medinet Habu and the great Harris papyrus,[200] are to the life of Rameses III precisely what Abou Simbel, the Ramesseum, and the poem of Pentaur are to the life of Rameses II. Great wars, great victories, magnificent praises of the prowess of the king, pompous lists of enemies slain and captured, inventories of booty and of precious gifts offered by the victor to the gods of Egypt, in both instances cover the sculptured walls and fill the written pages. A comparison of the two masses of evidence--due allowance being made both ways for oriental fervor of diction--shows that in Rameses III we have to do with a king as brilliant, as valorous, and as successful as Rameses II.[201]

It may be that before the time of this Pharaoh certain temples were used also as royal residences. It is possible to believe this of temples such as Gournah and Abydus, the plan of which includes, besides the usual halls, side-chambers and sanctuary, a number of other apartments, the uses of which are unknown. It may also be that former kings dwelt in houses of brick and carved woodwork, such as we see represented in the wall-paintings of various tombs.

It is, at all events, a fact that the only building which we can assume to have been a royal palace and of which any vestiges have come down to the present day, was erected by Rameses III, namely, this little pavilion at Medinet Habu.

It may not have been a palace. It may have been only a fortified gate; but, though the chambers are small, they are well lighted and the plan of the whole is certainly domestic in character. It consists, as we now see it, of two lodges connected by zigzag wings with a central tower. The lodges and tower stand to each other as the three points of an acute angle. These structures inclose an oblong court-yard leading by a passage under the central tower to the inclosure beyond. So far as its present condition enables us to judge, this building contained only eight rooms; namely, three--one above the other in each of the lodges and two above the gateway.[202] These three towers communicate by means of devious passages in the connecting wings. Two of the windows in the wings are adorned with balconies supported on brackets; each bracket representing the head and shoulders of a crouching captive in the attitude of a gargoyle. The heads and dresses of these captives--conceived as they are in a vein of gothic barbarism--are still bright with color.

The central or gateway tower is substantially perfect. The writer, with help, got as high as the first chamber; the ceiling of which is painted in a rich and intricate pattern, as in imitation of mosaic. The top room is difficult of access, but can be reached by a good climber. Our friend F. W. S., who made his way up there a year or two before, found upon the walls some interesting sculptures of cups and vases, apparently part of an illustrated inventory of domestic utensils. Three of these (unlike any engraved in the works of Wilkinson or Rosellini) are here reproduced from his sketch made upon the spot. The lid of the smaller vase, it will be observed, opens by means of a lever spooned out for the thumb to rest in, just like the lid of a German beer-mug of the present day.

The external decorations of the two lodges are of especial interest. The lower subjects are historical. Those upon the upper stories are domestic or symbolical, and are among the most celebrated of Egyptian bas-reliefs. They have long been supposed to represent Rameses III in his hareem, entertained and waited upon by female slaves. In one group the king, distinguished always by his cartouches, sits at ease in a kind of folding-chair, his helmet on his head, his sandaled feet upon a footstool, as one returned and resting after battle. In his left hand he holds a round object like a fruit. With the right he chucks under the chin an ear-ringed and necklaced damsel, who presents a lotus-blossom at his nose. In another much mutilated subject they are represented playing a game at draughts. This famous subject--which can only be seen when the light strikes sidewise--would scarcely be intelligible save for the help one derives from the cuts in Wilkinson and the plates in Rosellini. It is not that the sculptures are effaced, but that the great blocks which bore them are gone from their places, having probably been hurled down bodily upon the heads of the enemy during a certain siege of which the ruins bear evident traces.[203] Of the lady there remains little besides the arm and the hand that holds the pawn. The table has disappeared. The king has lost his legs. It happens, however, though the table is missing, that the block next above it contained the pawns, which can still be discerned from below by the help of a glass. Rosellini mentions three or four more subjects of a similar character, including a second group of draught-players, all visible in his time. The writer, however, looked for them in vain.

These tableaux are supposed to illustrate the home-life of Rameses III, and to confirm the domestic character of the pavilion. Even the scarab-selling Arabs that haunt the ruins, even the donkey boys of Luxor, call it the hareem of the sultan. Modern science, however, threatens to dispel one at least of these pleasant fancies.

The king, it seems, under the name of Rhampsinitus, is the hero of a very ancient legend related by Herodotus. While he yet lived, runs the story, he descended into hades, and there played a game at draughts with the Goddess Demeter, from whom he won a golden napkin; in memory of which adventure, and of his return to earth, “the Egyptians,” says Herodotus, “instituted a festival which they certainly celebrated in my day.”[204] In another version as told by Plutarch, Isis is substituted for Demeter. Viewing these tales by the light of a certain passage of the ritual, in which the happy dead is promised “power to transform himself at will, to play at draughts, to repose in a pavilion,” Dr. Birch has suggested that the whole of this scene may be of a memorial character, and represent an incident in the land of shades.[205]

Below these “hareem” groups come colossal bas-reliefs of a religious and military character. The king, as usual, smites his prisoners in presence of the gods. A slender and spirited figure in act to slay, the fiery hero strides across the wall “like Baal[206] descended from the heights of heaven. His limbs are indued with the force of victory. With his right hand he seizes the multitudes; his left reaches like an arrow after those who fly before him. His sword is sharp as that of his father Mentu.”[207]

Below these great groups run friezes sculptured with kneeling figures of vanquished chiefs, among whom are Libyan, Sicilian, Sardinian, and Etruscan leaders. Every head in these friezes is a portrait. The Libyan is beardless; his lips are thin; his nose is hooked; his forehead retreats; he wears a close-fitting cap with a pendant hanging in front of the ear. The features of the Sardinian chief[208] are no less Asiatic. He wears the usual Sardinian helmet surmounted by a ball and two spikes. The profile of the Sicilian closely resembles that of the Sardinian. He wears a head-dress like the modern Persian cap. As ethnological types, these heads are extremely valuable. Colonists not long since departed from the western coasts of Asia Minor, these early European settlers are seen with the Asiatic stamp of features; a stamp which has now entirely disappeared.

Other European nations are depicted elsewhere in these Medinet Habu sculptures. Pelasgians from the Greek isles; Oscans perhaps from Pompeii; Daunians from the districts between Tarentum and Brundusium, figure here, each in their national costume. Of these, the Pelasgian alone resembles the modern European. On the left wall of the pavilion gateway, going up toward the temple, there is a large bas-relief of Rameses III leading a string of captives into the presence of Amen-Ra. Among these, the sculptures being in a high state of preservation, there are a number of Pelasgians, some of whom have features of the classical Greek type, and are strikingly handsome. The Pelasgic head-dress resembles our old infantry shako; and some of the men wear disk-shaped amulets pierced with a hole in the center through which is passed the chain that suspends it round the neck.

Leaving to the left a fine sitting statue of Khons in green basalt and to the right his prostrate fellow, we pass under the gateway, cross a space of desolate crude-brick mounds, and see before us the ruins of the first pylon of the great Temple of Khem. Once past the threshold of this pylon we enter upon a succession of magnificent court-yards. The hieroglyphs here are on a colossal scale, and are cut deeper than any others in Egypt. They are also colored with a more subtle eye to effect. Struck by the unusual splendor of some of the blues and by a peculiar look of scintillation which they assumed in certain lights, I examined them particularly and found that the effect had been produced by very subtle shades of gradation in what appeared at first sight to be simple flat tints. In some of the reeds, for instance, the ground-color begins at the top of the leaf in pure cobalt, and passes imperceptibly down to a tint that is almost emerald green at the bottom.[209]

The inner walls of this great court-yard and the outer face of the northeast wall, are covered with sculptures outlined, so to say, in intaglio, and relieved in the hollow, so that the forms, though rounded, remain level with the general surface. In these tableaux the old world lives again. Rameses III, his sons and nobles, his armies, his foes, play once more the brief drama of life and death. Great battles are fought; great victories are won; the slain are counted; the captured drag their chains behind the victor’s chariot; the king triumphs, is crowned and sacrifices to the gods. Elsewhere more wars, more slaughter. There is revolt in Libya; there are raids on the Asiatic border; there are invaders coming in ships from the islands of the Great Sea. The royal standard is raised; troops assemble; arms are distributed. Again the king goes forth in his might, followed by the flower of Egyptian chivalry. “His horsemen are heroes; his foot-soldiers are as lions that roar in the mountains.” The king himself flames “like Mentu in his hour of wrath.” He falls upon the foe “with the swiftness of a meteor.” Here, crowded in rude bullock-trucks, they seek safety in flight. Yonder, their galleys are sunk; their warriors are slain, drowned, captured, scathed, as it were, in a devouring fire. “Never again will they sow seed or reap harvest on the fair face of the earth.”

“Behold!” says the Pharaoh, “Behold! I have taken their frontiers for my frontiers! I have devastated their towns, burned their crops, trampled their people under foot. Rejoice, O Egypt! Exalt thy voice to the heavens; for behold! I reign over all the lands of the barbarians! I, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Rameses III!”[210]

Such, linked each to each, by a running commentary of text, are the illustrations. The story is written elsewhere. Elaborately hieroglyphed in upward of seventy closely packed columns, it covers the whole eastern face of the great north tower of the second propylon. This propylon divides the Osiride and Hypæthral courts, so that the inscription faces those entering the temple and precedes the tableaux. Not even the poem of Pentaur is more picturesque, not even the psalms of David are more fervid, than the style of this great chronicle.[211]

The writer pitched her tent in the doorway of the first propylon, and thence sketched the northwest corner of the court-yard, including the tower with the inscription and the Osiride colossi. The roof of the colonnade to the right is cumbered with crude-brick ruins of mediæval date. The hieroglyphs, sculptured along the architrave and down the sides of the pillars, are still bright with color. The colossi are all the worse for three thousand years of ill-usage. Through the sculptured doorway opposite, one looks across the hypæthral court, and catches a glimpse of the ruined hall of pillars beyond.

While the writer was at work in the shade of the first pylon, an Arab story-teller took possession of the opposite doorway, and entertained the donkey boys and sailors. Well paid with a little tobacco and a few copper piasters, he went on for hours, his shrill chant rising every now and then to a quavering scream. He was a wizened, grizzled old fellow, miserably poor and tattered; but he had the “Arabian Nights” and hundreds of other tales by heart.

Mariette was of opinion that the temple of Medinet Habu, erected as it is on the side of the great Theban necropolis, is like the Ramesseum, a funerary monument erected by Rameses III in his own lifetime to his own memory. These battered colossi represent the king in the character of Osiris, and are in fact on a huge scale precisely what the ordinary funerary statuettes are upon a small scale. They would be out of place in any but a monumental edifice; and they alone suffice to determine the character of the building.

And such, no doubt, was the character of the Amenophium; of the little temple called Dayr el Medinet; of the temple of Queen Hatshepsu, known as Dayr el Bahari; of the temple of Gournah; of almost every important structure erected upon this side of the river. Of the Amenophium there remain only a few sculptured blocks, a few confused foundations, and--last representatives of an avenue of statues of various sizes--the famous colossi of the plain.[212] The temple of Dayr el Bahari--built in terraces up the mountain side, and approached once upon a time by a magnificent avenue of sphinxes, the course of which is yet visible--would probably be, if less ruined, the most interesting temple on the western side of the river. The monumental intention of this building is shown by its dedication to Hathor, the Lady of Amenti; and by the fact that the tomb of Queen Hatshepsu was identified by Rhind some twenty-five years ago as one of the excavated sepulchers in the cliff-side, close to where the temple ends by abutting against the rock.

As for the Temple of Gournah, it is, at least in part, as distinctly a memorial edifice as the Medici Chapel at Florence or the Superga at Turin. It was begun by Seti I in memory of his father Rameses I, the founder of the nineteenth dynasty. Seti, however, died before the work was completed. Hereupon Rameses II, his son and successor, extended the general plan, finished the part dedicated to his grandfather, and added sculptures to the memory of Seti I. Later still, Menepthah, the son and successor of Rameses II, left his cartouches upon one of the doorways. The whole building, in short, is a family monument, and contains a family portrait gallery. Here all the personages whose names figure in the shrines of the Ramessides at Silsilis are depicted in their proper persons. In one tableau, Rameses I, defunct, deified,[213] swathed, enshrined, and crowned like Osiris, is worshiped by Seti I. Behind Seti stands his Queen Tuaa, the mother of Rameses II. Elsewhere Seti I, being now dead, is deified and worshiped by Rameses II, who pours a libation to his father’s statue. Through all these handsome heads there runs a striking family likeness. All more or less partake of that Dantesque type which characterizes the portraits of Rameses II in his youth. The features of Rameses I and Seti I are somewhat pinched and stern, like the Dante of elder days. The delicate profile of Queen Tuaa, which is curiously like some portraits of Queen Elizabeth, is perhaps too angular to be altogether pleasing. But in the well-known face of Rameses II these harsher details vanish, and the beauty of the race culminates. The artists of Egyptian renaissance, always great in profile-portraiture, are nowhere seen to better advantage than in this interesting series.

Adjoining what may be called the monumental part of the building, we find a number of halls and chambers, the uses of which are unknown. Most writers assume that they were the private apartments of the king. Some go so far as to give the name of temple-palaces to all these great funerary structures. It is, however, far more probable that these western temples were erected in connection, though not in direct communication, with the royal tombs in the adjacent valley of Bab-el-Molûk.

Now every Egyptian tomb of importance has its outer chamber or votive oratory, the walls of which are covered with paintings descriptive, in some instances, of the occupations of the deceased upon earth, and in others of the adventures of his soul after death. Here at stated seasons the survivors repaired with offerings. No priest, it would seem, of necessity officiated at these little services. A whole family would come, bringing the first fruits of their garden, the best of their poultry, cakes of home-made bread, bouquets of lotus blossoms. With their own hands they piled the altar; and the eldest son, as representative of the rest, burned the incense and poured the libations. It is a scene constantly reproduced upon monuments[214] of every epoch. These votive oratories, however, are wholly absent in the valley of Bab-el-Molûk. The royal tombs consist of only tunneled passages and sepulchral vaults, the entrances to which were closed forever as soon as the sarcophagus was occupied; hence, it may be concluded that each memorial temple played to the tomb of its tutelary saint and sovereign that part which is played by the external oratory attached to the tomb of a private individual. Nor must it be forgotten that as early as the time of the pyramid kings, there was a votive chapel attached to every pyramid, the remains of which are traceable in almost every instance, on the east side. There were also priests of the pyramids, as we learn from innumerable funerary inscriptions.

An oratory on so grand a scale would imply an elaborate ceremonial. A dead and deified king would doubtless have his train of priests, his daily liturgies, processions, and sacrifices. All this again implies additional accommodation, and accounts, I venture to think, for any number of extra halls and chambers. Such sculptures as yet remain on the walls of these ruined apartments are, in fact, wholly funereal and sacrificial in character. It is also to be remembered that we have here a temple dedicated to two kings, and served most likely by a twofold college of priests.[215]

The wall-sculptures at Gournah are extremely beautiful, especially those erected by Seti I. Where it has been accidentally preserved, the surface is as smooth, the execution as brilliant, as the finest mediæval ivory carving. Behind a broken column, for instance, that leans against the southwest wall of the sanctuary,[216] one may see, by peeping this way and that, the ram’s-head prow of a sacred boat, quite unharmed, and of surpassing delicacy. The modeling of the ram’s head is simply faultless. It would indeed be scarcely too much to say that this one fragment, if all the rest had perished, would alone place the decorative sculpture of ancient Egypt in a rank second only to that of Greece.

The Temple of Gournah--northernmost of the Theban group--stands at the mouth of that famous valley called by the Arabs Bab-el-Molûk,[217] and by travelers, the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. This valley may be described as a bifurcated ravine, ending in two _culs de sac_, and hemmed in on all sides by limestone precipices. It winds round behind the cliffs which face Luxor and Karnak, and runs almost parallel with the Nile. This range of cliffs is perforated on both sides with tombs. The priests and nobles of many dynasties were buried terrace above terrace on the side next the river. Back to back with them, in the silent and secret valley beyond, slept the kings in their everlasting sepulchers.

Most travelers moor for a day or two at Karnak, and thence make their excursion to Bab-el-Molûk. By so doing they lose one of the most interesting rides in the neighborhood of Thebes. L---- and the writer started from Luxor one morning about an hour after daybreak, crossing the river at the usual point and thence riding northward along the bank, with the Nile on the one hand, and the corn-lands on the other. In the course of such rides one discovers the almost incredible fertility of the Thebaid. Every inch of arable ground is turned to account. All that grows, grows lustily. The barley ripples in one uninterrupted sweep from Medinet Habu to a point half-way between the Ramesseum and Gournah. Next come plantations of tobacco, cotton, hemp, linseed, maize and lentils, so closely set, so rich in promise, that the country looks as if it were laid out in allotment grounds for miles together. Where the rice crop has been gathered, clusters of temporary huts have sprung up in the clearings; for the fellahîn come out from their crowded villages in “the sweet o’ the year,” and live in the midst of the crops which now they guard, and which presently they will reap. The walls of these summer huts are mere wattled fences of Indian corn straw, with bundles of the same laid lightly across the top by way of roofing. This pastoral world is everywhere up and doing. Here are men plying the shâdûf by the river’s brink; women spinning in the sun; children playing; dogs barking; larks soaring and singing overhead. Against the foot of the cliffs yonder, where the vegetation ends and the tombs begin, there flows a calm river edged with palms. A few months ago, we should have been deceived by that fairy water. We know now that it is the mirage.

Striking off by and by toward the left, we make for a point where the mountains recede and run low, and a wedge-like “spit” of sandy desert encroaches upon the plain. On the verge of this spit stands a clump of sycamores and palms. A row of old yellow columns supporting a sculptured architrave gleams through the boughs; a little village nestles close by; and on the desert slope beyond, in the midst of the desolate Arab burial-ground, we see a tiny mosque with one small cupola, dazzling white in the sunshine. This is Gournah. There is a spring here, and some girls are drawing water from the well near the temple. Our donkeys slake their thirst from the cattle-trough--a broken sarcophagus that may once have held the mummy of a king. A creaking sakkieh is at work yonder, turned by a couple of red cows with mild Hathor-like faces. The old man who drives them sits in the middle of the cog-wheel, and goes slowly round as if he was being roasted.

We now leave behind us the well, and the trees, and the old Greek-looking temple, and turn our faces westward, bound for an opening yonder among cliffs pitted with the mouths of empty tombs. It is plain to see that we are now entering upon what was once a torrent-bed. Rushing down from the hills, the pent-up waters have here spread fan-like over the slope of the desert, strewing the ground with bowlders, and plowing it into hundreds of tortuous channels. Up that torrent-bed lies our road to-day.

The weird rocks stand like sentinels to right and left as one enters the mouth of the valley, and take strange shapes as of obelisks and sphinxes. Some, worn at the base, and towering like ruined pyramids above, remind us of tombs on the Appian Way. As the ravine narrows, the limestone walls rise higher. The chalky track glares under foot. Piles of shivered chips sparkle and scintillate at the foot of the rocks. The cliffs burn at a white heat. The atmosphere palpitates like gaseous vapor. The sun blazes overhead. Not a breath stirs; neither is there a finger’s breadth of shade on either side. It is like riding into the mouth of a furnace. Meanwhile, one looks in vain for any sign of life. No blade of green has grown here since the world began. No breathing creature makes these rocks its home. All is desolation--such desolation as one dreams of in a world scathed by fire from heaven.