CENTURY OF EXCAVATION
IN THE
LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
JAMES BAIKIE F.R.A.S.
A Century of Excavation in the Land of the Pharaohs
I. PORTRAIT STATUK OF THOTHMKS III, CAIRO MUSEUM.
A
Century of Excavation
in the
Land of the Pharaohs
JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.
AUTHOR OF "WONDER TALES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD"
LANDS AND PEOPLE OF THE BIBLE," "THE SEA KINGS OK CRETE'
"THE STORY OF THE PHARAOHS," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED WITH 32 PLATES SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR THIS VOLUME
LONDON THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY
4, Bouveric Street, E.C.4
« H-'n'-K-
Printed in Great Britain
BY
William Clowes & Sons, Limited, London and Beccles.
PREFACE
IT is somewhat remarkable that, in spite of the considerable, if spasmodic, interest which is taken in the results of research in Egypt, no adequate account of the work of excavation has ever been written. The student who wishes to learn how, when, and where the facts and objects which interest him were discovered, has himself to excavate the desired information from the innumerable volumes of reports issued by the various exploration societies. It is much to be desired that someone who is master of the subject, and preferably, someone who has had actual experience of the work of excavation, should tell the story, not in a manner suited only to the ears of experts, but so that the educated public on whom in the long run excavation must depend for its resources, could appreciate and enjoy a narrative which ought to be as fascinating as any story of search for buried treasure.
This volume makes no pretension to the dis- charge of such a task. All that it attempts to do is to outline the story of certain aspects of the great work which has given us back so many of the wonders of the ancient civilisation of Egypt. Its omissions are, doubtless, many ; but two will be at once conspicuous to anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with the subject. Nothing is said of the Search for the Cities, which in the
3
4 PREFACE
closing years of the nineteenth century created so much interest, and resulted in so many identifica- tions of sites ; and nothing is said of the great work of Papyrus-hunting which has added so much to our knowledge of ancient life. These two matters were left untouched for reasons which seemed valid. In the case of the Cities, many of the identifications of the 'nineties are at present being questioned, and it seemed better to leave the matter till something like agreement is reached. In the case of the Papyri, the subject has become so specialised, and has developed so large a literature of its own as to render impossible any attempt to deal with it, on the scale which it deserves, in such a volume as the present.
It may be that at some time in the not far distant future, when controversy has resulted in more or less general agreement as to the sites, these two aspects of Egyptian excavation may be dealt with in a volume which may be a sequel and companion to this. My indebtedness to many authorities is manifest on almost every page of the book ; but I wish specially to acknowledge my debt to Professor Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie, D.C.L., F.R.S., not only for the kindness which has allowed me to use the material of several of the plates in the book (7, 9, 10), but also for the constant inspiration and stimulus which his work has given to me, as to so many other students of the wonderful civilisation of Ancient Egypt.
JAMES BAIKIE.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
The Story of the Pioneers ....
CHAPTER II Mariette and his Work .....
CHAPTER III The Beginnings of the Modern Period
CHAPTER IV The Pyramids and their Explorers
CHAPTER V Work among the Temples .....
CHAPTER VI Buried Royalties .......
CHAPTER VII Tutankhamen and his Splendours
CHAPTER VIII Life, Arts, and Crafts in the Land of the Nile
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
7
18 35 48
84 128 177 213
I. Portrait Statue of Thothmes III, Cairo Museum Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
2. Wall of Chamber, Tomb of Sety I, Valley of the Kings 10
3. Detail of Decoration, Tomb of Sety I . . .18
4. Temple of Ramses III, Medinet Habu ... 30
5. Temple of Edfu — The Pylon, and View from the Pylon 40
6. Great Pyramid and Sphinx . . . . .52
7. Gold Pectorals of Senusert II and III, Xllth Dynasty 72
8. Diadems of Princess Khnumit, Gold work, Xllth
Dynasty ........ 80
9. Hatshepsut's Temple, Der el-Bahri. General view . 88
5
6 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE FACING PAGE
I c. North Colonnade, Der el-Bahri ; " Proto-Doric "
Columns ...... 92
11. Reliefs, Der el-Bahri ...... 96
12. Karnak, Avenue of Sphinxes ..... 104
13. Karnak, Nave of Hypostyle Hall . . . .112
14. Karnak, Columns of the Side-Aisle, Hypostyle Hall . 116
15. Karnak, View from the North ; Obelisks of Hatshep-
sut, and Thothmes I . . . . . 1 20
16. Luxor, Forecourt of Amenhotep III . . . .124
17. Luxor, Papyrus-Bud Columns and Colossi of Ramses II 128
18. Colonnade in Temple of Sety I, Abydos . . .136
19. Bracelets of 1st Dynasty Queen, Chain and Gold Seal,
Vlth Dynasty, with Xllth Dynasty Goldsmith's Work . . . . . . . -144
20. Entrance to the Valley of the Kings, Thebes . .148
21. Tomb of Ramses IX, Valley of the Kings . . .152
22. Granite Head of Tutankhamen, Cairo Museum . .178
23. Decoration from a Theban Tomb . . . .184
24. Decoration from a Theban Tomb : Sowing, Reaping,
the Vintage . . . . . . .192
25. Head of the Hathor-Cow, Der el-Bahri . . . 200
26. Colossus of Ramses II, Luxor ..... 208
27. Portrait-Statue of Mentuemhat, Cairo Museum . .216
28. Vth Dynasty Relief-Work, Tomb of Ptah-Hetep . 224
29. XlXth Dynasty Relief-Work, Temple of Sety I,
Abydos 228
30. XlXth Dynasty Relief- Work, Temple of Ramses II,
Luxor ........ 232
31. XXth Dynasty Relief- Work, Temple of Ramses III,
Medinet Habu 236
32. Ptolemaic Relief-Work, Kom Ombos . . . 240
A CENTURY OF EXCAVATION IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS
CHAPTER I
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
THE story of the beginnings of research into the wonders of antiquity in Egypt is unique in at least one point. In no other land does a conquering army march at the head of the pioneers of exploration ; but the true beginnings of the century and a quarter of research which has given to us so many wonders from the Land of the Nile are to be found with that amazing troop of learned camp- followers who accompanied Napoleon's army on the expedition of 1798. The wonders of ancient Egypt had never altogether been blotted from the memory and the interest of man, as was the case with some of the other lands of the Classic East. The pages of Herodotus, never fuller or more vivid than when he is dealing with Egypt, prevented that oblivion ; and therefore Herodotus has some right to be named at the very beginning of the story of the exploration of ancient Egypt
7
8 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
as the pioneer of pioneers. But the world was first really awakened to the richness of the Treasury of Egypt by the colossal production, twelve volumes of plates and twenty-four of text, which was the result of the untiring labours of Vivant Denon and his collaborators — the famous Description de VEgypte — a work almost comparable in scale and grandeur with the monuments which it described. Few armies have left behind them such a memorial of their passage across a land — the more credit to the man whose inexhaustibly fertile brain conceived the idea of making even war subserve the interests of science.
Unfortunately, however, the tie with inter- national strifes and jealousies, which had drawn the French savants originally to the Nile Valley, remained unbroken for many years ; and questions of archaeology were continually com- plicated by questions of national pride and prestige, so that the early story of Egyptian exploration is not the story of pure research, conducted for the love of truth and of antiquity, but very often merely the story of how the representative of France strove with the repre- sentative of Britain or Italy for the possession of some ancient monument whose capture might bring glory to his nation, or profit to his own purse. There are few more melancholy chapters in the story of human frailty than those in which the early explorers of Egypt (if you can dignify them by such a name) describe how they wrangled and intrigued, lied and cheated, over relics whose mutilated antiquity might have
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 9
taught them enough of the vanity of human wishes to make them ashamed of their pettiness.
Dr. Macalister has told us in the Cambridge Ancient History that "it is impossible to give any complete survey of the history of Egyptian excavation." This is true for the later period, because the field is so vast, and the workers are so many ; it is not less true for the beginnings, because it is impossible to write a history of the scufflings of kites and crows — or rather, one might say, of ghouls. It must be almost a nightmare to the modern excavator, with his ingrained appreciation of the importance of even the very smallest object which may add to the knowledge of ancient lands and peoples, to think of the priceless material which was destroyed by the undiscriminating zeal of men like Belzoni, Drovetti, and their fellows, or if not destroyed, at least deprived of half its value by being torn from its historical place and connection. These were the lamentable days when interest in the antiquities of Egypt had advanced but little beyond that displayed by the gentleman of Addison's first Spectator, whose Egyptian researches are thus described by himself — " I made a voyage to Grand Cairo on purpose to take the measure of a pyramid ; and as soon as I had set myself right in that particular, returned to my native country with great satisfaction," or by Lord Charlemont, who according to Johnson had nothing to tell of his travels except a story of a large serpent which he had seen in one of the pyramids of Egypt.
In the early years of the nineteenth century,
io THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
and, indeed, till Mariette in 1858 laid his masterful hand upon the key of the great treasure-house and allowed no one to spoil it but himself, there was a perfect orgy of spoliation carried on, not in the interests of science, but partly out of vanity, and partly out of greed. Every important or noble traveller had to add a few curios from Egypt to his miscellaneous collection gathered from half a dozen other lands, and sculptures, inscriptions, and papyri of the greatest value were thus uselessly dispersed in paltry private collections, where, when they had gratified a passing curiosity or ministered to a momentary spirit of emulation, they were allowed to gather dust through years of neglect, till at last the futile cabinet of curios was dispersed, and its items were lost sight of altogether.
Some collections, such as those of Belzoni, Passalacqua, Drovetti, and a few others, had better fortune, and were finally purchased for one or other of the great European Museums, which nearly all formed the nucleus of their Egyptological collections in this fashion ; but the amount of unnecessary loss of what can never now be replaced must have been deplorable.
This " unbridled pillage," as Maspero justly calls it, in which the consuls of the various European powers played an ignoble but doubtless lucrative part, lasted for more than thirty years, in spite of the protests of men like Champollion, who could understand the irreparable loss which was being inflicted on the infant science of Egyptology by this mutilation and confounding of the documents on which its future depended.
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS u
Among its practitioners were one or two men who were distinguished from the vulgar crowd of papyrus, scarab, and mummy hunters by a certain dim appreciation of the fact that the treasures with which they were dealing had a value greater than that of their price in the curio-market, and who have added at least a few interesting and remarkable items to the mass of Egyptian treasure which the nineteenth century accumulated, though our gratitude to them for this must always be qualified by the fact that we have no certain knowledge of what they lost and destroyed in the process, but can only judge from their own admissions that it must have been far more than they preserved.
Of these men who may be pronounced guilty, but with extenuating circumstances, the most interesting, and perhaps the least harmful, was the inimitable Belzoni, to whose unwearying efforts we owe the opening of the Second Pyramid, the discovery of the tomb of Sety I, the most perfect example of the rock-hewn tomb of a Pharaoh of the New Empire, and the magnificent alabaster sarcophagus of Sety which is one of the treasures of the Soane Museum, London, besides several of the most important royal statues in the Egyptian Galleries of the British Museum. No one who wishes to realise what the young science had to endure at the hands of its first devotees can afford to neglect the extraordinary farrago of vanity and pomposity, ignorance and self-seeking, but also of patience and endurance, and a certain inborn instinct for what was either beautiful or valuable, which
12 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
Belzoni has jumbled together under the sounding title — " Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia."
Belzoni's original object in going to Egypt was simply to get " The Bashaw " to adopt a hydraulic machine for irrigation work — a project in which it is almost needless to say that he failed ; his knowledge of the precious material with which he was soon dealing was nothing at the beginning, and not much more at the end of his " Researches and Operations " ; he had a positive gift for quarrelling with everybody with whom he came into contact, Egyptian or European, and a mania for imputing the vilest motives to anyone who coveted any piece of antiquity on which he had set his own heart ; but with it all he had the flair of the true explorer for a promising site, and could foresee hidden treasures where his rivals dreamed of nothing, and with all his petulance he had a patience which was almost inexhaustible. It was these qualities which have made him the only explorer of those unhappy days whose name is really remembered, or deserves to be remembered, in connection with our knowledge of ancient Egypt.
As to his methods, these, of course, were unspeakable, and the mere mention of them is enough to turn a modern excavator's hair white. He finds the entrance of a royal tomb in the Western Valley of the Kings, and proceeds to open it — with a battering-ram made of two palm- logs ! As to his reverence for the mighty dead of the past one sentence may suffice : " Every
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 13
step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other." Again he describes his journey through a tomb-gallery which the modern excavator would have given his ears to see as Belzoni saw it. "It was choked with mummies, and I could not pass without putting my face in contact with that of some decayed Egyptian ; but as the passage inclined downwards my own weight helped me on ; however, I could not avoid being covered with bones, legs, arms, and heads rolling from above."
The object of these ghoulish journeys was simply to plunder the coffins of their papyri, which, of course, were marketable, though as yet no one could read them ; and there can be little doubt that far more was destroyed than was preserved by methods which were only a little above those of the Ramesside tomb-robbers who stripped the mummies of King Sebek-em-saf and Queen Nub-khas of their jewels, and then burned them. Such was Egyptian excavation in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in the hands of one of its most distinguished practitioners, for Belzoni was an angel of light compared with some of his rivals, native or foreign.
Fortunately, however, the time for such ignorant and sordid exploitation of the treasures of the past was not to last for long ; though it lasted far too long for the welfare of Egyptology. By 1822, Jean Francois Champollion, working on the material supplied by the Rosetta Stone and the Philae Obelisk, and aided to some extent in his brilliant achievement by the previous
i4 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
labours of Akerblad and Young, gave to the world the key to the hieroglyphic inscriptions, so that the Egyptian monuments were no longer dumb. In 1828 came the second great general survey of the monuments under Rosellini and Champollion.
It was now possible to read some, at least, of the inscriptions, and therefore to reach some approach to order in the classification of the monuments dealt with. The work suffered an irreparable loss by the early death of Champollion ; but the results of the expedition, presented in the ten volumes of the Monumenti storichi delV Egitto e delta Nubia constituted a great en- largement of real knowledge as opposed to the conjectures which had previouslv held the field.
For a time after the Rosellini Expedition, the field was left to individual workers, of whom the most notable were two Englishmen, F. E. Perring and Colonel Howard Vyse, whose careful measurements of the pyramids, especially the great group of Gizeh, laid the foundation for all subsequent study of these wonderful structures. The work of Perring and Vyse was done in 1837, and three years later came the important Prussian Expedition directed by Karl Richard Lepsius, whose name must always stand among the foremost on the roll of Egyptology.
Lepsius began with the Pyramid field at Memphis, where his theorising on the method of erection of the pyramids, though perhaps the part of his work by which he is most generally
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 15
known, was of less importance than his investi- gation of the Old Kingdom tombs of the nobles in the necropolis, with its revelation of the life and culture of the Egypt of 3000 B.C. Thence the mission worked southwards, visiting the Fayum, and carrying out investigations as to the whereabouts of Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth.
Passing on up the Nile Valley, Lepsius paid special attention to the tombs of the Middle Kingdom with their valuable pictures of Egyptian life a millennium later than the pyramid period, and also visited the site which has since become so famous as Tell el-Amarna. Not content with carrying his researches to the limit of the Second Cataract, where Rosellini had stopped, he pressed on through Nubia as far as Napata and Meroe, the former seats of that Ethiopian extension of Egyptian civilisation which gave to Egypt its ill-starred XXVth Dynasty, while on his return journey he visited the Sinai Peninsula, where he discovered and published the very valuable inscriptions left by the Egyptian expedi- tions which for many centuries were sent to work the copper mines at the Wady Maghareh and Serabit el-Khadem. He thus revealed to us the first chapter of the wonderful story of Egyptian exploring and commercial activity, whose subsequent disclosures have at last almost succeeded in destroying the time-honoured myth which represented the ancient Egyptians as a cloistered nation, the Chinese of the Near East.
The Denkmdler aus JEgypten und JEthiopen, published from 1849 to 1858, gave to the
16 THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS
world the results of the wonderfully fruitful work of Lepsius, and has scarcely yet been altogether superseded as a source of illustration of the manners and culture of the ancient Egyp- tians. " In the main," says Dr. Macalister, " the statement may stand, that Lepsius exhausted the general topographical study of the country." Subsequent researches have done no more than to add filling in to the broad outlines which he drew with such care and certainty.
But now the period of superficial survey of the wealth of material which Egypt offers to the student was drawing to a close, and was to be succeeded by the period in which excavation, conducted with constantly growing skill and attention to the most minute details, was to do, as it is still doing, what no amount of superficial cataloguing of the monuments of the land could ever do, and to give us back, not only pictures of the life of these ancient days, but the tools and weapons with which the Egyptian worked, fought, and hunted, the vessels which he used for all the purposes of life, the jewels with which he and his women-kind adorned themselves, the books which they read, and the songs which they sang ; all the material from which, if we have the vision and the insight, we may reconstruct the life of those far-off days ; and to crown its gifts by calling up from the tomb the very men themselves who ruled and warred in the land of the Nile in the great days when Egypt was the first of all empires, and her Pharaoh a god incarnate, before whose golden sandals all the lesser kings of the world bowed in the dust " seven times
THE STORY OF THE PIONEERS 17
and seven times." The pioneer of this work, surely the most romantic and interesting, as it has proved not the least fruitful, in the whole realm of scientific research, was the brilliant Frenchman, Auguste Mariette.
CHAPTER II MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
THE story of the life-work of the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the creation of a genuine interest in the great works of ancient Egypt, as distinguished from the aimless or sordid antiquity-grubbing which has been described in the preceding chapter, is one of the romances of science. Mariette was one of those men who, in the words of Cromwell, never go so far as when they do not know whither they are going, and in his early connection with Egypt he was like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to look for his father's asses and found a kingdom. Born in 1821, at Boulogne, and employed as a teacher in the college of his native town, he was drawn to the study of ancient Egypt by the fact that the town museum had acquired a fine Egyptian sarcophagus from the collection of Denon, one of the savants who had accompanied Napoleon's Army of Egypt.
In 1849 he was appointed assistant in the Egyptian Department of the Louvre, and in the following year he was sent out to Egypt for the purpose of buying Coptic manuscripts. The mission, a comparatively trifling one in itself,
18
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 19
was one of those trifles which often prove turning- points in a man's life ; and from the moment when he set foot on Egyptian soil, Mariette's future career was marked out for him.
The thing which determined his fate was a passage from the old geographer and historian Strabo. The god of Memphis, the most ancient capital of Egypt, was Ptah, the artificer-god, who was supposed to become incarnate in the sacred bull Apis. As each successive Apis died, it was buried with all the reverence and splendour due to an incarnation of Divinity, in a special necropolis at Saqqara. Later in the complicated story of Egyptian religion Apis was identified with the god of the Underworld, Osiris, and was called Osiris-Apis, and the Greeks speedily corrupted this into Serapis, and called the burial-place of the Apis bulls the Serapeum.
Now Strabo, in writing his account of Egypt, inserted the following passage about this ancient bull-cemetery. " One finds also [at Memphis] a temple of Serapis in a spot so sandy that the wind causes the sand to accumulate in heaps, under which we could see many sphinxes, some of them almost entirely buried, others only partially covered ; from which we may conjecture that the route leading to this temple might be attended with danger if one were surprised by a sudden gust of wind." While Mariette was
Eursuing his inquiries after Coptic manuscripts, e noticed in a garden at Alexandria several sphinxes, and shortly after, when at Cairo, he came across several more of the same type, while more still were found at Gizeh. It was
20 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
plain that there was somewhere not far off some storehouse of sphinxes which was being plundered to furnish ornaments for the gardens of local officials. The matter lay in Mariette 's mind until one day when he was at Saqqara he noticed the head of a similar sphinx sticking up out of the sand. Searching round about it, he found a libation-tablet, inscribed with a dedication to Osiris- Apis. At once Strabo's statement occurred to his mind, and he realised that he was standing over the avenue of sphinxes which the ancient writer refers to.
Coptic manuscripts went to the winds. With- out apparently asking permission of anybody, " almost furtively," as he says himself, Mariette gathered a handful of workmen, and began the excavation. " The first attempts were hard indeed," he says ; " but before very long lions and peacocks, and the Grecian statues of the dromos, together with the monumental tablets or stela of the temple of Nectanebo, were drawn out of the sand, and I was able to announce my success to the French Government, informing them, at the same time, that the funds placed at my disposal for the researches after the manu- scripts were entirely exhausted, and that a further grant was indispensable. Thus was begun the discovery of the Serapeum."
The passage is entirely characteristic of Mariette, and the calmness with which he assumes that the Government which had sent him out to buy manuscripts will be quite pleased to hear that he has spent all their money on something quite different, and has committed
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 21
them to a huge excavation which was to last four years, instead of to the purchase of a few parch- ments, is particularly delightful. One wonders what were the first thoughts of officialdom at Paris when his letter reached the Louvre, and his chiefs realised the kind of man and the irre- pressible energy which they had let loose in Egypt to spend money on things which they had never dreamed of.
His action at the Serapeum was typical of his whole career in Egypt. When Mariette had once reached the conclusion that a certain object was desirable, nothing was allowed to stand in the way. He went for his object, one cannot always say straight, for he had caution as well as daring, and knew how to use the wisdom of the serpent, but with a resolute determination which seldom failed in the end to accomplish its purpose; and if regulations stood in the way, so much the worse for the regulations. It was this self- reliance and impatience of restraint which were responsible for a good deal of the wastefulness which undoubtedly was a marked feature of his Egyptian work ; but, on the other hand, without these same qualities it is difficult to see how his work could have been accomplished at all, in the face of all the obstacles which were thrown in his way by Oriental lethargy and corruption, and by European jealousy and selfishness.
The great Apis-cemetery which was thus dis- covered by Mariette 's happy disregard of the limits of his commission is all that remains of the original Serapeum. When the place was com- plete, it comprised an avenue of sphinxes at
22 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
least 600 feet in length, leading up to the great temple of Osiris-Apis. No fewer than 141 of the sphinxes were discovered, together with the pedestals of others. The temple had entirely disappeared, having, no doubt, been used as a quarry for other building operations ; but an inclined passage led from one of its chambers downwards into the vast vaults where for centuries the bodies of the dead Apis-bulls were given burial with splendours which rival those of the Pharaohs.
The vaults belong to three periods. In the first, which belongs to the XVIIIth Dynasty, the tombs are separate vaults hewn here and there in the rock ; in the second, which is that of Dynasties XXII to XXV, a long gallery was excavated, on either side of which mortuary chambers were excavated as needed ; in the third (XXVIth Dynasty) the gallery plan is followed, but on a much larger scale. The total length of the galleries of the XXVIth Dynasty is 11 50 feet, and the great gallery alone measures 640 feet in length. In the side chambers are the immense granite coffins, of superb workmanship, which were provided for the last resting-place of the Apis. Twenty-four of these were found in the third gallery. They average 13 feet in length, 11 feet in height, and 7 feet 8 inches in breadth, and weigh not less than 65 tons apiece, magnificent specimens of the engineering skill of the ancient workers who transported these vast blocks from Aswan to Memphis, a distance of almost 600 miles.
The discovery of the Serapeum set the seal
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 23
on Mariette's destiny. Henceforward his life- work was to lie in the excavation and preservation of the relics of that ancient land to which fate had brought him ; but as yet he occupied no official position in the country, and was, indeed, looked upon rather as an unauthorised interloper by the native antiquity-hunters and the foreign officials who encouraged the constant and shame- less pillage which had been going on for half a century. It was in his struggles with these vampires that the great explorer acquired the habits of secret and solitary planning and working which characterised his reign as chief of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and the distrust of all other excavators which led him to forbid all such work even to the most famous scholars or to his dearest friends, and to retain the right to excavate exclusively in his own hands to thejiay of his death.
" Forced to struggle for more than three years," says Maspero in his vivid sketch of his predecessor, " against the jealousy of the dealers of the time and the sharp practices of the Egyptian officials, he was not long in learning and putting into practice all the dodges which the natives employed to track out their rivals or to cheat the treasury. No one knew better than he how to conceal a quest, to pack up the product of it in secret, and to dispatch it without arousing the suspicion of anyone." Curious qualifications for the head of a great Government department ; yet they served him well in what was really a lifelong battle against the rivalry of men of science, who, instead of encouraging him in his
24 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
efforts to set Egyptology on a firm foundation in its native land, did their worst to rob him of the fruits of his labours ; and against the apathy and indifference of his master, who regarded the antiquities which his untiring servant unearthed as valuable only because he could gratify a globe- trotting potentate by the gift of some of them, or in the last resort might raise a loan on the precious treasures of his Museum.
Mariette's appointment as head of the Service of Antiquities was due, indeed, to a piece of skilful wire-pulling in which de Lesseps and Prince Napoleon, afterwards Napoleon III, were concerned ; and Said Pasha gave him the post, not because he cared for his royal predecessors, but because, as Maspero caustically puts it, " he came to the conclusion that he would be more acceptable to the Emperor if he made some show of taking pity on the Pharaohs."
An appointment due to no higher inspiration than self-interest on the part of the giver obviously depended largely on how long self- interest coincided with the interests of the new post ; and perhaps the most arduous part of Mariette's task consisted in trying to make his thoroughly Oriental master see that it was his interest to maintain what he had begun, and in overcoming the whims and caprices, and the secret intrigues which continually threatened to undermine his position and destroy the structure which he was so painfully rearing. He never could get a permanent grant for the work of his department from the Egyptian Government. When money was needed he had always to ask
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 25
it direct from the Khedive, who granted a subsidy or refused it according to the mood in which he happened to be at the moment. Again and again Mariette had to close down his excavations because he had unfortunately approached Said when the Khedive was in a bad temper ; but though the continuance of work under such conditions might have driven the most phlegmatic of men, let alone a mercurial Frenchman, to despair, he never for a moment lost sight of his end. Repulsed once, he only waited a more favourable opportunity to return to the charge, and in the end he was almost invariably successful.
When his work is criticised, as it has often, and not unjustly, been, as hasty and wanting in thoroughness, let it be remembered that, with all its faults, it was done under conditions which would have driven most men mad, and that thoroughness and minute care are not precisely the qualities which are encouraged by the knowledge that the exchequer is empty, and that there is no prospect of being able to pay the workmen unless one can catch a wayward prince in a favourable mood. All things considered, the wonder is, not that so much was overlooked and left undone, but that so much was actually accomplished under such maddening conditions.
His main object was to form such a Museum in Egypt that it would no longer be possible for the representatives of the European powers to excuse their spoliation by the suggestion that Egypt was unable to safeguard her own treasures of antiquity. With this end in view he was indefatigable in the work of excavation, doing
26 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
his utmost to gather from Memphis, Thebes, Abydos, Tanis, and other famous sites, such a collection of historical monuments as should render the creation of a permanent home for them a crying necessity.
Erelong he had so far succeeded that his collection included fine statues of Ramses II, the well-known Amenartas, the so-called Hyksos Sphinxes, the Triumphal Stele of Thothmes III, and a great mass of amulets from the cemeteries of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. To house these treasures he was provided with a set of miserable buildings which were of no use for any other purpose — a deserted mosque which was falling into ruin, some filthy sheds, and a dwelling-house alive with vermin, in which he lived himself. Making the most of this heap of ruins, he improvised pedestals for the statues and cases for the amulets, and turned his early training as a drawing-master to account in the painting of the decorations of his crazy walls.
The incident which finally determined Said to yield to the importunity of his energetic Director of Antiquities was highly characteristic, both of the daring and persistence of Mariette, and the waywardness of the ruler with whom he had to deal. One of the chief hindrances to the erection of the Museum was the fact that the excavations, though highly productive of objects of historic interest, had as yet yielded nothing in the way of gold or jewellery, and Said, a thorough Oriental, cared but little for researches which only produced inscribed or sculptured stones. Early in 1859, Mariette's workmen at
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 27
Drah-Abou'l-Neggah, near Thebes, discovered the splendid gilded sarcophagus of the Queen Aahhotep. Mariette sent orders for it to be sent to Cairo at once ; but meanwhile the Mudir of Keneh had laid hands on it, opened it in his harem, and, throwing aside the mummy, took possession of the fine set of jewellery which the coffin contained, and hurried off by boat to present it to the Khedive as an offering from himself.
Mariette immediately set out on his steam- boat, the Samanoudy to meet the robber. Board- ing the Mudir's boat, he tried to persuade him to give up his ill-gotten goods, and when persuasion failed he passed to threats, and from threats to blows. Finally he triumphed, and took posses- sion of the treasure. Knowing the danger which he ran of having his action represented to the Khedive as sheer robbery of a treasure addressed to the Royal Palace, Mariette took care to be the first to tell the story to his royal master, and did so with such effect that the Khedive thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and laughed heartily at the spoiling of the spoiler. He kept a gold chain for one of his wives, and himself wore for awhile a fine scarab which he afterwards returned ; but the rest of the treasure was reserved, as Mariette wished, for his darling Museum, and the Khedive, now convinced that the collection was worth housing, gave orders for the erection of a suitable building at Boulak.
Thus, by a happy combination of good fortune and daring, the great explorer succeeded in the attainment of at least a part of his heart's desire.
28 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
The buildings at Boulak, however, were far from satisfactory, and his heart was always set on a dream-museum, which he did not live to realise, which indeed has not yet been realised, though the great Egyptian Museum has known two changes of abode since his time, and is now preparing for a fresh extension to house the treasures of Tutankhamen's tomb. In addition, he had to be continually on his guard to see that the priceless things which he had gathered with such pains, and housed at such risk, were not dissipated to gratify his patron's passing whims of generosity towards some favourite guests, or sold en masse to act as security for a loan. Mariette had no intention of allowing his treasures to be treated as pawnbroker's pledges ; but it took all his energy and authority to prevent this happening, for whenever Said was short of money, which happened with unfailing regularity, his first thought was to raise a loan on the Museum, and it was only the Director's personal accepta- bility with his master which enabled him to stave off disaster once and again.
The narrowest escape came just on the heels of what had seemed the greatest triumph of his life. At the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he had secured the first adequate representation of Egyptian antiquities. A small Egyptian temple was built, preceded by a short avenue of sphinxes ; and within the temple were housed trie finest specimens of art and craftsmanship which Egypt could produce. For six months all the world admired and wondered ; then came the blow. Mariette had wrought^too well, and made his
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 29
treasures look too inviting. The Empress Eugenie had cast covetous eyes upon them, and the Khedive Ismail was informed that she desired to have the whole collection offered to her as a gift. Ismail, taken by surprise, and, as usual, short of cash, did not dare to refuse ; but he had the sense to make his consent subject to one condition. " There is," he said to the emissary of the Empress, " someone at Boulak more powerful than I, and you must address yourself to him." It must have been the cruellest of blows to Mariette thus to be wounded in the house of his friends ; but his resolution was proof against both imperial wiles and threats, and the collection returned in safety to its native home. The explorer had saved the treasures of the land of his adoption from the greed of his native land ; but it was at a heavy cost that the victory was gained. The favour of France, which had always been one of his main supports, was immediately withdrawn, and for the next two or three years Mariette found himself in disgrace at the palace, and unable to obtain any support for his schemes. Curiously enough, it was the downfall of France in 1870 which brought him into favour once more with the Khedive, and for the last ten years of his life he saw the work to which he had given himself steadily growing, though on at least one occasion the proposal to raise a loan on the Museum was revived, and though Ismail's grandiose plans for the extension of the buildings remained only dreams, which came through the ivory gate.
In respect to the excavations which he kept so
3o MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
jealously in his own hands, Mariette's energy was amazing, though its results were never so carefully chronicled as they might have been, and were sometimes scarcely chronicled at all. The two greatest charges to be brought against him as an excavator are, first, this lack of adequate publication of his results, a huge mass of precious material being gathered without anything to tell the student its actual provenance, or its historical connection, and, second, the craving for big and imposing results, which led him often to neglect the smaller but often more important material which would have been of priceless value to modern workers, but did not appeal to him, and consequently got overlooked and lost.
With regard to the latter point, however, we must remember that the knowledge of the infinite importance of the small game of the archaeologist is a thing of modern growth, and that it is scarcely fair to blame Mariette for not being a quarter of a century in advance of his time ; and also that the difficulties of his position obliged him to lay stress on the big and imposing monu- ment, even at the cost of neglecting what was really of more value to the serious student. Broken potsherds may mean far more for the reconstruction of history than intact colossi ; but to the men in authority on whom depended the continuance of the excavator's work, they were just-broken potsherds.
Spite of all the defects of his methods, we owe him an infinite debt, both for what he accomplished and for what he hindered others from destroying. The chief fruit of his toil,
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 31
apart from the work at the Serapeum and in the necropolis at Saqqara, was the unveiling at Abydos of the noble temple of Sety I, with its exquisite reliefs, which will always rank among the very finest work of the artists of the New Empire. Besides the excavation of the temple, he did an immense amount of work, very imper- fectly recorded, alas, in the great necropolis of Abydos, where he unearthed over 15,000 monu- ments of one kind or another. It ought not to be forgotten either, though it often has been, and though it has been stated that in his work at Abydos he had no idea of the existence there of any remains of the early dynasties, that it was Mariette who prophesied both the discovery of 1st Dynasty tombs and that of the great subterranean " Pool of Osiris," which is the latest fruit of M. Naville's work there.
Scarcely less important was his work at Thebes, where he for the first time made some approach to establishing the architectural history of the great temple of Karnak from its foundation under the Middle Kingdom down to the close of building under the Ptolemies. To him, also, we owe the excavation of the great temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, and the first beginnings of that huge piece of work which M. Naville and his assistants at Der el-Bahri only completed, after thirteen years' hard labour, in 1908.
How many of the visitors to Hatshepsut's beautiful memorial temple, who wonder at the patience which unearthed this most exquisite of Egyptian buildings, remember that it was Mariette
32 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
who first gave to the world the most interesting part of the whole building with its reliefs of the royal expedition to the Land of Punt ?
To tell of all his work at the thirty-seven places in which he excavated would take a volume, and not a chapter. One of his greatest successes, though it dealt only with a Ptolemaic building, was the excavation of the very perfect temple of Edfu. He found it so completely covered with rubbish that an Arab village had established itself upon the roof of the ancient sanctuary of Horus. Mariette succeeded in getting these interlopers cleared away, and was at last able to reveal the whole of a building, which, while comparatively modern as Egyptian temples go, is yet one of the most complete and perfect specimens of Egyptian architecture, show- ing the almost pure type of temple architecture as it can be seen only in one or two other instances in the whole land.
The great explorer's work in Egypt lasted for almost exactly thirty years. Before his death on January 18, 1881, he had the satisfaction of know- ing that the work of which he had so well laid the foundations would not be interrupted when he had to lay it down. He never, indeed, saw the accomplishment of his great life-dream, the completion of a Museum really worthy of the treasures which he had gathered. Sir Gaston Maspero, his able successor, has told us how that vision hovered round his death-bed, and cheered his last hours ; but even to-day the great Museum at Cairo is scarcely worthy of the matchless stores which it holds, and it is
MARIETTE AND HIS WORK 33
becoming more and more doubtful whether Cairo is the right place for a collection of such priceless value. But at least Mariette accom- plished one thing which will never be undone ; he put a stop to the worst of the pillage of Egyptian antiquities which had gone on unchecked for half a century, and he established the fact that the proper place where the historical monuments of a great nation's past should be gathered is on national soil, where they are at home, and where they have a value which could never be theirs if they were scattered through a score of alien collections.
A noble statue keeps his memory alive in the Cairo Museum. Maspero tells us that a great personage who visited the Museum asked whether this monument was that of a Pharaoh or of a modern individual ; and when he was told that it was the monument of Mariette, the founder of the Museum, " Mariette," said he, " I did not know that the founder of the Museum was a woman ! " Such is fame, even in the land where memories seem to endure longer than in any other spot on earth. But Mariette's worth to the world does not depend on monu- ments, though he had so much to do with them, nor on great personages, though he suffered so much at their hands all his life. It lies in this, that he saved the relics of ancient Egyptian history from the bottomless bog of international jealousies and greed and insisted that a nation with a great past had the right and the responsi- bility to hold the treasures of that past within its own bounds — in trust for the world.
34 MARIETTE AND HIS WORK
" Assuredly," says Maspero, " Mariette is not a model to be blindly imitated ; and the man who should imitate him to-day would run the risk of committing irreparable blunders ; but let anyone who is tempted to depreciate him replace himself in spirit in the Egypt of sixty years ago, and let him ask himself how he would have acted in the midst of the difficulties which would then have assailed him on all sides ; I believe that, if he is an honest man, he will be forced to admit that though perhaps he would have handled matters differently, he would not have come better out of the business. Mariette was the man who fitted the time."
CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN PERIOD
THE coming of Mariette in 1850 marked the close of the old and bad period of reckless pillage in Egypt. His thirty years of ceaseless struggle against difficulties formed the transition period, in which the foundations of the modern science of Egyptology were being laid, but in which its aims and methods were as yet but partially and imperfectly under- stood. With his death in 1881, and the beginning of the reign of his successor, the late Sir Gaston Maspero, we may fairly be said to reach the dawn of the modern period, in which new men and new methods have completely revolutionised the whole conception of archaeology, and made it one of the most fruitful aids to the reconstruction and the comprehension of ancient history, and above all the indispensable interpreter of the life of ancient peoples. It seems fitting, there- fore, that at this point we should stop for a little to consider what archaeology is, and what are its aims, its methods, and its materials ; for with regard to all these points there is, save in the case of those who are more or less students of the past, a very general haziness in the public mind.
35
36 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
To the average man, archaeology might be quite satisfactorily defined as the study of old stones and old bones, potsherds, and fragments of corroded metal — a study presupposing, on the part of the student, a curious and perverted taste for the dry and the dusty and a disregard for all the things which have in them the true sap and joy of life. " Your true antiquarian," it has been said, " loveth a thing the better for that it is rotten and stinketh " ; and this judg- ment, more pointed than polite, fairly represents the conception which most people cherish of the work of the excavator and the interpreter of his results.
Now and again this crude and summary judgment is shaken for a little by some wonderful discovery which seems to hint that there is more in archaeology than the man in the street had thought. Some Pharaoh, like Tutankhamen, is found " lying in glory, in his own house," as Isaiah puts it, and the world in general begins to turn in its sleep and dream for a while of the romance of buried treasure. It may be suspected that no small part of the interest awakened with regard to Tutankhamen's tomb arose from the fact that there was talk of the money value of the find running into millions sterling. A science which can produce assets like that must be worth attention. To tell anyone whose interest has thus been excited that the money value of the find, even if it has not been ridiculously over- estimated, as is most likely the case, is the least important aspect of it, absolutely negligible in comparison with its other values, is merely to
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 37
invite incredulity, polite or otherwise. In any case the temporary interest of the find soon dies away, and the public reverts to its old and normal conception of the archaeologist as an amiable and quite harmless lunatic, and of his study as the dullest and dustiest thing under heaven.
All this, of course, is just about as wrong, and as stupidly wrong, as anything well can be. It is, indeed, exactly the opposite of the truth. The explorer, instead of being inspired with a malignant disregard for the sap and joy of life, is really so enamoured of these very things that one of his main objects is to endeavour to make the world realise tnem not only in the present, but for the past also. His purpose, and his business, if he has any real understanding of the end for which Providence created him (for there are some archaeologists who have not, and who almost justify the worst that the public can believe of their science), is not the mere gathering of facts, but the reconstruction by means of these of the life of the past, for the interest, the help, and the guidance of the present. His work is not complete until he has presented a picture of that ancient world in which he is interested, not as it is now, a handful of unrelated fragments of dry bone and dusty papyrus and mouldering metal, but as it was when the dry bones were alive, clothed with flesh and inspired with spirit, when the words on the scroll throbbed with the hopes and fears of a living man or woman, and the corroded bronze or iron was a sword in the hand of a mighty man of valour, or a chisel in that of a
38 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
cunning sculptor. Unless he keeps this in view as his real object, he is misconceiving his whole purpose, and substituting means for ends ; unless he can to some extent accomplish this (no man, of course, can do it completely) he is failing of his aim.
But we are still waiting for our definition of what archaeology is, and what are the ways in which it is to accomplish this desirable revivifying of the past. It has been defined by a well-known excavator and writer as " the study of the facts of ancient history and ancient lore " — which is very well as far as it goes, but omits, strangely enough, the very point in which its author has shown himself most keenly interested. To com- plete the definition, one would need to add, " and of ancient life in all aspects."
The archaeologist deals with ancient history, and may prove helpful to the historian of the past in many ways ; he deals with ancient lore, and may reveal material which is of the utmost importance for the study of the knowledge and literature of the past ; but his main concern is always with the life of the past, and his main use to the world is to enable the present to see and to realise the life of the past as it really was, to give life again to the men of old so that they shall no longer be names in a dry text-book, but fiesh-and-blood figures, and to do this for the common man of the past as well as for his rulers, so that ancient history shall no longer be the chronicle of the deeds, great or otherwise, of Pharaohs and monarchs of all sorts, but shall give you the whole many-coloured tapestry of
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 39
life as it was in those far-off days with the fates of common men interwoven with the glittering destinies of their lords and masters.
" Archaeological research," says Dr. R. A. S. Macalister in the latest summary of its results, " consists principally in the discovery and the classification of the common things of daily life, houses, personal ornaments, domestic utensils, tools, weapons, and the like." To have said such a thing fifty years ago would have been to make the scientific man of those days hold up his hands in horror at such a degradation of a science whose chief end was the discovery of the great monuments of great men, and the substantiation or correction of history by their means.
To put the change of view in a word, archaeology has during the modern period become human. It has learned that history never existed, and cannot be viewed, in a vacuum ; and that quite as important for its right apprehension of the facts is the realisation of the medium in which the facts transpired, and which largely conditioned them. " The true function of archaeological research," says Dr. Macalister again, " is to discover the conditions amid which lived such heroes of old as we have mentioned ; to show them, no longer as solitary, more or less idealised or superhuman, figures, but as men of like passions to ourselves moving with other men, in a busy world engrossed in its secular interests, and making daily use of the common things of life." To take an illustration from a familiar figure of Egyptian history, we know, as
4o BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
a fact of history, that the favourite son of the mighty Ramses II was Setna-Khaemuast, that he fought in his father's Syrian wars, that about the middle of the reign he was high-priest of Memphis, and that he died somewhere before the fifty-fifth year of Ramses ; in other words, so far as the big records of the historical monu- ments go, he is to us " magni nominis umbra," and no more. The real living interest of the man begins for us with the discovery of a papyrus of the Ptolemaic period, now in the Cairo Museum, which shows him studying the old inscriptions at Memphis in search of magic charms, stealing the roll of Thoth from the tomb of an earlier prince, just like a modern explorer, and getting into trouble over the theft.
" The lofty personages," says Maspero in the Introduction to his charming Contes PopulaireSy " The lofty personages whose mummies repose in our museums had a reputa- tion for gravity so thoroughly established, that nobody suspected them of having ever diverted themselves with such futilities in those days when they were only mummies in expectation." That is just the point. It is not the impassive mummies, with their reputation for gravity, thoroughly well-deserved for the last three thousand years, since they became mummies, that we want to know ; it is the folk who were only " mummies in expectation," who lived and loved, hated and fought, and made fools of themselves, like other people. And the business of archaeology is to snow you these people, in their habit as they lived, and in the ordinary
V IIMl'll. ()!■• I. Dl I llll I'VI.ON, AM> VII \Y FROM Mil I'VI.ON,
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 41
medium which conditioned their actions. If it cannot or does not do that, then it deserves all the vivid abuse which Carlyle used to hurl at the Dry-as-dusts of the past.
Now it is the supreme merit of the modern period that it has been steadily learning the importance of this aspect of its work among the treasures of the past, till now it can say " nothing human is foreign to me." The change of view is set before us very plainly in the contrast between our modern histories of Egypt and those of our forefathers.
Take, for instance, Maspero's Histoire Ancienne, or Breasted's History of Egypt, and compare the brilliant pictures of ancient Egyptian life which you will find in their pages with the dry summaries of events which passed for Egyptian history fifty years ago. What has made the difference ? Simply the fact that in the interval the archaeologist has been learning that his business is not only or even chiefly with the great historical monuments of the land with which he is dealing, but, above all, with the small things which made the background of life, " the pots and pans," as Dr. Macalister puts it, " which are essential if he is to fill in the picture of the ancient life of the region."
The change of view thus brought about is marked by a corresponding change of judgment as to what shall constitute the chief object of search in the excavations which reveal the past to us. In the dawn of excavation it was the big and imposing monument which was eagerly and almost exclusively sought for — very naturally,
42 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
for it was only by the discovery of such relics that the explorer could hope, in the existing state of knowledge, to justify his work, and to create the interest on the part of the public which would provide him with the funds which were needed for its prosecution. Colossal statues, granite sarcophaguses, intact burials in Egypt, winged human-headed bulls, alabaster slabs carved in relief, cuneiform tablets inscribed with legends of the Creation and the Flood in Mesopotamia ; such were the prizes which rewarded and vindi- cated the labours of men like Mariette, Botta, and Layard in the middle of last century. It was all very natural and inevitable, as things then were ; and it is both unjust and unreasonable to denounce the work of such pioneers because they worked with the knowledge and under the conditions of their own time.
The science of excavation and the knowledge of its true objects did not exist when they did their work ; it had to be slowly and painfully created by experience, and in the process it was inevitable that many things should suffer and that there should be much loss of material which a better instructed generation would have known how to value. These great men would doubtless do their work very differently now ; but it is vain to criticise them for not possessing a know- ledge which nobody possessed in their day. We owe them rather our gratitude for that they accomplished so much in such unfavourable circumstances.
There can be no doubt, nevertheless, that the methods of the early excavators, judged from
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 43
the modern point of view, were wasteful to a large degree of the things which we have learned to consider of supreme importance in the study of the past. In their search for the big game of excavation they overlooked, too often with fatal loss to the science of the future, the common things which would have made the indispensable background to their more imposing discoveries, and in many instances what they let slip will never be recovered. To-dav the outlook is entirely changed, and the man who should excavate on the lines of Mariette or Layard would be a hopeless anachronism among explorers. The excavator goes to his work now, not with the hope of finding some great monument which will confirm some doubtful statement of history or disprove some theory of succession, not even with the hope of discovering some store of tablets which will let new light in on a dark period. Such things may of course be found, and are welcomed when they are found ; and such discoveries as that of the tomb of Tutan- khamen tell us that the romance of exploration is by no means a thing of the past. But the modern explorer has learned the infinite importance of little things, and the. results for which he mainly hopes are such things as would be heartily despised by the casual and uninstructed beholder. Perhaps the change may be expressed most simply by saying that while the explorer of two generations back looked for colossi, his present- day successor looks for crockery.
It may seem that from a science thus occupied and concerned mainly with the infinitely little,
44 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
the romance of the early days of exploration has departed ; but this is to misunderstand the situa- tion. The explorer's work was never romantic in the sense in which the average man understands the word. The idea of the excavator as a man who spends his days in exploring wonderful underground chambers filled with the treasures of the past, is just about as true as the picture of the great detective who is always unravelling the mysteries of crime by the most amazing strokes of genius, and landing himself incidentally in the most appalling situations. There never was such an explorer, or such a detective ; and the life of the one as of the other is mainly one of monotonous drudgery at which most of the folk who talk about romance would shudder. The great thrilling moments, when a discovery which will excite the imagination of the world is made, have always been far between, and the finding of Tutankhamen's tomb has shown that they may still come to the modern explorer just as richly as to his predecessor. But the true romance of modern excavation lies in this, not that it can reveal the dead monarchs of thirty centuries back in all their splendour, but that by its patient piecing together of innumerable small details it can give back to us the actual life of the period in which the dead monarch lived, and let us see the order of his court, and what is far more important to our knowledge of the past, the traffic of the market-place in his cities, and the intercourse of his land with the nations around it. It is scarcely too much to say that because of the minute care with which the modern
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 45
excavator has treated the minutest fragments of the relics of ancient days we are better acquainted with the life of the Egypt of the New Empire than we are with that of the ordinary European nation of the Dark Ages, though the latter be more than two millenniums nearer us in time. A science which can accomplish such a miracle of resurrection can never lack the element of true romance in the eyes of anyone who has a real sense of the wonder of life.
It follows from the fact that the modern excavator is called to deal with such a multitude of matters, each in itself perhaps comparatively insignificant, but each of importance, as an additional stroke in the picture of the past which is being slowly built up on the canvas, that far more extensive qualifications are exacted of him than sufficed for his predecessor. " Our explorer in Egypt," says Miss Amelia Edwards, " is only called upon to be an ' all-round ' archaeologist within the field of the national history : namely, from the time of Mena, the prototype of Egyptian royalty, who probably reigned about five thousand years before Christ, down to the time of the Emperor Theodosius, Anno Domini 379. Yet even within that limit, he has to know about a vast number of things. He must be familiar with all the styles and periods of Egyptian architecture, sculpture and decoration ; with the forms, patterns and glazes of Egyptian pottery ; with the distinctive characteristics of the mummy-cases, sarcophagi, methods of em- balmment and styles of bandaging peculiar to interments of various epochs ; and with all
46 BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD
phases of the art of writing, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Nor is this all. He must know by the measurement of a mud brick, by the colour of a glass bead, by the modelling of a porcelain statuette, by the pattern of an ear- ring, to what period each should be assigned. He must be conversant with all the types of all the gods ; and last, not least, he must be able to recognise a forgery at first sight. After this, it must, I think, be admitted that the explorer, like the poet, is ' born, not made ' ! The wonder perhaps is that he should ever be born at all."
It seems, no doubt, a sufficiently formidable catalogue of qualifications ; but to Miss Edwards' list others would now have to be added. For the progress of investigation of the inter-relation of the nations of the ancient east has broken down the limitation which she imposed upon the knowledge of her imaginary explorer, and the Egyptian excavator of the present day must be familiar, not only with all that has been men- tioned, but with the related work of Mesopotamia and Babylonia, with the art of the brilliant Minoan craftsman, with all that is known of the enigmatic Hittite civilisation, and with the art, both archaic and mature, of Greece, together with a score of other related matters !
All this development of a science which has grown almost within the lifetime of some of its exponents from a comparatively simple thing to one of the most complex and exacting of human studies, has, of course, been the work of many minds and hands. But if the name of any one man must be associated with modern excavation
BEGINNINGS OF MODERN PERIOD 47
as that of the chief begetter of its principles and methods, it must be the name of Professor Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie. It was he, as one of the most brilliant of the exponents of his methods has recently stated, who first called the attention of modern excavators to the importance of " unconsidered trifles," as means for the recon- struction of the past. Above all, it was he who first taught us tnat for purposes of certainty in the establishment of the succession of different periods, the " broken earthenware " of a people may be of far greater value than its most gigantic monuments. And it has been men trained in the principles which he established who have during the last generation been doing the work which has made the past of the Classic East a living thing to the world of to-day. It remains now to trace the outline of their accomplishment in Egypt.
CHAPTER IV THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
OF all the works of man there is none which has attained such lasting and universal fame as the group of build- ings known as the Pyramids of Gizeh. For the best part of five thousand years this group of mighty structures has been one of the wonders of the world, and the theories which have been framed to account for their existence have been more numerous than the Pyramids themselves. Egypt has many buildings far more beautiful, and perhaps as wonderful ; but the Pyramids are, to the great majority of people, the character- istic buildings of the land, and whenever Egypt is named there rises before the mind at once a vision of three vast bulks of masonry squatting defiantly on the rising ground above the Libyan desert, as though challenging Time himself to make any impression on their stupendous mass. " All things dread Time," it has been said, " but Time itself dreads the Pyramids " ; and the very exaggeration testifies to the profound impression which their bulk and strength have made upon the mind of man. The mere lapse of forty-five centuries would seemingly of itself
48
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 49
have made next to no impression on them ; the vandalism of man has done a little more ; but even the efforts of those who for many centuries have used the vast masses as a convenient quarry have done little more than show more con- vincingly the power and skill of the builders who reared in the beginning these huge mausoleums around whose bases the workers of succeeding generations have pottered and scratched like children playing with toy spades in the sand.
Yet though the Pyramids may fairly claim to be the most famous and the best-known buildings in the world, the ignorance in the average mind with regard to them and the purpose for which they were reared is still just about as general and widespread as the fame of them ; and the purpose of this chapter is, first, to tell what, and how many, and of what kind they are ; next, what was the end for which they were reared in the beginning of history ; and lastly, to recount something of the efforts which have taught us what is really known about them.
To most people the Pyramids mean solely the great group at Gizeh ; but though these are by far the greatest and the most famous, they are by no means the only pyramids, nor are they even the oldest. The chief field, known as the Great Pyramid Field, begins almost opposite Cairo, on the western side of the Nile, at Abu Roash, where is the pyramid of Dadefra (Razedef) of the IVth Dynasty, and extends south along the bank of the Nile for a distance of about sixty miles to the Fayum, where lie the pyramids
D
5o PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
of the great Xllth Dynasty Pharaohs, the last of the regular kings of Egypt to build pyramids for themselves. Far to the south again in the country which we know as the Soudan, there lie two other pyramid fields, the one at Gebel Barkal or Napata, near to the Fourth Cataract, the other at Begarawiyah, the ancient Meroe, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and a little more than a hundred miles north of Khartoum. These two fields have neither the greatness of scale nor the historic importance and interest of the Great Pyramid Field, for they belong to the Ethiopian kings, some of whom, for a time, reigned over Egypt in the days of its decline. The Napata group belongs to the earlier Ethiopian monarchs, who founded the XXVth Egyptian Dynasty, which was finally driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians in the reign of Tanutamen, and to their successors, who after the disasters of 66 1 B.C. maintained the old Ethiopian sovereignty in the south ; the Meroe group belongs to the later Ethiopian kings who reigned after 300 B.C. As things go in Egypt, therefore, these southern pyramids are quite modern, nor do they belong to the most interesting period of Egyptian history, and though they have been long known, they are only now in process of being investigated by the Harvard- Boston Expedition under G. A. Reisner, whose work at Begarawiyah is still unfinished. Our attention, therefore, may be given solely to the Great Pyramid Field.
Beginning with Abu Roash, the next site of importance is Gizeh itself, with all its wonders
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 51
of IVth Dynasty work.. Passing southwards, we come to Abusir, with its remains of the pyramids and temples of the Sun- worshipping Pharaohs of the Vth Dynasty, lately excavated by the German expedition ; beyond these again comes the great field of Saqqara, with remains dating over a long period of Egyptian history. The Step-Pyramid of King Zeser of the Illrd Dynasty is, of course, the most important and imposing monument ; but besides, there are pyramids dating from the latter part of the Vth Dynasty, a number of Vlth Dynasty ones, and the splendid tombs of many of the nobles of the early dynastic period, so that, though the Saqqara portion of the field cannot compare with Gizeh in the size of its monuments, it is only second to its northern rival, and surpasses it in the variety and the pictorial interest of its minor tombs ./Still travelling southwards, we pass in succession Dahshur and Lisht with their pyramids of the great Pharaohs of the Xllth Dynasty, Medum, with its remarkable pyramid of King Seneferu of the Illrd Dynasty, rising in three stages, like a Mesopotamian Ziggurat, to a height of 114 feet, and Illahun, where Senusert II had his pyramid, and where the exquisite jewellery of some of the royal princesses was found recently, and reach the last of the series at Hawara, where Amenemhat III, one of the greatest and noblest of the long line of Egyptian Pharaohs, had his last resting-place. In later days there were pyramid tombs at Thebes and Abydos ; but the pyramid part of these structures was com- paratively unimportant, and they have, in any
52 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
case, left few traces behind. Indeed, after the Xllth Dynasty the fashion of pyramid-burial seems to have gradually died out, though we know from the revelations of the Abbott Papyrus that in the XXth Dynasty there were in the Theban necropolis at least ten royal pyramids belonging to kings of the XHIth to the XVIIIth Dynasty. Altogether there must be at present in Egypt something like seventy pyramids of greater or less importance, without reckoning the later and less important groups of Napata and Meroe. Passing by the Abu Roash pyramid of King Razedef, we begin our survey with the magnifi- cent group of Gizeh, which to the ordinary man are the Pyramids to the exclusion of all others. Everyone knows, of course, what the Pyramids are like, and has some rough idea of their sur- passing size, and perhaps the only way to impress the sense of their vastness on the mind is to use one or other of the comparisons which have been worked out to illustrate the stupendous scale on which they are built. To tell the reader that the weight of the stones built into the Great Pyramid is over six million tons is merely to bewilder him ; the vastness of the business may be better appreciated when one realises that a town of the size of Aberdeen might be built out of the materials which Khufu gathered together for his monstrous tomb, or that if the stones were divided into blocks a foot square, and these blocks placed end to end in a straight line, the line would be long enough to reach two-thirds of the length of the circum- ference of the earth at the Equator.
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 53
Khufu's pyramid was originally about 481 feet in height, and each of its sides measured at the base a matter of 755 feet 8 inches, and these long lines were laid out and built with such wonderful accuracy that the maximum error is not more than an inch. " The laying out of the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu," says Professor Sir W. M. F. Petrie, " is a triumph of skill ; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be covered by placing one's thumb on them ; and to lay out a square of more than a furlong in the side (and with rock in the midst of it, which prevented any diagonal checks being measured) with such accuracy shows surprising care. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the same class ; the faces are so straight and so truly square, that when the stones were built together the film of mortar left between them is on an average not thicker than one's thumb-nail, though the joint is a couple of yards long ; and the levelling of them over long distances has not any larger errors." " Equal to optician's work of the present day," says the same authority elsewhere, " but on a scale of acres instead of feet or yards of material."
The Second Pyramid is slightly inferior to the first in size, its measurements being 472 feet in height and 706 feet 3 inches on each side ; and its workmanship is also of inferior accuracy, the errors in length being double, and those of angle quadruple those of its predecessor, while the masonry is of poorer quality. Curiously enough, the sarcophagus, the core of the whole vast building, was in the case of the Great
54 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
Pyramid one of the poorest pieces of work of its kind in the period, and much inferior to that of Khafra in the Second Pyramid. Spite of its smaller size, which most travellers scarcely notice owing to the fact of its somewhat superior position, and its inferior workmanship, the Second Pyramid is itself a world's wonder.
Beside these great twin brethren, Men- kaura's Third Pyramid, with its 215 feet of height and its length on the side of 346 feet 2 inches, seems diminutive, though its partial outer casing of granite may have given it a richness of appearance which to some extent compensated for its smallness.
Here, then, we have a group of buildings which, from whatever point of view they are regarded, are among the most wonderful ever reared by the hand of man, and which in sheer bulk are by far the greatest of all architectural works. What was the purpose for which these stupendous bulks were built and maintained for so long ? To ask such a question was, not so long ago, to let loose all the flood of vain imagina- tions which always gathers about a subject which is great and imperfectly understood.
The theories which have been framed about the Great Pyramid in particular are almost as monstrous as itself, but have none of its solidity. Of these, perhaps the favourite, because of a certain romance attaching to it, and because of the reputation of some of those who have supported it, is, or rather one should say, was, that it was designed for an astronomical obser- vatory. R. A. Proctor, to whose advocacy the
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 55
idea owes a great deal of what vogue it had, has told us that the entrance passage is so placed that at the date which he assumes for the erection of the pyramid (3400 B.C.) it bore directly on the then Pole-Star, Thuban, or Theta Draconis, when the star was on the meridian below the pole, and further, that the great gallery which leads up to the King's Chamber was designed to serve the purpose of a great transit instrument, through whose open upper end the transits of stars could be observed by astronomers occupying seats on cross-benches laid across the gallery at different levels ! Still wilder are the fancies which would have us see in the measurements of the Great Pyramid divinely inspired revelations as to units of length, capacity, and so forth, and which gravely inform us that the granite sarco- phagus of Khufu is really a standard measure of capacity, of which our British quarter is a fourth part. It seems rather a pity in view of this wonderful theory that Professor Petrie should have just told us of the inferiority of Khufu's sarcophagus in accuracy to that of Khafra, as such a fact tends to disturb the mind as to the truth of our own measures ; but it is a sufficient indication of the flimsy nature of the foundations on which all these theories rest.
The fact is that no evidence worth considera- tion has been brought forward in support of any of them, and in especial that the idea of the great gallery having been a gigantic transit instrument (surely the most cumbrous and inefficient ever designed) is absolutely negatived
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by the knowledge which we possess of the object with which the whole building was constructed — an object whose all-important condition was absolute secrecy and concealment. To dream that Khufu built a pyramid to secure his body from discovery and destruction, and then allowed its passages to remain open to the sky for years that astronomers might observe the stars, and tomb-robbers the plan of the pyramid, is to put a fool's cap on the whole business. The Great Pyramid, like all the other pyramids, great and small, was none of the extraordinary things which we have been told it was ; it was some- thing simpler and more wonderful than any of them — the greatest witness ever given on earth to the human craving for immortality !
There is no longer any doubt that all the pyramids, from the first imperfect conception of the form in the Step-Pyramid of Saqqara, through the giants of Gizeh, down to the crumb- ling heaps of brickwork which are all that remain of some of the later fabrics, were built simply and solely as tombs, and that their one object was to render the resting-place of their royal tenant as secure as precautions could make it from the attacks of dynastic enemies or mere robbers.
The pyramid was just one pathetic expression of that marvellously persistent passion which gave us the tomb-chambers of Abydos, with their storerooms for the supply of the dead king's wants in the Underworld, the Mummy with all its wonderful elaboration of means for preserving the shape and likeness of the dead man, the Funerary Statue, with its amazingly
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lifelike portrait of the man whose place it was designed to take when time had reduced the mummy to dust, and the soul still craved a recognisable dwelling-place, and the long, rock- hewn galleries of the Valley of the Kings, with their pictured representations of all that could help their owner through the dangers and difficulties of the long journey to the Egyptian Fields of Contentment.
No race has ever been so possessed by any religious idea as was the ancient Egyptian by the faith that it was possible to secure immortal life for humanity beyond the gates of death, possible, but difficult to the last degree, and needing all the effort which could be given to secure so great and so difficult an end ; and the Great Pyramid is just the most colossal seal ever put on that creed, expressing, as nothing else ever could, both the intensity of the con- viction and the consciousness of the extreme difficulty of its attainment in actual fact. The Egyptian Pharaoh built his pyramid as the expression of his faith in life everlasting ; he built it as huge and as massy as he could, as the expression of his consciousness of the numberless difficulties and dangers which compassed the road which led to the attainment of immortality, and of his determination that, so far as human effort could secure it, he would be secured against everything which might prejudice his chance of winning eternity.
The Pyramid, then, is a tomb, or rather it is the sole surviving part of the elaborate and complicated structure which the Egyptians of
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the Pyramid period devised for the accomplish- ment of this end of securing the duration of the personality of its owner. For what we see now at Gizeh and elsewhere is by no means what the Egyptians of the early dynasties saw when they looked upon the " eternal dwelling-places " of their great kings, but only a fragment, which by reason of its massiveness, and especially of its form, has survived while the rest of the fabric has perished. The complete pyramid- complex was a development of the normal Egyptian arrangement of tomb-chamber and tomb-chapel. Each Egyptian of any rank or pretensions was buried in a chamber, generally underground, which contained his coffin of stone or wood ; but he had also another chamber above ground, where the necessary rites might be observed at the stated times, and the daily offerings of food and drink made for his use in the other world by his relations or by the priests who were appointed for this purpose. These two chambers were combined in the " mastabas " of the Old Kingdom nobles, with their shafts and their chapels. The pyramid took the place of the mastaba, and as it developed, the chapel, instead of being within the same mass of building as the tomb-chamber, was built outside, at the foot of the great structure which protected the mummy of the king, as was fondly hoped, from sacrilegious attack. This pyramid- temple lay at the east side of the pyramid, and in close connection with it. But the pyramids were situated on rising ground, generally at a considerable distance from the cultivated land,
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and it was therefore necessary to arrange for a convenient approach to them, instead of allowing the priests or the royal relatives to scramble over the rough ground. Accordingly a secondary temple, or portico, was built down on the level of the cultivated land in a position where it could be approached by boats during the inundation ; and from this portico-temple a covered causeway led up to the temple proper at the foot of the pyramid.
We are to conceive of the pyramid fabric, then, as consisting of these four parts, first the part for whose sake all the rest existed, the pyramid itself, with its concealed passages and its carefully protected sarcophagus-chamber, in which lay the mummy of the king in its granite coffin ; then the temple crouching at the foot of the great tomb-chamber ; then the long covered causeway leading down to the lower levels, and finally the Portico-temple on the margin of the flooded river. One imagines the scene on the feast-day of a great Pharaoh — the graceful and gaily decorated Egyptian river-skiffs drawing up to the stately columned portico on the river bank, and landing their freight of white-robed priests and gorgeous courtiers and princes of the blood, the preliminary service within the lower temple, and then the solemn procession up the causeway to the temple proper where the memory of Khufu or Khafra is celebrated, and his wants for the other world supplied under the shadow of the mighty mass of stone where the bones of the great builder are laid. The Pyramids are impressive enough to-day in their stripped
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and gaunt majesty — one wonders if they could be more impressive even in the days of their perfected splendour. Possibly not, but at all events the world can have seen few more imposing sights than an Egyptian Pyramid Field such as that of Gizeh, when its three giants were girt with all the sumptuous fabrics which were part of their essential design as their architects planned them, and without which we are no more seeing them as they were meant to be seen than if we were viewing Salisbury without its spire, or the Duomo of Florence without its campanile.
As to the sumptuousness of these subsidiary parts of the pyramid-complex, we have fortunately first-hand evidence. Little remains of the temple proper of the Second Pyramid, though what there is has been completely excavated ; but the cause- way leading down from it has been traced, and it terminates in a building which has been for long familiar as one of the most striking examples of the combined restraint and magnificence of the Egyptian architects of the early dynasties, the so-called Temple of the Sphinx, which is in reaiity the Portico-temple of Khafra's pyramid. With its severely simple architecture of vertical and horizontal lines, its great blocks of stone absolutely without ornament of any sort, and the richness of its granite monoliths and its alabaster wall-surfaces, it tells us something of what must have been the dignity and splendour of the Gizeh Pyramid Field when it stood intact.
So far as the fulfilment of the object for which they were erected is concerned, the Pyramids of Gizeh are no more than a melancholy
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monument of the vanity of human wishes, and an illustration of how human cupidity or malice will in the long run break through the most elaborate system of defence. Professor Petrie has suggested that Sir Thomas Browne was in the wrong when he wrote that "to be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy of duration," and comments upon that characteristic utterance : " Khufu has provided the grandest monument that any man ever had, and is by this means better remembered than any other Eastern king throughout history.' '
That is so ; and yet one cannot help remembering that this was not at all Khufu s object in the rearing of his vast mausoleum. It was not to keep his memory green, but to keep his body intact that the greatest builder of the world raised the Great Pyramid, and in that simple object he utterly failed, as did all his brother pyramid-builders great and small. The evidence shows that not in one single case has greed or hatred failed to overcome all the obstacles placed in their way by royal power. Every pyramid known has been rifled in ancient times, probably not long after its builder was laid to rest in his stately tomb, and the duration of the mass of senseless stone, which bids fair to be as long as that of the everlasting hills, only mocks the hopes with which it was reared. The pyramid remains ; but the jewel for whose sake so costly a casket was devised is long ages since " blown about the desert dust."
The story of excavation at the Pyramids of Gizeh has nothing very exciting about it. The
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first excavators were, no doubt, the enemies of the Crown, who, as Petrie has suggested, pene- trated into the burial-chambers in the troubled days between the Vllth and Xth Dynasties and wreaked their spite on the bodies of their dead masters. Thereafter, through the Classical period, the entrance into the subterranean pas- sages of the Great Pyramid was well known ; but the knowledge had been lost by the time of the Arab Conquest, and the Khalif Mamun had laboriously to quarry his way through the masonry into the actual passages, leaving behind him the great hole, which is still called " Mamun 's Hole." This was the beginning of the vandalism which has done so much destruction at the Pyramids of Gizeh, though the worst efforts of human stupidity have somehow only seemed to emphasise the dignity and grandeur of the great buildings whose might mocks at the puny attempts of the destroyer. After Mamun had showed the way, his successors followed him, and used the pyramid as a quarry. In 1356 Sultan Hasan used part of the casing of the Great Pyramid in the building of his mosque, and though his work may be, as it has been called, " the finest monument in Cairo," and " the most perfect specimen extant of Saracenic archi- tecture," its beauty is sadly discounted by the fact that it was created by the robbery of the most magnificent example of an architecture more ancient and more noble. Hasan, or one of his immediate successors, added to his crime by stripping part of the casing from the Second Pyramid also, leaving it in the partially despoiled
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condition in which it now appears, for one of his coins was found by Petrie deep down in the southern foundation. Compared with such barbarities, the indignities which the Pyramids have had to suffer in all ages at the hands of tourists, who have insisted on disgracing their un- distinguished names by scrawling them on these great memorials of the past, are mere trifles.
Early in the nineteenth century Caviglia succeeded in penetrating into the centre of the Great Pyramid, and he was followed in the spring of 18 18 by the redoubtable Belzoni, whose account of the manner in which he forced an entrance into the Second Pyramid is as vivacious as the rest of his narrative. Belzoni's earlier efforts only resulted in the discovery of one of the passages by which former explorers had vainly attempted to force their way into the pyramid ; but his disappointment only quickened his desire, and as he says in his own inimitable way : " Hope returned to cherish my pyramidical brains." His workmen were speedily set to work again at a new spot. " As to expectation that the entrance might be found, they had none ; and I often heard them utter, in a low voice, the word ' magnoon,' in plain English, madman. I pointed out to the Arabs the spot where they had to dig, and such was my measurement, that I was right within two feet, in a straight direction, as to the entrance ; and I have the pleasure of reckoning this day as fortunate." Even after the passage was dis- covered, the removal of the blocks of stone which obstructed it required several days of hard labour ;
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but at last, thirty days after the work began, the explorer found himself standing in the sarco- phagus chamber of Khafra. Besides the empty sarcophagus, Belzoni found the evidence that he had not been the first who had penetrated into the secret of the pyramid, for in addition to many graffiti on the walls of the chamber, which were written in charcoal and rubbed off at the slightest touch, there was an Arabic inscription which ran : " The Master Mohammed Ahmed, lapicide, has opened them ; and the Master Othman attended this opening : and the King Ali Mohammed, from the beginning to the closing up." The Third Pyramid, that of Menkaura, was opened in 1226 by treasure-hunters. ** After passing through various passages, a room was reached wherein was found a long blue vessel [the sarcophagus] quite empty. . . . They found in this basin, after they had broken the covering of it, the decayed remains of a man, but no treasures, excepting some golden tablets inscribed with characters of a language which nobody could understand." The disappointed treasure-seekers were succeeded in 1837 by Colonel Howard Vyse, some of the results of whose discoveries are in the British Museum in the shape of a fragment of the basalt sarcophagus, and portions of a wooden coffin, purporting to be that of " the King of the North and South, Men-kau-Ra, living for ever," together with the remains of a man, wrapped in a coarse woollen cloth of a yellow colour. " In clearing the rubbish out of the large entrance room," says Colonel Vyse, " after the men had been employed
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there several days and had advanced some distance towards the south-eastern corner, some bones were first discovered at the bottom of the rubbish ; and the remaining bones and part of the coffin were immediately discovered all together. No other parts of the coffin or bones could be found in the room ; I therefore had the rubbish which had been previously turned out of the same room carefully re-examined, when several pieces of the coffin and of the mummy- cloth were found ; but in no other part of the pyramid were any parts of it to be discovered, although every place was most minutely examined, to make the coffin as complete as possible." Unfortunately some doubt exists as to the coffin being actually of the period which its inscription claims, and the same doubt hangs over the remains. It has been suggested that the coffin is a restoration of the time of the XXVIth Dynasty, and that the remains are not those of Menkaura, but of one of the treasure-hunters who lost his life in the attempt of 1226. Accord- ingly we cannot say, as might otherwise have been the case, that Vyse actually discovered a Pharaoh in the great tomb which he had built for his eternal abode. The fine basalt sarco- phagus was taken out of the pyramid by Vyse, and shipped for England in 1838 ; but the ill- luck which has dogged the pyramid explorations attended Menkaura's coffin also. The ship left Leghorn on October 12, 1838, and was never heard of again, though some bits of wreckage were picked up off Carthagena.
Valuable work was done at Gizeh during the
E
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years after Vyse's researches by Perring and Piazzi Smyth, though the careful measurement work of the latter was somewhat obscured by the fanciful theories which possessed his mind on the subject of the purpose of the Great Pyramid ; but the most complete survey of the Gizeh field was due to Flinders Petrie, who in 1 880-1 88 1 measured and planned the whole site with the most scrupulous care.
Perhaps the most interesting result of his work, apart from the evidence which he gathered as to Egyptian methods of working stone, was his discovery, behind the Second Pyramid, of the barracks in which the skilled masons who were permanently employed on the building lived while the work was going on. These were capable of containing easily about 4000 men. The rest of the 100,000, who, as Herodotus tells us, were employed in the building of the Great Pyramid, were doubtless merely labourers employed during the three months of high Nile, when work on the land was impossible, to bring up the blocks of stone and leave them ready for the skilled hewers and masons to work upon. As to the methods of these skilled workmen, evidence of the most interesting kind was accumulated. It was found that the great blocks of stone were sawn by means of bronze saws over nine feet in length, and equipped with jewelled cutting points. The sarcophagi of hard granite or basalt were thus sawn to shape with the most remarkable accuracy, while they were hollowed out by cutting rows of holes with tubular drills also set with jewelled cutting points. The
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chief difference between this kind of ancient Egyptian work and modern practice with diamond drills is that the ancient work is undeniably superior to the modern. " Truth to tell, modern drill cores cannot hold a candle to the Egyptians ; by the side of the ancient work they look wretchedly scraped out and irregular." " There has been no flinching or jumping of the tool," says Petrie again, speaking of a drill core from Gizeh, " every crystal, quartz, or felspar has been cut through in the most equable way, with a clean irresistible cut."
Our wonder at the mighty mass of the Pyramids of Gizeh, then, is not to be mere wonder at the barbaric power which summoned myriads of slaves and forced them to toil till by sheer brute force they had piled up these mountains of stone. Brute force, unguided and unorganised, would never have built the Pyramids, though millions instead of thousands had been employed, and for centuries instead of decades, but would only have led to disaster and confusion. The wonder of the Pyramids is that five thousand years ago there was found a race whose keen intelligence so clearly understood the need and the marvellous power of organised and trained human labour, architects and engineers who were capable of directing the energies of a hundred thousand men without confusion towards a clearly foreseen end, and craftsmen who were capable of producing, with tools whose material seems to us pathetic in its inadequacy, results which put to shame the best achievements of men using the finest modern tools.
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The recent excavations in the Gizeh Pyramid Field, directed by Dr. G. A. Reisner, have added much to our knowledge of the subordinate tombs of the period, and of the life of the times. \ Moving southwards from Gizeh, we come to the pyramid field of Abusir, passing on the way the unfinished pyramid of Zawiyet el Aryan. Of this pyramid, designed for the Pharaoh Nefer- ka-Ra of the Illrd Dynasty, nothing exists above ground. The remains consist simply of the trenches destined for the superstructure, and the inclined plane leading down to the mortuary chamber with its fine oval libation- trough, or sarcophagus. Yet there are few works of ancient Egypt which impress one more with the sense of the magnificent power with which these early architects carried out their designs. " The whole," says Maspero, " is merely a T-shaped ditch, some ioo feet deep ; and yet the impression it makes when one goes down into it is unforgettable. The richness and the cutting of the materials, the perfection of the joints and sections, the incomparable finish of the basin, the boldness of the lines and the height of the walls all combine to make up a unique creation."
The German excavations have resulted in the discovery at Abusir of a curious development both of the pyramid idea and of the early Egyptian temple. It was already known from one of the magical tales of the Westcar Papyrus, that the kings of the Vth Dynasty were probably a priestly line of usurpers, who claimed to be related to the Sun-god Ra by direct descent —
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a relationship which was henceforth claimed by every subsequent Pharaoh, and embodied in the royal titulary. The German Expedition has revealed to us the unmistakable proof of the devotion of the Vth Dynasty kings to the worship of the Sun-god, and the unique form which their temples took. The temple of Ne-user-ra, for example, consisted of a rectangular court, 380 feet by 280 feet, whose main axis ran east and west. In the western half of this area rose the pyramid, a curious combination of the idea of the mastaba- pyramid of Seneferu at Medum and the later ooelisk. On a great block of building about 130 feet square by 100 feet in height, shaped like a truncated pyramid, rose a squat brick obelisk whose point reached a height of about 120 feet. Roofed corridors surrounded the enclosure on the other three sides, and probably provided storerooms for the temple furniture, and for the materials of the offerings. At the foot of the pyramid an immense alabaster altar stood in a small court surrounded by low walls. The obelisk, on its truncated pyramid, represented the Sun-god, and outside the temple wall, near the south side, was placed the most curious of all the furnishings of this curious temple, in the shape of a great boat, built of brick, which bore all the sacred insignia of the Sun-god in his voyage across the heavens. The interior of the temple walls was covered with sculptured scenes of the life created by the god, scenes from the river, the swamps, the fields and the desert, these being the earliest specimens of such mural decorations in any Egyptian temple.
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The next stage of the Great Pyramid Field is at Saqqara, where the chief feature is the most ancient, and save for the monsters of Gizeh, the most famous of all the pyramids, the Stepped- Pyramid of King Zeser of the Illrd Dynasty, the earliest great stone structure in the world. This remarkable building was probably the work of Zeser's famous counsellor and architect Imhotep, the typical wise man of early Egypt, whose counsel was " as though one inquired at the oracle of God," and who was subsequently deified and became the patron-deity of the scribes.
The tomb which he reared for his master (who had also another great tomb at Bet-Khallaf) was built in six stages, stands about 197 feet in height, and has the peculiarity that its base is not a square but a rectangle, measuring 394 by 351 feet. But though the interest attaching to man's first great piece of stonework must always be great, the actually living interest at Saqqara attaches not so much to Zeser's hoary and im- posing tomb, as to the comparatively insignificant and decayed pyramids of the Vth and Vlth Dynasty kings, Unas, Teti, Pepy I, Merenra, and Pepy II. Mere heaps of rubble and sand as they seem, with none of the splendour of con- struction or greatness of scale of the Gizeh group, these monuments of the time when the royal power of the Old Kingdom was beginning to decline are yet of supreme value ; for they are the first pyramids in which inscriptions have been found, and the long religious texts discovered in them, and now known as the Pyramid Texts, are unique and of infinite importance.
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Up to the end of his career, Mariette believed that the pyramids were dumb, as the Gizeh group had proved to be, and therefore looked upon the attempt to open any of the Saqqara group as mere waste labour. Maspero, however, believed otherwise, and the opening of the pyramid of Pepy I in 1880 proved that he was right. The other pyramids named proved also to be inscribed, and altogether the five pyramids give us a series of religious texts covering a period of about one hundred and fifty years, or perhaps one hundred and eighty, from 2825 to 2644 B.C., or, on Petrie's dating, from 4275 to 4090 B.C. Even taking the later dates, these Pyramid Texts form by far the earliest large body of religious writings which have come down from any part of the ancient East, and their importance as sources of knowledge as to the beliefs of the earliest Dynastic period can scarcely be overrated.
Apart from the interest of its pyramids, Saqqara has proved of infinite value to the student of ancient Egyptian life because of the richness of its necropolis in the great mastaba tombs of the nobles of the Old Kingdom. Since Mariette's excavation of the tomb of Ti, who was a great man in his day, and architect to two successive kings of the Vth Dynasty, Nefer-ari- ka-ra and Ne-user-ra, the sculptures of this splendid tomb, and those, scarcely less remark- able, of the tombs of Ptah-hetep, Mereruka and Kagemni, have been recognised as among the most precious accomplishments of ancient art.
Apart altogether from their artistic value, their importance as first-hand documents for
72 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
the reconstruction of life in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago is supreme, for their repre- sentations, executed with infinite vivacity and spirit, cover almost every department of Egyptian life. The great man is represented as surrounded by all the busy life which ministered to his com- fort when he was on earth, or engaged in the sports and diversions which were his relaxation in the intervals of his public duties, sailing, fishing, fowling, or hippopotamus-hunting among the Nile swamps. Farm life, with its changing activities according to the season, and all its peaceful and beautiful incident, is faithfully depicted, so that the crops which the Egyptian landowner grew and the stock he kept can be perfectly known ; while all the crafts which were necessary to the upkeep of a great estate are also depicted with abundant detail and a charming directness and dash. The tomb-paintings of the New Empire at Thebes are much and deservedly admired ; but even they must yield in freshness and charm to these pictures from the dawn of history, which have trie dew of youth still upon them, and all the vigour of an art which is already quite sure of itself, but has not had the time to grow stale.
From Dahshur down to Illahun and Hawara lie the pyramids of the great kings of the Xllth Dynasty, who, though Thebans, realised that the centre of gravity of the national government must be further north, and who therefore made their royal residence between Memphis and the Fayum. The earlier kings of trie dynasty, Amenemhat land Senusert I, had their pyramids
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PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 73
at Lisht ; Amenemhat II and Senusert III preferred Dahshur for their resting-place ; while Senusert II chose Lahun, and Amenemhat III Hawara, where he could sleep beside the great works which he had wrought at Lake Moeris for the welfare of his land. The Xllth Dynasty pyramids are not imposing externally. The ruinous piles of brickwork at Dahshur and Lahun look more like gigantic ant-heaps than true pyramids ; yet they were the work of kings who in their own wav were quite as powerful as the pyramid-builders of the IVth Dynasty, and the detail of the inner workmanship of the sarcophagus chambers is quite as remarkable as anything to be seen at Gizeh. Part of the reason for the difference is a change, not so much in the ideal for which the pyramid was con- structed (for that remained constant throughout the history of Egypt), but in the conception of the best means towards the realising of the ideal. " It seems," says Petrie, describing the change which Senusert II introduced in his pyramid at Lahun, " that the pyramids of the earlier kings had fallen a prey to violence already, the signs of personal spite in the destructions are evident. Therefore Senusert II determined to abandon the old system of a north entrance in the face, and to conceal the access to the interior by a new method." His method was to excavate his sarcophagus chamber entirely out of the solid rock on which the pyramid was founded, and to place the entrance to the passage which led to the chamber outside of the pyramid altogether. The shaft which gives access to the
74 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
passage actually opens out on the plain, beneath the floor of the tomb of one of the princesses of the dynasty. Inside the rock-hewn chamber which was protected with such care, and which was splendidly lined with red granite, stood the red granite sarcophagus, " exquisitely wrought," says Petrie, " the errors of flatness and straightness being matters of thousandths of an inch."
Yet the cunning and the skill of the Xllth Dynasty architects and masons proved as helpless as the massive power of the IVth Dynasty to protect the dead monarchs from the ravages of hatred or greed. Nor were the elaborate pre- cautions of Amenemhat III any more successful than those of his grandfather had been. Petrie's description of the construction of the inner passages of Amenemhat 's pyramid at Hawara reads like something planned to be a nightmare to explorers. " The explorer," he says, " who had found the entrance in the unusual place on the south side, descended a long staircase, which ended in a dumb chamber. The roof of this, if slid aside, showed another passage, which was filled with blocks. This was a mere blind, to divert attention from the real passage, which stood ostentatiously open. A plunderer has, however, fruitlessly mined his way through all these blocks. On going down the real passage, another dumb chamber was reached ; another sliding trap-door was passed ; another passage led to a third dumb chamber ; a third trap-door was passed ; and now a passage led along past one side of the real sepulchre ; and to amuse explorers, two false wells open in the passage
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 75
floor, and the wrong side of the passage is filled with masonry blocks fitted in. Yet by some means the plunderers found a cross trench in the passage floor which led to the chamber. Here another device was met. The chamber had no door, but was entered solely by one of the immense roof-blocks, weighing 45 tons, being left raised, and afterwards dropped into place on closing the pyramid." One would have imagined that with such precautions the sleep of Amenemhat would surely be undisturbed ; but when Petrie in 1889 tunnelled his way through the roofing-beams of the sepulchral chamber he found that an early plunderer had anticipated him by mining right through the great 45-ton block. " The royal interments had been entirely burnt ; and only fired grains of diorite and pieces of lazuli inlaying showed the splendour of the decorations of the coffins."
Here, as in all the other cases of the pyramids, the very elaboration of the means adopted for the preservation of the dead body of the king had only whetted the appetite of the spoiler and destroyer, and little has survived from the Xllth Dynasty pyramids to reward the modern explorer. The great finds in the Xllth Dynasty pyramid fields were all from outside the pyramids. Of these one of the most valuable, though by no means the most spectacular, was Petrie's dis- covery, near the pyramid of Senusert II at Lahun, of the town, created specially for the occasion, in which the workmen of Senusert had lived with their staff of architects, overseers, and scribes, while the pyramid was under construction .
76 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
The little town of Ha-hetep-Senusert, Kahun as it is now called, gives us the most complete instance extant of the character of an Egyptian town of the Middle Kingdom. It occupied an area of about i 8 acres, and the plans of the narrow streets and of the houses, mostly small and closely crowded together, though there are exceptions to this rule, have been completely wrought out. Much that is interesting in the way of pottery, tools, and papyri came from the ruins of the deserted houses of the little pyramid-town, whose existence seems to have been a very brief one, probably not much longer than was necessary for the erection of the pyramid.
Again it was not in Amenemhat's elaborately devised pyramid at Hawara, but in the Roman cemetery to the north of it, that the great find was made which has made Hawara famous in the history of ancient Egyptian art, and has given us one of the most valuable contributions ever made to our knowledge of the processes and technique of ancient painting. A cemetery which dates mostly from a.d. instead of from B.C. has in general comparatively little attraction to the explorer in ancient Egypt, unless he be a specialist in the Greco-Roman Period. Accordingly, when Petrie in 1888 found that the cemetery in question was of the first and second centuries a.d., he was on the point of giving it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found with a painted portrait on a wooden panel inserted above its face. The picture was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, painted in soft tones, and quite un-Egyptian in its style. It proved to be only
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 77
the forerunner of a whole series of similar portraits, of which about sixty were found before the excavations closed. The work was resumed in 191 1 with further success. The portraits are of varying merit, and of even the best of them it has to be remembered that we are not dealing with the product of the studio of a skilled artist, but only with that of the workshop of a firm of local undertakers, who supplied funerary portraits just as they supplied coffins. All things con- sidered the quality of the work is wonderfully good, and the information given by these panel pictures as to the methods of the ancient painters is of the highest importance. Before the Hawara discoveries, we were left very much in the dark as to how Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus and their companions and rivals produced the master- pieces which have only survived in the literary descriptions of their contemporaries. The Hawara pictures may be very far, even the best of them, from being masterpieces ; but at least they tell us what were the methods by which the great painters of ancient Greece produced the pictures which were considered the equals in artistic merit of the statues which are now the wonder of the world. The manner in which they were painted is often described as " encaustic," but this is an incorrect description of portraits which, so far as can be judged, were simply painted with melted coloured wax, laid on with a free brush, each tint being laid on as a solid body, and not subjected to subsequent glazings.
The Xllth Dynasty pyramid fields at Dahshur
78 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
and Illahun have yielded two of the most remark- able finds of Egyptian jewellery which have ever been made, and the results of the work of de Morgan and Petrie in this respect are such as to increase our admiration for the marvellous skill of the craftsmen of the Middle Kingdom. It was in 1894 and 1895 that de Morgan's work- men, clearing up the area round the Xllth Dynasty pyramids at Dahshur, found in the tombs of the princesses of the royal house one of the most wonderful stores of jewellery which have ever rewarded excavation. The two most notable pieces of the treasure were the diadems of the princess Khnumit, the most exquisite examples of the skill of the goldsmith ever worn. " The floret crown," says Petrie, " is perhaps the most charmingly graceful head- dress ever seen ; the fine wavy threads of gold harmonised with the hair, and the delicate little flowers and berries seem scattered with the wild grace of Nature. Each floret is held by two wires crossing in an eye behind it, and each pair of berries has likewise an eye in which the wires cross. The florets are not stamped, but each gold socket is made by hand for the four inserted stones. The berries are of lazuli. In no in- stance, however small, was the polishing of the stone done in its cloison ; it was always finished before setting." The other diadem is more conventional, but scarcely less beautiful. Eight rosettes of gold and precious stones are sur- mounted with motives of lyre shape terminating in golden flowers, and the rosettes are united by long links also bearing jewelled rosettes.
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 79
The stones of the two crowns are lapis-lazuli, carnelian, red jasper, and green felspar. Along with the diadems were found gold pectorals of fine design and execution, bearing the car- touches of Senusert II, Senusert III, and Amenemhat III, and various other articles of jewellery, and even the famous jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep, so long the typical specimen of Egyptian craftsmanship, must yield the palm to the earlier work in beauty of design and daintiness of execution.
The second discovery came in February, 10 14, when Professor Petrie's workmen were clearing a rifled tomb belonging to the " Royal daughter Sat-Hathor-ant " at Lahun near the pyramid of Senusert II. How the treasure of Lahun had ever escaped the plunderers who had rifled the tomb is a mystery. " The tomb had been attacked," says Petrie ; " the long and heavy work of shifting the massive granite lid of the sarcophagus, and breaking it away, had been achieved ; yet all this gold was left in the recess of the passage untouched. . . . The whole treasure seems to have been stacked in the recess at the time of the burial, and to have gradually dropped apart as the wooden caskets decayed in course of years, with repeated flooding of storm water and mud slowly washed into the pit. . . . The whole treasure was standing in an open recess, within arm's reach of the gold- seekers, while they worked at breaking open the granite sarcophagus." We can only be thankful that all the luck did not go to the ancient robber, and that, like his earlier companion who
80 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
left the arm of the 1st Dynasty queen, with its jewelled bracelets, at Abydos, he overlooked something to tell a later age of the skill and taste of ancient Egypt.
The chief feature of the Lahun find was a perfect specimen of a royal diadem, bearing the urasus on its front. No actual specimen of the famous double crown of Egypt has ever come to light, familiar though its appearance may be, probably because its materials were of a perishable nature ; but the diadem of Lahun gives us a unique specimen of such a crown as Egyptian royalty may often have worn in preference to the cumbrous mitre so frequently figured. " It is formed by a broad band of highly burnished gold over an inch wide, and large enough to pass round the bushy wig worn in the Xllth Dynasty. The uraeus is of open work, inlaid with lazuli and carnelian ; the head is of lazuli, which was found loose in the mud. Around the polished band were affixed fifteen rosettes, each composed of four flowers with intermediate buds. At the back a tube of gold was riveted on to the band, and into that fitted a double plume of sheet gold, the stem of which slipped through a flower of solid gold. The thickness of the plumes was such that they would wave slightly with every movement of the head. At the back and sides of the crown were streamers of gold, which hung from hinges attached to the rosettes. The whole construction was over a foot and a half high." Such was an Egyptian diadem in the great days of the Middle Kingdom, and surely never did a royal head wear a more
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graceful emblem of sovereignty than that which came so strangely to light in 19 14.
Along with the crown were found two pectorals, one of Senusert II, the other of Amenemhat III, of even finer design than the famous pectorals of Dahshur. " The earlier pectoral is inlaid with minute feathering of lazuli and turquoise ; the later with a different feathering of lazuli and white paste, which has probably been green. . . . They were probably suspended by necklaces of the very rich deep amethyst beads which were found here." With the pectorals went several gold and jewelled collars and necklets, and broad armlets of golden bars with beads of carnelian and turquoise, and inlaid clasps bearing the royal cartouche, and a number of other articles, amulets and toilet utensils, including a silver mirror with a handle of obsidian, inlaid with bands of plaited gold, and bearing a cast gold head of Hathor. Another item came to light from Lahun in 1920 in the shape of the royal uraeus of Senusert II, "a massive gold casting, with inlay of carnelian and lazuli, a head of lazuli, and eyes of garnet in gold setting," which was found near the sepulchral chamber in the heart of the pyramid, amidst a heap of dust and chips of stone. Doubtless this is the royal emblem which adorned the brow of Senusert when he was laid to rest in his pyramid, though how it escaped the notice of the robbers who plundered his tomb is as great a mystery as the escape of the treasure of Sat-Hathor-ant.
Thus the pyramids of the Xllth Dynasty
82 PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS
monarchs, insignificant as they may seem in comparison with the gigantic piles of Gizeh, have proved in their way no less interesting than the colossal work of Khufu, Khafra, and Men- kaura. Indeed each of the pyramid groups has its own characteristics, and has given its own contribution to our knowledge of the successive periods of early Egyptian history. To the mighty structures of the IVth Dynasty we owe the revelation of the marvellous organisation of the Egyptian kingdom, and the skill with which its resources could be concentrated on a single gigantic task. To the less imposing buildings of the Vth and Vlth Dynasties we owe something perhaps even more precious — the revelation of the thoughts which were shaping themselves in the mind of man in these most ancient days with regard to the soul and its life beyond the grave. To those of the Xllth Dynasty we owe the evidence of the skill which shaped the marvel- lous red-granite sarcophagus of Senusert II, or the great quartzite funeral chamber of Amenemhat III, and the union of luxury with the finest taste which created the jewellery of Dahshur and Lahun. It may be questioned if even the tomb of Tutankhamen, with all its mass of splendour, will have anything to show us which can surpass in grace and dignity the diadems of Khnumit and Sat-Hathor-ant, or in exquisiteness of finish their pectorals and armlets.
With the decline of the royal power at the close of the Xllth Dynasty, the age of the pyramid-builders closes. Already the taste for
PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS 83
these huge structures was being modified, as it was continually found how powerless they were to accomplish the great end for which they were designed — the protection of the dead body of the king from the hatred of his enemies or the greed of the professional tomb-robber. The decay of the royal power which is so marked even in the beginnings of the dark period which now ensues no doubt completed a process which disillusionment had already begun ; and when Egypt once more found herself under a strong and stable government, the Theban kings who delivered her from the Hyksos tyranny had recourse to another device for securing the continuity of existence after death, and instead of piling mountains of stone or brick above their sepulchral chambers, were hewing in the Valley of the Kings the galleries and halls which have been yielding up their secrets in our time for the wonder and instruction of the world.
CHAPTER V
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
SCARCELY less famous than the pyramids, and of far greater beauty, are the splendid temples whose ruins extend from Heliopolis, close to the Delta, to Philse, where the beautiful shrines of Isis, exquisite in their setting, even if of late date for Egypt, are now becoming only memories of a beauty which has had to yield to the claims of present-day life. Egypt, almost equally with Greece, may claim to be the Land of Temples ; and certainly no other land of the ancient East can rival her in the number, the scale, and the magnificence of the shrines which she reared to her innumerable gods. The claim of the Greek to be the supreme temple-builder of the ancient world is, of course, unquestioned, and nothing in Egypt can bear comparison with the serene beauty of the Parthenon ; but, though the Egyptian architect knew nothing of that exquisite balance and harmony of proportion which has made Greek architecture the crown of human effort in sacred building, the temples of Egypt have a grandeur and impressiveness of their own which make a pro- found appeal to the mind ; and the contribution
84
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 85
of the Egyptian to the sum of human achieve- ment in this respect is coming to be more and more appreciated every day.
The pyramids show him to have been one of the great master-builders of the world in respect of the vastness of his creations ; the temples, often scarcely less impressive in this respect, show him to have been also a master in the art of constructing stately and nobly proportioned examples of that art of the column and architrave of which the temples of Hellas gave the supreme demonstration. The question of how much the Greek owed to the earlier builder may still be the subject of debate ; but there can be no question of the originality of the architects who gave to the world such noble specimens of the builder's art as the great colonnades of Karnak and Luxor, the beautiful terraces of Der el-Bahri, and the later glories of Edfu and Philae.
In one sense there can be comparatively little to tell in the way of a story of excavation with regard to the Egyptian temples. In Mesopotamia and Babylonia the remains of the great temples of Anu and Adad, of Enlil, and of Marduk, owe their restoration to the light of day entirely to the spade of the excavator, for they were completely buried beneath the dust of ages in the great mounds of Ashur, Nippur, and Babylon, and almost nothing was visible to tell of their former splendours till the modern excavator patiently stripped away the mantle in which time had wrapped them.
But the temples of Egypt had never experienced the oblivion which had covered their
86 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
northern rivals. They had suffered, indeed, many things at the hands of Time and of human vandalism. Sometimes they were half-buried in the sand which had risen higher and higher, century after century, around their columns ; sometimes the shrines of a rival faith had been thrust incongruously into their ruined courts, or an Arab village had grown up like an ugly parasite on their roofs ; but there always remained enough to tell that the work of one of the great master-building races of the world was there, waiting the time when it should be stripped of these paltry accretions, and revealed in its full beauty. Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, and their companion shrines were never quite for- gotten, and even Hatshepsut's exquisite terraces at Der el-Bahri, half-smothered beneath the sand, and wrecked by Coptic fanaticism though they were, still showed enough to enable the first European explorers who described them (MM. Jollois and Devilliers of Napoleon's Expedition of 1798) to be sure of the general character of the building which lay beneath the rubbish-heaps.
Accordingly the work of the excavator in connection with the temples of Egypt has not been so much the discovery of the unknown as the recovery of the complete form of what was already partially known, the clearing away of the excrescences which had attached themselves in the course of centuries to the original structures ; the preservation of the more delicate work, such as relief-sculpture and painting, from further injury ; the re-establishment in a state of security
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 87
of tottering walls and columns ; and, not least, the tracing out of the history of the building of temples which were in general the work of centuries, and of many kings. It has all been work which, from its very nature, can have but little of the nature of romance about it, which has but seldom led to any startling finds, which has involved a colossal amount of sheer hard labour, without any very conspicuous rewards ; but which has resulted in the temples becoming intelligible to the ordinary traveller, and safe for his interest for generations to come, and has enabled us to trace, in the case of a great structure like Karnak, the successive stages by which the vast building grew to a finished whole.
It is, of course, obviously impossible to attempt to tell, even in the scantiest outline, the story of a work which has extended over the whole length of the land from the Delta to the furthest bounds of Egyptian influence in Nubia, and has been carried on by scores of workers of all nationalities. Perhaps our end will best be served by taking a typical instance of the recovery of a temple, and telling in more or less detail the story of the work which gave it back to present-day knowledge. We take as our example Queen Hatshepsut's terraced temple at Der el-Bahri, one of the most beautiful, as it is now also one of the most famous, of Egyptian buildings.
In all Egypt there is probably no more beautiful or imposing site than that of the " Paradise of Amen," which the great queen reared to the glory of the Theban god and of
88 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
her own name. On the western side of the Nile, almost exactly opposite Karnak, the limestone cliffs of the Libyan Range sweep backwards in a great semicircle, forming a bay across whose mouth is drawn the long line of the funerary temples of the Theban kings of the XVIIIth and XlXth Dynasties. Behind them, and behind the innumerable tombs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh and the Northern Assassif, there lies, close against the salmon-red cliffs, the building which, of all Egyptian temples, makes the strongest appeal of pure beauty, as distinguished from the impressiveness which comes from sheer scale and mass.
The site is one which offers peculiar advantages, but is also encompassed with peculiar risks. No more magnificent background for a building could be desired ; but the background is precisely of such magnificence as to form a dangerous pitfall in which a merely mediocre architect would have been lost. To attempt to compete with Nature, when the work of man has to be placed in such close proximity with her towering architecture, would be to ensure hopeless defeat and to invite ridicule. Khufu's mountain of stone gets its full value from contrast with the long lines of the desert plateau on whose edge it stands. The columns and obelisks of Karnak and Luxor are far enough from the hills on either bank of the Nile to make the human handiwork the central and impressive feature of the picture ; but the site at Der el-Bahri would have made what was possible elsewhere a mere derision. To have placed the huge columns which seem so
.*■ -
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 89
great on the Theban plain in competition with the soaring vertical lines of the Libyan cliffs would have been to place a fool's cap on the most grandiose work of human hands. What was needed at Der el-Bahri was a building which should avoid the very idea of rivalry with Nature's handiwork, and which should conquer by subjec- tion, a building where all the emphasis should be laid on the horizontal lines of structure, so as to disclaim at once the thought of competition with the towering buttresses and bastions behind.
It may be questioned if ever an architect more thoroughly appreciated the conditions of his problem, or more satisfactorily fulfilled them, than did Senmut, when he designed for Queen Hatshepsut the three rising courts of the Paradise of Amen, with the long slopes leading from the one to the other, and the stately colonnades, where the shadows are so cunningly pressed into the decorative scheme, and the vertical lines of the columns give emphasis to the horizontaiity of the whole conception, and never for one moment suggest rivalry with the cliffs above.
Excavation, which has done so much for our knowledge of Der el-Bahri, has taught us that the originality of the XVIIIth Dynasty architect was not quite so absolute as was once imagined, and that he owed at least the idea of colonnaded terraces to the great man of the Xlth Dynasty, Mertisen or another, who designed the pyramid- temple, " Glorious are the seats of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra," for his royal master. But Senmut was one of those great men who, though they take their blessings where they find
9o WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
them, can never be accused of plagiarism, because they give back to the world the original idea transfigured and glorified. He has made the idea of the terraced courts and colonnades his own, while avoiding the heavy central block, which, with its somewhat paltry pyramid (if this was ever completed), must have been a contradiction to the whole conception of the rest of the building ; and his spacious courts, with their almost Greek grace of surrounding colonnade, seem touched with a spirit which is lacking in the older work.
Mr. Robert Hichens has told us how " after the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the temple at Deir-el- Bahari came upon him like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing — ever so knowingly — against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain " ; and though his idea is quite too fantastically elaborated (for the idea of conscious striving after prettiness is the last thing one could think of in connection with Der el-Bahri), yet the idea of femininity does occur to the mind when the temple is compared with other Egyptian work. Hatshepsut had not much of the weak woman about her, to all appearance, and Senmut, if his statues are any clue to the man, was as rough-hewn and masculine a piece of granite as one might encounter ; but between them they managed to rear a temple which stands alone in Egypt for the feminine quality of grace.
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 91
So now we may turn to the story of how this most graceful of Egyptian temples, unique in its grace if not in its main idea, and unique also in that it is the only temple in Egypt which came into being wholly at the bidding of a woman, was rescued from the accumulations of two and a half millenniums of neglect and the ravages of religious fanaticism.
Hatshepsut's temple was first made known to the modern world, as we have seen, by MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two of the savants attached to Napoleon's Expedition of 1798. The English traveller Pococke had indeed visited the site in 1737 ; but the thing which chiefly interested him was the abundance of mummies, and all that can be learned about the temple from his mention of it is that in his day the sanctuary was apparently accessible. " Here it seemed," he says, " as though the mountain had been vertically hewn out by the hand of man, and the people of the place said that there had once been a passage through it into the next valley " — the Valley of the Kings.
What the French explorers saw sixty years later was not a great deal more. They traced what they believed to be the bases of a series of sphinxes which had formerly formed an avenue, 42 feet wide and 437 yards long, leading up to the enclosure-wall of the temple, the remains of a wall which must have formed part of one of the terraces, what they took for the evidence of two flights of steps, leading to the higher levels of the building, the central part of the highest platform, and the rock-cut sanctuary which
92 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
Pococke had seen. The rest of the temple was completely covered with heaps of sand and rubbish.
The next visitor of importance was the famous Champollion, who, as was natural in the first decipherer of the hieroglyphics, was chiefly interested in the inscriptions which were visible, especially on the granite trilithon portal of the upper platform ; and the great scholar at once recognised the existence in these of a puzzle which was only to be solved later. He read the cartouche of Hatshepsut as that of a king Amenenthe ; but was surprised to see that all the nouns and verbs referring to this unknown king were in the feminine, and that the royal builder was addressed by Amen-Ra as " His daughter whom he loves." He imagined the existence of a female ruler Amense, who must have been connected by marriage with an unknown Thothmes, and also with the unknown Amenenthe, and his solution of the mystery, though his names were incorrect, was, after all, not so far from the truth.
Champollion found evidence in the work of the temple of one of his favourite theories — that Greek art found its origin in imitation of Egyptian work ; and here, again, he was only anticipating the recognition of the fact that the colonnades of Der el-Bahri approach nearer to the style of Greek work than almost any other work in Egypt.
Nearly thirty years after the first French explorers, and shortly after the visit of Champollion, Wilkinson surveyed the ruins, and apparently saw, not only the ramps of approach
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES 93
to the courts, but also one of the pillared corridors whose walls were covered with sculptures of soldiers carrying boughs and weapons, and with a scene representing the dedication of two obelisks to Amen. His reading of the name of the builder of the temple, Amunneitgori, or Amun-noo- het, was no nearer to the truth than that of Champollion, though he saw that the French scholar's unknown Thothmes was no other than Thothmes II.
Lepsius, who evidently saw more of the temple than any of his predecessors, was the first to make a real approach to the true reading of its builder's name. His version of the name, " Numt Amen," was indeed an almost correct reading of part of Hatshepsut's title, Khnum Amen ; and he con- jectured that she was the eldest sister of Thothmes III, who occupied the throne during the minority of her brother, but was not permitted to rank in the regular lists of the kings of Egypt.
In 1858 the indefatigable Mariette visited the temple, and added it to the thirty-six other sites at which he carried on excavations during his thirty years of ceaseless toil. He was too busy with other work at Qurneh to give to Der el-Bahri the attention which it deserved, and his work there was carried on only with a small staff, and for a short time, though he worked again at the place in 1862 and 1866. Nor were his methods here such as to be helpful to his successors. Working, as he did all his lifetime, under the lash, as it were, and with the need of getting the largest possible results with the smallest expenditure of money and time, it was impossible
94 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
for him to make his clearances thorough and methodical. Indeed, he seriously added to the difficulties of subsequent excavators by the fact that instead of removing the rubbish of his excavations completely outside the probable limits of the temple, he was forced by stress of time and want of money simply to dump his waste on the nearest convenient spot within the temple area. The consequence was that when Naville came to make the systematic clearance of the whole building, he found several of the most important chambers completely buried, not only beneath the debris of the centuries, but beneath that also which Mariette had heaped on the top of everything.
All the same, it was Mariette who, as in so many other instances, first revealed to the world the real wonder of Der el-Bahri and the sur- passing interest of its sculptured halls. His was the first plan to give us anything like a true conception of the form of the temple, then held to be unique in Egyptian architecture ; and though his restoration of the details, or rather the restoration of M. Brune, working on his material, was incorrect in several points, it was a good deal less so than some more pretentious attempts which succeeded it, and at least gave an impression intelligible, and in the main not very far from the actuality.
It was to this first excavation of Mariette also that we owe what has ever since been the most picturesque, and not the least informing, of the treasures of Der el-Bahri — the wonderful series of reliefs representing the voyage of
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Hatshepsut's squadron to Punt, which decorates the retaining wall terminating the middle platform of the temple. This series of sculptures, one of the priceless treasures of New Empire Egyptian art, would of itself be the justification of Marietta's work.
In 1893 the Egypt Exploration Fund took up the great task of completely excavating Queen Hatshepsut's temple, and their work, conducted by M. Edouard Naville and a number of assistants, only closed with the publication, in 1908, of the sixth folio volume of plates and plans, completing, with the introductory memoir, a present-day memorial which even the great queen need not have disdained, and which is worthy of her fine achievement. By the patient efforts of M. Naville and his fellow- workers the long ramps and spacious courts of the temple were completely cleared of the rubbish of centuries, their graceful colonnades put in a condition of safety, and the priceless coloured reliefs roofed over so as to protect them from the ruinous effects of the weather, which, even in the period between the work of Mariette and that of the Egypt Exploration Fund, had wrought more damage to the wonderful series of scenes of the Expedition to Punt than had been done by all the centuries of neglect.
Wisely the explorers made no attempt at restoration. Their aim was solely one of preserva- tion, and we owe to them the fact that the most interesting temple of the XVIIIth Dynasty is now in a condition which permits some realisation of its former beauty, and which promises its
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endurance for centuries to come. Thanks to the explorers' labours, and to the complete view of the building which we owe to Mr. Somers Clarke, the memorial temple of Egypt's greatest queen is now as well known in all its essential features as almost any structure in the world.
The work at Der el-Bahri, however, only ended in one aspect to begin in another. Already in 1879 Mariette, to whose instinct for the possibilities of the various Egyptian sites full justice has never been done, had declared his belief, founded on his discovery of a block of stone bearing the name of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra of the Xlth Dynasty, and of several fragments of columns, that a small temple of the Xlth Dynasty had once existed not far from Hatshepsut's great temple. In 1903, after the completion of the actual work of excavation at the great temple, M. Naville began the excava- tion of the large mounds to the south of the site of his former labours, and with the assistance of Dr. H. R. Hall and others, the work was carried on till 1907, the final volume of results being published in 191 3.
The work began, as M. Naville tells us, chiefly with the view of clearing the Xlth Dynasty cemetery which the explorer was convinced lay beneath the great mounds of rubbish ; but the cemetery soon proved to be less, and other objects more, important than had been antici- pated. Ere long the diggers made out the line of a ramp, running parallel to the outer wall of Hatshepsut's temple, and, following up the traces of building which successively revealed
E 1 —
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themselves, as the mounds, often from 15 to 20 feet in height, were cleared away, they at last completely unearthed the remains of a building which is as unique in the history of Egyptian architecture as Hatshepsut's temple was formerly thought to be. The temple was at an early stage found to belong, as Mariette had suggested, to the Xlth Dynasty, and to be the work of one of the greatest kings of this little-known line of rulers, the Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra who has already been mentioned.
It is by no means in such good preservation as its great companion, for about the end of the XlXth Dynasty it appears to have been definitely abandoned as a temple, and handed over to the tender mercies of the masons who used it as a convenient quarry for material. Nothing is now standing above 10 feet from the pavement level, and none of the pillars are above 7 feet in height. Yet the remains are sufficiently complete to allow of the understanding of the appearance which the whole must have presented in the days when Hatshepsut's architect took its platform and colonnades as the inspiration of the great work on which he was engaged at its side.
At the end of a spacious enclosure, bounded by a double temenos wall of which the outer member was of brick and the inner of limestone, a broad ramp, sloping somewhat steeply, rose to the level of a rectangular platform. The retaining wall of the platform was faced, as in the later temple, with a colonnade consisting of a double row of pillars square on plan. The platform itself was surrounded by a double range of
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similar square pillars, which was roofed over, and made a kind of veranda completely enclosing the central mass of the temple. In the centre of this colonnade, a door, curiously narrow and paltry for so fine a building (it is only 3 feet wide), gave access to an almost square hypostyle hall, whose roof was supported by a perfect forest of octagonal columns ranged on three sides in three rows, and on the fourth, at the back of the hall, in two. In the centre of this hall, and probably with a narrow open space between it and the innermost row of columns, rose the unique feature of the temple — a rectangular mass of rubble faced with hewn stone, and surmounted by a pyramid of similar materials. Behind the pyramid, and against the wall which separated the pyramid-court from the rear portion of the temple, were several shrines, corresponding to certain tombs in the court beyond.
Passing through another granite doorway, of the same meagre proportions as the one in the front of the hall, the visitor entered an open court surrounded by a colonnade of octagonal columns, two deep on the southern side, but single on the east and west. In the midst of this court the mouth of a sloping passage, which descended for 150 metres to the rock-hewn sanctuary, lined with granite and furnished with an alabaster shrine, where the Ka of King Mentuhotep was worshipped, formed a strange and impressive feature. Beyond the open court stood another hypostyle hall, with eight rows of octagonal columns, ten deep, and, last of all, a passage, bounded by two walls which reached
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from the seventh of the two central rows of columns in the hall, led to a tiny sanctuary hewn out of the cliff behind the temple.
Such was the temple of Mentuhotep as excavation has revealed it to us — undoubtedly a most interesting memorial of Middle Kingdom architecture, and most important as being by far the most complete example which has survived of the work of that period. Probably we should have thought the dominant feature of the building, the central pyramid, rather an incongruity than otherwise, and evidently Senmut, when he came to his great task six hundred years later, thought so too, for he adopted the ideas of his prede- cessor in other respects, but discarded what seems to us the clumsy pyramid block altogether. One thing, however, Senmut could not do. He could not secure for his splendid design anything like the fineness of masonry which Mentuhotep's architect had been able to compass in the older temple. The XVIIIth Dynasty builders, clever though they were in many respects, left poor work behind them compared with the magnificent masonry of the Xlth Dynasty men.
One of the most interesting features of the older building was found in the six shrines which have been already mentioned. They belonged to certain princesses, Aashait, Sadhe, Kauit, Kemsit, and Henhenit, with one unnamed, who were also priestesses. These shrines were in connection with the tombs of the ladies in question, who were buried within the temple.
The building had been completed before either the tombs or the shrines were inserted ;
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and the inference has been drawn that these were the ladies of the harem who were chosen for the honour of accompanying King Mentuhotep on his voyage through the Underworld to the regions of the blessed — in other words, who were killed at his funeral so that he should not lack company in the world of the dead. The survival to so late a period of this barbarous custom is not proved, though it has been suggested that it continued even as late as the middle of the XVII Ith Dynasty ; but at all events the shrines of the princesses have furnished us with some fine examples of the work of the little-known Xlth Dynasty.
In the extreme north corner of the temple, Thothmes III intruded another shrine to the goddess Hathor, which was discovered during the progress of the excavations in February, 1906, and has provided us with one of the most admir- able examples extant of Egyptian sculpture. The shrine is a small chamber, 10 feet long and 8 feet high, hewn in the rock and lined with sandstone. The slabs are sculptured with religious scenes in which Thothmes III makes offerings to Hathor. The goddess herself stood in the centre of the shrine in the shape of a life-sized figure of a cow, suckling a kneeling figure of a king, while another royal figure stands in front under her head. The name of Amenhotep II is attached to these figures ; but the probability is that they were meant to represent Thothmes III, who dedicated the chapel, and that all that Amenhotep II had to do with the act of piety was the engraving of his cartouche on his father's work. The Hathor cow of Der el-Bahri is
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quite one of the masterpieces of New Empire art, quite eclipsing the famous example of the same figure which has come from the Saite period and has hitherto been esteemed one of the finest specimens of Egyptian animal sculpture. " Neither Greece nor Rome," says Maspero of the Der el-Bahri cow, " has left us anything that can be compared with it ; we must go to the great sculptors of animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work." Indeed the Hathor cow and the two lions of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen, now in the British Museum, might be safely taken as the pieces on which Egyptian sculpture might elect to stand as an interpreter of animal figure.
Such, then, have been the main results of excavation on a single Egyptian site ; surely enough to afford ample justification of the expenditure of time and money and labour which has been involved. Two great temples have been given back to the knowledge of the world — one of them, it is true, from a period otherwise fairly well known, the other from a period which was hitherto almost a blank. Even in the case of the later temple, where the results contained no surprises, and only extended our already existing knowledge, the contribution of this site to our estimate of Egyptian art was of surpassing value ; while Mentuhotep's temple has filled a gap at one of the points where further knowledge of Egyptian history and art was most to be desired.
There have been no marvels of buried treasure to gild the pages of the story of excavation at
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Der el-Bahri ; but there has been a solid addition to the sum of human knowledge of the past. At a score of other sites, work similar to that which has just been described has been continually going on during the last thirty years. Mariette's beginnings of clearance at sites such as Edfu, Esneh, Denderah, and Abydos have been followed by work whose thoroughness has been such as Mariette, from the nature of the case, could never have accomplished. To tell the story of excava- tion, even in the most meagre outline, would take a volume instead of a chapter, and Der el-Bahri must suffice as a typical example of the kind of work which has been done all up and down the land of Egypt.
Reference must be made, however, to one piece of work, associated, curiously enough, also with the name of the explorer of Der el-Bahri, which has a unique interest of its own. This is the discovery of the Pool of Osiris, which, as Strabo told us, lay beneath the great temple, or, as he called it, the Memnonium, at Abydos. In 1914 M. Naville, following up the work of Miss M. A. Murray and Professor Petrie in 1902-3, found a great underground chamber, 100 feet by 60 feet, constructed of huge blocks of limestone, cased inside with hard red sand- stone. The pillars, the architraves, and the roofing-blocks of the aisles of this chamber were all of fine granite, without adornment or inscrip- tion, and in fact resembled almost exactly the similar work in the so-called " Temple of the Sphinx " at Gizeh, with this difference, that whereas the granite pillars of the Temple of the
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Sphinx are 3 feet square, those of the chamber at Abydos are 8^ feet square. The wonder of the building, however, was its arrangement. In the centre of the chamber stood two rows of these great granite monoliths, each row consisting of five pillars. Around the central block of masonry on which these pillars rested, ran a deep channel, which had manifestly once been filled with water, so as to render the central block an island.
Around this channel runs a ledge of stonework about 3 feet wide, and from this ledge access is given to a set of seventeen cells each about 6 feet square and 6 feet high.
Manifestly this extraordinary building is Strabo's " well," which, as he tells us, was below the temple, and was built like the Labyrinth, only on a smaller scale, with passages covered by a single stone. What may have been its use it is as yet impossible to say. The water channel and the ledge round it suggest that the boat of Osiris may have been towed around the pool by his priests on the great feast-days, or when the Passion Play of Abydos, representing the death and resurrection of Osiris, was being celebrated. Two things alone seem certain, the first, the identity of the chamber with the pool described by the old geographer, and the second, that we have here one of the most ancient sacred buildings in Egypt.
Other parts of the structure are the work of the XlXth Dynasty, which did so much at Abydos, and bear the cartouche of Merenptah and representations of this king worshipping the
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gods ; but the chamber of the pool is another matter. Its construction is of such a character as to refer it at once to a very much earlier date ; and there can be little doubt that the resemblance to the Temple of the Sphinx is only the evidence of the fact that the two buildings are of the same period, and that the Pool of Osiris is the earliest Egyptian building of any size known, apart from the pyramids.
The magnificence of its masonry shows how far the Egyptians of this early period had already carried the system of construction which they were to use to such splendid purpose in the great temples of the land. Never again, however, even in the great days of New Empire building, did they put together such a piece of sumptuous massiveness as the underground chamber of Osiris at Abydos.
Another aspect of work among the temples must be referred to, as being, in its own way, not less important than the rescuing of the actual structures from obscurity and neglect ; and that is the interpretation of the work thus rescued, the tracing of its history, and the disentangling of the various periods of building which are represented, and the different hands which have been at work in the completion of a building whose history as a growing organism may stretch through centuries, and involve the activities of half a dozen dynasties.
To make the temples intelligible is a matter scarcely less important than to make them visible, and it has involved scarcely less effort. Even after all that has been accomplished in
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this direction, a great Egyptian temple such as Karnak remains a sufficiently complicated business to bewilder the ordinary sight-seer and make him turn with relief to the clarity of Greek architecture ; but at least it is now possible to arrive at something like an under- standing of how the vast bulk of Karnak grew, century after century, to what we now see, and to realise a little of the romance of history which is involved in the succession of Pharaohs who have laboured to make great and splendid the holy and beautiful house of Amen in Thebes.
Let us turn, then, to Karnak, and try to see a little of what modern work has done in the direction of making this vastest of extant Egyptian temples intelligible. A century ago, Belzoni wandered round the ruins of the great temple, his mind filled with vague dreams of Memnon, Osymandias, and Psammethes, perhaps as appreciative of the wonder of what he saw as the most enlightened of his successors, but absolutely in the dark as to the significance of what he saw, or the history of how the great building had been reared ; to-day the story of Karnak is practically as well understood as that of one of our European cathedrals, and anyone who likes to take the trouble may trace out the evidence of its age-long growth. Indeed it is difficult for the modern to realise how lengthy is the story which unfolds itself in the sculptured stones of the great temple. We think with something like awe of the long process which reared some of our cathedrals, and which may, perhaps, have lasted for a century, or
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perhaps, in an extreme case, for two ; but Karnak was a growing organism for a period of time more than twice as long, not only as any of our cathe- drals took in the building, but twice as long as any of them have been standing. Towards the eastern end of the vast complex of Karnak there are still to be seen the scanty relics of the earliest builders of the temple of whom we have any knowledge — the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, who began their work at Karnak certainly not much later than 2000 B.C. On the western face of the great temple is the Pylon of the Ptolemies, whose dynasty only closed with the subjection of Egypt to Roman rule in 30 B.C. Karnak, in other words, was building for a period which was certainly not less than seventeen hundred years, and which may have been almost two thousand ! Such a consideration makes our ideas as to duration seem very small indeed.
Nor has the work been less complicated than it has been lengthy. Practically every Pharaoh worth naming has left his mark on the great building in some form or another, and often the work of the reigning king was done without the slightest regard to that of his forerunners ; sometimes, indeed, with the deliberate design of obscuring it and blotting out its memory. Consequently the task of disentangling the story of Karnak has been no easy one. It has been like the reading of a manuscript where interpola- tions of different writers, dealing with different matters, continually break the thread of the main narrative, and where, to add to the confusion, part of the writing is a palimpsest, written over
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the faded script of an earlier author. Along with the difficulty of interpreting the story of the various buildings has gone that of preserving them from destruction.
One of the curious facts about Egyptian building is that, for a race of master-builders such as they showed themselves to be, they were strangely, even culpably careless about their foundations. If the mighty halls which they reared had been built on such foundations as modern builders would insist on for even much less important structures, there seems no reason why, short of deliberate destruction by the hand of man, the Egyptian temples should not stand practically for ever. But the Egyptian architect was content to pile walls and colonnades which are the wonder of the world on the most flimsy foundations, and his work is in most cases literally a house built on the sand.
The wonder is, not that there have been occasional collapses, but that the buildings have stood so long as they have ; indeed nothing but their sheer mass and weight has enabled them to endure. Even so, earth-tremors, and the constant and insidious work of infiltration, have worked havoc on the badly founded buildings, and were it not for the constant care devoted to them, and the work of practically refounding them which has been carried out, the great halls of Karnak would ere long be only masses of tumbled ruin. There is nothing dramatic about the work of either the interpreter or the preserver ; neither can point, in general, to any treasure-trove which has resulted from his efforts, though occasionally,
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as notably in connection with the work of M. Legrain at Karnak, the work of preservation has resulted in the unearthing of a mass of the most wonderful ancient statuary. But we owe the double fact that Karnak stands to-day and is likely to stand for centuries to come, and that its vast complex of building is intelligible, to many years of quiet and unobtrusive work on the part of scholars and architects.
In the great days of Egypt's glory under the New Empire, Thebes must have been one of the wonder-cities of the world, and one of the fairest sights on which the sun ever shone. It may be that Babylon, in the short-lived glory of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, was vaster in extent, and the German excavations have taught us how gorgeous were some of the great buildings of the city, with their facings of enamelled brick and their wealth of colour ; but it may be questioned if even Babylon could show anything to match the solemn splendour of Karnak or Luxor, and beside the ordered sumptuousness of the huge Egyptian temples, with their wonders of megalithic construction, one imagines that Babylon's glories would have seemed rather cheap and tawdry. And of all the glories of Thebes, Karnak was the centre and crown.
Petrie tells us that the pitiful remains of the Labyrinth, the great temple of Amenemhat III of the Xllth Dynasty, show that it was big enough to hold all the temples of Karnak and Luxor put together ; but the imagination is scarcely capable of trying to comprehend the extent of such a building, and Karnak is quite
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big enough for most people. The actual area of its buildings is about equal to that of St. Peter's (Rome), Milan, and Notre Dame (Paris) ; while the sacred enclosure, the Cathedral Close, so to speak, would hold another half-dozen of the biggest cathedrals of Europe, without crowding them unduly.
Let us try to imagine ourselves visiting the great temple in the days when it had reached its greatest extent, though, by that time, the glory of Thebes had in great measure departed. Still the building, as we now see it, was practically completed only in the days of the Ptolemies, and no survey of it would be adequate without including their work. Unfortunately in taking the temple in the natural order of approach, by its west front, so to speak, we reverse almost exactly the order of its building, which was, generally speaking, from east to west. Yet the history of the building is sufficiently intelligible even when thus taken in reverse order, and though there are other approaches to Karnak, and the approach by either the Eastern or the Western Avenue of Sphinxes must have been very impressive, yet the main front of the temple must always have been that which faced the Nile, in the termination of the axis of the whole structure. No doubt also the Egyptian Kings, with their fondness for using their great river as the scene of ceremonial processions, used the western front of the temple for their visits to the shrine of Amen.
We land, then, at a quay of hewn stone, adorned with two small obelisks of Setv II of the
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XlXth Dynasty, and with two statues of couchant lions. Passing down a short and gentle slope, we move along a broad paved way between rows of couchant ram-headed sphinxes, which were placed here by Ramses II. The path extends for 200 feet, and leads up to the vastest portal to be found even in this land of vast portals. This is the First Pylon of Karnak — first in point of approach, but last in point of erection, for it is the work of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs who grasped the sceptre of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great ; and indeed, as you can see, the work is not yet complete. Building is still going on, and the ramps of crude brick by which the great stones are dragged up to their positions are still heaped against the walls, where they will continue to stand for more than two thousand years.
The pylon itself is gigantic. The breadth of the west front of St. Paul's, the greatest building familiar to English minds, is 179 feet, and its height, to the top of the statue of St. Paul on the pediment, is 135 feet. The Pylon of the Ptolemies measures 370 feet in breadth, or rather more than double St. Paul's, while its height is 142J feet, so that it overtops St. Paul's head by 7! feet. In addition its walls are 49 feet thick. No mightier approach to a temple was ever devised.
Passing through this great gateway we find ourselves in an open court whose dimensions are worthy of the portal which gave access to it. From the gateway where you stand to the scarcely less imposing pylon of Ramses I, which faces you across the open space, this court
WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES in
measures 275 feet, while its breadth is 338 feet. The area of St. Paul's is 84,000 square feet, so that this single court of Karnak exceeds our great cathedral in area by 8000 square feet. Around its walls runs a colonnade of single columns. In the north corner of the court there stands a little grey sandstone temple, divided into three chapels, which are dedicated to Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the members of the Theban Triad. The southern colonnade is broken by the intruding front of a larger temple. This is the temple of Ramses III, the last of the great warrior kings of Egypt, who saved the land, in the degenerate days of the XXth Dynasty, from being overrun and ravaged by the raid of the Sea-Peoples. His temple, though very modest in size (it measures only 170 feet in length), is important as giving one of the most perfect examples extant of a complete Egyptian temple, built from start to finish by one monarch, and on a straightforward and homogeneous plan.
The great court which has taken these two lesser buildings into its sweep was the work of the Libyan Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, who held their court at Bubastis, and is therefore often called the Court of the Bubastites. The temple of Ramses III was cleared of rubbish in 1896-7 by M. Legrain, in the course of his great work at Karnak. Down the central avenue of the Bubastite court the Ethiopian Pharaohs of the XXVth Dynasty began the erection of a colonnade whose purpose has not been quite determined. As they left it, it consisted of a double range of huge columns, five in each row.
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Of the ten, only one solitary survivor now stands, and is known as the Column of Taharqa, after the Ethiopian king who was responsible for its erection, and for some of the sorest disasters of Egypt in her declining days. It was Taharqa and his successor Tanutamen who brought down upon Egypt the wrath of the Assyrian conqueror, Ashurbanipal, whose ruthless soldiery by the sack of Thebes dealt the imperial city a blow from which she never recovered. Taharqa 's column stands as the memorial of a man who " began to build, and was not able to finish " in more senses than one.
Leaving the court for a moment by the portal in the south-east corner, we find on the wall of the second pylon one of the most interesting records of the temple. This is the inscription in which Sheshanq, one of the Libyan Pharaohs, records the triumph of that campaign in Syria in the course of which he humbled the pride of Rehoboam of Judah, and robbed Solomon's temple of all the riches which the wise king had accumulated. In Sheshanq's relief a gigantic figure of Amen leads up before the now vanished figure of the king five rows of captive towns of Palestine, each represented by a circular wall enclosing its name, from which emerges the upper part of a bound prisoner.
Before us, as we return to the great court, rises the second pylon, the work of Ramses I, the founder of the XlXth Dynasty. Scarcely any part of the temple is more eloquent of the jumble of times, and kings, and even faiths, which goes to make up Karnak, than the
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neighbourhood of this pylon. The great gateway itself is of Ramses I ; but its materials had their own story before he built them into his new approach to the temple of Amen, and had served another god ; for some of the blocks of the pylon once belonged to one of the heretical temples of Akhenaten, and bear his name and those of his successors, Tutankhamen and Ay. The little vestibule before the pylon is flanked by statues of Ramses II ; but within the doorway are found the cartouches of Ramses I and Sety II, as well as that of Ramses II, while part of the vestibule is the work of two of the Ptolemies. Thus in this little space the work of no fewer than eight Pharaohs, covering a period of more than a thousand years, is represented.
The gateway of Ramses I gives access to what is perhaps the most remarkable, though by no means the most beautiful, of the halls of Karnak. The Hypostyle Hall, one of the hugest of human creations, was, like so much else at Karnak, the work of several sovereigns, though in this case the completion of the building was not so very long protracted as in some other instances. The hall was begun by Ramses I, whose short reign of two years only enabled him to see the work started. The greater part of the hall as we now see it is the work of Sety I, one of the finest of Egyptian Pharaohs, whose work everywhere is in accordance with the nobility of his face as it can be seen at Cairo.
Sety carried out the erection of what is by far the most imposing feature of the hall, the nave, with its double row of gigantic open-flower
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columns, the largest in existence. Each of the twelve tremendous columns is 69 feet in height and 33 feet in circumference, while the spread- ing capitals, 11 feet in height, have an area large enough for one hundred men to stand upon. Imagine twelve versions of the Trajan Column at Rome, or the Vendome Column at Paris, facing one another in two rows and supporting gigantic architraves of sixty to a hundred tons in weight, which in their turn support the great roofing-slabs. These form the central avenue of the great hall. On either side of them the papyrus-bud columns of the two side aisles rise to a height of 42J feet. The rows nearest to the central avenue on either side bear above their architraves rectangular pillars which make up the difference between the height of the side columns and those of the centre, and which bear the extremities of the roof of the nave with its cornice. On the lower level of the side pillars, the roof of the hall continues over the rest of the area, supported by a forest of one hundred and twenty-two columns.
Sety I is responsible for the whole of the northern half of the hall, as well as for the central avenue, so that the southern portion of the building is all that Ramses II can claim as his work, if indeed even this part was not erected by his father, and only sculptured by him. Ramses II, however, had the knack of securing to himself the glory of work which was done by other men, and to most people the great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak is his work, though he had really very little to do with it.
The architectural merits of the huge building
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are undoubted, up to a certain point ; but its faults are equally unquestionable. Mere size tells here, as indeed it almost always does, unless its impression is spoilt by sheer incapacity. There can be no question of the impressiveness of the great building. The central avenue, with its soaring columns, and its grated clerestory rising above the roofs of the side-aisles, is the prototype of all subsequent cathedral archi- tecture. But the side-aisles do not add to the dignity of the great chamber. Their forest of squat, shapeless columns, instead of being impres- sive, is only bewildering. Here, very certainly, you cannot see the wood for the trees, and the spaciousness of the hall is quite destroyed by the multitude of the supports of its roof. " The size that strikes us," says Professor Petrie, " is not the grandeur of strength, but the bulkiness of disease."
The outer walls of the great hall are sculptured with reliefs representing the wars of its two creators. The north wall bears a fine series of scenes, covering over 200 feet of surface, in which the wars of Sety I are depicted with great spirit. In some later instances such war-reliefs are merely wearisome ; but these of Sety are both vivacious and well-executed, and such scenes as that of the king smiting the Libyans are among the best examples of work in this kind, and infinitely superior to the pretentious work of his son. The southern wall has reliefs of Ramses II, his eternal Battle of Kadesh, which he could never forget, or allow anyone else to forget, a copy of the treaty of peace with the Hittites, and the
n6 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
so-called Poem of Pentaur, in which the king's valour at Kadesh is celebrated.
Behind the Hypostyle Hall comes the Illrd Pylon, which was reared by the most magnificent, if not the greatest, of Egyptian Pharaohs, the gorgeous Amenhotep III, in whose glittering reign the glories of the New Empire seemed to culminate, before the shadows of his son's ill-starred attempt at religious reform dimmed their splendour. When Thebes was at the height of its fame, and when all the kings of the ancient east were sending their ambas- sadors to the great city to fall " seven times and seven times " in the dust before the golden sandals of the man who was God visible on earth to a great part of the ancient world, this third pylon was the main front of the great Theban temple, which then occupied not much more than half the space which it now covers. Its western face was used by Sety as the back wall of the Hypostyle Hall ; but on the northern tower on the eastern side can still be seen the faint remains of a great scene in which a royal procession on the Nile in honour of Amen is depicted. One great ship over 40 feet long has the king standing on the poop, and cabins with cornices amidships. Thirty or forty rowers urge it along, and it tows behind it the sacred barge of Amen, which bears in a shrine a small processional bark of the god, and at the bow a sphinx and an altar.
Besides his pylon, Amenhotep wrought a vast amount of work at Karnak ; but it was not, like that of Sety and Ramses, concentrated in a single great structure, but dispersed in various parts
I|. KAKNAK, COI.l'MNS OF Mil: SI I > 1-:- A ISI.I-: , II YPOSTYI.i: 1 1 A II .
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of the sacred enclosure, and so does not produce the same effect. To see the work of Amenhotep on a scale worthy of his importance in the line of Egyptian Pharaohs, you have to go to Luxor with its fine papyrus-bud forecourt, and its noble nave, which, had it been finished, would have almost rivalled the Hypostyle Hall of the later kings in size and exceeded it in beauty ; or to try to think back the vanished glories of what was probably the most gorgeous and beautiful of all the Theban temples — the Funerary temple of Amenhotep, which was destroyed, not by the Assyrian conqueror, but by the royal vandals of the XlXth Dynasty, Ramses II and his son Merenptah.
All the same, Amenhotep accomplished no small amount of work, in one way and another, within the enclosure of Karnak. Just beyond the girdle-wall of the great temple on the north side, he built a temple to Mentu, the Theban War-God, with a pylon, and obelisks of red granite. This temple once contained statues in black granite of the king, and of the goddess Sekhmet, towards whom he evidently cherished a feeling of deep devotion, if we may judge by the number of statues to her which he dedicated in the temple of Mut.
The temple of Mentu shared the usual fate of Amenhotep's work, and was meddled with by Merenptah, Ramses V, and at least four of the Ptolemies, a fair specimen of the fashion in which the history of Karnak is complicated by the multitude of superimposed strata, or rather of interwoven strands, with which you have to do.
n8 WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES
On the south side, and just at the girdle-wall, stands the beautiful temple of Khonsu (the son of the Theban Triad), one of the finest examples of a complete Egyptian temple of normal form. This is not the work of Amenhotep, but of Ramses III ; but apparently an earlier temple of Amenhotep must have once occupied the site, for the king set up before the gateway a noble avenue of one hundred and twenty-two sandstone sphinxes bearing his name. Beyond the wall, and approached by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, lies another of Amenhotep 's contributions to the glories of Karnak — the temple of Mut, the mother-goddess of the Theban Triad, which was excavated in 1895-7 by two English ladies, Miss Margaret Benson and Miss Janet Gourlay. It is full of Sekhmet statues, and behind it lies a sacred lake, shaped like a horse-shoe.
But the following out of the work of Amenhotep has drawn us away from our main quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. Returning to the great temple by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, we pass the girdle-wall by a pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of a temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had reared in Thebes to his new deity the Aten. Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed to promote peace in the state after the religious troubles of Akhenaten's times. The square court behind the pylon has on its east side the ruins of a small temple of Amenhotep II, and the walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb. Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous
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condition, closes the court on the north side, and passing through it we are faced by one of the most ancient parts of the whole ouilding, the pylon of Queen Hatshepsut. The pylon bears witness both to what Professor Breasted calls " the Feud of the Thutmosids," and to the religious strifes of the XVIIIth Dynasty, for Hatshepsut 's name was erased from her reliefs by Thothmes II, and all allusions to Amen were scrupulously removed by Akhenaten, and restored by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut 's pylon we pass a pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and enemy, and traversing a court whose walls bear inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor of Ramses II, in which he describes his victories over the Libyans and the Peoples of the Mediter- ranean, we find ourselves back at the point from which our digression started, in the central court behind the great pylon of Amenhotep III. Here was the western front of the temple in the days of Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary remaining member of the quartette of obelisks with which this king and Thothmes III adorned the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins behind them. The obelisks of the later king are both gone — the survivor of the pair of Thothmes I is a fine shaft, 75 \ feet high.
Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller one which he erected to the east, Thothmes reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns of cedar wood ; but his work was not permitted to endure for long. It was within this hall that the priests of Amen arranged a little piece of play-acting in which the god Amen declared his
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preference for Thothmes III as king, and it was perhaps this unpalatable fact which determined Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece of vandalism which was to redound to her own glory. Anyhow, as the time for the celebration of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect, Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great shafts of granite for her jubilee obelisks, and when the tremendous blocks, 97! feet high, arrived, she stripped off the roof from part of her father's hall and set them up there. Apart from the filial piety of such an act, the obelisks were things of which she might justly be proud.
With the single exception of the stone, the work of her deadly enemy Thothmes III, which now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, and which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft of Hatshepsut, which still remains erect at Karnak, is the largest obelisk existing, and is more than 20 feet higher than the so-called " Cleopatra's Needle," which represents to Londoners, as its twin does to the folk of New York, the skill of ancient Egypt.
Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement that she caused the shafts to be engraved with an inscription in which she swears, "As Ra loves me, as my father Amen favours me ... as I shall be unto eternity like an Imperishable, as I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely these two great obelisks which My Majesty hath wrought with electrum for my father, Amen, in order that my name may abide in his temple, enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block of enduring granite, without seam or joining."
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She goes on to say, what is still more surprising, that the time occupied in the extraction and transportation of the mighty shafts was seven months !
When Thothmes III came to the throne, he showed his love for his distinguished relative by casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet with sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not be read. As rulers, the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very front rank ; they cannot be said to have shone as exponents of family affection.
To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I had another court, which was altered and added to by Thothmes III, who built also a small pylon in front of his Halls of Records, which come next in the great complex of building, jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which stand beside them. In the First Hall of Records stand the two pillars which strike everyone who sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and examples of a type not common in Egyptian work. They are of granite, the southern one carved with the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with the Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was turned into the chapel of the temple, in which the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidaeus, at the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that one of the oldest and one of the newest parts of the building are here united.
In the open space behind the chapel lie the scanty remains of the earliest Karnak known to us — that of the Xllth Dynasty. A few broken polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style,
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for the earliest parts of the great temple, with the work of the Xlth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri ; but it is impossible to say with the least approach to certainty what the first temple may have looked like. East again of these remnants comes the last important part of the vast building — the great Festal Temple of Thothmes III, with its fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and its eastern sanctuary and complex of store-chambers.
The Festal Hall presents a feature unique in Egyptian Architecture. Its colonnade consists of thirty-two rectangular piers ranged round the sides, while down the centre of the hall run two rows of ten round columns, not spaced with the piers, and of extraordinary shape. Instead of tapering from the base to the top, their taper runs the opposite way, and their capitals are inverted, and present the appearance of a bell standing on its mouth. The downwards tapering column is, of course, a familiar feature in Minoan archi- tectural practice, and it is within the bounds of possibility that Thothmes' columns are an Egyptian adaptation of a Minoan motive, for, as the tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara show, Minoan influence was at its height in the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and intercourse between Crete and Egypt was frequent. Whether Thothmes owed the idea to some Minoan suggestion or not, it never established itself in Egypt. In Crete, with its regular use of wooden pillars resting on stone bases, the downward taper was quite natural ; in Egypt, with a prevalent stone construction, it was an exotic, and could show no reason for its existence, and it
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was never repeated. One cannot say that its disappearance was any great loss to Egyptian architecture, for the effect of the inversion is singularly clumsy.
We have thus traced the story of Karnak as one traverses the great temple from front to rear, and the bewildering complexity of the building is reflected in the variegated fabric of the narrative. To call Karnak, as is often done, " the typical temple of the Egyptian Empire," is to create an entire misapprehension in the mind of anyone who hears such a phrase used. Karnak is anything but a typical temple ; indeed it is not a temple, but rather an aggregate of many temples, and above everything else an epitome of Egyptian history for at least a millennium and a half. One would not even seek it for typical representatives of Egyptian architecture. Karnak, in this respect, possesses its beauties — and its monstrosities ; but one would look rather to smaller specimens of the builder's art for an adequate representation of Egyptian achievement in this respect.
The great temple claims, and will always claim, our attention and wonder, by its sheer vastness, to begin with, for undoubtedly vastness has its own effect, though it is not the highest, in the elements of architectural impressiveness ; then by the extraordinary way in which it presents a summary in stone of the vicissitudes of Egyptian history ; last, and perhaps least, by the surprising quality, and in some instances the beauty, of some of its detail. The main element in its appeal will always be wonder ; admiration, and even
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that qualified by many reservations, is a bad second to the impression of simple amazement, that human hands and brains should have ever wrought so vast a thing.
The preservation of the temple is, and will continue to be, a work almost as great, and as difficult, as its erection. It lies in the hands of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a task as unending as the web of Penelope. Generally speaking, such work is of the kind which has to be its own reward, for it makes no appeal to the average visitor, who only sees that his enjoyment of this court or that is more or less hindered by the progress of work whose one merit is that it will keep safe for future generations priceless treasures which other- wise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, however, the work does bring other prizes in its train.
Such was the case when, in November, 1903, M. Legrain, in the course of his work near the pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned to the central court after our digression to the south, found what has since been known as " the Karnak Cachette," a great pit full of pieces of sculpture of all types and periods. " For a year and eight months," wrote Maspero in February, 1905, " we have been fishing for statues in the Temple of Karnak. . . . Seven hundred stone monuments have already come out of the water, and we are not yet at the end. . . . Statues whole and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless bodies, bodiless heads, vases on which there were only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned, queens
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standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals holding naos, or images of gods, in front of them, crouching, kneeling, sitting, found in all the attitudes of their profession or rank, in limestone, in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sand- stone, in green breccia, in schist, in alabaster — indeed, a whole population returns to the upper air and demands shelter in the galleries of the Museum."
The reason for the existence of this extra- ordinary dump of discarded sculpture, whose richness Maspero's vivacious sentences do not in the least exaggerate, and which gave us, to mention only two examples, the masterly pink granite head of Senusert III, one of the most brilliant examples of Xllth Dynasty sculpture, and the schist Thothmes III, equally one of the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, seems to have been this. The Ptolemies, the presence of whose coins in the pit sufficiently dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, and in the course of their cleaning up of the places where they worked, they, no doubt, came on an infinity of out-of-date ex voto statues, some of them broken, some of them whole, but all rather a nuisance and obstruction, as the persons with whom they were associated had long since ceased to be of importance. What was to be done with them ? They could not simply be thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedi- cated to the god, and were therefore sacred ; and they could not be allowed to stand littering up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily tidying. Accordingly the great pit was dug
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within the sacred enclosure, and Senusert, Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old Egyptian notables were consigned to its muddy depths, thence to be resurrected, more than two thousand years later, by their degenerate descen- dants, who baled out the water from the pit with old petroleum cans, and hoisted Pharaoh, High- priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his dark resting-place with lever and tackle. It has been a fortunate chance for us, for Egyptian portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the pit has yielded scores almost as good.
The work of preserving the building, and putting it in a condition of safety for the future, has had a curious interest from the fact that in its progress Karnak has been to some extent rebuilt, and by exactly the same methods by means of which it was built in the beginning. For there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk about the wonderful mechanical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and their possession of secrets which have been lost to our time, that Karnak, like all the great Egyptian buildings, was built, not by means of any of these remarkable secrets which never existed save in the imagination of those who have talked about them, but by the disciplined and ordered use of the very simplest means known to man, the inclined plane, the lever, and any amount of obedient human muscle. These were the mechanical secrets which M. Legrain found most useful and most economical in the end of the nineteenth century a.d., as those who had gone before him had done
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in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth century B.C. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa, Ptolemy, they all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour, disciplined and guided by a race of builders who for thousands of years had specialised in the training of men for such tasks, and with no more marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest of man's mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the lever. M. Legrain has repeated their miracles with the same equipment ; and in an age of machinery has shown that the human machine may still be the most adequate, the most adaptable, and the most economical.
Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most interesting sites in Egypt, something of the work which has been going on with the double object of extending our knowledge of the past and of preserving its treasures for the future. Realising something of the importance of such buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their scores of companions throughout the land, buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt to us, one can feel that work such as that which has been meagrely described in these pages, un- spectacular though it may be compared with the work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and enduring importance, the indispensable fabric on which the glittering embroidery of the treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere is wrought, and without whose rich and durable substance to form a background the golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half itsjneaning and beauty.
CHAPTER VI
■7 BURIED ROYALTIES
A MONG the most curious of ancient Egyptian /\ documents are the two papyri, the Abbott J. V 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 i ioo 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 super- vised 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 juris- dictions ; 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
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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,
1
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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,
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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 crav- ings 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 pre- cautions that age-long endurance of the physical frame which was deemed a necessary condition for the welfare of the dead king in the Under- world, 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,
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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