I
A large pool among the ruins, and at the southern end two batteries of chadoufs, one on top of the other, working to exhaust the water continually renewed by the infiltrations. On the banks are blocks and muddy statues, round which half-naked workmen are busily occupied, beams, levers, coils of rope, and the beginnings of a Decauville line; remains of storied walls dominate the workshops, and the modern village of Karnak stands out clearly on the horizon beyond their irregular tops.
When the first Ptolemies decided at the beginning of the third century B.C. to restore the Theban temple of Amon, they found it encumbered with ex-votos. Everywhere, in the halls, the corridors, the court-yards, there were stelæ, stone statues, little wooden or bronze figures, sacred or royal insignia, heaped up one on the other, and in such quantities that there was no space for new ones. It was a legacy of extinct Dynasties or of noble families who had died out, to whom the Pharaohs had granted the privilege of consecrating their image in the house of the god, and to sell or destroy any of them would have been to commit sacrilege.[46] They were dealt with according to the custom of the contemporary peoples: a vast pit was dug between the seventh pylon and the hypostyle hall, and then they were buried pell-mell in holy ground. Twenty centuries later, in 1883, hastily made soundings revealed the richness of the site to me, but, lacking money, I could not venture to undertake anything. It was not until 1901, when the regular progress of clearing away brought the workmen to the spot, that I advised M. Legrain to dig more deeply than usual, so that nothing which was hidden beneath the earth might escape observation. The excavations yielded just what I had foreseen, royal colossi in granite, limestone, sandstone which were restored to their ancient places along the pylon; a little below came fragments of a fine limestone building of Amenôthes I that Thoutmôsis III had used for banking up when he enlarged the temple; and at the very bottom, at a depth of over six, twelve, fourteen yards, what none of us had thought of, an intact favissa in which hundreds of statues and small objects awaited in the mud the hour of their deliverance.
For four years M. Legrain has been exploring the spot foot by foot, and I think he has succeeded in entirely emptying it. We must now draw up the inventory of the treasures it has bestowed on us. The greatest benefit conferred by them is assuredly on political history. All epochs are not represented in equal abundance—the first Theban Empire is, so to speak, merely mentioned, and the two great Dynasties of the second are represented only by about a hundred pieces—but from the fall of the Ramessides to the Persian conquest the series of the high priests of Amon reappears almost complete, with their wives, sons, brothers, the children or latest descendants of their brothers, and from the day when the male line failed, the princesses who inherited its rights, with the noble persons who wielded the power in their name. However, the large find all at once of statues and inscriptions serves not only to give information about the revolution that transformed the military kingdom of Thebes into a theocracy, but also furnishes documents for the study of the progress of art during the twenty centuries and more that the revolution took. The artistic merit of the objects is very unequal, and many of them are only interesting to the archæologist; some, however, stand out distinguished above the mass, and take their rank worthily beside the best known productions of Egyptian art. As they come from the same temple, and have been erected by different members of the same families, it is natural to see in them the work of one school, established at Thebes in far-off antiquity. Indeed, a unity of character common to all is easily discerned, which, perpetuating itself without notable change from generation to generation, fixes undeniable affinities of conception and technique.
THE WORKS AT KARNAK IN JANUARY, 1906.