A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

The tombs in the Valley of Bab-el-Molûk are as unlike tombs in the cliffs opposite Luxor as if the Theban kings and the Theban nobles were of different races and creeds. Those sacred scribes and dignitaries, with their wives and families and their numerous friends and dependents, were a joyous set. They loved the things of this life, and would fain have carried their pursuits and pleasures with them into the land beyond the grave. So they decorated the walls of their tombs with pictures of the way in which their lives were spent, and hoped perhaps that the mummy, dreaming away its long term of solitary waiting, might take comfort in those shadowy reminiscences. The kings, on the contrary, covered every foot of their last palaces with scenes from the life to come. The wanderings of the soul after its separation from the body, the terrors and dangers that beset it during its journey through hades, the demons it must fight, the accusers to whom it must answer, the transformations it must undergo, afforded subjects for endless illustration. Of the fishing and fowling and feasting and junketing that we saw the other day in those terraces behind the Ramesseum, we discover no trace in the tombs of Bab-el-Molûk. In place of singing and lute-playing we find here prayers and invocations; for the pleasant Nile boat and the water parties and the chase of the gazelle and the ibex, we now have the bark of Charon and the basin of purgatorial fire and the strife with the infernal deities. The contrast is sharp and strange. It is as if an epicurean aristocracy had been ruled by a line of Puritan kings. The tombs of the subjects are Anacreontics. The tombs of their sovereigns are penitential psalms.

To go down into one of those great sepulchers is to descend one’s self into the lower world and to tread the path of the shades. Crossing the threshold we look up—half expecting to read those terrible words in which all who enter are warned to leave hope behind them. The passage slopes before our feet; the daylight fades behind us. At the end of the passage comes a flight of steps, and from the bottom of that flight of steps we see another corridor slanting down into depths of utter darkness. The walls on both sides are covered with close-cut columns of hieroglyphic text, interspersed with ominous shapes, half-deity, half-demon. Huge serpents writhe beside us along the walls. Guardian spirits of threatening aspect advance, brandishing swords of flame. A strange heaven opens overhead—a heaven where the stars travel in boats across the seas of space; and the sun, escorted by the hours, the months and the signs of the zodiac, issues from the east, sets in the west and traverses the hemisphere of everlasting night. We go on and the last gleam of daylight vanishes in the distance. Another flight of steps leads now to a succession of passages and halls, some smaller, some larger, some vaulted, some supported on pillars. Here yawns a great pit half-full of débris. Yonder opens a suite of unfinished chambers abandoned by the workmen. The farther we go the more weird become our surroundings. The walls swarm with ugly and evil things. Serpents, bats and crocodiles, some with human heads and legs, some vomiting fire, some armed with spears and darts, pursue and torture the wicked. These unfortunates have their hearts torn out; are boiled in caldrons; are suspended, head downward, over seas of flame; are speared, decapitated and driven in headless gangs to scenes of further torment. Beheld by the dim and shifting light of a few candles, these painted horrors assume an aspect of ghastly reality. They start into life as we pass, then drop behind us into darkness. That darkness alone is awful. The atmosphere is suffocating. The place is ghostly and peopled with nightmares.

Elsewhere we come upon scenes less painful. The sun emerges from the lower hemisphere. The justified dead sow and reap in the Elysian fields, gather celestial fruits, and bathe in the waters of truth. The royal mummy reposes in its shrine. Funerary statues of the king are worshiped with incense and offerings of meat and libations of wine.[218] Finally the king arrives, purified and justified, at the last stage of his spiritual journey. He is welcomed by the gods, ushered into the presence of Osiris, and received into the abode of the blest.[219]

Coming out for a moment into blinding daylight, we drink a long draught of pure air, cross a few yards of uneven ground, arrive at the month of another excavation, and plunge again into underground darkness. A third and a fourth time we repeat this strange experience. It is like a feverish sleep, troubled by gruesome dreams and broken by momentary wakings. These tombs in a general way are very much alike. Some are longer than others;[220] some loftier. In some the descent is gradual; in others it is steep and sudden. Certain leading features are common to all. The great serpent,[221] the scarab,[222] the bat,[223] the crocodile,[224] are always conspicuous on the walls. The judgment-scene, and the well-known typical picture of the four races of mankind, are continually reproduced. Some tombs,[225] however, vary both in plan and decoration. That of Rameses III, though not nearly so beautiful as the tomb of Seti I, is perhaps the most curious of all. The paintings here are for the most part designed on an unsculptured surface coated with white stucco. The drawing is often indifferent, and the coloring is uniformly coarse and gaudy. Yellow abounds; and crude reds and blues remind us of the colored picture-books of our childhood. It is difficult to understand, indeed, how the builder of Medinet Habu, with the best Egyptian art of the day at his command, should have been content with such wall-paintings as these.

Still Rameses III seems to have had a grand idea of going in state to the next world, with his retainers around him. In a series of small ante-chambers opening off from the first corridor we see depicted all the household furniture, all the plate, the weapons, the wealth and treasure of the king. Upon the walls of one the cooks and bakers are seen preparing the royal dinner. In the others are depicted magnificent thrones; gilded galleys with party-colored sails; gold and silver vases; rich stores of arms and armor; piles of precious woods, of panther skins, of fruits and birds and curious baskets, and all such articles of personal luxury as a palace-building Pharaoh might delight in. Here, also, are the two famous harpers; cruelly defaced, but still sweeping the strings with the old powerful touch that erewhile soothed the king in his hours of melancholy. These two spirited figures—which are undoubtedly portraits[226]—almost redeem the poverty of the rest of the paintings.

In many tombs the empty sarcophagus yet occupies its ancient place.[227] We saw one in No. 2 (Rameses IV), and another in No. 9 (Rameses VI); the first, a grand monolith of dark granite, overturned and but little injured; the second, shattered by early treasure-seekers.

Most of the tombs at Bab-el-Molûk were open in Ptolemaic times. Being then, as now, among the stock sights and wonders of Thebes, they were visited by crowds of early travelers, who have, as usual, left their neatly scribbled graffiti on the walls. When and by whom the sepulchers were originally violated is of course unknown. Some, doubtless, were sacked by the Persians; others were plundered by the Egyptians themselves, long enough before Cambyses. Not even in the days of the Ramessides, though a special service of guards was told off for duty in “the great valley,” were the kings safe in their tombs. During the reign of Rameses IX—whose own tomb is here and known as No. 6—there seems to have been an organized band, not only of robbers, but of receivers, who lived by depredations of the kind. A contemporary papyrus[228] tells how, in one instance, the royal mummies were found lying in the dust, their gold and silver ornaments and the treasures of their tombs all stolen. In another instance, a king and his queen were carried away bodily, to be unrolled and rifled at leisure. This curious information is all recorded in the form of a report, drawn up by the commandant of Western Thebes, who, with certain other officers and magistrates, officially inspected the tombs of the “royal ancestor,” during the reign of Rameses IX.

No royal tomb has been found absolutely intact in the valley of Bab-el-Molûk. Even that of Seti I had been secretly entered ages before ever Belzoni discovered it. He found in it statues of wood and porcelain, and the mummy of a bull; but nothing of value save the sarcophagus, which was empty. There can be no doubt that the priesthood were largely implicated in these contemporary sacrileges. Of thirty-nine persons accused by name in the papyrus just quoted, seven are priests and eight are sacred scribes.

To rob the dead was always a lucrative trade at Thebes; and we may be certain that the splendid Pharaohs who slept in the valley of the tombs of the kings,[229] went to their dark palaces magnificently equipped for the life to come.[230] When, indeed, one thinks of the jewels, furniture, vases, ointments, clothing, arms, and precious documents which were as certainly buried in those tombs as the royal mummies for whom they were excavated, it seems far more wonderful that the parure of one queen should have escaped, rather than that all the rest of these dead and gone royalties should have fallen among thieves.

Of all tombs in the valley of Bab-el-Molûk, one would rather, I think, have discovered that of Rameses III. As he was one of the richest of the Pharaohs[231] and an undoubted virtuoso in his tastes, so we may be sure that his tomb was furnished with all kinds of beautiful and precious things. What would we not give now to find some of those elaborate gold and silver vases, those cushioned thrones and sofas, those bows and quivers and shirts of mail so carefully catalogued on the walls of the side-chambers in the first corridor! I do not doubt that specimens of all these things were buried with the king and left ready for his use. He died, believing that his Ka would enjoy and make use of these treasures, and that his soul would come back after long cycles of probation, and make its home once more in the mummied body. He thought he should rise as from sleep; cast off his bandages; eat and be refreshed, and put on sandals and scented vestments, and take his staff in his hand, and go forth again into the light of everlasting day. Poor ghost, wandering bodiless through space! where now are thy funeral-baked meats, thy changes of raiment, thy perfumes and precious ointments? Where is that body for which thou wert once so solicitous, and without which resurrection[232] is impossible? One fancies thee sighing forlorn through these desolate halls when all is silent and the moon shines down the valley. Life at Thebes is made up of incongruities. A morning among temples is followed by an afternoon of antiquity-hunting; and a day of meditation among tombs winds up with a dinner-party on board some friend’s dahabeeyah, or a fantasia at the British consulate. L—— and the writer did their fair share of antiquity-hunting both at Luxor and elsewhere; but chiefly at Luxor. I may say, indeed, that our life here was one long pursuit of the pleasures of the chase. The game it is true was prohibited; but we enjoyed it none the less because it was illegal. Perhaps we enjoyed it the more.