A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Two or three days later we came within reach of Abydus. Our proper course would have been to push on to Bellianeh, which is one of the recognized starting-points for Abydus. But an unlucky sand-bank barred the way; so we moored instead at Samata, a village about two miles nearer to the southward. Here our dragoman requisitioned the inhabitants for donkeys. As it happened, the harvest had begun in the neighborhood and all the beasts of burden were at work, so that it was near midday before we succeeded in getting together the three or four wretched little brutes with which we finally started. Not one of these steeds had ever before carried a rider. We had a frightful time with them. My donkey bolted about every five minutes. L——’s snarled like a camel and showed its teeth like a dog. The idle man’s, bent on flattening its rider, lay down and rolled at short intervals. In this exciting fashion we somehow or other accomplished the seven miles that separate Samata from Abydus. Skirting some palm-groves and crossing the dry bed of a canal, we came out upon a vast plain, level as a lake, islanded here and there with villages, and presenting one undulating surface of bearded corn. This plain—the plain of ancient Thinis—runs parallel with the Nile, like the plain of Thebes, and is bounded to the westward by a range of flat-topped mountains. The distance between the river and the mountains, however, is here much greater than at Thebes, being full six miles; while to north and south the view ends only with the horizon.

Our way lies at first by a bridle-track through the thick of the barley; then falls into the Bellianeh road—a raised causeway, embanked some twenty feet above the plain. Along this road the country folk are coming and going. In the cleared spaces where the maize has been cut, little encampments of straw huts have sprung up. Yonder, steering their way by unseen paths, go strings of camels; their gawky necks and humped backs undulating above the surface of the corn, like galleys with fantastic prows upon a sea of rippling green. The pigeons fly in great clouds from village to village. The larks are singing and circling madly in the clear depths overhead. The bee-eaters flash like live emeralds across our path. The hoopoes strut by the wayside. At rather more than half-way across the plain we come into the midst of the harvest. Here the brown reapers, barelegged and naked to the waist, are at work with their sickles, just as they are pictured in the tomb of Tih. The women and children follow, gleaning, at the heels of those who bind the sheaves. The sheik in his black robe and scarlet slippers rides to and fro upon his ass, like Boaz among his people. As the sheaves are bound up the camels carry them homeward. A camel-load is fourteen sheaves; seven to each side of the hump. A little farther and the oxen, yoked two and two, are plowing up the stubble. In a day or two the land will be sown with millet, indigo, or cotton, to be gathered in once more before the coming of the inundation.

Meanwhile, as the plain lengthens behind us and the distance grows less between ourselves and the mountains, we see a line of huge irregular mounds reaching for apparently a couple of miles or more along the foot of the cliffs. From afar off the mounds look as if crowned by majestic ruins, but as we draw nearer these outlines resolve themselves into the village of Arabát-el-Madfûneh, which stands upon part of the mounds of Abydus. And now we come to the end of the cultivated plain—that strange line of demarcation where the inundation stops and the desert begins. Of actual desert, however, there is here but a narrow strip, forming a first step, as it were, above the alluvial plain. Next comes the artificial platform, about a quarter of a mile in depth, on which stands the modern village; and next again, towering up sheer and steep, the great wall of limestone precipice. The village is extensive and the houses, built in a rustic arabesque, tell of a well-to-do population. Arched gateways ornamented with black, white and red bricks, windows of turned lattice-work and pigeon-towers in courses of pots and bricks, give a singular picturesqueness to the place; while the slope down to the desert is covered with shrubberies and palms. Below these hanging gardens, on the edge of the desert, lies the cut corn in piles of sheaves. Here the camels are lying down to be unladen. Yonder the oxen are already treading out the grain, or chopping the straw by means of a curious sledge-like machine set with rows of revolving circular knives.[248] Meanwhile, fluttering from heap to heap, settling on the sheaves, feeding unmolested in the very midst of the threshing-floors, strutting all over the margin of the desert, trailing their wings, ruffling their plumes, cooing, courtesying, kissing, courting, filling the air with sweet sounds and setting the whole lovely idyl to a pastoral symphony of their own composing, are thousands and tens of thousands of pigeons.[249]

Now our path turns aside and we thread our way among the houses, noticing here a sculptured block built into a mud wall—yonder, beside a dried-up well, a broken alabaster sarcophagus—farther on, a granite column, still erect, in the midst of a palm-garden. And now, the village being left behind, we find ourselves at the foot of a great hill of newly excavated rubbish, from the top of which we presently look down into a kind of crater, and see the great Temple of Abydus at our feet.

It was now nearly three o’clock; so, having seen what we could in the time and having before us a long ride through a strange country, we left again at six. I will not presume to describe the temples of Abydus—one of which is so ruined as to be almost unintelligible, and the other so singularly planned and so obscure in its general purport as to be a standing puzzle to archæologists—after a short visit of three hours. Enough if I sketch briefly what I saw but cursorily.

Buried as it, Abydus,[250] even under its mounds, is a place of profound historical interest. At a time so remote that it precedes all written record of Egyptian story, there existed a little way to the northward of this site a city called Teni.[251] We know not to what aboriginal community of prehistoric Egypt this city belonged; but here, presumedly, the men of Kem[252] built their first temple, evolved their first notions of art and groped their way to an alphabet which, in its origin, was probably a mere picture-writing, like the picture-writing of Mexico. Hence, too, came a man named Mena, whose cartouche from immemorial time has stood first in the long list of Egyptian Pharaohs. Of Mena,[253] a shadowy figure hovering on the border-land of history and tradition, we know only that he was the first primitive chieftain who took the title of king of Upper and Lower Egypt and that he went northward and founded Memphis. Not, however, till after some centuries was the seat of government removed to the new city. Teni—the supposed burial-place of Osiris—then lost its political importance; but continued to be for long ages the holy city of Egypt.

In the meanwhile, Abydus had sprung up close to Teni. Abydus, however, though an important city, was never the capital of Egypt. The seat of power shifted strangely with different dynasties, being established now in the delta, now at Thebes, now at Elephantine; but having once departed from the site which, by reason of its central position and the unbounded fertility of its neighborhood, was above all others best fitted to play this great part in the history of the country, it never again returned to the point from which it had started. That point, however, was unquestionably the center from which the great Egyptian people departed upon its wonderful career. Here was the nursery of its strength. Hence it derived its proud title to an unmixed autochthonous descent. For no greater proof of the native origin of the race can be adduced than the position which their first city occupies upon the map of Egypt. That any tribe of colonists should have made straight for the heart of the country and there have established themselves in the midst of barbarous and probably hostile aborigines is evidently out of the question. It is, on the other hand, equally clear that if Egypt had been colonized from Asia or Ethiopia, the strangers would, on the one hand, have founded their earliest settlement in the neighborhood of the isthmus; or, on the other, have halted first among the then well-watered plains of Nubia.[254] But the Egyptians started from the fertile heart of their own mother country and began by being great at home.

Abydus and Teni, planted on the same platform of desert, were probably united at one time by a straggling suburb inhabited by the embalmers and other tradesfolk concerned in the business of death and burial. A chain of mounds, excavated only where the temples were situated, now stand to us for the famous city of Abydus. An ancient crude-brick inclosure and an artificial tumulus mark the site of Teni. The temples and the tumulus, divided by the now exhausted necropolis, and about as distant from one another as Medinet Habu and the Ramesseum.

There must have been many older temples at Abydus than these which we now see, one of which was built by Seti I, and the other by Rameses II. Or possibly, as in so many instances, the more ancient buildings were pulled down and rebuilt. Be this as it may, the temple of Seti, as regards its sculptured decorations, is one of the most beautiful of Egyptian ruins; and as regards its plan, is one of the most singular. A row of square limestone piers, which must once have supported an architrave, are now all that remains of the façade. Immediately behind these comes a portico of twenty-four columns leading by seven entrances to a hall of thirty-six columns. This hall again opens into seven parallel sanctuaries, behind which lie another hall of columns and a number of small chambers. So much of the building seems to be homogeneous. Adjoining this block, however, and leading from it by doorways at the southern end of the great hall, come several more halls and chambers connected by corridors, and conducting apparently to more chambers not yet excavated. All these piers, columns, halls, and passages, and all the seven sanctuaries,[255] are most delicately sculptured and brilliantly colored.

There is so far a family resemblance between temples of the same style and period that, after a little experience, one can generally guess before crossing the threshold of a fresh building what one is likely to see in the way of sculptures within. But almost every subject in the temple of Seti at Abydus is new and strange. All the gods of the Egyptian pantheon seem to have been worshiped here and to have had each his separate shrine. The walls are covered with paintings of these shrines and their occupants; while before each the king is represented performing some act of adoration. A huge blue frog, a greyhound, a double-headed goose, a human-bodied creature with a Nilometer for its head,[256] and many more than I can now remember, are thus depicted. The royal offerings, too, though incense and necklaces and pectoral ornaments abound, are for the most part of a kind that we have not seen before. In one place the king presents to Isis a column with four capitals, having on the top capital a globe and two asps surmounted by a pair of ostrich feathers.