[206] Baal, written sometimes Bar, was, like Sutekh, a god borrowed from the Phœnician mythology. The worship of Baal seems to have been introduced into Egypt during the nineteenth dynasty. The other god here mentioned, Mentu or Month, was a solar deity adored in the Thebaid, and especially worshiped at Hermonthis, now Erment; a modern town of some importance, the name of which is still almost identical with the Per-Mentu of ancient days. Mentu was the Egyptian, and Baal the Phœnician, god of war.
[207] From one of the inscriptions at Medinet Habu, quoted by Chabas. See “Antiquité Historique,” ch. iv, p. 238. Ed. 1873.
[208] It is a noteworthy fact (and one which has not, so far as I know, been previously noticed) that while the Asiatic and African chiefs represented in these friezes are insolently described in the accompanying hieroglyphic inscriptions as “the vile Libyan,” “the vile Kushite,” “the vile Mashuasha,” and so forth, the European leaders, though likewise prostrate and bound, are more respectfully designated as “the Great of Sardinia,” “the Great of Sicily,” “the Great of Etruria,” etc. May this be taken as an indication that their strength as military powers was already more formidable than that of the Egyptians’ nearer neighbors?
[209] The grand blue of the ceiling of the colonnade of the Great Hypæthral Court is also very remarkable for brilliancy and purity of tone; while to those interested in decoration the capital and abacus of the second column to the right on entering this court-yard, offers an interesting specimen of polychrome ornamentation on a gold-colored ground.
[210] Inscriptions at Medinet Habu. See Chabas’ “Antiquité Historique,” chap. iv. Paris: 1876.
[211] The whole of this chronicle is translated by M. Chabas in “L’Antiquité Historique,” chap. iv, p. 246 et seq. It is also engraved in full in Rosellini (“Monumenti Storici”); and has been admirably photographed by both M. Hammerschmidt and Signor Beata.
[212] These two statues—the best-known, probably, of all Egyptian monuments—have been too often described, painted, engraved and photographed, to need more than a passing reference. Their featureless faces, their attitude, their surroundings, are familiar as the pyramids, even to those who know not Egypt. We all know that they represent Amenhotep, or Amunoph III; and that the northernmost was shattered to the waist by the earthquake of B.C. 27. Being heard to give out a musical sound during the first hour of the day, the statue was supposed by the ancients to be endowed with a miraculous voice. The Greeks, believing it to represent the fabled son of Tithonus and Aurora, gave it the name of Memnon; notwithstanding that the Egyptians themselves claimed the statues as portraits of Amenhotep III. Prefects, consuls, emperors and empresses, came “to hear Memnon,” as the phrase then ran. Among the famous visitors who traveled thither on this errand, we find Strabo, Germanicus, Hadrian and the Empress Sabina. Opinion is divided as to the cause of this sound. There is undoubtedly a hollow space inside the throne of this statue, as may be seen by all who examine it from behind; and Sir G. Wilkinson, in expressing his conviction that the musical sound was a piece of priestly jugglery, represents the opinion of the majority. The author of a carefully considered article in the Quarterly Review, No. 276, April, 1875, coincides with Sir D. Brewster in attributing the sound to a transmission of rarefied air through the crevices of the stone, caused by the sudden change of temperature consequent on the rising of the sun. The statue, which, like its companion, was originally one solid monolith of gritstone, was repaired with sandstone during the reign of Septimius Severus.
[213] This deification of the dead was not deification in the Roman sense; neither was it canonization in the modern sense. The Egyptians believed the justified dead to be assimilated, or rather identified, in the spirit with Osiris, the beneficient judge and deity of the lower world. Thus, in their worship of ancestry, they adored not mortals immortalized, but the dead in Osiris, and Osiris in the dead.
It is worth noting, by the way, that notwithstanding the subsequent deification of Seti I, Rameses I remained, so to say, the tutelary saint of the temple. He alone is represented with the curious pointed and upturned beard, like a chamois horn reversed, which is the peculiar attribute of deity.
[214] There is among the funereal tablets of the Boulak collection a small bas-relief sculpture representing the arrival of a family of mourners at the tomb of a deceased ancestor. The statue of the defunct sits at the upper end. The mourners are laden with offerings. One little child carries a lamb; another a goose. A scribe stands by, waiting to register the gifts. The tablet commemorates one Psamtik-nefar-Sam, a hierogrammate under some king of the twenty-sixth dynasty. The natural grace and simple pathos with which this little frieze is treated lift it far above the level of ordinary Egyptian art, and bear comparison with the class of monuments lately discovered on the Eleusinian road at Athens.