A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

The foundation of the little basilica, with its apse toward the east and its two doorways to the west, are still traceable. We set a couple of our sailors one day to clear away the rubbish at the lower end of the nave, and found the font—a rough-stone basin at the foot of a broken column.

It is not difficult to guess what Philæ must have been like in the days of Abbot Theodore and his flock. The little basilica, we may be sure, had a cluster of mud domes upon the roof; and I fancy, somehow, that the abbot and his monks installed themselves in that row of cells on the east side of the great colonnade, where the priests of Isis dwelled before them. As for the village, it must have been just like Luxor—swarming with dusky life; noisy with the babble of children, the cackling of poultry and the barking of dogs; sending up thin pillars of blue smoke at noon; echoing to the measured chimes of the prayer-bell at morn and even; and sleeping at night as soundly as if no ghostlike, mutilated gods were looking on mournfully in the moonlight.

The gods are avenged now. The creed which dethroned them is dethroned. Abbot Theodore and his successors, and the religion they taught, and the simple folk that listened to their teaching, are gone and forgotten. For the Church of Christ, which still languishes in Egypt, is extinct in Nubia. It lingered long; though doubtless in some such degraded and barbaric form as it wears in Abyssinia to this day. But it was absorbed by Islamism at last; and only a ruined convent perched here and there upon some solitary height, or a few crosses rudely carved on the walls of a Ptolemaic temple, remain to show that Christianity once passed that way.

The mediæval history of Philæ is almost a blank. The Arabs, having invaded Egypt toward the middle of the seventh century, were long in the land before they began to cultivate literature; and for more than three hundred years history is silent. It is not till the tenth century that we once again catch a fleeting glimpse of Philæ. The frontier is now removed to the head of the cataract. The Holy Island has ceased to be Christian; ceased to be Nubian; contains a mosque and garrison, and is the last fortified outpost of the Moslems. It still retains, and apparently will continue to retain for some centuries longer, its ancient Egyptian name. That is to say (P being as usual converted into B) the Pilak of the hieroglyphic inscriptions becomes in Arabic Belak;[61] which is much more like the original than the Philæ of the Greeks.

The native Christians, meanwhile, would seem to have relapsed into a state of semi-barbarism. They make perpetual inroads upon the Arab frontier and suffer perpetual defeat. Battles are fought; tribute is exacted; treaties are made and broken. Toward the close of the thirteenth century, their king being slain and their churches plundered, they lose one-fourth of their territory, including all that part which borders upon Assûan. Those who remain Christians are also condemned to pay an annual capitation tax, in addition to the usual tribute of dates, cotton, slaves and camels. After this we may conclude that they accepted Islamism from the Arabs, as they had accepted Osiris from the Egyptians and Christ from the Romans. As Christians, at all events, we hear of them no more; for Christianity in Nubia perished root and branch, and not a Copt, it is said, may now be found above the frontier.

Philæ was still inhabited in A.D. 1799, when a detachment of Desaix’s army under General Beliard took possession of the island and left an inscription[62] on the soffit of the doorway of the great pylon to commemorate the passage of the cataract. Denon, describing the scene with his usual vivacity, relates how the natives first defied and then fled from the French; flinging themselves into the river, drowning such of their children as were too young to swim and escaping into the desert. They appear at this time to have been mere savages—the women ugly and sullen, the men naked, agile and quarrelsome, and armed not only with swords and spears, but with matchlock guns, with which they used to keep up “a brisk and well-directed fire.”

Their abandonment of the island probably dates from this time; for when Burckhardt went up in A.D. 1813, he found it, as we found it to this day, deserted and solitary. One poor old man—if indeed he still lives—is now the one inhabitant of Philæ; and I suspect he only crosses over from Biggeh in the tourist-season. He calls himself, with or without authority, the guardian of the island; sleeps in a nest of rags and straw in a sheltered corner behind the great temple; and is so wonderfully wizened and bent and knotted up that nothing of him seems quite alive except his eyes. We gave him fifty copper paras[63] for a parting present when on our way back to Egypt; and he was so oppressed by the consciousness of wealth that he immediately buried his treasure and implored us to tell no one what we had given him.

With the French siege and the flight of the native population closes the last chapter of the local history of Philæ. The holy island has done henceforth with wars of creeds or kings. It disappears from the domain of history and enters the domain of science. To have contributed to the discovery of the hieroglyphic alphabet is a high distinction; and in no sketch of Philæ, however slight, should the obelisk[64] that furnished Champollion with the name of Cleopatra be allowed to pass unnoticed. This monument, second only to the Rosetta stone in point of philological interest, was carried off by Mr. W. Bankes, the discoverer of the first tablet of Abydos, and is now in Dorsetshire. Its empty socket and its fellow obelisk, mutilated and solitary, remain in situ at the southern extremity of the island.

And now—for we have lingered over long in the portico—it is time we glanced at the interior of the temple. So we go in at the central door, beyond which opens some nine or ten halls and side-chambers leading, as usual, to the sanctuary. Here all is dark, earthly, oppressive. In rooms unlighted by the faintest gleam from without, we find smoke-blackened walls covered with elaborate bas-reliefs. Mysterious passages, pitch-dark, thread the thickness of the walls and communicate by means of trap-like openings with vaults below. In the sanctuary lies an overthrown altar; while in the corner behind it stands the very niche in which Strabo must have seen that poor, sacred hawk of Ethiopia which he describes as “sick and nearly dead.”

But in this temple dedicated not only to Isis, but to the memory of Osiris and the worship of Horus their son, there is one chamber which we may be quite sure was shown neither to Strabo nor Diodorus, nor to any stranger of alien faith, be his repute or station what it might; a chamber holy above all others; holier even than the sanctuary—the chamber sacred to Osiris. We, however, unrestricted, unforbidden, are free to go where we list; and our books tell us that this mysterious chamber is somewhere overhead. So, emerging once again into the daylight, we go up a well-worn staircase leading out upon the roof.