The glory of the Pharaohs

by Arthur E. P. Brome Weigall

The late Theodore Roosevelt, in his Romanes lecture at Oxford, gave it as his opinion that the industrious collector of facts occupied an honourable but not an exalted position; and he added that the merely scientific historian must rest content with the honour, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some master shall arise to use. Now every student should aim to be a master, to use the material which he has so laboriously collected; and though at the beginning of his career, and indeed throughout his life, the gathering of material is a most important part of his work, he should never compile solely for the sake of compilation, unless he be content to serve simply as a clerk of archæology.

An archæologist must be a historian. He must conjure up the past; he must play the Witch of Endor. His lists and indices, his catalogues and note-books, must be but the spells which he uses to invoke the dead. The spells have no potency until they are pronounced: the lists of Kings of Egypt have no more than an accidental value until they call before the curtain of the mind those monarchs themselves. It is the business of the archæologist to wake the dreaming dead: not to send the living to sleep. It is his business to make the stones tell their tale: not to petrify the listener. It is his business to put motion and commotion into the past that the present may see and hear: not to pin it down, spatchcocked, like a dead thing. In a word, the archæologist must be in command of that faculty which is known as the historic imagination, without which Dean Stanley was of opinion that the story of the past could not be told. “Trust Nature,” said Dryden. “Do not labour to be dull!”

But how can that imagination be at once exerted and controlled as it needs must be, unless the archæologist be so well acquainted with the conditions of the country about which he writes that his pictures of it can be said to be accurate? The student must allow himself to be saturated by the very waters of the Nile before he can permit himself to write of Egypt. He must know the modern Egyptians before he can construct his model of Pharaoh and his court.

When the mummy of Akhnaton was discovered and was proved to be that of a man of only thirty years of age, many persons doubted the identification on the grounds that the king was known to have been married at the time when he came to the throne, seventeen years before his death, and it was freely stated that a marriage at the age of eleven or twelve was impossible and out of the question. Thus it actually remained for the present writer to point out that the fact of the king’s death occurring seventeen years after his marriage practically fixed his age at his decease at not much above twenty-nine years, so unlikely was it that his marriage would have been delayed beyond his twelfth year. Those who doubted the identification on such grounds were showing all too clearly that the manners and customs of the Egyptians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so many of which have come down intact from olden times, were unknown to them.

Here we come to the root of the trouble. The Egyptologist who has not resided for some time in Egypt, is inclined to allow his ideas regarding the ancient customs of the land to be influenced by his unconsciously-acquired knowledge of the habits of the west. But is he blind that he sees not the great gulf fixed between the ways of the east and those of his accustomed west? It is of no value to science to record the life of Thutmosis III with Napoleon as our model for it, nor to describe the daily life of the Pharaoh with the person of an English king before our mind’s eye. Our western experience will not give us material for the imagination to work upon in dealing with Egypt. The setting for our Pharaonic pictures must be derived from Egypt alone; and no Egyptologist’s work that is more than a simple compilation is of value unless the sunlight and the sandy glare of Egypt have burnt into his eyes, and have been reflected on to the pages under his pen.

The archæologist must possess the historic imagination, but it must be confined to its proper channels. It is impossible to exert this imagination without, as a consequence, a figure rising up before the mind partially furnished with the details of a personality and fully endowed with the broad character of an individual. The first lesson, thus, which we must learn is that of allowing no incongruity to appear in our figures. In ancient history there can seldom be sufficient data at the Egyptologist’s disposal with which to build up a complete figure; and his puppets must come upon the stage sadly deficient, as it were, in arms, legs, and apparel suitable to them, unless he know from an experience of modern Egyptians how to restore them and to clothe them in good taste. The substance upon which the imagination works must be no less than a collective knowledge of the people of the nation in question. Rameses must be constructed from an acquaintance with many a Pasha of modern Egypt, and his Chief Butler must reflect the known characteristics of a hundred Beys and Effendis. Without such “padding” the figures will remain but names, and with names Egyptology is already over-stocked.

It is remarkable to notice how little is known regarding the great personalities in history. Taking three characters at random: we know extremely little that is authentic regarding King Arthur; our knowledge of the actual history of Boadicea is extremely meagre; and the precise historian would have to dismiss Pontius Pilate in a few paragraphs. But let the archæologist know so well the manners and customs of the period with which he is dealing that he will not, like the author of the stories of the Holy Grail, dress Arthur in the armour of the thirteenth century, nor fill the mind of Pilate with the thoughts of a modern Colonial Governor; let him be so well trained in scientific cautiousness that he will not give unquestioned credence to the legends of the past; let him have sufficient knowledge of the nation to which his hero or heroine belonged to be able to fill up the lacunæ with a kind of collective appreciation and estimate of the national characteristics—and I do not doubt that his interpretations will hold good till the end of all history.

The Egyptologist to whom Egypt is not a living reality is handicapped in his labours more unfairly than is realised by him. Avoid Egypt, and though your brains be of vast capacity, though your eyes be never raised from your books, you will yet remain in many ways an ignoramus, liable to be corrected by the merest tourist in the Nile valley. But come with me to a Theban garden that I know, where, on some still evening, the dark palms are reflected in the placid Nile, and the acacias are mellowed by the last light of the sunset; where, in leafy bowers, the grapes cluster overhead, and the fig-tree is burdened with fruit. Beyond the broad sheet of the river rise those unchanging hills which encompass the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings; and at their foot, dimly seen in the evening haze, sit the twin colossi, as they have sat since the days of Amenophis the Magnificent. The stars begin to be seen through the leaves now that the daylight dies, and presently the Milky Way becomes apparent, stretching across the vault of the night, as when it was believed to be the Nile of the Heavens.

The owls hoot to one another through the garden; and at the edge of the alabaster tank wherein the dusk is mirrored, a frog croaks unseen amidst the lilies. Even so croaked he on this very ground in those days when, typifying eternity, he seemed to utter the endless refrain, “I am the resurrection, I am the resurrection,” into the ears of men and maidens beneath these self-same stars.

And now a boat floats past, on its way to Karnak, silhouetted against the last-left light of the sky. There is music and song on board. The sound of the pipes is carried over the water and pulses to the ears, inflaming the imagination with the sorcery of its cadences and stirring the blood by its bold rhythm. The gentle breeze brings the scent of many flowers to the nostrils, and with these come drifting thoughts and undefined fancies, so that presently the busy considerations of the day are lulled and forgotten. The twilight seems to cloak the extent of the years, and in the gathering darkness the procession of the centuries is hidden. Yesterday and to-day are mingled together, and there is nothing to distinguish to the eye the one age from the other. An immortal, brought suddenly to the garden at this hour, could not say from direct observation whether he had descended from the clouds into the twentieth century before or the twentieth century after Christ; and the sound of the festal pipes in the passing boat would but serve to confuse him the more.