I took a sketch of this remarkable cluster of ruins from their northern end, and afterwards another from the valley below, whence each pyramid appears distinct and separate, no one covering the other. The raïs and sailors were puzzled what to make of my inspection of the place, but finally concluded that I hoped to find a few golden pigeons, which the Frank astrologer had not carried away. I next visited the eastern group, which consists of ten pyramids, more or less dilapidated, and the ruined foundations of six or eight more. The largest, which I ascended, consists of thirty-five courses of stone, and is about fifty-three feet in height, eight or ten feet of the apex having been hurled down. Each side of the apex is seventeen paces, or about forty-two feet long, and the angle of ascent is consequently much greater than in the pyramids of Egypt. On the slope of the hill are the substructions of two or three large buildings, of which sufficient remains to show the disposition of the chambers and the location of the doorways. Towards the south, near where the valley inclosed between the two groups opens upon the plain, are the remains of other pyramids and buildings, and some large, fortress-like ruins are seen on the summits of the mountains to the East. I would willingly have visited them, but the wind was blowing fresh, and the raïs was impatient to get back to his vessel. Many of the stones of the pyramids are covered with rude attempts at sculpturing camels and horses; no doubt by the Arabs, for they resemble a school-boy’s first drawings on a slate—straight sticks for legs, squares for bodies, and triangles for humps.
Leaving the ruins to the company of the black goats that were browsing on the dry grass, growing in bunches at their eastern base, I walked to another group of pyramids, which lay a mile and a half to the south-west, towards the Nile. As we approached them, a herd of beautiful gray gazelles started from among the stones and bounded away into the Desert. “These were the tents of the poor people,” said the raïs, pointing to the pyramids: “the Frank found no golden pigeons here.” They were, in fact, smaller and more dilapidated than the others. Some had plain burial chambers attached to their eastern sides, but the sculptures were few and insignificant. There were sixteen in all, more or less ruined. Scattering mounds, abounding with fragments of bricks and building-stones, extended from these ruins nearly to the river’s bank, a distance of more than two miles; and the foundations of many other pyramids might be seen among them. The total number of pyramids in a partial state of preservation—some being nearly perfect, while a few retained only two or three of the lower courses—which I counted on the site of Meroë, was forty-two. Besides these, I noticed the traces of forty or fifty others, which had been wholly demolished. The entire number, however, of which Meroë could boast, in its prime, was one hundred and ninety-six. The mounds near the river, which cover an extent of between one and two miles, point out the site of the city, the capital of the old Hierarchy of Meroë, and the pyramids are no doubt the tombs of its kings and priests. It is rather singular that the city has been so completely destroyed, as the principal spoilers of Egypt, the Persians, never penetrated into Ethiopia, and there is no evidence of the stones having been used to any extent by the Arabs, as building materials.
The examination of Meroë has solved the doubtful question of an Ethiopian civilization anterior to that of Egypt. Hoskins and Cailliaud, who attributed a great antiquity to the ruins, were misled by the fact, discovered by Lepsius, that the Ethiopian monarchs adopted as their own, and placed upon their tombs the nomens of the earlier Pharaohs. It is now established beyond a doubt, that, so far from being the oldest, these are the latest remains of Egyptian art; their inferiority displays its decadence, and not the rude, original type, whence it sprang. Starting from Memphis, where not only the oldest Egyptian, but the oldest human records yet discovered, are found, the era of civilization becomes later, as you ascend the Nile. In Nubia, there are traces of Thothmes and Amunoph III., or about fifteen centuries before the Christian era; at Napata, the ancient capital of Ethiopia, we cannot get beyond King Tirhaka, eight centuries later; while at Meroë, there is no evidence which can fix the date of the pyramids earlier than the first, or at furthest, the second century before Christ. Egypt, therefore, was not civilized from Ethiopia, but Ethiopia from Egypt.
The sculptures at Meroë also establish the important fact that the ancient Ethiopians, though of a darker complexion than the Egyptians (as they are in fact represented, in Egyptian sculpture), were, like them, an offshoot of the great Caucasian race.[3] Whether they were originally emigrants from Northern India and the regions about Cashmere, as the Egyptians are supposed to have been, or, like the Beni Koreish at a later period, crossed over from the Arabian Peninsula, is not so easily determined. The theory of Pococke and other scholars, based on the presumed antiquity of Meroë, that here was the first dawning on African soil of that earliest Indian Civilization, which afterwards culminated at Memphis and Thebes, is overthrown; but we have what is of still greater significance—the knowledge that the highest Civilization, in every age of the world, has been developed by the race to which we belong.
I walked slowly back to the boat, over the desolate plain, striving to create from those shapeless piles of ruin the splendor of which they were once a part. The sun, and the wind and the mountains, and the Nile, were what they had ever been; but where the kings and priests of Meroë walked in the pomp of their triumphal processions, a poor, submissive peasant knelt before me with a gourd full of goat’s milk; and if I had asked him when that plain had been inhabited, he would have answered me, like Chidhar, the Prophet: “As thou seest it now, so has it been for ever!”
CHAPTER XIX.
ETHIOPIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS.
The Landscapes of Ethiopia—My Evenings beside the Nile—Experiences of the Arabian Nights—The Story of the Sultana Zobeide and the Wood-cutter—Character of the Arabian Tales—Religion.
“For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Al-Raschid.”—Tennyson.