When the temporary excitement of the explorers had somewhat abated, they felt that no time was to be lost in securing their newly discovered treasures. Accordingly, three hundred Arabs were engaged from the neighbouring villages; and working as they did with unabated vigour, without sleep and without rest, they succeeded in clearing out the sepulchral chamber and the long passages of their valuable contents in the short space of forty-eight hours. All the mummies were then carefully packed in sail-cloth and matting, and carried across the plain of Thebes to the edge of the river. Thence they were rowed across the Nile to Luxor, there to lie in readiness for embarkation on the approach of the Nile steamers.
Some of the sarcophagi are of huge dimensions, the largest being that of Nofretari, a queen of the XVIIIth dynasty. The coffin is ten feet long, made of cartonnage, and in style resembles one of the Osiride pillars of the Temple of Medinat Aboo. Its weight and size are so enormous that sixteen men were required to remove it. In spite of all difficulties, however, only five days elapsed from the time the Boolak officials were lowered down the shaft until the precious relics lay ready for embarkation at Luxor.
The Nile steamers did not arrive for three days, and during that time Messrs. Brugsch and Kemal, and a few trustworthy Arabs, kept constant guard over their treasure amid a hostile fanatical people who regarded tomb-breaking as the legitimate trade of the neighbourhood. On the fourth morning the steamers arrived, and having received on board the royal mummies, steamed down the stream en route for the Boolak Museum. Meanwhile the news of the discovery had spread far and wide, and for fifty miles below Luxor, the villagers lined the river banks, not merely to catch a glimpse of the mummies on deck as the steamers passed by, but also to show respect for the mighty dead. Women with dishevelled hair ran along the banks shrieking the death-wail; while men stood in solemn silence, and fired guns into the air to greet the mighty Pharaohs as they passed. Thus, to the mummified bodies of Thothmes the Great, and Rameses the Great, and their illustrious compeers, the funeral honours paid to them three thousand years ago were, in a measure, repeated as the mortal remains of these ancient heroes sailed down the Nile on their way to Boolak.
The principal personages found either as mummies, or represented by their mummy cases, include a king and queen of the XVIIth dynasty, five kings and four queens of the XVIIIth dynasty, and three successive kings of the XIXth dynasty, namely, Rameses the Great, his father, and his grandfather. The XXth dynasty, strange to say, is not represented; but belonging to the XXIst dynasty of royal priests are four queens, two kings, a prince, and a princess.
These royal mummies belong to four dynasties, and between the earliest and the latest there intervenes a period of above seven centuries,—a space of time as long as that which divides the Norman Conquest from the accession of George III. Under the dynasties above mentioned ancient Egypt reached the summit of her fame, through the expulsion of the Hykshos invaders, and the extensive conquests of Thothmes III. and Rameses the Great. The oppression of Israel in Egypt and the Exodus of the Hebrews, the colossal temples of Thebes, the royal sepulchres of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, the greater part of the Pharaonic obelisks, and the rock-cut temples of the Nile Valley, belong to the same period.
It would be beyond the scope of this brief account to describe each royal personage, and therefore there can only be given a short description of the two kings connected with the London Obelisk, namely, Thothmes III. and Rameses the Great, the mightiest of the Pharaohs.
Standing near the end of the long dark passage running northward, and not far from the threshold of the family vault of the priest-kings, lay the sarcophagus of Thothmes III., close to that of his brother Thothmes II. The mummy case was in a lamentable condition, and had evidently been broken into and subjected to rough usage. On the lid, however, were recognized the well-known cartouches of this illustrious monarch. On opening the coffin, the mummy itself was exposed to view, completely enshrouded with bandages; but a rent near the left breast showed that it had been exposed to the violence of tomb-breakers. Placed inside the coffin and surrounding the body were found wreaths of flowers: larkspurs, acacias and lotuses. They looked as if but recently dried, and even their colours could be discerned.
Long hieroglyphic texts found written on the bandages contained the seventeenth chapter of the “Ritual of the Dead,” and the “Litanies of the Sun.”
The body measured only five feet two inches; so that, making due allowance for shrinking and compression in the process of embalming, still it is manifest that Thothmes III. was not a man of commanding stature; but in shortness of stature as in brilliancy of conquests, finds his counterpart in the person of Napoleon the Great.
It was desirable in the interests of science to ascertain whether the mummy bearing the monogram of Thothmes III. was really the remains of that monarch. It was therefore unrolled. The inscriptions on the bandages established beyond all doubt the fact that it was indeed the most distinguished of the kings of the brilliant XVIIIth dynasty; and once more, after an interval of thirty-six centuries, human eyes gazed on the features of the man who had conquered Syria, and Cyprus, and Ethiopia, and had raised Egypt to the highest pinnacle of her power; so that it was said that in his reign she placed her frontiers where she pleased. The spectacle was of brief duration; the remains proved to be in so fragile a state that there was only time to take a hasty photograph, and then the features crumbled to pieces and vanished like an apparition, and so passed away from human view for ever. The director felt such remorse at the result that he refused to allow the unrolling of Rameses the Great, for fear of a similar catastrophe.