My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

This—some mounds, some fragments of stone, and the statue,—was all we saw of Memphis. But I should like to have spent a day in this lovely grove, which was carpeted with the only turf I saw in Egypt; reclining upon the old mounds in the shade, and pretending to think of Menes and Moses and Menephtah; and of Rhampsinitus, the king who “descended alive into the place which the Greeks call Hades, and there played at dice with Ceres, and sometimes won, and other times lost,” and of the treasure-house he built here; and whether, as Herodotus believed, Helen, the beautiful cause of the Iliad, really once dwelt in a palace here, and whether Homer ever recited his epic in these streets.

We go on over the still rich plain to the village of Sakkarah—chiefly babies and small children. The cheerful life of this prairie fills us with delight—flocks of sheep, herds of buffaloes, trains of dromedaries, hundreds of laborers of both sexes in the fields, children skylarking about; on every path are women, always with a basket on the head, their blue cotton gown (the only article of dress except a head-shawl,) open in front, blowing back so as to show their figures as they walk.

When we reach the desert we are in the presence of death—perhaps the most mournful sight on this earth is a necropolis in the desert, savage, sand-drifted, plundered, all its mounds dug over and over. We ride along at the bases of the pyramids. I stop at one, climb over the débris at its base, and break off a fragment of stone. The pyramid is of crumbling limestone, and, built in stages or degrees, like that of Maydoom; it is slowly becoming an unsightly heap. And it is time. This is believed to be the oldest structure in the world, except the Tower of Babel. It seems to have been the sepulchre of Keken, a king of the second dynasty. At this period hieroglyphic writing was developed, but the construction and ornamentation of the doorway of the pyramid exhibit art in its infancy. This would seem to show that the Egyptians did not emigrate from Asia with the developed and highly perfected art found in the sculptures of the tombs of the fourth, fifth, and sixth dynasties, as some have supposed, but that there was a growth, which was arrested later.

But no inference in regard to old Egypt is safe; a discovery tomorrow may upset it. Statues recently found, representing persons living in the third dynasty, present a different type of race from that shown in statues of the fourth and fifth dynasties. So that, in that period in which one might infer a growth of art, there may have been a change of the dominating race.

The first great work of Mariette Bey in Egypt—and it is a monument of his sagacity, enthusiasm, and determination, was the unearthing, in this waste of Memphis, the lost Serapeum and the Apis Mausoleum, the tombs of the sacred bulls. The remains of the temple are again covered with sand; but the visitor can explore the Mausoluem. He can walk, taper in hand, through endless galleries, hewn in the rock, passing between rows of gigantic granite sarcophagi, in which once rested the mummies of the sacred bulls. Living, the bull was daintily fed—the Nile water unfiltered was thought to be too fattening for him—and devotedly worshipped; and dying, he was entombed in a sepulchre as magnificent as that of kings, and his adorers lined the walls of his tomb with votive offerings. It is partly from these stelæ, or slabs with inscriptions, that Mariette Bey has added so much to our knowledge of Egyptian history.

Near the Serapeum is perhaps the most elegant tomb in Egypt, the tomb of Tih, who lived in the fifth dynasty, some time later than Cheops, but when hippopotami abounded in the river in front of his farm, Although Tih was a priest, he was a gentleman of elegant tastes, an agriculturist, a sportsman. He had a model farm, as you may see by the buildings and by the thousand details of good management here carved. His tomb does him great credit. In all the work of later times there is nothing so good as this sculpture, so free, so varied, so beautiful; it promises everything. Tih even had, what we do not expect in people of that early time, humor; you are sure of it from some of the pictures here. He must have taken delight in decorating his tomb, and have spent, altogether, some pleasant years in it before he occupied it finally; so that he had become accustomed to staying here.

But his rule was despotic, it was that of the “stick.” Egyptians have never changed in this respect, as we have remarked before. They are now, as then, under the despotism of some notion of governance—divine or human—despotic and fateful. The “stick” is as old as the monarchy; it appears in these tombs; as to day, nobody then worked or paid taxes without its application.

The sudden arrest of Egyptian art was also forced upon us next day, in a second visit to the pyramids of Geezeh. We spent most of the day in the tombs there. In some of them we saw the ovals of all the kings of the fourth dynasty, many of them perfect and fresh in color. As to drawing, cutting, variety, liveliness of attitude and color, there is nothing better, little so good, in tombs of recent date. We find almost every secular subject in the early tombs that is seen in the latest. In thousands of years, the Egyptians scarcely changed or made any progress. The figures of men and animals are better executed in these old tombs than in the later. Again, these tombs are free from the endless repetitions of gods and of offerings to them. The life of the people represented is more natural, less superstitious; common events are naively portrayed, with the humorous unconsciousness of a simple age; art has thought it not unworthy its skill to represent the fact in one tomb, that men acted as midwives to cows, in the dawn of history.

While we lay at Geezeh we visited one of the chicken-hatching establishments for which the Egyptians have been famous from a remote period. It was a very unpretending affair, in a dirty suburb of the town. We were admitted into a low mud-building, and into a passage with ovens on each side. In these ovens the eggs are spread upon mats, and the necessary fire is made underneath. The temperature is at 100° to 108° Fahrenheit. Each oven has a hole in the center, through which the naked attendant crawls to turn the eggs from time to time. The process requires usually twenty-one days, but some eggs hatch on the twentieth. The eggs are supplied by the peasants who usually receive, without charge, half as many chickens as they bring eggs. About one third of the eggs do not hatch. The hatching is only performed about three months in the year, during the spring.

In the passage, before one of the ovens, was a heap of soft chickens, perhaps half a bushel, which the attendant scraped together whenever they attempted to toddle off. We had the pleasure of taking up some handfuls of them. We also looked into the ovens, where there was a stir of life, and were permitted to hold some eggs while the occupants kicked off the shell.