My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

This is very wonderful art, and proves that the Egyptians excelled all who came after them in the use of the chisel and brush; since they could not only represent in a drawing on the wall of a tomb the gaiety of an evening party and the subject of its conversation, but could make the picture convey as well the talk of the guests to their friends after they returned home!

We had read a good deal about the harem of Rameses III., and it was naturally the first object of our search at Medeenet Haboo. At the first visit we could not find it, and all our expectation of his sweet domestic life was unrealized. It was in vain that we read over the description:—“Here the king is attended by his harem, some of whom present him with flowers, or wave before him fans and flabella; and a favorite is caressed, or invited to divert his leisure hours with a game of draughts.” We climbed everywhere, and looked into every room, but the king and his harem were not visible. And yet the pictures, upon which has been built all this fair fabric of the domestic life of Rameses, must exist somewhere in these two pyramidal towers. And what a gallery of delights it must be, we thought. The king attended by his harem!

Upon a subsequent visit, we insisted that the guide should take us into this harem. That was not possible, but he would show it to us. We climbed a broken wall, from the top of which we could look up, through a window, into a small apartment in the tower. The room might be ten feet by twelve in size, probably smaller. There was no way of getting to it by any interior stairway or by any exterior one, that we could see, and I have no doubt that if Pharaoh lived there he climbed up by a ladder and pulled his harem up after him.

But the pictures on the walls, which we made out by the help of an opera-glass, prove this to have been one of the private apartments, they say. There are only two pictures, only one, in fact, not defaced; but as these are the only examples of the interior decoration of an ancient royal palace in all Egypt, it is well to make the most of them. They are both drawn in spirited outlines and are very graceful, the profile faces having a Greek beauty. In one Rameses III., of colossal size, is represented seated on an elegant fauteuil, with his feet on a stool. He wears the royal crown, a necklace, and sandals. Before him stands a lady of his harem, clad in a high crown of lotus-stems, a slight necklace, and sandals turned up like skates. It must be remembered that the weather was usually very warm in Thebes, especially on this side the river. The lady is holding up a lotus-flower, but it is very far from the royal nose, and indeed she stands so far off, that the king has to stretch out his arm to chuck her under the chin. The Pharaoh's beautiful face preserves its immortal calm, and the “favorite is caressed” in accordance with the chastest requirements of high art.

In the other picture, the Pharaoh is seated as before, but he is playing at draughts. In his left hand he holds some men, and his right is extended lifting a piece from the draughtboard. His antagonist has been unfortunate. Her legs are all gone; her head has disappeared. There remain of this “favorite” only the outline of part of the body, the right arm and the hand which lifts a piece, and a suggestion of the left arm extended at full length and pushing a lotus-bud close to the king's nose. It is an exhibition of man's selfishness-The poor woman is not only compelled to entertain the despot at the game, but she must regale his fastidious and scornful nose at the same time; it must have been very tiresome to keep the left hand thus extended through a whole game. What a passion the Egyptians had for the heavy perfume of this flower. They are smelling it in all their pictures.

We climbed afterwards, by means of a heap of rubbish, into a room similar to this one, in the other tower, where we saw remains of the same sculpture. It was like the Egyptians to repeat that picture five hundred times in the same palace.

The two Colossi stand half a mile east of the temple of Medeenet Haboo, and perhaps are the survivors of like figures which lined an avenue to another temple. One of them is better known to fame than any other ancient statue, and rests its reputation on the most shadowy basis. In a line with these statues are the remains of other colossi of nearly the same size, buried in the alluvial deposit. These figures both represent Amunoph III. (about 1500 or 1600 b. c.); they are seated; and on either side of the legs of the king, and attached to the throne, are the statues of his mother and daughter, little women, eighteen feet high. The colossi are fifty feet high without the bases, and must have stood sixty feet in the air before the Nile soil covered the desert on which they were erected. The pedestal is a solid stone thirty-three feet long.

Both were monoliths. The southern one is still one piece, but shockingly mutilated. The northern one is the famous Vocal Statue of Memnon; though why it is called of Memnon and why “vocal” is not easily explained. It was broken into fragments either by some marauder, or by an earthquake at the beginning of our era, and built up from the waist by blocks of stone, in the time of the Roman occupation, during the reign of Septimius Severus.

There was a tradition—perhaps it was only the tradition of a tradition—that it used to sing every morning at sunrise. No mention is made of this singing property, however, until after it was overthrown; and its singing ceased to be heard after the Roman Emperor put it into the state in which we now see it. It has been assumed that it used to sing, and many theories have been invented to explain its vocal method. Very likely the original report of this prodigy was a Greek or Roman fable; and the noise may have been produced by a trick for Hadrian's benefit (who is said to have heard it) in order to keep up the reputation of the statue.

Amunoph III. (or Amenôphis, or Amen-hotep—he never knew how to spell his name) was a tremendous slasher-about over the territories of other people; there is an inscription down at Samneh (above the second cataract) which says that he brought, in one expedition, out of Soudan, seven hundred and forty negro prisoners, half of whom were women and children. On the records which this modest man made, he is “Lord of both worlds, absolute master, Son of the Sun.” He is Horus, the strong bull. “He marches and victory is gained, like Horus, son of Isis, like the Sun in heaven.” He also built almost as extensively as Rameses II; he covered both banks of the Nile with splendid monuments; his structures are found from Ethiopia to the Sinaitic peninsula. He set up his image in this Colossus, the statue which the Greeks and Romans called Memnon, the fame of which took such possession of the imagination of poets and historians. They heard, or said they heard, Memnon, the Ethiopian, one of the defenders of Troy, each morning saluting his mother, Aurora.