My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

If this sound was heard, scientists think it was produced by the action of the sun's rays upon dew fallen in the crevices of the broken figure. Others think the sound was produced by a priest who sat concealed in the lap of the figure and struck a metallic stone. And the cavity and the metallic stone exist there now. Of course the stone was put in there and the cavity left, when the statue was repaired, it having been a monolith. And as the sound was never heard before the statue was broken nor after it was repaired, the noise was not produced by the metallic stone. And if I am required to believe that the statue sang with his head off, I begin to doubt altogether. I incline to think that we have here only one of those beautiful myths in which the Greeks and Romans loved to clothe the distant and the gigantic.

One of the means of accounting for a sound which may never have been heard, is that the priests produced it in order to strike with awe the people. Now, the Egyptian priests never cared anything about the people, and wouldn't have taken the trouble; indeed, in the old times “people” wouldn't have been allowed anywhere within such a sacred inclosure as this in which the Colossus stood. And, besides, the priest could not have got into the cavity mentioned. When the statue was a monolith, it would puzzle him to get in; and there is no stairway or steps by which he could ascend now. We sent an Arab up, who scaled the broken fragments with extreme difficulty, and struck the stone. The noise produced was like that made by striking the metallic stones we find in the desert,—not a resonance to be heard far.

So that I doubt that there was any singing at sunrise by the so-called Memnon (which was Amunoph), and I doubt that it was a priestly device.

This Amunoph family, whose acquaintance we have been obliged to make, cut a wide swath in their day; they had eccentricities, and there are told a great many stories about them, which might interest you if you could believe that the Amunophs were as real as the Hapsburgs and the Stuarts and the Grants.

Amunoph I. (or Amen-hotep) was the successor of Amosis (or Ahmes) who expelled the Shepherds, and even pursued them into Canaan and knocked their walled-towns about their heads. Amunoph I. subdued the Shasu or Bedaween of the desert between Egypt and Syria, as much as those hereditary robbers were ever subdued. This was in the seventeenth century b. c. This king also made a naval expedition up the Nile into Ethiopia, and it is said that he took captive there the “chief of the mountaineers.” Probably then, he went into Abyssinia, and did not discover the real source of the Nile.

The fourth Amunoph went conquering in Asia, as his predecessors had done, for nations did not stay conquered in those days. He was followed by his seven daughters in chariots of war. These heroic girls fought, with their father, and may be seen now, in pictures, gently driving their chariot-wheels over the crushed Asiatics. When Amunoph IV. came home and turned his attention to religion, he made lively work with the Egyptian pantheon. This had grown into vast proportions from the time of Menes, and Amunoph did not attempt to improve it or reform it; he simply set it aside, and established a new religion. He it was who abandoned Thebes and built Tel-el-Amarna, and there set up the worship of a single god, Aten, represented by the sun's disc. He shut up the old temples, effaced the images of the ancient gods, and persecuted mercilessly their worshippers throughout the empire.

He was prompted to all this by his mother, for he himself was little better than an imbecile. It was from his mother that he took his foreign religion as he did his foreign blood, for there was nothing of the Egyptian type in his face. His mother, Queen Taia, wife of Amunoph III., had light hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, the characteristics of northern women. She was not of royal family, and not Egyptian; but the child of a foreign family then living in the Delta, and probably the king married her for her beauty and cleverness.

M. Lenormant thinks she was a Hebrew. That people were then very numerous in the Delta, where they lived unmolested keeping their own religion, a very much corrupted and materialized monotheism. Queen Taia has the complexion and features of the Hebrews—I don't mean of the Jews who are now dispersed over the continents. Lenormant credits the Hebrews, through the Queen Taia, with the overthrow of the Pharaonic religion and the establishment of the monotheism of Amunoph IV.—a worship that had many external likenesses to the Hebrew forms. At Tel-el-Amarna we see, among the utensils of the worship of Aten, the Israelitish “Table of Shew-bread.” It is also noticed that the persecution of the Hebrews coincides with the termination of the religious revolution introduced by the son of Taia.

Whenever a pretty woman of talent comes into history she makes mischief. The episode of Queen Taia is however a great relief to the granite-faced monotony of the conservative Pharaohs. Women rulers and regents always make the world lively for the time being—and it took in this case two or three generations to repair the damages. Smashing things and repairing damages—that is history.

History starts up from every foot of this Theban plain, piled four or five deep with civilizations. These temples are engulfed in rubbish; what the Persians and the earthquake spared, Copts and Arabs for centuries have overlaid with their crumbling habitations. It requires a large draft upon the imagination to reinstate the edifices that once covered this vast waste; but we are impressed with the size of the city, when we see the long distances that the remaining temples are apart, and the evidence, in broken columns, statues, and great hewn blocks of stone shouldering out of the sand, of others perhaps as large.