Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

History, which had only an embryonic and potential existence in the time of the old knight, and which even now is only beginning to assume its proper form and lineaments, and to become a living thing with power to teach, to guide, and to save from error—formerly what was taken for history often only misled—would readily have enabled each of them to have escaped the temptation that was besetting him.

It is worth noticing, by the way, that Mandeville was one of the last who saw the original inscriptions on the Great Pyramid. The construction of Sultan Hassan’s Mosk, the materials for which were supplied by the outer flakes of this Pyramid, was completed about the middle of the fourteenth century. Mandeville was in Egypt immediately before its commencement, and mentions the inscriptions. Notices of them are also to be found in several Arabian and other writers of earlier date. These were what Herodotus saw, and refers to. Some others, both in Greek and Latin, had been added during the period of Ptolemaic and Cæsarian domination. When the Father of History saw, and had them interpreted to him, they were more than 2,000 years old. The knight of St. Albans, 1,700 years later, looked upon them in blank ignorance. Here we have brought together, as it were, in a single canvas, the primæval Egyptian, the inquisitive Greek, and the adventurous Englishman. What would not one now give to behold such inscriptions, on such a building, and with such a history? They had stood for nearly 4,000 years; and were capable, probably, of standing 4,000 years more: at all events, at this day, we might, certainly, be reading what Cheops had inscribed, and Herodotus and Mandeville had seen, if (we need not say anything about Sultan Hassan) Mohamed had been less of an ignorant barbarian. What destroyed these inscriptions, just as it had overthrown a civilization it was incapable of reconstructing, was the grand and luminous formula that ‘God is God, and Mohamed his Prophet.’ This, which the true believer takes for a summary of all knowledge, is, in fact, nothing but the profession and apotheosis of all ignorance. It does excellently well for Mecca, and still better for Timbuctoo. But, however, as it is the summary of all knowledge, those who utter it have attained (how easy then is the achievement) the highest point man can reach. They can have on intellectual sympathy, or moral connexion with the ages that preceded its announcement. So also the ages that are to come (why there should be such ages does not appear) can never be, in anything, one step in advance of them. God can never be anything but God, and he never can have any prophet but Mohamed: that is to say, men must never conceive the idea of God otherwise than as Mohamed conceived it. This was what destroyed the inscriptions Cheops had placed on the Great Pyramid, and turned it into a quarry for Mosks and palaces at Cairo.

Religion, however, sooner or later, has its revenge on the theology which endeavours to confine it within narrow and inexpansive limits of this kind. The day comes when ‘the engineer is hoist with his own petard,’ that is, when the theology is strangled with its own formularies. History, too, which theologies generally ignore, has its revenge in pointing, as a warning, to the indications, scattered throughout all lands, of their former existence, and of the causes of their decay and extinction. Religion is a living thing that, from time to time, advances into a higher form. Theologies are often only fossils of forms of religion that have passed away.

But to return to our question: why was this particular form given to these tombs and sepulchral monuments? Of course, it was because this was the form which presented itself to the minds of the men of those times as the natural and proper form. But why did a thought, which does not appear obvious and appropriate to us, appear to them natural and proper? It was because in the ages that had preceded the times of the Pyramid builders, and which had left some of the ideas that had belonged to them still impressed on men’s minds, tools for quarrying and squaring stones had been scarce; and it had resulted from this scarcity of tools (sometimes it was an entire absence of them) and from the corresponding embryonic condition of the primitive ideas of art, that the tombs and sepulchral monuments of those ages had consisted merely of a shallow grave covered over with a pile of inartificially heaped-up stones, or earth. That was all that the natural desire in the survivors to perpetuate the memory of the dead had found possible. Such was, with the Aryan race, the primæval idea of a tomb and sepulchral monument, throughout the whole Aryan world. Cheops and Chephren, and their predecessors for many generations on the throne of Egypt, had acquired tools, and an unlimited supply of labour; but they had not acquired new ideas about tombs and sepulchral monuments. So when, with the vigour of thought, and boldness of conception, that belonged to a young world, conscious of its strength, they resolved to construct such tombs and sepulchral monuments as should endure while the world endured, no other form occurred to them, excepting that of the simple antique Aryan cairn. They wanted a tomb, and a sepulchral monument, and nothing but a cairn could be that. And so they built the cairns of Gizeh.

Solomon’s Temple indicated that it had been preceded by a time during which the House of God had been a tent; the marble Parthenon that it had been preceded by a time during which the ancestors of its architects had built with wood.

Suppose that it were discovered that in the language of old Egypt the word for a sepulchral monument meant literally a heap of stones, should we not be justified by the known history of the power words have over thought, in feeling certain that in those early times there could not have been a man in Egypt capable of forming any other conception of a sepulchral monument? We have some little ground for presuming that something of the kind was at work in the minds of the builders of the Pyramids. The force, that is to say, of words, as well as the force of tradition, may have constrained them to adopt the pyramidal form. At all events, we know that the word pyramid may mean the mountain, perhaps the mound, perhaps really the cairn, the heap of stones.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE GREAT PYRAMID LOOKS DOWN ON THE CATARACT OF PHILÆ.

Now I gain the mountain’s brow,

What a landscape lies below!—Dyer.