Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Well horsed, well manned.—Homer’s Iliad.

Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes, are three fragments of the hundred-gated city of Homer. The landing, to which you moor your boat, is about two hundred yards from the great temple of Luxor. The open space, between the landing and the temple, is a slight acclivity, and is completely covered with sand. To the right and left of the open space are the mean buildings of the modern town. Those on the right cluster round and conceal the greater part of the temple, leaving only a grand colonnade visible from the water, at the further side of the open sandy acclivity. As you enter this colonnade, and stand in the roofed hall among the mighty pillars that support the roof, a feeling comes over you that you have shrunk to the dimensions and feebleness of a fly. The oldest sanctuary, of which there are any remains still standing here, was built by Amenophis III., who belonged to the dynasty that expelled the Hyksos. It was now seen that Thebes would be a safer capital than Memphis, which was too near the Semitic border. The close connexion also that had now been formed with Ethiopia, sometimes being that of its complete subjection, made a more southern capital desirable. The erection of the splendid temple of Amenophis indicates the complete triumph of the new policy. This took place about four thousand years ago. Rameses the Great, the most magnificent and prolific architect the world has ever seen, was not satisfied with the original structure. Following the example of his father, Sethos, he conceived a plan for investing Thebes with a grandeur and a glory that none of the Empires, that have grown to greatness during the thousands of years that have passed since his day, have done anything to rival, or approach. And this plan he carried out to a successful completion. Part of it was the architectural connexion of Luxor and Karnak. For this purpose it was necessary to give additional height and massiveness to Luxor. This he did by attaching to the extremity of the temple of Amenophis, nearest to Karnak, a grand court, enriched externally with colossal statues of himself and two obelisks; one of which is now standing where he placed it; the other is in the Place de la Concorde at Paris. Having made the Temples of Luxor and Karnak, by their height and massiveness, their lofty courts, propylæa and obelisks, reciprocally conspicuous and imposing from each other, the direct connexion was effected by a broad straight road, or street, nearly two miles in length, guarded on either side by a row of sphinxes. Some of these, at the Karnak end of the connecting street, still remain; they are ram-headed. Fragments of others are found in the débris nearer Luxor.

Along the line of this old street, which, however, except at its northern end, is quite obliterated by rubbish mounds, cultivation, and palm-groves, you ride to Karnak. As you pass no houses by the way the distance seems great. Here was for many centuries the splendid centre of the most splendid city in the world. On nothing like it did the sun shine. The dwelling-houses, many of them Diodorus tells us four, some even five, stories high, were, we may be sure, not allowed to approach so near as to interfere with the solemnizing effect of the long dromos of sphinxes. This effect was the very object of these avenues of sphinxes and colossi, which were prefixed to the temples. They shut out the world as the worshipper approached the temple, and prepared his mind for the services and the influences of the house of God.

The area of the sacred enclosure at Karnak was a square of about 2,000 feet each way. The enclosing wall is still everywhere traceable. In some parts it is but little injured by time. There were twenty-six temples within the enclosure. It was a city of temples. The axis of the main series points across the river to the gorge of the valley, in the Libyan hills, at the head of which were placed the tombs of the kings. Another series of temples reached down to the south-west entrance of the enclosure, where was the termination of the Luxor-Karnak street. These two series of temples may be roughly described as close and parallel to the north-eastern and north-western sides of the enclosure. The rest of the space was filled with more or less detached structures.

Here was, if not the sublimest—for the mass and simplicity of the Great Pyramid may contest that—yet certainly the most magnificent architectural effort ever made by man. What prompted it? At what did it aim? Of course it was the embodiment of an idea, and that idea was, in its simplest expression, the same as the idea contained in the Greek temple, and the Christian cathedral. It was the glorification of the builders conception of the Deity. The difference in the structures, in their fashion and effect, arose out of the differences in the conceptions these people had respectively formed of the Deity. In the conception of the Egyptian awe was the predominant feature. Whatever else Deity might be, awfulness was its first attribute. Beauty, if at all, came in a comparatively low degree. With the Greeks and the Christians it was very different. The gods of the Greeks were connected with and took delight in Nature. The God of the Christians was the author of Nature. With them, therefore, the recognition, the creation, and the exhibition of what was beautiful, formed a part of the service of God. They felt that in religion a sense of, and the sight of, the beautiful dispose to love. The Egyptian beholder and worshipper was not to be attracted and charmed, but overwhelmed. His own nothingness, and the terribleness of the power and will of God, was what he was to feel. The soul of the Greek, and of the Christian, was to be elevated, not crushed; to be calmed, to be harmonized. One was the work of minds in which the instinct of freedom was operative; the other of minds which felt the powerlessness, the helplessness of man in the face of an unchangeable iron order alike of Nature and of society.

Moreover, as we have already seen, in Egypt Nature herself did not originate and nurture the thought of beauty. In Egypt were no rocky, moss-margined streams, no hanging woods, no shady groves, no lovely valleys. The two paramount objects in Nature, as they presented themselves to the eye and the thought of the Egyptian, suggested to him absolute power on the part of Nature, and absolute dependence on the part of man. These two objects were a singularly dull and monotonous river, but without which the Egyptian world would be a desert, and the scorching sun, but without which all would be darkness and death. They did everything. Without them everything was nothing.

These stupendous structures, then, expressed the feebleness of the worshipper by magnifying the power of the object of his worship. They awed him, as was intended, into a sense of personal nothingness, while they called into being and fed a sense of irresistible power, external to man, the idea of which the peculiarities of everything Egyptian gave rise to. Moral ideas, engendered by the structure and working of Egyptian society, and ideas of the physical forces which were ever before them, and to which they felt their subjection, were entangled in their minds in an inextricable knot, and that knot was their religion.

On the walls of these stupendous structures is written and sculptured the history, as well as the religion, of Egypt, from Osirtasen I., who reigned four thousand five hundred years ago, down to the Roman Augustus: these are the earliest and the latest names inscribed on the lithotomes of Karnak. The included space of time embraces the two last dynasties of the primæval monarchy; the Hyksos period; the whole of the new monarchy, when Egypt rose to its zenith of power, glory, art, wealth, and wisdom; the domination of Persia; the Ptolemaic sovereignty; and a part of the Roman rule. None inscribed so much history on these walls as the two mightiest of Egyptian conquerors and builders, Sethos, and the stronger son of a strong father, his successor, Rameses the Great. These two Pharaohs themselves made more history than all who had gone before them; and none who followed them attained to their eminence. The buildings they erected are history, as much as their conquests.

The Coliseum is a part of Roman history. Its magnitude and its purpose are history. It tells us that Cæsar could issue a decree that all the world should be taxed; that Cæsar found it necessary to dazzle and amuse the populace; that the amusements of the populace were brutal; that amusement, not religion, was the order of the day. So in the stones of Karnak we see the plunder and the tribute of Asia and Ethiopia. Many a city had been made a desolate heap, and many a fair region had been ravaged, and the silver and the gold collected, and the surviving inhabitants swept into the Egyptian net, and carried away captive into Egypt, to assist in building the grand hypostyle Court of Karnak, the grandest hall ever constructed by man. In the direction of the axis of the connected series of temples this hall is 170 ft. long. Its width is 329 ft. It is supported by one hundred and thirty-four columns. The central twelve are 62 ft. high in the shaft, and 36 ft. in circumference. The remaining one hundred and twenty-two columns are 42 ft. in height, and 28 ft. in circumference. The lintel stone of the great doorway is within 2 in. of 41 ft. in length. Every part of the walls, the pillars, and the roof is covered with coloured sculptures cut by the chisel of history, and of religion, which, however, as far as we are concerned, belongs to history. The purpose of this hall was to provide a fitting place for the great religious diets of the nation. It must have appeared to the thoughts of those times that the gods had assisted the king—who was already becoming their associate—in designing and erecting such a structure. We, however, are aware that no people can imagine, or undertake such structures, unless they are inspired with the sentiment that they are the greatest among the nations, and at the head of the world. Great things—it is more true of literature than of architecture, but it is true of everything—are not done by imitation but by inspiration, and nothing inspires great things but greatness itself.