Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER XVIII.
THEBES—THE TEMPLE-PALACES.

Cur invidendis postibus, et novo

Sublime ritu moliar atrium?—Horace.

We will now, having left the tombs, turn our attention to the temples. Some we find upon the edge of the Háger, others a little way back upon it. The greater number of those that were once here have been completely razed to the ground, nothing now remaining of them except fragments of statues, the foundations of walls, and the bases of pillars; all of which are buried in rubbish heaps. There are, however, some singularly interesting exceptions which demand particular notice. Fortunately, though it hardly looks like chance, the temple-palaces of Sethos, of the great Rameses, and of Rameses III., are still standing. These were built by the two great conquerors of the nineteenth, and the great conqueror of the twentieth dynasties. Why did not other Pharaohs erect similar structures? The reason is not far to seek. It is here present in the case of these three kings, and is absent from the cases of other kings. The funds necessary for such structures had to be procured by looting Asia, and a great part of the work had to be done by captives taken in war. And we know that at this time it was the custom for those kings of Egypt, who contemplated great works, to begin their reigns with raids into Asia, for the express purpose of collecting the gold and the slaves that would enable them to carry out their designs. It was the good old rule, the simple plan, that those should take who had the power. These great and famous expeditions, in truth, were only imperial slave hunts, and imperial brigandage, in which not petty tribes of African negroes, but the (for those times) civilized nations of Asia, and not a few travellers, but the inhabitants of great cities and kingdoms, were the victims. These great builders, administrators, and soldiers, who believed of themselves that they had already been received into the hierarchy of heaven, could not have understood in what sense they could have done ill in building themselves a wide house, and large chambers, and ceiling it with cedar, and painting it with vermilion; though they doubtless would have thought that it would have been ill, even for an Egyptian Pharaoh, to build his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong, to use his neighbour’s service without wages, and to give him not for his work. But how any question of unrighteousness and wrong could arise between Pharaoh and strangers, people who were not Egyptians, would have been something new and incomprehensible to Pharaoh. I once asked a fisherman’s boy who was unconcernedly breaking up a basketful of live crabs to bait his father’s dab-nets, if it was not cruel work that he was about? ‘No,’ he replied, ‘because it is their business to find us a living.’ Somewhat in the same way did Pharaoh think of the outside world; and in much the same way, too, did he treat it, when he wished to build himself a temple-palace. In these temple-palaces one hears the groans, and sees the blood, of those who were broken up alive to build them.

There are no buildings in the old world so full of actually written and pictured history as these three temple-palaces, for each of them contains records of the achievements and life of the builder, as they were regarded by himself, and of his religion, as it was understood by himself. The grandest of the three is the Memnonium, or, as it ought to be called, the Rameseum. Here lived the great Rameses. He designed it, built it, and made it his home. He built it after his great Asiatic campaigns. How often here must he have fought his battles o’er again.

The Rameseum bears the same relation to all the other buildings of old Egypt that the Parthenon does to all the other remains of Greek architecture. It was built at the culminating point of Egyptian art and greatness. The conception was an inspiration of a consciousness of excellence and power. Everything here is grand, even for Egypt; the lofty propylons, the Osirid court, the great halls, and, above all, the colossal statue of the king seated on his throne, a monolith of red granite, weighing nearly 900 tons, and which is now lying on the ground in stupendous fragments, its overthrow having been probably the work of the vengeful Persians. Nothing can exceed the interest of this grand structure. It included even a spacious library, on the walls of which were sculptured figures of the god of letters, and of the god of memory. Over the door by which it was entered was the famous inscription, ‘The medicine of the mind.’ And this more than three thousand years ago: and yet we may be sure that it did not contain the first collection of books that had been made in Egypt, but only the first of which we have any record. We know that they had been keeping a regular register of the annual rising of the Nile then for nearly a thousand years, and that their written law ante-dated this library by between two and three thousand years. Both of these facts, to some degree, indicate collections of books. By a concurrence of happy chances, which almost make one regret that a grateful offering can no longer be made to good fortune, papyrus-rolls have been found dated from this library, and in the Háger behind have been discovered the tombs of some of the Royal librarians.

The temple-palace, at Cornéh, of Sethos, the father of Rameses, though built with all the solidity of Egyptian architecture in its best days, is a very much smaller structure than the Rameseum. What remains of it is in very good preservation. It stands about a mile to the north-west of the latter building, some little way back in the Háger, and on somewhat higher ground, near the entrance of the Valley of the Kings. On one of the sphinxes belonging to it are inscribed the names of all the towns in the Delta Sethos conquered. This is an important record, as it shows either that the Semites had been able to some extent to re-establish themselves in the Delta, or that they had never been thoroughly subjugated, in that part of the country, before the time of Sethos. The work, however, was now done thoroughly, for from this time we do not hear of any troubles that can be assigned to them. The sculptures on the walls of this palace are in the freest and boldest style. They relate chiefly to religious acts and ceremonies. As Sethos was the designer and builder of the chief part of the stupendous hypostyle Hall of Karnak, it was not because his architectural ideas were less grand than those of his son that his palace was so much smaller. I can imagine that the reason of this was that he was desirous that none of his attention and resources should be diverted from his great work, which was enough of itself to tax to their utmost all the powers both of the king and of the kingdom. It raises him in our estimation to find that his greatest work was not his own palace, but the hall in which the ecclesiastical diets of Egypt (of course the members were priests) were to be held; for though he was a Pharaoh, and a conquering Pharaoh too, he could see that the kingdom was greater than the king, and that to do great things well one thing must be done at a time.

A little to the south of the Rameseum is the third of these temple-places. It is that of the third Rameses. This, though not so grand and pure in style as the Rameseum, has been better preserved. Upon it, and within it, are the ruins of a Coptic town. The crude brick tenements perched on the roof, and adhering to the walls of the mighty structure, reminded me of the disfigurements of the obelisk of Heliopolis, and of the propylons of Dendera, by the mud-cells which insect architecture had plastered over them. So wags the world. Squalid poverty had succeeded to imperial splendour. But the same fate had waited upon both. The towers of kings, and the hovels of the poor, are now equally desolate and untenanted. One of the courts of the palace had been metamorphosed by the Copts of the neighbourhood into their church. From the expense which must have been incurred in effecting this transformation it is evident that they once formed here a numerous body. The community, however, has entirely disappeared from this place, and nothing—absolutely nothing—has come in its stead. They say in the East that where the Turk sets his foot grass will not grow; but this is true of El Islam generally. It is great at pulling down and destroying, but not equally great at reconstructing.

The Christian church and the Egyptian temple are alike deserted. The old Egyptian and the Coptic Christian have both completely vanished from this scene. It is curious as we stand here, with equal evidence before us of the equal fate of both, to observe how little people think about the fate of the latter in comparison with what they think about the fate of the former; and yet there are, at all events, some reasons to dispose us favourably, and sympathizingly, towards our Coptic co-religionists. If the causes of the feeling could be analyzed, would it be found to have arisen from a half-formed thought that there was no gratitude to be felt to the poor Copt for anything he had done, and that the world had no hope of anything from him? Or would it be because there is really little to interest the thought in the fortunes of a community, of which we know little more than that, by having changed the law of liberty into a petrified doctrine, they had gone a long way towards committing moral and intellectual suicide?

In one of the private apartments of this temple-palace of Rameses III. the sculptures represent the king seated on a chair, which would not be out of place at Windsor, or Schönbrunn. His daughters are standing around him, offering him fruit and flowers, and agitating the air with their fans. He amuses himself with a game of drafts, and with their conversation.