Somewhat in advance of these temple-palaces of the two Rameses, stand on the cultivated plain the two great colossi of Thebes. The space between them is sufficient for a road or street. The easternmost of the pair is the celebrated vocal Memnon of antiquity. It is covered with Roman inscriptions placed upon it by travellers, who were desirous of leaving behind them a record of the fact, that they had not been disappointed in hearing the sound. That was an age when the love of the marvellous, combined with ignorance of what nature could, and could not, do, prepared, and predisposed men, for being deceived. There can be no doubt how the sound was produced. There is in the lap of the seated figure an excavation in which a priest was concealed, who, when the moment had arrived, struck a stone in the figure, of a kind which rang like brass. The Arabs now climb into the lap in a few seconds, and will for a piastre produce the sound for you at any hour of the twenty-four you please. The Emperor Hadrian heard three emissions of the sound on the morning he went to listen. This is a compliment we are not surprised to find the statue paid to the ruler of the world.
This colossus was erected by Amunoph III., a name which, by an easy corruption, the Greeks transformed into Memnon, just as they changed Chufu into Cheops, Amenemha into Mœris, and Sethos into Sesostris.
Behind these colossi stood a temple which had been erected by the same Amunoph. Nothing now remains of this temple but its rubbish heap, and its foundations. It was, however, once connected, architecturally, with the temple he had built at Luxor, on the other side of the river. The street that connected them was called Street Royal. This was the line Sethos, and the two Rameses, must always have taken, in going from their palaces on the western bank to Luxor and Karnak on the eastern side. It must have been about three miles in length. The line of this Royal Street is marked by the two still standing colossi. The fragments of a few others have been found. Those that remain are sixty feet in height. This must have been a grand street, with the two temples at its two ends, and part of it, at all events, consisting of a dromos of such figures.
I have already mentioned that a sphinx-guarded street, about two miles long, ran from Luxor to Karnak. I have also pointed out that the north-west angle of the great enclosure of Karnak was connected, to the eye, with the temples of the western Háger. The precise spot upon the Háger where a temple had been made conspicuous to the eye from Karnak, was what is now called Assassef. Of course from Assassef the lofty structures of Karnak were in full view. In order to place the temple at Assassef reciprocally in view to the spectator standing at Karnak, it was necessary to remove a part of the natural rock wall of the eastern side of the valley of Assassef, and this had been done. The distance from Karnak to Assassef is somewhat over three miles. From this point temples and temple-palaces were continuous along the edge of the Háger, in front of the Necropolis, as far as the western extremity of the Royal Street. Thus was completed the grand Theban Parallelogram. The circuit of the four sides measured, I suppose, about ten miles. It included every one of the great structures of Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes. There can be no doubt but that the lofty propylæa, and obelisks of Luxor and Karnak were intended to be seen from a distance. As the site of Thebes was, of itself, somewhat elevated above the sites of Luxor and Karnak, there was no occasion for obelisks at Thebes; as also they would have been backed by the mountains to one looking from the other side of the river, they would have been inconspicuous, and therefore this architectural form was not used at Thebes: though, indeed, I believe no instance remains to show that it was ever used on that side of the valley, on which the sun set.
The structural connexion of all the mighty, magnificent buildings throughout these ten miles was the grand conception of Rameses the Great, of which I spoke some way back. There never were, we may be quite sure, ten such miles, elsewhere, on the surface of this earth. It is rash to prophesy, but we may doubt whether there ever will be ten such miles again. We may, I think, say there will not be, unless time give birth to two conditions. The first of the two is, that communities should become animated with the desire to do for themselves what these mighty Pharaohs did for themselves in the old days of their greatness; and as man is much the same now that he was then, and as private persons are capable of entertaining the same ideas as kings, there is no à priori reason against the possibility of this. The second condition is, that machinery should eventually give us the power of cutting and moving large blocks of stone at a far cheaper rate than is possible, with that already mighty assistant, at present. For, as the world does not go back, we may be sure that myriads of captives, and of helpless subjects, will never again be employed in this way. It is quite conceivable that the mass of some community may come to feel itself great, the feeling being in the community generally, and not only in the individual at its head; and should they at the same time entertain the desire that the magnificence of their architecture should be in proportion to, and express, the greatness of their ideas and sentiments, then the world may again see hypostyle halls as grand as that of Karnak, and magnificence equal to that of the Osirid Court of the Rameseum: with, however, the difference that they will be constructed by, and for, the community. In this there would be no injury in any way to any one, and there would be nothing to regret, for those who had raised such structures, and were in the habit of using them, would perhaps on that account be less likely to be mean, and little, in the ordinary occurrences of life. At all events there would be nothing demoralizing in making machinery the slave to do the heavy drudgery required in their construction.
There is one source of interest which belongs to the study of the antiquities of Egypt in a higher degree than to the study of the antiquities of any other country. Every object on which the eye may rest, whether great or small, from the grandest architectural monument down to a glass bead, is thoroughly, and genuinely Egyptian. Not a tool with which the compact limestone, or intractable granite was cut; not a colour with which the sculptures or walls were decorated; not a form in their architectural details; not a thought, or practice, or scene the sculptures and paintings represent, was, as far as we know, borrowed, or could have been borrowed, from any neighbouring people. The grand whole, and the minutest detail, everything seen, and everything implied, was strictly autochthonous; as completely the product of the Egyptian mind, as Egypt itself is of the Nile.
CHAPTER XIX.
RAMESES THE GREAT GOES FORTH FROM EGYPT.
Why, then the world’s mine oyster,