Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

At Sais and Bubastis were held two of the great annual religious Assemblies and Festivals of the Egyptians. It naturally occurs to us to ask, why at these two cities of the Delta, and not at primæval This, royal Memphis, or imperial Thebes? The answer that first occurs is that these two then modern Capitals may have been selected in order to bring them into repute, and invest them with an importance, they would not otherwise have possessed. This supposition, however, is, to some extent, negatived by the known antiquity, at all events, of Bubastis, and by the remark of Herodotus that the Egyptians were the first of mankind to institute these religious gatherings and fêtes: we are, therefore, precluded from imagining that their chief celebrations of this kind dated only from the Bubastic or Saite Dynasties. We can also see that the people of Upper Egypt, all of whom dwelt on the actual bank of the river, would be more disposed to come down the stream to the Delta, than the people of the broad Delta would be to ascend the stream to This or Thebes.

These great annual Feasts answered several important purposes. They impressed the same religious ideas on all who participated in them; and this contributed much to national, as well as to religious, unity and amalgamation. By their tone also of gladness, festivity, and licence they temporarily lightened the yoke of an austere religion, and provided a recognized vent for some very natural, and not unhealthy, impulses of our common humanity. Just what the Saturnalia were to the ancient Roman, and what the Carnival is to his modern representative, the Feast of Bubastis was to the old Egyptian for some thousands of years before the name of Rome had been heard on the seven Hills. The reader may form his own opinion on this point by turning to the account of the Festival given by one who four centuries and a half before our era was travelling through Egypt, and who we may be pretty sure himself witnessed what he thus describes. “While those, who are about to keep the Feast, are on the way to Bubastis, this is what they do. The men and women go together; and there is a large number of both sexes in each boat. Some of the women are provided with castanets, and some of the men with pipes, upon which they perform throughout the whole of the voyage. The rest of the men, and of the women, accompany them with singing, and with clapping their hands. When, as they sail along, they have reached any city, having made fast their boat to the bank, some of the women do what has been already mentioned, while of the rest some assail the women of the city with loud cries and scurrilous jibes, others dance, and others stand up, and make immodest exhibitions. They go through these performances at every river-side city. When they have reached Bubastis they keep the feast with unusually large offerings, and there is a greater consumption of grape wine at this feast than in the remainder of the whole of the twelve months. The number of men and women who are brought together on this occasion, for the children are not reckoned, reaches, as the Egyptians themselves say, to 700,000 souls.”

I will append his account of the Feast at Sais. “When the people are assembled at Sais for the solemnity, on a certain night everybody lights a great number of lamps, in the open air, in a circle round his house. The lamps are cups full of oil mixed with salt. The wick rests on the surface, and burns all night. This is called the Feast of Lamps. All Egyptians who happen not to be present at the gathering, wherever they may be, light lamps; and thus there is an illumination not only in Sais, but throughout the whole of the country. A religious reason is given to account for this particular night having been thus honoured by illumination.” He does not give the reason; but as we know that the Festival was in honour of Neith, the Egyptian Athena or Minerva, or of Osiris, we may suppose that the old Egyptians were the first to use light shining in darkness as the symbol of the mind-illuminating power of the Divine Spirit.

A few fragments of granite, in the mounds of the old city, are all the remains of the former greatness of Sebennytus.

Only six miles, however, from Sebennytus are the rubbish-heaps of Iseum. Here are the ruins of a most stately temple, every stone in the walls and roof of which was an enormous block of granite. No other material had been used. So regardless had been its builders of cost, that throughout the greater part of the structure they had sculptured this intractable adamant in unusually high relief. But though it had been thus massively constructed of imperishable materials, and decorated with such lavish expenditure, it was so completely wrecked, that now the traveller finds in its place merely a heap of stones. What had been the temple is there, but not one stone has been left standing on another.

And so we might go on throughout the whole Delta. Every few miles would bring us to the site of a city that once was great—the distinguishing feature of the greatness of which had been its temple. The peculiarity of them all was that the material chiefly used in their construction was granite. In most cases, the very materials of which the temples were constructed have utterly disappeared, though the spot on which each stood is still easily distinguishable. In some few cases, where the temple was of unusual extent—Iseum is the most conspicuous instance of this—considerable proportions of the materials remain, but even there everything has been thrown down, and, as far as possible, destroyed.

The reason generally given for this, in every case, utter ruin, and in most cases complete disappearance of the monuments of antiquity throughout the Delta is, that the climate being rendered comparatively moist by the contiguity of the sea, has not been so favourable to their preservation as the drier climate of Upper Egypt has proved to the monuments of that district. The difference in the hygrometrical condition of the air, and the rain that falls occasionally in the Delta, will not account, I think, for the effect that has been produced. The climate of Gizeh is not very different from that of the actual Delta, and here five or six thousand years have not in the least affected the original casing at the top of the Second Pyramid. The obelisk that had been standing for very nearly two thousand years on the very beach at Alexandria, and which for the previous two thousand years had stood at the apex of the Delta, has not been affected to such an extent as would contribute, in any appreciable degree, I will not say to the overthrow, but to the injury, of any building ever raised by an Egyptian architect. And yet at Alexandria these supposed disintegrating influences are at their maximum, and are aided by the salt-impregnated drift from the sea in the case of this obelisk, which has, notwithstanding, outlived for so long a period every temple and palace throughout the Delta, after having witnessed the erection of every one of them. If it had a tongue, it would, I think, tell us that it was not the climate that had been the destroyer, but man.

The decree which the Emperor Theodosius issued at the instance of the Archbishop and Christians of Alexandria, to authorize the destruction of the great temple of Serapis in that city, shows what was probably the cause of the first overthrow of the temples of the Delta. As long as they stood, it was thought there would be priests to minister in them, and worshippers to frequent them. And in those days of religious faction-fights, we know that they were frequently used as fortresses. We might say that the way to meet these difficulties was to trust to the imperishableness of truth, and to the sure decay of falsehood; but whatever we might do, we certainly should not destroy the historic monuments of a glorious antiquity. They, however, had not our ideas on these subjects; and, moreover, were blinded by the dust and smoke of the battle that was raging around them; and so they acted on the principle that was afterwards formulated to the north of the Tweed, that the way to get rid of the rooks is to pull down the nests.

When the overthrow of a temple had been once effected, we may be quite sure that all the limestone that could be found in it would be very soon sent to the kiln. A great deal of lime is used in Egypt for walls, and for plastering; and everywhere throughout the country, even in places where the stone might be had for the quarrying, the Arab has preferred the stones of old tombs and temples to the somewhat more costly process of cutting what he wanted from the living rock. Mehemet Ali, while constructing his paltry nitre-works at Karnak, although the mountain on the opposite bank was of limestone, to get what of this material was requisite for his purpose, destroyed one of the historic propylons within the sacred enclosure. In the pyramid district, often with the limestone under their feet and all around them, it has been the common practice to calcine the, to us, precious sculptured and painted stones from the tombs. And in this the modern Arab is only following the example of the old Egyptian, and of all other people who wanted the materials of unused buildings close at hand. We may, therefore, be sure that, a few centuries after the overthrow of these temples of the Delta, all the limestone that could be picked out of their ruins was consumed in this way.

We have seen, however, that the chief material employed in the construction of the grandest of them was not limestone, but granite. This was utterly indestructible by the climate; and yet, in some places, it has entirely vanished as completely as the limestone; and has in the rest been much diminished. The same cause, I believe, has brought about the disappearance of both. As was done with the limestone, so has it happened to the granite: it has been used for whatever purposes it was adapted. The smaller pieces, as may frequently be seen, have been carried off for building material; and the larger pieces have been turned to account in the way in which we find that fragments of the granite colossus of Rameses the Great at Thebes have been employed, that is to say, as millstones for grinding, and mortars for pounding corn. In the alluvial Delta the old buildings were the only quarries.