Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

We thought it a wonderful work to bring the Alexandria obelisk from Egypt to New York in the hold of a steamer. To load it a hole had to be cut in the bow of the vessel and the pillar dragged through. The Egyptian obelisk at Paris was carried across the Mediterranean on a barge, while that which now stands in London was taken there in an iron watertight cylinder which was shipped to Alexandria in pieces and built around the column as it lay upon the shore. When the great stone was thoroughly encased, the whole was rolled into the sea and thus towed to London. After the huge monoliths were landed, the modern engineers had great trouble to get them where they wanted them. The New York obelisk was rolled along upon iron balls running in iron grooves laid down for the purpose, while that of London was hauled over greased ways to the place where it now stands on the banks of the Thames.

The oldest temple of Egypt by five hundred years was unearthed here by the agents of the Egyptian Exploration Fund. This lies near the famous temple of Deir-el-Bahari, and in a valley which is a branch of that of the tombs of the kings. When I visited it to-day the excavators were at work, and the men in charge told me they had great hopes of making valuable discoveries. It was with the American representative of the Exploration Fund, that I went over the temple. I met him at the little one-story house which forms the laboratory and home of the foreign explorers, and had a chat with the other members as to the progress of the work. A number of specialists from Canada, England, and the United States, supported by the fund, are superintending the Egyptians, who do the hard labour. They have quite an army of men at work and have been successful. Of what they find one half goes to the museum at Cairo and the rest to the countries which subscribe to the fund in proportion to the amount of their subscriptions. The chief money from America has come from Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, so that our share of what is now being unearthed will go to the museums of those cities.

More famous than this ancient temple itself is its shrine of the cow goddess, Hathor, from which the noted statue was excavated by the Egyptian Exploration Fund and taken to Cairo. I saw the place whence it came and talked to the men who dug it out of the earth. The statue, which is life-sized, is a perfect likeness of a beautiful cow carved out of stone. It is reddish-brown in colour, with spots shaped like a four-leaved clover. Traces still remain of the gold that once covered the head, neck, and horns. The head is crowned with lotus flowers and lotus stalks hang down each side the neck almost to the ground. Beneath the head stands the dead king whom Hathor protects, while the living king, whom she nourishes, kneels beneath her form. That image was probably worshipped at the time the Israelites were working in the valley of the Nile, and it may have been after one like her that they modelled their calf of gold.

Near the site of this oldest temple are the ruins of the great temple of Hatshepsut, the Queen Elizabeth of Egypt, who ruled fifteen hundred years before Christ was born. Her epitaph says that “Egypt was made to labour with bowed head for her.” The temple is really a tomb-chapel in memory of the royalties buried there—her father, her two brothers, and herself. Hatshepsut took most of the space, however, and put the bodies of her male relatives into as small quarters as she could. She called her temple “most splendid of all” and covered its walls with engravings and paintings showing her principal acts. Hers is a long record of kingly deeds. She discarded the dress of a woman, wore the crown, attached an artificial beard to her chin, and let it be known that she liked to be addressed as His Majesty by her courtiers and subjects. The New Woman is apparently as old as civilization itself!

It was the work of Americans, again, that unearthed here the tomb of the first great pacifist, Pharaoh Akhnaton, who reigned from 1375 to 1358 B.C. When he came to the throne Egypt, in the height of her power, was mistress of the chief parts of the civilized world. But the country was then ridden by the priesthood of Amon with its hosts of gods and its degraded worship. According to the inscriptions which have been deciphered young Akhnaton defied the priests of Amon and declared his belief in one God, a “tender and merciful Father and Mother of all that He had made,” the “Lord of Love,” the “Comforter of them that weep.” It is thought that he was the Pharaoh in Egypt when the Children of Israel came into the land and that the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm in our Bible was written by him. He did not believe that warfare or military conquests were consistent with his creed and when revolts broke out in his Syrian provinces he refused to fight, though his soldiers tried desperately hard to hold the different people of his empire faithful to their king.

Breaking entirely with the priests, Akhnaton left Thebes and set up his capital at Aton, one hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile. He died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving only daughters to succeed him. They reëstablished the court at Thebes, the city of Aton was abandoned, and its temples and palaces were left to crumble and decay.

I had thought of the Pharaoh who forced the Israelites to make bricks without straw as living at Memphis, near where Cairo now stands. The truth is, he had a great city there, but his capital and favourite home was at Thebes, over four hundred and fifty miles farther up the Nile valley. Thebes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity. It covered almost as much ground as Paris does now and is said to have had more than a million people. The metropolis had walls so thick that chariots drawn by half-a-dozen horses abreast could easily pass as they galloped along them. It had one hundred gates, and temples and residences which were the wonder of the world. Some of the houses were five stories high, the skyscrapers of those days. The riches of Thebes were increased by the successful wars which the kings waged with other nations. The monarchs of that day had mighty armies of infantry and cavalry. Some of the kings had twenty thousand war chariots, and ancient writers say that there were scattered along the Nile from here to Memphis one hundred stone stables, each large enough to accommodate two hundred horses.

Avenues of sphinxes guarded the approach to the ancient Egyptian temple. Between the paws of each of the ram-headed sphinxes at the great temple at Karnak, Rameses II placed a statue of one of his predecessors.