The remoteness of caves and grottoes from the busy haunts of life, their eternal silence and their nightly gloom, have ever pointed them out as fit resting-places for the dead. From the earliest times they have been used as sepulchral vaults, and where nature neglected to hollow out the rock, it has often been excavated for this purpose by the hand of man.
Thus the Pharaohs of Egypt rested not in temples and mausoleums reared in the heart of cities, but they chose the desert-ravine for their sepulchre, and hid their tombs in deep excavations in the earth.
A more impressive scene can hardly be imagined than that which is afforded by these splendid memorials. Of all such monuments which still mark the site of ancient Thebes, perhaps none are more striking to the traveller than the royal tombs—Biban-el-Moluk—which the pride of monarchs, whose very name is now a mystery, excavated four thousand years ago in the bosom of the Libyan mountains.
‘The next morning at daybreak,’ says Warburton,[[29]] ‘we started for the Tombs of the Kings. I was mounted on a fine horse, belonging to the sheikh of the village, and the cool air of the morning, the rich prospect before us, and the cloudless sky, all conspired to impart life and pleasure to my relaxed and languid frame. I had been for a month almost confined to my pallet by illness, and now, mounted on a gallant barb, sweeping across the desert, with the mountain breezes breathing round me, I felt a glow of spirits and exhilaration of mind and body to which I had been long a stranger. For a couple of hours we continued along the plain, which was partially covered with wavy corn, but flecked widely here and there with desert tracts. Then we entered the gloomy mountain gorges, through which the Theban monarchs passed to their tombs. Our path lay through a narrow defile, between precipitous cliffs of rubble and calcareous strata, and some large boulders of coarse conglomerate lay strewn along this desolate valley, in which no living thing of earth or air ever met our view. The plains below may have been, perhaps, once swarming with life and covered with palaces; but the gloomy defile we were now traversing must have ever been as they now are, lonely, lifeless, desolate—a fit avenue to the tombs for which we were bound.
‘After five or six miles’ travel, our guide stopped at the base of one of the precipices, and, laying his long spear against the rock, proceeded to light his torches. There was no entrance apparent at the distance of a few yards, nor was this great tomb betrayed to the outer world by any visible aperture, until discovered by Belzoni. This extraordinary man seems to have been one of the few who have hit off in life the lot for which Nature destined them. His sepulchral instincts might have been matter of envy to the ghouls; with such unerring certainty did he guess at the place containing the embalmed corpses most worthy of his body-snatching energies.
‘We descended by a steep path into this tomb, through a doorway covered with hieroglyphics, and entered a corridor that ran some hundred yards into the mountain. It was about twenty feet square, and painted throughout most elaborately in the manner of Raphael’s Loggia at the Vatican, with little inferiority of skill or colouring. The doorways were richly ornamented with figures of a larger size, and over each was the winged globe or a huge scarabæus. In allusion, probably, to the wanderings of the freed spirit, almost all the larger emblems on these walls wore wings, however incompatible with their usual vocations; boats, globes, fishes, and suns, all were winged. On one of the corridors there is an allegory of the progress of the sun through the hours, painted with great detail; the god of day sits in a boat (in compliment to the Nile he lays aside his chariot here), and steers through the hours of the day and night, each of the latter being distinguished by a star. The Nile in this, as in all other circumstances of Egyptian life, figures as the most important element; even the blessed souls for its sake assume the form of fishes, and swim about with angelic fins in this River of Life. One gorgeous passage makes way into another more gorgeous still, until you arrive at a steep descent. At the base of this, perhaps 400 feet from daylight, a doorway opens into a vaulted hall of noble proportions, whose gloom considerably increases its apparent size. Here the body of Osirei, father of Rameses the Second, was laid about 3,200 years ago, in the beautiful alabaster sarcophagus which Belzoni drew from hence, the reward of his enterprise. Its poor occupant, who had taken such pains to hide himself, was “undone” for the amusement of a London conversazione.
‘There are numerous other tombs, all full of interest; but as the reader who is interested in such things will consult higher authorities than mine, I shall only add that the whole circumstance of ancient Egyptian life, with all its vicissitudes, may be read in pictures out of these extraordinary tombs, from the birth, through all the joys and sorrows of life, to the death, the lamentations over the corpse, the embalmer’s operations, and finally the judgment and the immortality of the soul. In one instance the Judge is measuring all men’s good actions in a balance against a feather from an angel’s wing; in another, a great serpent is being bound head and foot, and cast into a pit; and there are many other proofs, equally convincing, of the knowledge that this mysterious people possessed of a future life and judgment.’
But not the kings alone; the illustrious, the wealthy, the whole nation reposed in rock-tombs magnificently sculptured or rudely excavated, according to the means of the defunct. Behind the ruins of the stately temples of ancient Thebes, which extend from Gourna to Medinet Abou, and fill the narrow strip of desert between the inundated fields and the foot of the mountains, lies an interminable necropolis, whose graves, like the cells of a bee-hive, one close to the other, are hewn in the rocky ground of the plain, or in the slopes of the neighbouring hills.
These grottoes, originally destined for sarcophagi and mummies, are now occupied by fellahs and their herds, as they were in the fifth and sixth century by pious anchorites; and, being roomy and situated at a considerable height above the plain, may be considered as the most healthy dwellings of the country.
The oldest graves are hewn in the mountains; and at a later period, when the rocky plain at their foot alone gave room for these excavations, it gradually became invaded by the dead. In the more splendid of these mausoleums, high gates and walls inclosed deep courtyards, scooped out of the rock, and from these long corridors led to subterranean halls, profusely decorated with sculptures and paintings.