The fine granite rams which bear the name of Amenophis III., (eighteenth dynasty), and one of which at present adorns the Berlin museum, were transported thither at a later period. They came, probably, from Soleb. Ninety-two fellahin spent three sultry days in dragging down to the Nile on rollers the “fat sheep” which weighed one hundred and fifty hundred weight, and was to be transported to the Spree.
Lepsius advised the purchase for the Berlin museum of the gold and silver ornaments discovered in 1834, by the Italian Romali. They were found in a pyramid at Meroë which had a Roman vaulted antechamber. This advice Lepsius gave after he recognized that they had probably belonged to a specially powerful and warlike Ethiopian queen, whose image has been preserved at El-Naga in rich attire, and with pointed finger nails, nearly an inch long. At present the ornaments mentioned form one of the embellishments of the Egyptian collection at Berlin.
An entertaining anecdote is connected with the so-called Ferlini discovery at Meroë, and with the recollection of the sojourn of the expedition and their labors there. The natives, naturally, could only regard as treasure-seekers the strange men who busied themselves so indefatigably among the old monuments, who applied measuring line and rule to them, covered them with wet paper, poured plaster over them, gazed at them, note book and pen in hand, and penetrated into their innermost recesses.
When one of our colleagues afterwards visited this neighborhood, an old sheik told him that he knew well that the King of the Germans had only acquired the resources to vanquish the French, through the treasures which the Howadji Lepsius had found at Meroë and sent back to his native land.
Lepsius’ sojourn in Ethiopia led him to the conviction, only confirmed by all subsequent investigations, that there could have been no ancient and original Ethiopian civilization and culture. In respect to this, all the reports of the ancients which do not rest upon a pure misunderstanding refer only to Egyptian culture and art, which, during the dominion of the Hyksos, had taken refuge in Ethiopia. The outbreak of the Egyptian power from Ethiopia at the founding of the New Egyptian Kingdom, and its advance even far into Asia, was transferred from the Ethiopian country to the Ethiopian people, first in the Asiatic and afterwards in the Greek traditions respecting this event; for no knowledge had penetrated to the northern peoples of a still older Egyptian Kingdom, and its proud but peaceful prime.
During the long journey which led the expedition once more northward, and towards home, and which was now uninterrupted by side excursions, a number of short inscriptions on the rock were discovered at Semneh[57] and Kummeh. These yielded important historical information, for they proved that the solicitude of Amenemha III. (the Moeris of the Greeks, twelfth dynasty), for the regulation of the inundation of the Nile had extended to this point; that the Sebekhotep must be added, as the thirteenth dynasty, to the twelfth, and that four thousand years ago the river rose higher by twenty-four feet than it does in our day.
The principal purpose of the expedition, the one which Lepsius ever kept in view, and which decided the choice of the monuments to be copied, was historical. When he could believe that he had achieved everything possible in pursuance of this object, he felt that he might consider himself satisfied. If we remember this we can easily understand how he was almost wearied by the examination of those temples belonging to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods which he inspected cursorily before coming to Thebes; these were Philae, Kom Ombos, Edfu, Esneh, Erment. We can see especially that the inexhaustible but more lately built temple of Edfu could detain him but for a disproportionately short time. But in Thebes, which he reached more than two years after leaving Europe, he found once more the old delight in, and impulse for, research, and he could therefore write, in a letter dated November twenty-fourth, 1844; “Here, where the Homeric figures of the mighty Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties meet me in all their splendor and magnificence, I feel once more as fresh as at the beginning of the journey.” And one must credit his assurance, and profoundly admire the man’s elasticity and enthusiasm for his task, when one surveys the great treasure of inscriptions which he and his assistants amassed there, and the wealth of admirable surveys, maps, sketches, and pictures, which the expedition found time to execute. Five and a half months he devoted to Thebes, and did not leave off until there, too, he had attained his purpose, although he was already on his homeward way and surrounded by unspeakable difficulties and privations, while before him, on the contrary, beckoned with outstretched hands everything to which his heart clung, and which could bring him peace, recreation, honor and spiritual refreshment.
His friend Abeken had been forced to leave him at Philae, and although there was no lack of occasional European visitors in Thebes, yet it would have been natural if his taste for travel had by this time abated. But, on the contrary, his passion for research seems just then to have gained a new impetus, and the trip which he undertook from Thebes to the Peninsula of Sinai, after indicating the course to be followed during his absence by the members of the expedition in their various labors, was begun and carried through as though he had just quitted his native land, with an immense surplus stock of energy and enthusiasm.
Accompanied only by the younger Weidenbach and the necessary servants, he chose to proceed from Keneh to the Red Sea, not by the usual caravan route, but by the road through the midst of the mountains to Gebel-es-Set. This promised to save time, and he hoped to find on it something interesting and new.
In the Wadi Hammamat the Arabs refused to follow him upon this route, which was destitute of water, little known, and not free from danger. But he succeeded in inducing them to consent, and came within a hair’s-breadth of losing his life when, in his search for the porphyry quarries, he went astray on Gebel Dukhan, the Mons porphyrites of the ancients. But he was not the man to resign easily a scientific prize when he beheld it before him, and therefore we see him, though scarcely escaped from destruction, begin his search anew, and once more attain his aim.