Every time we visited an antiquity these guards tagged at our heels, watching us like hawks, and invariably they tried to hold us up for a piece of silver before we departed. There is a Masonic understanding among the natives that the tourist is to be fleeced. For instance, although the copper coins are in common use among the natives, and in the cheaper shops the prices are usually reckoned in milliemes, it is almost impossible for a traveller to get any of these copper coins because the natives want him to bestow his gratuities in piastres. A millieme is worth one-half cent, and then the millieme is further subdivided into fractional coins, some of which are about the size of the mustard seed and worth about as much as a share of mining stock.
Egyptian money is very easily understood by Americans. The piastre is the same as our five-cent piece or nickel. The silver five piastre piece resembles our quarter and has the same value. The ten piastre piece is the same as our half-dollar. The 100 piastre bill is worth five dollars. Inasmuch as many of the prices sound large and important when quoted in piastres, the dealers have learned to demand English pounds sterling or American dollars. That is, they name their first prices in sovereigns and dollars and then gradually work down to piastres. I saw a native trying to sell a scarab to a tourist. His first price was £7, equivalent to $35. After a half-hour of haggling he had cut it to 7 piastres, or 35 cents, and the deal was consummated.
The old city of Thebes was a huge and hustling metropolis, surrounded by a high wall of a hundred gates, with countless regiments of soldiers marching out to conquer distant lands and bring back slaves in little batches of 80,000 or so. This was along about 2000 B.C. The city began to lose some of its importance a few centuries before the Christian era and dwindled in size until twenty years ago it was a mere village of huts nestling in the shade of the great temples. Then the tourist travel set in very heavily, and to-day Luxor is a hustling city with large hotels and fancy shops and a general air of prosperity. The magnificent temple of Luxor is in the very heart of the new city. The rambling temple of Karnak is a short donkey ride to the north, and across the river, some three miles to the west, there are more temples and shattered statues and the wonderful tombs of the kings. In olden days there was a broad avenue leading north to Karnak and thence west to the valley in the desert, where the kings were buried, and this boulevard was guarded on either side, for the entire distance, by huge recumbent Sphinxes carved out of granite. Can you imagine a double row of gigantic figures crouched on each side of the street and about twenty feet apart all the way up Broadway to Central Park and then through the Park to Riverside Drive and up the drive to the distant suburbs? If so, you will understand to what an extent these old rulers "went in" for sphinxes. Labour cost nothing and time did not count for anything and if a king wished to build an avenue of sphinxes leading to his private temple or tomb all he had to do was to give the word.
As soon as a king mounted the throne he began making his funeral preparations, and ordered the entire staff of stone cutters to chisel out hieroglyphs explaining that he was great and good and just, and that he never took off his hat to anyone except the gods, and then not ordinary picayune gods, but only those of the very first magnitude. According to the hieroglyphs, every king that ruled in Egypt was as wise as Solomon, as brilliant in military strategy as Napoleon, and as hard on the evildoer as our own beloved T.R.
This unanimous outpouring of eulogy is largely explained by the fact that every memorial in honour of a ruler was erected and supervised by that ruler himself. It's a fact! Of all the countless temples and obelisks and godlike granite figures and festal tomb chambers remaining in Egypt to testify to the majesty and splendour of the ancient dynasties, every one was built under the personal supervision of the man who gets all of the glory out of the inscriptions. The succeeding generation never got up subscription lists to build monuments to statesmen or military commanders. The dutiful and loving son never ordered a memorial in honour of his illustrious father. He was too busy carving his own biography on the sandstone and depicting himself as pursuing the enemy or taking afternoon tea with haughty three-headed gods.
In old Egypt every king was his own press agent. These rulers could have written some great "personal recollections" for the magazines, because they remembered all the incidents that brought them to the centre of the stage with the calcium turned on, and wisely forgot all details calculated to injure their standing with posterity.
In old Egypt every king was his own press agent
You take Rameses the Great. He is regarded as perhaps the king pin of all the rulers during Egypt's long period of national splendour. Have you ever heard anyone say a word in criticism of Rameses' fiscal policy, his treatment of the rebate system, management of the Senate, or his social relations with the dark emissaries that came up from Nubia? No! Everyone has a good word for Rameses. The writers of ancient history extol him, and the guide books print his name in big black letters, and the travellers to Egypt gather about his glass-covered coffin in the Ghizeh Museum at Cairo and try to trace noble lineaments in the shrunken features. They sigh over his departure and look down at him mournfully, with their hats in their hands, as if they had lost him this spring, instead of 3164 years ago this spring. They say:—"Well, he certainly was a grand character and it's too bad we haven't got some rulers of his calibre nowadays."