Th crude bricks, dried simply in the sun, became disintegrated with time and fell into powder; the kiln dried bricks were carried off from the ruins of one building to be used in another. The few piers or fragments of wall which remain are confused and shapeless. A few blocks of stone, sometimes even a single chip of marble, is enough to enable us to tell the history of a building which has been long destroyed. Such a chip may be the only surviving fragment of the edifice to which it belonged, but it preserves the impression of the chisel which fashioned it, that is of the taste and individuality of the artist who held the chisel. We have nothing of the kind in the case of a brick. Bricks were almost always covered with a coat of stucco, so that nothing was required of them beyond that they should be of the right size and of a certain hardness. It is only by their inscriptions, when they have them, that the dates of these bricks can be determined; when they are without them they tell us nothing at all about the past. Sometimes a brick structure presents, from a distance, an imposing appearance, and the traveller approaches it thinking that he will soon draw all its secrets from it. But after carefully studying and measuring it he is forced to confess that he has failed. It has no trace of decoration, and it is the decoration of an ancient building which tells us its age, its character, and its purpose. Stone, even when greatly broken, allows mouldings to be traced, but bricks preserve nothing; they are as wanting in individual expression as the pebbles which go to make a shingly beech.
Even if it had come down to us in a less fragmentary condition, the military architecture of Egypt would have been far less interesting than that of Greece. The latter country is mountainous; the soil is cut up by valleys and rocky hills; the Greek towns, or, at least, their citadels, occupied the summits of rocky heights which varied greatly in profile and altitude. Hence the military architecture of the country showed great diversity in its combinations. In Egypt the configuration of the soil was not of a nature to provoke any efforts of invention or adaptation. All the cities were in the plain. Fortified posts were distinguished from one another only by the greater or less extent, height, and thickness of their walls. We shall, however, have to call attention to the remains of a few defensive works which, like those established to guard the defiles of the cataracts, were built upon sites different enough from those ordinarily presented by the Nile valley. In these cases we shall find that the Egyptian constructors knew how to adapt their military buildings to the special requirements of the ground.
Egyptian cities seem always to have been surrounded by a fortified enceinte; in some cases the remains of such fortifications have been found, in others history tells us that they existed. At Thebes, for instance, no traces have, so far as we know, been discovered of any wall. Homer's epithet of hundred-gated (ἑκατόμπυλος) may be put on one side as evidence, because the Greek poet did not know Egypt. He described the great metropolis of the Empire of the South as he imagined it to be. The Homeric epithet is capable also of another explanation, an explanation which did not escape Diodorus,[34] it may have referred, not to the gates of the city, but to the pylons of the temples, and should in that case be translated as "Thebes of the hundred pylons" instead of hundred gates. We have better evidence as to the existence of fortifications about the town in the descriptions left to us by the ancient historians of the siege of Ptolemy Physcon: the city could not have resisted for several years if it had been an open town. It was the same with Memphis. On more than one occasion, during the Pharaonic period as well as after the Persian conquest, it played the part of a fortress of the first class. It was the key of middle Egypt. It even had a kind of citadel which included almost a third of the city and was called the white wall (λευκὸν τεῖχος).[35] This name was given, as the scholiast to Thucydides informs us, "because its walls were of white stone, while those of the city itself were of red brick." The exactness of this statement may be doubted. The Egyptians made their defensive walls of a thickness which could only be attained in brick. It seems likely therefore that these walls consisted of a brick core covered with white stone. An examination of the remains of Heliopolis suggested to the authors of the Description de l'Égypte that the walls of that city also were cased with dressed stone. They found, even upon the highest part of the walls, pieces of limestone for which they could account in no other way.
Nowhere else is there anything to be discovered beyond the remains of brick walls, which have always been laid out in the form of a parallelogram.[36] These walls are sometimes between sixty and seventy feet thick.[37] In some cases their position is only to be traced by a gentle swelling in the soil; at Sais, however, they seem to have preserved a height of fifty-seven feet in some parts.[38] No signs of towers or bastions are ever found. At Heliopolis there were gates at certain distances with stone jambs covered with inscriptions.[39] The best preserved of all these enceintes is that of the ancient city of Nekheb, the Eilithyia of the Greeks, in the valley of El-Kab. The rectangle is 595 yards long by 516 wide; the walls are 36 feet-thick.[40] About a quarter of the whole enceinte has been destroyed for the purposes of agriculture; the part which remains contains four large gates, which are not placed in the middle of the faces upon which they open. In all the paintings representing sieges these walls are shown with round-topped battlements, which were easily constructed in brick.
The only fort, properly speaking, which has been discovered in Egypt, appears to be the ruin known as Chounet-es-Zezib at Abydos.[41] This is a rectangular court inclosed by a double wall, and it still exists in a fair state of preservation, to the west of the northern necropolis (Fig. [28]). After examining many possible hypotheses, Mariette came to the conclusion that this was a military post intended to watch over the safety of the necropolis, and to keep an eye upon the caravans arriving from the desert. Robber tribes might otherwise be tempted to make use of any moment of confusion for the pillage of the temple. There were curious arrangements for the purpose of guarding against a coup-de-main. Within the outer wall, which is provided with small gateways, there is a covered way extending round the whole fort, and commanded by the inner wall. Before the inner court could be reached, an enemy had to traverse a narrow and crooked passage in the thickness of the wall, which was well calculated to secure the necessary time for a moment of preparation in case of surprise (Fig. [29]).
Fig. 28.—Military post at Abydos; perspective from the plans, etc., of Mariette.
Fig. 29.—Military post. Plan of the entrances; from Mariette.
The most curious relic of the military engineering of the Egyptians is to be found in Nubia. Thirty-seven miles south-ward of the cataracts of Wadi-Halfah the Nile has worn a channel through a long chain of granite hills which run across the valley from east to west. On each side of the river-bed these hills rise to some height and across its torrent there are a few detached rocks, which once formed a natural dam, but between which the water now rushes impetuously. Navigation is only possible among these rapids during the inundation. This point in the river's course was therefore well fitted to be the gate of Egypt and to be fortified against the incursions of the southern tribes. During the first Theban Empire, the Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty drew the national frontier at this point, and resolved to establish themselves there in force. The Third Ousourtesen seems to have built the two fortresses of which substantial remains exist even now. Each fortress contained a temple and numerous houses. Lepsius gives the name of Kummeh to that on the right bank and reserves the name Semneh, which has usually been applied to the whole group, to the building on the left bank only.