“The view from Cheops has been often described. I can not say that it increased my impression of the majesty and grandeur of the pyramid, for that was already complete. My eyes wandered off from the courses of granite, broadening away below my feet, to contemplate the glorious green of the Nile-plain, barred with palm-trees and divided by the gleaming flood of the ancient river; the minarets of Cairo; the purple walls of the far Arabian mountains; the pyramid groups of Sakkara and Dashoor, overlooking disinterred Memphis in the south; and the arid yellow waves of the Libyan desert, which rolled unbroken to the western sky. The clear, open heaven above, which seemed to radiate light from its entire concave, clasped in its embrace and harmonized the different features of this wonderful landscape. There was too much warmth and brilliance for desolation. Everything was alive and real; the pyramids were not ruins, and the dead Pharaohs, the worshipers of Athor and Apis, did not once enter my mind.
“My wild attendants did not long allow me to enjoy the view quietly. To escape from their importunities for backsheesh I gave them two piasters in copper coin, which instantly turned their flatteries into the most bitter complaints. It was insulting to give so little, and they preferred having none; if I would not give a dollar, I might take the money back. I took it without more ado, and put it into my pocket. This rather surprised them, and first one, and then another, came to me and begged to have it again, on his own private account. I threw the coins high into the air, and as they clattered down on the stones, there ensued such a scramble as would have sent any but Arabs over the edge of the pyramid. We then commenced the descent, two seizing my hands as before, and dragging me headlong after them. We went straight down the side, sliding and leaping from stone to stone without stopping to take breath, and reached the base in five or six minutes. I was so excited from the previous aggression of the Arabs, that I neither felt fatigue nor giddiness on the way up and down, and was not aware how violent had been my exertions. But when I touched the level sand, all my strength vanished in an instant. A black mist came over my eyes, and I sank down helpless and nearly insensible. I was scarcely able to speak, and it was an hour before I could sit upright on my donkey. I felt the pyramid in all my bones, and for two or three days afterward moved my joints with as much difficulty as a rheumatic patient.
“In returning, in about an hour and a half we reached the ruined pyramids of Abousir, where our path turned southward into the desert. After seeing Cheops and Cephrenes, these pyramids are only interesting on account of their dilapidated state and the peculiarity of their forms, some of their sides taking a more obtuse angle at half their hight. They are buried deep in the sand, which has so drifted toward the plain, that from the broad hollow lying between them and the group of Sakkara, more than a mile distant, every sign of vegetation is shut out. Vast, sloping causeways of masonry lead up to two of them, and a large mound, occupying the space between, suggests the idea that a temple formerly stood there. The whole of the desert promontory, which seemed to have been gradually blown out on the plain, from the hills in the rear, exhibits traces here and there of ruins beneath the surface. My friend and I, as we walked over the hot sand, before our panting donkeys, came instinctively to the same conclusion, that a large city must have once occupied the space between, and to the southward of the two groups of pyramids. It is not often that amateur antiquarians find such sudden and triumphant confirmation of their conjectures, as we did.
“On the way, Achmet had told us of a Frenchman who had been all summer digging in the sand, near Sakkara. After we had crawled into the subterranean dépôt of mummied ibises, and nearly choked ourselves with dust in trying to find a pot not broken open; and after one of our donkeymen went into a human mummy pit and brought out the feet and legs of some withered old Egyptian, we saw before us the residence of this Frenchman; a mud hut on a high sand-bank. It was an unfortunate building, for nearly all the front wall had tumbled down, revealing the contents of his kitchen. One or two Arabs loitered about, but a large number were employed at the end of a long trench which extended to the hills. Before reaching the house a number of deep pits barred our path, and the loose sand, stirred by our feet, slid back into the bottom, as if eager to hide the wonders they disclosed. Pavements, fresh as when first laid; basement-walls of white marble, steps, doorways, pedestals and fragments of pillars glittered in the sun, which, after the lapse of more than two thousand years, beheld them again. I slid down the side of the pit and walked in the streets of Memphis. The pavement of bitumen, which once covered the stone blocks, apparently to protect them and deaden the noise of horses and chariots, was entire in many places. Here a marble sphinx sat at the base of a temple, and stared abstractedly before her; there a sculptured cornice, with heavy moldings, leaned against the walls of the chamber into which it had fallen; and over all were scattered fragments of glazed and painted tiles and sculptured alabaster. The principal street was narrow, and was apparently occupied by private dwellings, but at its extremity were the basement-walls of a spacious edifice. All the pits opened on pavements and walls, so fresh and cleanly cut, that they seemed rather the foundations of a new city, laid yesterday, than the remains of one of the oldest capitals of the world.
“We approached the workmen, where we met the discoverer of Memphis, Mr. Auguste Mariette. On finding we were not Englishmen, (of whose visits he appeared to be rather shy,) he became very courteous and communicative. He apologized for the little he had to show us, since on account of the vandalism of the Arabs, he was obliged to cover up all his discoveries, after making his drawings and measurements. The Egyptian authorities are worse than apathetic, for they would not hesitate to burn the sphinxes for lime, and build barracks for filthy soldiers with the marble blocks. Besides this, the French influence at Cairo was then entirely overshadowed by that of England, and although M. Mariette was supported in his labors by the French academy, and a subscription headed by Louis Napoleon’s name, he was forced to be content with the simple permission to dig out these remarkable ruins and describe them. He could neither protect them nor remove the portable sculptures and inscriptions, and therefore preferred giving them again into the safe keeping of the sand. Here they will be secure from injury, until some more fortunate period, when, possibly, the lost Memphis may be entirely given to the world, as fresh as Pompeii, and far more grand and imposing.
“I asked M. Mariette what first induced him to dig for Memphis in that spot, since antiquarians had fixed upon the mounds near Mitrahenny (a village in the plain below, and about four miles distant,) as the former site of the city. He said that the tenor of an inscription which he found on one of the blocks quarried out of these mounds, induced him to believe that the principal part of the city lay to the westward, and therefore he commenced excavating in the nearest sand-hill in that direction. After sinking pits in various places he struck on an avenue of sphinxes, the clue to all his after discoveries. Following this, he came upon the remains of a temple, (probably the Serapeum, or temple of Serapis, mentioned by Strabo,) and afterward upon streets, colonnades, public and private edifices, and all other signs of a great city. The number of sphinxes alone, buried under these high sand-drifts, amounted to two thousand, and he had frequently uncovered twenty or thirty in a day. He estimated the entire number of statues, inscriptions and reliefs, at between four and five thousand. The most remarkable discovery was that of eight colossal statues, which were evidently the product of Grecian art. During thirteen months of assiduous labor, with but one assistant, he had made drawings of all these objects and forwarded them to Paris. In order to be near at hand, he had built an Arab house of unburnt bricks, the walls of which had just tumbled down for the third time. His workmen were then engaged in clearing away the sand from the dwelling of some old Memphian, and he intended spreading his roof over the massive walls, and making his residence in the exhumed city. The man’s appearance showed what he had undergone, and gave me an idea of the extraordinary zeal and patience required to make a successful antiquarian. His face was as brown as an Arab’s, his eyes severely inflamed, and his hands as rough as a bricklayer’s. His manner with the native workmen was admirable, and they labored with a hearty good-will which almost supplied the want of the needful implements. All they had were straw baskets, which they filled with a sort of rude shovel, and then handed up to be carried off on the heads of others.
“Strabo states that Memphis had a circumference of seventeen miles, and therefore both M. Mariette and the antiquarians are right. The mounds of Mitrahenny probably mark the eastern portion of the city, while its western limit extended beyond the pyramids of Sakkara, and included in its suburbs those of Abousir and Dashoor. The space explored by M. Mariette is about a mile and a half in length, and somewhat more than half a mile in breadth. He was then continuing his excavations westward, and had almost reached the first ridge of the Libyan hills, without finding the termination of the ruins. The magnitude of his discovery will be best known when his drawings and descriptions are given to the world. A few months after my visit, his labors were further rewarded by finding thirteen colossal sarcophagi of black marble, and he has recently added to his renown by discovering an entrance to the Sphinx. Yet at that time, the exhumation of the lost Memphis, second only in importance to that of Nineveh, was unknown in Europe, except to a few sarans in Paris, and the first intimation which some of my friends in Cairo and Alexandria had of it, was my own account of my visit, in the newspapers they received from America. But M. Mariette is a young man, and will yet see his name inscribed beside those of Burckhardt, Belzoni and Layard.
“We had still a long ride before us, and I took leave of Memphis and its discoverer, promising to revisit him on my return from Khartoum. As we passed the brick pyramid of Sakkara, which is built in four terraces of equal hight, the dark, grateful green of the palms and harvest-fields of the Nile appeared between two sand-hills, a genuine balm to our heated eyes. We rode through groves of the fragrant mimosa to a broad dike, the windings of which we were obliged to follow across the plain, as the soil was still wet and adhesive. It was too late to visit the beautiful pyramids of Dashoor, the first of which is more than three hundred feet in hight, and from a distance has almost as grand an effect as those of Gizeh. Our tired donkeys lagged slowly along to the palm-groves of Mitrahenny, where we saw mounds of earth, a few blocks of red granite and a colossal statue of Remeses II., (Sesostris,) which until now were supposed to be the only remains of Memphis. The statue lies on its face in a hole filled with water. The countenance is said to be very beautiful, but I could only see the top of Sesostris’s back, which bore a faint resemblance to a crocodile. Through fields of cotton in pod and beans in blossom, we rode to the Nile, dismissed our donkeys and their attendants, and lay down on some bundles of cornstalks to wait the arrival of our boat. But there had been a south wind all day, and we had ridden much faster than our men could tow. We sat till long after sunset before the stars and stripes, floating from the mizzen of the Cleopatra, turned the corner below Bedrasheyn. When, at last, we sat at our cabin-table, weary and hungry, we were ready to confess that the works of art produced by our cook, were more marvelous and interesting than Memphis and the pyramids.”
THE TOMBS AT SAKKARA.
The prediction of Taylor, quoted above, “that M. Mariette, though a young man, would yet see his name inscribed beside those of Burckhardt, Belzoni and Layard,” is in a fair way for fulfillment; for the finding of the wonderful tombs of Sakkara, and their magnificent sarcophagi, is, perhaps, the greatest discovery which has been made relative to the antiquities of Egypt, since the days of Belzoni himself. The tomb, a view of the entrance to which is given in the cut below, is situated in the desert near Sakkara, to the north-west of and near the pyramid, about four or five hours’ ride from Cairo, by way of Toura, where the Nile must be crossed. Monsieur Mariette, to whose knowledge and research this discovery is due, is employed by the French government. A passage in Strabo having led him to infer that a line of sphinxes led to the Serapeum, he commenced his search, under a firman from the viceroy of Egypt, about two years and a half since, in the moving sand-hills of Sakkara. He discovered the line of sphinxes, one of which had been found in 1832, by Signor Marucchi; but they not being in a straight direction, and turning abruptly at the entrance of the Serapeum, it was with difficulty they were traced. They were one hundred and forty in number, and sixteen feet apart. The whole avenue proved eleven hundred and twenty feet in length. At the termination were eleven Greek statues of Homer, Pindar, Solon, Lycurgus, Aristotle, and other poets, philosophers, and lawgivers of Greece. One sphinx, having the name of Apis inscribed upon it, was met with under a depth of sixty or seventy feet of sand: stone peacocks nine feet high, and colossal lions, were also found here. The tomb of Apis was now sought for, and discovered, after a whole year of labor, on the twelfth of November, 1851. From the avenue a mastaba, or bench, and passage two hundred and ninety feet long, leads to a pylon, the entrance of the great temple. The tomb runs from south to north, and the great gallery from east to west. This is about five hundred and twenty yards in length, and from four to five yards wide. The chambers are not formed throughout the whole length of the gallery, and some passages are altogether without them. The hieroglyphic inscriptions on the tomb are, in one instance, if not more, unfinished; and the doors erected at the entrance are too small to have allowed the passage of the sarcophagi, and must, therefore, have been built after the latter were introduced. The chambers are not opposite each other, but arranged alternately, in the usual manner of Egyptian places of sepulture. The appearance of this long gallery, when lighted up by numerous candles, receding in dim perspective into gloom—the massive sarcophagi, of polished granite, each in its chamber, looking tranquillity, is an imposing sight, as may be seen in the next following cut. They are of enormous size and weight: one, and that not the largest, has been estimated to weigh, including the lid, upward of sixty tuns. To have moved these and lowered them into their receptacles, which are some six feet below the floor of the gallery, in so confined a space, must have required a considerable amount of mechanical skill and power. In the walls are holes, apparently for the introduction of the ends of beams. The chambers may, however, have been filled with sand, the sarcophagus pushed in and gradually lowered by abstracting the sand. The under side of one of the sarcophagi is rounded, and it was kept steady by wooden blocks on each side. When these are removed it can be rocked by the hand. A groove, about two feet broad and two or three inches in depth, runs down the middle of the gallery. A wooden capstan was found near the tombs, and is supposed to have been used for moving the stones. The entrance is inclined. The tombs are excavated in a soft friable limestone, containing numerous small veins of gypsum, about half an inch in thickness. To prevent the roof from falling, it has been coated with flagstones, cemented to it by a gypseous cement; but, either by the hand of violence, or that of time, these have been detached, and have fallen to the ground, encumbering, and partially choking the galleries and rooms. The mortar, however, still adheres in several places to the walls, and projects where the joints of the stones have been. In one chamber is a self-sustained stone arch; another proof, if any were now necessary, that its construction was known to the ancients. This chamber contains a small sarcophagus, in which, probably, were the bones of a young bull. The bones of bulls have been found in several sarcophagi; but every one had been opened, and some heaped with stones; an eastern mark of contempt, probably the work of the Persians. At the entrance were numerous ex voto offerings of inscribed tablets inserted in small recesses in the walls. There are also inscriptions, in the Demotic character, on the outer doorway. In some chambers are large recesses to the right and left of the tomb, which in one instance contained a large granite tablet with hieroglyphics. The number of sarcophagi already discovered is twenty-five.