“The tomb of Memnon, as it was called by the Romans, is the most elegant of all, in its proportions, and is as symmetrical as a Grecian temple. On the walls of the entrance are several inscriptions of Greek tourists, who visited it in the era of the Ptolemies, and spent their time in carving their names, like Americans nowadays. The huge granite sarcophagus in which the monarch’s mummy was deposited, is broken, as are those of the other tombs, with a single exception. This is the tomb of Osirei I., the grandfather of Sesostris, and the oldest in the valley. I visited it by crawling through a hole barely large enough to admit my body, after which I slid on my back down a passage nearly choked with sand, to another hole, opening into the burial chamber. Here no impious hand had defaced the walls, but the figures were as perfect and the coloring as brilliant as when first executed. In the center stood an immense sarcophagus, of a single block of red granite, and the massive lid, which had been thrown off, lay beside it. The dust in the bottom gave out that peculiar mummy odor perceptible in all the tombs, and in fact long after one has left them, for the clothes become saturated with it. The guide, delighted with having dragged me into that chamber, buried deep in the dumb heart of the mountain, said not a word, and from the awful stillness of the place and the phantasmagoric gleam of the wonderful figures on the walls, I could have imagined myself a neophyte, on the threshold of the Osirian mysteries. We then rode to the western valley, a still deeper and wider glen, containing tombs of the kings of the foreign dynasty of Atin-Re. We entered the two principal ones, but found the paintings rude and insignificant. There are many lateral passages and chambers, and in some places deep pits, along the edge of which we were obliged to crawl. In the last tomb a very long and steep staircase descends into the rock. As we were groping after the guide, I called to my friend to take care, as there was but a single step, after making a slip. The words were scarcely out of my mouth before I felt a tremendous thump, followed by a number of smaller ones, and found myself sitting in a heap of sand, at the bottom, some twenty or thirty feet below. Fortunately, I came off with but a few slight bruises.
THE TWO COLOSSI.
“Returning to the temple of Goorneh, we took a path over the plain, through fields of wheat, lupines and lentils, to the two colossi, which we had already seen from a distance. These immense sitting figures, fifty-three feet above the plain, which has buried their pedestals, overlook the site of vanished Thebes and assert the grandeur of which they and Karnak are the most striking remains. They were erected by Amunoph III., and though the faces are totally disfigured, the full, round, beautiful proportions of the colossal arms, shoulders and thighs do not belie the marvelous sweetness of the features which we still see in his tomb. Except the head of Antinous, I know of no ancient portrait so beautiful as Amunoph. The long and luxuriant hair, flowing in a hundred ringlets, the soft grace of the forehead, the mild serenity of the eye, the fine thin lines of the nostrils, and the feminine tenderness of the full lips, triumph over the cramped rigidity of Egyptian sculpture, and charm you with the lightness and harmony of Greek art. In looking on that head, I can not help thinking that the subject overpowered the artist, and led him to the threshold of a truer art. Amunoph, or Memnon, was a poet in soul, and it was meet that his statue should salute the rising sun with a sound like that of a harp-string. Modern research has wholly annihilated this beautiful fable. Memnon now sounds at all hours of the day, and at the command of all travelers who will pay an Arab five piasters to climb up into his lap. We engaged one, who threw off his garments, hooked his fingers and toes into the cracks of the polished granite, and soon hailed us with ‘salaam’ from the knee of the statue. There is a certain stone on Memnon’s lap, which, when sharply struck, gives out a clear, metallic ring. Behind it is a small square aperture, invisible from below, where one of the priests no doubt stationed himself to perform the daily miracle. Our Arab rapped on the arms and body of the statue, which had the usual dead sound of stone, and rendered the musical ring of the sun-smitten block the more striking.” And Thompson tells us, that while he and his associates sat before it on their donkeys, they saw “a boy of fifteen, with a solitary rag round his waist, scrambling up the side of the statue, and presently he was completely hidden in its lap, just where the sly priest used to hide himself over night. Then striking with a hammer the hollow, sonorous stone, it emitted a sharp, clear sound, like the striking of brass,” though it was “not sunrise, but the middle of a scorching afternoon.” “An avenue of sphinxes,” continues Taylor, “once led from these colossi to a grand temple, the foundations of which we found about a quarter of a mile distant. On the way are the fragments of two other colossi, one of black granite. The enormous substructions of the temple and the pedestals of its columns, have been sufficiently excavated to show what a superb edifice has been lost to the world. A crowd of troublesome Arabs, thrusting upon our attention newly baked cinerary urns, newly roasted antique wheat, and images of all kinds fresh from the maker’s hand, disturbed our quiet examination of the ruins, and in order to escape their importunities, we rode to the Memnonium. This edifice, the temple-palace of Remeses the Great, is supposed to be the Memnonium, described by Strabo. It is built on a gentle rise of land at the foot of the mountain, and looks eastward to the Nile and Luxor. The grand stone pylon which stands at the entrance of its former avenue of sphinxes, has been half leveled by the fury of the Persian conquerors; and the colossal granite statue of Remeses, in the first court of the temple, now lies in enormous fragments around its pedestal. Mere dimensions give no idea of this immense mass, the weight of which, when entire, was nearly nine hundred tuns. How poor and trifling appear the modern statues which we call colossal, when measured with this, one of whose toes is a yard in length; and how futile the appliances of modern art, when directed to its transportation for a distance of one hundred and fifty miles! The architrave at each end of the court was upheld by four caryatides, thirty feet in hight. Though much defaced, they are still standing, but are dwarfed by the mighty limbs of Remeses. It is difficult to account for the means by which the colossus was broken. There are no marks of any instruments which could have forced such a mass asunder, and the only plausible conjecture I have heard is, that the stone must have been subjected to an intense heat and afterward to the action of water. The statue, in its sitting position, must have been nearly sixty feet in hight, and is the largest in the world, though not so high as the rock-hewn monoliths of Aboo-Simbel. The Turks and Arabs have cut several mill-stones out of its head, without any apparent diminution of its size. The Memnonium differs from the other temples of Egypt in being almost faultless in its symmetry, even when measured by the strictest rules of art. I know of nothing so exquisite as the central colonnade of its grand hall—a double row of pillars, forty-five feet in hight and twenty-three in circumference, crowned with capitals resembling the bell-shaped blossoms of the lotus. One must see them to comprehend how this simple form, whose expression is all sweetness and tenderness in the flower, softens and beautifies the solid majesty of the shaft. In spite of their colossal proportions, there is nothing massive or heavy in their aspect. The cup of the capital curves gently outward from the abacus on which the architrave rests, and seems the natural blossom of the columnar stem. On either side of this perfect colonnade are four rows of Osiride pillars, of smaller size, yet the variety of their form and proportions only enhances the harmony of the whole. This is one of those enigmas in architecture which puzzle one on his first acquaintance with Egyptian temples, and which he is often forced blindly to accept as new laws of art, because his feeling tells him they are true, and his reason can not satisfactorily demonstrate that they are false.
“We waited till the yellow rays of sunset fell on the capitals of the Memnonium, and they seemed, like the lotus flowers, to exhale a vapory light, before we rode home. All night we wandered in dreams through kingly vaults, with starry ceilings and illuminated walls; but on looking out of our windows at dawn, we saw the red saddle-cloths of our horses against the dark background of the palm grove, as they came down to the boat. No second nap was possible, after such a sight, and many minutes had not elapsed before we were tasting the cool morning air in the delight of a race up and down the shore. Our old guide, however, was on his donkey betimes, and called us off to our duty. We passed Goorneh, and ascended the eastern face of the mountain to the tombs of the priests and private citizens of Thebes. For miles along the mountain side, one sees nothing but heaps of sand and rubbish, with here and there an Arab hut, built against the face of a tomb, whose chambers serve as pigeon-houses and stalls for asses. The earth is filled with fragments of mummies, and the bandages in which they were wrapped; for even the sanctity of death itself, is here neither respected by the Arabs nor the Europeans whom they imitate. The first tomb we entered almost cured us of the desire to visit another. It was that called the Assasseef, built by a wealthy priest, and it is the largest in Thebes. Its outer court measures one hundred and three by seventy-six feet, and its passages extend between eight and nine hundred feet into the mountain. We groped our way between walls as black as ink, through long, labyrinthine suites of chambers, breathing a deathlike and oppressive odor. The stairways seemed to lead into the bowels of the earth, and on either hand yawned pits of uncertain depth. As we advanced, the ghostly vaults rumbled with a sound like thunder, and hundreds of noisome bats, scared by the light, dashed against the walls and dropped at our feet. We endured this for a little while, but on reaching the entrance to some darker and deeper mystery, were so surrounded by the animals, who struck their filthy wings against our faces, that not for ten kings’ tombs would we have gone a step further. My friend was on the point of vowing never to set his foot in another tomb, but I persuaded him to wait until we had seen that of Amunoph. I followed the guide, who enticed me by flattering promises into a great many snakelike holes, and when he was tired with crawling in the dust, sent one of our water-carriers in advance, who dragged me in and out by the heels.
“The temple of Medeenet Abou is almost concealed by the ruins of a Coptic village, among which it stands, and by which it is partially buried. The outer court, pylon, and main hall of the smaller temple, rise above the mounds and overlook the plain of Thebes, but scarcely satisfy the expectation of the traveler, as he approaches. You first enter an inclosure surrounded by a low stone wall, and standing in advance of the pylon. The rear wall, facing the entrance, contains two single pillars, with bell-shaped capitals, which rise above it and stand like guards before the doorway of the pylon. Here was another enigma for us. Who among modern architects would dare to plant two single pillars before a pyramidal gateway of solid masonry, and then inclose them in a plain wall, rising to half their hight? Yet here the symmetry of the shafts is not injured by the wall in which they stand, nor oppressed by the ponderous bulk of the pylon. On the contrary, the light columns and spreading capitals, like a tuft of wild roses hanging from the crevice of a rock, brighten the rude strength of the masses of stone with a gleam of singular loveliness. What would otherwise only impress you by its size, now endears itself to you by its beauty. Is this the effect of chance, or the result of a finer art than that which flourishes in our day? I will not pretend to determine, but I must confess that Egypt, in whose ruins I had expected to find only a sort of barbaric grandeur, has given me a new insight into that vital beauty which is the soul of true art. We devoted little time to the ruined court and sanctuaries which follow the pylon, and to the lodges of the main temple, standing beside them like watch-towers, three stories in hight. The majestic pylon of the great temple of Remeses III. rose behind them, out of heaps of pottery and unburnt bricks, and the colossal figure of the monarch in his car, borne by two horses into the midst of the routed enemy, attracted us from a distance. We followed the exterior wall of the temple, for its whole length of more than six hundred feet, reading the sculptured history of his conquests. The entire outer wall of the temple presents a series of gigantic cartoons, cut in the blocks of sandstone, of which it is built. Remeses is always the central figure, distinguished from subjects and foes, no less by his superior stature, than by the royal emblems which accompany him. Here we see heralds sounding the trumpet in advance of his car, while his troops pass in review before him; there, with a lion walking by his side, he sets out on his work of conquest. His soldiers storm a town, and we see them climbing the wall with ladders, while a desperate hand-to-hand conflict is going on below. In another place, he has alighted from his chariot and stands with his foot on the neck of a slaughtered king. Again, his vessels attack a hostile navy on the sea. One of the foreign craft becomes entangled and is capsized, yet while his spearmen hurl their weapons among the dismayed enemy, the sailors rescue those who are struggling in the flood. After we have passed through these strange and stirring pictures, we find the monarch reposing on his throne, while his soldiers deposit before him the hands of the slaughtered, and his scribes present to him lists of their numbers, and his generals lead to him long processions of fettered captives. Again, he is represented as offering a group of subject kings to Amun, the Theban Jupiter, who says to him: ‘Go, my cherished and chosen, make war on foreign nations, besiege their forts and carry off their people to live as captives.’ On the front wall, he holds in his grasp the hands of a dozen monarchs, while with the other hand he raises his sword to destroy them. Their faces express the very extreme of grief and misery, but he is cold and calm as fate itself. We slid down the piles of sand and entered by a side-door into the grand hall of the temple. Here, as at Dendera, a surprise awaited us. We stood on the pavement of a magnificent court, about one hundred and thirty feet square, around which ran a colonnade of pillars, eight feet square and forty feet high. On the western side is an inner row of circular columns, twenty-four feet in circumference, with capitals representing the papyrus blossom. The entire court, with its walls, pillars and doorways, is covered with splendid sculptures and traces of paint, and the ceiling is blue as the noonday sky, and studded with stars. Against each of the square columns facing the court once stood a colossal caryatid, upholding the architrave of another colonnade of granite shafts, nearly all of which have been thrown from their bases and lie shivered on the pavement. This court opens toward the pylon into another of similar dimensions, but buried almost to the capitals of its columns in heaps of rubbish. The character of the temple is totally different from that of every other in Egypt. Its hight is small in proportion to its great extent, and it therefore loses the airy lightness of the Memnonium and the impressive grandeur of Dendera. Its expression is that of a massive magnificence, if I may use such a doubtful compound: no single epithet suffices to describe it.”
The visit to this temple ended our traveler’s survey of the western division of Thebes, “two long days of such experience,” he remarks, “as the contemplation of a lifetime can not exhaust;” and at sunset they crossed over the Nile, to
LUXOR AND ITS TEMPLE.
The temple of Luxor is imbedded in the modern village, and only the front of the pylon, facing toward Karnak, and part of the grand central colonnade, are free from its hovels and their accessories. For this reason, though of much grander proportions than the Memnonium, its effect is less agreeable and impressive. “Its plan, however,” says Taylor, “is easily traced; and having been built by only two monarchs, Remeses the Great and Amunoph III., or, to use their more familiar titles, Sesostris and Memnon, it is less bewildering, in a historical point of view, to the unstudied tourist, than most of the other temples of Egypt. The sanctuary, which stands nearest the Nile, is still protected by the ancient stone quay, though the river has made rapid advances, and threatens finally to undermine Luxor as it has already undermined the temples of Antæopolis and Antinoë. I rode into what were once the sacred chambers, but the pillars and sculptures were covered with filth, and the Arabs had built in, around and upon them, like the clay nests of the cliff-sparrow. The peristyle of majestic Osiride pillars, in front of the portico, as well as the portico itself, are buried to half their depth, and so surrounded by hovels, that to get an idea of their arrangement you must make the tour of a number of hen-houses and asses’ stalls. The pillars are now employed as drying-posts for the buffalo dung which the Arabs use as fuel. Proceeding toward the entrance, the next court, which is tolerably free from incumbrances, contains a colonnade of two rows of lotus-crowned columns, twenty-eight feet in circumference. They still uphold their architraves of giant blocks of sandstone, and rising high above the miserable dwellings of the village, are visible from every part of the plain of Thebes. The English vice-consul occupies a house between two of these pillars. He gave us the agreeable news that the consul was endeavoring to persuade the pasha to have Karnak cleared of its rubbish and preserved from further spoliation. If I possessed despotic power, (and I then wished it for the first time,) I should certainly make despotic use of it, in tearing down some dozens of villages and setting some thousands of Copts and Fellahs at work in exhuming what their ancestors have mutilated and buried. The world can not spare these remains. Tear down Roman ruins if you will; level Cyclopean walls; build bridges with the stones of Gothic abbeys and feudal fortresses; but lay no hand on the glory and grandeur of Egypt! We ascended the great pylon of the temple, on the face of the towers of which the victories of Remeses are sculptured; but his colossi, solid figures of granite, which sit on either side of the entrance, have been much defaced. The lonely obelisk, which stands a little in advance, on the left hand, is more perfect than its Parisian mate. From this stately entrance, an avenue of colossal sphinxes once extended to the Ptolemaic pylon of Karnak, a distance of a mile and a half. The sphinxes have disappeared, and the modern Arab road leads over its site, through fields of waste grass.”