Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

Bubastis was the goddess Aphrodite of foreigners, represented with the head of a lion or cat. The cat was sacred to this goddess and said to have honorable burial here. Indeed a regular cat cemetery, filled with the remains of mummied felines, has been found. The feast was held at what corresponds to our Christmas time, and Herodotus thus describes it. “When the Egyptians travel to Bubastis they do it in this manner. Men and women sail together and in each boat there are many persons of both sexes. Some of the women make a noise with rattles and some blow pipes during the whole journey, while the other men and women sing and clap their hands. If they pass a town on the way they lay to and some of the women land and shout and mock at the women of the place, while others dance and make a disturbance. They do this at every town that lies on the Nile and when they arrive at Bubastis they begin the festival with great sacrifices and on this occasion more wine is consumed than during the whole of the rest of the year. All the people of both sexes, except children, make a pilgrimage thither, 700,000 persons in all, as the Egyptians assert.” In these festivals both queens probably, separately or together, took a share.

Amen-Ra was the patron deity of Rameses II, but he also paid homage to Sutech in honor probably to his Khitan wife, as this was chiefly confined to Tanis, where we may believe Ur-maa-nofru-ra resided. The god is represented with the head-dress of a Khitan prince. Whatever travelling she may have done, whatever her experiences, Tanis was home to this queen, while the city grew in magnificence and she watched the erection of a grand temple to the god of her fathers, some proof at least that she held a high place in Rameses’ affection and regard.

The name Thebes is of Greek origin, as are many of the Egyptian places, our knowledge of the country being in so large a part derived from the Greeks. Tanis also was so named by the Greeks. This formerly great city, of which now only mounds, ruins, etc., remain, was variously known as Tanis, Zoan, or San, the last of Arab designation. It is believed by some authorities to be the Zoan of the Bible, where the miracles were performed. Its history is now told by broken statues, mounds, tombs and hieroglyphics. Scarcely one stone remains upon another. It is in the Delta of the Nile and is called in some of the inscriptions, “The Place of the Leg,” “The Winged Disk of the North,” and “The Cradle of Lower Egypt.” It was an old city when Rameses II occupied and embellished it. He never hesitated to pull down and use the materials with which his predecessors had builded, nor to smooth out their cartouches and replace them with his own. Why should he, the greatest monarch the world had ever known, as he doubtless thought himself, shrink from taking his full rights or even obliterating the name and fame of some more insignificant ancestor. And devoted as he seemed to have been to his father’s memory, he even did the like occasionally with his father’s signature.

The monumental history of Tanis, it is said, begins with the Twelfth Dynasty, a fine broken statue of Amenemhat I having been found. Then follow memorials of later times. Superb statues of the Hyksos period have also been discovered. Of the work of Rameses II it is quoted that “he found the place given over to the abomination of desolation, he left it one of the most magnificent of Egyptian cities.” For this purpose he laid all Egypt under contribution, red granite and black from Syene, and the Valley of Hammamat, sandstone and limestone from Silsilis and Toorah. His great temples to the gods were but as the parchment on which he inscribed the story of his own victories. It was the spirit of the Pharisee which said, ‘I am not as other men are.’

Wars and fires at different times have done much to obliterate Tanis and its records as well as to destroy all traces of it. Mr. Petrie, who, like many archeologists, spares neither strength nor effort to bring to light the history of the past, with the true lover’s fervency in his favorite pursuit, which is to be a gain not to himself, but to the world, and Miss Edwards, who to a close study of the old ruins and remains, adds a charming power of picturesque description, have both told much of Tanis. We condense their accounts of the city at this past era. The Nile was alive with vessels, the banks bordered with towns and villas, the land beyond occupied by villages. The great temple, which looked like a fortress, was half a mile from the shore, and approached by a fine road, in part bordered by sphinxes and the city entered by a massive gateway. Gigantic statues of the king alternated with sphinxes, the last statue being fourteen times the size of a man. There was a grand avenue bordered by columns, thirty-six feet in height. Pylons, statues, obelisks, a very forest of them—the tribute of the previous centuries, many of them, to the present king. Through these passed many processions, the king, his son and officials, his warriors and his captives. He, with the double crown on his head, and glittering with jewels, the leopard skin over his shoulders, to be received by the priests, with divine honors, amid the plaudits and adulation of the people. All to the sound of the harp and flute, cimbals and sistrum. The queen doubtless looking, from some gorgeously decorated point of vantage when she did not personally share in the pageant.

This was the home of the young queen, these the magnificent sights to which her eyes were accustomed. Parts of private letters on parchment and on pottery have been found, telling familiarly of the feasts and festivals, the expenses and the daily incidents of the life of this period. And the love stories and other fragments of fiction which have, come down to us also give their share of local color.

The last forty-six years of Rameses II’s long reign (which is said to have lasted sixty-seven) were peaceful, and says one author, “It became his passion and his pride to found new cities, to raise dykes, to dig canals, to build fortresses, to multiply statues, obelisks and inscriptions, and to erect the most costly temples in which man ever worshipped.”

His eldest sons appear to have died before him, or been passed over in the succession, for it was his thirteenth son, Meremptah, who shared his authority and eventually succeeded him. He is believed to have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus, as Rameses II of the oppression of the Israelites.

In strange contrast to the life of Rameses II was the disposition of his body after death; there is a story told of the mummy of one of the Pharaohs, that in order to obtain entrance into Cairo, with his prize, Bruch Bey was obliged to pay octroi duty on “dead fish,” as the officials refused to admit it free of duty and the register contained no directions as to mummies. Doubtless Rameses II received magnificent burial, but in later reigns many royal tombs were rifled and his among them; the empty tomb now remains, but only filled with rubbish, the body of the king, with those of many others, being removed. Inscriptions record that this occurred more than once. In the sixteenth year of the reign of Pinotem I it was placed in the tomb of Amenophis I, so that even in death sometimes “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” It is said that in 1880 his mummy was offered for sale to an American gentleman, who, doubting its genuineness, refused to purchase.

In 1881 the wonderful discovery of the shaft containing so many royal mummies was made, and their removal to the museum of Gizeh is thus described, “Already it was known, far and wide, that these kings and queens of ancient times were being conveyed to Cairo, and for more than fifty miles below Thebes the villages turned out en masse, not merely to stare at the piled decks, as the steamer went by, but to show respect to the illustrious dead. Women, running along the banks and shrieking the death wail; men, ranged in solemn silence and firing their guns in the air, greeted the Pharaohs as they passed.”