52. Ushabti Figures, Twentieth Dynasty. 1: 8.
53. A Nile Morning.
CHAPTER VI.
UP THE NILE.
1887.
When in the end of 1886 I went to Egypt, I had no excavations in prospect, having bid good-bye to the Fund; but I had promised to take photographs for the British Association, and I had much wished to see Upper Egypt in a more thorough way than during a hurried dahabiyeh trip to Thebes in 1882. To this end my friend Mr. Griffith joined me. We hired a small boat with a cabin at Minia, and took six weeks wandering up to Assuan, walking most of the way in and out of the line of cliffs. Thus we saw much that is outside of the usual course, and spent afterwards ten days at Assuan, and three weeks at Thebes, in tents. On coming down the Nile I walked along the eastern shore from Wasta to Memphis, but found it a fruitless region. Lastly, I lived several weeks at Dahshur, for surveying the pyramids there.
Assuan proved a most interesting district, teeming with early inscriptions cut on the rocks; and to copy all of these was a long affair. Every day we went out with rope-ladder, bucket, and squeeze-paper, as early as we could, and returned in the dusk; so at last some two hundred inscriptions were secured, many of which were of importance, and quite unnoticed before. These carvings are some of them notices of royal affairs, but mostly funereal lists of offerings for the benefit of various deceased persons. They abound most in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties, though some of them are later; and one records queen Amenardus, and another Psamtik II, of the twenty-sixth dynasty. Their main interest is in the great number of personal names which they preserve, and the relationships stated. We see that the father is often not named at all, and the father’s family is scarcely ever noticed; while on the mother’s side the relations extend even to second cousins. To decipher these records is sometimes a hard matter, when they are very rudely chipped—or rather bruised—on the rough granite rocks; and continually we used to consult and dispute about some sign for long enough to copy all the rest of the inscription. Some of them are, however, beautifully engraved, and quite monumental in style. The most striking, perhaps, is a rock on the island of Elephantine, which had never been noticed before, although in the pathway. It was a sort of royal album begun by Ra-kha-nefer (fifth dynasty); followed by Unas (fifth), who carved a handsome tablet. Then Ra-meri Pepi (sixth) appropriated Ra-kha-nefer’s inscription; Ra-nefer-ka Pepi next carved a tablet; in later times, of the eleventh dynasty, Antef-aa II followed with another tablet; and lastly Amenemhat I (twelfth dynasty) placed the sixth inscription here.