Kitabı oku: «Eastern Life», sayfa 11

Here, then, we take leave of the Pharaohs and their times; and, we may say, of their people; for the spirit of the old Egyptians was gone, and only a lifeless body was left, to be used as it pleased their conquerors. We hear of the brilliant reigns of the Ptolemies, who now succeeded to the Egyptian throne: but theirs was a Greek civilisation, which, though unquestionably derived from Egypt many centuries before, was now as essentially different from that of the old Egyptians as were the characteristics of the two nations.

We must ever observe that there was no true fusion of the minds of the two races. The Greeks learned and adopted much from the Egyptians: but the Egyptians, instead of adopting from the Greeks, died out. No new god was ever introduced into Egypt: while the Greeks, after having long before derived many of their gods from Egypt, now accommodated their deities to those of the Egyptians, and in an arbitrary and superficial way adopted the old symbols. There is every reason to believe that the priests, when employed by the Ptolemies to interpret the monuments, fitted their new and compounded ideas to the old symbols, and thus produced a theology and philosophy which any resuscitated Pharaoh would have disavowed. The Greeks took no pains to learn the Egyptian language, or to enter into the old Egyptian mind; and there is therefore endless confusion in the accounts they have given to the world of the old gods and the old monarchs of the Nile valley. To understand anything of the monuments of the times we are now entering upon, it will be necessary to bear in mind that the Ptolemies and Caesars built upon Pharaonic foundations, and in imitation of Pharaonic edifices; but necessarily with such an admixture of Greek and Roman ideas with their Egyptian conceptions as to cause a complete corruption of ancient art. It is necessary never to forget this, or we shall be perpetually misled. We may admire the temples of the Ptolemies and Caesars as much or as little as we please; but we must remember that they are not Egyptian.

Every country weak enough to need the aid of Greek mercenaries was sure to become, ere long, Greek property. It was so with Persia, and with its province, Egypt. The event was hastened by the desire of the Egyptians to be quit of their Persian masters. Alexander the Great was the conqueror, as everybody knows. He chose his time when the chief part of the Persian forces of Egypt was absent – sent to fight the Greeks in Asia Minor. When once Alexander had set foot in Pelusium, the rest was easy; for the towns opened their gates to him with joy; and he had only to march to Heliopolis and then to Memphis. He gave his countenance, as well as he knew how, to the old worship, restoring the temples and honouring the symbols of the gods at Memphis, and marching to the Oasis of Amun, to present gifts to the chief deity of the Egyptians, and to claim to be his son. It was on his way there, by the coast, that he saw in passing the harbour where Alexandria now stands, and perceived its capabilities. He ordered the improvement of the harbour, and the building of the city which would have immortalised his name, if he had done nothing else. This visit of Alexander the Great to Egypt took place 332 B.C. He left orders that the country should be governed by its own laws, and that its religion should be absolutely respected. This was wise and humane; and no doubt we owe some of our knowledge of more ancient times to this conservative principle of Alexander's government. But he was not practically sustained by his deputies; and he died eight years after his visit to Egypt. – His successor gave the government of Egypt into the hands of Ptolemy, who called himself the son of Lagus, but was commonly believed to be an illegitimate son of Philip of Macedon. In seventeen years he became king; and with him begins the great line of the Ptolemies, of whom sixteen reigned in succession for 275 years, till the witch Cleopatra let the country go into the hands of the Romans, to become a Roman province, in 30 B.C.

It was under the government of the first Ptolemy that Greek visitors again explored the Nile valley as high as Thebes, and higher. Hecataeus of Abdera was one of these travellers, and a great traveller he was; for, if Diodorus Siculus tells us truly, he once stood on Salisbury Plain, and saw there the great temple of the Sun which we call Stonehenge:⁴³ and he certainly stood on the plain of Thebes, and saw the great temple of the Sun there. The priests had recovered their courage, under the just rule of the Greeks, and had brought out the gold and silver and other treasures of the temples which had been carefully hidden from the Persians. Thebes, however, was almost dead by this time; and its monuments were nearly all which a stranger had to see. We are glad to know that the records of the priests told of forty-seven tombs existing in the Valley of Kings' Sepulchres, of which seventeen had at that time been discovered under their concealment of earth and laid open. Some of these, and some fresh ones, have been explored in our own days; but it is an animating thing to believe that there were at least forty-seven originally; and that many yet remain, untouched since they were closed on the demise of the Pharaohs. Whose will be the honour of laying them open? – not in the Cambyses spirit of rapine; but in all honour and reverence, in search of treasures which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves carry away – a treasure of light out of the darkened place, and of knowledge out of that place where usually no device or knowledge is found!

We are grieved now to lose the old Egyptian names: but at this time they naturally become exchanged for Greek. On becomes Heliopolis. This becomes Abydos. Thebes (called in the Bible No Ammen) becomes Diospolis Magna. Pilak becomes Philae. Petpieh is Aphroditopolis (the city of Athor). Even the country itself, from being called Khem (answering to Ham in the Bible), is henceforth known as Aegyptus.

In the reign of the second Ptolemy lived a writer of uncommon interest and importance to us now: – Manetho, the Egyptian priest. We have only fragments of the writings of Manetho; but they are of great and immediate value to us: fragments of the history of Egypt, which he wrote at the command of Ptolemy Philadelphus. He wrote in Greek, of course, deriving his information from the inscriptions in the temples. What would not we give now for his knowledge of the Egyptian language! and what would we not give to have his works complete! His abode was at that great seat of learning where Moses got his lore – Heliopolis. He is the very man we want – to stand on the ridge of time, and tell us who are below, what was doing in the depths of the old ages. He did so stand; and he did fully tell what he saw: but his words are gone to the four winds, and but a few unconnected declarations have reached us. We have a list of old kings from him: and Josephus has, by extracting, preserved some passages of his account of the Hebrews when in Egypt: but Josephus, in his unscrupulous vanity, wishing to make out that his nation were descended from the Shepherd Kings, put certain words of his own into Manetho's mouth, thus impairing our trust in the poor extracts we have. It appears, and should be remembered, that the Egyptian records make no mention of the Hebrews; and that what Manetho told of them must therefore be derived from other, and probably inferior sources. His list of kings is preserved in some early Christian writers: but the difficulty has been how to use it, and how far to trust it. I must not enter here upon the story, however interesting, of the fluctuations of the credit of Manetho. Suffice it that all recent discoveries have directly tended to establish his character as an able and conscientious historian. The names he gives have been found inscribed in temples and tombs; and even, latterly, in the Pyramids: and the numerous and nameless incidental notices which occur in the study of ancient monuments have, in this instance, gone to corroborate the statements of Manetho. As the monuments are a confirmation of his statements, so are his statements a key to the monuments: and with this intimation of unbounded obligations to Manetho, we must leave him.

One event which happened in the reign of the second Ptolemy we must just refer to, as it is connected with the chronological questions which make up so much of the interest of the history of Egypt. The Jews then in Egypt were emancipated by this Ptolemy; and they employed their influence with him in obtaining, by his countenance, a good Greek translation of their Scriptures. By communication with the High Priest at Jerusalem, there came about an appointment of seventy qualified men who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and presented the world with the version called the Septuagint. The chronology of this work differs widely from that given by the Samaritan and Hebrew versions; the Septuagint assigning, between Adam and Abraham, nearly 1400 years more than the Hebrew; and so on. For a long course of time, the learned and religious world believed that the discrepancy between the Septuagint and (so-called) Mosaic histories was ascribable to forgery on the part of the Alexandrian Jews. But now that chronological evidence is flowing in from, other sources, the judgment of biblical scholars is becoming favourable to the Septuagint computation. Of course it becomes at the same time more accordant with the recorded history of Egypt.

In the reign of the third Ptolemy lived Eratosthenes, – a truly great scholar and wise man, – called the second Plato, and also the second, of the first man in every science. He was a Greek, understanding Egyptian: and he wrote a history of Egypt in correction of that of Manetho. Their statements, their lists of kings, appear at first sight irreconcileable. This is not the place in which to give an account of the difficulty. It is enough to say that the attention of scholars has been employed upon it to good purpose; and that it may be hoped that two men, reasonably believed so trustworthy, will be found, when we can understand them, to have told the same story, and to have supplied us with new knowledge by the Very difference in their way of telling it.

One great event must be noticed before we go on from the dominion of the Ptolemies to that of Rome. The Ptolemies degenerated, as royal races are apt to do; and after a few of their reigns, the Egyptians became as heartily tired of their Greek rulers as they had been of the Persian. In the time of the eighth and ninth sovereigns of this line Thebes rebelled, and maintained a long resistance against the authority and forces of Ptolemy Lathyrus. The temples were stout citadels, in which the besieged could seclude themselves: and they held them long. When Ptolemy Lathyrus prevailed at last, he made dreadful havoc at Thebes. Cambyses had done wonders in the way of destruction: but Lathyrus far exceeded him. As one walks over the plain of Thebes, whose final overthrow dates from this conflict, one's heart sickens among the ruins made by the Persian, the Greek, and the Earthquake. To the last of these one submits quietly, though mournfully, as to a fate: but those who do not regard men as necessary agents – agents of an exact necessity in human history, – may find their spirits rising in resentment against the long-buried invaders, as the spirits of the Thebans rose in resentment while they looked out upon their besiegers from the loopholes of their lofty propyla. This greatest and last act of devastation took place 88 B.C., fifty-eight years before Egypt became a Roman province.

About thirty years before this annexatian, Diodorus Siculus was in Egypt. He probably witnessed the beginning of the building of the Temple of Dendera. He saw much religious ceremonial, which it is curious to read of, though there is no saying how far it remained true to the old ideas in which it originated. The testimony of Diodorus as to what happened in his own time is of course more valuable than his essays in the ancient history: but the latter are interesting in their way, as showing what were the priestly traditions current in the last days of the Ptolemies.

As our object in this rapid view of Egyptian history is to obtain some clearness of ideas in preparation for looking at the monuments, we need not go into any detail of the times subsequent to the building of Egyptian monuments, or of the times of those Romans who erected some temples, but whose history is familiar to everybody. I need only Say that after the death of the last Cleopatra and her son, Caesarion, in 30 B.C., Egypt was annexed to the Roman dominions for seven hundred years. At the end of that period, the ruler of Egypt had enough to do to keep off Persian aggression. He bought off the Arabs – a stronger enemy – for a time; but the great conqueror Amrou marched in triumph from his capture of Damascus and Jerusalem, and, after some struggle and mischance, took the great cities of Egypt, and sent the libraries of Alexandria to heat the baths of that city; for which purpose, it is said that they lasted six months.

One of the first visitors to Egypt after its annexation to Rome was Strabo, who went up the banks of the Nile with the Prefect, as far as Aswán, and has left a full and careful account of what he saw. He enlarges on Alexandria, at that time a most magnificent city, while Thebes was a village, interspersed with colossal ruins. Memphis was still great, ranking next to Alexandria: but Heliopolis was sunk, and almost gone. Its schools were closed; but the memory of them remained, on the spot, as well as afar: for the house was shown where Plato and Euxodus lived and studied. Would it were there still! At present there is nothing left visible of Heliopolis but its obelisk and a circuit of mounds. Strabo thought the place almost deserted in his time: but what a boon it would be to us to see what was before his eyes, within a few years of the Christian era!

Here, then, we stop; at a period which we have been wont to consider ancient, but which, in regard to our object, is so modern as to have no further interest or purpose which need detain us.

We now proceed to the monuments.

X. Aboo-Simbil – Egyptian Conceptions of The Gods

The temples of Aboo-Simbil are both of the time of Ramases II. – in the earlier part of the great Third Period. Nothing more interesting than these temples is to be found beyond the limits of Thebes.

I went up to the smaller temple early in the morning. Of the six statues of the façade, the two in the centre represent Athor, whose calm and gentle face is surmounted by the usual crown, – the moon contained within the cow's horns. On entering the portal in the rock, I found myself in a hall where there was plenty to look at, though the fires lighted by the Arabs have blackened the walls in some places, and the whole is, as I need not say, very old – nearly 1400 B.C. – This entrance hall is supported by six square pillars, all of which bear the head of Athor on the front face of their capitals, the other three faces being occupied with sculptures, once gaily painted, and still showing blue, red, and yellow colours. On the walls here were the men of the old military caste in their defensive armour – a sort of cuirass of chain armour – red links on a yellow ground: and their brethren the civilians, in red frocks: and the women in tight yellow garments, with red sashes tied in front. Most of the figures are represented in the act of bringing offerings to the gods: but on either side the door the hero Ramases is holding by the hair a captive who is on one knee, and looks up; in the one instance with a complete negro face; in the other, with a face certainly neither Egyptian nor negro, and whose chin ends in a peaked beard. Here we have the conquests of the hero in upper Africa, and probably in Asia. He holds up his faulchion, as if about to strike; but the goddess behind him lifts her hand, as if in intercession, while Osiris, in front, holds forth the great knife, as if to command the slaughter. When Osiris carries, as here, the emblems of the crosier and the flagellum or whip, he is present in his function of Judge: and here, accordingly, we see him deciding the fate of the nations conquered by Ramases.

Within this outer hall is a transverse corridor, ending in two rude chambers, where I found nothing but bats. But beyond the corridor lies the sacred chamber, the shrine of the deity. There she is, in the form of the crowned head of a cow, her emblematic disc being between the horns. In another part, she stands, as a cow, in a boat surrounded by water plants, the king and queen bringing offerings to this »Lady of Aboshek, the foreign land.« We shall meet with Athor frequently as »Lady of the West«; and therefore as the morning star: as the welcomer of the Sun at the end of his course; and as the mild and transient Night, which is quite a different personage from the stern and fixed Night of Chaos. As possessor or guardian of the West, Athor was patroness of the western part of Thebes – »the Libyan suburb,« as it was called of old.⁴⁴ Plutarch says that the death of Osiris was believed to have happened in her month – the third Egyptian month: that her shrines were in that month carried about in procession; at the time when the Pleiades appear and the husbandmen began to sow their corn. The countenance of this goddess was everywhere in the temples so mild and tranquil as to accord well with the imagery of the Summer Night, the Morning Star, and the Seedtime, which are associated, in the Egyptian worship, with her name. – I found the figure in the adytum (Holiest Place) much mutilated: but the head and ears were still distinctly visible. Hieroglyphic legends on each side declare her name and titles. This temple extends, from the portal, about ninety feet into the rock. Little as I had yet learned how to look at temples, I found this full of interest. – In the course of the morning, we detected some of our own crew making a fire against the sculptures in the hall. Of course, we interfered, with grave faces: but there is no hope that Arabs will not make their fires in such convenient places, whenever they can. A cave at the top of the bank is irresistible to them, whether it be sculptured or not.

I was impatient to get to the Colossi of the large temple, which looked magnificent from our deck. So, after breakfast, I set forth alone, to see what height I could attain in the examination of the statues.

The southernmost is the only complete one. The next to it is terribly shattered: and the other two have lost the top of the helmet. They are much sanded up, though, thanks to Mr. Hay, much less than they were. The sand slopes up from the half-cleared entrance to the chin of the northernmost colossus: and this slope of sand it was my purpose to climb. It was so steep, loose, and hot to the feet, that it was no easy matter to make my way up. The beetles, which tread lightly and seemed to like having warm feet, got on very well; and they covered the sand with a network of tracks: but heavier climbers, shod in leather, are worsted in the race with them. But one cannot reach the chin of a colossus every day: and it was worth an effort. And when I had reached the chin, I made a little discovery about it which may be worth recording, and which surprised me a good deal at the time. I found that a part of the lower jaw, reaching half-way up the lower lip, was composed of the mud and straw of which crude bricks are made. There had been evidently a fault in the stone, which was supplied by this material. It was most beautifully moulded. The beauty of the curves of these great faces is surprising in the stone; – the fidelity of the rounding of the muscles, and the grace of the flowing lines of the cheek and jaw: but it was yet more wonderful in such a material as mud and straw. I cannot doubt that this chin and lip were moulded when the material was in a soft state: – a difficult task in the case of a statue seventy feet high, standing up against the face of a rock. – I called the gentlemen up, to bear witness to the fact, and it set us looking for more instances. Mr. E. soon found one. Part of the dress of the Second Osiride on the right hand, entering the temple, is composed of this same material, as smoothly curved and nicely wrought as the chin overhead. On examining closely, we found that this layer of mud and straw covered some chiselling within. The artist had been carving the folds of the dress, when he came upon a fault in the stone which stopped his work till he supplied a surface of material which he could mould.

The small figures which stand beside the colossi and between their ankles, and which look like dolls, are not, as is sometimes said, of human size. The hat of a man of five feet ten inches does not reach their chins by two inches. These small figures are, to my eye, the one blemish of this temple. They do not make the great Ramases look greater, but only look dollish themselves.

On the legs of the shattered colossus are the Greek letters, scrawled as by a Greek clown, composing the inscription of the soldiers sent by Psammitichus in pursuit of the Egyptian deserters whom I mentioned as going up the country from Elephantine, when weary of the neglect in which they were left there. We are much obliged to »Damearchon, the son of Amaebichus, and Pelephus, the son of Udamus,« for leaving, in any kind of scrawl, a record of an event so curious. One of the strangest sensations to the traveller in Egypt, is finding such traces as these of persons who were in their day modern travellers seeing the antiquities of the country, but who take their place now among the ancients, and have become subjects of Egyptian history. These rude soldiers, carving their names and errand on the legs of an ancient statue as they went by, passed the spot a century and a half before Cambyses entered the country. One wonders what they thought of Thebes, which they had just seen in all its glory.

As nearly as we could judge by the eye, and by knowing pretty well the dimensions of the colossi, the façade, from the base of the thrones to the top of the row of apes, is nearly or quite one hundred feet high. Above rises the untouched rock.

The faces of Ramases outside (precisely alike) are placid and cheerful, – full of moral grace: but the eight Osirides within (precisely alike too) are more. They are full of soul. It is a mistake to suppose that the expression of a face must be injured by its features being colossal. In Egypt it may be seen that a mouth three feet wide may be as delicate, and a nostril which spans a foot as sensitive in expression as in any marble bust of our day. It is very wonderful, but quite true. Abdallatif has left us his testimony as follows, – in speaking of the Sphinx. »A little more than a bow-shot from these Pyramids, we see a colossal head and neck appearing above ground ... Its countenance is very charming, and its mouth gives an impression of sweetness and beauty. One would say that it smiles benignly. – An able man having asked me what I admired most of all that I had seen in Egypt, I told him that it was the truth of the proportions in the head of the Sphinx ... It is very astonishing that in a countenance so colossal, the sculptor should have preserved the precise proportions of all the parts, whilst Nature has presented no model of such a colossus, nor of anything which could be compared to it.«⁴⁵ I was never tired of gazing at the Osirides, everywhere, and trying to imprint ineffaceably on my memory the characteristics of the old Egyptian face; – the handsome arched nose, with its delicate nostril; the well-opened, though long eye; the placid, innocent mouth, and the smooth-rounded, amiable chin. Innocence is the prevailing expression; and sternness is absent. Thus the stiffest figures, and the most monotonous gesture, convey still only an impression of dispassionateness and benevolence. The dignity of the gods and goddesses is beyond all description, from this union of fixity and benevolence. The difficulty to us now is, not to account for their having been once worshipped, but to help worshipping them still. I cannot doubt their being the most abstract gods that men of old ever adored. Instead of their being engaged in wars or mutual rivalries, or favouritisms, or toils, or sufferings, here they sit, each complete and undisturbed in his function, – everyone supreme, – free from all passion, but capable of all mild and serene affections. The Greek and Roman gods appear like wayward children beside them. Herodotus says that the Greek gods were children to these, in respect of age:⁴⁶ and truly they appear so in respect of wisdom and maturity. Their limitation of powers, and consequent struggles, rivalries, and transgressions, their fondness and vindictiveness, their anger, fear, and hope, are all attributes of childhood, contrasting strikingly with the majestic passive possession of power, and the dispassionate and benignant frame of these ever-young old deities of Egypt. Vigilant, serene, benign, here they sit, teaching us to inquire reverentially into the early powers and condition of that Human Mind which was capable of such conceptions of abstract qualities as are represented in their forms. I can imagine no experience more suggestive to the thoughtful traveller, anywhere from pole to pole, than that of looking with a clear eye and fresh mind on the ecclesiastical sculptures of Egypt, perceiving, as such a one must do, how abstract and how lofty were the first ideas of Deity known to exist in the world. That he should go with clear eyes and a fresh mind is needful: for if he carries a head full of notions about idolatry, obscenity, folly, and ignorance, he can no more judge of what is before his eyes, – he can no more see what is before his face, – than a proud Mohammedan can apprehend Christianity in a Catholic chapel at Venice, or an arrogant Jew can judge of Quakerism or Quietism. – If the traveller be blessed with the clear eye and fresh mind, and be also enriched by comprehensive knowledge of the workings of the human intellect in its various circumstances, he cannot but be impressed, and he may be startled, by the evidence before him of the elevation and beauty of the first conceptions formed by men of the Beings of the unseen world. And the more he traces downwards the history and philosophy of religious worship, the more astonished he will be to find to what an extent this early theology originated later systems of belief and adoration, and how long and how far it has transcended some of those which arose out of it. New suggestions will thence arise, that where in the midst of what is solemn and beautiful he meets with what appears to modern eyes puerile and grotesque, such an appearance may deceive, and there may be a meaning contained in it which is neither puerile nor grotesque. He will consider that Cambyses might be more foolish in stabbing the bull Apis, to show that it could bleed, which nobody denied, than the priests in conserving a sacred idea in the form of the bull. He will consider that the Sphinx might be to Egyptian eyes, not a hideous compound animal, as it is when carved by an English stone-mason for a park gate, but a sacred symbol of the union of the strongest physical with the highest intellectual power on earth.

The seriousness I plead for comes of itself into the mind of any thoughtful and feeling traveller at such a moment as that of entering the great temple of Aboo-Simbil. I entered it at an advantageous moment, when the morning sunshine was reflected from the sand outside so as to cast a twilight even into the adytum, – two hundred feet from the entrance. The four tall statues in the adytum, ranged behind the altar, were dimly visible: and I hastened to them, past the eight Osirides, through the next pillared hall, and across the corridor. And then I looked back, and saw beyond the dark halls and shadowy Osirides the golden sand-hill without, a corner of blue sky, and a gay group of the crew in the sunshine. It was like looking out upon life from the grave. When we left the temple, and the sun had shifted its place, we could ho longer see the shrine. It is a great advantage to enter the temple first when the sun is rather low in the east.

The eight Osirides are perfectly alike, – all bearing the crosier and flagellum, and standing up against huge square pillars, the other sides of which are sculptured, as are the walls all round. The aisles behind the Osirides are so dark that we could not make out the devices without the help of torches: and the celebrated medallion picture of the siege would have been missed by us entirely if one of the crew had not hoisted another on his shoulders to hold a light above the height of their united statures. There we saw the walled town, and the proceedings of the besieged and besiegers, as they might have happened in the middle ages. The north wall is largely occupied by a tablet, bearing the date of the first year of Ramases the Great; and on the other side of the temple, between two of the pillars, is another tablet, bearing the date of the thirty-fifth year of his reign. The battle scenes on the walls are all alive with strong warriors, flying foes, trampled victims, and whole companies of chariots. I observed that the chariot-wheels were not mere discs, as we should have expected in so early an age, but had all six spokes. Every chariot-wheel I saw in the country had six spokes, however early the date of the sculpture or painting. One figure on the south wall is admirable, – a warrior in red, who is spearing one foe, while he has his foot on the head of another.