Upper Egypt: Memphis, Thebes, Syene

Asyoot, February 14, 1880. – This is the capital of Upper Egypt, and a place of some 25,000 inhabitants. It is full of picturesque interiors and groups, especially in the camel fair there were hundreds of these beasts for sale, and I am beginning to have my opinion about the “points” of a dromedary – and the bazaars. From the outside, the town, being built of mud and sun-dried bricks of the same colour as the Nile, looks, with its flat roofs, as if made of millboard. Behind it stands the Libyan range of glaring limestone, pierced with countless square-mouthed tombs, like port-holes. Here the old Egyptians were buried, and hither, long afterwards, Christians fled and lived a hermit life in the very early ages of their faith. Indeed, this country may be reckoned as the mother of monks. We climbed the range and looked across the narrow green strip of Egypt, whose life is the Nile, on the opposite Arabian hills. It is a path of grass through great beds of gravel, the mud villages showing upon it like worm-casts on a lawn. Behind us lay the Desert, yellow, scorched, empty, stretching into Africa. As we drew near to the gate of the city on our return we met two funerals, with their attendant crowds of shrieking women. The utterances of these hired mourners struck me as conspicuously indifferent. They seemed to walk in heedless chatter, occasionally giving a professional scream, and then falling back into their gabble again. But they got over the ground at a rapid pace, which lent a fresh significance to the gesture – “He came and touched the bier, and they that bare him stood still.” Indeed, one here inevitably perceives new force in familiar words of Scripture. For instance, I never before so apprehended the last clause of the verse which ends with “A rod for the back of fools.” The bearer of a stick makes no scruple of thus emphasising his estimate of folly. Our dragoman, seemingly a kind-hearted fellow with a ready smile, is armed with a hippopotamus whip, a fearful instrument. “Good for bad Arab,” he says. And sometimes he sheds this his goodness forth plenteously. A village chief too, say a senior warden, will carry a pole six feet long, and suddenly turn upon his fellow-ratepayers, and send them all scampering in a moment if they show an indisposition to take his view of the question. This, however, is an ugly factor in the problem of Egyptian regeneration, be the Khedive never so lavish in the provision of railways and sugar factories, whose chimneys make great patches of defilement against the blue sky with their smoke.

Talking of smoke, I must say a word about the Nile steamers. Of course, there are epicures in sensation who shudder at the thought of them. But yesterday as we passed a richly equipped dahabeah, crawling against stream and wind with fourteen long sweeps, pulled by grunting Arabs and Nubians, I thought that the owner, in his secret heart, would have liked to be taken in tow. Many long reaches of the Nile are utterly uninteresting. You pass between endless mud embankments, exactly like the sea walls in the Essex “saltings,” and from some of the dahabeahs see nothing else, except the tops of the low limestone ranges which border the land. Now, from the deck of our steamer we look over the country and go swiftly through the dullest parts, making a fresh wind of our own in the sultriest calm. Certainly we are fortunate on the present occasion, as the boat, containing forty-five berths, has only eighteen passengers on board. It is true, however, that we cannot stop when and wherever we fancy; but the steamer is run ashore and tied to a stake or a palm-tree at the most famous spots, where donkeys are always ready to take us to tombs or what not, and our intelligent dragoman, who speaks English fluently, saves us trouble in the matter of baksheesh, and, in reply to questions, tells us what he knows. Ashore, you can walk or ride apart from the rest of the party, if you please. No doubt, for two or three months of perfect ease, a dahabeah is much to be commended, and a crowded steamer might be very disagreeable. But, again, I do not think I should thoroughly enjoy a repose in which calms or contrary winds were overcome by a toiling crew, dragging, like slaves in a trireme, at their heavy sweeps, just in front of the cabin door. No. The perfection of progress here would be in a roomy private steam launch, fitted with silent machinery, and capable of being used under sail. As it is, we are comfortable enough at present. There is a small pleasant party on board, and we have a French cook and a doctor told off for the service¹. He wants to see the hospitals in London, though, as he says, the anatomical school in Egypt is good, since he can get a body for dissection when he pleases.

The weather is most treacherous. A perfectly blue sky and a fierce sun make you fancy that it is the height of summer. But the wind is so keen that I have been glad to wear my ulster on deck; and directly the sun sets – ruit nox. And it often comes with cold so sudden, that unless you wrap up quickly and thoroughly you run the chance of a dangerous chill. Several of our few fellow-passengers suffered from a neglect of this precaution. But the night sky is crowded with a multitude of glowing, magnified stars, which throw tracks or patches of light over the silent Nile. We always run the boat ashore when it is dark, mostly by some palm grove, and paddle on at dawn. One striking feature of the dusk is the “afterglow” which remains in the sky, like a warm western aurora borealis, long after the sun has set.

In glancing for a moment at the ground over which we have passed, I must say a word on Memphis, and the great necropolis of Sakkárah. Memphis, the magnificent city of the Pharaoh whom Moses and Aaron went in unto with their message from the Lord God of the Hebrews, has had its ruins pulled down for the sake of the building materials which it provided, and that which may remain of it is now smothered with mud – the last and greatest of Egyptian plagues. Nothing is left but a huge statue of Rameses, flat upon its face in a pool of mire. Its vast necropolis, with its millions of buried mummies, is itself, in turn, buried beneath the sands which have drifted over the Libyan range. Not many years ago the head of a sphinx showed itself, like the top of a rock at low tide. Then investigators dug a trench to the depth of seventy feet, and disclosed a double row of sphinxes leading into some of the sepulchral wonders of the place. The importunate sand has filled it again now. But the entrance to the tombs where the sacred bulls were laid in pomp has been kept open. They were worshipped in Memphis, and buried here. We went down into their graves. You traverse a subterranean gallery more than 200 yards long, on either side of which, in recesses, are huge sarcophagi, in which the bulls were put. When discovered, some quarter of a century ago, they were found empty. Every lid had been shifted. But how familiar the Hebrews were with the worship of the calf, as it is called, those thousands of years ago! The surface of the sandy soil which has buried this vast burial-ground is broken into mounds and covered with fragments of ancient pottery. A couple of Arabs were digging a hole with hoes as we rode over this sepulchral site, and rudely throwing out the skulls and ribs of mummies whose rest had been unbroken, till that afternoon, through the mightiest changes of history that the world knows.

It is curious to notice the contrast between the Western civilisation introduced by the Khedive and the conservative habits of the peasantry. The railway has preceded the wheelbarrow. The sole tool in the land appears to be a broad hoe, which does the duty of a spade. But the bare hand and foot are chiefly used. The “navigator” moves the soil in a basket which he carries on his shoulder and fills with his fingers. He works more like a rabbit than a man. The corn is sown broadcast, and when the crop is weeded at all it is weeded by the hand. The corn is cut with a small sickle. The wheat, now in ear, promises a magnificent yield. The wants of the people seem to be very few, and if now we see their winter dress, which generally consists of a single garment-though many of the men at work wear only a loin cloth-they must be very lightly clad in summer. The faces and figures of the people often strikingly resemble those painted on the walls of tombs three thousand years old. They have the same long eyes, square shoulders, and strong legs, and their colour is unchanged. Among them are Nubians, black as coal, but the Egyptian is chocolate; and fine anatomical studies he presents. All have magnificent teeth, which much smoking does not seem to harm. But then they are water-drinkers, and though some “advanced” Mohammedans transgress the Koran, you may look in vain among the evening crowds of a city for a drunken man. Talking seems to be the national recreation. Circles and little groups of men squat about with very dirty-looking long pipes and perpetual chatter. I have not seen the devotion I expected-very far from it; but some of the firemen of our steamer come up and say their prayers upon the deck at sunrise.

February 15. – We have just had service with our little party of English. The boat was passing under tomb-pierced cliffs while we sang the hymn “0 God, our help in ages past.” With what fresh truth did those familiar lines come:

“A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its eons away.”

Achmed, our dragoman, told me afterwards that he had been listening round the corner, and, to prove it – an astonishing feat for one of these unmusical Arabs – hummed the well-known tune, out of “Hymns Ancient and Modern,” which we had used and he had caught. I read the hymn to him, and he said, pointing up to the sky, “Good; very good.”

Assouan, February 23, 1880. – This is the land’s-end, or water’s-end, of Egypt, the old Syene, counted once as the place whence the Nile flowed north into the Mediterranean and south into Africa. It was also reckoned as the spot where at the summer solstice the sun shone perpendicularly; and some old geographers calculated accordingly. I don’t wonder. The heat this February day is tremendous, and swarms of Arab and Nubian brats come about one like flies, screaming-they suggest at a little distance the crisis of a successful school treat – ” Baksheesh, Ahói.” There is often no supplication in this cry. The other day I was riding at the distance of some eighty yards past one of the native waterwheels, driven, after the fashion of a threshing-machine, by two oxen. A boy sat behind them with a goad, and as he came round every half-minute, like the lamp of a revolving lighthouse, he flashed out the national petition. Even when the boat passes swiftly up the river, promiscuous imps upon the bank occasionally send forth the same cry. I believe that they would thus salute a balloon. Assouan is our turning-point, and we have set foot into Nubia, which lies beyond it, by means of a camel ride to the first cataract. It has been my first experience of a camel, and an arrival of fresh sensations. You sit down on a haycock, which rises, half at a time, into a stack. It is like riding on the roof of a small house, which comes to pieces when you have to get down. I had a very tall Nubian, as black as a coal, in a blue shirt and white turban, as my attendant. Wanting to stop, I said so. He then addressed a remark to my camel, who made a ponderous, slobbering groan, and began folding up his legs in unexpected places, till at last I found myself sitting on a saddle with my feet almost touching the ground. He subsided as if he purposed to go on sinking till he left only his head visible, like that of the sphinx.

The trot of a camel is prodigious; and as he moves both legs on the same side at the same time, it is something more and else than, say, the exaggerated procedure of a rough colossal dray-horse. After about half an hour of it, a German gentleman, who bumped so hopelessly along by my side that I thought his boots would come off; shouted out, as if he had been on the rack, that he could bear it no longer, and got down to proceed on an ass. But I soon found that by suitable management the pace was bearable enough. This early discovery was promising, since we have the prospect of a thirty days’ camel ride in the desert.

On reaching the “cataract” we found this word wholly delusive. There is only a short rapid, up which the native boats can sail at high Nile. Murray says that travellers are amused by seeing the Nubian boys shoot it on logs of wood. True, there were Nubian boys thus mounted who accompanied a cranky boat in which we rowed across for a nearer view of the place, like black mermaids – of course singing Baksheesh, Ahói,” all the time; but the “shooting” business was done by our crew of men, who suddenly whipped off their shirts, within a few yards of us, and jumped into the water as bare as so many bronze Adams. It was not nice, especially as there were three or four English young ladies in our party. The colour of the skin is, however, supposed to make a difference. It was a poor business at the best. The performers soon scrambled out, and came shining back to ask for the eternal douceur.

Assouan is the “Beersheba” of Egypt, and its islands of Elephantine and Philae are crowded with relics of the long past. The first of these is sheer jumbled rubbish smothered in bright yellow sand; the latter picturesque – a word rarely applicable to anything on the Nile, and studded with well-preserved, showy temples, where the worship of Osiris expired. We noticed what appeared to be an ancient stone Christian altar, three feet by two feet, lying in one of them. It was no doubt natural, but now, in an antiquarian sense, to be regretted, that the very early Christians who made Egypt a home of their faith should have left so many other records of their zeal in the defacement of sculptures, especially in temples which they used for worship. You constantly see the faces, and sometimes figures, of the old gods and heroes which were within reach hacked out, apparently with pickaxes. Occasionally, however, they are only plastered over with clay, as if they had been pelted, as in fact they were, with mud.

We have spent some time in riding about the Theban plain from one monument of the past to another. It is eight or nine miles across, the mountains receding on either side from the river, which in the course of ages has left upon it a coat of Nile mud some six feet thick. This is now sown with wheat just coming into ear. The first glance of the site of the famous Thebes was disappointing. We climbed the Libyan, or African, range for a general view of the whole place, and it struck me that a careless eye might notice little or nothing to indicate the presence of the greatest ruins in the world. True, beneath us were the famous Colossi, of which the vocal Memnon is one, still with their huge arms upon their knees, gazing, or rather grinning for they are wofully defaced – over the scene of their ancient fame; but though more than fifty feet high, they looked no bigger than two hares sitting up in the middle of a green meadow. The patches of ruins too, once bright with colour, are now dull-brown, and hardly to be distinguished at a distance from mud Egyptian hamlets. It is when you enter and explore them that you begin to realise the vastness of the temples of which they are the relics, or mutilated survivors. For instance, the great temple at Karnak is more than 1,100 feet long, and has still standing in one of its halls a forest of one hundred and thirty-four huge, perfect columns, some 60 feet in height. In another court is one of the obelisks with which it was equipped, once gilt and capped with solid gold, 92 feet high. The walls and pillars of this skeleton of magnificence are covered with graven life and hieroglyphic records.

The ancient Egyptians were the greatest chroniclers that the world has ever known. They covered every square foot of their buildings, inside and out, with picture-writing of the world and its life which was around them. And they did this before anything in the shape of a book had elsewhere been written. We were able, in some measure, to realise what this Karnak temple must have been by a visit to that at Edfou. This is only 450 feet long, but, barring its paint and the lofty wooden standard poles at its entrance, unchanged from what it was when built. It had been buried in sand and the rubbish of Arab huts, and was revealed by digging only some thirty years ago. Its columns and walls, within and without, are crowded with sculptures. Part is, as it was at first, open to the sky, and when we climbed one of its towers by two hundred and fifty steps, and looked down upon the stone roofs or 1aved courts beneath us, it was easy to fancy that the temple might be used again, at once, for the old Egyptian rites. All around was the wretched village, showing no more architecture than martins’-nests or mole-heaps, but a wonderful foil to the grandeur of ancient Egypt.

To return to Thebes. We visited the temple where the colossal statue of the great Rameses-he was the Pharaoh who mightily oppressed the Hebrews – lies broken on its face. His was the largest statue of one stone in the world. As he sat there he looked over the city around him, and might have been seen miles away in that clear Egyptian air. I was, however, I think, most impressed by the Tombs of the Kings. You ride across the bright wheat-sown plain, and enter a stone ravine in the Libyan range. It is utterly barren, and glares in the sun. The green site of the city is left behind. You wind on and on, expecting at every corner to reach the head of this blasted cleft in these mountains which fringe the desert. But no. I wish I had counted how many turns we took; each revealed more profound desolation. At last we arrived at a sort of amphitheatre, or cul de sac, among the cliffs. Here lie “all the kings in glory, every one in his own house” (Isaiah xiv. 18). Hither were they brought from the life and magnificence of Thebes, with pomp and procession, and hid away. But what hiding-places are these! You enter the mouth of a tunnel in the face of the cliff, and after traversing it for hundreds of feet reach a succession of halls, in the last of which the royal sarcophagus was laid. Both these and the sides of the tunnels are covered with sculpture and painting, of which the colour in many places is still as fresh as it was thousands of years ago. All the old Egyptian daily social, domestic, and religious life is here set forth. The idea was to surround the dead king with everything with which he had been most familiar, so that at his awakening nothing, so far, might be strange. There each king was laid in turn, in the sepulchre which he had prepared, or begun to prepare, while alive, and then the entrance to his tomb was built up, that all might be undisturbed till the day of resurrection. But in no sarcophagus has the royal mummy been found. The sculptures in a hail in one of these chambers in Belzoni’s Tomb, as it is called, from his having opened it, are not begun. They are only sketched, very boldly, in red lines. But this was done by some minor artist, for the chief decorator had corrected them in many places with a black pencil. One could imagine him going round and by torchlight looking critically at the rough sketch of his assistant, here and there stopping, and with a free sweep of his pencil giving the true curve to a limb or a feature. But the engraver never came. The king died, and there the simple corrected sketch has been left for some three thousand years.

We rode across the necropolis of Thebes on our return. It is underlaid with inglorious mummies. The Arabs had just dragged one out and thrown it in our path. They tore it in pieces, like dogs round a carcase, and offered its hands and grinning skull for sale. The place is full of holes where these ghouls have rifled the dead. But no one cares. No pains are apparently taken to preserve even the priceless chambers of the Kings. They are being smoked with the torches of explorers, and many are scored breast-high with the scrawlings of travellers and tourists. It must be admitted, however, that some of these inscriptions have now the interest of antiquity, divers of the names being those of old Greeks and Romans, written one thousand five hundred or more years ago. Unfortunately this trick of travellers is ‘’posted” up to the latest date, and though it is strange indeed to see the very handwriting of the torch-bearer of the Eleusinian mysteries who visited the spot, as he records, in the reign of Constantine, it is not touching to see also the autograph of a “gent” from Paddington added in the last month. What a curious phase of selfish inappreciation of these wonderful relics is indicated, when a man stares at a sculpture still fresh from the hand of the workman who may have wrought it before Abraham journeyed into Egypt, and then whips out his knife to spend the remainder of his visit in cutting his name upon the best-preserved surface that he can find! A rascal was even chipping pieces off the vocal Memnon, as we passed, for some one to put in his pocket.

The condition of the Coptic Christians here makes one wish to know more about it. They are supposed to be the purest descendants of the ancient Egyptians who were converted in the earliest ages of our faith. Outwardly they appear undistinguishable from the Arabs among whom they live and work. Several times, however, a child has drawn up the sleeve of its shirt to show the cross tattooed upon its arm. St. George seems a popular saint here. In one or two places he is respected even by Mohammedans, who tell their beads before his picture. A special mixture of sensations, indeed, arose in my mind on seeing the familiar representation of the saint on horseback slaying the dragon in a St. George’s very much in the East among temples adorned by a Pharaoh with sculptures of himself and Osiris. There was an attendant in the building – say a verger – in a turban and blue shirt, who came up to us with a plate, in which we laid a small offering. I ought to have called on the rector. He is certain to be chocolate-coloured, and – dressed like his verger, with the sole addition of a pair of red slippers – to be in the habit of riding about on a donkey without a bridle or stirrups. Most probably he carries in his hand a long chibouque, and sits on his heels, with his knees up to his ears, when he smokes it at home. Talking with gravity of impressions which in some sense are unexpected, it is strangely striking, while looking through some graven list of victories in a temple crowded with records which, however interesting, touch no associations, to come upon a sculpture representing Shishak leading Jewish prisoners with cords and presenting them before Ammon. This is very vividly portrayed at Karnak, and gives a touching thrill of reality to these wonderful histories in stone. They are horribly real. Nothing can be more grim than the agony in the faces of some captives with their elbows tied tight together behind their backs, and the calm cruelty in the countenance of the conqueror who is engaged in slaying them.

From Past and Present in The East
by the Rev. Harry Jones, 1880

Notes

¹ These steamers are really in the possession of Mr. T. Cook, and I found the arrangements for the treatment of tourists convenient, and the attendants very civil.