The Old World and Its Ways

While the excavators have been searching for historical records, they have occasionally found treasures of great pecuniary value. A considerable quantity of gold and silver in the form of jewelry has been unearthed, and the museum contains specimens of exquisite workmanship which not only display the skill of the artificers but portray the habits and customs of the early Egyptians.

The museum also contains enough of cloth, found with the mummies, and of pictures of looms, to show that weaving was an industry with which the people of those days were familiar.

But we must leave the museum and proceed to those masterpieces which are too large for any roof, save that formed by the vaulted skies. I am, however, constrained to offer one criticism of the museum in passing. It is under the control of a French society, and the only catalogue obtainable is printed in French. While most of the exhibits bear a brief description in both French and English, some are labeled in French only and a few not at all. As there are no guides to show a visitor through the numerous rooms and point out the principal objects of interest, those who are unable to read French are at a great disadvantage. Considering the number of English and American tourists it seems strange that more attention should not be paid to their accommodation.

But to the temples. We reached Egypt after the regular tourist season was over and could not visit all the ruins. We selected the most famous, those of the two ancient cities, Thebes and Memphis, and they alone would repay a visit to Egypt. The present city of Luxor, four hundred and twenty miles from Cairo, covers a small part of the vast area once occupied by "Hundred-gated Thebes." In the very heart of the city a mammoth temple has been found where kings worshiped through many reigns. It was built during the eighteenth dynasty (B. C. 1500) on the site of a still older sanctuary and dedicated to Ammon, his wife, Mut, and their son, Khons, the Moon-god. Some of the columns are twelve feet in diameter, more than forty feet in height, and support great blocks of red granite twenty feet long and four feet in width and thickness. Some of the columns represent clustered papyrus and have capitals shaped like the lotus bud. In the temple are a number of statues of Rameses II, some sitting, some standing. One of these statues is forty-five feet in height, and another of less dimensions was unearthed only about a year ago. When excavations were begun houses were serenely resting on the top of the temple, and it is believed that further excavations will disclose an avenue leading to other temples two miles away.

In front of the Luxor temple is an obelisk of pink granite, a part of which is still under ground. Obelisks were always erected in pairs, and the companion of this one was removed some years ago to Paris. These great monoliths come down to us from the period when the Egyptians worshiped the sun, and they were intended to represent his rays. The oldest Egyptian obelisk is at Heliopolis, not far from Cairo, and is sixty-six feet in height. It is supposed to have been erected 2000 to 2200 B. C., but it is in an excellent state of preservation and bids fair to bear testimony for ages yet to the reverence felt by the ancients for the sun. At one time Heliopolis was a thriving city and is referred to in the Bible as "On," but to-day the obelisk stands alone in the midst of cultivated fields, all the buildings having disappeared.

While the obelisk at Heliopolis outranks all others in age, the one at Karnak, in the suburbs of Luxor, has the distinction of being the tallest one yet remaining. It is eight and a half feet in diameter at the base and ninety-seven and a half feet in height (eight and a half feet less than the obelisk at Rome). The obelisks were cut in a single shaft, most of them from granite quarries near Assuan. These quarries are more than five hundred miles south of Cairo, and it is supposed that the obelisks were transported on the Nile to the places where they have since been found, but how they were handled or placed in position no one knows.

The temple of Ammon, at Karnak, is generally regarded as the most interesting of temple-ruins in Egypt. It is the work of many kings, one adding a sanctuary, another a pylon, another a court, etc. – each placing his cartouche, or seal, upon his work. This temple, which was officially styled the Throne of the World, covers an immense area. One pylon, or gateway, is more than three hundred feet wide, nearly a hundred and fifty feet high, and has walls sixteen feet thick. One court covers almost a thousand square yards, and one aisle leads between pillars sixty-nine feet in height, about twelve feet in diameter and supporting capitals of eleven feet. The stones used in this temple are of enormous size, and they were probably raised to their positions on scaffolding of earth – this being also the method employed where attempts have recently been made to restore fallen columns.

The hieroglyphics upon the walls, the columns, the obelisks and the statues, after remaining a puzzle for ages, have been deciphered and woven into a consecutive history. This was made possible by the discovery, in 1799, of what is known as the "Rosetta stone" (now in the British Museum) at the mouth of the Rosetta arm of the Nile by a French engineer named Bouchard. This stone bears a decree inscribed in three languages – ancient Egyptian, modern Egyptian and Greek, and furnishes the key to unlock the secrets of ancient history.

The pictures represent sacrificial ceremonies, domestic and industrial scenes, battles, triumphal processions – all phases of life, in fact. One wall contains, in hieroglyphics, the treaty of peace which Rameses II concluded with the Hittites, while another wall represents Rameses III holding a group of prisoners by the hair and raising a club as if to strike. Close by, the god Ammon is delivering to him chained representatives of different vanquished nations, the faces being so true to life that the Israelities brought from Palestine can be easily distinguished from the Ethiopians and Nubians of the south. One of the heads seen often in the drawings resembles "the yellow kid," and the donkeys are exactly like those seen to-day.

Luxor and Karnak are on the east bank of the Nile, but Thebes required both sides of the river for her great population, and the west bank is also rich in evidences of ancient civilization. The Rameseum is here and would attract more attention if it were not overshadowed by larger temples; here also are the "Colossi of Memmon," one of them known to literature as the singing statue. This is described by Strabo and Juvenal and bears many inscriptions in Latin and Greek made by those who visited it under the Roman rule. Hadrian looked upon it 150 A. D., and a poetess of his day declares that the statue greeted the emperor. It is supposed that the sound which for many years issued from the head of the statue just after sunrise was caused by the change in temperature, the granite having been cracked; at any rate, the sound ceased when the statue was repaired. It now sits silent, and with its companion gazes upon the barley field that reaches out in every direction from their feet.

But more interesting than the Rameseum or the Colossi are the tombs of the kings, some forty-two of which have already been discovered. At this point the west side of the valley of the Nile is walled in by a range of limestone hills, one of which bears a striking resemblance to a pyramid. (Could it have suggested the idea of a pyramid for a tomb?) Leaving the valley of the Nile about two miles north of this pyramidal hill, there is a small dry valley which wends its way back through the hills and terminates at the foot of steep walls just west of the hill mentioned. Here are the tombs, hewn in the solid rock, the most elaborate of which is the tomb of Sethos, or Seti, the father of Rameses II. This tomb burrows into the hill to the depth of three hundred and thirty feet, a flight of steps leading down through different levels and different chambers to the final vault. The walls are covered with figures in colors representing the king in the act of making offerings to the various gods. There are also drawings illustrating scenes in this world and life as it is supposed to be in the next world. Some of these pictures portray a hell where the wicked are punished with fire, and there are also drawings which have been interpreted to represent the resurrection and judgment.

Not far away is the tomb of "the Pharaoh of the Exodus" which contains a granite image of the king, and close by this tomb is another in which the mummied form of a Pharaoh still reposes. Grave robbing, however, was so popular an amusement in those days that the bodies of nearly all the kings had been removed for safety to a secret vault, which was so carefully concealed that they were not found until the nineteenth century.

At Memphis, which is only about eighteen miles from Cairo, there are tombs of less importance, colossal statues of Rameses II and the sarcophagi of the sacred bulls. In one of the tombs or Mastabas, as tombs of this style are called, are some of the drawings that have been most widely reproduced. In one place a boy is fattening geese by the stuffing process; in another, cranes are being fed; here, rams are treading in the seed, and the cattle, horned and hornless, are being driven through a river. Agriculture, ship-building, carpentering and other industries are minutely pictured. While the human figures are stiff and angular, the birds and beasts are so exactly like what we see to-day that one could easily believe them to have been drawn by a modern artist.

The sarcophagi of the sacred bulls, twenty-four in number, are hollowed out from single pieces of granite and are covered with immense slabs of the same kind of stone. Each is large enough to contain a good sized animal, and some of them are covered with hieroglyphics giving the pedigrees of the blue-blooded occupants. These caskets of the royal line rest in subterranean vaults hewn out of rock and connected by spacious halls.

Still nearer to Cairo, only six miles away, in fact, are the great pyramids of Gizeh – Cheops and Khephren. These have been described so often that any elaborate comment upon them might weary the reader. We climbed to the summit of the largest, and by doing so not only gained an idea of the immensity of this three million cubic feet of stone, but obtained an excellent view of the green valley on the one side and the yellow plain of shifting sand upon the other, for these pyramids stand upon the dividing line between Egypt's far famed fertile lands and one of the most barren of earth's deserts. We also followed the narrow passage which leads to the center of the pyramid and peered into the empty granite sarcophagus which, for more than four thousand years, kept the body of the builder concealed from the sight of man, and when we came out, half crawling and half climbing, each assisted by two Arabs, our muscles as well as our memories testified that we had seen all of this stupendous pile.

At the foot of these two pyramids stands the silent Sphinx, and near it a granite temple almost as old. The Sphinx itself is a little disappointing because photographs often show it in the foreground and the pyramids behind it, and it thus appears relatively larger than it really is. It represents the body of an animal with a human head and is cut from a huge stone that juts out into the valley. It was a grand conception of the brain of one long ago forgotten and is the oldest product of the chisel of man. It has outlived unnumbered generations and seems to mock at time. Its position by the pyramids is a fitting one, and looking upon it and them one is awed by the sense of their antiquity and recognizes the appropriateness of the lines of the lecturer, Stoddard:

Eternal Sphinx;The pyramids are thine;Their giant summits guard thee night and day;On thee they look when stars in splendor shine,Or while around their crests the sunbeams play;Thine own coevals, who with thee remainColossal genii of the boundless plain.Eternal Sphinx!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MODERN EGYPT

The first article on Egypt might have been begun with an account of our stay in quarantine, but as this precaution against the spread of Asiatic disease is of modern origin, I thought it best to speak of it in this article. The P. and O. steamer, Persia, which brought us from Bombay to Egypt, was suspected of having four cases of plague on board. One man having died and been buried at sea just before we reached Suez, and three more being ill, the international health board insisted on taking charge of the ten passengers bound for Egypt. We were taken on board a barge and towed a couple of miles up the Suez canal to the quarantine station, which we reached about midnight. Besides the four in our family, there were three Americans from Ohio, two English merchants from Egypt and an English lady engaged in missionary work in Palestine. We were comfortably housed in one-story brick buildings and were informed that we would have to remain there five days, unless further investigation removed the suspicion of the plague. While the members of the company proved to be very congenial, we were all anxious to have the stay shortened as much as possible on account of its interference with our plans. At the end of two days we were notified that a bubonic germ had been discovered and that we must stay the full time. The quarantine station is situated on the bank of the canal and is surrounded on three sides by as barren a desert as can be found. The buildings are enclosed by a double fence, and the only exit is to the wharf through a lane. We were permitted to go to the wharf, and, under the escort of a guard, were allowed to gather shells on the bank of the canal. Thus occupied, when not reading or writing, the days passed much more pleasantly than we had expected, and we were almost sorry when the time came for us to separate. One day our quarters were visited by a sirocco, and from the dust and sand that filled the air until the sun was darkened, we were able to gain some idea of desert life.

The canal itself is a little disappointing. It is simply a huge ditch, and with an expanse of sand on either bank, seems narrower than it is. The sides are not walled as a rule, and the depth – thirty feet – does not reveal itself. Several dredges are constantly at work removing the sand which drifts in with the wind or is washed in by the tide. The canal is said to follow the route laid out more than three thousand years ago by Rameses II. About thirty-five hundred ships pass through the canal each year, an average of nearly ten a day. Somewhat more than that passed during our stay, some of the ships being loaded with Russian soldiers from Japan and others crowded with pilgrims returning from Mecca.

On the afternoon of the fifth day the head physician came out and released us and at the same time conveyed to us the cheering, but somewhat belated, information that the three men taken from the ship did not have the plague; we had, however, been so courteously treated that we did not complain of the board bills or quarantine fees, even though the detention proved to be unnecessary. The spread of the plague through Europe would be such a calamity that we realize it is better to err on the side of over-caution. At any rate, we have added to our experience and are carrying the yellow flag (the quarantine signal) home as a trophy.

A few hours' ride brought us to Cairo, the metropolis and capital of Egypt. It is not an ancient city, as they count time in Egypt, having been founded about a thousand years ago, but it has in the business portion the appearance of a European city and contains a population of more than half a million. Of its inhabitants thirty-five thousand are European, the Greeks leading with about ten thousand, and the Italians, French, English, Austrians and Germans following in the order named. The British would outnumber the French if the garrison were included, but the city reminds one much more of France than of England. Many of the buildings recall the streets of Paris, and the sidewalks adjacent to restaurants and saloons are filled with tables and chairs, as in continental Europe.

Cairo is a city of mosques and minarets, as one quickly discovers when he takes a bird's eye view of the city from the citadel which stands upon an eminence in the suburbs. While the main streets are suggestive of Europe, the native quarters and bazaars are distinctly Oriental, many of the streets being too narrow for a carriage. The shops are for the most part little open booths, and each line of business has its particular section. On one street silver and gold smiths monopolize the space; another street is gay with red shoes; in another the red fez, the universal hat, is conspicuous; and still another is given over to vegetables. Some of the larger stores handle Persian rugs, silks, brass ware, inlaid work and patchwork, reproducing the drawings found on tombs and temples. The bazaars also abound in interesting reminders of the land of the mummy, the pyramid and the sphinx.

We had not been in Cairo long before we visited the banks of the Nile, that wonderful river without whose fructifying waters there would have been no Egypt. It is one of the most remarkable – in some respects the most remarkable – of all the rivers of the earth. No wonder the ancient Egyptians included a Nile god among their deities, for next to the sun, to which they raised their obelisks, nothing was so necessary to their existence as this almost magic stream. The Nile renders fertile two narrow strips, one on either bank, four thousand miles long, and but a few miles wide. For thirteen hundred miles it floats through a desert and receives but a single tributary in that distance, and yet, after supplying irrigation for the crops of some ten millions of people, it pours into the ocean a scarcely diminished stream. The annual rise of the river not only supplies water but it renews the land by deposits of alluvial soil. Someone has described the Nile valley as appearing, if seen from above, like a strip of green carpet on a floor of gold, so yellow are the sands that hem it in. No one who has not visited an arid country and noted the influence of water upon the thirsty soil can imagine how distinctly the line is drawn between the verdant field and the barren desert that adjoins it. Where the waters of the Nile can be brought upon the land, a farm will rent for $30 per acre, while a few feet away the land can not be given away. Lord Cromer, in a recent report, gives the income and expenditure of a number of the fellaheen, or farmers. The statements show that a hundred dollars' worth of cotton is sometimes produced from a single acre, or about thirty dollars' worth of corn. The average income, taking all crops together, often runs as high as $50 per acre.

An increasing quantity of land is being brought under the canals, but irrigation from wells is still the main reliance of a large proportion of the people. Water can be found at the level of the water in the river, and the landscape is dotted over with old-fashioned well sweeps and with water wheels, where blindfolded camels or oxen tread their patient round. The land produces so abundantly and there is such a variety of garden and farm products that one recalls that passage in the Bible in which the children of Israel are described as longing for "the flesh pots of Egypt." Coming from India to Egypt we could not but notice the difference in the appearance of the people. In the former country they looked so emaciated and hungry; in the latter they are strong and robust and seemingly well fed. In the markets, too, the food is heaped up in big baskets, while in India it is exposed for sale in tiny piles that speak only too plainly of the poverty of the people.

For ages upon ages the fellaheen have drawn from the inexhaustible storehouse of the Nile. Cheops, Khephren and their successors built pyramids, and the fellah fed the builders; Thutmosis and Sethos and their descendants constructed tombs and temples, and the fellah supported the laborers; the Rameses added gigantic statues to the stupendous works of their ancestors and the fellah still furnished food; the Persians overran the country and still the hand of the fellah supplied the necessaries of life; then came Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, and the fellah plowed on; after the Roman came the Arab, and after the Arab the Turk, followed by Napoleon and later by the Briton, but through all this change of dynasties the fellah kept "the noiseless tenor of his way," and as a middle man, handed over the bounties of the Nile valley to the rulers and their armies – and he is doing so to-day. Of the eleven hundred thousand land owners, nearly nine hundred and fifty thousand hold less than five acres each, and almost half of the total acreage is owned by twelve thousand three hundred persons. More than one-tenth of the tillable land is owned by sixteen hundred Europeans.

Very few horses are seen in the country, the beasts of burden being the ox (there are a few water buffaloes also), the donkey and the camel. The ox resembles the American rather than the Indian ox, in that it has no hump on its shoulders and the drawings on some of the walls represent cattle with horns as large as those formerly worn by the Texas steer. The donkey – poor, patient creature – has not changed materially in the last four thousand years. The pictures drawn of him by the ancient Egyptians show him just as he is now. Then, as now, a large part of his nourishment went to the development of his vocal organs and left the rest of his body woefully small for the large burdens which he was called upon to carry. If his disposition was as gloomy in the days of the Pharaohs as it is at present, he probably annoyed them when he lifted up his voice and wept, as he now annoys the tourist.

The camel, however, if the test is special fitness for the country, is the king of beasts. He pulls the plow, turns the water wheel, draws the wagon, carries burdens, and for long distance travel outstrips the horse. Equipped with emergency water tanks, he can go for several days without drinking, and for this reason is of inestimable value on desert journeys. He kneels to receive his load, though sometimes with pathetic groans, and is as docile as the horse. He has sometimes been styled "the ship of the desert" and seems to have been fashioned for this peculiar region. His large, padded feet do not add to his beauty, but they enable him to cross sandy plains into which a horse's hoof would sink.

The Bible says that the plague of flies brought upon Egypt, when Moses was endeavoring to secure the release of the Israelites, was removed when Pharaoh promised to let the people go, but one is inclined to think that they afterwards returned when Pharaoh again hardened his heart, for nowhere have we found flies like those of Egypt. They bite with unusual vigor and are very persistent in their attentions. At first we thought it strange that people should carry horse-hair brushes as a protection against the flies, but we were soon driven to follow their example. These flies seem to be especially attracted to the eyes of children. As these flies, like those in other countries, carry disease, it is not strange that sore eyes should be especially prevalent here. Blindness seems to be more common than elsewhere, and a very considerable percentage of the people have lost one eye. So widespread is this affliction that Sir Ernest Cassel has established a fund of forty thousand pounds, the interest on which is to be devoted to the treatment of diseases of the eye. Already the fruits of this beneficence are being enjoyed by the poor. The Mohammedan women in Egypt wear veils – a custom which is but slowly giving way to western ideas. If the eyes of the children were protected with half as much care as the faces of the women, what benefits would result!

The government of Egypt defies definition. Nominally the Khedive is the supreme authority, aided by a native legislative council and assembly (their business is to advise, however, rather than to legislate), but back of the Khedive is Lord Cromer, the agent and consul-general of England, whose power is undefined and almost unlimited. England's authority in Egypt rests upon the articles of capitulation signed after the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. In these articles it was announced that England's occupancy would be of brief duration, but in 1904 she secured from France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy consent to postpone the fixing of a date for her withdrawal, she at the same time announcing that it was not her intention to interfere with the political situation in Egypt. England's reasons for remaining in Egypt are very clearly stated by Lord Milner in his book entitled "England in Egypt." He says: "On the one hand, our commercial interests in Egypt are so great and growing that her prosperity, which would be immediately wrecked by misgovernment, is a matter of concern to us. Secondly, and chiefly, the geographical position of Egypt compels attention to her political condition. We have nothing to gain by owning the country ourselves, but we should have a great deal to fear from its falling into the possession of another power."