Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt

On their papyrus rolls the Egyptians wrote all sorts of things—books of wise advice, stories like the fairy-tales which we have been hearing, legends of the gods, histories, and poems; but the book that is oftenest met with is one of their religious books. It is nearly always called the "Book of the Dead" now, and some people call it the Egyptian Bible, but neither of these names is the right one. Certainly, it is not in the least like the Bible, and the Egyptians themselves never called it the Book of the Dead. They called it "The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day," and the reason they gave it that name was because they believed that if their dead friends knew all the wisdom that was written in it, they would escape all the dangers of the other world, and would be able in heaven to go in and out just as they had done upon earth, and to be happy for ever.

The book is full of all kinds of magical charms against the serpents and dragons and all the other kinds of evil things that sought to destroy the dead person in the other world. The scribes used to write off copies of it by the dozen, and keep them in stock, with blank places for the names of the persons who were to use them. When anyone died, his friends went away to a scribe, and bought a roll of the Book of the Dead, and the scribe filled in the name of the dead person in the blank places. Then the book was buried along with his mummy, so that when he met the demons and serpents on the road to heaven, he would know how to drive them away, and when he came to gates that had to be opened, or rivers that had to be crossed, he would know the right magical words to use.

Some of these rolls of the Book of the Dead are very beautifully written, and illustrated with most wonderful little coloured pictures, representing different scenes of life in the other world, and it is from these that we have learned a great deal of what the Egyptians believed about the judgment after death, and heaven. But the common ones are very carelessly done. The scribes knew that the book was going to be buried at once, and that nobody was likely ever to see it again; so they did not care much whether they made mistakes or not, and often they missed out parts of the book altogether. They little thought that, thousands of years after they were dead, scholars would dig up their writings again, and read them, and see all their blunders.

Of course, a great deal of this book is dreadful rubbish, and anything more unlike the noble and beautiful teaching of the Bible you can scarcely imagine. It has no more sense in it than the "Fee! fi! foh! fum!" of our fairy-stories. Here is one little chapter from it. It is called "The Chapter of Repulsing Serpents," and the Egyptians supposed that when a serpent attacked you on your way to heaven, you had only to recite this verse, and the serpent would be powerless to harm you: "Hail, thou serpent Rerek! advance not hither. Stand still now, and thou shalt eat the rat which is an abomination unto Ra (the Sun-God), and thou shalt crunch the bones of a filthy cat."

It sounds very silly, doesn't it? And there are many things quite as silly as this in the book. You can scarcely imagine how wise people like the Egyptians could ever have believed in such drivel. But, then, side by side with this miserable stuff, you find really wonderful and noble thoughts, that surely came to these men of ancient days from God Himself, telling them how every man must be judged at last for all that he has done on earth, and how only those who have done justly, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with God, will be accepted by Him.

CHAPTER XII

TEMPLES AND TOMBS

Anyone travelling through our own land, or through any European country, to see the great buildings of long ago, would find that they were nearly all either churches or castles. There are the great cathedrals, very beautiful and wonderful; and there are the great buildings, sometimes partly palaces and partly fortresses, where Kings and nobles lived in bygone days. Well, if you were travelling in Egypt to see its great buildings, you would find a difference. There are plenty of churches, or temples, rather, and very wonderful they are; but there are no castles or palaces left, or, at least, there are next to none. Instead of palaces and castles, you would find tombs. Egypt, in fact, is a land of great temples and great tombs.

Plate 14

GATEWAY OF THE TEMPLE OF EDFU. Pages 74, 75

Now, one can see why the Egyptians built great temples; for they were a very religious nation, and paid great honour to their gods. But why did they give so much attention to their tombs? The reason is, as you will hear more fully in another chapter, that there never was a nation which believed so firmly as did the Egyptians that the life after death was far more important than life in this world. They built their houses, and even their palaces, very lightly, partly of wood and partly of clay, because they knew that they were only to live in them for a few years. But they called their tombs "eternal dwelling-places"; and they have made them so wonderfully that they have lasted long after all the other buildings of the land, except the temples, have passed away.

First of all, let me try to give you an idea of what an Egyptian temple must have been like in the days of its splendour. People come from all parts of the world to see even the ruins of these buildings, and they are altogether the most astonishing buildings in the world; but they are now only the skeletons of what the temples once were, and scarcely give you any more idea of their former glory and beauty than a human skeleton does of the beauty of a living man or woman. Suppose, then, that we are coming up to the gates of a great Egyptian temple in the days when it was still the house of a god who was worshipped by hundreds of thousands of people.

As we pass out of the narrow streets of the city to which the temple belongs, we find ourselves standing upon a broad paved way, which stretches before us for hundreds of yards. On either side, this way is bordered by a row of statues, and these statues are in the form of what we call sphinxes—that is to say, they have bodies shaped like crouching lions, and on the lion-body there is set the head of a different creature. Some of the sphinxes, like the Great Sphinx, have human heads; but those which border the temple avenues have oftener either ram or jackal heads.

As we pass along the avenue, two high towers rise before us, and between them is a great gateway. In front of the gate-towers are two tall obelisks, slender, tapering shafts of red granite, like Cleopatra's Needle on the Thames Embankment. They are hewn out of single blocks of stone, carved all over with hieroglyphic figures, polished till they shine like mirrors, and their pointed tops are gilded so that they flash brilliantly in the sunlight. Beside the obelisks, which may be from 70 to 100 feet high, there are huge statues, perhaps two, perhaps four, of the King who built the temple. These statues represent the King as sitting upon his throne, with the double crown of Egypt, red and white, upon his head. They also are hewn out of single blocks of stone, and when you look at the huge figures you wonder how human hands could ever get such stones out of the quarry, sculpture them, and set them up. Before one of the temples of Thebes still lie the broken fragments of a statue of Ramses II. When it was whole the statue must have been about 57 feet high, and the great block of granite must have weighed about 1,000 tons—the largest single stone that was ever handled by human beings. Plate 10 will give you some idea of what these huge statues looked like.

Fastened to the towers are four tall flagstaves—two on either side of the gate—and from them float gaily-coloured pennons. The walls of the towers are covered with pictures of the wars of the King. Here you see him charging in his chariot upon his fleeing enemies; here, again, he is seizing a group of captives by the hair, and raising his mace or his sword to kill them; but whatever he is doing, he is always gigantic, while his foes are mere helpless human beings. All these carvings are brilliantly painted, and the whole front of the building glows with colour; it is really a kind of pictorial history of the King's reign.

Now we stand in front of the gate. Its two leaves are made of cedar-wood brought from Lebanon; but you cannot see the wood at all, for it is overlaid with plates of silver chased with beautiful designs. Passing through the gateway, we find ourselves in a broad open court. All round it runs a kind of cloister, whose roof is supported upon tall pillars, their capitals carved to represent the curving leaves of the palm-tree. In the middle of the court there stands a tall pillar of stone, inscribed with the story of the great deeds of Pharaoh, and his gifts to the god of the temple. It is inlaid with turquoise, malachite, and lapis-lazuli, and sparkles with precious stones.

At the farther side of this court, another pair of towers and another gateway lead you into the second court. Here we pass at once out of brilliant sunlight into semi-darkness; for this court is entirely roofed over, and no light enters it except from the doorway and from grated slits in the roof. Look around you, and you will see the biggest single chamber that was ever built by the hands of man. Down the centre run two lines of gigantic pillars which hold up the roof, and form the nave of the hall; and beyond these on either side are the aisles, whose roofs are supported by a perfect forest of smaller columns.

Look up to the twelve great pillars of the nave. They soar above your head, seventy feet into the air, their capitals bending outwards in the shape of open flowers. On each capital a hundred men could stand safely; and the great stone roofing beams that stretch from pillar to pillar weigh a hundred tons apiece. How were they ever brought to the place? And, still more, how were they ever swung up to that dizzy height, and laid in their places? Each of the great columns is sculptured with figures and gaily painted, and the surrounding walls of the hall are all decorated in the same way. But when you look at the pictures, you find that it is no longer the wars of the King that are represented. The inside of the temple is too holy for such things. Instead, you have pictures of the gods, and of the King making all kinds of offerings to them; and these pictures are repeated again and again, with endless inscriptions, telling of the great gifts which Pharaoh has given to the temple.

Finally we pass into the Holy of Holies. Here no light of day ever enters at all. The chamber, smaller and lower than either of the others, is in darkness except for the dim light of the lamp carried by the attendant priest. Here stands the shrine, a great block of granite, hewn into a dwelling-place for the figure of the god. It is closed with cedar doors covered with gold plates, and the doors are sealed; but if we could persuade the priest to let us look within, we should see a small wooden figure something like the one that we saw carried through the streets of Thebes, dressed and painted, and surrounded by offerings of meat, drink, and flowers. For this little figure all the glories that we have passed through have been created: an army of priests attends upon it day by day, dresses and paints it, spreads food before it, offers sacrifices and sings hymns in its praise.

Behind the sanctuary lie storehouses, which hold corn and fruits and wines enough to supply a city in time of siege. The god is a great proprietor, holding more land than any of the nobles of the country. He has a revenue almost as great as that of Pharaoh himself. He has troops of his own, an army which obeys no orders but his. On the Red Sea he has one fleet, bringing to his temple the spices and incense of the Southland; and from the Nile mouths another fleet sails to bring home cedar-wood from Lebanon, and costly stuffs from Tyre. His priests have far more power than the greatest barons of the land, and Pharaoh, mighty as he is, would think twice before offending a band of men whose hatred could shake him on his throne. Such was an Egyptian temple 3,000 years ago, when Egypt was the greatest power in the world.

But if the temples of ancient Egypt are wonderful, the tombs are almost more wonderful still. Very early in their history the Egyptians began to show their sense of the importance of the life after death by raising huge buildings to hold the bodies of their great men. Even the earliest Kings, who lived before there was any history at all, had great underground chambers scooped out and furnished with all sorts of things for their use in the after-life. But it is when we come to that King Khufu, who figures in the fairy-stories of Zazamankh and Dedi, that we begin to understand what a wonderful thing an Egyptian tomb might be.

Not very far from Cairo, the modern capital of Egypt, a line of strange, pointed buildings rises against the sky on the edge of the desert. These are the Pyramids, the tombs of the great Kings of Egypt in early days, and if we want to know what Egyptian builders could do 4,000 years before Christ, we must look at them. Take the largest of them, the Great Pyramid, called the Pyramid of Cheops. Cheops is really Khufu, the King who was so much put out by Dedi's prophecy about Rud-didet's three babies. No such building was ever reared either before or since. It stands, even now, 450 feet in height, and before the peak was destroyed, it was about 30 feet higher. Each of its four sides measures over 750 feet in length, and it covers more than twelve acres of ground, the size of a pretty large field. But you will get the best idea of how tremendous a building it is when I tell you that if you used it as a quarry, you could build a town, big enough to hold all the people of Aberdeen, out of the Great Pyramid; or if you broke up the stones of which it is built, and laid them in a line a foot broad and a foot deep, the line would reach a good deal more than halfway round the world at the Equator. You would have some trouble in breaking up the stones, however; for many of the great blocks weigh from 40 to 50 tons apiece, and they are so beautifully fitted to one another that you could not get the edge of a sheet of paper into the joints!

Inside this great mountain of stone there are long passages leading to two small rooms in the centre of the Pyramid; and in one of these rooms, called "the King's Chamber," the body of the greatest builder the world has ever seen was laid in its stone coffin. Then the passages were closed with heavy plug-blocks of stone, so that no one should ever disturb the sleep of King Khufu. But, in spite of all precautions, robbers mined their way into the Pyramid ages ago, plundered the coffin, and scattered to the winds the remains of the King, so that, as Byron says, "Not a pinch of dust remains of Cheops."

The other pyramids are smaller, though, if the Great Pyramid had not been built, the Second and Third would have been counted world's wonders. Near the Second Pyramid sits the Great Sphinx. It is a huge statue, human-headed and lion-bodied, carved out of limestone rock. Who carved it, or whose face it bears, we do not certainly know; but there the great figure crouches, as it has crouched for countless ages, keeping watch and ward over the empty tombs where the Pharaohs of Egypt once slept, its head towering seventy feet into the air, its vast limbs and body stretching for two hundred feet along the sand, the strangest and most wonderful monument ever hewn by the hands of man (Plate 11).

Later on in Egyptian history the Kings and great folk grew tired of building pyramids, and the fashion changed. Instead of raising huge structures above ground, they began to hew out caverns in the rocks in which to lay their dead. Round about Thebes, the rocks on the western side of the Nile are honeycombed with these strange houses of the departed. Their walls, in many cases, are decorated with bright and cheerful pictures, showing scenes of the life which the dead man lived on earth. There he stands, or sits, placid and happy, with his wife beside him, while all around him his servants go about their usual work. They plough and hoe, sow and reap; they gather the grapes from the vines and put them into the winepress; or they bring the first-fruits of the earth to present them before their master (Plate 15). In other pictures you see the great man going out to his amusements, fishing, hunting, or fowling; or you are taken into the town, and see the tradesmen working, and the merchants, and townsfolk buying and selling in the bazaars. In fact, the whole of life in Ancient Egypt passes before your eyes as you go from chamber to chamber, and it is from these old tomb-pictures that we have learned the most of what we know of how people lived and worked in those long-past days.

In one wild rocky glen, called the "Valley of the Kings," nearly all the later Pharaohs were buried, and to-day their tombs are one of the sights of Thebes. Let us look at the finest of them—the tomb of Sety I., the father of that Ramses II. of whom we have heard so much. Entering the dark doorway in the cliff, you descend through passage after passage and hall after hall, until at last you reach the fourteenth chamber, "the gold house of Osiris," 470 feet from the entrance, where the great King was laid in his magnificent alabaster coffin. The walls and pillars of each chamber are wonderfully carved and painted. The pillars show pictures of the King making offerings to the gods, or being welcomed by them, but the pictures on the walls are very strange and weird. They represent the voyage of the sun through the realms of the under-world, and all the dangers and difficulties which the soul of the dead man has to encounter as he accompanies the sun-bark on its journey. Serpents, bats, and crocodiles, spitting fire, or armed with spears, pursue the wicked. The unfortunates who fall into their power are tortured in all kinds of horrible ways; their hearts are torn out; their heads are cut off; they are boiled in caldrons, or hung head downwards over lakes of fire. Gradually the soul passes through all these dangers into the brighter scenes of the Fields of the Blessed, where the justified sow and reap and are happy. Finally, the King arrives, purified, at the end of his long journey, and is welcomed by the gods into the Abode of the Blessed, where he, too, dwells as a god in everlasting life.

Plate 15

WALL-PICTURES IN A THEBAN TOMB. Pages 80, 81

The beautiful alabaster coffin in which the mummy of King Sety was laid is now in the Soane Museum, London. When it was discovered, nearly a century ago, it was empty, and it was not till 1872 that some modern tomb-robbers found the body of the King, along with other royal mummies, hidden away in a deep pit among the cliffs. Now it lies in the museum at Cairo, and you can see the face of this great King, its fine, proud features not so very much changed, we can well believe, from what they were when he reigned 3,200 years ago. In the same museum you can look upon the faces of Tahutmes III., the greatest soldier of Egypt; of Ramses II., the oppressor of the Israelites; and, perhaps most interesting of all, of Merenptah, the Pharaoh who hardened his heart when Moses pled with him to let the Hebrews go, and whose picked troops were drowned in the Red Sea as they pursued their escaping slaves.

It is very strange to think that one can see the actual features and forms on which the heroes of our Bible story looked in life. The reason of such a thing is that the Egyptians believed that when a man died, his soul, which passed to the life beyond, loved to return to its old home on earth, and find again the body in which it once dwelt; and even, perhaps, that the soul's existence in the other world depended in some way on the preservation of the body. So they made the bodies of their dead friends into what we call "mummies," steeping them for many days in pitch and spices till they were embalmed, and then wrapping them round in fold upon fold of fine linen. So they have endured all these hundreds of years, to be stored at last in a museum, and gazed upon by people who live in lands which were savage wildernesses when Egypt was a great and mighty Empire.

CHAPTER XIII

AN EGYPTIAN'S HEAVEN

In this chapter I want to tell you a little about what the Egyptians thought of heaven—what it was, where it was, how people got there after death, and what kind of a life they lived when they were there. They had some very quaint and curious ideas about the heavens themselves. They believed, for instance, that the blue sky overhead was something like a great iron plate spread over the world, and supported at the four corners, north, south, east, and west, by high mountains. The stars were like little lamps, which hung down from this plate. Right round the world ran a great celestial river, and on this river the sun sailed day after day in his bark, giving light to the world. You could only see him as he passed round from the east by the south to the west, for after that the river ran behind high mountains, and the sun passed out of sight to sail through the world of darkness.

Behind the sun, and appearing after he had vanished, came the moon, sailing in its own bark. It was protected by two guardian eyes, which watched always over it (Plate 13), and it needed the protection, for every month it was attacked by a great enemy in the form of a sow. For a fortnight the moon sailed on safely, and grew fuller and rounder; but at the middle of the month, just when it was full, the sow attacked it, tore it out of its place, and flung it into the celestial river, where for another fortnight it was gradually extinguished, to be revived again at the beginning of the next month. That was the Egyptians' curious way of accounting for the waxing and waning of the moon, and many of their other ideas were just as quaint as this.

I do not mean to say anything of what they believed about God, for they had so many gods, and believed such strange things about them, that it would only confuse you if I tried to make you understand it all. But the most important thing in all the Egyptian religion was the belief in heaven, and in the life which people lived there after their life on earth was ended. No other nation of these old times ever believed so firmly as did the Egyptians that men were immortal, and did not cease to be when they died, but only began a new life, which might be either happy or miserable, according to the way in which they had lived on earth.

They had a lot of different beliefs about the life after death, some of them rather confusing, and difficult to understand; but I shall tell you only the main things and the simplest things which they believed. They said, then, that very long ago, when the world was young, there was a great and good King called Osiris, who reigned over Egypt, and was very good to his subjects, teaching them all kinds of useful knowledge. But Osiris had a wicked brother named Set, who hated him, and was jealous of him. One day Set invited Osiris to a supper, at which he had gathered a number of his friends who were in the plot with him. When they were all feasting gaily, he produced a beautiful chest, and offered to give it to the man who fitted it. One after another they lay down in the chest, but it fitted none of them. Then at last Osiris lay down in it, and as soon as he was inside, his wicked brother and the other plotters fastened the lid down upon him, and threw the chest into the Nile. It was carried away by the river, and at last was washed ashore, with the dead body of the good King still in it.

But Isis, wife of Osiris, sought for her husband everywhere, and at last she found the chest with his body. While she was weeping over it the wicked Set came upon her, tore his brother's body to pieces, and scattered the fragments far and wide; but the faithful Isis traced them all, and buried them wherever she found them.

Now, Isis had a son named Horus, and when he grew to manhood he challenged Set, fought with him, and defeated him. Then the gods all assembled, and gave judgment that Osiris was in the right, and Set in the wrong. They raised Osiris up from the dead, made him a god, and appointed him to be judge of all men after death. And then, not all at once, but gradually, the Egyptians came to believe that because Osiris died, and rose again from the dead, and lived for ever after death, therefore all those men who believed in Osiris would live again after death, and dwell for ever with Osiris. You see that in some respects the story is strangely like that of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Well, then, they supposed that, when a man died on earth, after his body was mummified and laid in its tomb, his soul went on to the gates of the palace of Osiris in the other world, where was the Hall of Truth, in which souls were judged. The soul had to know the magic names of the gates before it could even enter the Hall; but as soon as these names were spoken the gates opened, and the soul went in. Within the Hall there stood a great pair of scales, and beside the scales stood a god, ready to mark down the result of the judgment; while all round the Hall sat forty-two terrible creatures, who had authority to punish particular sins.

The soul had to make confession to these avengers of sin that he had not been guilty of the sins which they had power to punish; then, when he had made his confession, his heart was taken, and weighed in the scales against a feather, which was the Egyptian sign for truth. If it was not of the right weight, the man was false, and his heart was thrown to a dreadful monster, part crocodile, part hippopotamus, which sat behind the balances, and devoured the hearts of the unjust; but if it was right, then Horus, the son of Osiris, took the man by the hand, and led him into the presence of Osiris the Judge, and he was pronounced just, and admitted to heaven.

But what was heaven? Well, the Egyptians had several different ideas about it. One rather pretty one was that the souls which were pronounced just were taken up into the sky, and there became stars, shining down for ever upon the world. Another was that they were permitted to enter the boat, in which, as I told you, the sun sails round the world day by day, and to keep company with the sun on his unending voyage.

But the idea that most believed in and loved was that somewhere away in a mysterious land to the west, there lay a wonderful and beautiful country, called the Field of Bulrushes. There the corn grew three and a half yards high, and the ears of corn were a yard long. Through the fields ran lovely canals, full of fish, and bordered with reeds and bulrushes. When the soul had passed the Judgment Hall, it came, by strange, hard roads, and through great dangers, to this beautiful country. And there the dead man, dead now no more, but living for ever, spent his time in endless peace and happiness, sowing and reaping, paddling in his canoe along the canals, or resting and playing draughts in the evening under the sycamore-trees.

Now, I suppose that all this seemed quite a happy sort of heaven to most of the common people, who had been accustomed all their days to hard work and harder fare; but by-and-by the great nobles came to think that a heaven of this sort was not quite good enough for them. They had never done any work on earth; why should they have to do any in heaven? So they thought that they would find out a way of taking their slaves with them into the other world. I fancy that at first they actually tried to take them by killing the slaves at their master's grave. When the funeral of a great man took place, some of his servants would be killed beside the tomb, so that they might go with their lord into heaven, and work for him there, as they had worked for him on earth.

But the Egyptians were always a gentle, kind-hearted people, and they quickly grew disgusted with the idea of such cruelty, so they found another way out of the difficulty. They got numbers of little clay figures made in the form of servants—one with a hoe on his shoulder, another with a basket in his hand, and so on. They called these little figures "Answerers," and when a man was buried, they buried a lot of these clay servants along with him, so that, when he reached heaven, and was summoned to do work in the Field of Bulrushes, the Answerers would rise up and answer for him, and take the task off his shoulders.

So, along with the mummies of the dead Egyptians, there is often found quite a number of these tiny figures, all ready to make heaven easy for their master when he gets there. They have sometimes a little verse written upon them, to tell the Answerer what he has got to do in the other world. It runs like this:

"Oh, thou Answerer, when I am called, and when I am asked to do any kind of work that is done in heaven, and am required at any time to cause the field to flourish, or to convey the sand from east to west, thou shalt say, 'Here am I.'"

It all seems rather a curious idea of heaven, does it not? And most curious of all is the idea of dodging work in the other world by carrying a bundle of china dolls to heaven with you. But, even if we think that very ridiculous, we need not forget that the Egyptians had a wonderfully clear and sure grasp of the fact that it is a man's character in this world which will make him either happy or unhappy in the next, and that evil-doing, even if it escapes punishment in this life, is a thing that God will surely punish at last.

Remember that these men of old, wonderfully wise and strong as they were in many ways, were still the children of the time when the world was young; like children, forming many false and even ridiculous ideas about things they could not understand; like children, too, reaching out their groping hands through the darkness to a Father whose love they felt, though they could not explain His ways. We need not wonder if at times they made mistakes, and went far astray. We may wonder far more at the way in which He taught them so many true and noble things and thoughts, never leaving Himself without a witness even in those days of long ago.

The End