My Winter on the Nile

The habit of leisure is at least two thousand years old here; at any rate, we fell into it without the least desire to resist its spell. This is one of the eddies of the world in which the modern hurry is unfelt. If it were not for the coughing steamboats and the occasional glimpse one has of a whisking file of Cook’s tourists, Thebes would be entirely serene, and an admirable place of retirement.

It has a reputation, however, for a dubious sort of industry. All along the river from Geezeh to Assouan, whenever a spurious scarabæus or a bogus image turned up, we would hear, “Yes, make ‘em in Luxor.” As we drew near to this great mart of antiquities, the specification became more personal—“Can’t tell edzacly whether that make by Mr. Smith or by that Moslem in Goorneh, over the other side.”

The person named is well known to all Nile voyagers as Antiquity Smith, and he has, though I cannot say that he enjoys, the reputation hinted at above. How much of it is due to the enmity of rival dealers in relics of the dead, I do not know; but it must be evident to anyone that the very clever forgeries of antiquities, which one sees, could only be produced by skillful and practiced workmen. We had some curiosity to see a man who has made the American name so familiar the length of the Nile, for Mr. Smith is a citizen of the United States. For seventeen years he has been a voluntary exile here, and most of the time the only foreigner resident in the place; long enough to give him a good title to the occupation of any grotto he may choose.

In appearance Mr. Smith is somewhat like a superannuated agent of the tract society, of the long, thin, shrewd, learned Yankee type. Few men have enjoyed his advantages for sharpening the wits. Born in Connecticut, reared in New Jersey, trained for seventeen years among the Arabs and antiquity-mongers of this region, the sharpest in the Orient, he ought to have not only the learning attached to the best-wrapped mummy, but to be able to read the hieroglyphics on the most inscrutable human face among the living.

Mr. Smith lives on the outskirts of the village, in a house, surrounded by a garden, which is a kind of museum of the property, not to say the bones, of the early Egyptians.

“You seem to be retired from society here Mr. Smith,” we ventured to say.

“Yes, for eight months of the year, I see nobody, literally nobody. It is only during the winter that strangers come here.”

“Isn’t it lonesome?”

“A little, but you get used to it.”

“What do you do during the hottest months?”

“As near nothing as possible.”

“How hot is it?”

“Sometimes the thermometer goes to 120° Fahrenheit. It stays a long time at 100°. The worst of it is that the nights are almost as hot as the days.”

“How do you exist?”

“I keep very quiet, don’t write, don’t read anything that requires the least thought. Seldom go out, never in the daytime. In the early morning I sit a while on the verandah, and about ten o’clock get into a big bath-tub, which I have on the ground-floor, and stay in it nearly all day, reading some very mild novel, and smoking the weakest tobacco. In the evening I find it rather cooler outside the house than in. A white man can’t do anything here in the summer.”

I did not say it to Mr. Smith, but I should scarcely like to live in a country where one is obliged to be in water half the year, like a pelican. We can have, however, from his experience some idea what this basin must have been in summer, when its area was a crowded city, upon which the sun, reverberated from the incandescent limestone hills, beat in unceasing fervor.

CHAPTER XXIX.—THE FUTURE OF THE MUMMY’S SOUL

I SHOULD like to give you a conception, however faint, of the Tombs of the ancient Egyptians, for in them is to be found the innermost secret of the character, the belief, the immortal expectation of that accomplished and wise people. A barren description of these places of sepulchre would be of small service to you, for the key would be wanting, and you would be simply confused by a mass of details and measurements, which convey no definite idea to a person who does not see them with his own eyes. I should not indeed be warranted in attempting to say anything about these great Tombs at Thebes, which are so completely described in many learned volumes, did I not have the hope that some readers, who have never had access to the works referred to will be glad to know something of that which most engaged the educated Egyptian mind.

No doubt the most obvious and immediate interest of the Tombs of old Egypt, is in the sculptures that depict so minutely the life of the people, represent all their occupations and associations, are, in fact, their domestic and social history written in stone. But it is not of this that I wish to speak here; I want to write a word upon the tombs and what they contain, in their relation to the future life.

A study of the tombs of the different epochs, chronologically pursued, would show, I think, pretty accurately, the growth of the Egyptian theology, its development, or rather its departure from the primitive revelation of one God, into the monstrosities of its final mixture of coarse polytheistic idolatry and the vaguest pantheism. These two extremes are represented by the beautiful places of sepulchre of the fourth and fifth dynasties at Geezeh and Memphis, in which all the sculptures relate to the life of the deceased and no deities are represented; and the tombs of the twenty-fourth dynasty at Thebes which are so largely covered with the gods and symbols of a religion become wholly fantastic. It was in the twenty-sixth dynasty (just before the conquest of Egypt by the Persians) that the Funeral Ritual received its final revision and additions—the sacred chart of the dead which had grown, paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter, from its brief and simple form in the earliest times.

The Egyptians had a considerable, and also a rich literature, judging by the specimens of it preserved and by the value set upon it by classical writers; in which no department of writing was unrepresented. The works which would seem of most value to the Greeks were doubtless those on agriculture, astronomy, and geometry; the Egyptians wrote also on medicine, but the science was empirical then as it is now. They had an enormous bulk of historical literature, both in verse and prose, probably as semifabulous and voluminous as the thousand great volumes of Chinese history. They did not lack, either, in the department of belles lettres; there were poets, poor devils no doubt who were compelled to celebrate in grandiose strains achievements they did not believe; and essayists and letter-writers, graceful, philosophic, humorous. Nor was the field of fiction unoccupied; some of their lesser fables and romances have been preserved; they are however of a religious character, myths of doctrine, and it is safe to say different from our Sunday-School tales. The story of Cinderella was a religious myth. No one has yet been fortunate enough to find an Egyptian novel, and we may suppose that the quid-nunes, the critics of Thebes, were all the time calling upon the writers of that day to make an effort and produce The Great Egyptian Novel.

The most important part, however, of the literature of Egypt was the religious, and of that we have, in the Ritual or Book of the Dead, probably the most valuable portion. It will be necessary to refer to this more at length. A copy of the Funeral Ritual, or “The Book of the Manifestation to Light” as it was entitled, or some portion of it—probably according to the rank or wealth of the deceased, was deposited with every mummy. In this point of view, as this document was supposed to be of infinite service, a person’s wealth would aid him in the next world; but there came a point in the peregrination of every soul where absolute democracy was reached, and every man stood for judgment on his character. There was a foreshadowing of this even in the ceremonies of the burial. When the mummy, after the lapse of the seventy days of mourning, was taken by the friends to the sacred lake of the nome (district), across which it must be transported in the boat of Charon before it could be deposited in the tomb, it was subjected to an ordeal. Forty-two judges were assembled on the shore of the lake, and if anyone accused the deceased, and could prove that he led an evil life, he was denied burial. Even kings were subjected to this trial, and those who had been wicked, in the judgment of their people, were refused the honors of sepulchre. Cases were probably rare where one would dare to accuse even a dead Pharaoh.

Debts would sometimes keep a man out of his tomb, both because he was wrong in being in debt, and because his tomb was mortgaged. For it was permitted a man to mortgage not only his family tomb but the mummy of his father,—a kind of mortmain security that could not run away, but a ghastly pledge to hold. A man’s tomb, it would seem, was accounted his chief possession; as the one he was longest to use. It was prepared at an expense never squandered on his habitation in life.

You may see as many tombs as you like at Thebes, you may spend weeks underground roaming about in vast chambers or burrowing in zig-zag tunnels, until the upper-world shall seem to you only a passing show; but you will find little, here or elsewhere, after the Tombs of the Kings, to awaken your keenest interest; and the exploration of a very few of these will suffice to satisfy you. We visited these gigantic masoleums twice; it is not an easy trip to them, for they are situated in wild ravines or gorges that lie beyond the western mountains which circle the plain and ruins of Thebes. They can be reached by a footpath over the crest of the ridge behind Medeenet Haboo; the ancient and usual road to them is up a valley that opens from the north.

The first time we tried the footpath, riding over the blooming valley and leaving our donkeys at the foot of the ascent. I do not know how high this mountain backbone may be, but it is not a pleasant one to scale. The path winds, but it is steep; the sun blazes on it; every step is in pulverized limestone, that seems to have been calcined by the intense heat, and rises in irritating powder; the mountain-side is white, chalky, glaring, reflecting the solar rays with blinding brilliancy, and not a breath of air comes to temper the furnace temperature. On the summit however there was a delicious breeze, and we stood long looking over the great basin, upon the temples, the villages, the verdant areas of grain, the patches of desert, all harmonized by the wonderful light, and the purple eastern hills—a view unsurpassed. The descent to the other side was steeper than the ascent, and wound by precipices, on narrow ledges, round sharp turns, through jagged gorges, amid rocks striken with the ashy hue of death, into the bottoms of intersecting ravines, a region scarred, blasted, scorched, a grey Gehenna, more desolate than imagination ever conceived.

Another day we rode to it up the valley from the river, some three miles. It is a winding, narrow valley, little more than the bed of a torrent; but as we advanced windings became shorter, the sides higher, fantastic precipices of limestone frowned on us, and there was evidence of a made road and of rocks cut away to broaden it. The scene is wilder, more freakishly savage, as we go on, and knowing that it is a funereal way and that only, and that it leads to graves and to nothing else, our procession imperceptibly took on the sombre character of an expedition after death, relieved by I know not what that is droll in the impish forms of the crags, and the reaction of our natures against this unnecessary accumulation of grim desolation. The sun overhead was like a dish from which poured liquid heat, I could feel the waves, I thought I could see it running in streams down the crumbling ashy slopes; but it was not unendurable, for the air was pure and elastic and we had no sense of weariness; indeed, now and then a puff of desert air suddenly greeted us as we turned a corner. The slender strip of sky seen above the grey limestone was of astonishing depth and color—a purple, almost like a night sky, but of unimpeachable delicacy.

Up this strange road were borne in solemn state, as the author of Job may have seen, “the kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;” the journey was a fitting prelude to an entry into the depths of these frightful hills. It must have been an awful march, awful in its errand, awful in the desolation of the way: and, in the heat of summer, a mummy passing this way might have melted down in his cercueil before he could reach his cool retreat.

When we come to the end of the road, we see no tombs. There are paths winding in several directions, round projecting ridges and shoulders of powdered rock, but one might pass through here and not know he was in a cemetery. Above the rubbish here and there we see, when they are pointed out, holes in the rock. We climb one of these heaps, and behold the entrance, maybe half-filled up, of one of the great tombs. This entrance may have been laid open so as to disclose a portal cut in the face of the rock and a smoothed space in front. Originally the tomb was not only walled up and sealed, but rocks were tumbled down over it, so as to restore that spot in the hill to its natural appearance. The chief object of every tomb was to conceal the mummy from intrusion forever. All sorts of misleading devices were resorted to for this purpose.

Twenty-five tombs (of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties) have been opened in this locality, but some of them belonged to princes and other high functionaries; in a valley west of this are tombs of the eighteenth dynasty, and in still another gorge are the tombs of the queens. These tombs all differ in plan, in extent, in decoration; they are alike in not having, as many others elsewhere have, an exterior chamber where friends could assemble to mourn; you enter all these tombs by passing through an insignificant opening, by an inclined passage, directly into the heart of the mountain, and there they open into various halls chambers, and grottoes. One of them, that of Sethi I., into whose furthermost and most splendid halls Belzoni broke his way, extends horizontally four hundred and seventy feet into the hill, and descends to a depth of one hundred and eighty feet below the opening. The line of direction of the excavation is often changed, and the continuation skillfully masked, so that the explorer may be baffled. You come by several descents and passages, through grand chambers and halls, to a hall vast in size and magnificently decorated; here is a pit, here is the granite sarcophagus; here is the fitting resting-place of the royal mummy. But it never occupied this sarcophagus. Somewhere in this hall is a concealed passage. It was by breaking through a wall of solid masonry in such a room, smoothly stuccoed and elaborately painted with a continuation of the scenes on the side-walls, that Belzoni discovered the magnificent apartment beyond, and at last a chamber that was never finished, where one still sees the first draughts of the figures for sculpture on the wall, and gets an idea of the bold freedom of the old draughtsmen, in the long, graceful lines, made at a stroke by the Egyptian artists. Were these inner chambers so elaborately concealed, by walls and stucco and painting, after the royal mummy was somewhere hidden in them? Or was the mummy deposited in some obscure lateral pit, and was it the fancy of the king himself merely to make these splendid and highly decorated inner apartments private?

It is not uncommon to find rooms in the tombs unfinished. The excavation of the tomb was began when the king began to reign; it was a work of many years and might happen to be unfinished at his death. He might himself become so enamoured of his enterprise and his ideas might expand in regard to his requirements, as those of builders always do, that death would find him still excavating and decorating. I can imagine that if one thought he were building a house for eternity—or cycles beyond human computation,—he would, up to his last moment, desire to add to it new beauties and conveniences. And he must have had a certain humorous satisfaction in his architectural tricks, for putting posterity on a false scent about his remains.

It would not be in human nature to leave undisturbed tombs containing so much treasure as was buried with a rich or royal mummy. The Greeks walked through all these sepulchres; they had already been rifled by the Persians; it is not unlikely that some of them had been ransacked by Egyptians, who could appreciate jewelry and fine-work in gold as much as we do that found by M. Mariette on the cold person of Queen Aah-hotep. This dainty lady might have begun to flatter herself, having escaped through so many ages of pillage, that danger was over, but she had not counted upon there coming an age of science. It is believed that she was the mother of Amosis, who expelled the Shepherds, and the wife of Kamés, who long ago went to his elements. After a repose here at Thebes, not far from the temple of Koorneh, of about thirty-five hundred years, Science one day cried,—“Aah-hotep of Drah-Aboo-l-neggah! we want you for an Exposition of the industries of all nations at Paris; put on your best things and come forth.”

I suppose that there is no one living who would not like to be the first to break into an Egyptian tomb (and there are doubtless still some undisturbed in this valley), to look upon its glowing paintings before the air had impaired a tint, and to discover a sweet and sleeping princess, simply encrusted in gems, and cunning work in gold, of priceless value—in order that he might add something to our knowledge of ancient art!

But the government prohibits all excavations by private persons. You are permitted, indeed, to go to the common pits and carry off an armful of mummies, if you like; but there is no pleasure in the disturbance of this sort of mummy; he may perhaps be a late Roman; he has no history, no real antiquity, and probably not a scarabæus of any value about him.

When we pass out of the glare of the sun and descend the incline down which the mummy went, we feel as if we had begun his awful journey. On the walls are sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of the dead, the grotesque monsters of the under-world, which will meet him and assail him on his pilgrimage, the deities friendly and unfriendly, the tremendous scenes of cycles of transmigration. Other sculptures there are; to be sure, and in some tombs these latter predominate, in which astronomy, agriculture, and domestic life are depicted. In one chamber are exhibited trades, in another the kitchen, in another arms, in another the gay boats and navigation of the Nile, in another all the vanities of elegant house-furniture. But all these only emphasize the fact that we are passing into another world, and one of the grimmest realities. We come at length, whatever other wonders or beauties may detain us, to the king, the royal mummy, in the presence of the deities, standing before Osiris, Athor, Phtah, Isis, Horus, Anubis, and Nofre-Atmoo.

Somewhere in this vast and dark mausoleum the mummy has been deposited; he has with him the roll of the Funeral Ritual; the sacred scarabæus is on his breast; in one chamber bread and wine are set out; his bearers withdraw, the tomb is closed, sealed, all trace of its entrance effaced. The mummy begins his pilgrimage.

The Ritual[4 - Lenormant’s Epitome.] describes all the series of pilgrimages of the soul in the lower-world; it contains the hymns, prayers, and formula for all funeral ceremonies and the worship of the dead; it embodies the philosophy and religion of Egypt; the basis of it is the immortality of the soul, that is of the souls of the justified, but a clear notion of the soul’s personality apart from the body it does not give.

The book opens with a grand dialogue, at the moment of death, in which the deceased, invoking the god of the lower-world, asks entrance to his domain; a chorus of glorified souls interposes for him; the priest implores the divine clemency; Osiris responds, granting permission, and the soul enters Kar-Neter, the land of the dead; and then renews his invocations. Upon his entry he is dazzled by the splendor of the sun (which is Osiris) in this subterranean region, and sings to it a magnificent hymn.

The second part traces the journeys of the soul. Without knowledge, he would fail, and finally be rejected at the tribunal.

Knowledge is in Egyptian sbo, that is, “food in plenty,” knowledge and food are identified in the Ritual; “the knowledge of religious truths is the mysterious nourishment that the soul must carry with it to sustain it in its journeys and trials.” This necessary preliminary knowledge is found in the statement of the Egyptian faith in the Ritual; other information is given him from time to time on his journey. But although his body is wrapped up, and his soul instructed, he cannot move, he has not the use of his limbs; and he prays to be restored to his faculties that he may be able to walk, speak, eat, fight; the prayer granted, he holds his scarabæus over his head, as a passport, and enters Hades.

His way is at once beset by formidable obstacles; monsters, servants of Typhon, assail him; slimy reptiles, crocodiles, serpents seek to devour him; he begins a series of desperate combats, in which the hero and his enemies hurl long and insulting speeches at each other. Out of these combats he comes victorious, and sings songs of triumph; and after rest and refreshment from the Tree of Life, given him by the goddess Nu, he begins a dialogue with the personification of the divine Light, who instructs him, explaining the sublime mysteries of nature. Guided by this new Light, he advances, and enters into a series of transformations, identifying himself with the noblest divine symbols: he becomes a hawk, an angel, a lotus, the god Ptah, a heron, etc.

Up to this time the deceased has been only a shade, an eidolon, the simulacrum of the appearance of his body. He now takes his body, which is needed for the rest of the journey; it was necessary therefore that it should be perfectly preserved by the embalming process. He goes on to new trials and dangers, to new knowledge, to severer examinations of his competence: he shuns wiles and delusions; he sails down a subterranean river and comes to the Elysian Fields, in fact, to a reproduction of Egypt with its camels and its industries, when the soul engages in agriculture, sowing and reaping divine fruit for the bread of knowledge which he needs now more than ever.

At length he comes to the last and severest trial, to the judgment-hall where Osiris awaits him, seated on his throne, accompanied by the forty-two assessors of the dead. Here his knowledge is put to the test; here he must give an account of his whole life. He goes on to justify himself by declaring at first, negatively, the crimes that he has not committed. “I have not blasphemed,” he says in the Ritual; “I have not stolen; I have not smitten men privily; I have not treated any person with cruelty; I have not stirred up trouble; I have not been idle; I have not been intoxicated; I have not made unjust commandmants; I have shown no improper curiosity; I have not allowed my mouth to tell secrets; I have not wounded anyone; I have not put anyone in fear; I have not slandered anyone; I have not let envy gnaw my heart; I have spoken evil neither of the king nor of my father; I have not falsely accused anyone; I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings; I have not practiced any shameful crime; I have not calumniated a slave to his master.”

The deceased then speaks of the good he has done in his lifetime; and the positive declarations rise to a higher morality than the negative; among them is this wonderful sentence:—“I have given food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked.”

The heart of the deceased, who is now called Osiris, is then weighed in the balance against “truth,” and (if he is just) is not found wanting; the forty-two assessors decide that his knowledge is sufficient, the god Osiris gives sentence of justification, Thoth (the Hermes of the Greeks, the conductor of souls, the scribe of Osiris, and also the personification of literature or letters) records it, and the soul enters into bliss.

In a chamber at Dayr el Medeeneh you may see this judgment-scene. Osiris is seated on his throne waiting the introduction of souls into Amenti; the child Harpocrates, with his finger on his lip, sits upon his crook; behind are the forty-two assessors. The deceased humbly approaches; Thoth presents his good deeds written upon papyrus; they are weighed in the balance against an ostrich-feather, the symbol of truth; on the beam sits a monkey, the emblem of Thoth.

The same conceit of weighing the soul in judgment-scenes was common to the mediaeval church; it is very quaintly represented in a fresco in the porch of the church of St. Lawrence at Rome.

Sometimes the balance tipped the wrong way; in the tomb of Rameses VI. is sculptured a wicked soul, unjustified, retiring from the presence of Osiris in the ignoble form of a pig.

The justified soul retired into bliss. What was this bliss? The third part of the Ritual is obscure. The deceased is Osiris, identified with the sun, traversing with him, and as him, the various houses of heaven; afterwards he seems to pass into an identification with all the deities of the pantheon. This is a poetical flight. The justified soul was absorbed into the intelligence from which it emanated. For the wicked, there was annihilation; they were destroyed, decapitated by the evil powers. In these tombs you will see pictures of beheadings at the block, of dismembered bodies.

It would seem that in some cases the souls of the wicked returned to the earth and entered unclean animals. We always had a suspicion, a mere idle fancy, that the chameleon, which we had on our boat, which had a knowing and wicked eye, had been somebody.

The visitor’s first astonishment here is to find such vast and rich tombs, underground temples in fact, in a region so unutterably desolate, remote from men, to be reached only by a painful pilgrimage. He is bewildered by the variety and beauty of the decorations, the grace and freedom of art, the minute finish of birds and flowers, the immortal loveliness of faces here and there; and he cannot understand that all this was not made for exhibition, that it was never intended to be seen, that it was not seen except by the workmen and the funeral attendants, and that it was then sealed away from human eyes forever. Think of the years of labor expended, the treasure lavished in all this gorgeous creation, which was not for men to see! Has human nature changed? Expensive monuments and mausoleums are built now as they have been in all the Christian era; but they are never concealed from the public view. I cannot account for these extraordinary excavations, not even for one at the Assaseef, which extends over an acre and a quarter of ground, upon an ostentation of wealth, for they were all closed from inspection, and the very entrances masked. The builders must have believed in the mysteries of the under-world, or they would not have expended so much in enduring representations of them; they must have believed also that the soul had need of such a royal abode. Did they have the thought that money lavished in this pious labor would benefit the soul, as much as now-a-days legacies bequeathed to missions and charities?