CHAPTER IV

THE PYRAMIDS AND THEIR EXPLORERS

Of all the works of man there is none which has attained such lasting and universal fame as the group of buildings known as the Pyramids of Gizeh. For the best part of five thousand years this group of mighty structures has been one of the wonders of the world, and the theories which have been framed to account for their existence have been more numerous than the Pyramids themselves. Egypt has many buildings far more beautiful, and perhaps as wonderful; but the Pyramids are, to the great majority of people, the characteristic buildings of the land, and whenever Egypt is named there rises before the mind at once a vision of three vast bulks of masonry squatting defiantly on the rising ground above the Libyan desert, as though challenging Time himself to make any impression on their stupendous mass. “All things dread Time,” it has been said, “but Time itself dreads the Pyramids”; and the very exaggeration testifies to the profound impression which their bulk and strength have made upon the mind of man. The mere lapse of forty-five centuries would seemingly of itself have made next to no impression on them; the vandalism of man has done a little more; but even the efforts of those who for many centuries have used the vast masses as a convenient quarry have done little more than show more convincingly the power and skill of the builders who reared in the beginning these huge mausoleums around whose bases the workers of succeeding generations have pottered and scratched like children playing with toy spades in the sand.

Yet though the Pyramids may fairly claim to be the most famous and the best-known buildings in the world, the ignorance in the average mind with regard to them and the purpose for which they were reared is still just about as general and widespread as the fame of them; and the purpose of this chapter is, first, to tell what, and how many, and of what kind they are; next, what was the end for which they were reared in the beginning of history; and lastly, to recount something of the efforts which have taught us what is really known about them.

To most people the Pyramids mean solely the great group at Gizeh; but though these are by far the greatest and the most famous, they are by no means the only pyramids, nor are they even the oldest. The chief field, known as the Great Pyramid Field, begins almost opposite Cairo, on the western side of the Nile, at Abu Roash, where is the pyramid of Dadefra (Razedef) of the IVth Dynasty, and extends south along the bank of the Nile for a distance of about sixty miles to the Fayum, where lie the pyramids of the great XIIth Dynasty Pharaohs, the last of the regular kings of Egypt to build pyramids for themselves. Far to the south again in the country which we know as the Soudan, there lie two other pyramid fields, the one at Gebel Barkal or Napata, near to the Fourth Cataract, the other at Begarawiyah, the ancient Meroë, between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and a little more than a hundred miles north of Khartoum. These two fields have neither the greatness of scale nor the historic importance and interest of the Great Pyramid Field, for they belong to the Ethiopian kings, some of whom, for a time, reigned over Egypt in the days of its decline. The Napata group belongs to the earlier Ethiopian monarchs, who founded the XXVth Egyptian Dynasty, which was finally driven out of Egypt by the Assyrians in the reign of Tanutamen, and to their successors, who after the disasters of 661 B.C. maintained the old Ethiopian sovereignty in the south; the Meroë group belongs to the later Ethiopian kings who reigned after 300 B.C. As things go in Egypt, therefore, these southern pyramids are quite modern, nor do they belong to the most interesting period of Egyptian history, and though they have been long known, they are only now in process of being investigated by the Harvard-Boston Expedition under G. A. Reisner, whose work at Begarawiyah is still unfinished. Our attention, therefore, may be given solely to the Great Pyramid Field.

Beginning with Abu Roash, the next site of importance is Gizeh itself, with all its wonders of IVth Dynasty work. Passing southwards, we come to Abusir, with its remains of the pyramids and temples of the Sun-worshipping Pharaohs of the Vth Dynasty, lately excavated by the German expedition; beyond these again comes the great field of Saqqara, with remains dating over a long period of Egyptian history. The Step-Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd Dynasty is, of course, the most important and imposing monument; but besides, there are pyramids dating from the latter part of the Vth Dynasty, a number of VIth Dynasty ones, and the splendid tombs of many of the nobles of the early dynastic period, so that, though the Saqqara portion of the field cannot compare with Gizeh in the size of its monuments, it is only second to its northern rival, and surpasses it in the variety and the pictorial interest of its minor tombs. Still travelling southwards, we pass in succession Dahshur and Lisht with their pyramids of the great Pharaohs of the XIIth Dynasty, Medum, with its remarkable pyramid of King Seneferu of the IIIrd Dynasty, rising in three stages, like a Mesopotamian Ziggurat, to a height of 114 feet, and Illahun, where Senusert II had his pyramid, and where the exquisite jewellery of some of the royal princesses was found recently, and reach the last of the series at Hawara, where Amenemhat III, one of the greatest and noblest of the long line of Egyptian Pharaohs, had his last resting-place. In later days there were pyramid tombs at Thebes and Abydos; but the pyramid part of these structures was comparatively unimportant, and they have, in any case, left few traces behind. Indeed, after the XIIth Dynasty the fashion of pyramid-burial seems to have gradually died out, though we know from the revelations of the Abbott Papyrus that in the XXth Dynasty there were in the Theban necropolis at least ten royal pyramids belonging to kings of the XIIIth to the XVIIIth Dynasty. Altogether there must be at present in Egypt something like seventy pyramids of greater or less importance, without reckoning the later and less important groups of Napata and Meroë.

Passing by the Abu Roash pyramid of King Razedef, we begin our survey with the magnificent group of Gizeh, which to the ordinary man are the Pyramids to the exclusion of all others. Everyone knows, of course, what the Pyramids are like, and has some rough idea of their surpassing size, and perhaps the only way to impress the sense of their vastness on the mind is to use one or other of the comparisons which have been worked out to illustrate the stupendous scale on which they are built. To tell the reader that the weight of the stones built into the Great Pyramid is over six million tons is merely to bewilder him; the vastness of the business may be better appreciated when one realises that a town of the size of Aberdeen might be built out of the materials which Khufu gathered together for his monstrous tomb, or that if the stones were divided into blocks a foot square, and these blocks placed end to end in a straight line, the line would be long enough to reach two-thirds of the length of the circumference of the earth at the Equator.

[Illustration: 6. GREAT PYRAMID AND SPHINX, WITH PART OF TEMPLE OF THE SPHINX.]

Khufu’s pyramid was originally about 481 feet in height, and each of its sides measured at the base a matter of 755 feet 8 inches, and these long lines were laid out and built with such wonderful accuracy that the maximum error is not more than an inch. “The laying out of the base of the Great Pyramid of Khufu,” says Professor Sir W. M. F. Petrie, “is a triumph of skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be covered by placing one’s thumb on them; and to lay out a square of more than a furlong in the side (and with rock in the midst of it, which prevented any diagonal checks being measured) with such accuracy shows surprising care. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the same class; the faces are so straight and so truly square, that when the stones were built together the film of mortar left between them is on an average not thicker than one’s thumb-nail, though the joint is a couple of yards long; and the levelling of them over long distances has not any larger errors.” “Equal to optician’s work of the present day,” says the same authority elsewhere, “but on a scale of acres instead of feet or yards of material.”

The Second Pyramid is slightly inferior to the first in size, its measurements being 472 feet in height and 706 feet 3 inches on each side; and its workmanship is also of inferior accuracy, the errors in length being double, and those of angle quadruple those of its predecessor, while the masonry is of poorer quality. Curiously enough, the sarcophagus, the core of the whole vast building, was in the case of the Great Pyramid one of the poorest pieces of work of its kind in the period, and much inferior to that of Khafra in the Second Pyramid. Spite of its smaller size, which most travellers scarcely notice owing to the fact of its somewhat superior position, and its inferior workmanship, the Second Pyramid is itself a world’s wonder.

Beside these great twin brethren, Menkaura’s Third Pyramid, with its 215 feet of height and its length on the side of 346 feet 2 inches, seems diminutive, though its partial outer casing of granite may have given it a richness of appearance which to some extent compensated for its smallness.

Here, then, we have a group of buildings which, from whatever point of view they are regarded, are among the most wonderful ever reared by the hand of man, and which in sheer bulk are by far the greatest of all architectural works. What was the purpose for which these stupendous bulks were built and maintained for so long? To ask such a question was, not so long ago, to let loose all the flood of vain imaginations which always gathers about a subject which is great and imperfectly understood.

The theories which have been framed about the Great Pyramid in particular are almost as monstrous as itself, but have none of its solidity. Of these, perhaps the favourite, because of a certain romance attaching to it, and because of the reputation of some of those who have supported it, is, or rather one should say, was, that it was designed for an astronomical observatory. R. A. Proctor, to whose advocacy the idea owes a great deal of what vogue it had, has told us that the entrance passage is so placed that at the date which he assumes for the erection of the pyramid (3400 B.C.) it bore directly on the then Pole-Star, Thuban, or Theta Draconis, when the star was on the meridian below the pole, and further, that the great gallery which leads up to the King’s Chamber was designed to serve the purpose of a great transit instrument, through whose open upper end the transits of stars could be observed by astronomers occupying seats on cross-benches laid across the gallery at different levels! Still wilder are the fancies which would have us see in the measurements of the Great Pyramid divinely inspired revelations as to units of length, capacity, and so forth, and which gravely inform us that the granite sarcophagus of Khufu is really a standard measure of capacity, of which our British quarter is a fourth part. It seems rather a pity in view of this wonderful theory that Professor Petrie should have just told us of the inferiority of Khufu’s sarcophagus in accuracy to that of Khafra, as such a fact tends to disturb the mind as to the truth of our own measures; but it is a sufficient indication of the flimsy nature of the foundations on which all these theories rest.

The fact is that no evidence worth consideration has been brought forward in support of any of them, and in especial that the idea of the great gallery having been a gigantic transit instrument (surely the most cumbrous and inefficient ever designed) is absolutely negatived by the knowledge which we possess of the object with which the whole building was constructed--an object whose all-important condition was absolute secrecy and concealment. To dream that Khufu built a pyramid to secure his body from discovery and destruction, and then allowed its passages to remain open to the sky for years that astronomers might observe the stars, and tomb-robbers the plan of the pyramid, is to put a fool’s cap on the whole business. The Great Pyramid, like all the other pyramids, great and small, was none of the extraordinary things which we have been told it was; it was something simpler and more wonderful than any of them--the greatest witness ever given on earth to the human craving for immortality!

There is no longer any doubt that all the pyramids, from the first imperfect conception of the form in the Step-Pyramid of Saqqara, through the giants of Gizeh, down to the crumbling heaps of brickwork which are all that remain of some of the later fabrics, were built simply and solely as tombs, and that their one object was to render the resting-place of their royal tenant as secure as precautions could make it from the attacks of dynastic enemies or mere robbers.

The pyramid was just one pathetic expression of that marvellously persistent passion which gave us the tomb-chambers of Abydos, with their storerooms for the supply of the dead king’s wants in the Underworld, the Mummy with all its wonderful elaboration of means for preserving the shape and likeness of the dead man, the Funerary Statue, with its amazingly lifelike portrait of the man whose place it was designed to take when time had reduced the mummy to dust, and the soul still craved a recognisable dwelling-place, and the long, rock-hewn galleries of the Valley of the Kings, with their pictured representations of all that could help their owner through the dangers and difficulties of the long journey to the Egyptian Fields of Contentment.

No race has ever been so possessed by any religious idea as was the ancient Egyptian by the faith that it was possible to secure immortal life for humanity beyond the gates of death, possible, but difficult to the last degree, and needing all the effort which could be given to secure so great and so difficult an end; and the Great Pyramid is just the most colossal seal ever put on that creed, expressing, as nothing else ever could, both the intensity of the conviction and the consciousness of the extreme difficulty of its attainment in actual fact. The Egyptian Pharaoh built his pyramid as the expression of his faith in life everlasting; he built it as huge and as massy as he could, as the expression of his consciousness of the numberless difficulties and dangers which compassed the road which led to the attainment of immortality, and of his determination that, so far as human effort could secure it, he would be secured against everything which might prejudice his chance of winning eternity.

The Pyramid, then, is a tomb, or rather it is the sole surviving part of the elaborate and complicated structure which the Egyptians of the Pyramid period devised for the accomplishment of this end of securing the duration of the personality of its owner. For what we see now at Gizeh and elsewhere is by no means what the Egyptians of the early dynasties saw when they looked upon the “eternal dwelling-places” of their great kings, but only a fragment, which by reason of its massiveness, and especially of its form, has survived while the rest of the fabric has perished. The complete pyramid-complex was a development of the normal Egyptian arrangement of tomb-chamber and tomb-chapel. Each Egyptian of any rank or pretensions was buried in a chamber, generally underground, which contained his coffin of stone or wood; but he had also another chamber above ground, where the necessary rites might be observed at the stated times, and the daily offerings of food and drink made for his use in the other world by his relations or by the priests who were appointed for this purpose. These two chambers were combined in the “mastabas” of the Old Kingdom nobles, with their shafts and their chapels. The pyramid took the place of the mastaba, and as it developed, the chapel, instead of being within the same mass of building as the tomb-chamber, was built outside, at the foot of the great structure which protected the mummy of the king, as was fondly hoped, from sacrilegious attack. This pyramid-temple lay at the east side of the pyramid, and in close connection with it. But the pyramids were situated on rising ground, generally at a considerable distance from the cultivated land, and it was therefore necessary to arrange for a convenient approach to them, instead of allowing the priests or the royal relatives to scramble over the rough ground. Accordingly a secondary temple, or portico, was built down on the level of the cultivated land in a position where it could be approached by boats during the inundation; and from this portico-temple a covered causeway led up to the temple proper at the foot of the pyramid.

We are to conceive of the pyramid fabric, then, as consisting of these four parts, first the part for whose sake all the rest existed, the pyramid itself, with its concealed passages and its carefully protected sarcophagus-chamber, in which lay the mummy of the king in its granite coffin; then the temple crouching at the foot of the great tomb-chamber; then the long covered causeway leading down to the lower levels, and finally the Portico-temple on the margin of the flooded river. One imagines the scene on the feast-day of a great Pharaoh--the graceful and gaily decorated Egyptian river-skiffs drawing up to the stately columned portico on the river bank, and landing their freight of white-robed priests and gorgeous courtiers and princes of the blood, the preliminary service within the lower temple, and then the solemn procession up the causeway to the temple proper where the memory of Khufu or Khafra is celebrated, and his wants for the other world supplied under the shadow of the mighty mass of stone where the bones of the great builder are laid. The Pyramids are impressive enough to-day in their stripped and gaunt majesty--one wonders if they could be more impressive even in the days of their perfected splendour. Possibly not, but at all events the world can have seen few more imposing sights than an Egyptian Pyramid Field such as that of Gizeh, when its three giants were girt with all the sumptuous fabrics which were part of their essential design as their architects planned them, and without which we are no more seeing them as they were meant to be seen than if we were viewing Salisbury without its spire, or the Duomo of Florence without its campanile.

As to the sumptuousness of these subsidiary parts of the pyramid-complex, we have fortunately first-hand evidence. Little remains of the temple proper of the Second Pyramid, though what there is has been completely excavated; but the causeway leading down from it has been traced, and it terminates in a building which has been for long familiar as one of the most striking examples of the combined restraint and magnificence of the Egyptian architects of the early dynasties, the so-called Temple of the Sphinx, which is in reality the Portico-temple of Khafra’s pyramid. With its severely simple architecture of vertical and horizontal lines, its great blocks of stone absolutely without ornament of any sort, and the richness of its granite monoliths and its alabaster wall-surfaces, it tells us something of what must have been the dignity and splendour of the Gizeh Pyramid Field when it stood intact.

So far as the fulfilment of the object for which they were erected is concerned, the Pyramids of Gizeh are no more than a melancholy monument of the vanity of human wishes, and an illustration of how human cupidity or malice will in the long run break through the most elaborate system of defence. Professor Petrie has suggested that Sir Thomas Browne was in the wrong when he wrote that “to be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy of duration,” and comments upon that characteristic utterance: “Khufu has provided the grandest monument that any man ever had, and is by this means better remembered than any other Eastern king throughout history.”

That is so; and yet one cannot help remembering that this was not at all Khufu’s object in the rearing of his vast mausoleum. It was not to keep his memory green, but to keep his body intact that the greatest builder of the world raised the Great Pyramid, and in that simple object he utterly failed, as did all his brother pyramid-builders great and small. The evidence shows that not in one single case has greed or hatred failed to overcome all the obstacles placed in their way by royal power. Every pyramid known has been rifled in ancient times, probably not long after its builder was laid to rest in his stately tomb, and the duration of the mass of senseless stone, which bids fair to be as long as that of the everlasting hills, only mocks the hopes with which it was reared. The pyramid remains; but the jewel for whose sake so costly a casket was devised is long ages since “blown about the desert dust.”

The story of excavation at the Pyramids of Gizeh has nothing very exciting about it. The first excavators were, no doubt, the enemies of the Crown, who, as Petrie has suggested, penetrated into the burial-chambers in the troubled days between the VIIth and Xth Dynasties and wreaked their spite on the bodies of their dead masters. Thereafter, through the Classical period, the entrance into the subterranean passages of the Great Pyramid was well known; but the knowledge had been lost by the time of the Arab Conquest, and the Khalif Mamun had laboriously to quarry his way through the masonry into the actual passages, leaving behind him the great hole, which is still called “Mamun’s Hole.” This was the beginning of the vandalism which has done so much destruction at the Pyramids of Gizeh, though the worst efforts of human stupidity have somehow only seemed to emphasise the dignity and grandeur of the great buildings whose might mocks at the puny attempts of the destroyer. After Mamun had showed the way, his successors followed him, and used the pyramid as a quarry. In 1356 Sultan Hasan used part of the casing of the Great Pyramid in the building of his mosque, and though his work may be, as it has been called, “the finest monument in Cairo,” and “the most perfect specimen extant of Saracenic architecture,” its beauty is sadly discounted by the fact that it was created by the robbery of the most magnificent example of an architecture more ancient and more noble. Hasan, or one of his immediate successors, added to his crime by stripping part of the casing from the Second Pyramid also, leaving it in the partially despoiled condition in which it now appears, for one of his coins was found by Petrie deep down in the southern foundation. Compared with such barbarities, the indignities which the Pyramids have had to suffer in all ages at the hands of tourists, who have insisted on disgracing their undistinguished names by scrawling them on these great memorials of the past, are mere trifles.

Early in the nineteenth century Caviglia succeeded in penetrating into the centre of the Great Pyramid, and he was followed in the spring of 1818 by the redoubtable Belzoni, whose account of the manner in which he forced an entrance into the Second Pyramid is as vivacious as the rest of his narrative. Belzoni’s earlier efforts only resulted in the discovery of one of the passages by which former explorers had vainly attempted to force their way into the pyramid; but his disappointment only quickened his desire, and as he says in his own inimitable way: “Hope returned to cherish my pyramidical brains.” His workmen were speedily set to work again at a new spot. “As to expectation that the entrance might be found, they had none; and I often heard them utter, in a low voice, the word ‘_magnoon_,’ in plain English, _madman_. I pointed out to the Arabs the spot where they had to dig, and such was my measurement, that I was right within two feet, in a straight direction, as to the entrance; and I have the pleasure of reckoning this day as fortunate.” Even after the passage was discovered, the removal of the blocks of stone which obstructed it required several days of hard labour; but at last, thirty days after the work began, the explorer found himself standing in the sarcophagus chamber of Khafra. Besides the empty sarcophagus, Belzoni found the evidence that he had not been the first who had penetrated into the secret of the pyramid, for in addition to many graffiti on the walls of the chamber, which were written in charcoal and rubbed off at the slightest touch, there was an Arabic inscription which ran: “The Master Mohammed Ahmed, lapicide, has opened them; and the Master Othman attended this opening: and the King Ali Mohammed, from the beginning to the closing up.”

The Third Pyramid, that of Menkaura, was opened in 1226 by treasure-hunters. “After passing through various passages, a room was reached wherein was found a long blue vessel [the sarcophagus] quite empty.... They found in this basin, after they had broken the covering of it, the decayed remains of a man, but no treasures, excepting some golden tablets inscribed with characters of a language which nobody could understand.” The disappointed treasure-seekers were succeeded in 1837 by Colonel Howard Vyse, some of the results of whose discoveries are in the British Museum in the shape of a fragment of the basalt sarcophagus, and portions of a wooden coffin, purporting to be that of “the King of the North and South, Men-kau-Ra, living for ever,” together with the remains of a man, wrapped in a coarse woollen cloth of a yellow colour. “In clearing the rubbish out of the large entrance room,” says Colonel Vyse, “after the men had been employed there several days and had advanced some distance towards the south-eastern corner, some bones were first discovered at the bottom of the rubbish; and the remaining bones and part of the coffin were immediately discovered all together. No other parts of the coffin or bones could be found in the room; I therefore had the rubbish which had been previously turned out of the same room carefully re-examined, when several pieces of the coffin and of the mummy-cloth were found; but in no other part of the pyramid were any parts of it to be discovered, although every place was most minutely examined, to make the coffin as complete as possible.” Unfortunately some doubt exists as to the coffin being actually of the period which its inscription claims, and the same doubt hangs over the remains. It has been suggested that the coffin is a restoration of the time of the XXVIth Dynasty, and that the remains are not those of Menkaura, but of one of the treasure-hunters who lost his life in the attempt of 1226. Accordingly we cannot say, as might otherwise have been the case, that Vyse actually discovered a Pharaoh in the great tomb which he had built for his eternal abode. The fine basalt sarcophagus was taken out of the pyramid by Vyse, and shipped for England in 1838; but the ill-luck which has dogged the pyramid explorations attended Menkaura’s coffin also. The ship left Leghorn on October 12, 1838, and was never heard of again, though some bits of wreckage were picked up off Carthagena.

Valuable work was done at Gizeh during the years after Vyse’s researches by Perring and Piazzi Smyth, though the careful measurement work of the latter was somewhat obscured by the fanciful theories which possessed his mind on the subject of the purpose of the Great Pyramid; but the most complete survey of the Gizeh field was due to Flinders Petrie, who in 1880–1881 measured and planned the whole site with the most scrupulous care.

Perhaps the most interesting result of his work, apart from the evidence which he gathered as to Egyptian methods of working stone, was his discovery, behind the Second Pyramid, of the barracks in which the skilled masons who were permanently employed on the building lived while the work was going on. These were capable of containing easily about 4000 men. The rest of the 100,000, who, as Herodotus tells us, were employed in the building of the Great Pyramid, were doubtless merely labourers employed during the three months of high Nile, when work on the land was impossible, to bring up the blocks of stone and leave them ready for the skilled hewers and masons to work upon. As to the methods of these skilled workmen, evidence of the most interesting kind was accumulated. It was found that the great blocks of stone were sawn by means of bronze saws over nine feet in length, and equipped with jewelled cutting points. The sarcophagi of hard granite or basalt were thus sawn to shape with the most remarkable accuracy, while they were hollowed out by cutting rows of holes with tubular drills also set with jewelled cutting points. The chief difference between this kind of ancient Egyptian work and modern practice with diamond drills is that the ancient work is undeniably superior to the modern. “Truth to tell, modern drill cores cannot hold a candle to the Egyptians; by the side of the ancient work they look wretchedly scraped out and irregular.” “There has been no flinching or jumping of the tool,” says Petrie again, speaking of a drill core from Gizeh, “every crystal, quartz, or felspar has been cut through in the most equable way, with a clean irresistible cut.”

Our wonder at the mighty mass of the Pyramids of Gizeh, then, is not to be mere wonder at the barbaric power which summoned myriads of slaves and forced them to toil till by sheer brute force they had piled up these mountains of stone. Brute force, unguided and unorganised, would never have built the Pyramids, though millions instead of thousands had been employed, and for centuries instead of decades, but would only have led to disaster and confusion. The wonder of the Pyramids is that five thousand years ago there was found a race whose keen intelligence so clearly understood the need and the marvellous power of organised and trained human labour, architects and engineers who were capable of directing the energies of a hundred thousand men without confusion towards a clearly foreseen end, and craftsmen who were capable of producing, with tools whose material seems to us pathetic in its inadequacy, results which put to shame the best achievements of men using the finest modern tools.

The recent excavations in the Gizeh Pyramid Field, directed by Dr. G. A. Reisner, have added much to our knowledge of the subordinate tombs of the period, and of the life of the times.

Moving southwards from Gizeh, we come to the pyramid field of Abusir, passing on the way the unfinished pyramid of Zawiyet el Aryan. Of this pyramid, designed for the Pharaoh Nefer-ka-Ra of the IIIrd Dynasty, nothing exists above ground. The remains consist simply of the trenches destined for the superstructure, and the inclined plane leading down to the mortuary chamber with its fine oval libation-trough, or sarcophagus. Yet there are few works of ancient Egypt which impress one more with the sense of the magnificent power with which these early architects carried out their designs. “The whole,” says Maspero, “is merely a T-shaped ditch, some 100 feet deep; and yet the impression it makes when one goes down into it is unforgettable. The richness and the cutting of the materials, the perfection of the joints and sections, the incomparable finish of the basin, the boldness of the lines and the height of the walls all combine to make up a unique creation.”

The German excavations have resulted in the discovery at Abusir of a curious development both of the pyramid idea and of the early Egyptian temple. It was already known from one of the magical tales of the Westcar Papyrus, that the kings of the Vth Dynasty were probably a priestly line of usurpers, who claimed to be related to the Sun-god Ra by direct descent--a relationship which was henceforth claimed by every subsequent Pharaoh, and embodied in the royal titulary. The German Expedition has revealed to us the unmistakable proof of the devotion of the Vth Dynasty kings to the worship of the Sun-god, and the unique form which their temples took. The temple of Ne-user-ra, for example, consisted of a rectangular court, 380 feet by 280 feet, whose main axis ran east and west. In the western half of this area rose the pyramid, a curious combination of the idea of the mastaba-pyramid of Seneferu at Medum and the later obelisk. On a great block of building about 130 feet square by 100 feet in height, shaped like a truncated pyramid, rose a squat brick obelisk whose point reached a height of about 120 feet. Roofed corridors surrounded the enclosure on the other three sides, and probably provided storerooms for the temple furniture, and for the materials of the offerings. At the foot of the pyramid an immense alabaster altar stood in a small court surrounded by low walls. The obelisk, on its truncated pyramid, represented the Sun-god, and outside the temple wall, near the south side, was placed the most curious of all the furnishings of this curious temple, in the shape of a great boat, built of brick, which bore all the sacred insignia of the Sun-god in his voyage across the heavens. The interior of the temple walls was covered with sculptured scenes of the life created by the god, scenes from the river, the swamps, the fields and the desert, these being the earliest specimens of such mural decorations in any Egyptian temple.

The next stage of the Great Pyramid Field is at Saqqara, where the chief feature is the most ancient, and save for the monsters of Gizeh, the most famous of all the pyramids, the Stepped-Pyramid of King Zeser of the IIIrd Dynasty, the earliest great stone structure in the world. This remarkable building was probably the work of Zeser’s famous counsellor and architect Imhotep, the typical wise man of early Egypt, whose counsel was “as though one inquired at the oracle of God,” and who was subsequently deified and became the patron-deity of the scribes.

The tomb which he reared for his master (who had also another great tomb at Bet-Khallaf) was built in six stages, stands about 197 feet in height, and has the peculiarity that its base is not a square but a rectangle, measuring 394 by 351 feet. But though the interest attaching to man’s first great piece of stonework must always be great, the actually living interest at Saqqara attaches not so much to Zeser’s hoary and imposing tomb, as to the comparatively insignificant and decayed pyramids of the Vth and VIth Dynasty kings, Unas, Teti, Pepy I, Merenra, and Pepy II. Mere heaps of rubble and sand as they seem, with none of the splendour of construction or greatness of scale of the Gizeh group, these monuments of the time when the royal power of the Old Kingdom was beginning to decline are yet of supreme value; for they are the first pyramids in which inscriptions have been found, and the long religious texts discovered in them, and now known as the Pyramid Texts, are unique and of infinite importance.

Up to the end of his career, Mariette believed that the pyramids were dumb, as the Gizeh group had proved to be, and therefore looked upon the attempt to open any of the Saqqara group as mere waste labour. Maspero, however, believed otherwise, and the opening of the pyramid of Pepy I in 1880 proved that he was right. The other pyramids named proved also to be inscribed, and altogether the five pyramids give us a series of religious texts covering a period of about one hundred and fifty years, or perhaps one hundred and eighty, from 2825 to 2644 B.C., or, on Petrie’s dating, from 4275 to 4090 B.C. Even taking the later dates, these Pyramid Texts form by far the earliest large body of religious writings which have come down from any part of the ancient East, and their importance as sources of knowledge as to the beliefs of the earliest Dynastic period can scarcely be overrated.

Apart from the interest of its pyramids, Saqqara has proved of infinite value to the student of ancient Egyptian life because of the richness of its necropolis in the great mastaba tombs of the nobles of the Old Kingdom. Since Mariette’s excavation of the tomb of Ti, who was a great man in his day, and architect to two successive kings of the Vth Dynasty, Nefer-ari-ka-ra and Ne-user-ra, the sculptures of this splendid tomb, and those, scarcely less remarkable, of the tombs of Ptah-hetep, Mereruka and Kagemni, have been recognised as among the most precious accomplishments of ancient art.

Apart altogether from their artistic value, their importance as first-hand documents for the reconstruction of life in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago is supreme, for their representations, executed with infinite vivacity and spirit, cover almost every department of Egyptian life. The great man is represented as surrounded by all the busy life which ministered to his comfort when he was on earth, or engaged in the sports and diversions which were his relaxation in the intervals of his public duties, sailing, fishing, fowling, or hippopotamus-hunting among the Nile swamps. Farm life, with its changing activities according to the season, and all its peaceful and beautiful incident, is faithfully depicted, so that the crops which the Egyptian landowner grew and the stock he kept can be perfectly known; while all the crafts which were necessary to the upkeep of a great estate are also depicted with abundant detail and a charming directness and dash. The tomb-paintings of the New Empire at Thebes are much and deservedly admired; but even they must yield in freshness and charm to these pictures from the dawn of history, which have the dew of youth still upon them, and all the vigour of an art which is already quite sure of itself, but has not had the time to grow stale.

[Illustration: 7. CHASED GOLD PECTORAL ORNAMENTS OF SENUSERT II AND III (XIIth DYNASTY).

(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]

From Dahshur down to Illahun and Hawara lie the pyramids of the great kings of the XIIth Dynasty, who, though Thebans, realised that the centre of gravity of the national government must be further north, and who therefore made their royal residence between Memphis and the Fayum. The earlier kings of the dynasty, Amenemhat I and Senusert I, had their pyramids at Lisht; Amenemhat II and Senusert III preferred Dahshur for their resting-place; while Senusert II chose Lahun, and Amenemhat III Hawara, where he could sleep beside the great works which he had wrought at Lake Moeris for the welfare of his land. The XIIth Dynasty pyramids are not imposing externally. The ruinous piles of brickwork at Dahshur and Lahun look more like gigantic ant-heaps than true pyramids; yet they were the work of kings who in their own way were quite as powerful as the pyramid-builders of the IVth Dynasty, and the detail of the inner workmanship of the sarcophagus chambers is quite as remarkable as anything to be seen at Gizeh. Part of the reason for the difference is a change, not so much in the ideal for which the pyramid was constructed (for that remained constant throughout the history of Egypt), but in the conception of the best means towards the realising of the ideal. “It seems,” says Petrie, describing the change which Senusert II introduced in his pyramid at Lahun, “that the pyramids of the earlier kings had fallen a prey to violence already, the signs of personal spite in the destructions are evident. Therefore Senusert II determined to abandon the old system of a north entrance in the face, and to conceal the access to the interior by a new method.” His method was to excavate his sarcophagus chamber entirely out of the solid rock on which the pyramid was founded, and to place the entrance to the passage which led to the chamber outside of the pyramid altogether. The shaft which gives access to the passage actually opens out on the plain, beneath the floor of the tomb of one of the princesses of the dynasty. Inside the rock-hewn chamber which was protected with such care, and which was splendidly lined with red granite, stood the red granite sarcophagus, “exquisitely wrought,” says Petrie, “the errors of flatness and straightness being matters of thousandths of an inch.”

Yet the cunning and the skill of the XIIth Dynasty architects and masons proved as helpless as the massive power of the IVth Dynasty to protect the dead monarchs from the ravages of hatred or greed. Nor were the elaborate precautions of Amenemhat III any more successful than those of his grandfather had been. Petrie’s description of the construction of the inner passages of Amenemhat’s pyramid at Hawara reads like something planned to be a nightmare to explorers. “The explorer,” he says, “who had found the entrance in the unusual place on the south side, descended a long staircase, which ended in a dumb chamber. The roof of this, if slid aside, showed another passage, which was filled with blocks. This was a mere blind, to divert attention from the real passage, which stood ostentatiously open. A plunderer has, however, fruitlessly mined his way through all these blocks. On going down the real passage, another dumb chamber was reached; another sliding trap-door was passed; another passage led to a third dumb chamber; a third trap-door was passed; and now a passage led along past one side of the real sepulchre; and to amuse explorers, two false wells open in the passage floor, and the wrong side of the passage is filled with masonry blocks fitted in. Yet by some means the plunderers found a cross trench in the passage floor which led to the chamber. Here another device was met. The chamber had no door, but was entered solely by one of the immense roof-blocks, weighing 45 tons, being left raised, and afterwards dropped into place on closing the pyramid.” One would have imagined that with such precautions the sleep of Amenemhat would surely be undisturbed; but when Petrie in 1889 tunnelled his way through the roofing-beams of the sepulchral chamber he found that an early plunderer had anticipated him by mining right through the great 45-ton block. “The royal interments had been entirely burnt; and only fired grains of diorite and pieces of lazuli inlaying showed the splendour of the decorations of the coffins.”

Here, as in all the other cases of the pyramids, the very elaboration of the means adopted for the preservation of the dead body of the king had only whetted the appetite of the spoiler and destroyer, and little has survived from the XIIth Dynasty pyramids to reward the modern explorer. The great finds in the XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields were all from outside the pyramids. Of these one of the most valuable, though by no means the most spectacular, was Petrie’s discovery, near the pyramid of Senusert II at Lahun, of the town, created specially for the occasion, in which the workmen of Senusert had lived with their staff of architects, overseers, and scribes, while the pyramid was under construction.

The little town of Ha-hetep-Senusert, Kahun as it is now called, gives us the most complete instance extant of the character of an Egyptian town of the Middle Kingdom. It occupied an area of about 18 acres, and the plans of the narrow streets and of the houses, mostly small and closely crowded together, though there are exceptions to this rule, have been completely wrought out. Much that is interesting in the way of pottery, tools, and papyri came from the ruins of the deserted houses of the little pyramid-town, whose existence seems to have been a very brief one, probably not much longer than was necessary for the erection of the pyramid.

Again it was not in Amenemhat’s elaborately devised pyramid at Hawara, but in the Roman cemetery to the north of it, that the great find was made which has made Hawara famous in the history of ancient Egyptian art, and has given us one of the most valuable contributions ever made to our knowledge of the processes and technique of ancient painting. A cemetery which dates mostly from A.D. instead of from B.C. has in general comparatively little attraction to the explorer in ancient Egypt, unless he be a specialist in the Greco-Roman Period. Accordingly, when Petrie in 1888 found that the cemetery in question was of the first and second centuries A.D., he was on the point of giving it up as not worth working, when one day a mummy was found with a painted portrait on a wooden panel inserted above its face. The picture was a beautifully drawn head of a girl, painted in soft tones, and quite un-Egyptian in its style. It proved to be only the forerunner of a whole series of similar portraits, of which about sixty were found before the excavations closed. The work was resumed in 1911 with further success. The portraits are of varying merit, and of even the best of them it has to be remembered that we are not dealing with the product of the studio of a skilled artist, but only with that of the workshop of a firm of local undertakers, who supplied funerary portraits just as they supplied coffins. All things considered the quality of the work is wonderfully good, and the information given by these panel pictures as to the methods of the ancient painters is of the highest importance. Before the Hawara discoveries, we were left very much in the dark as to how Apelles, Zeuxis, Polygnotus and their companions and rivals produced the masterpieces which have only survived in the literary descriptions of their contemporaries. The Hawara pictures may be very far, even the best of them, from being masterpieces; but at least they tell us what were the methods by which the great painters of ancient Greece produced the pictures which were considered the equals in artistic merit of the statues which are now the wonder of the world. The manner in which they were painted is often described as “encaustic,” but this is an incorrect description of portraits which, so far as can be judged, were simply painted with melted coloured wax, laid on with a free brush, each tint being laid on as a solid body, and not subjected to subsequent glazings.

The XIIth Dynasty pyramid fields at Dahshur and Illahun have yielded two of the most remarkable finds of Egyptian jewellery which have ever been made, and the results of the work of de Morgan and Petrie in this respect are such as to increase our admiration for the marvellous skill of the craftsmen of the Middle Kingdom. It was in 1894 and 1895 that de Morgan’s workmen, clearing up the area round the XIIth Dynasty pyramids at Dahshur, found in the tombs of the princesses of the royal house one of the most wonderful stores of jewellery which have ever rewarded excavation. The two most notable pieces of the treasure were the diadems of the princess Khnumit, the most exquisite examples of the skill of the goldsmith ever worn. “The floret crown,” says Petrie, “is perhaps the most charmingly graceful head-dress ever seen; the fine wavy threads of gold harmonised with the hair, and the delicate little flowers and berries seem scattered with the wild grace of Nature. Each floret is held by two wires crossing in an eye behind it, and each pair of berries has likewise an eye in which the wires cross. The florets are not stamped, but each gold socket is made by hand for the four inserted stones. The berries are of lazuli. In no instance, however small, was the polishing of the stone done in its cloison; it was always finished before setting.” The other diadem is more conventional, but scarcely less beautiful. Eight rosettes of gold and precious stones are surmounted with motives of lyre shape terminating in golden flowers, and the rosettes are united by long links also bearing jewelled rosettes. The stones of the two crowns are lapis-lazuli, carnelian, red jasper, and green felspar. Along with the diadems were found gold pectorals of fine design and execution, bearing the cartouches of Senusert II, Senusert III, and Amenemhat III, and various other articles of jewellery, and even the famous jewellery of Queen Aah-hotep, so long the typical specimen of Egyptian craftsmanship, must yield the palm to the earlier work in beauty of design and daintiness of execution.

The second discovery came in February, 1914, when Professor Petrie’s workmen were clearing a rifled tomb belonging to the “Royal daughter Sat-Hathor-ant” at Lahun near the pyramid of Senusert II. How the treasure of Lahun had ever escaped the plunderers who had rifled the tomb is a mystery. “The tomb had been attacked,” says Petrie; “the long and heavy work of shifting the massive granite lid of the sarcophagus, and breaking it away, had been achieved; yet all this gold was left in the recess of the passage untouched.... The whole treasure seems to have been stacked in the recess at the time of the burial, and to have gradually dropped apart as the wooden caskets decayed in course of years, with repeated flooding of storm water and mud slowly washed into the pit.... The whole treasure was standing in an open recess, within arm’s reach of the gold-seekers, while they worked at breaking open the granite sarcophagus.” We can only be thankful that all the luck did not go to the ancient robber, and that, like his earlier companion who left the arm of the Ist Dynasty queen, with its jewelled bracelets, at Abydos, he overlooked something to tell a later age of the skill and taste of ancient Egypt.

[Illustration: 8. _Above_, CROWNS OF GOLD INLAID WITH STONES OF KHNUMIT. _Below_, GRANULATED GOLD WORK. ALL XIIth DYNASTY.

(_From “Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt.”_)]

The chief feature of the Lahun find was a perfect specimen of a royal diadem, bearing the uræus on its front. No actual specimen of the famous double crown of Egypt has ever come to light, familiar though its appearance may be, probably because its materials were of a perishable nature; but the diadem of Lahun gives us a unique specimen of such a crown as Egyptian royalty may often have worn in preference to the cumbrous mitre so frequently figured. “It is formed by a broad band of highly burnished gold over an inch wide, and large enough to pass round the bushy wig worn in the XIIth Dynasty. The uræus is of open work, inlaid with lazuli and carnelian; the head is of lazuli, which was found loose in the mud. Around the polished band were affixed fifteen rosettes, each composed of four flowers with intermediate buds. At the back a tube of gold was riveted on to the band, and into that fitted a double plume of sheet gold, the stem of which slipped through a flower of solid gold. The thickness of the plumes was such that they would wave slightly with every movement of the head. At the back and sides of the crown were streamers of gold, which hung from hinges attached to the rosettes. The whole construction was over a foot and a half high.” Such was an Egyptian diadem in the great days of the Middle Kingdom, and surely never did a royal head wear a more graceful emblem of sovereignty than that which came so strangely to light in 1914.

Along with the crown were found two pectorals, one of Senusert II, the other of Amenemhat III, of even finer design than the famous pectorals of Dahshur. “The earlier pectoral is inlaid with minute feathering of lazuli and turquoise; the later with a different feathering of lazuli and white paste, which has probably been green.... They were probably suspended by necklaces of the very rich deep amethyst beads which were found here.” With the pectorals went several gold and jewelled collars and necklets, and broad armlets of golden bars with beads of carnelian and turquoise, and inlaid clasps bearing the royal cartouche, and a number of other articles, amulets and toilet utensils, including a silver mirror with a handle of obsidian, inlaid with bands of plaited gold, and bearing a cast gold head of Hathor. Another item came to light from Lahun in 1920 in the shape of the royal uræus of Senusert II, “a massive gold casting, with inlay of carnelian and lazuli, a head of lazuli, and eyes of garnet in gold setting,” which was found near the sepulchral chamber in the heart of the pyramid, amidst a heap of dust and chips of stone. Doubtless this is the royal emblem which adorned the brow of Senusert when he was laid to rest in his pyramid, though how it escaped the notice of the robbers who plundered his tomb is as great a mystery as the escape of the treasure of Sat-Hathor-ant.

Thus the pyramids of the XIIth Dynasty monarchs, insignificant as they may seem in comparison with the gigantic piles of Gizeh, have proved in their way no less interesting than the colossal work of Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura. Indeed each of the pyramid groups has its own characteristics, and has given its own contribution to our knowledge of the successive periods of early Egyptian history. To the mighty structures of the IVth Dynasty we owe the revelation of the marvellous organisation of the Egyptian kingdom, and the skill with which its resources could be concentrated on a single gigantic task. To the less imposing buildings of the Vth and VIth Dynasties we owe something perhaps even more precious--the revelation of the thoughts which were shaping themselves in the mind of man in these most ancient days with regard to the soul and its life beyond the grave. To those of the XIIth Dynasty we owe the evidence of the skill which shaped the marvellous red-granite sarcophagus of Senusert II, or the great quartzite funeral chamber of Amenemhat III, and the union of luxury with the finest taste which created the jewellery of Dahshur and Lahun. It may be questioned if even the tomb of Tutankhamen, with all its mass of splendour, will have anything to show us which can surpass in grace and dignity the diadems of Khnumit and Sat-Hathor-ant, or in exquisiteness of finish their pectorals and armlets.

With the decline of the royal power at the close of the XIIth Dynasty, the age of the pyramid-builders closes. Already the taste for these huge structures was being modified, as it was continually found how powerless they were to accomplish the great end for which they were designed--the protection of the dead body of the king from the hatred of his enemies or the greed of the professional tomb-robber. The decay of the royal power which is so marked even in the beginnings of the dark period which now ensues no doubt completed a process which disillusionment had already begun; and when Egypt once more found herself under a strong and stable government, the Theban kings who delivered her from the Hyksos tyranny had recourse to another device for securing the continuity of existence after death, and instead of piling mountains of stone or brick above their sepulchral chambers, were hewing in the Valley of the Kings the galleries and halls which have been yielding up their secrets in our time for the wonder and instruction of the world.