CHAPTER V

WORK AMONG THE TEMPLES

Scarcely less famous than the pyramids, and of far greater beauty, are the splendid temples whose ruins extend from Heliopolis, close to the Delta, to Philæ, where the beautiful shrines of Isis, exquisite in their setting, even if of late date for Egypt, are now becoming only memories of a beauty which has had to yield to the claims of present-day life. Egypt, almost equally with Greece, may claim to be the Land of Temples; and certainly no other land of the ancient East can rival her in the number, the scale, and the magnificence of the shrines which she reared to her innumerable gods. The claim of the Greek to be the supreme temple-builder of the ancient world is, of course, unquestioned, and nothing in Egypt can bear comparison with the serene beauty of the Parthenon; but, though the Egyptian architect knew nothing of that exquisite balance and harmony of proportion which has made Greek architecture the crown of human effort in sacred building, the temples of Egypt have a grandeur and impressiveness of their own which make a profound appeal to the mind; and the contribution of the Egyptian to the sum of human achievement in this respect is coming to be more and more appreciated every day.

The pyramids show him to have been one of the great master-builders of the world in respect of the vastness of his creations; the temples, often scarcely less impressive in this respect, show him to have been also a master in the art of constructing stately and nobly proportioned examples of that art of the column and architrave of which the temples of Hellas gave the supreme demonstration. The question of how much the Greek owed to the earlier builder may still be the subject of debate; but there can be no question of the originality of the architects who gave to the world such noble specimens of the builder’s art as the great colonnades of Karnak and Luxor, the beautiful terraces of Der el-Bahri, and the later glories of Edfu and Philæ.

In one sense there can be comparatively little to tell in the way of a story of excavation with regard to the Egyptian temples. In Mesopotamia and Babylonia the remains of the great temples of Anu and Adad, of Enlil, and of Marduk, owe their restoration to the light of day entirely to the spade of the excavator, for they were completely buried beneath the dust of ages in the great mounds of Ashur, Nippur, and Babylon, and almost nothing was visible to tell of their former splendours till the modern excavator patiently stripped away the mantle in which time had wrapped them.

But the temples of Egypt had never experienced the oblivion which had covered their northern rivals. They had suffered, indeed, many things at the hands of Time and of human vandalism. Sometimes they were half-buried in the sand which had risen higher and higher, century after century, around their columns; sometimes the shrines of a rival faith had been thrust incongruously into their ruined courts, or an Arab village had grown up like an ugly parasite on their roofs; but there always remained enough to tell that the work of one of the great master-building races of the world was there, waiting the time when it should be stripped of these paltry accretions, and revealed in its full beauty. Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, and their companion shrines were never quite forgotten, and even Hatshepsut’s exquisite terraces at Der el-Bahri, half-smothered beneath the sand, and wrecked by Coptic fanaticism though they were, still showed enough to enable the first European explorers who described them (MM. Jollois and Devilliers of Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798) to be sure of the general character of the building which lay beneath the rubbish-heaps.

Accordingly the work of the excavator in connection with the temples of Egypt has not been so much the discovery of the unknown as the recovery of the complete form of what was already partially known, the clearing away of the excrescences which had attached themselves in the course of centuries to the original structures; the preservation of the more delicate work, such as relief-sculpture and painting, from further injury; the re-establishment in a state of security of tottering walls and columns; and, not least, the tracing out of the history of the building of temples which were in general the work of centuries, and of many kings. It has all been work which, from its very nature, can have but little of the nature of romance about it, which has but seldom led to any startling finds, which has involved a colossal amount of sheer hard labour, without any very conspicuous rewards; but which has resulted in the temples becoming intelligible to the ordinary traveller, and safe for his interest for generations to come, and has enabled us to trace, in the case of a great structure like Karnak, the successive stages by which the vast building grew to a finished whole.

It is, of course, obviously impossible to attempt to tell, even in the scantiest outline, the story of a work which has extended over the whole length of the land from the Delta to the furthest bounds of Egyptian influence in Nubia, and has been carried on by scores of workers of all nationalities. Perhaps our end will best be served by taking a typical instance of the recovery of a temple, and telling in more or less detail the story of the work which gave it back to present-day knowledge. We take as our example Queen Hatshepsut’s terraced temple at Der el-Bahri, one of the most beautiful, as it is now also one of the most famous, of Egyptian buildings.

In all Egypt there is probably no more beautiful or imposing site than that of the “Paradise of Amen,” which the great queen reared to the glory of the Theban god and of her own name. On the western side of the Nile, almost exactly opposite Karnak, the limestone cliffs of the Libyan Range sweep backwards in a great semicircle, forming a bay across whose mouth is drawn the long line of the funerary temples of the Theban kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties. Behind them, and behind the innumerable tombs of Sheikh Abd el-Qurneh and the Northern Assassif, there lies, close against the salmon-red cliffs, the building which, of all Egyptian temples, makes the strongest appeal of pure beauty, as distinguished from the impressiveness which comes from sheer scale and mass.

[Illustration: 9. HATSHEPSUT’S TEMPLE, DER EL-BAHRI, GENERAL VIEW.]

The site is one which offers peculiar advantages, but is also encompassed with peculiar risks. No more magnificent background for a building could be desired; but the background is precisely of such magnificence as to form a dangerous pitfall in which a merely mediocre architect would have been lost. To attempt to compete with Nature, when the work of man has to be placed in such close proximity with her towering architecture, would be to ensure hopeless defeat and to invite ridicule. Khufu’s mountain of stone gets its full value from contrast with the long lines of the desert plateau on whose edge it stands. The columns and obelisks of Karnak and Luxor are far enough from the hills on either bank of the Nile to make the human handiwork the central and impressive feature of the picture; but the site at Der el-Bahri would have made what was possible elsewhere a mere derision. To have placed the huge columns which seem so great on the Theban plain in competition with the soaring vertical lines of the Libyan cliffs would have been to place a fool’s cap on the most grandiose work of human hands. What was needed at Der el-Bahri was a building which should avoid the very idea of rivalry with Nature’s handiwork, and which should conquer by subjection, a building where all the emphasis should be laid on the horizontal lines of structure, so as to disclaim at once the thought of competition with the towering buttresses and bastions behind.

It may be questioned if ever an architect more thoroughly appreciated the conditions of his problem, or more satisfactorily fulfilled them, than did Senmut, when he designed for Queen Hatshepsut the three rising courts of the Paradise of Amen, with the long slopes leading from the one to the other, and the stately colonnades, where the shadows are so cunningly pressed into the decorative scheme, and the vertical lines of the columns give emphasis to the horizontality of the whole conception, and never for one moment suggest rivalry with the cliffs above.

Excavation, which has done so much for our knowledge of Der el-Bahri, has taught us that the originality of the XVIIIth Dynasty architect was not quite so absolute as was once imagined, and that he owed at least the idea of colonnaded terraces to the great man of the XIth Dynasty, Mertisen or another, who designed the pyramid-temple, “Glorious are the seats of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra,” for his royal master. But Senmut was one of those great men who, though they take their blessings where they find them, can never be accused of plagiarism, because they give back to the world the original idea transfigured and glorified. He has made the idea of the terraced courts and colonnades his own, while avoiding the heavy central block, which, with its somewhat paltry pyramid (if this was ever completed), must have been a contradiction to the whole conception of the rest of the building; and his spacious courts, with their almost Greek grace of surrounding colonnade, seem touched with a spirit which is lacking in the older work.

Mr. Robert Hichens has told us how “after the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon him like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing--ever so knowingly--against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain”; and though his idea is quite too fantastically elaborated (for the idea of conscious striving after prettiness is the last thing one could think of in connection with Der el-Bahri), yet the idea of femininity does occur to the mind when the temple is compared with other Egyptian work. Hatshepsut had not much of the weak woman about her, to all appearance, and Senmut, if his statues are any clue to the man, was as rough-hewn and masculine a piece of granite as one might encounter; but between them they managed to rear a temple which stands alone in Egypt for the feminine quality of grace.

So now we may turn to the story of how this most graceful of Egyptian temples, unique in its grace if not in its main idea, and unique also in that it is the only temple in Egypt which came into being wholly at the bidding of a woman, was rescued from the accumulations of two and a half millenniums of neglect and the ravages of religious fanaticism.

Hatshepsut’s temple was first made known to the modern world, as we have seen, by MM. Jollois and Devilliers, two of the savants attached to Napoleon’s Expedition of 1798. The English traveller Pococke had indeed visited the site in 1737; but the thing which chiefly interested him was the abundance of mummies, and all that can be learned about the temple from his mention of it is that in his day the sanctuary was apparently accessible. “Here it seemed,” he says, “as though the mountain had been vertically hewn out by the hand of man, and the people of the place said that there had once been a passage through it into the next valley”--the Valley of the Kings.

What the French explorers saw sixty years later was not a great deal more. They traced what they believed to be the bases of a series of sphinxes which had formerly formed an avenue, 42 feet wide and 437 yards long, leading up to the enclosure-wall of the temple, the remains of a wall which must have formed part of one of the terraces, what they took for the evidence of two flights of steps, leading to the higher levels of the building, the central part of the highest platform, and the rock-cut sanctuary which Pococke had seen. The rest of the temple was completely covered with heaps of sand and rubbish.

The next visitor of importance was the famous Champollion, who, as was natural in the first decipherer of the hieroglyphics, was chiefly interested in the inscriptions which were visible, especially on the granite trilithon portal of the upper platform; and the great scholar at once recognised the existence in these of a puzzle which was only to be solved later. He read the cartouche of Hatshepsut as that of a king Amenenthe; but was surprised to see that all the nouns and verbs referring to this unknown king were in the feminine, and that the royal builder was addressed by Amen-Ra as “His daughter whom he loves.” He imagined the existence of a female ruler Amense, who must have been connected by marriage with an unknown Thothmes, and also with the unknown Amenenthe, and his solution of the mystery, though his names were incorrect, was, after all, not so far from the truth.

Champollion found evidence in the work of the temple of one of his favourite theories--that Greek art found its origin in imitation of Egyptian work; and here, again, he was only anticipating the recognition of the fact that the colonnades of Der el-Bahri approach nearer to the style of Greek work than almost any other work in Egypt.

[Illustration: 10. NORTH COLONNADE, DER EL-BAHRI; “PROTO-DORIC” COLUMNS.]

Nearly thirty years after the first French explorers, and shortly after the visit of Champollion, Wilkinson surveyed the ruins, and apparently saw, not only the ramps of approach to the courts, but also one of the pillared corridors whose walls were covered with sculptures of soldiers carrying boughs and weapons, and with a scene representing the dedication of two obelisks to Amen. His reading of the name of the builder of the temple, Amunneitgori, or Amun-noohet, was no nearer to the truth than that of Champollion, though he saw that the French scholar’s unknown Thothmes was no other than Thothmes II.

Lepsius, who evidently saw more of the temple than any of his predecessors, was the first to make a real approach to the true reading of its builder’s name. His version of the name, “Numt Amen,” was indeed an almost correct reading of part of Hatshepsut’s title, Khnum Amen; and he conjectured that she was the eldest sister of Thothmes III, who occupied the throne during the minority of her brother, but was not permitted to rank in the regular lists of the kings of Egypt.

In 1858 the indefatigable Mariette visited the temple, and added it to the thirty-six other sites at which he carried on excavations during his thirty years of ceaseless toil. He was too busy with other work at Qurneh to give to Der el-Bahri the attention which it deserved, and his work there was carried on only with a small staff, and for a short time, though he worked again at the place in 1862 and 1866. Nor were his methods here such as to be helpful to his successors. Working, as he did all his lifetime, under the lash, as it were, and with the need of getting the largest possible results with the smallest expenditure of money and time, it was impossible for him to make his clearances thorough and methodical. Indeed, he seriously added to the difficulties of subsequent excavators by the fact that instead of removing the rubbish of his excavations completely outside the probable limits of the temple, he was forced by stress of time and want of money simply to dump his waste on the nearest convenient spot within the temple area. The consequence was that when Naville came to make the systematic clearance of the whole building, he found several of the most important chambers completely buried, not only beneath the debris of the centuries, but beneath that also which Mariette had heaped on the top of everything.

All the same, it was Mariette who, as in so many other instances, first revealed to the world the real wonder of Der el-Bahri and the surpassing interest of its sculptured halls. His was the first plan to give us anything like a true conception of the form of the temple, then held to be unique in Egyptian architecture; and though his restoration of the details, or rather the restoration of M. Brune, working on his material, was incorrect in several points, it was a good deal less so than some more pretentious attempts which succeeded it, and at least gave an impression intelligible, and in the main not very far from the actuality.

It was to this first excavation of Mariette also that we owe what has ever since been the most picturesque, and not the least informing, of the treasures of Der el-Bahri--the wonderful series of reliefs representing the voyage of Hatshepsut’s squadron to Punt, which decorates the retaining wall terminating the middle platform of the temple. This series of sculptures, one of the priceless treasures of New Empire Egyptian art, would of itself be the justification of Mariette’s work.

In 1893 the Egypt Exploration Fund took up the great task of completely excavating Queen Hatshepsut’s temple, and their work, conducted by M. Edouard Naville and a number of assistants, only closed with the publication, in 1908, of the sixth folio volume of plates and plans, completing, with the introductory memoir, a present-day memorial which even the great queen need not have disdained, and which is worthy of her fine achievement. By the patient efforts of M. Naville and his fellow-workers the long ramps and spacious courts of the temple were completely cleared of the rubbish of centuries, their graceful colonnades put in a condition of safety, and the priceless coloured reliefs roofed over so as to protect them from the ruinous effects of the weather, which, even in the period between the work of Mariette and that of the Egypt Exploration Fund, had wrought more damage to the wonderful series of scenes of the Expedition to Punt than had been done by all the centuries of neglect.

Wisely the explorers made no attempt at restoration. Their aim was solely one of preservation, and we owe to them the fact that the most interesting temple of the XVIIIth Dynasty is now in a condition which permits some realisation of its former beauty, and which promises its endurance for centuries to come. Thanks to the explorers’ labours, and to the complete view of the building which we owe to Mr. Somers Clarke, the memorial temple of Egypt’s greatest queen is now as well known in all its essential features as almost any structure in the world.

The work at Der el-Bahri, however, only ended in one aspect to begin in another. Already in 1879 Mariette, to whose instinct for the possibilities of the various Egyptian sites full justice has never been done, had declared his belief, founded on his discovery of a block of stone bearing the name of King Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra of the XIth Dynasty, and of several fragments of columns, that a small temple of the XIth Dynasty had once existed not far from Hatshepsut’s great temple. In 1903, after the completion of the actual work of excavation at the great temple, M. Naville began the excavation of the large mounds to the south of the site of his former labours, and with the assistance of Dr. H. R. Hall and others, the work was carried on till 1907, the final volume of results being published in 1913.

[Illustration: 11. RELIEFS, DER EL-BAHRI.]

The work began, as M. Naville tells us, chiefly with the view of clearing the XIth Dynasty cemetery which the explorer was convinced lay beneath the great mounds of rubbish; but the cemetery soon proved to be less, and other objects more, important than had been anticipated. Ere long the diggers made out the line of a ramp, running parallel to the outer wall of Hatshepsut’s temple, and, following up the traces of building which successively revealed themselves, as the mounds, often from 15 to 20 feet in height, were cleared away, they at last completely unearthed the remains of a building which is as unique in the history of Egyptian architecture as Hatshepsut’s temple was formerly thought to be. The temple was at an early stage found to belong, as Mariette had suggested, to the XIth Dynasty, and to be the work of one of the greatest kings of this little-known line of rulers, the Mentuhotep Neb-hepet-Ra who has already been mentioned.

It is by no means in such good preservation as its great companion, for about the end of the XIXth Dynasty it appears to have been definitely abandoned as a temple, and handed over to the tender mercies of the masons who used it as a convenient quarry for material. Nothing is now standing above 10 feet from the pavement level, and none of the pillars are above 7 feet in height. Yet the remains are sufficiently complete to allow of the understanding of the appearance which the whole must have presented in the days when Hatshepsut’s architect took its platform and colonnades as the inspiration of the great work on which he was engaged at its side.

At the end of a spacious enclosure, bounded by a double temenos wall of which the outer member was of brick and the inner of limestone, a broad ramp, sloping somewhat steeply, rose to the level of a rectangular platform. The retaining wall of the platform was faced, as in the later temple, with a colonnade consisting of a double row of pillars square on plan. The platform itself was surrounded by a double range of similar square pillars, which was roofed over, and made a kind of veranda completely enclosing the central mass of the temple. In the centre of this colonnade, a door, curiously narrow and paltry for so fine a building (it is only 3 feet wide), gave access to an almost square hypostyle hall, whose roof was supported by a perfect forest of octagonal columns ranged on three sides in three rows, and on the fourth, at the back of the hall, in two. In the centre of this hall, and probably with a narrow open space between it and the innermost row of columns, rose the unique feature of the temple--a rectangular mass of rubble faced with hewn stone, and surmounted by a pyramid of similar materials. Behind the pyramid, and against the wall which separated the pyramid-court from the rear portion of the temple, were several shrines, corresponding to certain tombs in the court beyond.

Passing through another granite doorway, of the same meagre proportions as the one in the front of the hall, the visitor entered an open court surrounded by a colonnade of octagonal columns, two deep on the southern side, but single on the east and west. In the midst of this court the mouth of a sloping passage, which descended for 150 metres to the rock-hewn sanctuary, lined with granite and furnished with an alabaster shrine, where the _Ka_ of King Mentuhotep was worshipped, formed a strange and impressive feature. Beyond the open court stood another hypostyle hall, with eight rows of octagonal columns, ten deep, and, last of all, a passage, bounded by two walls which reached from the seventh of the two central rows of columns in the hall, led to a tiny sanctuary hewn out of the cliff behind the temple.

Such was the temple of Mentuhotep as excavation has revealed it to us--undoubtedly a most interesting memorial of Middle Kingdom architecture, and most important as being by far the most complete example which has survived of the work of that period. Probably we should have thought the dominant feature of the building, the central pyramid, rather an incongruity than otherwise, and evidently Senmut, when he came to his great task six hundred years later, thought so too, for he adopted the ideas of his predecessor in other respects, but discarded what seems to us the clumsy pyramid block altogether. One thing, however, Senmut could not do. He could not secure for his splendid design anything like the fineness of masonry which Mentuhotep’s architect had been able to compass in the older temple. The XVIIIth Dynasty builders, clever though they were in many respects, left poor work behind them compared with the magnificent masonry of the XIth Dynasty men.

One of the most interesting features of the older building was found in the six shrines which have been already mentioned. They belonged to certain princesses, Aashait, Sadhe, Kauit, Kemsit, and Henhenit, with one unnamed, who were also priestesses. These shrines were in connection with the tombs of the ladies in question, who were buried within the temple.

The building had been completed before either the tombs or the shrines were inserted; and the inference has been drawn that these were the ladies of the harem who were chosen for the honour of accompanying King Mentuhotep on his voyage through the Underworld to the regions of the blessed--in other words, who were killed at his funeral so that he should not lack company in the world of the dead. The survival to so late a period of this barbarous custom is not proved, though it has been suggested that it continued even as late as the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty; but at all events the shrines of the princesses have furnished us with some fine examples of the work of the little-known XIth Dynasty.

In the extreme north corner of the temple, Thothmes III intruded another shrine to the goddess Hathor, which was discovered during the progress of the excavations in February, 1906, and has provided us with one of the most admirable examples extant of Egyptian sculpture. The shrine is a small chamber, 10 feet long and 8 feet high, hewn in the rock and lined with sandstone. The slabs are sculptured with religious scenes in which Thothmes III makes offerings to Hathor. The goddess herself stood in the centre of the shrine in the shape of a life-sized figure of a cow, suckling a kneeling figure of a king, while another royal figure stands in front under her head. The name of Amenhotep II is attached to these figures; but the probability is that they were meant to represent Thothmes III, who dedicated the chapel, and that all that Amenhotep II had to do with the act of piety was the engraving of his cartouche on his father’s work. The Hathor cow of Der el-Bahri is quite one of the masterpieces of New Empire art, quite eclipsing the famous example of the same figure which has come from the Saite period and has hitherto been esteemed one of the finest specimens of Egyptian animal sculpture. “Neither Greece nor Rome,” says Maspero of the Der el-Bahri cow, “has left us anything that can be compared with it; we must go to the great sculptors of animals of our own day to find an equally realistic piece of work.” Indeed the Hathor cow and the two lions of Amenhotep III and Tutankhamen, now in the British Museum, might be safely taken as the pieces on which Egyptian sculpture might elect to stand as an interpreter of animal figure.

Such, then, have been the main results of excavation on a single Egyptian site; surely enough to afford ample justification of the expenditure of time and money and labour which has been involved. Two great temples have been given back to the knowledge of the world--one of them, it is true, from a period otherwise fairly well known, the other from a period which was hitherto almost a blank. Even in the case of the later temple, where the results contained no surprises, and only extended our already existing knowledge, the contribution of this site to our estimate of Egyptian art was of surpassing value; while Mentuhotep’s temple has filled a gap at one of the points where further knowledge of Egyptian history and art was most to be desired.

There have been no marvels of buried treasure to gild the pages of the story of excavation at Der el-Bahri; but there has been a solid addition to the sum of human knowledge of the past. At a score of other sites, work similar to that which has just been described has been continually going on during the last thirty years. Mariette’s beginnings of clearance at sites such as Edfu, Esneh, Denderah, and Abydos have been followed by work whose thoroughness has been such as Mariette, from the nature of the case, could never have accomplished. To tell the story of excavation, even in the most meagre outline, would take a volume instead of a chapter, and Der el-Bahri must suffice as a typical example of the kind of work which has been done all up and down the land of Egypt.

Reference must be made, however, to one piece of work, associated, curiously enough, also with the name of the explorer of Der el-Bahri, which has a unique interest of its own. This is the discovery of the Pool of Osiris, which, as Strabo told us, lay beneath the great temple, or, as he called it, the Memnonium, at Abydos. In 1914 M. Naville, following up the work of Miss M. A. Murray and Professor Petrie in 1902–3, found a great underground chamber, 100 feet by 60 feet, constructed of huge blocks of limestone, cased inside with hard red sandstone. The pillars, the architraves, and the roofing-blocks of the aisles of this chamber were all of fine granite, without adornment or inscription, and in fact resembled almost exactly the similar work in the so-called “Temple of the Sphinx” at Gizeh, with this difference, that whereas the granite pillars of the Temple of the Sphinx are 3 feet square, those of the chamber at Abydos are 8½ feet square. The wonder of the building, however, was its arrangement. In the centre of the chamber stood two rows of these great granite monoliths, each row consisting of five pillars. Around the central block of masonry on which these pillars rested, ran a deep channel, which had manifestly once been filled with water, so as to render the central block an island.

Around this channel runs a ledge of stonework about 3 feet wide, and from this ledge access is given to a set of seventeen cells each about 6 feet square and 6 feet high.

Manifestly this extraordinary building is Strabo’s “well,” which, as he tells us, was below the temple, and was built like the Labyrinth, only on a smaller scale, with passages covered by a single stone. What may have been its use it is as yet impossible to say. The water channel and the ledge round it suggest that the boat of Osiris may have been towed around the pool by his priests on the great feast-days, or when the Passion Play of Abydos, representing the death and resurrection of Osiris, was being celebrated. Two things alone seem certain, the first, the identity of the chamber with the pool described by the old geographer, and the second, that we have here one of the most ancient sacred buildings in Egypt.

Other parts of the structure are the work of the XIXth Dynasty, which did so much at Abydos, and bear the cartouche of Merenptah and representations of this king worshipping the gods; but the chamber of the pool is another matter. Its construction is of such a character as to refer it at once to a very much earlier date; and there can be little doubt that the resemblance to the Temple of the Sphinx is only the evidence of the fact that the two buildings are of the same period, and that the Pool of Osiris is the earliest Egyptian building of any size known, apart from the pyramids.

The magnificence of its masonry shows how far the Egyptians of this early period had already carried the system of construction which they were to use to such splendid purpose in the great temples of the land. Never again, however, even in the great days of New Empire building, did they put together such a piece of sumptuous massiveness as the underground chamber of Osiris at Abydos.

Another aspect of work among the temples must be referred to, as being, in its own way, not less important than the rescuing of the actual structures from obscurity and neglect; and that is the interpretation of the work thus rescued, the tracing of its history, and the disentangling of the various periods of building which are represented, and the different hands which have been at work in the completion of a building whose history as a growing organism may stretch through centuries, and involve the activities of half a dozen dynasties.

[Illustration: 12. KARNAK, AVENUE OF SPHINXES.]

To make the temples intelligible is a matter scarcely less important than to make them visible, and it has involved scarcely less effort. Even after all that has been accomplished in this direction, a great Egyptian temple such as Karnak remains a sufficiently complicated business to bewilder the ordinary sight-seer and make him turn with relief to the clarity of Greek architecture; but at least it is now possible to arrive at something like an understanding of how the vast bulk of Karnak grew, century after century, to what we now see, and to realise a little of the romance of history which is involved in the succession of Pharaohs who have laboured to make great and splendid the holy and beautiful house of Amen in Thebes.

Let us turn, then, to Karnak, and try to see a little of what modern work has done in the direction of making this vastest of extant Egyptian temples intelligible. A century ago, Belzoni wandered round the ruins of the great temple, his mind filled with vague dreams of Memnon, Osymandias, and Psammethes, perhaps as appreciative of the wonder of what he saw as the most enlightened of his successors, but absolutely in the dark as to the significance of what he saw, or the history of how the great building had been reared; to-day the story of Karnak is practically as well understood as that of one of our European cathedrals, and anyone who likes to take the trouble may trace out the evidence of its age-long growth. Indeed it is difficult for the modern to realise how lengthy is the story which unfolds itself in the sculptured stones of the great temple. We think with something like awe of the long process which reared some of our cathedrals, and which may, perhaps, have lasted for a century, or perhaps, in an extreme case, for two; but Karnak was a growing organism for a period of time more than twice as long, not only as any of our cathedrals took in the building, but twice as long as any of them have been standing. Towards the eastern end of the vast complex of Karnak there are still to be seen the scanty relics of the earliest builders of the temple of whom we have any knowledge--the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, who began their work at Karnak certainly not much later than 2000 B.C. On the western face of the great temple is the Pylon of the Ptolemies, whose dynasty only closed with the subjection of Egypt to Roman rule in 30 B.C. Karnak, in other words, was building for a period which was certainly not less than seventeen hundred years, and which may have been almost two thousand! Such a consideration makes our ideas as to duration seem very small indeed.

Nor has the work been less complicated than it has been lengthy. Practically every Pharaoh worth naming has left his mark on the great building in some form or another, and often the work of the reigning king was done without the slightest regard to that of his forerunners; sometimes, indeed, with the deliberate design of obscuring it and blotting out its memory. Consequently the task of disentangling the story of Karnak has been no easy one. It has been like the reading of a manuscript where interpolations of different writers, dealing with different matters, continually break the thread of the main narrative, and where, to add to the confusion, part of the writing is a palimpsest, written over the faded script of an earlier author. Along with the difficulty of interpreting the story of the various buildings has gone that of preserving them from destruction.

One of the curious facts about Egyptian building is that, for a race of master-builders such as they showed themselves to be, they were strangely, even culpably careless about their foundations. If the mighty halls which they reared had been built on such foundations as modern builders would insist on for even much less important structures, there seems no reason why, short of deliberate destruction by the hand of man, the Egyptian temples should not stand practically for ever. But the Egyptian architect was content to pile walls and colonnades which are the wonder of the world on the most flimsy foundations, and his work is in most cases literally a house built on the sand.

The wonder is, not that there have been occasional collapses, but that the buildings have stood so long as they have; indeed nothing but their sheer mass and weight has enabled them to endure. Even so, earth-tremors, and the constant and insidious work of infiltration, have worked havoc on the badly founded buildings, and were it not for the constant care devoted to them, and the work of practically refounding them which has been carried out, the great halls of Karnak would ere long be only masses of tumbled ruin. There is nothing dramatic about the work of either the interpreter or the preserver; neither can point, in general, to any treasure-trove which has resulted from his efforts, though occasionally, as notably in connection with the work of M. Legrain at Karnak, the work of preservation has resulted in the unearthing of a mass of the most wonderful ancient statuary. But we owe the double fact that Karnak stands to-day and is likely to stand for centuries to come, and that its vast complex of building is intelligible, to many years of quiet and unobtrusive work on the part of scholars and architects.

In the great days of Egypt’s glory under the New Empire, Thebes must have been one of the wonder-cities of the world, and one of the fairest sights on which the sun ever shone. It may be that Babylon, in the short-lived glory of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar, was vaster in extent, and the German excavations have taught us how gorgeous were some of the great buildings of the city, with their facings of enamelled brick and their wealth of colour; but it may be questioned if even Babylon could show anything to match the solemn splendour of Karnak or Luxor, and beside the ordered sumptuousness of the huge Egyptian temples, with their wonders of megalithic construction, one imagines that Babylon’s glories would have seemed rather cheap and tawdry. And of all the glories of Thebes, Karnak was the centre and crown.

Petrie tells us that the pitiful remains of the Labyrinth, the great temple of Amenemhat III of the XIIth Dynasty, show that it was big enough to hold all the temples of Karnak and Luxor put together; but the imagination is scarcely capable of trying to comprehend the extent of such a building, and Karnak is quite big enough for most people. The actual area of its buildings is about equal to that of St. Peter’s (Rome), Milan, and Nôtre Dame (Paris); while the sacred enclosure, the Cathedral Close, so to speak, would hold another half-dozen of the biggest cathedrals of Europe, without crowding them unduly.

Let us try to imagine ourselves visiting the great temple in the days when it had reached its greatest extent, though, by that time, the glory of Thebes had in great measure departed. Still the building, as we now see it, was practically completed only in the days of the Ptolemies, and no survey of it would be adequate without including their work. Unfortunately in taking the temple in the natural order of approach, by its west front, so to speak, we reverse almost exactly the order of its building, which was, generally speaking, from east to west. Yet the history of the building is sufficiently intelligible even when thus taken in reverse order, and though there are other approaches to Karnak, and the approach by either the Eastern or the Western Avenue of Sphinxes must have been very impressive, yet the main front of the temple must always have been that which faced the Nile, in the termination of the axis of the whole structure. No doubt also the Egyptian Kings, with their fondness for using their great river as the scene of ceremonial processions, used the western front of the temple for their visits to the shrine of Amen.

We land, then, at a quay of hewn stone, adorned with two small obelisks of Sety II of the XIXth Dynasty, and with two statues of couchant lions. Passing down a short and gentle slope, we move along a broad paved way between rows of couchant ram-headed sphinxes, which were placed here by Ramses II. The path extends for 200 feet, and leads up to the vastest portal to be found even in this land of vast portals. This is the First Pylon of Karnak--first in point of approach, but last in point of erection, for it is the work of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs who grasped the sceptre of Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great; and indeed, as you can see, the work is not yet complete. Building is still going on, and the ramps of crude brick by which the great stones are dragged up to their positions are still heaped against the walls, where they will continue to stand for more than two thousand years.

The pylon itself is gigantic. The breadth of the west front of St. Paul’s, the greatest building familiar to English minds, is 179 feet, and its height, to the top of the statue of St. Paul on the pediment, is 135 feet. The Pylon of the Ptolemies measures 370 feet in breadth, or rather more than double St. Paul’s, while its height is 142½ feet, so that it overtops St. Paul’s head by 7½ feet. In addition its walls are 49 feet thick. No mightier approach to a temple was ever devised.

Passing through this great gateway we find ourselves in an open court whose dimensions are worthy of the portal which gave access to it. From the gateway where you stand to the scarcely less imposing pylon of Ramses I, which faces you across the open space, this court measures 275 feet, while its breadth is 338 feet. The area of St. Paul’s is 84,000 square feet, so that this single court of Karnak exceeds our great cathedral in area by 8000 square feet. Around its walls runs a colonnade of single columns. In the north corner of the court there stands a little grey sandstone temple, divided into three chapels, which are dedicated to Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the members of the Theban Triad. The southern colonnade is broken by the intruding front of a larger temple. This is the temple of Ramses III, the last of the great warrior kings of Egypt, who saved the land, in the degenerate days of the XXth Dynasty, from being overrun and ravaged by the raid of the Sea-Peoples. His temple, though very modest in size (it measures only 170 feet in length), is important as giving one of the most perfect examples extant of a complete Egyptian temple, built from start to finish by one monarch, and on a straightforward and homogeneous plan.

The great court which has taken these two lesser buildings into its sweep was the work of the Libyan Pharaohs of the XXIInd Dynasty, who held their court at Bubastis, and is therefore often called the Court of the Bubastites. The temple of Ramses III was cleared of rubbish in 1896–7 by M. Legrain, in the course of his great work at Karnak. Down the central avenue of the Bubastite court the Ethiopian Pharaohs of the XXVth Dynasty began the erection of a colonnade whose purpose has not been quite determined. As they left it, it consisted of a double range of huge columns, five in each row. Of the ten, only one solitary survivor now stands, and is known as the Column of Taharqa, after the Ethiopian king who was responsible for its erection, and for some of the sorest disasters of Egypt in her declining days. It was Taharqa and his successor Tanutamen who brought down upon Egypt the wrath of the Assyrian conqueror, Ashurbanipal, whose ruthless soldiery by the sack of Thebes dealt the imperial city a blow from which she never recovered. Taharqa’s column stands as the memorial of a man who “began to build, and was not able to finish” in more senses than one.

Leaving the court for a moment by the portal in the south-east corner, we find on the wall of the second pylon one of the most interesting records of the temple. This is the inscription in which Sheshanq, one of the Libyan Pharaohs, records the triumph of that campaign in Syria in the course of which he humbled the pride of Rehoboam of Judah, and robbed Solomon’s temple of all the riches which the wise king had accumulated. In Sheshanq’s relief a gigantic figure of Amen leads up before the now vanished figure of the king five rows of captive towns of Palestine, each represented by a circular wall enclosing its name, from which emerges the upper part of a bound prisoner.

[Illustration: 13. KARNAK, NAVE OF HYPOSTYLE HALL.]

Before us, as we return to the great court, rises the second pylon, the work of Ramses I, the founder of the XIXth Dynasty. Scarcely any part of the temple is more eloquent of the jumble of times, and kings, and even faiths, which goes to make up Karnak, than the neighbourhood of this pylon. The great gateway itself is of Ramses I; but its materials had their own story before he built them into his new approach to the temple of Amen, and had served another god; for some of the blocks of the pylon once belonged to one of the heretical temples of Akhenaten, and bear his name and those of his successors, Tutankhamen and Ay. The little vestibule before the pylon is flanked by statues of Ramses II; but within the doorway are found the cartouches of Ramses I and Sety II, as well as that of Ramses II, while part of the vestibule is the work of two of the Ptolemies. Thus in this little space the work of no fewer than eight Pharaohs, covering a period of more than a thousand years, is represented.

The gateway of Ramses I gives access to what is perhaps the most remarkable, though by no means the most beautiful, of the halls of Karnak. The Hypostyle Hall, one of the hugest of human creations, was, like so much else at Karnak, the work of several sovereigns, though in this case the completion of the building was not so very long protracted as in some other instances. The hall was begun by Ramses I, whose short reign of two years only enabled him to see the work started. The greater part of the hall as we now see it is the work of Sety I, one of the finest of Egyptian Pharaohs, whose work everywhere is in accordance with the nobility of his face as it can be seen at Cairo.

Sety carried out the erection of what is by far the most imposing feature of the hall, the nave, with its double row of gigantic open-flower columns, the largest in existence. Each of the twelve tremendous columns is 69 feet in height and 33 feet in circumference, while the spreading capitals, 11 feet in height, have an area large enough for one hundred men to stand upon. Imagine twelve versions of the Trajan Column at Rome, or the Vendôme Column at Paris, facing one another in two rows and supporting gigantic architraves of sixty to a hundred tons in weight, which in their turn support the great roofing-slabs. These form the central avenue of the great hall. On either side of them the papyrus-bud columns of the two side aisles rise to a height of 42½ feet. The rows nearest to the central avenue on either side bear above their architraves rectangular pillars which make up the difference between the height of the side columns and those of the centre, and which bear the extremities of the roof of the nave with its cornice. On the lower level of the side pillars, the roof of the hall continues over the rest of the area, supported by a forest of one hundred and twenty-two columns.

Sety I is responsible for the whole of the northern half of the hall, as well as for the central avenue, so that the southern portion of the building is all that Ramses II can claim as his work, if indeed even this part was not erected by his father, and only sculptured by him. Ramses II, however, had the knack of securing to himself the glory of work which was done by other men, and to most people the great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak is his work, though he had really very little to do with it.

The architectural merits of the huge building are undoubted, up to a certain point; but its faults are equally unquestionable. Mere size tells here, as indeed it almost always does, unless its impression is spoilt by sheer incapacity. There can be no question of the impressiveness of the great building. The central avenue, with its soaring columns, and its grated clerestory rising above the roofs of the side-aisles, is the prototype of all subsequent cathedral architecture. But the side-aisles do not add to the dignity of the great chamber. Their forest of squat, shapeless columns, instead of being impressive, is only bewildering. Here, very certainly, you cannot see the wood for the trees, and the spaciousness of the hall is quite destroyed by the multitude of the supports of its roof. “The size that strikes us,” says Professor Petrie, “is not the grandeur of strength, but the bulkiness of disease.”

The outer walls of the great hall are sculptured with reliefs representing the wars of its two creators. The north wall bears a fine series of scenes, covering over 200 feet of surface, in which the wars of Sety I are depicted with great spirit. In some later instances such war-reliefs are merely wearisome; but these of Sety are both vivacious and well-executed, and such scenes as that of the king smiting the Libyans are among the best examples of work in this kind, and infinitely superior to the pretentious work of his son. The southern wall has reliefs of Ramses II, his eternal Battle of Kadesh, which he could never forget, or allow anyone else to forget, a copy of the treaty of peace with the Hittites, and the so-called Poem of Pentaur, in which the king’s valour at Kadesh is celebrated.

Behind the Hypostyle Hall comes the IIIrd Pylon, which was reared by the most magnificent, if not the greatest, of Egyptian Pharaohs, the gorgeous Amenhotep III, in whose glittering reign the glories of the New Empire seemed to culminate, before the shadows of his son’s ill-starred attempt at religious reform dimmed their splendour. When Thebes was at the height of its fame, and when all the kings of the ancient east were sending their ambassadors to the great city to fall “seven times and seven times” in the dust before the golden sandals of the man who was God visible on earth to a great part of the ancient world, this third pylon was the main front of the great Theban temple, which then occupied not much more than half the space which it now covers. Its western face was used by Sety as the back wall of the Hypostyle Hall; but on the northern tower on the eastern side can still be seen the faint remains of a great scene in which a royal procession on the Nile in honour of Amen is depicted. One great ship over 40 feet long has the king standing on the poop, and cabins with cornices amidships. Thirty or forty rowers urge it along, and it tows behind it the sacred barge of Amen, which bears in a shrine a small processional bark of the god, and at the bow a sphinx and an altar.

[Illustration: 14. KARNAK, COLUMNS OF THE SIDE-AISLE, HYPOSTYLE HALL.]

Besides his pylon, Amenhotep wrought a vast amount of work at Karnak; but it was not, like that of Sety and Ramses, concentrated in a single great structure, but dispersed in various parts of the sacred enclosure, and so does not produce the same effect. To see the work of Amenhotep on a scale worthy of his importance in the line of Egyptian Pharaohs, you have to go to Luxor with its fine papyrus-bud forecourt, and its noble nave, which, had it been finished, would have almost rivalled the Hypostyle Hall of the later kings in size and exceeded it in beauty; or to try to think back the vanished glories of what was probably the most gorgeous and beautiful of all the Theban temples--the Funerary temple of Amenhotep, which was destroyed, not by the Assyrian conqueror, but by the royal vandals of the XIXth Dynasty, Ramses II and his son Merenptah.

All the same, Amenhotep accomplished no small amount of work, in one way and another, within the enclosure of Karnak. Just beyond the girdle-wall of the great temple on the north side, he built a temple to Mentu, the Theban War-God, with a pylon, and obelisks of red granite. This temple once contained statues in black granite of the king, and of the goddess Sekhmet, towards whom he evidently cherished a feeling of deep devotion, if we may judge by the number of statues to her which he dedicated in the temple of Mut.

The temple of Mentu shared the usual fate of Amenhotep’s work, and was meddled with by Merenptah, Ramses V, and at least four of the Ptolemies, a fair specimen of the fashion in which the history of Karnak is complicated by the multitude of superimposed strata, or rather of interwoven strands, with which you have to do.

On the south side, and just at the girdle-wall, stands the beautiful temple of Khonsu (the son of the Theban Triad), one of the finest examples of a complete Egyptian temple of normal form. This is not the work of Amenhotep, but of Ramses III; but apparently an earlier temple of Amenhotep must have once occupied the site, for the king set up before the gateway a noble avenue of one hundred and twenty-two sandstone sphinxes bearing his name. Beyond the wall, and approached by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, lies another of Amenhotep’s contributions to the glories of Karnak--the temple of Mut, the mother-goddess of the Theban Triad, which was excavated in 1895–7 by two English ladies, Miss Margaret Benson and Miss Janet Gourlay. It is full of Sekhmet statues, and behind it lies a sacred lake, shaped like a horse-shoe.

But the following out of the work of Amenhotep has drawn us away from our main quest, the tracing of the story of Karnak proper. Returning to the great temple by the eastern avenue of sphinxes, we pass the girdle-wall by a pylon built by Horemheb out of the material of a temple which the unfortunate Akhenaten had reared in Thebes to his new deity the Aten. Beside the pylon stands a stele inscribed with a manifesto of Horemheb, which was designed to promote peace in the state after the religious troubles of Akhenaten’s times. The square court behind the pylon has on its east side the ruins of a small temple of Amenhotep II, and the walls of the court have reliefs of Horemheb. Another pylon of Horemheb, in a very ruinous condition, closes the court on the north side, and passing through it we are faced by one of the most ancient parts of the whole building, the pylon of Queen Hatshepsut. The pylon bears witness both to what Professor Breasted calls “the Feud of the Thutmosids,” and to the religious strifes of the XVIIIth Dynasty, for Hatshepsut’s name was erased from her reliefs by Thothmes II, and all allusions to Amen were scrupulously removed by Akhenaten, and restored by Sety I. Behind Hatshepsut’s pylon we pass a pylon of Thothmes III, her successor and enemy, and traversing a court whose walls bear inscriptions of Merenptah, the son and successor of Ramses II, in which he describes his victories over the Libyans and the Peoples of the Mediterranean, we find ourselves back at the point from which our digression started, in the central court behind the great pylon of Amenhotep III. Here was the western front of the temple in the days of Thothmes I, and here still stands the solitary remaining member of the quartette of obelisks with which this king and Thothmes III adorned the front of the pylon which now lies in ruins behind them. The obelisks of the later king are both gone--the survivor of the pair of Thothmes I is a fine shaft, 75½ feet high.

Behind his pylon, and between it and a smaller one which he erected to the east, Thothmes reared a fine ceremonial hall with roof and columns of cedar wood; but his work was not permitted to endure for long. It was within this hall that the priests of Amen arranged a little piece of play-acting in which the god Amen declared his preference for Thothmes III as king, and it was perhaps this unpalatable fact which determined Queen Hatshepsut to make it the scene of a piece of vandalism which was to redound to her own glory. Anyhow, as the time for the celebration of her jubilee drew near, she sent her architect, Senmut, up to Aswan to bring down two great shafts of granite for her jubilee obelisks, and when the tremendous blocks, 97½ feet high, arrived, she stripped off the roof from part of her father’s hall and set them up there. Apart from the filial piety of such an act, the obelisks were things of which she might justly be proud.

With the single exception of the stone, the work of her deadly enemy Thothmes III, which now stands before St. John Lateran in Rome, and which is 8 feet higher than its rival, the shaft of Hatshepsut, which still remains erect at Karnak, is the largest obelisk existing, and is more than 20 feet higher than the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which represents to Londoners, as its twin does to the folk of New York, the skill of ancient Egypt.

[Illustration: 15. KARNAK, VIEW FROM THE NORTH, OBELISKS OF HATSHEPSUT, AND THOTHMES I.]

Hatshepsut was so proud of her achievement that she caused the shafts to be engraved with an inscription in which she swears, “As Ra loves me, as my father Amen favours me ... as I shall be unto eternity like an Imperishable, as I shall go down in the west like Atum, so surely these two great obelisks which My Majesty hath wrought with electrum for my father, Amen, in order that my name may abide in his temple, enduring for ever and ever, they are of one block of enduring granite, without seam or joining.” She goes on to say, what is still more surprising, that the time occupied in the extraction and transportation of the mighty shafts was seven months!

When Thothmes III came to the throne, he showed his love for his distinguished relative by casing her obelisks to a height of 82 feet with sandstone, so that her inscriptions might not be read. As rulers, the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty, male or female, stand in the very front rank; they cannot be said to have shone as exponents of family affection.

To the east of his second pylon, Thothmes I had another court, which was altered and added to by Thothmes III, who built also a small pylon in front of his Halls of Records, which come next in the great complex of building, jostling the apartments of Hatshepsut, which stand beside them. In the First Hall of Records stand the two pillars which strike everyone who sees them as one of the beauties of Karnak, and examples of a type not common in Egyptian work. They are of granite, the southern one carved with the Lotus of Upper Egypt, the northern with the Papyrus of Lower Egypt. The Second Hall was turned into the chapel of the temple, in which the sacred bark was kept, by Philip Arrhidæus, at the beginning of the Ptolemaic dominion, so that one of the oldest and one of the newest parts of the building are here united.

In the open space behind the chapel lie the scanty remains of the earliest Karnak known to us--that of the XIIth Dynasty. A few broken polygonal columns suggest a kinship in style, for the earliest parts of the great temple, with the work of the XIth Dynasty at Der el-Bahri; but it is impossible to say with the least approach to certainty what the first temple may have looked like. East again of these remnants comes the last important part of the vast building--the great Festal Temple of Thothmes III, with its fine Hall, 144 feet by 52 feet, and its eastern sanctuary and complex of store-chambers.

The Festal Hall presents a feature unique in Egyptian Architecture. Its colonnade consists of thirty-two rectangular piers ranged round the sides, while down the centre of the hall run two rows of ten round columns, not spaced with the piers, and of extraordinary shape. Instead of tapering from the base to the top, their taper runs the opposite way, and their capitals are inverted, and present the appearance of a bell standing on its mouth. The downwards tapering column is, of course, a familiar feature in Minoan architectural practice, and it is within the bounds of possibility that Thothmes’ columns are an Egyptian adaptation of a Minoan motive, for, as the tombs of Senmut and Rekhmara show, Minoan influence was at its height in the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and intercourse between Crete and Egypt was frequent. Whether Thothmes owed the idea to some Minoan suggestion or not, it never established itself in Egypt. In Crete, with its regular use of wooden pillars resting on stone bases, the downward taper was quite natural; in Egypt, with a prevalent stone construction, it was an exotic, and could show no reason for its existence, and it was never repeated. One cannot say that its disappearance was any great loss to Egyptian architecture, for the effect of the inversion is singularly clumsy.

We have thus traced the story of Karnak as one traverses the great temple from front to rear, and the bewildering complexity of the building is reflected in the variegated fabric of the narrative. To call Karnak, as is often done, “the typical temple of the Egyptian Empire,” is to create an entire misapprehension in the mind of anyone who hears such a phrase used. Karnak is anything but a typical temple; indeed it is not a temple, but rather an aggregate of many temples, and above everything else an epitome of Egyptian history for at least a millennium and a half. One would not even seek it for typical representatives of Egyptian architecture. Karnak, in this respect, possesses its beauties--and its monstrosities; but one would look rather to smaller specimens of the builder’s art for an adequate representation of Egyptian achievement in this respect.

The great temple claims, and will always claim, our attention and wonder, by its sheer vastness, to begin with, for undoubtedly vastness has its own effect, though it is not the highest, in the elements of architectural impressiveness; then by the extraordinary way in which it presents a summary in stone of the vicissitudes of Egyptian history; last, and perhaps least, by the surprising quality, and in some instances the beauty, of some of its detail. The main element in its appeal will always be wonder; admiration, and even that qualified by many reservations, is a bad second to the impression of simple amazement, that human hands and brains should have ever wrought so vast a thing.

The preservation of the temple is, and will continue to be, a work almost as great, and as difficult, as its erection. It lies in the hands of the Egyptian Service of Antiquities, and is a task as unending as the web of Penelope. Generally speaking, such work is of the kind which has to be its own reward, for it makes no appeal to the average visitor, who only sees that his enjoyment of this court or that is more or less hindered by the progress of work whose one merit is that it will keep safe for future generations priceless treasures which otherwise would ere long pass away. Sometimes, however, the work does bring other prizes in its train.

[Illustration: 16. LUXOR, FORECOURT OF AMENHOTEP III.]

Such was the case when, in November, 1903, M. Legrain, in the course of his work near the pylon of Thothmes III by which we returned to the central court after our digression to the south, found what has since been known as “the Karnak Cachette,” a great pit full of pieces of sculpture of all types and periods. “For a year and eight months,” wrote Maspero in February, 1905, “we have been fishing for statues in the Temple of Karnak.... Seven hundred stone monuments have already come out of the water, and we are not yet at the end.... Statues whole and in fragments, busts, mutilated trunks, headless bodies, bodiless heads, vases on which there were only broken feet, Pharaohs enthroned, queens standing upright, priests of Amon and individuals holding naos, or images of gods, in front of them, crouching, kneeling, sitting, found in all the attitudes of their profession or rank, in limestone, in black or pink granite, in yellow or red sandstone, in green breccia, in schist, in alabaster--indeed, a whole population returns to the upper air and demands shelter in the galleries of the Museum.”

The reason for the existence of this extraordinary dump of discarded sculpture, whose richness Maspero’s vivacious sentences do not in the least exaggerate, and which gave us, to mention only two examples, the masterly pink granite head of Senusert III, one of the most brilliant examples of XIIth Dynasty sculpture, and the schist Thothmes III, equally one of the finest examples of the art of the New Empire, seems to have been this. The Ptolemies, the presence of whose coins in the pit sufficiently dates it, did a great deal of building at Karnak, and in the course of their cleaning up of the places where they worked, they, no doubt, came on an infinity of out-of-date _ex voto_ statues, some of them broken, some of them whole, but all rather a nuisance and obstruction, as the persons with whom they were associated had long since ceased to be of importance. What was to be done with them? They could not simply be thrown out as rubbish, for they had been dedicated to the god, and were therefore sacred; and they could not be allowed to stand littering up the courts which the Ptolemies were busily tidying. Accordingly the great pit was dug within the sacred enclosure, and Senusert, Thothmes, Senmut, and hundreds of other old Egyptian notables were consigned to its muddy depths, thence to be resurrected, more than two thousand years later, by their degenerate descendants, who baled out the water from the pit with old petroleum cans, and hoisted Pharaoh, High-priest or Statesman, unceremoniously out of his dark resting-place with lever and tackle. It has been a fortunate chance for us, for Egyptian portrait-sculpture might stake its reputation on the two pieces which I have mentioned, and the pit has yielded scores almost as good.

The work of preserving the building, and putting it in a condition of safety for the future, has had a curious interest from the fact that in its progress Karnak has been to some extent rebuilt, and by exactly the same methods by means of which it was built in the beginning. For there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk about the wonderful mechanical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and their possession of secrets which have been lost to our time, that Karnak, like all the great Egyptian buildings, was built, not by means of any of these remarkable secrets which never existed save in the imagination of those who have talked about them, but by the disciplined and ordered use of the very simplest means known to man, the inclined plane, the lever, and any amount of obedient human muscle. These were the mechanical secrets which M. Legrain found most useful and most economical in the end of the nineteenth century A.D., as those who had gone before him had done in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth century B.C. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa, Ptolemy, they all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour, disciplined and guided by a race of builders who for thousands of years had specialised in the training of men for such tasks, and with no more marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest of man’s mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the lever. M. Legrain has repeated their miracles with the same equipment; and in an age of machinery has shown that the human machine may still be the most adequate, the most adaptable, and the most economical.

Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most interesting sites in Egypt, something of the work which has been going on with the double object of extending our knowledge of the past and of preserving its treasures for the future. Realising something of the importance of such buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their scores of companions throughout the land, buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt to us, one can feel that work such as that which has been meagrely described in these pages, unspectacular though it may be compared with the work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and enduring importance, the indispensable fabric on which the glittering embroidery of the treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere is wrought, and without whose rich and durable substance to form a background the golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half its meaning and beauty.