Part 12 (1/2)
It was the custom for the tax-collectors to place that portion of a farmer's harvest, which they had taken, upon the farmer's own boat, in order to convey it to the public granary. These boats often failed to be returned to their owners when finished with, and were ultimately sold by the officials for their own profit. h.o.r.emheb, therefore, made the following law:--
”If the poor man has made for himself a boat with its sail, and, in order to serve the State, has loaded it with the Government dues, and has been robbed of the boat, the poor man stands bereft of his property and stripped of his many labours. This is wrong, and the Pharaoh will suppress it by his excellent measures. If there be a poor man who pays the taxes to the two deputies, and he be robbed of his property and his boat, my majesty commands: that every officer who collects the taxes and takes the boat of any citizen, this law shall be executed against him, and his nose shall be cut off, and he shall be sent in exile to Tharu. Furthermore, concerning the tax of timber, my majesty commands that if any officer find a poor man without a boat, then he shall bring him a craft belonging to another man in which to carry the timber; and in return for this let the former man do the loading of the timber for the latter.”
The tax-collectors were wont to commandeer the services of all the slaves in the town, and to detain them for six or seven days, ”so that it was an excessive detention indeed.” Often, too, they used to appropriate a portion of the tax for themselves. The new law, therefore, was as follows:--
”If there be any place where the officials are tax-collecting, and any one shall hear the report saying that they are tax-collecting to take the produce for themselves, and another shall come to report saying, 'My man slave or my female slave has been taken away and detained many days at work by the officials,' the offender's nose shall be cut off, and he shall be sent to Tharu.”
One more law may here be quoted. The police used often to steal the hides which the peasants had collected to hand over to the Government as their tax. h.o.r.emheb, having satisfied himself that a tale of this kind was not merely an excuse for not paying the tax, made this law:--
”As for any policeman concerning whom one shall hear it said that he goes about stealing hides, beginning with this day the law shall be executed against him, by beating him a hundred blows, opening five wounds, and taking from him by force the hides which he took.”
To carry out these laws he appointed two chief judges of very high standing, who are said to have been ”perfect in speech, excellent in good qualities, knowing how to judge the heart.” Of these men the King writes: ”I have directed them to the way of life, I have led them to the truth, I have taught them, saying, 'Do not receive the reward of another. How, then, shall those like you judge others, while there is one among you committing a crime against justice?'” Under these two officials h.o.r.emheb appointed many judges, who went on circuit around the country; and the King took the wise step of arranging, on the one hand, that their pay should be so good that they would not be tempted to take bribes, and, on the other hand, that the penalty for this crime should be most severe.
So many were the King's reforms that one is inclined to forget that he was primarily a soldier. He appears to have made some successful expeditions against the Syrians, but the fighting was probably near his own frontiers, for the empire lost by Akhnaton was not recovered for many years, and h.o.r.emheb seems to have felt that Egypt needed to learn to rule herself before she attempted to rule other nations. An expedition against some tribes in the Sudan was successfully carried through, and it is said that ”his name was mighty in the land of Kush, his battle-cry was in their dwelling-places.” Except for a semi-military expedition which was dispatched to the land of Punt, these are the only recorded foreign activities of the King; but that he had spent much time in the organisation and improvement of the army is shown by the fact that three years after his death the Egyptian soldiers were swarming over the Lebanon and hammering at the doors of the cities of Jezreel.
Had he lived for another few years he might have been famous as a conqueror as well as an administrator, though old age might r.e.t.a.r.d and tired bones refuse their office. As it is, however, his name is written sufficiently large in the book of the world's great men; and when he died, about B.C. 1315, after a reign of some thirty-five years, he had done more for Egypt than had almost any other Pharaoh. He found the country in the wildest disorder, and he left it the master of itself, and ready to become once more the master of the empire which Akhnaton's doctrine of Peace and Goodwill had lost. Under his direction the purged wors.h.i.+p of the old G.o.ds, which for him meant but the maintenance of some time-proved customs, had gained the mastery over the chimerical wors.h.i.+p of Aton; without force or violence he had subst.i.tuted the practical for the visionary; and to Amon and Order his grateful subjects were able to cry, ”The sun of him who knew thee not has set, but he who knows thee s.h.i.+nes; the sanctuary of him who a.s.sailed thee is overwhelmed in darkness, but the whole earth is now in light.”
The tomb of this great Pharaoh was cut in the rocks on the west side of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, not far from the resting-place of Amenhotep II. In the days of the later Ramesside kings the tomb-plunderers entered the sepulchre, pulled the embalmed body of the king to pieces in the search for hidden jewels, scattered the bones of the three members of his family who were buried with him, and stole almost everything of value which they found. There must have been other robberies after this, and finally the Government inspectors of about B.C. 1100 entered the tomb, and, seeing its condition, closed its mouth with a compact ma.s.s of stones. The torrents of rain which sometimes fall in winter in Egypt percolated through this filling, and left it congealed and difficult to cut through; and on the top of this hard ma.s.s tons of rubbish were tossed from other excavations, thus completely hiding the entrance.
In this condition the tomb was found by Mr Davis in February 1908. Mr Davis had been working on the side of the valley opposite to the tomb of Rameses III., where the acc.u.mulations of _debris_ had entirely hidden the face of the rocks, and, as this was a central and likely spot for a ”find,” it was hoped that when the skin of rubbish had been cleared away the entrance of at least one royal tomb would be exposed. Of all the XVIIIth-Dynasty kings, the burial-places of only Thutmosis II., Tutankhamon, and h.o.r.emheb remained undiscovered, and the hopes of the excavators concentrated on these three Pharaohs.
After a few weeks of digging, the mouth of a large shaft cut into the limestone was cleared. This proved to lead into a small chamber half-filled with rubbish, amongst which some fine jewellery, evidently hidden here, was found. This is now well published by Mr Davis in facsimile, and further mention of it here is unnecessary. Continuing the work, it was not long before traces of another tomb became apparent, and in a few days' time we were able to look down from the surrounding mounds of rubbish upon the commencement of a rectangular cutting in the rock. The size and style of the entrance left no doubt that the work was to be dated to the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and the excavators were confident that the tomb of either Tutankhamon or h.o.r.emheb lay before them. Steps leading down to the entrance were presently uncovered, and finally the doorway itself was freed from _debris_.
On one of the door-posts an inscription was now seen, written in black ink by one of the Government inspectors of B.C. 1100. This stated, that in the fourth year of an unknown king the tomb had been inspected, and had been found to be that of h.o.r.emheb.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PL. XXII. The mouth of the tomb of h.o.r.emheb at the time of its discovery. The author is seen emerging from the tomb after the first entrance had been effected. On the hillside the workmen are grouped.]
[_Photo by Lady Glyn._
We had hoped now to pa.s.s into the tomb without further difficulty, but in this we were disappointed, for the first corridor was quite choked with the rubbish placed there by the inspectors. This corridor led down at a steep angle through the limestone hillside, and, like all other parts of the tomb, it was carefully worked. It was not until two days later that enough clearing had been done to allow us to crawl in over the rubbish, which was still piled up so nearly to the roof that there was only just room to wriggle downwards over it with our backs pressing against the stone above. At the lower end of the corridor there was a flight of steps towards which the rubbish shelved, and, sliding down the slope, we were here able to stand once more. It was obvious that the tomb did not stop here, and work, therefore, had to be begun on the rubbish which choked the stairway in order to expose the entrance to further pa.s.sages. A doorway soon became visible, and at last this was sufficiently cleared to permit of our crawling into the next corridor, though now we were even more closely squeezed between the roof and the _debris_ than before.
The party which made the entrance consisted of Mr Davis; his a.s.sistant, Mr Ayrton; Mr Harold Jones; Mr Max Dalison, formerly of the Egypt Exploration Fund; and myself. Wriggling and crawling, we pushed and pulled ourselves down the sloping rubbish, until, with a rattling avalanche of small stones, we arrived at the bottom of the pa.s.sage, where we scrambled to our feet at the brink of a large rectangular well, or shaft. Holding the lamps aloft, the surrounding walls were seen to be covered with wonderfully preserved paintings executed on slightly raised plaster. Here h.o.r.emheb was seen standing before Isis, Osiris, Horus, and other G.o.ds; and his cartouches stood out boldly from amidst the elaborate inscriptions. The colours were extremely rich, and, though there was so much to be seen ahead, we stood there for some minutes, looking at them with a feeling much akin to awe.
The shaft was partly filled with rubbish, and not being very deep, we were able to climb down it by means of a ladder, and up the other side to an entrance which formed a kind of window in the sheer wall. In entering a large tomb for the first time, there are one or two scenes which fix themselves upon the memory more forcefully than others, and one feels as though one might carry these impressions intact to the grave. In this tomb there was nothing so impressive as this view across the well and through the entrance in the opposite wall. At one's feet lay the dark pit; around one the gaudy paintings gleamed; and through the window-like aperture before one, a dim suggestion could be obtained of a white-pillared hall. The intense eagerness to know what was beyond, and, at the same time, the feeling that it was almost desecration to climb into those halls which had stood silent for thousands of years, cast a spell over the scene and made it unforgetable.
This aperture had once been blocked up with stones, and the paintings had pa.s.sed across it, thus hiding it from view, so that a robber entering the tomb might think that it ended here. But the trick was an old one, and the plunderers had easily detected the entrance, had pulled away the blocks, and had climbed through. Following in their footsteps, we went up the ladder and pa.s.sed through the entrance into the pillared hall. Parts of the roof had fallen in, and other parts appeared to be likely to do so at any moment. Clambering over the _debris_ we descended another sloping corridor, which was entered through a cutting in the floor of the hall, originally blocked up and hidden. This brought us into a chamber covered with paintings, like those around the well; and again we were brought to a standstill by the amazingly fresh colours which arrested and held the attention.
We then pa.s.sed on into the large burial-hall, the roof of which was supported by crumbling pillars. Slabs of limestone had broken off here and there and had crashed down on to the floor, bringing with them portions of the ceiling painted with a design of yellow stars on a black ground. On the walls were unfinished paintings, and it was interesting to notice that the north, south, east, and west were clearly marked upon the four walls for ceremonial purposes.
The main feature towards which our eyes were turned was the great pink-granite sarcophagus which stood in the middle of the hall. Its sides were covered with well-cut inscriptions of a religious nature; and at the four corners there were figures of Isis and Nephthys, in relief, with their wings spread out as though in protection around the body.
Looking into the sarcophagus, the lid having been thrown off by the plunderers, we found it empty except for a skull and a few bones of more than one person. The sarcophagus stood upon the limestone floor, and under it small holes had been cut, in each of which a little wooden statue of a G.o.d had been placed. Thus the king's body was, so to speak, carried on the heads of the G.o.ds, and held aloft by their arms. This is a unique arrangement, and has never before been found in any burial.
In all directions broken figures of the G.o.ds were lying, and two defaced wooden statues of the king were overthrown beside the sarcophagus.
Beautiful pieces of furniture, such as were found by Mr Davis in the tomb of Yuaa and Thuau, were not to be expected in the sepulchre of a Pharaoh; for whereas those two persons were only mortals and required mortal comforts in the Underworld, the king was a G.o.d and needed only the comfort of the presence of other G.o.ds. Dead flowers were found here and there amidst the _debris_, these being the remnant of the ma.s.ses of garlands which were always heaped around and over the coffin.
Peering into a little chamber on the right, we saw two skulls and some broken bones lying in the corner. These appeared to be female, and one of the skulls may have been that of Mutnezem, the queen. In another small chamber on the left there was a fine painting of Osiris on the back wall; and, crouching at the foot of this, a statuette of a G.o.d with upraised hands had been placed. As we turned the corner and came upon it in the full glare of the lamps, one felt that the arms were raised in horror at sight of us, and that the G.o.d was gasping with surprise and indignation at our arrival. In the floor of another ante-chamber a square hole was cut, leading down to a small room. A block of stone had neatly fitted over the opening, thus hiding it from view; but the robbers had detected the crack, and had found the hiding-place. Here there were a skull and a few bones, again of more than one person.