Volume I Part 23 (2/2)
Two periods of national renascence, in the thirteenth and eighteenth dynasties, had to intervene before these marvels could be realized
The earlier of these two periods is only known to us by a feorks of sculpture in our uess at its architecture, as we have nothing but descriptions, which are at once incoinations
[Illustration: FIG 171--General plan of Thebes]
The second Theban Empire may be studied under very different conditions The architects of that epoch excelled all their predecessors in the skill hich they used their materials, and the artistic ability hich they laid their plans In a word, they realized the ideal towards which Egyptian builders had been tending for enius is still to be seen in buildings which, even in their ruin, charrandeur of their conception and the finish of their execution
In the century which saw the construction of the great temples of Abydos, of Karnak, and of Luxor, the architect as charged with the building of the royal tombs could dispose of all the resources of an empire which stretched from the southern boundaries of Ethiopia to Damascus and Nineveh He would have fulfilled the wishes of neither prince nor people had he not found ive an amplitude and a beauty to those tombs which should stand a cos had erected, in another part of the city, in honour of the great deities of the country
The simple and massive forms of the pyramid did not lend themselves to success in such an enterprise They afforded no opportunity for the happy combinations of horizontal and vertical lines, for the contrasts of light and shadow and splendour of decoration which distinguished the epoch The experience of the Middle Empire proved that it was better to make a fresh departure than to attempt to foist upon the pyramid a class of ornament which was destructive to the sihest expression of the new form of art was in the temple, the development of which was rather in a horizontal than in a vertical direction; in the long avenues of sphinxes, in the pylons and colossal statues of the kings, in porticoes and forests of columns The problem, therefore, was to en of the toive increased direater importance to a part of the royal sepulchre which had been hitherto colected The funerary chapel had to be expanded into a te, who had rejoined the deities froe and worshi+p of his people
The exploits of these princes, which were greater than anything of which Egypt had to boast in the whole of its glorious past, est the teeneral ive it effect nothing more was required than the separation of the chapel from the tomb proper, to which previous tradition had so closely allied it The situation of the sepulchre, after Thebes had becoer a matter of question It was in the rocky flanks of the Libyan chain that all its inhabitants sought that asylum for their dead which the inhabitants of Mee of the desert The Libyan chain to the west of Thebes offers no platform like that of the necropolis of Me ravines offer no sites for constructed works; hence the ordinary form of Theban toerated for his subjects, the sovereign loved to take his last repose in the ihbourhood of the city in which he had dwelt during his life, in which the streets had so often resounded to the cries of triun, or had seen hiured upon the walls of Medinet-Abou (Fig 172)[239] His tomb was a cavern like that of his subjects Fashi+on and the physical conditions of the country governed hin of Seti I onwards, the kings chose for their place of sepulture the wild and deserted valley in which Belzoni found the tomb of that conqueror In the time of the Ptoleyptian ine any site better calculated for the isolation and concealment of the mummy than this valley, where the rocks split and crumble under the sun, and the sand blown hither and thither by the winds from the desert fills up every crevice in the cliffs
[239] Fig 172 reproduces only a part of the long plate given in Wilkinson In order to bring the e, we have been compelled to omit the central portion, which consists principally of colulyphs
[Illustration: FIG 172--Raious procession, at Medinet-Abou (Wilkinson, iii, pl 50)]
Nothing could be easier than to mask the entrance in such a place, but, on the other hand, no constructed building of any ireat expenditure of time and labour[240]
[240] See the description of the Valley of the Kings in the _Lettres d'egypte et de Nubie_ of CHAMPOLLION (p 183 of the second edition)
But the plain at the foot of the range offered all that the architect could wish It was still within the district consecrated to the dead, and yet its level surface presented no obstacles to an unliht be placed upon it
We have here then the facts which deteryptian architects
In the space inclosed between the left bank of the river and the first slopes of the Libyan chain, certain edifices were raised which are still, in great part, extant Their funerary signification was never completely understood, in spite of the confused hints to that effect given by the Greek writers, until within the last few years To Mariette belongs the credit of having at last reh that the nureater than it is at present, but those which have coood preservation to enable us to discern and define their true character, a character which was doubtless common to all the temples on the left bank of the Nile
They were certainly teeious edifices, both in Thebes itself, and elsewhere in Egypt There is, however, a difference which was not perceived until the texts which contained the history of each temple and of the prince who claimed the credit of its erection were deciphered The fas at Luxor and Karnak may be taken as typical exa, in its richest and most complete development The translation of the inscriptions and royal ovals which cover their walls has sufficed to show that they were national , as the representative of the people, to the worshi+p of those great deities ere at once the principles of life and the faithful protectors of the Egyptian race Century after century they never ceased to found such temples, to increase and to embellish them From the princes of the twelfth dynasty down to the Ptolemies, and even to the Roman emperors, every successive family which occupied the throne held it a point of honour to add to the creations of its predecessors
One prince built a hypostyle hall, or a court surrounded by a colonnade; another added to the long rows of human or ram-headed sphinxes which lined the approaches; a third added a pylon, and a fourth a laboriously chiselled obelisk Soned in periods of recuperation after civil war or barbaric invasion, set thee caused by tithened foundations, they lifted fallen columns, they restored the faded colours of the painted decorations The foreign conquerors themselves, whether Ethiopians, Persians, or Greeks, as soon as they believed themselves to have a firm hold upon the country, set themselves with zeal to obliterate the traces of their own violence Each of these sovereigns, whether his contribution to any work had been great or small, took care to inscribe his own name upon it, and thus to call upon both posterity and his own contemporaries to bear witness to his piety
The temple as we see it at Karnak and Luxor is the collective and successive work of reat buildings at Memphis which were consecrated to Ptah and Neith
But on the left bank of the Nile, and in the neighbourhood of the Theban necropolis, we find a group of te exactly like the to one period, that of the three great Theban dynasties, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth[242] ”These tes thelory They are not, like the temples at Karnak and Luxor, the accuenerations
Each te who planned it, so far at least as construction was concerned In those cases where the decoration was left incomplete at the death of the royal builder, his successor finished it in his name In these decorations the founder of the te the Gods, or in the eventful reat hunts; and thus, while yet alive, he laid the foundations of an edifice destined to carry the lory and piety down to the latest posterity”[243]
[241] EBERS, indeed, found so of the same kind in the temple of Abydos He found there a cenotaph consecrated to his own memory by Seti I This cenotaph was near the to hiypten_, pp 234, 235)
[242] The beautiful little teun by Ptolemy Philopator and finished by his successors, especially by Physco, has often been considered a funerary ed that the situation of the temple in the necropolis, and the nature of the subjects represented in the interior, particularly in the Western Chamber, prove that it was so If we accept this opinion, we ested to Ptolemy Philopator by a journey to Thebes The Greek prince was interred far from it, and it could have formed no part of his tomb
[243] MARIETTE, _Deir-el-Bahari_, -- 1 (Atlas, folio, Leipsic, 1877, with 40 pages letterpress, 4to)
[Illustration: FIG 173--Ra; from Medinet-Abou]
Surrounded on all sides by tombs and packed into a comparatively narrow space, these temples are separated fro El-assassif The oldest of theent Hatasu, of whose career we know enough to strongly excite, but too little to satisfy, our curiosity We know that Hatasu, the wife and sister of Thothy for seventeen years, in trust for her brother, Thothmes III Where does her mummy repose? Is it in that ravine on the south-west of the Bab-el-Molouk which is called the _Valley of the Queens_, because the tombs of many Theban princesses have been found in it? Or is it in the slopes of the mountain behind the temple itself? Numerous sepulchral excavations have been found there, and many mummies have been drawn from their recesses The artists to whoed to represent the chief actions of Hatasu as regent, and, although their works do not give us a detailed history of her eth with the enterprise of which the regent herself seeainst _Punt_, a distant region which must have been either southern Arabia, the country of the Somalis, or the eastern coast of Africa