EDFU AND THE QUARRIES OF GEBEL SILSILEH
THE few incidents which occurred during the following six months, after I was reinstalled in my hut at Der el-Bahri, have been related in previous chapters. During the short season at Luxor friends and acquaintances often paid me a visit when going the rounds on the Theban side of the Nile. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Parker induced me to leave my camp to spend Christmastide with them in the delightful house they had lately built at Assuan. It is one of the few new houses in Upper Egypt which in aspect fits in exactly with its surroundings. Situated as it is on the western bank of the Nile, it commands a beautiful view both up and down the river, and Elephantine Island, the only green spot near Assuan, lies just opposite. A more ideal residence in which to pass the winter months would be hard to conceive. Would that he who built it had been spared to enjoy it for more than a few short seasons! Two years previously I had spent three months with them on their dahabieh. Henry Simpson, the artist, was of our company. We visited everything worth visiting between the first and second cataracts, mooring the ship wherever we found a subject we wished to paint. This is the ideal way of seeing the259 Nile, and when, as in this case, congenial companionship is added to the comforts of a well-equipped dahabieh, no more delightful way of tiding over the winter months is imaginable.
A diary in the form of caricatures of the daily events, which Mr. Simpson had left with the Parkers, brought those pleasant times vividly back to us.
Mrs. Parker and I made several excursions to Philae while there was still a chance of recording some of its beauty before it would be entirely submerged by the raising of the Assuan dam. As it is proposed that I should treat of Nubia in another volume, I shall defer what I may have to say on Assuan and of the country south of it.
Towards the end of my season at Der el-Bahri, which as usual was two months after the hotels at Luxor had put up the shutters, Mr. Weigall suggested my spending June with him in the tombs and temples south of Thebes. The valley in which I camped had become a veritable oven, and my hut was untenable till the sun sank behind the cliffs which form the amphitheatre behind Hatshepsu’s shrine. Some work I wished to do in the temple of Edfu, as well as to get shelter from the burning sun, tempted me to accept this kind invitation. The quarries and shrines at Gebel Silsileh, the tombs of Assuan and the courts and colonnades at Philae, all held out hopes of shady places in which I should find plenty of subjects to paint.
Our preparations were soon made. On the first day of June we took the train from Luxor to Edfu, and were encamped that afternoon in the dark shades of the great temple of Horus.
260 The thermometer fell to 100° Fahrenheit in the hypostyle hall, and we were grateful for this comparative coolness. Our attire could safely be of the scantiest, as there was no fear of a party of trippers arriving at this time of the year. Shoes were advisable till the pavements had been examined, for in some seasons the temple is infested with scorpions. Happily this was a poor scorpion season, and barely a dozen were killed during the eight days we spent there.
We decided on the hypostyle hall as our dining-room, unless the open court should cool down sufficiently after sundown; our beds were to be made on the roof of the great vestibule, and no cooler spot could be apportioned for our midday siesta than in one of the corridors which run round the sanctuary. What earthly potentate could claim so majestic a dwelling-place? If an apology for its modernity be needed to those whose interests lie in the earlier dynastic remains, we at all events had a roof over our heads, and Edfu temple, though shorn of its furniture, is not a ruin. Going back to pre-Ptolemaic times, no temple in Egypt exists where imagination has not to fill in great portions which are not in the places which the builders designed for them. Edfu temple is doubtless the grandest preserved edifice in the world which can date back rather more than two thousand years.
Some portions are out of repair; but let us hope that no more attempts at restoration may be made, more than to tie or buttress such places that may be in danger of falling. All credit is due to Mariette, who, under the auspices of Sa?d Pasha, cleared the temple of the rubbish which in places filled it to the roofing261 slabs; a part of the town actually stood on the roof. The rubbish hills which surround it are gradually lessening, for the septic material of which they are composed serves as a valuable manure to the fields around.
The entire building took 187 years to complete, its progress going on more or less uninterruptedly during the rule of eleven of the Ptolemies. The design is so complete that it is hard to believe that one architect did not draw up all the plans. I do not purpose to give the details of this vast building, as this has been so adequately done by Baedeker and in other guide-books. Curiously enough the Baedeker, which so accurately describes the most interesting details to be observed, makes no mention of the dimensions, though the first thing which impresses the visitor is the vastness of the building. Actual measurements are liable to do little more than give an impression of size, but a comparison with well-known structures often conveys a truer conception. The area of St. Paul’s, in square feet measurement, is 28,050, that of St. Peter’s at Rome is 54,000, while the temple at Edfu covers an area of 80,000 square feet. There is but one other temple in Egypt with which we can compare it, and that is the temple of Denderah. But in every way it is Denderah’s superior. The great temple of Ammon at Karnak was raised when Egyptian art was at a higher level than at the time of the Ptolemies, and, grand as that ruin may be, it fails to impress one as much as the almost intact structure here at Edfu.
The temples of Edfu, of Denderah, and of Esneh,262 though all three were raised during a debased period of Egyptian art, owe their impressiveness chiefly to the fact that they still have a roof above them. The subdued light of the vestibule, the dimmer light of the hypostyle hall, and the increasing darkness as one passes through the next two chambers till the blackness of the sanctuary is reached, strikes the imagination to a degree which no sunlit ruins can do, be they ever so fine. The reliefs which cover every wall space and column are not to be compared with the refined work in Hatshepsu’s shrine; but in this dim religious light they serve their purpose, and the general effect is in no wise diminished. The sculptured reliefs, on the girdle-wall and the pylons, which are seen in broad daylight, suffer greatly in comparison with the eighteenth dynasty work. But taken as a whole, the design of these temples is probably more beautiful than was that of the earlier structures, of which only fragments now remain. A Greek most likely furnished the design, the detail being left to Egyptians who had lost much of their artistry.
We ascended to the roof by a long inclined plane in the thickness of one of the walls, and in the comparative coolness of the evening we watched the sun dip into the coloured mists which hung over the cultivation between us and the Libyan desert. Edfu spreads round three sides of the temple, and we got a bird’s-eye view of the medley of mud huts, little courtyards, and modest places of worship which go to make up a small Nilotic town. Children were at play amidst the cattle and fowls in the yards, while their elders were263 attending to their household duties on the roof. The houses were on a higher level as they neared the temple, and the piles of débris on which they stood were sharply cut away a few yards from the girdle-wall, forming a second enclosure on that side of us. It was easily seen that before the temple was cleared the incline of the rubbish mounds would have reached to the roof we stood on.
In a letter which Mariette wrote in 1860 to the Révue Archéologique, he says: ‘I caused to be demolished the sixty-four houses which encumbered the roof, as well as twenty-eight more which approached too near the outer wall of the temple. When the whole shall be isolated from its present surroundings by a massive wall, the work of Edfu will be accomplished.’
Something similar to what Mariette found here fifty years ago may still be seen at the north end of the Luxor temple, where a mosque and a cluster of houses still remain on the top, on the yet unexcavated portions. The apertures in the roofing slabs (which now at midday allow of some rays of sunlight to lighten the interior) served as drains to carry off the filth from the houses on the roof. No wonder that the fellaheen gladly now fatten their land with the scourings from the temple enclosure. Many of the smaller objects now seen in the Antika shops are found by the peasants while they load their asses with this septic rubbish. Sub-inspectors and guards are told off to watch these operations; but it is seldom that anything which is not too heavy to carry off can be saved to the Antiquities Department.
It is no sinecure being Chief Inspector over as264 extended an area as that which is in Mr. Weigall’s charge.
By the light of a couple of candles we dined in the courtyard. The afterglow caught the top of the propylon as we sat down—from a deep rose it sank to a slaty grey, and then slowly darkened to a black mass against the starlit sky.
The two guardians preceded us with candles, so that we could find our way to the stairway entrance at the further end of the temple. Thousands of bats squeaked and fluttered above, disturbed by these unwonted lights; and from the rounded columns, whose summits were lost in the darkness, beast and bird headed gods seemed to resent our intrusion into the sacred precincts. When we ascended the inclined stairway we rubbed shoulders with the divinities and the Ptolemies which lined the wall surfaces of the narrow passage to the roof.
Selim had fixed up our camp beds above the great vestibule, which is considerably higher than the inner precincts of the temple; and here we slept well above the gods, but beneath the canopy of the heavens.
We arose with the first glimmer of light in the eastern sky and found Selim preparing our bath on the roof. When we descended to the interior of the temple we found that the thermometer had only fallen three degrees. The courtyard was again our coolest breakfasting place, besides being more or less free from the smell of bats, which is a distinctive feature of all enclosed temples.
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POTTERY BAZAAR IN A NILE VILLAGE
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265 The town is as unspoilt as any on the banks of the Nile, and the early morning and evening are the only times when it is possible to explore it in comfort at this time of the year. I found some delightful subjects in the little bazaar, and could paint here till the sun drove me from where I had set up my easel. The temple interior, even at a hundred degrees of Fahrenheit, then became a welcome shelter from the burning sun.
My companion was engaged on some literary work and never stirred out of the temple till dusk. After lunch we would retire to improvised beds near the sanctuary, and a ray of sunlight descending through a slit in the roof gave us light by which we could read till we fell asleep.
We spent eight days in the shades of this majestic shrine, and though Weigall had brought quite a library of books on things Egyptological and was also able fluently to read the inscriptions with which the walls are covered, we could only cull a fraction of the flowery descriptions of the deeds that were done while this temple of Horus was being raised. I made a careful study of a fine panel on the inner side of the western girdle-wall. It represents a ship with expanded sail, with Isis kneeling at the prow and Horus astride on the deck launching a javelin into a minute hippopotamus near the edge of the river; both he and the goddess hold a cord which is attached to the beast. The king stands on the bank and is also driving a spear into the victim. The figures are so beautifully drawn and the panel is so decoratively filled, that when we speak of the debased art of the Ptolemies, it must be understood as being so only in comparison with266 the superlatively fine work of some of the earlier dynasties.
We left Edfu in the early morning to step on to a steam-launch which would run us up to Gebel Silsileh in six hours. I seemed awakened from a sleep gently disturbed with dreams in which the great, of an age long past, and their strange divinities had slowly filed before me, to be lost in the darkness of Edfu’s sanctuary.
The steam-launch seemed an anachronism after the eight days during which we had been transported back to times before the dawn of Christianity. Running against the current our progress was slow; but it was a giddy speed compared with that of the Nile boats we overtook, though their great sails were swelled with the wind blowing up the river. Lying on a mattress in the shade of an extemporised awning and enjoying the breeze which overtook us, we could thoroughly enjoy some hours of complete laziness which we glorified by the name of well-deserved rest. It seemed a pity to fall asleep and to lose consciousness for a moment of this delicious feeling of fresh air and pleasant coolness. Objects we passed were just of sufficient interest not to over-excite us, but just to prevent any feeling of monotony. The remains of a Byzantine fortified town with the ruins of a convent spread picturesquely over the crest of the hill es-Serag. I should like to have made a sketch of this, though I soon found consolation in the thought that I might pass here again and catch it in a more pictorial lighting. Consolation for most ills comes easily while afloat on the Nile.
267 The character of the landscape changes considerably here. The nummulite limestone hills, with their pretty crag and cliff drawing, give place to the sandstone rocks. Ancient quarries with inscriptions abound, and had we not been making for the far-famed quarries of Silsileh, we might have felt inclined to stop and examine some.
We reached our destination in the early afternoon, and moored on the west bank of the river. Gebel Silsileh (the Mountain of the Chain) is so called on account of a tradition that ancient kings here blocked the river with a chain stretched across it from the cliffs on either side. The Nile contracts to within a couple of hundred yards, and the rocks rise, in most places, sheer out of the water. That a more natural barrier than this chain once blocked the river is evident, and also that it held up the waters in Lower Nubia sufficiently to force a second arm of the river to flow along the low-lying land between the first cataract, and on the western side of Assuan. A great disruption of the barrier is said to have taken place towards the end of the Hyksos period, when until then it was probably a rushing cataract. But in prehistoric times, when the course of the Nile was completely blocked at this gorge, the river must have flowed through other channels for a hundred miles or more.
We fixed on a tomb recess, cut out of a rock facing north, as our living-room, and put off deciding where we should sleep till we found which place might be the coolest after the sun had gone down. Selim improvised a kitchen in a disused tomb nearer the edge of the river.268 These arrangements being completed, we visited the numerous objects of interest on our side of the Nile.
The rock chapel, known as the Speos of Haremheb, lies furthest north, and it contains some very beautiful late eighteenth dynasty work. A relief of the young king taking the divine milk at the breast of a goddess can be compared in beauty with the similar subject in the Seti temple at Abydos. The workmanship appearing coarser here is owing to the sandstone not having the marble-like surface of the nummulite limestone in the latter temple. The relief of King Haremheb returning in triumph from Cush (generally supposed to be the district between the first two cataracts, which we now know as Nubia) is also very beautiful, and reminds one strongly of some of the Der el-Bahri work. The Speos itself is very interesting, being a form of shrine of a plan different to any I had so far seen. It is a long narrow chamber parallel with the rock-face, and entered by five doorways which are separated from each other by four square pillars hewn out of the rock. In the centre of the back wall is an entrance to an inner chamber also covered with reliefs, except the end which faces the doorway where damaged statues of the Pharaoh and of six gods occupy each a recess.
For the best part of half a mile we scrambled over the rocks and through disused quarries, examining a number of little shrines, tomb recesses and stele, all of which are more or less ornamented with reliefs while some show traces of colour.
Three imposing chapels hewn out of the solid rock are at the south end of the quarries. These are votive269 shrines to Seti I., Rameses II., and to the son of the latter, Merenptah—proscenium-shaped alcoves supported by columns of the clustered papyrus type, and surmounted with bold cornices. A rank growth of scrub on the strip of land between the shrines and the river relieved the amber hues of the sandstone, and some touches of pure colour in the shrines themselves helped to make this a promising subject for a picture.
Our camp was about midway between the Speos and these votive shrines. Selim was preparing our dinner when we returned, and during these odd moments we enjoyed a swim in the Nile. As usual we cut our evenings short by retiring early to bed, and we began our days with the first glimmer of light.
We spent four delightful days here, Weigall collecting Egyptological facts, and I increasing my number of drawings. We should have stayed here longer; but how this sojourn, as well as the remainder of our expedition, came to an end, will form the subject of another chapter.