Part 8

It is worthy of remark, that the Egyptian religion, intended to be abolished by Theodosius in his sweeping edict of 381 A.D.,[35] still existed at Philæ seventy years later—namely, in 453, as is proved by the sculptures on the walls of the temple. And Philæ further claims the honour of being the resting-place of a portion of the body of Osiris, to whom a monolithic shrine, now standing in the sanctuary, is dedicated. Osiris, it will be remembered, was slain by Typhon, or Set, who cut his body into pieces, and dispersed the fragments over the country; so that Philæ is not alone in the possession of so sacred a relic: although Isis, the wife of Osiris, presumedly gathered all the pieces together, when they became united, and Osiris was restored to life. Horus, the son of Osiris, was his father’s avenger, and, in his turn, destroyed Typhon. This fable bears several allegorical readings: for example—Osiris, as the setting sun, sinks into the regions of Set, or Saturn, and becomes king of Hades; Isis, or the moon, comes in search of her lost husband; but the sun rises again from the shades of Hades, as Horus, and dispels the darkness of Saturn, and the deadly influences of Typhon.[36] This is, perhaps, more obvious if we join with the Greeks in calling Horus, Phœbus. Osiris, Isis, Horus, are one form of the Egyptian trinity, in which the humble worshipper of the ancient faith still believes. The trinity was the creed of the earliest family of human beings; and so was the death of one member of that trinity, his descent into Hades, and his subsequent resurrection; with the consequent immortality of the soul. This is all pourtrayed in the Egyptian Triad. Moreover, the name of Osiris among the Egyptians was an unspoken word; it was a holy secret, breathed with extremest caution by the priests themselves. Even Herodotus mentions the word with reluctance; while the most solemn of all adjurations was the name of “him who sleeps in Philæ.” Here, then, was a secret, a holy secret, which has descended to Freemasons, and they have since held it, and must ever continue to hold it, sacred. [35] Athanasius was patriarch of Alexandria in 327 A.D.

[36] Typhon, the genius of evil, is the great ancestor of the too-frequent deadly enemy of our own day, typhus and typhoid fever. In the Egyptian language we meet with many words which are in common use amongst ourselves at the present time:—Chemistry is derived from _Chem_, or Shem; _Alabastron_, was a city of Egypt; the Oasis of _Ammon_ produces ammonia; the topaz and the sapphire are named after _Topazion_ and _Saparine_ on the Red Sea; the smaragd, or emerald, is found in Mount _Smaragdus_; and natron and nitre in Mount _Nitria_, &c. So that the world and all its mysteries are but a chain of mutually related links.

The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs was a curious accident, and, at the same time, an important step in the science of Egyptology. The French, in the year 1799, while digging the foundation of a fortress at Rosetta, exhumed a slab of black stone—a precious relic, as it proved to be, now carefully preserved in the British Museum.[37] On this stone was carved an inscription in three languages:—Hieroglyphic, the sacred tongue of Egypt; Demotic, the common language; and Greek. The inscription itself is a decree of the priests in honour of Ptolemy V., Epiphanes. Twenty years elapsed before the value of this writing was realised, although the Greek inscription had not failed to inform its readers that its two companions were translations of itself. The inclusion of royal names and royal titles within an oval had been made known by Zoëga some years before; and, comparing the Greek with the hieratic characters, the signs which indicated the name of Ptolemy were next made out. But it did not suffice to identify the emblazonment of Ptolemy alone; it needed the genius of Champollion to discover that the signs represent the letters of the alphabet. The word Ptolemy had supplied him with certain fixed signs, when a happy chance presented him with the cartouche of Cleopatra as certified by a Greek inscription on the base of an obelisk from Philæ. Comparing the signs of the two ovals, he was put in possession of three consonants and two vowels, which were identical in both, and corresponded as to position in the construction of the words. The three consonants were P T L, and the vowels E and O. Further research supplied him with the ovals of Berenice, Alexander, Cæsar, Tiberius, Trajan, and Hadrian; which together made up a complete alphabet. He was now in a position to read names in Greek when expressed by hieroglyphic signs. The next step was to convert the signs of the hieroglyphic text into words; and these he found to be Coptic, the national language of Egypt. All this seems to be simple enough when it is known; but Champollion had yet to discover that some of the signs were simply alphabetical, others syllabic, and others again symbolic; moreover, that the three kinds of signs were intermingled, without order, in accordance with the taste of the writer; and that the words were one while abundantly, and another while sparingly, interspersed with symbols. Here the funereal hymns of the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, so often repeated in the papyri, came to his help; for sometimes, in these writings, the words were expressed in symbols, and sometimes in alphabetical signs: the latter disclosed the secret of the former, and so the grammar of hieroglyphography came to be conclusively established. Shall we not, then, in admiration of their fruitful labours, invoke the favour of the Horus, the powerful, the sanctified of truth and wisdom, on these our Egyptographical pioneers, sons of the sun, lords of the diadems, beloved of science, children of genius and industry, establishers of alphabets—the de Sacy, Akerblad, Young, Champollion the resplendent, Lepsius, Hinckes, Brughsch, Saulcy, de Rougé, Birch, the Tum of the western hemisphere, approved of the learned, Bonomi, Tomlinson, and all the rest of the scholarly host, beloved of the birds, which follow in their wake like the stars of the firmament. To all and every, we, lord of the panegyrics, piercer of the sheep, convey our warmest congratulations, veneration, and respect, and wish for them a strong and pure life.

[37] In the centre of the southern Egyptian gallery of the British Museum, “is placed the celebrated Rosetta stone; it is a tablet of black basalt, having three inscriptions, two of them in the Egyptian language, but in two different characters (hieroglyphic and enchorial); the third in Greek. The inscriptions are to the same purport in each, being a decree of the priesthood at Memphis in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes, about the year B.C. 196. This stone has furnished the key to the interpretation of the Egyptian characters.” There is likewise, in the same gallery, “a cast of a similar trilingual tablet found at San, being a decree of the priests at Canopus in honour of Ptolemy Euergetes I. and Berenice, B.C. 238.” (_Birch._) San, it will be remembered, is “the field of Zoan of the Bible.”

As we float gently away adown the sleepy stream of the Nile, luxuriating in the dreamy ease of Dahabeeyah life, to our far-away northern and western home, let us try to summarise the results of our exploration into the history of Our Obelisk and its stately family.

I.—USERTESEN I., a Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty, corresponding with the year 3064 B.C., supplies us with the earliest example of an obelisk, in the venerable monolith still standing at Heliopolis. Its consort is lost, but the pedestal has been recently cleared of rubbish to prove its former existence. The Heliopolis or Matareeah obelisk was originally capped with metal, which has left its mark on the pyramidion; and its shaft is engraven with a solitary column of boldly carved hieroglyphs.

Another quadrangular shaft of syenitic granite, covered with hieroglyphs, and also the work of Usertesen, exists at Biggig in the Fyoom, on the western bank of the Nile, but broken into two pieces. The title, however, of this monument to the rank of an obelisk is a matter of dispute; and for several reasons: first, that it is wanting in the proper proportions of the typical obelisk; secondly, that it is rounded, instead of being pointed, at the apex, and is fashioned in a manner to receive an ornamental finial; and thirdly, and most cogently, that obelisks being consecrated to the rising sun, appertain solely to the eastern bank of the river, whereas this has been set up on the western bank; on which bank it was believed, until quite recently, that no other trace of an obelisk had ever yet been found.

Putting aside the poetical superstition affecting the eastern and western banks of the Nile, and the respective claims of Ra and Tum, the rising and the setting sun, a monolithic shaft, of which the two fragments together measure nearly forty-three feet in length, without accounting for a portion which may have been lost, might, without extreme license, be regarded as an obelisk.[38] It is true that the apex is rounded; but this may have been the consequence of accident; or perchance, being the first, or nearly the first, obelisk hewn from the granite rock, it may simply prove evidence of the “’prentice hand,” and be merely a ruder example of those more elegant, pointed shafts, which were afterwards to follow. It had a groove on its summit; but this was doubtless to bear a cap, like its big brother at Matereeah; and who knows but that this cap may have completed the point of the rounded head, and, to outward inspection, have made the shaft an obelisk complete. Another allegation against the Biggig monolith is, that it is broader on one side than on the other; but so are the majority of obelisks, as is evinced by our own Cleopatra’s Needle; although we are quite willing to confess that the deviation in the candidate before us is more considerable than usual; its mean breadth on two of its sides being 5 feet 2 inches, while that of the other two is 4 feet: its greatest diameter at the base being 6 feet 9½ inches. Under these circumstances it is, that while, by Sir Gardner Wilkinson and M. Mariette, the Biggig monolith is accepted as an obelisk, its privilege to that rank is rejected by Mr. Bonomi.

[38] Sixteen of Bonomi’s obelisks have a less altitude than forty-three feet, including two belonging to Rameses II.; two of Psammeticus; the Alnwick obelisk of Amenophis II., so ably described by himself; and the two obelisks of black basalt in the British Museum.

In a previous page (99) we have alluded to the Temple of Hatasou, at Thebes, on the western bank of the Nile, and consequently its sepulchral side, in the front of which Mariette notes the pedestals of a pair of obelisks. Does not this discovery invalidate, in some degree at least, the theological hypothesis of the rising and the setting sun; the shore of the living, and the shore of the dead? We must confess to considerable hesitation in accepting the sun-theory as an explanation of the site of the obelisks. Nor do we perceive any more reason to assume that a superstitious speculation governed the establishment of the abodes of the living, and of the tombs of the dead, than that the selection was one of simple convenience. The Egyptians are an Asiatic people, and therefore we may presume that they were deeply imbued with theological mysticism from their earliest origin; but, looking upon them in the light of wanderers in search of a home, that word _home_, and its necessities, we should expect to be a stronger and more rational power to govern their choice of residence than the theosophy of their priests. The first monarchical cities of Egypt, Thinis and Memphis, were founded on the western bank of the Nile; and here likewise sprung up a vast city of tombs. At this early period, the obelisk, the herald of triumph, had not been invented;[39] it was the manifestation of a more advanced period of social progress, when Thebes had asserted her claim of being the head[40] place; and, subsequently, at a time when the western shore was deserted by ancient temple-builders, the obelisks followed in the train of the architectural developments of the Theban kings.

The earliest dynasties were too much occupied with cities, and pyramids, and tombs, to care much for temples and decorative architecture; but Usertesen, whilst he erected temples and obelisks to the sun, likewise excavated tombs on the eastern shore of the Nile; and, as if to exhibit his ignorance of hypothetical sun-worship, planted an obeliskoid monument on the western shore, in the delicious oasis of Fyoom.

[39] Mr. W. R. Cooper, in his excellent Monograph on “Egyptian Obelisks,” just published, makes note of the following curious and interesting quotation from “Letters from Egypt, by Lepsius:”—“A few days ago we found a small obelisk erect, in its original position, in a tomb, near the pyramids, of the commencement of the seventh dynasty (Memphite, 3500-3400 B.C.). It is only a few feet high, but in good preservation, and with the name of the occupant of the tomb inscribed upon it. This form of monument, which is first conspicuous in the new monarchy, is thus removed several dynasties further back, in the old monarchy, even than the obelisk of Heliopolis.” This obelisk is remarkable, as having apparently a funereal character.

[40] Ap, Apé, Tapé, signify, in the Egyptian language, the head or capital of the country; Tapé, in the Memphic dialect, becomes Thaba, which the Greeks have converted into Thebes.

Next in the historical series of events followed the five hundred years of stagnation caused by the shepherd invaders; after which, obelisks, delayed for a time, again sprung into existence with the family of their conqueror Amosis, the Amenophs, and the Thothmeses; and once more a contradiction to the sun-theory is presented, by not the least distinguished of the last brilliant family, the great Queen Hatasou, or Amun-noohet.

Furthermore, the legend recorded on the fragments of the Biggig obelisk corresponds precisely with that found on the other obelisks. Upon the upper part of this broken monolith, Sir Gardner Wilkinson informs us that there are five compartments, one above the other, in which are represented two figures of the Pharaoh Usertesen making offerings to two deities; below these are hieroglyphs; and on either side of the shaft is a column of hieroglyphs, including a cartouche of the king, on one side describing him as beloved of Ptah, and on the other as beloved of Mandoo.

Mr. Bonomi remarks, that at the time when obelisks first came into use in Egypt, the patriarchs of the Jews were in the habit of setting up large monoliths to perpetuate the memory of great events, and to dedicate the spot to the Almighty. But these stones were taken as they were found, and were unfashioned by the hand of the sculptor; neither were they engraven. The Egyptians likewise set up tables, or tablets, on which legends were engraved; or they carved inscriptions on the rocks. But the Biggig obelisk differs materially from these, as it does likewise from the remarkable, so-called obelisk of Axum. This latter is a very striking and extraordinary monument, and merits exclusion, both on account of its want of proportion, and likewise the absence of written inscriptions. At Axum, the ancient capital of Abyssinia, Bruce, the celebrated African traveller, observes:—“In one square are forty obelisks, none of which have any hieroglyphics. There is one, larger than the rest, still standing; but there are two, still larger than this, fallen. They are all of one piece of granite, and, on the top of that which is standing, there is a patera (vase), exceedingly well carved in the Greek taste. Below, there is the door-bolt and lock, which Poncet speaks of, carved on the obelisk, as if to represent an entrance through it to some building behind. The lock and bolt are precisely the same as those used at this day in Egypt and Palestine.”

The progress of Egyptological science appears, therefore, to demand that we should adopt the Biggig monolith as a genuine obelisk, however awkward it may be presumed to be in its proportions. It, no doubt, stood once in front of the entrance of a temple dedicated to Ptah, or Vulcan, like the temple of Memphis; and in its broken condition is still highly reverenced by the country-people, who “look on these fragments with the same superstitious feeling as on some stones at the temple of Panopolis, and other places; and the women recite the Fat’ha over them in the hope of a numerous offspring.”[41] That they have some ground for their credence may be gathered from the official legend engraved on the narrow sides, translated by the distinguished Egyptologist, M. Chabas:[42]—

_North._—“The heaven, the kingly Horus, life of _births_, lord of the diadems, life of _births_, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ra-kheper-ka, beloved of Ptah of Res-sobt-ef (Ptah of the southern wall), the life of _births_, golden hawk, good god, master of domination.”

_South._—“The heaven, the kingly Horus, life of _births_, lord of diadems, life of _births_, king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Ra-kheper-ka, beloved of Month, lord of Thebais, life of _births_, hawk of gold, good god, lord of the two lands,”.... [41] Murray’s Hand-book.

[42] “A Short History of the Egyptian Obelisks,” by W. R. Cooper, F.R.A.S., M.R.A.S.; 1877.

So long as the Biggig monolith was the only known example of an obelisk on the western shore of the Nile, there were grounds for considering it as an interloper and an impostor; but at present, since the discovery of the pedestals of obelisks in western Thebes by M. Mariette, it may assert its claim to be admitted into the group of genuine obelisks.

II.—THOTHMES I., of the eighteenth dynasty, which embraces the period between 1703 and 1462 B.C., stands next in age to Usertesen, although about 1,500 years must have elapsed between the dates of their respective works. The obelisk now standing in front of the propylon of the Osiris temple at Karnak, is the work of Thothmes I.; the companion obelisk lies broken by its side. The hieroglyphic exordium of Thothmes I. occupies the pyramidion and two of the faces of the obelisk; while the remaining faces have been appropriated by Rameses II. Two hundred and fifty years therefore must have intervened between the dates of the two writings.

III.—HATASOU, daughter of Thothmes I., erected two obelisks within the temple of Osiris at Karnak, to the honour of her father. Like the preceding, one has fallen to the ground, and one only remains. The standing obelisk is ninety-two feet high,[43] and is a beautiful work. It is upon the base of this pair of obelisks that we find the legend of their having been hewn from the rock, erected and finished in seven months. The pedestals of two other obelisks are mentioned by Mariette as standing in front of her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, on the western shore of the Nile, at Thebes; but the obelisks themselves are destroyed.

IV.—THOTHMES III. follows next in succession with four obelisks, the four Needles; all erected at Heliopolis; the two beautiful obelisks termed Pharaoh’s Needles, and the pair at Alexandria called Cleopatra’s Needles. Pharaoh’s Needles were removed by the Emperor Constantine; one he conveyed to Constantinople, where it now stands;[44] and the other was sent to Rome by his son Constantius. The former records the conquest of Mesopotamia by Thothmes III.; while the latter is the celebrated obelisk of St. John Lateran: besides the cartouche of Thothmes III., it also bears in the lateral columns that of his grandson, Thothmes IV.; and of the pair it is said that, unlike the obelisks of Hatasou, they were thirty-six years in the artificers’ hands before they were completed. According to Mr. W. R. Cooper, the obelisk at Constantinople “was originally one of the splendours of Karnak.” It was broken on its journey to Byzantium; and judging from its present appearance, the upper part alone has been erected. An inscription formerly engraved on its pedestal in Greek and Latin, stated that thirty days were occupied in setting it up, and unpleasantly reminds us of “fire and sword:”—

“I was unwilling to obey imperial masters, but I was ordered to bear the palm after the destruction of tyrants. All things yield to Theodosius and his enduring offspring. Thus, I was conquered and subdued in thirty days, and elevated towards the sky in the prætorship of Proclus.” [43] Mr. W. E. Cooper states the height of Hatasou’s obelisk as upwards of 97 feet; Lenormant giving it 30 metres (97 feet 6 inches) in altitude, and 368 tons in weight. The height of the obelisk of Thothmes I. is, according to the same authority, 90 feet 6 inches.

[44] According to Mr. W. R. Cooper, the Constantinople obelisk was brought from Karnak; and sent to Constantinople A.D. 324. It was erected by Theodosius, seventy-three years later—namely, A.D. 397.

Of Cleopatra’s Needles, one stands at Alexandria; whilst the other, which had fallen several centuries ago, and been buried in the earth, will, we hope, soon fill a site on the banks of the Thames, by virtue of its privilege of being the British obelisk.

Mr. Bonomi admits into his list of obelisks two small granite monoliths dedicated to Thothmes III., which stand before the Usertesen sanctuary at Karnak. “I put them down,” he says, in a communication with which he favoured us recently, “as obelisks—because they stand in front of a temple, but doubt their claim to be reckoned such, for they never had the pointed apex. On the north face of the square block are three figures of the Papyrus of Lower Egypt, and, on the south face, three of the Papyrus of Upper Egypt. On the east and west sides are figures of Thothmes embraced by one of the goddesses of Egypt, repeated two or three times. The figures are in the sculpture peculiar to Egypt,[45] and a little more than three feet high.” We entirely agree with Mr. Bonomi, that the monoliths in question, however interesting in other respects, do not come up to the standard of the typical obelisk; and, although occupying so distinguished a place of honour as the front of a sanctuary temple, we must refuse them admission into our present list.

[45] The incavo-relievo.