Part 34

"He set out from Cairo on the 6th of February, 1818, went to the Kaia Bey, and gained permission; the Bey having first satisfied himself that there was no tilled ground within a considerable distance of Ghiza. On the 10th of February he began with six labourers in a vertical section at right angles to the north side of the base, cutting through a mass of stones and lime which had fallen from the upper part of the pyramid, but were so completely aggregated together as to spoil the mattocks, &c. employed in the operation. He persevered in making an opening fifteen feet wide, working downwards, and uncovering the face of the pyramid. During the first week there was but little prospect of meeting with anything interesting; but on the 17th, one of the Arabs employed called out with great vociferation that he had found the entrance. He had, in fact, come upon a hole into which he could thrust his arm and a djerid six feet long. Before night they ascertained that an aperture was there, about three feet square, which had been closed irregularly with a hewn stone. This being removed, they reached a larger opening, but filled with rubbish and sand. M. Belzoni was now satisfied that this was not a real, but a forced passage. Next day they had penetrated fifteen feet, when stones and sand began to fall from above; these were removed, but still they continued to fall in large quantities, when, after some more days' labour, he discovered an upper forced entrance, communicating with the outside from above. Having cleared this, he found another opening running inward, which proved, on further search, to be a continuation of the lower horizontal forced passage, nearly all choked up with rubbish. This being removed, he discovered, about half way from the outside, a descending forced passage, which terminated at the distance of forty feet. He now continued to work in the horizontal passage, in hope that it might lead to the centre, but it terminated at the depth of ninety feet; and he found it prudent not to force it further, as the stones were very loose over-head, and one actually fell, and had nearly killed one of the people. He therefore now began clearing away the aggregated stones and lime to the eastward of the forced entrance; but by this time his retreat had been discovered, and he found himself much interrupted by visitors.

"On the 28th of February he discovered, at the surface of the pyramid, a block of granite, having the same direction as that of the passage of the first pyramid, that of Cheops; and he now hoped that he was not far from the true entrance. Next day he removed some large blocks, and on the 2d of March he entered the true passage, an opening four feet high, and three feet and a half wide, formed by blocks of granite, and continued descending at an angle of about twenty-six degrees to the length of one hundred and four feet five inches, lined all the length with granite. From this passage he had to remove the stones with which it was filled, and at its bottom was a door or portcullis of granite, (fitted into a niche also made of granite,) supported at the height of eight inches by small stones placed under it. Two days were occupied in raising it high enough to admit of entrance. This door is one foot three inches thick, and, with the granite niche, occupies seven feet of the passage, where the granite work ends, and a short passage, gradually ascending twenty-two feet seven inches towards the centre, the descending commences; at the end of which is a perpendicular of fifteen feet. On the left is a small forced passage cut in the rock; and above, on the right, a forced passage running upward, and turning to the north thirty feet, just over the portcullis. At the bottom of the perpendicular, after removing some rubbish, he found the entrance of another passage, which inclined northward. But, quitting this for the present, he followed his prime passage, which now took a horizontal direction; and at the end of it, one hundred and fifty-eight feet eight inches from the above-mentioned perpendicular, he entered a chamber forty-six feet three inches long, sixteen feet three inches wide, and twenty-three feet six inches in height, for the greater part cut out of the rock; and in the middle of this room he found a SARCOPHAGUS of granite, eight feet long, three feet six inches wide, and two feet three inches deep inside, surrounded by large blocks of granite, as if to prevent its being removed. The lid had been opened, and he found in the interior a few bones, which he supposed to be human; but some of them having been since carried to England by Captain Fitzclarence, who was afterwards in this pyramid, and one of them (a thigh-bone) having, on examination by Sir Everard Home, been found to have belonged to a cow, it has been doubted whether any of them ever belonged to a human subject: but such a suspicion is premature, and without any solid foundation; since it appears, from an Arabic inscription on the west wall of this chamber, that this pyramid was opened by architects named Mahomet El Aghar and Othman, and inspected in the presence of the Sultan Ali Mahomet, the first Ugloch (a Tartaric title, as Uleg Bey, &c.). The length of time the pyramid remained open is not known; and it indeed appears to have been closed only by the fall of portions of the structure, and by the collecting of the sands of Libya. From this, and from the lid of the sarcophagus having been opened, and the remains of other animals being also found in the same sarcophagus, as is stated in other accounts, such an opinion does not even appear to be probable. On other parts of the walls are some inscriptions, supposed by M. Belzoni to be in Coptic.

"He now returned to the descending passage at the bottom of the above-mentioned perpendicular. Its angle is about twenty-six degrees. At the end of forty-eight feet and a half it becomes horizontal, still going north fifty-five feet; in the middle of which horizontal part there is a recess to the east eleven feet deep, and a passage to the west twenty feet, which descends into a chamber thirty-two feet long, nine feet nine inches wide, and eight and a half high. In this room were only a few small square blocks of stone, and on the walls some unknown inscriptions. He now returned to the horizontal part and advanced north, ascending at an angle of sixty degrees; and in this, at a short distance from the horizontal part, he met with another niche, which had been formerly furnished with a granite door, the fragments of which were still there. At forty-seven feet and a half from this niche the passage was filled with large stones, so as to close the entrance, which issues out precisely at the base of the pyramid. All the works below the base are cut in the rock, as well as part of the passages and chambers.

"By clearing away the earth to the eastward of the pyramid, he found the foundation and part of the walls of an extensive temple which stood before it at the distance of forty feet, and laid bare a pavement composed of fine blocks of calcareous stone, some of them beautifully cut and in fine preservation. This platform probably goes round the whole pyramid. The stones composing the foundation of the temple are very large: one, which he measured, was twenty-one feet long, ten high, and eight in breadth[366]."

The pyramid of MYCERINUS is one hundred and sixty-two feet in height, and two hundred and eighty on each side of the base. "If," says Diodorus Siculus, "it is less in size and extent than the others, it is superior to them in the costliness of the materials and excellence of the workmanship."

Of Mycerinus historians write in the following manner:--He was the son of Cheops, but of a character opposite to that of his father. So far from walking in his steps, he detested his conduct, and pursued quite different measures. He again opened the temples of the gods, restored the sacrifices, did all that lay in his power to comfort his subjects, and make them forget their past miseries; and believed himself set over them for no other purpose but to exercise justice, and to make them taste all the blessings of an equitable and peaceful administration. He heard their complaints, dried their tears, eased their misery, and thought himself not so much the master as the father of his people. This procured him the love of them all. Egypt resounded with his praises, and his name commanded veneration in all places.

"Men," says one writer, "have very justly reckoned these prodigious masses of earth and stone among the wonders of the world; nevertheless their use appears to us very trivial, or is unknown. The Egyptians seem to have been more desirous of exciting wonder, than of communicating instruction."--"The most probable opinion respecting the object of these vast edifices," says another writer, "is that which combines the double use of the sepulchre and the temple, nothing being more common in all nations than to bury distinguished men in places consecrated by the rites of divine worship. If Cheops, Suphis, or whoever else was the founder of the Great Pyramid, intended it only for his tomb, what occasion, says Dr. Shaw, for such a narrow sloping entrance into it, or for the well, as it is called, at the bottom;--or for the lower chamber with a large niche or hole in the eastern wall of it;--or for the long narrow cavities in the sides of the large upper room, which likewise is incrusted all over with the finest marble;--or for the two ante-chambers and the lofty gallery, with benches on each side, that introduce us into it? As the whole of the Egyptian theology was clothed in mysterious emblems and figures, it seems reasonable to suppose that all these turnings, apartments, and secrets in architecture, were intended for some nobler purpose;--for the catacombs or burying-places are plain vaulted chambers hewn out of the natural rock;--and the deity rather, which was typified in the outward form of this pile, was to be worshipped within."

"If thoughtlessness should condemn the immense and apparently useless labours of ancient Egypt," says a third, "so are they easily condemned, under the use of the ever-acceptable term tyranny, the ever-ready word of him who abuses all the power which he can command. Yet he who would eat must labour: it is the unvarying law, not of God alone, but of human society; the bond by which it is held together. The soil of Egypt was the possession of its singular government, and the labour of the people was the only manner in which they could demand or acquire a share of the produce: it was the only mode in which they ought to have possessed their portions. There is reason to believe that the soil had appropriated all the labour applicable to it; and commercial industry, as it then was, had probably done the same. An artificial invention to occupy labour became, therefore, imperiously necessary; and through this was Egypt peopled to an extent which seems to have been very great. The bearing of this fact on other cases, where, under a general law pervading all creation, conditions of labour have been attached to possession, must be obvious; and though tyranny had been the immediate cause, even thus does the Deity often direct the wickedness of man to his own good ends."

"I should, however," says a fourth, (Maupertuis,) "have been much better pleased had the kings of Egypt employed the millions of men who reared these pyramids in the air, in digging cavities in the earth of a depth answerable to the marvellous we find in the works of those princes."--"There have been many opinions expressed by learned men as to the object of these structures," says a fifth. One is, that they were the granaries of Joseph. This may be confuted by the smallness of the rooms, and the time required in building. Another, that they were observatories; which is accusing the builders of great absurdity, since the neighbouring rocks were better calculated for the purpose. The Arabians generally think that they were built by king Saurid, before the Deluge, as a refuge for himself and the public records from the Flood; but this opinion requires no answer. Josephus, the Jewish historian, who wrote A.D. 71, ascribes them to his countrymen, during the captivity in Egypt. As sun-dials, they would have failed. Shaw and Bryant, who wrote in the middle of the last century, believed them to be temples, and the stone chest, a tank for holding water used for purification. Pauw, who lived at the same time with Shaw and Bryant, considers the Great Pyramid as the tomb of Osiris; and that Osiris having fourteen tombs for various parts of his dismembered body, fourteen pyramids must have been devoted to them, and the annual funeral mysteries connected with his death and resurrection. But the greater number of writers, ancient and modern, believe it to be the tomb of Cheops, the alleged builder. Improving on this notion, Maillet (1760) supposed that the chambers were built for the purpose of shutting up the friends of the deceased king with the dead body; and that the holes on each side of the central chamber of the Great Pyramid were the means by which they were to be supplied with food, &c: an opinion which would have appeared sufficiently ludicrous, if it had not been exceeded by that expressed by an old Moulah to Buonaparte, when in Egypt (1799), that the object was to keep the buried body undecayed, by closely sealing up all access to the outward air. Another ingenious theory ascribes them to the shepherd kings, a foreign pastoral nation which oppressed Egypt in the early times of the Pharaohs. However, this is, after all, but conjecture. The utmost uncertainty exists in all that concerns these gigantic, unwieldy, and mysterious buildings. Their builders, origin, date, and purposes, are entirely lost in the night of ages. As the sides of all the pyramids face the cardinal points, and of course give the true meridian of the places where they are situated, it would seem that their builders had made some progress in _scientific_ knowledge; and the buildings themselves, under all circumstances, notwithstanding their plain exterior, clearly show the advanced state of art in those very early times.

When the traveller approaches[367] those vast monuments of human labour, the imagination seems to burst, as it were, the bands of ages, and the mind appears as if it had lived a thousand years. When the French were at Thebes, the whole army stopped among the ruins, and clapped their hands with delight: and when Buonaparte was about to engage the Mamelukes, who were advancing with loud cries, superbly accoutred, he called out to his army, "Behold! Yonder are the Pyramids; the most ancient of the works of men. From the summits of those monuments forty ages are now beholding us." The battle which ensued laid all Egypt at the feet of the French general.

We shall finish this account by selecting a passage from Rollin:--"Such were the famous Egyptian Pyramids, which, by their figure as well as size, have triumphed over the injuries of time and the barbarians. But what efforts soever men may make, their nothingness will always appear. These pyramids were tombs; and there is still to be seen in the middle of the largest, an empty sepulchre, cut out of one entire stone, about three feet deep and broad, and a little above six feet long[368]. Thus all this bustle, all this expense, and all the labours of so many thousand men, ended in procuring a prince, in this vast and almost boundless pile of building, a little vault six feet in length. Besides, the kings who built these pyramids had it not in their power to be buried in them, and so did not enjoy the sepulchre they had built. The public hatred which they incurred, by reason of their unheard-of cruelties to their subjects, in laying such heavy tasks upon them, occasioned their being interred in some obscure place, to prevent their bodies from being exposed to the fury and vengeance of the populace.

"This last circumstance, which historians have taken particular notice of, teaches us what judgment we ought to pass on these edifices, so much boasted of by the ancients. It is but just to remark and esteem the noble genius which the Egyptians had for architecture; a genius that prompted them from the earliest times, and before they could have any models to imitate, to aim in all things at the grand and magnificent, and to be intent on real beauties, without deviating in the least from a noble simplicity, in which the highest perfection of the art consists. But what idea ought we to form of those princes, who considered as something grand, the raising, by a multitude of hands and by the help of money, immense structures, with the sole view of rendering their names immortal, and who did not scruple to destroy thousands of their subjects to satisfy their vain-glory! They differed very much from the Romans, who sought to immortalise themselves by works of a magnificent kind, but, at the same time, of public utility.

"Pliny gives us, in few words, a just idea of these pyramids, when he calls them a foolish and useless ostentation of the wealth of the Egyptian kings--_Regum pecuniæ otiosa ac stulta ostentatio_,--and adds, that, by a just punishment, their memory is buried in oblivion."[369]

END OF VOL. I.

LONDON: BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Plutarch; Diodorus; Rollin; Sandwich.

[2] Pliny; Strabo; Plutarch; Diodorus; Wilkinson.

[3] Simon; Count Fedor de Karacray; Malte-Brun.

[4] "Ægina abounds," says Wheler, "with a sort of red-legged partridge, against which, by order of the Epitropi, or the chief magistrate of the town, all, both young and old, go out yearly, as the pigmies of old did against the cranes, to war with, and to break their eggs before they are hatched; otherwise, by their multitudes, they would so destroy and eat up the corn, that they would inevitably bring a famine every year upon the place."

[5] Mr. C. R. Cockerell and Mr. John Foster; W. Linckh and Baron Haller.

[6] Wheler; Chandler; Barthélemi; Sandwich; Lusieri; Clarke; Dodwell; Williams; Leake.

[7] Rollin.

[8] Livy, Cicero, Diodorus Siculus, Rollin, Brydone; Encyl. Lond., Brewster's Encyl.

[9] Dionysius of Halicarnassus;--Sir W. Gell.

[10] Jose Almana.

[11] Browne.

[12] Myos Hormos.

[13] Four hundred and fifty talents of gold. See 2 Chron. viii. 18. This, we may suppose, was the gross sum received; not the profit.

[14] A.M. 3685. Ant. J. C. 321. Diod. lib. xviii. p. 608, 610.

[15] This author lived in the fifteenth century.

[16] Earl of Sandwich.

[17] Some have commended Ptolemy for permitting the architect to put his name in the inscription which was fixed on the tower, instead of his own. It was very short and plain, according to the manner of the ancients. _Sostratus Cnidius Dexiphanis F. Diis Servatoribus pro navigantibus_, _i. e._, "Sostratus the Cnidian, son of Dexiphanes, to the protecting deities, for the use of sea-faring people." But certainly Ptolemy must have very much undervalued that kind of immortality which princes are generally very fond of, to suffer that his name should not be so much as mentioned in the inscription of an edifice so capable of immortalising him. What we read in Lucian, concerning this matter, deprives Ptolemy of a modesty, which indeed would be very ill-placed here. This author informs us that Sostratus, seeing the king determined to engross the whole glory of that noble structure to himself, caused the inscription with his own name to be carved in the marble, which he afterwards covered with lime, and thereon put the king's name. The lime soon mouldered away: and by that means, instead of procuring the king the honour with which he had flattered himself, served only to discover to future ages his unjust and ridiculous vanity.--ROLLIN.

[18] Savary.

[19] Lib. xxii. c. 16.

[20] See his observations on the supposed conflagration of the Alexandrian library, with a commentary on the 5th and 6th sections of the first chapter of the tenth book of Quintilian.

[21] Rees.

[22] Browne.

[23] A very curious instance is afforded by Bruce, who wrote an account of Alexandria, and, literally, did not spend one entire day in the city. He was at sea on the morning of the 20th of June, 1768, previously to his landing in Alexandria, (see Bruce's Travels, v. i. p. 7,) and in the afternoon he left that city for Rosetta.--CLARKE.

[24] Browne.

[25] After the English were in possession of Alexandria, a subscription was opened by the military and naval officers for the purpose of removing the prostrate obelisk to England. With the money so raised they purchased one of the vessels, sunk by the French in the old port of Alexandria: this was raised, and prepared for the reception of the obelisk. The French had already cleared away the heaps of rubbish which enveloped it, and the English turned it round, and found it in a fine state of preservation. It was moved towards the vessel, when an order arrived from the Admiralty, prohibiting the sailors from being employed at this work. No further attempts have been made to remove this fine monument to Europe.--ANON.

[26] Wilkinson.

[27] Sonnini.

[28] He gives a full description of them.--Part iv. p. 285, 4to.

[29] Sat. Mag.

[30] Diodorus Siculus; Quintilian; Ammianus Marcellinus; Abulfaragius; Prideaux; Rollin; Shaw; Harris; Gibbon; Johnson; Drake; Savary; Sonnini; Sandwich; Rees; Miot; Clarke; Wilkinson; Browne; Parker; Knight.

[31] Rollin; Sandwich.

[32] A.M. 3604, A.C. 300.

[33] Wheler; Pococke; Chandler; Rees; Sandwich; Porter; Kinneir; Buckingham; Carne; Robinson; Walpole.

[34] Rollin.

[35] Rollin.

[36] Clarke.

[37] The devastations of time and war have effaced the old city. The stranger in vain inquires for vestiges of its numerous edifices, the theatre, the gymnasium, the temples, and the monuments it once boasted, contending even with Athens in antiquity and in favours conferred by the gods.--CHANDLER.

[38] See Tiryns.

[39] Lib. vii.

[40] The district of Argol is first received colonies, who introduced civilisation into Greece. It has been reckoned the cradle of the Greeks, the theatre of events, which distinguished their earliest annals, and the country which produced their first heroes and artists. It was accordingly in the temple of Juno at Argos where the Doric order first rose to a marked eminence, and became the model for the magnificent edifices afterwards erected in the other cities, states, and islands.--CIVIL ARCHITECTURE.

[41] Rollin; Rees; Clarke; La Martine.

[42] Chardin; Cartwright; Ouseley.

[43] Every nation had a great zeal for their gods. "Among us," says Cicero, "it is very common to see temples robbed, and statues carried off; but it was never known, that any person in Egypt ever abused a crocodile; for its inhabitants would have suffered the most extreme torments, rather than be guilty of such sacrilege." It was death for any person to kill one of these animals voluntarily.

[44] Herodotus; Rollin; Savary; Belzoni; Rees.

[45] Strabo; Rees; Porter

[46] For the loves of Chosroes and Shirene, see D'Herbelot, and the Oriental collections.

[47] Rees; Sir Robert Ker Porter.

[48] Brewster.

[49] The Attic stater was a gold coin weighing two drachms.

[50] Brewster.

[51] Dodwell.

[52] Diogenes, and Hermias; Eulalicus, and Priscian; Damaschius; Isidore, and Simplicius.

[53] Anon.

[54] Hence Shakspeare, confounding dates, talks of Theseus, "Duke of Athens."

[55] Quin's Voyage down the Danube.

[56] Dodwell.

[57] Hobhouse.

[58] Dodwell.

[59] Clarke.

[60] Dodwell.

[61] Clarke.

[62] Hobhouse, p. 343.

[63] Clarke.

[64] Clarke.