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The Monuments of Rameses The: Herodotus

THESE details, borrowed from many sources, no doubt, by the historian of Stagyra, agree with those * The Greek form of the Egyptian Phtah. † Diodorus, Book I., chap. lvi. and Ivii. that Herodotus collected four centuries earlier from the lips of the priests at Memphis, Thebes and Heliopolis, those of the latter city being considered the best informed of all in the history of their country.* Of the numerous monuments of Rameses II. some, such as the Isthmus wall, and the fortified cities which he had built by the tribes of Beni- Heber upon that frontier, have been swept away by the breath of thirty-three centuries, or, like the terraces which formed the artificial soil of the ancient cities along the Nile, have been covered by the miry deposits which the inundations annually heap up; others, like the canal uniting the Seaweed Lake, since then rediscovered in the days of our fathers,† by the very man who was for them what Rameses had been for his contemporaries, have left vestiges which science interrogates, sometimes with profit and always with interest; still others, yet standing upon the desolate banks of the river that mirrored their pristine splendor, make the modern * Herodotus, Euterpe, c. III. † On the 30th of December, 1798, the general-in-chief of the Army of the East, passing from Cairo to Suez, several times crossed the vestiges of the old canal with his escort of learned men. - Napoleon, in his Memoirs dictated at St. Helena. Description of Egypt.-J. M. Lepère, in his Mémoire on the communication of the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean. solitudes participate in the majesty of the ancient days; and finally others again, borne away to the museums and public places of the great Western capitals, are perpetual sources of study and meditation for thinking minds. It was above all in the two great capitals of his empire, in Memphis and in Thebes, that the monumental splendor of Rameses struck the observers of antiquity.

III.

THE first of these cities, much more exposed than its rival, to the inroads of time and the invader, alike by its geographical situation and the material of which it was built, sleeps to-day, completely buried beneath the slime of the inundations and the sands of the desert. A few vague undulations of the soil alone disturbing this double shroud, have served to indicate the site of monuments the ruins of which were still, six hundred years ago, according to the statement of one of the most judicious sons of Islam, a subject of admiration and astonishment for the observer. "Notwithstanding the immense extent of Memphis and its high antiquity," writes the Arab Abdallatif in the 13th century of our Era, "notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the various governments to whose yoke it has submitted; whatever the attempts that different peoples have made to annihilate it, to cause even its faintest vestiges to disappear and wipe out the slightest traces of its existence by transporting to other points the stones and other materials of which it was constructed; by devastating its edifices and mutilating the statues that adorned them; in fine, despite all that the ages have superadded to so many causes of destruction, its ruins still present to those who contemplate them a combination of wonders that confounds the intelligence and which the most eloquent tongue or pen might vainly attempt to describe. The more one considers it the more one feels the admiration that it inspires augment; and every succeeding glance that one casts at its ruins is a new source of enchantment."* Memphis was especially proud of the grand temple of its eponymic divinity Phtah,† whom the relations of Rameses with Upper Asia, whence the wor- * Abdallatif translated into French by M. de Sacy. † Ph-t-ah-ahi, agny. The most ancient divinity of Vedic days. The northern origin of fire-worship seems to us indisputable. ship of this god had descended, had taught him to honor with especial devotion. Around this temple, where all the gods of the eighteenth dynasty seem to have been concentrated, Mei-Amoun had caused to be reared, in majestic colonnades, immense blocks of white calcareous stone in order to extract which from the quarrries of Mokattan and transport them to the other side of the Nile, thousands of captives had exhausted themselves for weary years.

Moreover, in testimony of his gratitude and his piety, he had caused the monolithic statues of his wife, his children and himself, to be placed before the pylons of the sanctuary, in the attitude of religious contemplation. Well! in these palaces or temples, divinities and worshippers are plunged in the same sleep and at this day abandon to the winds of the desert the same dust; and a fallen column cast to a distance from its pedestal, including which it must formerly have measured nearly forty-five feet in height, still surmounts with all the thickness of its mutilated fragments the general level of the plain-last relic of the palmy days of Memphis !

By his warlike insignia, by the delicacy of his features, by the name of Rameses engraved upon the ornaments on his breast and on the buckle of his belt, it is impossible to mistake in him the image of the conqueror, the same one of whom Diodorus and Herodotus wrote, and whom Abdallatif admired.

IV.