From Egypt to Japan

Then did the kings of Egypt rear temples and palaces and statues and obelisks worthy of all that greatness. Then were built the most gigantic temples ever raised by the hand of man – as much surpassing in vastness and grandeur those reared centuries afterward by the Greeks, as the latter surpass anything by the moderns. The temples of Thebes – including Luxor and Karnac, which are parts of one city – are as much grander than the Parthenon, as the Parthenon is grander than the Madeleine at Paris, which is a feeble attempt to copy it.

We have now been a week – beginning with Denderah – studying these ruins, and may give certain general impressions. We do not attempt any detailed description, which must necessarily be inadequate, since neither words nor figures convey an idea of them, any more than they do of the Alps. What would be thought of an avenue nearly two miles long, lined with over twelve hundred colossal sphinxes? Yet such was the avenue from Luxor to Karnac – an approach worthy to lead to the temple of the gods. What can we say of a forest of columns, each twelve feet in diameter, stretching out in long colonnades; of the massive walls covered with bas-reliefs; and obelisks in single shafts of granite, of such height and weight that it is the wonder of modern engineering how they could be cut from the side of the hills, and be brought a hundred and forty miles, and erected on their firm bases.

But this temple – or rather cluster of temples and palaces – was not, like the temple of Solomon, finished in a single reign. Karnac was not the work of one man, or of one generation. It was twenty-five hundred years in building, successive kings and dynasties adding to the mighty whole, which was to represent all the glory of Egypt.

The general impression of these temples – and the same is true of the Egyptian statues and sculptures – is one of grandeur rather than beauty. They seek to overpower the senses by mere size. Sometimes they overdo the matter. Thus in the temples at Karnac the columns seem to me too large and too much crowded for the best effect. Ordinary trees may be planted in a dense grove, but great, broad-spreading oaks or elms require space around them; and if these columns were a little more spaced– to use a printer's word – the architectural effect would be still grander. So in the Egyptian sculpture, everything is colossal. In the granite lions and sphinxes there is always an aspect of power in repose which is very impressive, and strikes one with awe. But in any lighter work, such as frescoes and bas-reliefs, there is a total absence of delicacy and grace. Nothing can be more stiff. They sometimes have a rude force of drawing, but beauty they have none. That was born in Greece. All the sculptures on all the temples of Egypt are not worth – except as historical monuments – the friezes of the Parthenon.

One thing else has struck me much as to the plan of these temples, viz.: that we see in them the types and models of much that has been reproduced in various forms of ecclesiastical architecture. One has but to observe with some care the construction of these vast basilicas, to see how many features of Jewish, and even of Christian and Moslem architecture, have been adopted from still older temples and an earlier religion. Thus in the temple at Edfoo there is first the vast enclosure surrounding the whole, and then within the walls an outer court open to the sky, corresponding to the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple at Jerusalem, to the Court of the Fountains leading to the Mosques, and the cloister surrounding the approaches to old abbeys and cathedrals. One might find a still closer resemblance in forms of worship, in the vestments of priests, in the altars, and in the burning of incense, etc., a parallel which scholars have often traced.

And now of all this magnificence and glory of the ancient capital of Egypt, what remains? Only these vast ruins of temples and palaces. The "plain of Thebes" is still here, but deserted and silent. A few columns and statues rise above the plain to mark where the city stood, but the city itself is gone as much as the people who inhabited it four thousand years ago. A few miserable mud huts are built against the walls of mighty temples, and the ploughman drives his team over the dust of the city of a hundred gates. I saw a fellah ploughing with a cow and a camel yoked together, and a couple of half-naked Arabs raising water with their shadoof between the Memnon (the statue which was said to sing when its stony lips were touched by the rising of the sun) and its brother statue – the two great Colossi, between which ran the Royal street to Luxor. Was there ever a more complete and utter desolation? In the temple called the Rameseum once stood the largest statue that ever was known – that of Rameses the Great (the same who had a statue at Memphis, for he erected monuments to himself everywhere), cut out of a single block of granite brought from the First Cataract, and weighing nearly nine hundred tons! On this was inscribed, as Herodotus writes, who saw it twenty-three hundred years ago: "I am the king of kings: if any man wish to know how great I am, and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works!" What a comment on the emptiness of human ambition, that this colossal statue, which was to last to the end of the world, was long ago pulled down by a later conqueror, Cambyses, the Persian, and now lies on its back, with its nose knocked off, and eyes put out, and all its glory in the dust!

In studying the figures and the inscriptions on the walls of temples, there are many things which throw light on the manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians. Here is a scene of hunting, or of fishing, or of feasting. Here are the different trades, which show the skill of the people in the mechanic arts, and many scenes which give us an insight into their domestic life. These have been the subjects of two learned and most interesting works by Wilkinson, which open the very interior of ancient Egypt to our modern eyes. They show a very high degree of civilization – of skill in all the useful arts, a skill fully equal in many things, and in some greatly superior, to that of our own day. Wendell Phillips, in his famous lecture on "The Lost Arts," finds many of his illustrations in ancient Egypt. I could not but think that this furnished a very effective answer to those advocates of evolution, who hold that mankind sprung from animals, and have gradually developed to their present state. How much progress have the Egyptians made in four thousand years? Here the race has gone backward, so that there is certainly no inherent tendency in our nature to advance.

But I was less interested in studying the domestic life of the ancient Egyptians, than their religious ideas. Herodotus says that the Egyptians were a very religious people, excelling all others in the honors paid to their gods; and this we can well believe, seeing the temples that they reared for their worship. But what were the gods they adored, and what sort of worship did they render, and how did all this act on the life and character of the people? Here we obtain a less exalted estimate of the ancient Egyptians. The remains which they have left, while they illustrate the greatness of the empire, which four thousand years ago had its seat in the valley of the Nile, do not give a high idea of its Religion. The land was wholly given to idolatry. The Egyptians had as many gods as the Greeks and Romans, only baser and lower, indicating baser and lower ideas. They made gods, not only of the sun, moon, and stars, but of beasts and birds and reptiles – of the apis and the ibis – of the serpent and the crocodile.

At Sakkara we visited one of the most stupendous mausoleums that we have seen in Egypt – one which Herodotus described, but which for centuries was so buried by the sands of the desert that its very site was not known until brought to light by the researches of Mariette Bey, who has done so much to restore the monuments of ancient Egypt. The approach to it was by an avenue of sphinxes, which led to a vast subterranean gallery – twenty feet wide and high – and leading two thousand feet, more than a third of a mile, under the earth. This long, vaulted passage is hewn in the solid rock – out of which open on either side a series of chambers or recesses, like side chapels – each containing a sarcophagus, 15 × 8 feet. These tombs, hollowed out of the solid granite, are so huge and massive that we wonder how they ever could have been got there. Yet these great sarcophagi – fit for the burial places of a long line of kings – were not for the Pharaohs or the Ptolemies, but for the Sacred Bulls! Thirty of these sarcophagi have been found, and on the walls are tablets which record the birth, and death, and burial of each one of these sacred beasts. These were the gods of Egypt, mother of the arts, and civilizer of the earth! This great repository of dead divinities is a colossal monument, at once of the architectural skill of the ancient Egyptians, and of their degrading superstition.

This single fact is enough to answer those who would imply, if they do not quite dare to assert, that the inspiration of the Books of Moses was derived from the Egyptians. It is a favorite theory of certain writers that Moses, being brought up in Egypt, here obtained both the Law and the Religion which he gave to the Israelites. No doubt he did learn much from a country that was at that time the most civilized in the world. He was brought up in a court, and enjoyed every advantage of a royal education. He was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." And it detracts not at all from his inspiration, to suppose that he may have been instructed to embody in his new and better code whatever was excellent in the older system, and had been approved by the experience of centuries. The ceremonial laws – such as those of purification – may have been adopted from the Egyptians. But these are the mere fringes of the garment of the great Lawgiver. As soon as we open the Hebrew Scriptures, we find traces of a wisdom such as the Egyptians never knew. The very first sentence – "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" – scatters the fables of Isis and Osiris, and substitutes for the troop of heathen deities the worship of One Living and True God. This single declaration marks a stupendous advance in the religious faith and worship of mankind.

The same first principle appears as the corner-stone of the law given on Mount Sinai: "I am the Lord thy God which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

The second law of the first table breaks in pieces the images of the gods of the Egyptians: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, nor any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, nor in the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth." This was spoken to a people that had just come out of a country where they worshipped beasts and birds and reptiles, and where the walls of the temples were covered with the images of all kinds of foul and creeping things.

In this age of the world, and among civilized nations, we cannot understand the passion for idolatry. Yet it is one of the most universal and ineradicable instincts of a half barbarous people. They see tokens of an unseen power in the forces of nature, in clouds and winds, in lightning and tempest, and they torment themselves with all imaginable terrors, from which they seek relief and protection in bowing down to gods of wood and stone.

The Israelites coming out of Egypt, were out of the house of bondage in one sense, but they were in it in another. They were continually relapsing into idolatry. The golden calf of Aaron was but an imitation of the sacred bulls of Egypt. Often they pined for the products of the fertile valley of the Nile. With nothing but the burning sands beneath their feet, they might well long for the shade of the palm tree and for its delicious fruit, and they said, Why hath this man Moses brought us up to die in this wilderness? It required forty years of wandering, and that a whole generation should leave their bones to whiten the sands of the desert, before their children could be wholly alienated from the worship of false gods. So not only with the Israelites, but with all nations of men, ages of fiery discipline have been necessary to bring back the race to this first article of our faith: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth."

We might follow the comparison through all the tables of the law, to show how absurd is the pretence that what Moses taught to the Israelites he first learned from the Egyptians. Tell us, ye learned antiquaries, where on all these temples, and in all the records which they have left us, is there any trace of the Ten Commandments?

And yet Egypt is connected very intimately, in history at least, with the birth of our religion. No other country, except Palestine, figures so largely in the Bible. Abraham went down into Egypt. Here came the sons of Jacob to buy corn, and found Joseph ruling in the house of Pharaoh. And hither centuries later fled the virgin mother with her child from the wrath of Herod, fulfilling the prediction, "Out of Egypt have I called my son."

But Religion – the Divine wisdom which at once instructs and saves mankind – came not from the valley of the Nile. Abraham and Jacob and Moses saw the Pyramids standing just as we see them now, but they did not point them to the true God. That knowledge came from a higher source. "History," says Bunsen, "was born on that night when Moses, with the law of God in his heart, led the people of Israel out of Egypt." And not History only, but Religion then came to a new birth, that was to be the herald of new and better hopes, and of a higher civilization than was known to the ancient world.