Nile Gleanings

Abstract

THE land of Egypt has of late caused the issue of a multitude of books, and that in consequence of the increased knowledge which half a century of Egyptian research has produced. Classical authorities no longer avail the traveller; he requires translations from the original hieroglyphic inscriptions, an insight into the discovery of a new world of antiquity and an acquaintance with the recent excavations which have revealed to the eye of the traveller an unveiled city of the dead. Scriptural texts alone garnished the older voyages. Above all the accomplished traveller should be acquainted with the various sciences which enable him to detect what is new or salient in the country that he visits, and its development, political institutions, progress, or decay should be seen at a glance even if it demands pages to describe them. The grand Egyptian tour is however a promenade of the land of monuments. Mr. Villiers Stuart's “Nile Gleanings” follow the usual track, and offer to the archaeologist, besides the usual discussions on art, hieroglyphs, and language, and an occasional notice on the fauna and flora of Egypt, several new facts of archaeological interest. At the description of Meidoum, the period of which is now known to be that of Senofrou, the tomb of Nofre Maat, with its strange figures inlaid with incrustations of red ochre, is new and interesting for its peculiar art and its remote age of the third dynasty; nor less important is the discovery of the flint flakes, the aébris of the old chisels which sculptured it. Other tombs at the spot were remarkable for their gigantic masonry. These belong indeed to the more recent discoveries, but the traveller paid his respects to the dog mummy pits at Bebe, and the sites of Minieh and Dayr-el-Nakel. Considerable interest attaches to the heretical worshippers of the sun's disk, who flourished about the close of the eighteenth dynasty, and who endeavoured to remove the capital of Egypt from Thebes with “its hundred gates,” to Tel-el-Amarna or Psinaula. The idea fashionable amongst Egyptologists has been that Amenophis III. of that line, the king, one of whose statues is the celebrated vocal Memnon, commenced an attempted religious reform and tried to substitute the worship of the sun's disk or orb, the Aten as it is called, for that of the god Amen-Ra, or the hidden sun. To this it is supposed that he was invited by the undue influence of his wife, Tai or Taiti. After his death it is conjectured that he was succeeded by his brother, Anienophis IV., and that this Amenophis IV. was a convert of the most pronounced zeal for the worship of the solar orb or pure Sabasanism. For this purpose, from the Amen-hept, or the Peaceful Amen, he changed his name to Khuenaten, the Light or Spirit of the Sun. The chief data for this arrangement of the monarchs of the period of the eighteenth dynasty were the stones used for the construction of the Pylon or gateway of Haremhebi or Horus of the same dynasty, which were found to have been taken from an edifice of the so-called disk worshippers at Thebes, and built with their faces inside the wall, exhibiting the erasure of the name of Amenophis IV. and the substitution of Khuenaten in the cartouches for Amenophis. Some objections indeed might have been taken from the fact that the features of Amenophis and Khuenaten were different, it being of course facile to adopt a new faith, impossible to secure fresh features, even such unenviable ones as those of Khuenaten. Mr. Villiers Stuart discovered a new tomb at Thebes, with Amenophis IV. and his queen on one side of the door and Khuenaten with his queen on the other, both dissimilar in features, arrangement, and condition-one perfect, the other mutilated. As both sovereigns could hardly have occupied the same sepulchre, evidently one of the two appropriated the construction of his predecessor. The theory of Mr. Villiers Stuart is that Khuenaten was a foreigner, which has been always asserted, although it is more difficult to decide to which of the races of mankind he belonged; there are however some reasons to believe that after all he may come from Nubia or the South. The discovery of this tomb is in fact the principal new point of the work, and is the one new and important contribution to the obscure history of the heretical division which took place about the thirteenth century B.C.

Nile Gleanings.

By Villiers Stuart of Dromana, M.P. (London: John Murray, 1879.)