EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES.

INTRODUCTION.

BEFORE we proceed to the separate description of the Monuments which have been procured from Egypt, and which now enrich the National Collection at the British Museum, we propose briefly to lay before our readers an outline of the nature of the celebrated country in which these, the earliest remains of ancient art, have been discovered, with some account of its most celebrated cities and buildings now wholly ruined. It seems, indeed, hardly possible thoroughly to appreciate the remains of ancient art without some knowledge of the peculiarities of the lands which they once adorned and illustrated. Thus a knowledge of the religious creed of a nation or a race, the language they spoke, the ordinary life they led, are almost essential requisites in tracing out the course of their artistic history. On sculptured monuments, alike in Egypt and in other lands, we observe the forms of animals and of plants which were subservient to their daily and domestic use, or honoured for some real or supposed virtues-while in the geological character of the natural productions of their country we discern and test the ability and the judgment with which they handled the materials they had at their command.

From the earliest Antiquity Egypt has been called the gift of the Nile: to that noble river it owes at once the peculiar formation and growth of its territory, and the fertility of its soil. But for the Nile, Egypt would have shared the fate of the rest of Central Africa, and would have been a sandy waste or a stony desert. Scarcely any country exists of which the natural limits are so narrow, and which yet affords so much internal variety, the richest fertility

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bordering on the sandiest deserts, and the luxuriant vegetation of the river-banks hemmed in by the most rugged and inhospitable mountains. Egypt is in fact but one long valley, divided into two nearly equal portions by its river, and valuable for the purposes of human life only so far as its annual inundation extends on either side from the main channel of the river.

The Nile flows in an undivided stream nearly due N., with occasional bends to the N.W., till it reaches the city of Cercasorus, about sixty miles from the sea, where it divides into several small, and two principal arms, which enclose the Delta, the fruitful part of Lower Egypt. In ancient times it entered the Mediterranean by seven mouths, two of which Herodotus states to have been artificial: and it is worthy of remark that these, the Rosetta and Damietta branches, are now alone navigable. From the point of division in Lat. 30° 15' to Lat. 24° 8', near Assouan (the ancient Syene, about 500 English miles) are the districts generally comprehended under the titles of Middle and Upper Egypt (the Thebais of the Greeks).

The basin of the Nile is formed by hills, seldom of great height, extending more or less from Jebel Silsileh, near Assouan, to Cairo, and with defiles on its eastern side in the direction of the Red Sea, which have in all ages served as lines of communication between the river and the trading towns on its coast. From these hills, which are of various geological frmoation, have been obtained the materials for all the monuments either still existing in Egypt, or preserved in the museums of Europe. To the peculiar characteristic of the Nile, its annual inundation, may doubtless be traced many of the peculiarities of ancient Egyptian life. Thus their mode of interment, and the constant practice of embalming not only the bodies of their own people, but also those of the animals sacred to their Deities-the cat, the bull, the crocodile, and the ibis-are probably due to this cause. The Egyptians would not place the bodies of their friends in the alluvial soil of the valley, which was liable to annual disturbance or obliteration by the action of the flood; still less would they consign them to the river, which was too sacred to have been thus polluted. The dryness of the climate and vicinity of the rocky mountain caverns provided them a place wherein to deposit the remains of those who were dear to them, and the use of spices, &c. enabled them by embalment to preserve them still longer.

On the West side of the Nile, as we ascend from the Delta, the mountain range is for the most part composed of shelly limestone, of

which the Great Pyramid at Gizeh has been built. Near Esneh, in Lat. 25° 20′, and Edfou, we find sandstone alternating with limestone, of which (with the exception of the ruins in the Delta) the majority of the temples have been constructed, and of which the colossal ram's head in the British Museum1 is an example. In the neighbourhood of Assouan we meet with that combination of granite and hornblende which has been called in consequence Syenite, the material of a large majority of the colossal statues and obelisks. A halfformed obelisk between seventy and eighty feet long, with unfinished columns, sarcophagi, and immense hewn blocks, still mark the site of the ancient quarries of Silsilis.

On the East side of the river the same geological features prevail with some slight differences, the limestone formation being more interrupted, and the serpentine and granite commencing earlier.

The mountainous region between the Nile and the Red Sea contains abundant mineral deposits. Iron, of which Agatharcides denied the existence, has been discovered by Mr. James Burton at Hammámi: and copper mines have been met with in the same range, and in Arabia Petræa. Agatharcides, D'Anville, and Makrizi have demonstrated the existence of gold mines, and tradition attributes the working of them to the Ptolemies and early Pharaohs.

It is worth while to state concisely what are the remains still existing in the Delta, Lower and Upper Egypt, and Nubia, as we shall have constant necessity to refer to them when we come to the description of the sculptures preserved in the Museum.

With regard to the Delta, our information is more limited than in the case of the other districts: owing to the climate and the difficulty of travelling in it, it has not been so thoroughly explored as other parts of Egypt, while from its vicinity to the sea it has suffered much more extensively from the depredations of other nations. The remains it at present contains are few in number, and, with two or three exceptions, offer fewer subjects of interest than are found elsewhere. The most important ruins are-1. Those of Sà, on the site of the ancient Sais, and to the N. of the village of Sa-al-Hajar. Sais was celebrated for its temple of Athene, and for the tombs of the Saite dynasty, who ruled Egypt for 150 years, till the time of the invasion by Cambyses. Cecrops is

1 Egyptian Saloon, No. 7.

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said to have led thence the colony who founded Athens in B. C. 1556, and to have visited Greece in a papyrus boat. Herodotus describes as a great curiosity a monolith temple, which had been brought from Elephantina and erected at Sais. 2. The ruins of Semennut (the ancient Sebennytus), built of granite blocks brought from Assouan, and described by Mr. Hamilton as one of the most magnificent remains of Egyptian art, though now shattered and piled in heaps as though by an earthquake. 3. Those of San (the Tanis of ancient history and Zoan of Scripture), among which Mr. Hamilton excavated an andro-sphinx of colossal size. 4. The mounds of Tel Atrib, in circuit about five miles, of Tel Basta (Pi-Beseth), and Matarieh near Cairo, where still stands a solitary obelisk on the site of the celebrated Heliopolis or On, the Ain-Shems of the Arab writers. Abd-al-latif, the Arabian historian, states that he saw two obelisks, one standing and the other fallen; and Zoëga conjectures that the one in the Campus Martius at Rome came originally from this place.

The evidence of many travellers demonstrates the rapid decay of the monuments in the Delta. The description of Abd-al-latif shows that in his time the ruins of Heliopolis were still considerable; and P. Lucas, who was in Egypt in A.D. 1716, states that the people of the country were in the habit of cutting grinding-stones out of the capitals and pillars of the temple at Bebek-al-Hajar.

Cairo (Al Kahirah) itself contains few relics of the early period of Egyptian art; but in its neighbourhood is the village of Metrahenny, which marks the site of the once celebrated Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt, and the rival in splendour of the even more celebrated Thebes. Owing to its position, it has served as a quarry for the successive rulers of the country, and fragments of columns, statues, and obelisks are all that now remains to indicate the position of the great temple of Phtha (Hephæstus).

Such are the principal ruins now existing in the Delta and its immediate neighbourhood.

On ascending the Nile, and entering the second main division of the country, Middle or Lower Egypt, the traveller enters the district of Al Fýúm, containing the once well-known lake Moeris (now Birket-al-Kerún), and passes the ruins of Madinat-al-Fýúm, the

1 Her. ii. 175.