George Rawlinson

“ Though thus useful, beneficent, and indeed essential to the existence of Egypt, the Nile can scarcely be said to add much to the variety of the landscape or to the beauty of the scenery. It is something, no doubt, to have the sight of water in a land where the sun beats down all day long with unremitting force till the earth is like a furnace of iron beneath a sky of molten brass. But the Nile is never clear. During the inundation it is deeply stained with the red argillaceous soil brought down from the Abyssinian highlands. ”

“ The repulse of this huge host was felt by the Egyptians almost as the repulse of the host of Xerxes was felt by the Greeks. Nectanebo was looked upon as a hero and a demigod; his throne was assured; it was felt that he had redeemed all the failures of the past, and had restored Egypt to the full possession of all her ancient dignity and glory. Nectanebo continued to rule over "the Two Lands" for nine years longer in uninterrupted peace, honour, and prosperity. During this time he applied himself, with considerable success, to the revival of Egyptian art and architecture. ”

“ To the notes of the music they sang, 'O king, thou conqueror! O Piankhi, thou conquering king! Thou hast come and smitten Lower Egypt; thou madest the men as women. The heart of the mother rejoices who bare such a son, for he who begat thee dwells in the vale of death. Happiness be to thee, O cow that hast borne the Bull! Thou shalt live for ever in after ages. ”

“ The walls of the Egyptian cities were rather banks to keep out the inundation than ramparts to repel an enemy. In a short time the strongholds that resisted were taken, the male population put to the sword, the women and children enslaved, the houses burnt, the temples ruthlessly demolished. An iconoclastic spirit possessed the conquerors. The gods and worship of Egypt were hateful to them. Where-ever the flood passed, it swept away the existing civilization, deeply impregnated as it was with religion ”

“ Nothing tells the character of a people so much as their religion; and we are only dealing superficially with the outward shows of things until we get down to the root of their being, the conviction, or convictions, held in the recesses of a people's heart. What, then, was the Egyptian religion? What did they worship? What did they reverence? What future did they look forward to?
Enter the huge courts of an Egyptian temple, or temple-palace, and you will see portrayed upon its lofty walls row upon row of deities. ”

“ Thus, after nearly a century and a half of repose, Egypt appeared once more in Western Asia as a conquering power, desirious of establishing an empire. The political edifice raised with so much trouble by David, and watched over with such care by Solomon, had been shaken to its base by the rebellion of Jeroboam; it was shattered beyond all hope of recovery by Shishak. Never more would the fair fabric of an Israelite empire rear itself up before the eyes of men; never more would Jerusalem be the capital of a State as extensive as Assyria or Babylonia, and as populous as Egypt. ”

“ The great river to which Egypt owes her being, is at once the source of all her blessings and her chiefest danger. Swelling with a uniformity, well calculated to call forth man's gratitude and admiration, almost from a fixed day in each year, and continuing to rise steadily for months, it gradually spreads over the lands, covering the entire soil with a fresh coating of the richest possible alluvium, and thus securing to the country a perpetual and inexhaustible fertility. ”

“ Had he gathered together all the troops that he could anyhow muster, and met Ochus in the open field, and fallen fighting for his crown, or had he even defended Memphis to the last, and only yielded himself when he could resist no longer, a certain halo of glory would have surrounded him. As it was, Egypt sank ingloriously at the last--her art, her literature, her national spirit decayed and almost extinct--paying, by her early disappearance from among the nations of the earth, the penalty of her extraordinarily precocious greatness. ”

“ In an absolute monarchy, the royal authority is the mainspring which controls all movements and all actions in every part of the State. Let this source of energy grow weak, and decline at once shows itself throughout the entire body politic. It is as when a fatal malady seizes on the seat of life in an individual--instantly every member, every tissue, falls away, suffers, shrinks, decays, perishes. Egyptian architecture is simply non-existent from the death of Ramesses III. to the age of Sheshonk ”

“ Men adored the orb of day as the grandest object which nature presented to them, as the great quickener of all things upon the earth, the cause of germination and growth, of fruitage and harvest, the dispenser to man of ten thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material--the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal ”

“ The greatest of the works of Ramesses are of a different description, and are indicative of that inordinate vanity which is the leading feature of his character. They are colossal images of himself. Four of these, each seventy feet in height, form the façade of the marvellous rock-temple of Ipsambul--"the finest of its class known to exist anywhere"--and constitute one of the most impressive sights which the world has to offer. ”

“ Imagine sitting figures, formed of a single solid block of sandstone, which have sat on for above three thousand years, mouldering gradually away under the influence of time and weather changes, yet which are still more than sixty feet high, and must originally, when they wore the tall crown of an Egyptian king, have reached very nearly the height of seventy feet! We think a statue vast, colossal, of magnificent dimensions, if it be as much as ten or twenty feet high--as Chantrey's statue of Pitt, or Phidias's chryselephantine statue of Jupiter. ”

“ The greatest of Egyptian queens--one of the greatest of Egyptian sovereigns--is indebted for the continuance of her memory among mankind to the accident that the stonemasons employed by Thothmes to carry out his plan of vengeance were too careless or too idle to effect the actual obliteration of the name, which they everywhere marred with their chisels. Hatred, for once, though united with absolute power, missed its aim; and Hatasu's great constructions, together with her "Merchant Fleet," are among the indisputable facts of history which can never be forgotten. ”

“ No language can convey an idea of its beauty, and no artist has yet been able to reproduce its form so as to convey to those who have not seen it an idea of its grandeur. The mass of its central piers, illumined by a flood of light from the clerestory, and the smaller pillars of the wings gradually fading into obscurity, are so arranged and lighted as to convey an idea of infinite space ”

“ Then it would be recognized that there lay before the travellers the fields and gardens and palaces and obelisks of Egypt, the broad flood and rich plain of the Nile, and their hearts would leap with joy, and lift themselves up in thanksgiving to the Most High, who had brought them through the great and terrible wilderness to a land of plenty. ”

“ Set in the old Egyptian mythology was recognized as "the patron of foreigners, the power which swept the children of the desert like a sand-storm over the fertile land." He was a representative of physical, but not of moral, evil; a strong and powerful deity, worthy of reverence and worship, but less an object of love than of fear. ”

“ The possession of the Nile was of extraordinary advantage to Egypt, not merely as the source of fertility, but as a means of rapid communication. One of the greatest impediments to progress and civilization which Nature offers to man in regions which he has not yet subdued to his will, is the difficulty of locomotion and of transport. Mountains, forests, torrents, marshes, jungles, are the curses of "new countries," forming, until they have been cut through, bridged over, or tunnelled under, insurmountable barriers, hindering commerce and causing hatreds through isolation. ”

“ There is an entire absence of picturesque scenery. A single broad river, unbroken within the limits of Egypt even by a rapid, two flat strips of green plain at its side, two low lines of straight-topped hills beyond them, and a boundless open space where the river divides itself into half a dozen sluggish branches before reaching the sea, constitute Egypt, which is by nature a southern Holland---"weary, stale, flat and unprofitable." ”

“ The long stalk of the lily is the Nile valley itself, which is a ravine scooped in the rocky soil for seven hundred miles from the First Cataract to the apex of the Delta, sometimes not more than a mile broad, never more than eight or ten miles. No other country in the world is so strangely shaped, so long compared to its width, so straggling, so hard to govern from a single centre. ”

“ Thus the sole question, when a foreign host invades Egypt, is this: Can it, or can it not, defeat the full force of Egypt in an open battle? If it gains one battle, there is no reason why it should not gain fifty; and this is so evident, and so well known, that on Egyptian soil one defeat has almost always been accepted as decisive of the military supremacy. A beaten army may, of course, protract its resistance behind walls, and honour, fame, patriotism, may seem sometimes to require such a line of conduct ”

“ To excavate a rock-tomb in the style fashionable at the day was a task requiring several years for its due accomplishment; Set-nekht felt that he could not look forward to many years--perhaps not even to many months--of life. In this difficulty, he felt no shame in appropriating to himself a royal tomb recently constructed by a king, named Siphthah, whom he looked upon as a usurper, and therefore as unworthy of consideration. ”

“ On the whole, it is perhaps most probable that the invading army, like that of Attila, consisted of a vast variety of races--"a collection of all the nomadic hordes of Syria and Arabia"--who made common cause against a foe known to be wealthy, and who all equally desired settlements in a land reputed the most productive in the East. An overwhelming flood of men--a quarter of a million, if we may believe Manetho--poured into the land, impetuous, irresistible. ”

“ At dawn long streaks of rosy light stretch themselves across the eastern sky, the haze above the western horizon blushes a deep red; a ruddy light diffuses itself around, and makes walls and towers and minarets and cupolas to glow like fire; the long shadows thrown by each tree and building are purple or violet. A glamour is over the scene, which seems transfigured by an enchanter's wand ”

“ It is seldom that any single event of ancient history is so profusely illustrated as this expedition of Queen Hatasu, which is placed before our eyes in all its various phases from the gathering of the fleet on the Red Sea coast to the return of those engaged in it, in gladness and triumph, to Thebes. ”

“ Once upon a time the gods were tired of ruling in the upper sphere, and resolved to take it in turns to reign over Egypt in the likeness of men. So, after four of them had in succession been kings, each for a long term of years, it happened that Osiris, the son of Seb and Nut, took the throne, and became monarch of the two regions, the Upper and the Lower. Osiris was of a good and bountiful nature, beneficent in will and words: he set himself to civilize the Egyptians, taught them to till the fields and cultivate the vine, gave them law and religion, and instructed them in various useful arts. ”

“ Greece is, of course, unapproachable in the matter of sculpture, whether in the way of statuary, or of high or low relief; but, apart from this, Egypt in her architectural works will challenge comparison with any country that ever existed, or any people that ever gave itself to the embodiment of artistic conceptions in stone or marble. And Egyptian architecture culminated under Seti and his son Ramesses. ”

“ Among the marvels of Egypt perhaps the Sphinx is second to none. The mysterious being with the head of a man and the body of a lion is not at all uncommon in Egyptian architectural adornment, but the one placed before the Second Pyramid (the Pyramid of Shafra) , and supposed to be contemporary with it, astonishes the observer by its gigantic proportions. It is known to the Arabs as Abul-hôl, the father of terror. It measures more than one hundred feet in length, and was partially carved from the rocks of the Lybian hills. ”

“ With a solitary exception, all the temples anterior to the event have disappeared, and no traces can be found of them except scattered ruins which bear the marks of a destructive violence. To say what during these centuries Egypt had to endure in the way of upsetting of her past is impossible. The only fact which can be stated as certain is, that not a single monument of this desolate epoch has come down to our days to show us what became of the ancient splendour of Egypt under the Hyksôs. We witness under the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties a fresh shipwreck of Egyptian civilization. ”

“ In vain did Iphicrates offer to run the whole risk himself--to take no troops with him besides his own mercenaries, and attack the city with them. As the Greek grew more hot and reckless, the Persian became more cool and wary. What might not be behind this foolhardiness? Might it not be possible that the Greek was looking to his own interests, and designing, if he got possession of Memphis, to set himself up as king of Egypt? ”