Obelisk of Memnon

“ At Thebes, too, is the Memnon, a mutilated statue of Amnoph, which never was vocal except by trick or in imagination, and the Obelisks, whose form is sufficiently explained, without obscenity or mystery, by the fancy for monolithic monuments and the possession of large blocks of granite. The remains of the Labyrinth do not enable us to pronounce whether its twenty-seven halls were a burial-place for kings or crocodiles, or a place of assembly for the provinces of Egypt.
"Very various and very extravagant notions have been formed of the population of ancient Egypt. ”

“ It is a very interesting fact, that in the inscriptions of the vth and vith dynasties in Memphis the obelisk has a curious shape, being represented by a short and singularly unproportional shaft on a high and wide pedestal, and crowned at the point of the pyramidion by a large disk of the sun. ”

“ The mounds of Memphis have not as yet been explored; but if an obelisk should be met with there at some future time, our dream of the privileges of the living and of the dead (already disturbed by Mariette’s discovery of the pedestals of two obelisks, in front of the temple of Queen Hatasou, in Western Thebes) , must share the fate of other pretty but illusory dreams. It seems hardly fair that the eastern bank should enjoy a monopoly of the sun’s beaming rays, considering that tombs are also abundant along its rocky bounds. ”

“ I have a few days since measured the colossi, as also the rise of the Nile deposit on the bases of their thrones. The height of the Memnon statue, reckoned from head to foot, but without the tall headdress they once wore, was 14·28 metres, or 451⁄2 feet, and to this the base, another block, 4·25 metres, or 13 feet 7 inches, of which about three feet was hidden by a surrounding step. Thus the statues originally stood nearly sixty feet (perhaps nearly seventy feet with the pshent) above the level of the temple. ”

“ At the landing-place in front of the chief temple at Philæ, a broad flight of steps, leading upwards from the river’s edge, is crowned at the summit by a solitary obelisk, one alone remaining; next follows an avenue of Isis-headed columns, and then the majestic propylon of the temple. The obelisk is of fine sandstone, without sculpture, broken at the summit, and about thirty feet in height. At no great distance is the pedestal, cupped at the top, which formerly supported its companion. ”

“ Memnon meanwhile had hurried to the spot where the battering-ram had by this time dealt a second blow, shouting as he went to every man who was not a coward to follow him.
Karnis, Orpheus and the rest of the high-priest’s guests obeyed his call and gathered round him; he commanded that everything portable should be brought out of the temple to be built into a barricade behind the point of attack, and that neither the most precious and beautiful statues, nor the brass and marble stelae and altar-slabs should be spared. ”

“ There are 250 steps on the big Pyramid, and it is 480 feet high. At one o'clock we had a capital lunch, and then started for the Statue of Memnon only a third of a mile from the Pyramids. Some camels were kneeling ready to take us, and I mounted one. The beast squealed and got up first on his front legs and then on his hind ones, pitching me back and forth, but I hung on and got along very nicely.
The immense statue, partly covered with sand, did not impress me much, but a tomb which I entered near by was a wonder. ”

“ How much we owe those bows of thine
Without thine arm to lend the breeze,
How vain the finger on the keys!
Though all unmatched the player's skill,
Those thousand throats were dumb and still:
Another's art may shape the tone,
The breath that fills it is thine own.
Six days the silent Memnon waits
Behind his temple's folded gates;
But when the seventh day's sunshine falls
Through rainbowed windows on the walls,
He breathes, he sings, he shouts, he fills
The quivering air with rapturous thrills ”

“ The two friends, equally enthusiastic on the subject of Egyptian antiquities, set to work to prosecute researches, with an ardor of rivalship which approached somewhat too nearly to jealousy. Each aspired to undertake the boldest expeditions, and to attempt the most hazardous excavations. But the great object of their ambition was an enormous bust of Memnon, in rose-colored granite, which lay half buried in the sand on the left bank of the Nile. ”

“ The statement made by Barber, in his The Mechanical Triumphs of the Ancient Egyptians, that the grooves are made at some later date with the intention of cutting up the obelisk, is impossible, as two (h and i, plate I) run transversely across the obelisk, where all the wedging and cutting in the world would not part the stone. The line of small punch-holes at H, however, was undoubtedly made in modern or mediæval times to extract a block from the side of the obelisk, and it is a marvel that the obelisk has not been used as a quarry throughout the ages. ”

“ After long meditation and the rejection of the hybrid monstrosities with which the nation was menaced, an obelisk is at last decided upon. How can it be made grand and dignified enough to be equal to the office assigned it? We dare not attempt to carve a single stone from the living rock,—all our modern appliances fail to make the task as easy to us as it seems to have been to the early Egyptians. No artistic skill is required in giving a four-square tapering figure to a stone column. If we cannot shape a solid obelisk of the proper dimensions, we can build one of separate blocks. ”

“ According to Sir G. Wilkinson, the whole mass, when entire, must have weighed about 887 tons. A colossal statue of Remeses II. lies with his face upon the ground on the site of Memphis; it was placed before the temple of Pthah. Its total height is estimated at forty-two feet eight inches, without the pedestal. It is of white siliceous limestone. Another well-known colossus is the statue of the so-called Memnon, now in the British Museum. It is supposed to be the [672] statue of Remeses II. It was brought by Belzoni from the Memnonium, at Thebes. ”

“ The cost of removing this obelisk from Luxor, near Thebes, to Paris, was about two millions of francs, or eighty thousand pounds. It is a handsome monolith, of reddish Syenite, but unfortunately it is damaged near the top, and suffers from the bad taste exhibited in the pedestal on which it was erected in 1836. ”

“ I.—Usertesen I., a Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty, corresponding with the year 3064 b.c., supplies us with the earliest example of an obelisk, in the venerable monolith still standing at Heliopolis. Its consort is lost, but the pedestal has been recently cleared of rubbish to prove its former existence. The Heliopolis or Matareeah obelisk was originally capped with metal, which has left its mark on the pyramidion; and its shaft is engraven with a solitary column of boldly carved hieroglyphs. ”

“ One singular feature is that in several cases a second row starts off from a small cairn in or close to the main row, and runs away in quite a different direction. [1]
5. The menhir, or tall stone, is a rude, unwrought obelisk. In some cases it is nothing other than the starting or the blocking stone of a row which has been destroyed. This is the case with that at Merrivale Bridge. But such is not always the case. There were no rows in connection with the menhirs on Devil Tor and the Whitmoor Stone.
That the upright block is a memorial to the dead can hardly be doubted ”

“ It is taken from a rock-cut tomb between Dayr-el-Medinet and Medinet-Abou.
[308] This plate (v.) is not a picturesque restoration; it is merely a map in relief. Only those buildings are marked upon it which have left easily traceable remains. No attempt has been made to reconstruct by conjecture any of those edifices which are at present nothing but confused heaps of débris.
[309] The obelisk of Ousourtesen at Heliopolis is 20·27 metres, or 67 feet 6 inches, high; the Luxor obelisk at Paris, 22·80 metres, or 76 feet; that in the piazza before St. Peter's in Rome, 83 feet 9 inches ”

“ It might thus seem, that by placing obelisks in our churchyards in association with the dead, we were violating their original significance, and guilty of adding another to the many incongruities which have arisen from adopting pagan symbols in Christian burying-places. But in reality we find a deeper reason for the association. In some of the oldest sculptures in Egypt, an obelisk is represented as standing on the top of a pyramid ”

“ On the belt of the colossus is the cartouche of Rameses II. The fist and big toe of this monster figure are in the British Museum. In the Piazza of St. John Lateran, at Rome, the tall obelisk towers heavenwards like a lofty spire, adorning that square. Originally it was one hundred and ten feet long, and therefore the longest monolith ever quarried. It was also the heaviest, weighing, as it does, about four hundred and fifty tons, and therefore considerably more than twice the weight of the London obelisk. ”

“ More imposing cenotaphs have risen, costlier mausoleums have charmed the eye, more gigantic monuments have aspired to kiss the clouds; but to the student of mankind none were more significant, to the historian none more interesting, to the poet none will appeal more powerfully through the long ages yet to be. It will be a new and grander Memnon in masonry, ever sounding celestial music for him that hath ears to hear, when smitten by the golden shafts of Justice's shining orb, when gilded with the celestial radiance of Love and Charity. ”

“ Classical authors tell us next to nothing; as an example I give Pliny’s account of an erection done by the Egyptians. In his Natural History, book XXXVI, chap. 14, he tells us: “Rhamsesis, who was reigning at the time of the capture of Troy, erected one 140 cubits high (73 metres) . Having left the spot where the palace of Mnevis stood, this monarch erected another obelisk 120 cubits (63 metres) in height, but of prodigious thickness, the sides being no less than 11 cubits in breadth (5.77 metres) . ”

“ Of modern theories two seem to be popular; the first suggests that the obelisk was laid flat, with one side of its base just above the notch, which in nearly all cases runs along one side of the pedestal, and that it was gradually levered up, and at the same time banked from below, being assisted when it had become sufficiently high by pulling with head-ropes, and similarly checked by ropes when on the point of tilting over on to its base. ”

“ The progress of Egyptological science appears, therefore, to demand that we should adopt the Biggig monolith as a genuine obelisk, however awkward it may be presumed to be in its proportions. It, no doubt, stood once in front of the entrance of a temple dedicated to Ptah, or Vulcan, like the temple of Memphis; and in its broken condition is still highly reverenced by the country-people, who “look on these fragments with the same superstitious feeling as on some stones at the [Pg 147] temple of Panopolis, and other places ”

“ According to Cooper the obelisk was an emblem of the sun—the clearest symbol of supreme deity. The Egyptian name was TEKHEN, a word signifying mystery, and it was regarded among the initiated as the esoteric symbol of light and life. The obelisk was consequently dedicated to Horus, the god of the rising sun, while the pyramid, the house of the dead, was dedicated to Tum, or Atum, the god of the setting sun. Hence obelisks are found only on the east bank of the Nile, while pyramids are built on the west side, by the edge of the silent desert. ”

“ Anyone who has seen, in sabâkh work or elsewhere, earth being cut from under a stone, or even being itself undercut, knows the way it has of slipping sideways or any way but the expected—generally on the heads of one’s workmen. With, say, a 500‐ton obelisk, the undercutting would be a somewhat delicate business to make it settle down true on to the pedestal.
The tendency to rock and pivot when being finally pulled upright is not dealt with. Whatever method the Egyptians used, it was sure, and did not depend on the skill of the men with the hoe and basket. ”

“ The fact that it is in black paint on very dark red weathered granite has made it very difficult to photograph. It appears to begin with a date, and to have a number in the middle, but there is no name of a king.
(20) At the top of the upper quarry-face there is what seems to be the bed from which a monument, very probably a small obelisk, of 7 metres long has been extracted. The bottom of the trench can still be traced where the work has been divided up into grooves of similar width to those in the obelisk trench. ”

“ Both of them show a peculiarity in their lines, which could only be noticed effectually when the pair stood together. This peculiarity is a convexity, or entasis, as it is called, on the inner faces. Even to the untrained eye its sides seem not of [207] equal dimensions; and actual measurement shows the irregularity more clearly. This is said, however, to be exceptional to the general rule, and to be foreign to the design of an obelisk in the best period of the Pharaonic art. Still, several magnificent specimens, such as the Luxor and Flaminian obelisks, exhibit it. ”

“ The Acropolis was called Memnonium. The Susians have the name also of Cissii. Æschylus442 calls the mother of Memnon, Cissia. Memnon is said to be buried near Paltus in Syria, by the river Badas, as Simonides says in his Memnon, a dithyrambic poem among the Deliaca. The wall of the city, the temples and palaces, were constructed in the same manner as those of the Babylonians, of baked brick and asphaltus, as some writers relate. Polycletus however says, that its circumference was 200 stadia, and that it was without walls. ”