Thebes

“ We have not gone far before we find that life in Thebes can be quite exciting. A great noise is heard from one of the narrow riverside streets, and a crowd of men comes rushing up with shouts and oaths. Ahead of them runs a single figure, whose writing-case, stuck in his girdle, marks him out as a scribe. He is almost at his last gasp, for he is stout and not accustomed to running ”

“ The poet gazes on it with awe and pity. No word of reproach escapes his lips. He cannot defend the cause in which the warriors fell; but he buries their fault in silence.
Amid the clouds and gloom which hung over Thebes, the result of her disgraceful union with, the enemies of Greece, one ray of light appears to console the patriotic poet. He dwells with eagerness on the sympathy, resting partly on national traditions, partly on community of interests, and not least, perhaps, on common fear and dislike of Athens, which, after the Persian troubles, grew up between Thebes and Sparta. ”

“ How good and tenderly considerate the Maker of souls was to make them in pairs—the man and the woman. The sun was setting over great Thebes, the capital of the Pharaohs, when they alighted, with the Nile, a broad band of gold, and the buildings ruddy in the ardent glow. ”

“ Everything was dim and gray in the twilight. She looked up at the great dungeon tower which overshadowed the garden, and thought of the two young princes who were prisoners there. Duke Theseus had brought them from Thebes. He was very proud of them, and would not give them up, although the people of their land offered to give him gold and jewels for their ransom. The princes were cousins, and were the last of the royal line of Thebes. In the stillness Emelia murmured their names to herself, "Palamon and Arcite, Palamon and Arcite. How miserable they must be in their narrow cell!" ”

“ Next to the city of Apollo is Thebes, now called Diospolis,
“with her hundred gates, through each of which issue two hundred men, with horses and chariots,”881
according to Homer, who mentions also its wealth;
“not all the wealth the palaces of Egyptian Thebes contain.”882
Other writers use the same language, and consider Thebes as the metropolis of Egypt. Vestiges of its magnitude still exist, which extend 80 stadia in length. There are a great number of temples, many of which Cambyses mutilated. The spot is at present occupied by villages. ”

“ Later on the banished prince married Adrastus's daughter, and the king equipped a large army to go with Polynices to Thebes. At the head of the troops he placed seven valiant chiefs who were determined to win the city from the usurper, or perish in the attempt. These leaders gave this315 celebrated expedition the name of "The Seven against Thebes."
If courage and boldness were enough to overthrow a city, the besiegers would have won an easy victory; but their bravery was of no avail against a place so well fortified and defended as Thebes. ”

“ The inhabitants of Thebes worship an eagle; the Leontopolitæ, a lion; the Mendesians, a male and female goat; the Athribitæ, a shrew-mouse; different people worshipping different animals. They do not, however, assign the same reasons for this difference of worship.
[Pg 258]
[CAS. 813] 41. Then follows the Hermopolite Castle, a place where is collected the toll on merchandise brought down from the Thebaïs. At this place begins the reckoning by schœni of sixty stadia each, which is continued to Syene and Elephantina. Next is the Thebaïc Keep, and a canal leading to Tanis. ”

“ The city of Thebes lay in the rich plains of Boeotia, where meat and corn and wine were to be had abundantly. The near by hills provided excellent hunting, and the Thebans were a people known to their neighbours as loving pleasure and all the good things of the world, as being good fighters, but men who were intellectually dull. There were some exceptions, however, for Thebes produced two men of genius: Pindar, the poet, and Epaminondas, the mighty general.
Pindar was born in the sixth century B.C. but he lived to be an old man, and the Persians had been driven out of Greece before he died. ”

“ Sloping revetment walls of unbaked bricks covered the banks, and the crests were lined many files deep by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, whose white or brightly striped costumes fluttered in the sun with that constant motion character [103] istic of a multitude even when it seems to be motionless. Behind this ring of spectators the cars, chariots, and litters watched by the coachmen, drivers, and slaves, seemed to be the camp of a migrating nation, so great was their number; for Thebes, the wonder of the ancient world, reckoned more inhabitants than do certain kingdoms. ”

“ These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley of the Nile—pure Egyptians, whose type has not changed in the course of centuries. In the oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis you may see many such, with the same noble profile and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure, surmounted by broad shoulders. ”

“ They were laughing loudly and passing inane remarks about the ruins, but they could not see that mighty multitude who moved to and fro paying no heed to these nineteenth century innovations. The tourists passed oblivious, and the busy city lived its life. The flesh-controlled blind, and the freeborn indifferent, to what was passing.
The city of Thebes, as it was now presented to Philip and Adela, was as it had been in its most palmy days of prosperity, only that the spirits of the embalmed ones had simplified their ceremonials. ”

“ Breathing from his heart this curse against the policy of the Corinthians above referred to, and conveniently named after the usurper who founded the system, Theognis soon retired to Thebes, as a state which, from its open sympathy with the politics of the banished Megarians, would be likeliest to offer them an asylum, and to connive at their projects for recovering their native city by force or subtlety. The first glimpse we have of him at Thebes is characteristic of the man in more ways than one. ”

“ Thebes, with its hundred gates, was perhaps the most splendid city in the world for many centuries. Then there were Luxor, Karnak, Philæ, Elephantine, Baalbeck, Dendera, Aba-Simbal, Abydos, Esneh, Edfau, Silsilis, and other places, all decorated with palaces, temples, pyramids, tombs, and sphinxes, &c., on the same magnificent scale; but all have shared the same fate, and their stupendous ruins are all that remain to strike the stranger with awe and wonder. ”

“ To begin with, a general comparison of the style of the rejected epics with that of our two poems suggests that the latter are far more elaborately 'worked up' than their brethren. They have more unity; they are less like mere lays; they have more dramatic tension and rhetorical ornament. One poem only can perhaps be compared with them, the first which is quoted as ' Homer's' in literature, the Thebais:* but the glory of Thebes was of all subjects the one which could least be publicly blazoned by Athenians ”

“ Objects of great rarity and antiquity were being brought to Europe every season by travellers who had purchased them from native dealers living on the spot; and many of these objects were historically traceable to certain royal dynasties which made Thebes their capital city. At length suspicion became certainty. An English tourist, passing through Paris, presented Professor Maspero with some photographs from a superb papyrus which he had then lately bought at Thebes from an Arab named Abd-er-Ranoul. ”

“ The origin of the great city is obscure. Unlike Memphis, Thebes, her southern rival, rose to the headship by slow degrees. It was towards the close of the dark age marked by the rule of Hanes, that a new line of kings arose in the upper country, with Thebes for their capital. At first they were merely nobles; then one became a local king, and his successors won the whole dominion of Egypt. These were the sovereigns of the Eleventh Dynasty. Their date must be before Abraham, probably some centuries earlier. ... Thebes, like the other cities of Egypt, had a civil and a religious name. ”

“ The Tortoise is, also, the designation of the coins of Thebes in Greece,—and from this fact, it is brought home at once to the Tyrians, as a Symbol of their country, as well as of Ægina,—and in all probability (consulting data) Ægina copied it from the Theban coin. The Phœnician Chief, Cadmus— (all ancient Tyrian Chiefs were so called) founded Thebes, and is well known to have introduced into Greece, the letters, or Alphabet of his own country ”

“ The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt, the chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes. There was plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over. Sethos and Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded Homer’s day by four or five centuries. And, as such things never lose in telling, Homer’s contemporaries must have had no very inadequate—we now know that they could hardly have had exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth of Thebes. ”

“ In the course of one or two generations Thebes had spread in every direction, and had enclosed within her circuit the neighbouring villages of Ashîrû, the fief of Maiit, and Apît-rîsîfc, the southern Thebes, which lay at the confluence of the Nile with one of the largest of the canals which watered the plain. The monuments in these two new quarters of the town were unworthy of the city of which they now formed part, and Amenôthes III. consequently bestowed much pains on improving them. ”

“ And it is so mystical, this town of Thebes, with its dark sanctuaries, once inhabited by gods and symbols. All the sublime, fresh-minded striving of the human soul after the Unknowable is as it were petrified in these ruins, in forms diverse and immeasurably grand. And subsisting thus down to our day it puts us to shame. Compared with this people, who thought only of eternity, we are a lot of pitiful dotards, who soon will be past caring about the wherefore of life, or thought, or death. ”

“ THEBES, ROMANCE OF. The French Roman de Thèbes is a poem of some 10,000 lines which appears to be based, not on the Thebaid of Statius, but on an abridgment of that work. This view is supported by the omission of incidents and details which, in spite of the altered conditions under which the poem was composed, would naturally have been preserved in any imitation of the Thebaid, while again certain modifications of the Statian version can hardly be due to the author’s invention but point to an ancient origin. As in other poems of the same kind, the marvellous disappears ”

“ Thou didst produce, O [Theban] land! thou didst produce formerly (as I heard the foreign report, [30] I heard it formerly at home) , the race sprung from teeth from the fiery-crested dragon fed on beasts, the proudest honor of Thebes. But to the nuptials of Harmonia the Gods came of old, and by the harp and by the lyre of Amphion uprose the walls of Thebes the tower of the double streams, [31] at the midst of the pass of Dirce, which waters the verdant plain before Ismenus. And Io, our ancient mother, doomed to bear horns, brought forth a line of Theban kings. ”

“ It is recommended to the student, to trace the provinces and cities on some good map of ancient Greece." ↑ [Some say Thebes the less, others, the suburbs of Thebes the greater. It is certain that Thebes itself sent none.—Tr.] ↑ It was the custom of these people to shave the fore parts of their heads, that their enemies might not seize them by the hair; on the hinder part they allowed it to grow, as a valiant race that would never turn their backs. Their manner of fighting was hand to hand, without quitting their javelins. ”

“ THE necropolis of Thebes—the great city which for so many centuries had been the capital of Egypt—lies on the western side of the Nile valley, on the margin of the desert opposite the modern village of Luxor. No ancient site has yielded a greater harvest of antiquities than this famous stretch of rocky land. From time immemorial it has been the profitable hunting-ground of the tomb robber; for more than a century a flourishing trade in its antiquities has been carried on by the natives of the district, and for nearly a hundred years archaeologists have been busy here with spade and pencil. ”

“ He moved, and founded another city, yet Thebes must ever be regarded as the mother of modern cities, and it is a goodly sight.
It was a wonderful sight, this city with its swarming population and refined luxuries. Philip and Adela became, with Apollonius, the guests of this priest in the temple of Amour, and had ample opportunities of judging the daily life of this ancient race of hard workers and ardent pleasure-seekers. They still continued, as they had lived of yore, industrious and just in their laws, striving during their lifetime to win a good record afterwards. ”

“ Very soon we had to enclose a space in front of the galleries to hold our collections of pottery, pieces of sculpture, and stacks of ushabtis.
3. At first I brought up some of our best men from Koptos, and took on many of the Qurneh people for the work. But as soon as we began to find antiquities, it was evident that the previous engagements of these local workers to the various dealers of Thebes took precedence of their engagement to me. ”

“ Another, Merikarâ, is a more real personage, for we have contemporary records of his days in the inscriptions of the tombs at Asyût, from which we see that the princes of Thebes were already wearing down the Northerners, in spite of the resistance of the adherents of Herakleopolis, among whom the most valiant were the chiefs of Asyût. The civil war eventuated in favour of Thebes, and the Theban XIth Dynasty assumed the double crown. The sceptre passed from Memphis and the North, and Thebes enters upon the scene of Egyptian history. ”