EDFU AND THE QUARRIES OF GEBEL SILSILEH
THE few incidents which occurred during the following six months, after I was reinstalled in my hut at Der el-Bahri, have been related in previous chapters. During the short season at Luxor friends and acquaintances often paid me a visit when going the rounds on the Theban side of the Nile. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Parker induced me to leave my camp to spend Christmastide with them in the delightful house they had lately built at Assuan. It is one of the few new houses in Upper Egypt which in aspect fits in exactly with its surroundings. Situated as it is on the western bank of the Nile, it commands a beautiful view both up and down the river, and Elephantine Island, the only green spot near Assuan, lies just opposite. A more ideal residence in which to pass the winter months would be hard to conceive. Would that he who built it had been spared to enjoy it for more than a few short seasons! Two years previously I had spent three months with them on their dahabieh. Henry Simpson, the artist, was of our company. We visited everything worth visiting between the first and second cataracts, mooring the ship wherever we found a subject we wished to paint. This is the ideal way of seeing the259 Nile, and when, as in this case, congenial companionship is added to the comforts of a well-equipped dahabieh, no more delightful way of tiding over the winter months is imaginable.
A diary in the form of caricatures of the daily events, which Mr. Simpson had left with the Parkers, brought those pleasant times vividly back to us.
Mrs. Parker and I made several excursions to Philae while there was still a chance of recording some of its beauty before it would be entirely submerged by the raising of the Assuan dam. As it is proposed that I should treat of Nubia in another volume, I shall defer what I may have to say on Assuan and of the country south of it.
Towards the end of my season at Der el-Bahri, which as usual was two months after the hotels at Luxor had put up the shutters, Mr. Weigall suggested my spending June with him in the tombs and temples south of Thebes. The valley in which I camped had become a veritable oven, and my hut was untenable till the sun sank behind the cliffs which form the amphitheatre behind Hatshepsu’s shrine. Some work I wished to do in the temple of Edfu, as well as to get shelter from the burning sun, tempted me to accept this kind invitation. The quarries and shrines at Gebel Silsileh, the tombs of Assuan and the courts and colonnades at Philae, all held out hopes of shady places in which I should find plenty of subjects to paint.
Our preparations were soon made. On the first day of June we took the train from Luxor to Edfu, and were encamped that afternoon in the dark shades of the great temple of Horus.
260 The thermometer fell to 100° Fahrenheit in the hypostyle hall, and we were grateful for this comparative coolness. Our attire could safely be of the scantiest, as there was no fear of a party of trippers arriving at this time of the year. Shoes were advisable till the pavements had been examined, for in some seasons the temple is infested with scorpions. Happily this was a poor scorpion season, and barely a dozen were killed during the eight days we spent there.
We decided on the hypostyle hall as our dining-room, unless the open court should cool down sufficiently after sundown; our beds were to be made on the roof of the great vestibule, and no cooler spot could be apportioned for our midday siesta than in one of the corridors which run round the sanctuary. What earthly potentate could claim so majestic a dwelling-place? If an apology for its modernity be needed to those whose interests lie in the earlier dynastic remains, we at all events had a roof over our heads, and Edfu temple, though shorn of its furniture, is not a ruin. Going back to pre-Ptolemaic times, no temple in Egypt exists where imagination has not to fill in great portions which are not in the places which the builders designed for them. Edfu temple is doubtless the grandest preserved edifice in the world which can date back rather more than two thousand years.
Some portions are out of repair; but let us hope that no more attempts at restoration may be made, more than to tie or buttress such places that may be in danger of falling. All credit is due to Mariette, who, under the auspices of Sa?d Pasha, cleared the temple of the rubbish which in places filled it to the roofing261 slabs; a part of the town actually stood on the roof. The rubbish hills which surround it are gradually lessening, for the septic material of which they are composed serves as a valuable manure to the fields around.
The entire building took 187 years to complete, its progress going on more or less uninterruptedly during the rule of eleven of the Ptolemies. The design is so complete that it is hard to believe that one architect did not draw up all the plans. I do not purpose to give the details of this vast building, as this has been so adequately done by Baedeker and in other guide-books. Curiously enough the Baedeker, which so accurately describes the most interesting details to be observed, makes no mention of the dimensions, though the first thing which impresses the visitor is the vastness of the building. Actual measurements are liable to do little more than give an impression of size, but a comparison with well-known structures often conveys a truer conception. The area of St. Paul’s, in square feet measurement, is 28,050, that of St. Peter’s at Rome is 54,000, while the temple at Edfu covers an area of 80,000 square feet. There is but one other temple in Egypt with which we can compare it, and that is the temple of Denderah. But in every way it is Denderah’s superior. The great temple of Ammon at Karnak was raised when Egyptian art was at a higher level than at the time of the Ptolemies, and, grand as that ruin may be, it fails to impress one as much as the almost intact structure here at Edfu.
The temples of Edfu, of Denderah, and of Esneh,262 though all three were raised during a debased period of Egyptian art, owe their impressiveness chiefly to the fact that they still have a roof above them. The subdued light of the vestibule, the dimmer light of the hypostyle hall, and the increasing darkness as one passes through the next two chambers till the blackness of the sanctuary is reached, strikes the imagination to a degree which no sunlit ruins can do, be they ever so fine. The reliefs which cover every wall space and column are not to be compared with the refined work in Hatshepsu’s shrine; but in this dim religious light they serve their purpose, and the general effect is in no wise diminished. The sculptured reliefs, on the girdle-wall and the pylons, which are seen in broad daylight, suffer greatly in comparison with the eighteenth dynasty work. But taken as a whole, the design of these temples is probably more beautiful than was that of the earlier structures, of which only fragments now remain. A Greek most likely furnished the design, the detail being left to Egyptians who had lost much of their artistry.
We ascended to the roof by a long inclined plane in the thickness of one of the walls, and in the comparative coolness of the evening we watched the sun dip into the coloured mists which hung over the cultivation between us and the Libyan desert. Edfu spreads round three sides of the temple, and we got a bird’s-eye view of the medley of mud huts, little courtyards, and modest places of worship which go to make up a small Nilotic town. Children were at play amidst the cattle and fowls in the yards, while their elders were263 attending to their household duties on the roof. The houses were on a higher level as they neared the temple, and the piles of débris on which they stood were sharply cut away a few yards from the girdle-wall, forming a second enclosure on that side of us. It was easily seen that before the temple was cleared the incline of the rubbish mounds would have reached to the roof we stood on.
In a letter which Mariette wrote in 1860 to the Révue Archéologique, he says: ‘I caused to be demolished the sixty-four houses which encumbered the roof, as well as twenty-eight more which approached too near the outer wall of the temple. When the whole shall be isolated from its present surroundings by a massive wall, the work of Edfu will be accomplished.’
Something similar to what Mariette found here fifty years ago may still be seen at the north end of the Luxor temple, where a mosque and a cluster of houses still remain on the top, on the yet unexcavated portions. The apertures in the roofing slabs (which now at midday allow of some rays of sunlight to lighten the interior) served as drains to carry off the filth from the houses on the roof. No wonder that the fellaheen gladly now fatten their land with the scourings from the temple enclosure. Many of the smaller objects now seen in the Antika shops are found by the peasants while they load their asses with this septic rubbish. Sub-inspectors and guards are told off to watch these operations; b............