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THEBES.
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court of her fathers temple at Karnak, new and wonderful points of view ai I ai
every step; and as we approach the level of the plain, and, leaving the platform v-vr
El-Bahry, wander past the Assasif to the long colonnade which shows how greal a temple the
Rameseum has once been-and with Kurnah on our left and Medinet Habu on our right,
ride back through the scented bean-fields where the two colossi keep guard, till we reach the
Nile again, with the temples and minarets of Luxor rising opposite in picturesque confusion
we shall say with a Hebrew poet that no city could be "better than the city of Anion, that
was enthroned among the streams, that had the waters round about her. whose rampart
the Nile and her wall the river-sea " (Nahum iii. 8).
The natural beauty of Thebes is not, however, in the eyes of most people, its chief title
to admiration. Its girdle of hills encloses not only one of Nature's masterpi it BOmi
the most marvellous achievements of human genius, skill, and perseverance. I here are n
than twenty temples at Thebes—as many, that is to say, as all the rest of the surviving temples
of Egypt put together—and in variety of design, grandeur of scale, and richness of decoration,
and also, unhappily, in the ruthlessness of their ruin, they have no rivals. Many will pn
for perfection of plan and comparative preservation, such exquisite examples of Ptolemaic art
as the temples of Edfu and Dendarah; the design and the matchless sculptun
enthral the admiration of others; while, for a bold and captivating realism in the wall paintil
combined with an almost incredible massiveness in the masonry, the buildings of the Mempl
empire stand without peer. But Thebes has something of all these, .md something more It
has the massiveness of Memphis applied to columns and roofs and colossi, instead <>l square
blocks of stone; it has graphic wall-sculptures, less natural and vivid, no doubt, than Sakkarah.
and without the extraordinary, almost Greek, purity of Abydos, but still vigorous ami .on
and representing, moreover, not merely a man's domestic life and country pursuits, Km the
victories of the greatest kings of antiquity and the erection of the most magnificent "i ancient
monuments, the works and wars of conquerors instead of the sports and business "I country
magnates. And all this is found at Thebes in such abundance ami variety, on such an
immense scale, in such endless forms and repetitions, that the mind fails to grasp the outline
in the lavishness of detail, and appalled at the number and vastness of the fra ol I hebes,
abandons the thoughts of analysis or comparison, and by acclamation accepts 'No Anion,
enthroned among the streams " of its canals, as, after Memphis, the chief of the monumental
sites of Egypt.
Yet what we now see of Thebes, the monster ruins that cover so immense a spa
represent but a fraction of what Thebes once has been. Even of the temples, not one- is e
nearly entire. Karnak is a heap of ruins, fallen columns, broken obelisks, walls and r
thrown down; Luxor is half buried and in part destroyed; Kurnah is in terrible the
greater part of the Rameseum has disappeared; the temple of Amenoph has entire] bed,
except its two colossal sentinels; Medinet Habu has suffered partial martyrdom at th<
oi the Copts, who built a village over it; and how many other templet, of which we know
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