December 8, 1904] 



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clear that they had been so placed in order that their 

 faces might be protected by the soft earth and mud 

 in which they were buried. The total yield from the 

 pit or well was about 450 statues. 



.■\s soon as the pit was emptied M. Legrain began 

 to examine the objects which he had found, and he 

 saw that many of the statues were royal, and that, 

 speaking generally, the oldest belonged to the second 

 or third dynasty, and the latest to the twenty-sixth 

 dynasty. The greater number of them were, of course, 

 made for high officials, generals, architects, priests, 

 &c., and we may be certain that from first to last they 

 represent the men who, during a period of about 3500 

 years, were the principal benefactors of the great 

 temple of Amen-RS, the "king of the gods," at 

 Thebes. The question which naturally arises is. How- 

 came these statues to be in the place in which they 

 were found? The answer is not far to seek. We 

 know that it was a custom among the Egyptians 

 for the kings and their nobles to dedicate statues of 

 themselves to the temples of the god or gods whom 

 they loved to worship, and they did so with the idea 

 that, after death, their spirits would come from their 

 graves and inliabit them, and would enjoy in their new 

 existence the worship which had been their delight 

 when upon earth. As the spirits of the gods also 

 dwelt in the statues which were dedicated to them in 

 the temples, the spirits of the kings and their nobles 

 would thus dwell in divine company, and would par- 

 ticipate in the happiness which disembodied spirits 

 were believed to derive from the chants and hymns of 

 the faithful, and the offerings and incense which were 

 offered up by the priests. How these statues were 

 arranged is not quite clear, but it is pretty certain tliat 

 they were placed in niches or on pedestals in the 

 chambers adjoining the sanctuary. As time went on, 

 chamber after chamber would become full, and at 

 length it would be as difficult to find a site for a new 

 statue as it is to find a site for a monument to some 

 illustrious dead person in our own Westminster .'\bbey. 



It has been the custom to say that the temple of 

 .■\men-Ra at Karnak was founded by the early kings 

 of the twelfth dynasty, about B.C. 2500, but it is clear 

 from the statues which M. Legrain has brought to 

 light that a temple to Amen must have existed at 

 Karnak at least some 1500 years earlier. Some 

 archaeologists, basing their opinion on tlie evidence 

 derived from religious texts, have always maintained 

 that the twefth dynasty temple of Amen was merely 

 a new foundation, and not the original temple, and 

 this was the view which Sir Norman Lockyer, K.C.B., 

 arrived at in his investigations of the systems of the 

 orientation of Egyptian temples. We now know that 

 so early as B.C. 4000 an important temple of Amen 

 stood at Karnak, and that even in that early period 

 it was already so old that kings held it to be one of 

 the highest honours attainable to have their statues 

 included among the monuments of the " glorious and 

 mighty dead " who were commemorated there. The 

 temple of Amen represented the roll of fame for the 

 Egyptians, and M. Legrain's " find " helps us to 

 understand why Karnak was declared by the priests to 

 be the " throne of the two lands " {i.e. Egypt), and 

 the " seat beloved of the heart of the god." Now the 

 fortunes of the god .'Vmen and of his temple varied 

 with those of the king, and the glory of his sanctuary 

 waxed and waned according as the prosperity of the 

 country increased or decreased. During the fourth, 

 fifth, and sixth dynasties the chief centre of power lay 

 between Heliopolis and Memphis ; from the twelfth to 

 the twentieth dynasty it rested at Thebes, and the 

 temple of .'Kmen between B.C. 2500 and B.C. 1050 was 

 the greatest in the land, just as Amen himself was the 

 greatest of the gods. 



Between B.C. 1000 and B.C. 650 evil times came upon 



NO. 1832, VOL. 71] 



Thebes, and the formerly wealthy capital became 

 poverty-stricken. .A serious trouble between the priests 

 and the people resulted in the departure of the former 

 to Nubia, and in consequence the temple of .Amen fell 

 into a state of decay. Worse than all, soon after his 

 accession, B.C. 668, Ashur-bani-pal, King of Assyria, 

 invaded Egypt, and, marching up the country, plun- 

 dered Thebes and its temples. This blow the city 

 seems never to have recovered, and for about 300 

 years it held a position of no importance in the country. 

 Under the Ptolemies some attempt to rebuild certain 

 portions of the Temple of Amen was made, and it is 

 probable that the work was begun under the wise rule 

 of that astute ruler Ptolemy I. It was, of course, 

 impossible to restore the worship of Amen to its 

 original glory, and the extent of the buildings of the 

 god must have been considerably curtailed. 



Whilst the work of restoration was going on, the 

 question of the disposal of the statues which M. 

 Legrain has unearthed came up for decision. It was 

 felt that to destroy the statues would be a sacrilegious 

 and profane act, and therefore an old well was chosen 

 in which to bury them; as we have seen, they were 

 carefully placed in layers of earth or mud, and it is 

 entirely to the religious instinct of the restorers of the 

 temple of Amen that we owe the preservation of such 

 a unique series of statues. In his " Notes prises a 

 Karnak," recently published in the Recueil, M. 

 Legrain directs special attention to the statues of three 

 kings, of whom previously no monuments have been 

 known ; these are :— Mer-hetep-Ra, Mer-sekhemRa 

 Mer-Snkh-Ra. It is early yet to attempt to assign 

 exact places to these kings, but the discovery of 

 their monuments is a striking contradiction of the 

 assertion which has been made recently to the 

 effect that our knowledge of Egyptian history is 

 complete, and that there are no more important 

 discoveries to be made in Egypt. Already M. 

 Legrain's examination of the statues from Karnak 

 enables us to correct our views on Egyptian 

 history, and we must be prepared to admit that the 

 kings of Egypt were considerably more in number 

 than the king-list of Manetho would lead us to sup- 

 pose, and that some of the dynasties were contempor- 

 aneous. M. Legrain's " find " also proves beyond all 

 doubt the futility of limiting dynastic history to a 

 period of 3000 years, as some of the German savants 

 have done, and the evidence which is accumulating 

 rapidly all goes to show that the assertions concerning 

 the great antiquitv of Egyptian civilisation made by 

 Herodotus and other Greek writers, and the opinions 

 of modern experts like Mariette, Chabas, and our own 

 Hincks, are generally correct. 



The statues recently found belong to all the dynasties 

 which are most famed for the production of fine 

 artistic efforts in sculpture and statuary, and many of 

 them may well be considered to represent with great 

 fidelity the features of the men they commemorate. 

 Nearly all the great kings of Egypt took care to have 

 their portrait-statues added to the Karnak collection, 

 and down to the Ptolemaic period the lover of 

 antiquity in Egypt could look upon contemporaneous 

 portraits in stoiie of the kings of the Archaic period, 

 of Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid, of the 

 great warriors of the eleventh, twelfth, and eighteenth 

 dynasties, of the bombastic Rameses II., and of the 

 Nubian king Tirhakah, who, to his credit be it said, 

 left the shrine of Amen at Karnak uninjured, and 

 humbly worshipped in that great symbol of the solar 

 worship of the ancient Egyptians. It is greatly to be 

 regretted that the Ptolemies did not cause portraits of 

 themselves and their queens to be included among the 

 statues of the great kings and priests of the country 

 over which a strange fate called them to rule. 



