WE STARTED THE NEXT morning, Gazelle and Assour leading, then the saddle camels and after that the pack animals. Our dromedaries, however, soon outdistanced the rest and as I looked back the last thing I saw in the blazing sunlight was Abou Taleb, white gown, red fez, red belt and bare of foot, trudging valiantly ahead of the caravan, carrying a forgotten coat hanger in one hand and a large iron lantern in the other.
We had left behind us the huge monuments of the great Fourth Dynasty kings, and were facing toward the south and the lesser pyramids at Abousir and Sakkara.
Lesser, indeed; made of inferior limestone, their cores a mass of rubble and sand, they show as plainly as written history the lessening power of the Pharaohs. No longer could a king summon a hundred thousand slaves for twenty years to build him a monument; a powerful feudal nobility was arising to dispute his hitherto unquestioned sway. The old cycle of empire, so often repeated, was beginning again; the abuse of power, and the rise of the people to contest it.
But how long, long ago! King Tut-ank-amen was not to be born for another thousand years or more, yet already the mud of the Nile delta had covered a civilization infinitely older. It is known that six thousand years ago these delta astronomers had already divided the year into 365 days; twelve months of thirty calendar days each and five feast days at the end. And that they possessed even at that time some form of writing, its nature now unknown.
Five thousand years ago, long before the Pyramids were built, and we find these people dressed in linen cloth, with sandals; wearing ornaments and rings, the women painting their faces and dressing their hair with ivory combs; making fine vessels of clay and of stone, and later on of copper; building boats, some of them with sails, and carrying standards or flags; using flint knives with gold handles; eating with carved ivory spoons.
More than two thousand years before the time of Tut-ank-amen, they were building great palaces for their kings and mansions for their nobles, furnished with beds, chairs, stools and chests, of cedar inlaid with ivory, or other precious woods. Rich vessels of alabaster, rock crystal, copper, silver and gold ornamented these houses, and the floors were covered with heavy rugs.
They were wearing a linen so fine that the fibers resembled silk; they were making gold jewelry of beauty and extreme delicacy, and with insets of precious stones, mostly amethyst and turquoise. The rich built gardens around their houses, and in them were artificial ponds, or lakes. And in these pleasure gardens they played at draughts, or the women danced to the music of the harp, the pipe and the lute.
A mass of servants and slaves attended on the wealthy. Their food was elaborate and carefully prepared. They ate meat and poultry, bread, cakes, fruit and sweets. They made and drank various sorts of beers and wines; they hunted the lion, the hippopotamus and the crocodile for pleasure, and in their households they had vast harems, with one legal wife and many concubines.
That their civilization was already beginning, after the manner of civilizations, to clutter itself, is shown by Breasted: “Although the royal toilet was comparatively simple, yet a small army of ring-makers, sandal-makers, perfumers, launderers, bleachers, and guardians of the royal wardrobe now filled the king’s palace.” But public work was not neglected; mining was carried on extensively with tools of copper, never of iron. And up and down the Nile traveled vast flotillas of boats carrying the commerce of the nation. Brickyards made in quantities the sun-dried mud bricks with which most of the houses were built; leather was cured and tanned, and textiles were woven.
For the old system of barter there was being substituted a form of currency, in the form of rings of copper and of gold. And the discovery of papyrus-paper displaced the heavy and unwieldy clay tablets; with the use of this papyrus-paper came the earliest writing, as we know it, displacing the elaborate hieroglyphic of earlier times.
Strange to think, as we moved along sedately on our camels, that much of this ancient civilization was still buried deep under the encroaching sands, beneath our very feet. Now and then some happy accident or painful exploration brings a bit of it to light. We saw here and there a camp of the searchers, tired sunburned men, showing the strain of long effort and of trying living conditions. But mostly it was desert, with perhaps the black tents of Bedouins under the lee of a sand dune, their camels hobbled, or free to graze where they could find a bit of sun-dried grass.
Along the Nile below and to our left were only fields, date gardens, and here and there a mud village, hardly to be distinguished from the newly plowed land about it. On the raised paths, high enough to be above the river at the time of its rise, moved no longer any gorgeous panoply of master and slaves, of women in transparent linen, through which showed the lines of their bare and scented bodies, of curtained palanquins or hunters armed with lances and with bows.
Instead, only bent and ragged husbandmen, women in untidy trailing black, and a procession of farm animals, camels, water buffalo and donkeys. Here and there a water wheel shrieked as it was drawn around by a bullock, the cessation of its weird squealing a warning signal that the animal had stopped; heavy water buffalo dragged the ancient plows through the rich soil, and even now and then a camel was superciliously laboring. Long-legged men rode on tiny donkeys, their elbows flapping, their feet almost touching the ground. The wind blew out their abas, or cloaks, so that like Assour they resembled small boats carrying enormous sails.
But of the glory of Egypt that was, so long ago, there remained only the Pyramids behind us and the lesser ones ahead.