TWICE AS OLD AS CAESAR

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 14, 16 July 1921, Page 7

TWICE AS OLD AS CAESAR

MODELS OF ANCIENT EGYPT

The dramatic discovery by lAinerican archaeologists of a rock-chamber near Thebes 'containing a set of models buried near tile grave of an !Egyptian noble of 2000 8.C., named Mehenkwetre, and representing all the 'details of his daily life, was recently described by one of the excavators, Mr. Ambrose I»ansing. He told Eow the contente of the chamber were first seen, by the light of electric torches, through a crack in the rock above. In the Illustrated London News the leader of Die expedition,. .Mr.. Herbert E. WiniocU, Assistant Gui-ator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art inNew York, jias since "described the objects found as follows ;— .

"As we worked, along through those three 'days .arid nights we began to realise what it was .that we had so unexpectedly discovered. • The tomb was that of a great noble of four thousand years ago. lie.himself lad. been buried in a gilded coffin and a iiaico.pliagus of stone in a, mortuary chamber deep down under the back of this corridor, where .the thieves had destroyed everything ages before our day. Only this little chamber has escaped, and it was, tufcning out to be a, sort of secret closet where the provision was stored for the future life of, the great ma.ii. "He could, not conceive of an existence in which ho would not require food and drink, clothing and housing, such as lie was used to in this life ; 'and, being a rich mail, .naturally he Wanted an 'estate in eternity like that which he' had owned on earith. His. philosophy carried him beyond that of the savage chieftain who expects a horde of servants to be slaughtered at his grave. He attained 'the same end by putting in his tomb a host of lit&le wooden servants, carved 'and painted, at tlreil- daily taste, working before little portraits of himself. The spirits of these little servants worked eternally, turning' wit spirit food or sailing ships upon a spirit Nile, and his eoul could enter a,ny one of the little portraits of himself at will to reap the harvest.of tlveir labours. In short, we liad a picture of the life the groat noble hoped to live in eternity, which was nothing more or less thsa the one he hsid led on earth, forty centuries ago. "The "first thing we had seteii when. \ve had peeped, through the 'crack, had been, a big model nearly six feet long, showing , the noble seated, on a porch among his scrib.es, taking the count .of his cattle as they were driven past. In^ the back of the room we found, under a lot of other .models, Mea-tlr stacked, the stable where these same cattle wfere being fattened, and finally when we came to move one big box-like affair ih th© 'fair corner—a. model I had tried niy best to siet a peep into amd alimost •fallen headlong ih the process—we found it Was the butcher-shop where the cattle's life "history ended. The night we worked in .the tomb by lamp-light we .got a peep into a granary where diminutive .scribes sat writing down the quantity bf grain being measured aaid carried to ths -bins by hai-(i-working labourers. And later we raw across the bakery Where the grain, was ground and made, into loaves, and the brewery where the^home beverage was 'being fermented ih till ■crocks and then decanted kiito round-<bellied jugs. Lansing extricated . two canoes manned rby fishermen, who hauled a ihiraculou's draft of painted wooden catfish and perch in a seine;and I picked the fa.Ue.ii stories out of two garden's in. Which - copper ponds-pthat would hold ■ real waters—were surrounded by little wooden fig-trees and cool, ehady porches. Then 'there was a carpenter shop,, aid another- shop where women spun .thread and wove doth. The very threads oh. their distaffs and spindles—frail as cobwebs though they were with age—had re-' mniiied unbroken in that eternal stillness.

"The business, of the great man entailed a lot of trarveUiiijr, And his idle hours were passed in pleasure sails, or fishing trips on the Nile,or on the still bdckivatefe of the marshes. On- the celestial Nile he would want to go voyaging or yachting. too, and therefore a dozen, model boats were put in r the chamber. We found them setting sail, the captain bossing the sailors who sway on the halyards and set the backstay^. i A man throws his whole weight against the pole as they put. off from the .bank, and another stands by in the bow with a fender in. case th«y bump against another vessel. When they travel down-stream against the north wind, the mast and sail are lowered, and the : crew..man the sweeps. The noble himself sits under the awning in front of the cabin smelliiig a lotus flower,, while his son .sits op deck beside him, and they both listoii to a singer atid an old blind harper. Inside the cabin. squats a steward beside the bunk, under which are shoved two little round-topped leather trunks. A kitchon-boak follows, and the cooks get ready A meal to be served whteh evening comes and they are moored to the bank. There were yachts, to be sailed with the wind, or paddled against it, and a low raking skiff, from, the bow of which two men are casting, harpoons, while others land an enormous fish over the side.

"Thus had the great man lived, and so did he expect to live after he had gone to his 'sterna] abode,' as he called it. Filially, the funeral day had crime. His body was brought across the river from his mortal home : in Thebes, through the green fields where the wondering ■peasants leaned oh their hoes to watch it pass,, and then up through the rocky gorges to his tomb. . A long procession followed him, each model borne on the head of one of his .serfs, and a crowd, of peasant girls and women 'from his estates brought baskets of wine and beer arid baked meats for the fulleral banquet. Eveii their contributions were ' expected 'to go "on for ever, and statues of two of them, half life-sized, had been made to go with the models in the chamber. There we found them, towering afeove the horde of miniature men arid beasts, looking over at us with grave, wide-open eyes. Four thousand years they had stood thus, silent. ...

"Four thousand years is an eternity. Just saying it over and over agaih gives no conception of .the ages that have gone by since that funeriil. Stop and think of how far ofE William the Conqueror seems. That takes yoii only a quarter of the way back. Julius. Caesar takes you half-way back. With Saul and David you are' three-fourths of the way, but there remain another, thousand' years to bridge with your imagination. Yet in that dry, still, -dark little chamber those boats' and Statues ltad stood indifferent to all that went • on in the oiiter world, a& {Indent in* the days of Caesar as Caesar is to us, but so little changed that even the fingerprints of the men who. put fclibm there were still fresh upon them. Hot only fthger-prinlis, but even fly-specks, cob--webs, and dead sjmfers remained from the time wheii these models wbre stoiod in some empty room. in the noble's house waiting for Iris day of death and burial., I,even suspect thai gome of.Mb grandchildren, had sneaked in and played with' them while they were at that house in ancient Thebes, Sor some of them were broken in a way .that is Mrd to explain otherwise. Possibly that is a wild guess, but itt any rate there is no doubt of what had happened to them in tho little chamber in tho

After all of the models had been stowfed awlay and. ;the masons .had- come toi brick up the doorway, they had found one .of the boats in their, -way. . So one of them picked it up and laid it on one side on top of the granary, and uh'der bow ali'd sferri. he left a great Smear of tlie iriiid he had just been mixing, for mortar. There those smears still remain.

"lii'e little models had to "be parted after all these ages together. Half pi them went to the Egyptian Government under the terms of our, concession, and a.re now ori .view in- the inuseu'm iif Cairo. The others can^ be seen, in the Metropolitan Museum •■ in New York."