From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE TEMPLE-SERVANT OF AMMON
Where are their palaces? is a question often asked in perplexity by those who find themselves for the first time among the remains of Ancient Egypt. They built both their tombs and their temples for eternity. Yet of their earthly houses, stately and splendid as the abodes of, at any rate, the greater and prouder of the Egyptian kings must have been, not a trace remains. We not only know not how or where the Royal builders of the Pyramids lived while their wretched slaves were toiling on the sands of Ghizeh, but we are as little able to fix the habitations of the much later monarchs who raised or added to that gigantic pillar forest at Karnak, or who carved the colossi on the rock-face at Abu Simbel. The Egyptologist's explanation of this puzzle is, of course, a familiar one. Magnificent as may have been, and doubtless were, the palaces of the Egyptian kings, it was not necessary for their constructors to aim at anything more than temporary splendour. If the palace served the purposes of the king and his successors for a few generations it was enough. He looked to the temple to perpetuate his memory, and to the deeply graven sculpturings on its walls to keep his name and his exploits in everlasting remembrance. What mattered it whether the house in which Rameses abode during his short life on earth remained or disappeared, so long as the record of his great deeds was imperishably secured? His tomb, of course, was built for eternity on other grounds. It was part of his religion to make it so if possible, just as it was a matter of religious duty to provide if he could for the punctual supply of his entombed mummy with the aliment necessary for the due sustenance of its "double" in the other world. This has naturally raised the question why Egyptian tombs are not more numerous than they are; to which the answer current among Irish students of Egyptology is that as a matter of fact they are considerably more numerous than that, only they have not yet been discovered. It was not, of course, to be expected that the private citizen—even the "prominent" citizen of ancient Thebes or Memphis—could afford to hew out and decorate for himself a subterranean sepulchre on the scale of a Seti; and many of the death-chambers of such persons have no doubt crumbled into irremediable decay. But it is probable that very many more are only awaiting the spade of the excavator. Their smaller dimensions have made them more difficult to light upon and to extricate from the heaped-up dust of ages, than are the tombs of the kings, queens, princesses, and high-priests which have been discovered and laid open to the inspection of the modern world. There must be many and many a counterpart of the exquisite little tomb of the "Temple servant Nekht," lying hidden under the wind-blown sands of the Libyan desert, in the vast Necropolis of Thebes.
At present, however, this singular and most touching relic of an infinitely remote civilisation is practically unique. The only tombs which approach it in purely human interest are those of Ameni and Chnemu-Hetep, on the hill of Beni Hassan, for in the long autobiographical inscription with which the tomb of the former is decorated, there is something which comes much closer home to the common sympathies of mankind in every age than in all the monotonous boastings on the temple-wall of the king. It is in the same complacent vein, it is true, but it awakens a response in hearts which the epic of Pentaur leaves utterly cold. "I have done all that I have said," wrote this provincial governor 2400 years before Christ. "I am a gracious and a compassionate man, and a ruler who loves his town. I have passed the course of years as the ruler of Meh, and all the labours of the palace have been carried out at my hands. I have given to the overseers of the temples of the gods of Meh 3000 bulls with their cows, and I was in favour in the palace on account of it, for I carried all the products of the milk-bearing cows to the palace, and no contributions to the king's storehouses have been more than mine. I have never made a child grieve, I have never robbed the widow, I have never repulsed the labourer, I have never shut up a herdsman, I have never impressed for forced labour the labourers of a man who only employed free men. There was never a person miserable in my time, no one went hungry under my rule, for if there were years of scarcity I ploughed up all the arable land in the home of such up to its very frontiers on the north and south. By this means I made its people live and procured for them provisions, so that there was not a hungry person among them. I gave to the widow the same amount as I gave to the married woman, and I made no distinction between the great and little in all that I gave. And, behold, when the inundation was great and the owners of the land became rich thereby I laid no additional tax on the fields."
Here is a lesson from the ages on the question of "unearned increment." Has any modern controller of taxation, Imperial or local, so clear a record as this? It is a short inscription, but it is worth a whole wall full of the vapourings of Rameses II. over his famous battle with the Hittites—a piece of almost ludicrously vainglorious writing which the great conqueror has repeated in more than one of the mural records left behind by him in the temples of his construction, and the style of which was not approached in "general orders," so far as one knows, until the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. The sculptured representation of this eternal victory over the Hittites becomes at last a weariness to the student's soul. Rameses the Great in his chariot discharging volleys of arrows among the Hittites, with his charioteer visible in miniature between his legs; Rameses the Great destroying his defeated enemies, apparently in cold blood, where the great King has got a whole batch of them by the hair like a bunch of vegetables, and is menacing them with a weapon which looks at a distance like a life-preserver, but on a closer view is seen to possess the facilities of a scalping-knife; Rameses the Great returning in triumph; the King making offerings to Ammon-Ra, with an interminable train of Hittite captives behind him, each couple chained together on a different principle from the preceding one. There is just a little too much of it, and after a long course of victory over the Hittites it is quite refreshing to meet with the wall-painting of his degenerate successor, Rameses III., playing chess in his harem. There is, of course, nothing of this kind in the Epic of Pentaur, but a poem about the domestic life of the Egyptian monarchs would be very welcome after many perusals of the famous battle-piece of that very early Laureate.
In fact, the further one gets from "official poetry," and from official tomb inscriptions in general, the nearer you get to Nature, and even in the sepulchre of Chnemu-Hetep you are conscious of a smack of officialism in the otherwise simple recital of the Governor's public services and private virtues in general. In the case of Nekht, however, we really get, as Mr. Wallis Budge has said, a typical example of the tomb of a "Theban gentleman of the Middle Empire," or, in other words, of a gentleman who lived, moved, and had his being, who loved and hated, and hoped and feared, and worked and played on the site of these ruins, say a thousand and odd years before the Greek Father of History was born, and nearly two thousand years before history begins for our own islands with the first settlement of the Saxons on English shores. Nekht, it is true, was, in a certain limited sense, a public official. He was a "temple servant" of Ammon, and his sister, of whom he obviously thought a great deal, was also attached to the religious ritual and services of that deity; but though he never fails to give himself and her their sacerdotal descriptions on his tomb-walls, he seems to have done so rather as a matter of private devoutness and piety than in any official spirit. The exquisite little tomb, in fact, which has only been opened six or seven years, and the wall-paintings on the ceiling, which are in many places still as clear in design and as beautifully fresh in colour as when they were put on more than thirty centuries ago, had evidently been the delight of its future occupant during its construction and decoration.
A pious Theban gentleman of the Middle Empire "made his soul" by making himself a costly and artistic sepulchre, just as a Western devotee of our own day makes it by building a church or endowing a religious order. One sees in a moment that Nekht must have worked lovingly at his own little "bijou residence" for eternity. It is nearly finished, but not quite; its incomplete condition meaning, it is to be feared, in this as in other cases, that the heir was of opinion that the deceased had spent quite enough money on his hobby, that it was really quite sufficiently decorated to do all reasonable credit to the family, and that on the whole the tomb might be closed without calling upon the artist to add the colours to that little wall-scene which he had just "blocked out" in black and white in one corner of the chamber when the late lamented paid the debt of nature. Unfortunately, the imperfection of the pictured record begins at the very point at which the dead man's deeply religious instincts would have made him particularly regret the failure to complete it. In this scene Nekht and his wife are seated at a table loaded with funereal offerings, and four priestly officials are bringing up haunches of veal or beef. To have left this plain instead of coloured was a grave omission. Did Nekht suffer for it in the underworld, one wonders? Did it undo the work of those multiplied prayers in hieroglyphic, the incessant reiteration of which on the walls of Egyptian mortuary-chambers produces almost an effect of passionate appeal? Osiris and Harmachis, and Ammon and Anubis are again and again beseeched to grant favours to "the double of the temple-servant, Nekht, a free passport for the disembodied soul to the regions of the dead, a coming-in and going-out from the underworld, not being repulsed at its gates." It is to be hoped that there was no hitch in the arrangements.
The temple-servant, however, was evidently a cheery soul, and seems to have been not less interested in the things of this world than in those of the other. It is this which brings him so much nearer to us than all the conquering and building kings who have raised their gigantic temples, and mined the earth with their vast sepulchres all up the valley of the Nile. Nekht has made his artists set forth scenes of his daily life, its business and its pleasures. Here we see his farm-servants gathering grapes, treading them in the wine-press, and drawing off the new wine into jars. Here, again, are men ploughing and reaping, women gleaning, labourers binding up the sheaves. Nekht looks on with a complacent air of proprietorship, with the inscription above his head, "Sitting in the chamber seeth his fields, the temple-servant of Ammon, Nekht triumphant before the great God."
Further on, we see the worthy citizen taking a holiday with his wife and children. They have, in fact, gone out for a day's sport, and are spearing fish from a boat, and bringing down birds with the boomerang in a papyrus swamp. Above is the inscription: "Passeth through wild-fowl marshes, traverseth wildfowl marshes with gladness, speareth fish, Nekht triumphant." On the bank stand two of his servants holding sandals, staff, boomerang, &c, and lower down is another servant bringing the game to his master. The inscriptions above it read: "Rejoiceth, seeth happiness in making the chase and in the work of the Goddess Sekhet" (the country goddess, the Ceres of the ancient Egyptians); "the temple-servant Nekht triumphant. His sister the singing priestess of Ammon, the lady of the house, Tani, saith, 'Rejoice thou in the work of Sekhet and the birds which he (Nekht) sets apart for her selection.'" Such was the sort of diary of his simple pursuits and pleasures this Theban gentleman of the Middle Empire kept upon the walls of his tomb-chamber for perpetual remembrance. It is like a page of Pepys in stone.