The Sphynx

Today’s installment concludes Pyramid Builders of Egypt,
our selection from Ancient Egypt by George Rawlinson and by Arthur Gilman published in 1886.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of thousand words. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Pyramid Builders of Egypt

Time: c 2500 BC

The fashion of burying in pyramids continued to the close of Manetho’s sixth dynasty, but no later monarchs rivalled the great works of Khufu and Shafra. The tombs of their successors were monuments of a moderate size, involving no oppression of the people, but perhaps rather improving their condition by causing a rise in the rate of wages. Certainly, the native remains of the period give a cheerful representation of the condition of all classes. The nation for the most part enjoys peace, and applies itself to production. The wealth of the nobles increases, and the position of their dependents is improved. Slaves were few, and there was ample employment for the laboring classes. We do not see the stick at work upon the backs of the laborer’s in the sculptures of the time; they seem to accomplish their various tasks with alacrity and gaiety of heart. They plough, and hoe, and reap; drive cattle or asses; winnow and store corn; gather grapes and tread them, singing in chorus as they tread; cluster round the winepress or the threshing-floor, on which the animals tramp out the grain; gather lotuses; save cattle from the inundation; engage in fowling or fishing; and do all with an apparent readiness and cheerfulness which seems indicative of real content. There may have been a darker side to the picture, and undoubtedly was while Khufu and Shafra held the throne; but kings of a morose and cruel temper seem to have been the exception, rather than the rule, in Egypt; and the moral code, which required kindness to be shown to dependents, seems, at this period at any rate, to have had a hold upon the consciences, and to have influenced the conduct, of the mass of the people. “Happy the nation that has no history!” Egypt during this golden age was neither assailed by any aggressive power beyond her borders, nor had herself conceived the idea of distant conquest. An occasional raid upon the negroes of the South, or chastisement of the nomads of the East, secured her interests in those quarters, and prevented her warlike virtues from dying out through lack of use. But otherwise tranquility was undisturbed, and the energies of the nation were directed to increasing its material prosperity, and to progress in the arts.

Among the marvels of Egypt perhaps the Sphinx is second to none. The mysterious being with the head of a man and the body of a lion is not at all uncommon in Egyptian architectural adornment, but the one placed before the Second Pyramid (the Pyramid of Shafra), and supposed to be contemporary with it, astonishes the observer by its gigantic proportions. It is known to the Arabs as Abul-hôl, the father of terror. It measures more than one hundred feet in length, and was partially carved from the rocks of the Lybian hills. Between its out-stretched feet there stands a chapel, uncovered in 1816, three walls of which are formed by tablets bearing inscriptions indicative of its use and origin.

A small temple behind the great Sphinx, probably also built by Shafra, is formed of great blocks of the hardest red granite, brought from the neighborhood of Syene and fitted to each other with a nicety astonishing to modern architects, who are unable to imagine what tools could have proved equal to the difficult achievement. Mysterious passages pierce the great Sphinx and connect it with the Second Pyramid, three hundred feet west of it. In the face of this mystery all questions are vain, and yet every visitor adds new queries to those that others have asked before him.

Since what unnumbered year
Hast thou kept watch and ward,
And o’er the buried land of fear
So grimly held thy guard?
No faithless slumber snatching,
Still couched in silence brave,
Like some fierce hound, long watching
Above her master’s grave….

Dost thou in anguish thus
Still brood o’er Oedipus?
And weave enigmas to mislead anew,
And stultify the blind
Dull heads of human-kind,
And inly make thy moan,
That, mid the hated crew,
Whom thou so long couldst vex,
Bewilder and perplex,
Thou yet couldst find a subtler than thine own?

Even now; methinks that those
Dark, heavy lips which close
In such a stern repose,
Seem burdened with some thought unsaid,
And hoard within their portals dread
Some fearful secret there,
Which to the listening earth
She may not whisper forth.
Not even to the air!

Of awful wonders hid
In yonder dread Pyramid,
The home of magic fears;
Of chambers vast and lonely,
Watched by the Genii only,
Who tend their masters’ long-forgotten biers,
And treasures that have shone
On cavern walls alone,
For thousand, thousand years.

Would she but tell. She knows
Of the old Pharaohs;
Could count the Ptolemies’ long line;
Each mighty myth’s original hath seen,
Apis, Anubis,–ghosts that haunt between
The bestial and divine,–
(Such he that sleeps in Philæ,–he that stands
In gloom unworshipped, ‘neath his rock-hewn lane,–
And they who, sitting on Memnonian sands,
Cast their long shadows o’er the desert plain:)
Hath marked Nitocris pass,
And Oxymandyas
Deep-versed in many a dark Egyptian wile,–
The Hebrew boy hath eyed
Cold to the master’s bride;
And that Medusan stare hath frozen the smile
Of all her love and guile,
For whom the Caesar sighed,
And the world-loser died,–
The darling of the Nile.

This ends our series of passages on Pyramid Builders of Egypt by George Rawlinson and Arthur Gilman from their book Ancient Egypt published in 1886. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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