United States or Kuwait ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On this temple of Deir-el-Bahari is the scene of the birth of Hatshepsu, and there are two babies, the princess and her Ka. For this imagined Ka, when a great queen, long after, she built this temple, or chapel, that offerings might be made there on certain appointed days. Fortunate Ka of Hatshepsu to have had so cheerful a dwelling! Liveliness pervades Deir-el-Bahari.
Yonder Queen Hatshepsu, who wrought wonders at Deir-el-Bahari, and who is more familiar perhaps as Hatasu, had left there traces, and nearer, to the right, Rameses III. had made a temple, surely for the birds, so fond they are of it, so pertinaciously they haunt it.
Beyond them is the very heart of this "land of sand and ruins and gold"; Medinet-Abu, the Ramesseum, Deir-el Medinet, Kurna, Deir-el-Bahari, the tombs of the kings, the tombs of the queens and of the princes. In the strip of bare land at the foot of those hard, and yet poetic mountains, have been dug up treasures the fame of which has gone to the ends of the world.
To me most feminine she seemed when I saw her temple at Deir-el-Bahari, with its brightness and its suavity; its pretty shallowness and sunshine; its white, and blue, and yellow, and red, and green and orange; all very trim and fanciful, all very smart and delicate; full of finesse and laughter, and breathing out to me of the twentieth century the coquetry of a woman in 1500 B.C. After the terrific masculinity of Medinet-Abu, after the great freedom of the Ramesseum, and the grandeur of its colossus, the manhood of all the ages concentrated in granite, the temple at Deir-el-Bahari came upon me like a delicate woman, perfumed and arranged, clothed in a creation of white and blue and orange, standing ever so knowingly against a background of orange and pink, of red and of brown-red, a smiling coquette of the mountain, a gay and sweet enchantress who knew her pretty powers and meant to exercise them.
One knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from her sacred forehead to her feet; that long before him Mariette here brought to the light at Drah-abu'l-Neggah the treasures of kings of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; that at the foot of those tiger-colored precipices Theodore M. Davis the American found the sepulcher of Queen Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and Thuaa, the parents of Queen Thiy, containing mummy-cases covered with gold, jars of oil and wine, gold, silver, and alabaster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded ivory a chair with gilded plaster reliefs, chairs of state, and a chariot; that here Maspero, Victor Loret, Brugsch Bey, and other patient workers gave to the world tombs that had been hidden and unknown for centuries; that there to the north is the temple of Kurna, and over there the Ramesseum; that those rows of little pillars close under the mountain, and looking strangely modern, are the pillars of Hatshepsu's temple, which bears upon its walls the pictures of the expedition to the historic land of Punt; that the kings were buried there, and there the queens and the princes of the vanished dynasties; that beyond to the west is the temple of Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the dead; that here by the native village is Medinet-Abu.
Word Of The Day