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We drove out to the ruins in a string of hired carriages, at an incredibly early hour this morning. As the night was one long dog-howl, and the dawn one overwhelming cockcrow, people were thankful to get up. But what a waste of hardly obtained baths before the start! Between Medinet and Crocodilopolis rose a solid wall of red dust.
How that catastrophe came about we can see, not with any certainty of detail, but with some amount of probability as to its general outlines, from that echo of a period of wandering and strife in the Mediterranean area which comes to us from the records of Ramses III. at Medinet Habu.
Not but that the Egyptians sometimes cut boldly into the stone. At Medinet Habû and Karnak on the higher parts of these temples, where the work is in granite or sandstone, and exposed to full daylight the bas-relief decoration projects full 6-3/8 inches above the surface.
In the middle of the floor is a tank surrounded by a covered colonnade. The lower classes lived in mere huts which, though built of bricks, were no better than those of the present fellahin. At Karnak, in the Pharaonic town; at Kom Ombo, in the Roman town; and at Medinet Habû, in the Coptic town, the houses in the poorer quarters have seldom more than twelve or sixteen feet of frontage.
The elfin light was growing brighter by perceptible degrees; and Paul, looking toward the speaker, now was able to discern him as a shadowy bulk, without definite outline, but impressive, pagan as a granite god, or one of those broken pillars of Medînet Habû.
Their height is determined only by the taste of the architect or the necessities of the building. So also with the spacing of columns. Not only does the inter- columnar space vary considerably between temple and temple, or chamber and chamber, but sometimes as in the first court at Medinet Habû they vary in the same portico.
Here were fixed four great wooden masts, formed of joined beams and held in place by a wooden framework fixed in the four openings above mentioned. Such was the temple of Khonsû, and such, in their main features, were the majority of the greater temples of Theban and Ptolemaic times, as Luxor, the Ramesseum, Medinet Habû, Edfû, and Denderah.
The quadrangular pillar, with parallel or slightly inclined sides, and generally without either base or capital, frequently occurs in tombs of the ancient empire. It reappears later at Medinet Habû, in the temple of Thothmes III., and again at Karnak, in what is known as the processional hall.
Slaves waited on them, and filled their earthen beakers with yellow beer. The scandalous pictures in the so-called kiosk of Medinet Habu, the caricatures in an indescribable papyrus at Turin, confirm these statements. "My arms ache; the mob of slaves get more and more dirty and refractory."
We must not, however, say too much in dispraise of the Ptolemaic Egyptians and their works. We have to be grateful to them indeed for the building of the temples of Edfu and Dendera, which, owing to their later date, are still in good preservation, while the best preserved of the old Pharaonic fanes, such as Medinet Habû, have suffered considerably from the ravages of time.
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