: Predecessors of Cleopatra by North Leigh Davis G A Georgina A Illustrator - Egypt History To 640 A.D.; Queens Egypt Biography; Egypt History 332-30 B.C. Biography; Egypt History To 332 B.C. Biography

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

The envoys had a small guard of soldiers, but all included did not number more than two hundred and ten men.

The voyagers were met with a friendly welcome and returned with stores of treasures. The inhabitants of Punt lived in little round shaped huts, built on stages and reached by ladders, all under the shade of spreading palms. A picture on the wall of the temple shows the prince of the land Parihu by name, with his wife, Ati or Aty, the latter fat and ungainly , with a donkey to ride upon, followed by two sons and a young daughter, the last giving promise of rivaling her mother in rotundity of outline. Gold, spices, ivory, incense bearing trees, to the number of thirty-one, precious gums, used in the service of the temple, and various animals were brought back to Egypt as a result of this most successful journey. The return was celebrated by a high festival in the temple. Hatshepsut or Hatasu appeared in fullest royal attire, adorned in the richest manner, a helmet on her head, a spotted leopard skin covering her shoulders and her limbs "perfumed like fresh dew." She offered incense to the god Amen, as his priestess, bearing two bowls full and weighing out gold with her own hand. This was before the sacred boat of Amen Ra, with a ram's head at each end, and carried by high priests, also in leopard skins. The Naka, or incense bearing trees, were borne in tubs, and the weights for weighing the precious metals were gold rings in the shape of recumbent oxen.

Later, as was his iconoclastic wont, Rameses II destroyed some of these pictures and inscriptions and inserted his own name.

Although the name of Tahutmes II, husband and co-ruler with the queen, is not specially mentioned in connection with this great expedition, he shared in the after festival. He, too, designated by his court name of King Menkhefer-ka-ra, offered incense in the boat of Amen, carried on the shoulders of men. "Thus," says Miss Edwards, "to the sound of trumpets and drums, with waving of green boughs and shouts of triumph, and followed by an ever gathering crowd, the great procession takes its way between avenues of sphinxes, past obelisks and pylons, and up one magnificent flight of steps after another till the topmost terrace of the Great Temple is reached, where the Queen herself welcomed them to the presence of Hathor, the Beautiful, the Lady of the Western Mountain, the Goddess Regent of the Land of Punt."

At what period is not exactly known, but of course earlier than this, since he is believed to have designed the beautiful temple of Deir el Bahri, the queen called to her assistance the services of the architect Senmut, whose statue is in the Berlin Museum. He, it is implied, usurped the place in Hatasu's affection which rightfully belonged to her husband, but of this it is not possible to speak with any degree of certainty or authority. We only know that he was a man of great ability in his own line, of intelligent mind and skillful hand, and was highly appreciated by her majesty. In an inscription in the Berlin Museum he says his lady ruler made him "great in both countries" and "chief of the chiefs" in the whole of Egypt. The buildings which the queen and he erected are said to be among the most tasteful, complete and brilliant in the land. He was of lowly birth, and therefore his position was the more surprising. He appears to have occupied in the queen's counsels something of the place of Disraeli to Queen Victoria, whose Jewish origin made his occupancy of the position he gained remarkable. After Senmut's death Hatasu raised to him a stone memorial as a token of gratitude, with his portrait in black granite and in an attitude of repose. On his shoulder were the short but significant words, "there was not found in writing his ancestors." He is also introduced in an inscription, as himself speaking, where he used the male pronoun "he" in mentioning the queen refers to his own services and ends with styling her "the lord of the country, the King of Makara."

Senmut was evidently the chief counsellor and favorite of Hatshepsut, but there was also another highly regarded officer who shared with or succeeded him in the queen's favor and good graces. This was a certain Aahmes, who had also served her father, Thothmes, or Tahutmes I, and whose tomb was discovered by Brugsch, and bears this inscription, "I was during my existence in the favor of the king, and was rewarded by His Holiness, and a divine woman gave me further reward, the defunct great queen Makara , because I brought up her daughter, the great queen's daughter, the defunct Nofrerura." It is of course plain that he survived the queen, but we do not know whether he met with equal favor at the hand of her successor. Possibly the mother's heart, little given to tenderness, may have had an especial softness towards this "nurse" or tutor of her dead child, her father's trusted servant and perhaps, on that very account, hers also.

Tahutmes I had continued the building of Thebes and set up his two granite obelisks. Tahutmes II and Hatshepsut continued building at Karnak, the temple having been in existence, it is said, as far back as the Eleventh Dynasty. So gigantic was the scale on which these architectural works were undertaken that one life seldom saw their completion. Like the coral reef the temples grew and were added to, monarch after monarch of succeeding generations taking a share in the general design.

Tahutmes I had raised at Karnak two obelisks seventy feet in height, his daughter's far outdid them, for hers were the loftiest then known in Egypt, a flawless block of red granite or rose quartz, rising 108 or 109 feet into the air. This was erected in the sixteenth year of her reign and after the death of her husband, which took place some dozen or more years after that of his father. Probably the ceremonial mourning was observed for him, but the heart of Hatshepsut was hard and cold and even if we exonerate her from the implication of being directly concerned in his decease, which stands "not proven," there seems little doubt that she rejoiced to be comparatively free and hold the reins of power exclusively in her own hands. Nothing seemed missing from her life or her pursuits, which she followed with renewed energy and appeared more constantly than ever in male attire, the short kilt and sandals, the war helmet and even perhaps, as in her reproduction, a beard. Architecture was evidently of great interest to her as to many of her predecessors and obelisks and temples still, after the lapse of centuries, bear witness to her power and skill.

In an inscription on part of the rock-cut temple of Speos Artemidos, south Beni-hasan, reciting her re-establishment of Egyptian power and worship after destruction by the Hyksos, Hatshepsut says: "The abode of the mistress of Qes was fallen in ruin, the earth had covered her beautiful sanctuary and children played over her temple--I cleared and rebuilt it anew--I restored that which was in ruins and I completed that which was left unfinished. For there had been Amu in the midst of the Delta and in Hanar and the foreign hoardes of their number had destroyed the ancient works. They reigned ignorant of the god Ra."

The temple of Deir-el-Bahri or "Dayre-el-Bahari," its present Arabic name, was perhaps the greatest work of Hatshepsut's life and enough of the ruins still remained for the clever French architect, M. Brune, to reconstruct its plan for us. The site was one that would have been chosen by the Greeks for a theatre, but the Egyptian dedicated it to what he deemed a higher object, the worship of the gods. Situated on a green plain, near the tombs of the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty, it was a magnificent natural amphitheatre on the shore of the river and, terrace by terrace, rose from the edge of the water to its steep background of golden brown rock, in which the inner temple, the "holy of holies," was excavated. Of its structure Senmut or Sen-Maut was the presiding genius. The name "Dayre-el-Bahari" means North church, or monastery, and was, of course, applied to it in later times from the ruins of an old monastery which was yet young and modern beside the original erection. An avenue of sphinxes connected the landing for boats with the four terraces. These were supported by earth-works and stone and guarded by hawk-headed figures, in marble, bearing the uraeus. Columns also supported it, some of them polygonal in shape, with the head of the goddess Hathor as a capitol, and were later restored and kept in order till the time of the Ptolemies. "This temple," says one writer, "was a splendid specimen of Egyptian Art history, whether we consider the treatment of the stone or the richness of the colored decorations," and it was unique in design and differed from all others. In the inner recesses of the rock-cut chambers was a picture of the queen, representing her as sucking the milk of the sacred cow, the incarnation of the goddess Hathor, thereby intimating her divine origin.

Her cartouch, which may be seen in Baedaker and other works, seems comparatively simple, beside the more elaborate ones of other monarchs. It is a circle with a dot in the centre, a small seated female figure, wearing the plumes of a goddess and below two right angles joined. The three hieroglyphic signs are explained to mean "Ma, the sitting figure of the goddess of Truth, Law and Justice; Ka, represented by the hieroglyphic of the uplifted arms and signifying Life, and the sun's disk, representing Ra, the supreme solar god of the universe."

Many memorials of this great queen, spite of the efforts made to destroy them, remain to us. The ruins of the temple, the great obelisks, one of which is still standing, various statues and statuettes, many sun-dried brick with her cartouch and that of her father, some of which can be seen in our own Metropolitan Museum in New York, a cabinet in wood and ivory, her standard, her signet ring in turquoise and gold, in the possession of an English gentleman, and, most interesting of all perhaps, the remains of her throne chair, now in the British Museum. It is made of a dark wood, not natural to Egypt, and probably from the land of Punt. The legs are decorated with ucilisks in gold, and the carven hoof of some animal. The other parts are ornamented with hieroglyphics in gold and silver and one fragmentary royal oval in which the name of Hatasu appears and thereby identifies the owner of the throne.

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!