Egypt Through The Stereoscope

A Journey Through The Land Of The Pharaohs

by James Henry Breasted | 1908 | 103,705 words

Examines how stereographs were used as a means of virtual travel. Focuses on James Henry Breasted's "Egypt through the Stereoscope" (1905, 1908). Provides context for resources in the Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA). Part 3 of a 4 part course called "History through the Stereoscope."...

Position 14 - The Stela Of Amenophis Iii, Re-used By Merneptah, And Bearing The Earliest Mention Of Israel; Cairo

This remarkable stela or stone tablet is for several reasons one of the most interesting monuments even in this great museum, where there is so much of unusual interest, and when you have heard its history I think you will agree with me. It is an enormous stela, hewn out of black granite, ten feet three inches high, five feet four inches wide, and thirteen inches thick. On this side it bears a long inscription of King Amenophis III, who lived at the height of Egypt's greatest power, before the downfall of the 18th Dynasty, in the middle of the 14th century B. C.

The inscription narrates the king's extensive temple buildings for the god Amon, and over the inscription you see the king twice represented as offering to the god Amon. The two figures of the king are near the outer edge, and those of the god, back to back in the middle. Curving over their heads is the winged sun-disk, and the inscriptions scattered among the figures contain the names of the king and the god, with the promises of the latter insuring the Pharaoh long life, power, health and happiness. The king erected this splendid monument in his mortuary temple on the west shore of the Nile at Thebes, behind the great colossi of the plain, which we shall visit there (Position 64).

When his son, Amenophis IV, or Ikhnaton, introduced a new religion and attempted to exterminate the worship of Amon, he sent his craftsmen all over the land erasing the name of Amon wherever they could find it, and destroying all monuments erected in honor of the hated god. These workmen found this stela in the temple of the king's father behind the colossi, and they chiseled away the figures of Amon in the middle, as well as almost the entire inscription below, because it recorded the temples built in Amon's honor by the king's father, whose own figure, however, they respected. The splendid monument was thus destroyed.

But again, after the fall and death of the Amonhating Ikhnaton, Sethos I, who followed him after an interval, sent his craftsmen about the country restoring the monuments which had been defaced during the reform. His workmen, therefore, finding this defaced stela in the temple of Amenophis III, carefully recut all that had been erased, sufficient traces remaining in most cases so that they could follow them with the chisel. That dark lower portion at the bottom was untouched by Ikhnaton's destroyers, and those are the hieroglyphs of Amenophis III's original inscription, but the lighter portions above are the recutting of Sethos I.

Between the two Amon figures, in the middle at the top, Sethos I has inscribed a short record of his restoration, in that prominent vertical column of hieroglyphs. It reads: “Restoration of the monument, which King Sethos I made, for his father Amon-Re, king of gods.”

This, then, was the pious work of the king whose face you have just looked upon. But under his grandson, Merneptah, the temple which guarded this stela fell on evil days; for, following the example of his father, Sethos I's son Ramses II, Merneptah began demolishing the temples of his great predecessors, in order to obtain building materials for his own works. He razed the temple containing this stela to the ground, and upon discovering the stela immediately appropriated it for his own mortuary temple but a few hundred feet away.

Placing it with this inscribed face to the wall, he inscribed upon its unoccupied back a triumphant inscription of twenty-eight lines, recording his victory over the Libyans in the fifth year of his reign. The last three lines of the inscription, his court flatterers devoted to a song of victory, in which the singer, sweeping the whole northern horizon from west to east, exults in the power of the king over the nations, as he enumerates them one by one. As he reaches Palestine he says: “Israel is desolated; his grain is not, Palestine has become as widows for Egypt.”

This is the earliest mention of the Hebrews (their own literature being much later), and indicates that at least part of the people were at this time in Palestine. Thus we gain from this inscription a swift and uncertain glimpse of the Israelites suffering from the Pharaoh's power in Palestine, before they appear as a nation there in the Old Testament, but it does not settle the vexed question of the date of the Hebrew exodus.

But we cannot wander further through these halls; the land about us lies more thickly strewn with mighty ruins than does any other land in all the world, and to these we must now devote ourselves, incidentally seeing as much as we can of the life of the present-day Egyptians. We had a view of the pyramids across the domes and minarets of this city (Position 4, page 69), but we must now visit them and view them at close range. This will carry us out of the town and across the Nile bridge, which is but a step from this museum. Let us therefore proceed to the bridge and enjoy our first view of the Nile and its shipping, on our way to the pyramids. Find on Map 4 the red lines numbered 15 on the west side of Cairo, which show our next standpoint and the direction in which we are to be looking— northwest.

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