Position 40 - The Tomb Of A Feudal Lord At Benihasan, Built About 1900 B. C.

We have now left Lower Egypt far behind; Cairo is almost in front of us, 167 miles to the north, but a little to the left as we look east of north, and we are almost midway between Cairo and Thebes, which is nearly behind us, 183 miles distant (Map 3). We stand on ground sacred to the great barons and feudal lords of the 12th Dynasty, in the Middle Kingdom. The slope of the mountain extends backward and upward above the cornice of this façade, for we are before a tomb hewn out of the solid rock of the cañon cliffs.

It is our first view of a cliff-tomb, of which we shall see many, especially when we reach Thebes. Already in the Old Kingdom, the nobles had begun to hew out such tombs, and we might have seen them at Gizeh, had not the greater pyramid tombs there consumed so much of our time; but we shall see some of them from the days of the Old Kingdom, when we arrive at the first cataract (Position 85). But it was only or chiefly the provincial nobles of that time, who made use of the cliff-tomb. By 2000 B. C., however, it had become the prevailing method of tomb construction, and the mastaba, while it had not disappeared, was no longer so common.

Thus we shall meet the cliff-tomb as the usual form from the beginning of the Middle Kingdom onward. At this time we find in it all the elements which we noticed in the mastaba, with the modifications necessary in view of the change in the character of the construction, that is, from masonry on the plain to solid rock in the cliff.

That door before us gives access to the chapel-chamber, as in the mastaba; but as it was impossible to hew the secret chamber for the false body, the mortuary statue, out of the solid rock, without leaving one side of it open, it was therefore made as we see here; and the secret chamber thus became an open niche or shrine in the back wall of the chapel. Sitting in this shrine, and really a part of it, for it is hewn from the same rock, is the portrait or mortuary statue of the deceased; and these sculptured portraits of the Middle Kingdom, being thus still attached to the native rock, cannot be removed to enrich our museums like those which you saw in Cairo, but they have for the most part suffered defacement and destruction in antiquity. The sepulcher-chamber, where the mummy was deposited, is below the chapel, and was reached by a shaft leading from the floor of the chapel vertically downward. Thus, as we have said, all the parts of the mastaba are here present.

This tomb is architecturally interesting. Look at that architrave timber resting upon the tops of the pillars. Would you not imagine it were hewn in wood? But look further at that row of timber ends projecting under the cornice. They are but the imitation in stone, of the ends of the wooden timbers which supported the roof in the wooden structure, unconsciously used by the architect as his model. That wooden structure perished four thousand years ago. What it was—a house, a temple, a storage magazine, we do not know; but certain it is, that of that vanished wooden building some of the architectural details are here preserved to us in this stone tomb. In all probability the pillars, too, are imitated from the same building.

They are sixteen-sided, and when first seen by the savants of Napoleon's expedition, they were so struck with their resemblance to the Doric column, that they called them “proto-Doric,” thinking that they were certainly the predecessors of the Doric order. This impression was enforced by the timber ends above the architrave, which much resemble a similar detail in Doric architecture called the “mutule.” But you notice that this pillar has no capital (and for that reason, I have called it a pillar and not a column), and that it has a circular base, whereas the Doric column has a capital, but no base, springing as it does directly from the pavement.

But nevertheless the purity of line and fine simplicity of this pillar do strongly suggest the Doric column, and it is not impossible that examples of it here and elsewhere in Egypt, may have been seen by the early Greek architects, and may have given them hints which affected the general character of the Doric column. In any case, this colonnade, thrown out before the tomb chapel, is a very effective piece of architecture.

The impression from it is somewhat marred by a very necessary modern precaution, the iron grating, which keeps out the modern native intruder, at whose hands the tombs at Benihasan have suffered sadly in past years. For these chambers have been open to his forefathers for thousands of years, and in this very one before us, one of his ancestors, a scribe named Amenmose, who lived some three thousand years ago, left a record of his visit to the place about seven hundred years after its occupant had been laid to rest in it. He took his pen from behind his ear, where he kept it as modern scribes do, and he wrote upon the wall in a rapid hand the words: “The scribe Amenmose came to see the temple of Khufu, and found it like the heavens, when the sun rises therein.” Because the name of Khufu incidentally occurs here, he mistook it for the tomb of Khufu, the builder of the great pyramid, of whom, of course, as a monarch already belonging to ancient history, he had little knowledge; just as an unlettered German of to-day might know very little of his great ancestor, Frederick Barbarossa. For Amenmose the scribe was as far in years from Khufu and his empire, as a modern Italian is from the Roman emperor Augustus.

But who was the man who slept in this tomb? Here are his name and pompous titles written all around the door. He was Khnumhotep, who lived in the 20th century before Christ. He was one of the most powerful lords of his class; one of those feudal barons of the 12th Dynasty, whom the Pharaoh was forced to conciliate (page 26). They were lords of a town and domain which lay at the foot of these cliffs, but such was their favor that the Pharaoh often united with their domain, also that of another district or nome, opposite this, on the other side of the river.

They built their own temple in this town, they placed their own statues there, they mustered their own troops, but placed them at the Pharaoh's service when necessary; they dated events by the years of their own reigns, as well as those of the Pharaoh; in short, they were miniature kings, but under the Pharaoh's more or less immediate control. Here in this cliff they hewed out their tombs, generation after generation of them, and on the chapel walls they depicted, in beautiful painted reliefs, the scenes and occupations among which they moved upon their great estates. We know how they hunted, how they dressed, how they worked and how they played, how they fought and how they worshiped, and it is all on the walls of the chapel, to which this door gives access.

Among the scenes in this chapel is one depicting an incident of which Khnumhotep was evidently very proud. It shows him receiving a company of thirty-seven Semitic Asiatics, countrymen of Abraham, who likewise must have lived at about this time. They are led by their sheik, whose name is Absha, a name which occurs in the Old Testament in the form “Abishai,” which means father of a gift, so that these people evidently spoke a dialect closely akin to Hebrew. They came to Khnumhotep, so the accompanying inscription states, to bring eye-cosmetic, one of the products of the farther east of which the Egyptians were very fond, but were obliged to obtain by trade.

Below these scenes which cover the four walls Khnumhotep has placed a long biography of himself showing how his line had been favored by the kings of the ruling dynasty from its beginning on to the time of his own sons, then grown men. It is evident that this Benihasan family was a source of strength to the 12th Dynasty, and that its kings rewarded the family accordingly. But we cannot trace them back of the Middle Kingdom.

“We are now to visit Assiut, where we shall find a similar family, but of still earlier date. You will locate Assiut on Map 3, about seventy miles south of Benihasan, but on the western bank of the Nile. Our first position there is shown by the red lines numbered 41. We are to stand, you see, with our backs to the modern town and the river and look southwest to the cliffs.