Position 12 - The Body Of Sethos I, Who Lived In The Middle Of The Fourteenth Century B. C., Museum At Cairo

What would you say if you might look upon the face of King David, of Solomon, or of Josiah? But this king before us, upon whose actual features we look, almost as if he had died but yesterday, lived and reigned centuries before the Hebrew monarchy began. Sethos I was the second king of the 19th Dynasty, and his reign fell just after the middle of the 14th century B. C. The Hebrews were toiling in Egypt then, when the utterance of these very lips was the supreme decree of the state; for his son, Ramses II, was probably the Pharaoh of the oppression.

Those arms, now folded in repose, once bore the sword in triumph through the very land where the Hebrews afterward gained their home. This tall form once towered in the speeding chariot, scattering death and destruction among the Beduin kindred of the Hebrews, as they sought to invade and possess the land of Palestine. It is all depicted on the walls of the great Karnak temple, where we shall see it when we arrive at Thebes.

The Egyptians believed that such a body as this was absolutely indispensable to the future existence of the person, and we have seen that they even wrought false bodies, portrait statues in stone or wood, to take the place of this real body, should the latter ever suffer destruction. The process of preservation was easy in a country of so dry a climate, where a body buried on the margin of the desert above the reach of the Nile but without other precaution, will desiccate and after thousands of years be exhumed in an astonishingly perfect condition. When the climate was aided by artificial means, you see before you what an amazing durability was imparted to the frail body, which in other climates perishes in a comparatively short time.

There were various means and processes of embalmment suited to the purses of the different families seeking the embalmer's services, and although the process was, of course, unused and unknown in the earliest times, it rapidly spread after it was once introduced, and long before Sethos I's time the practice of it had become a regular profession, demanding the services of thousands of men. In course of time, although the custom ceased in later Roman days, the tombs of Egypt became glutted with millions of such bodies. When we remember that three generations of five or six millions of people died every century, and that a large proportion of these were embalmed for probably over 3,000 years, we shall not wonder that we find large cavernous tombs with the mummies piled in like cord wood to the very ceiling.

In the body of this king you can clearly see the masses of aromatic gums and the like, that have been used to fill up the interior cavities, from which the perishable organs have been removed. These latter were also preserved in four jars, which in the tomb were placed beside the body. The top of each jar was carved in the form of a genius, to whose special protection each was committed.

Such a king was laid away in great state, wearing the splendid regalia of gold, silver and costly stones, with which he had been adorned in life. Of these things he had need in the hereafter, and they were necessarily placed in the tomb with him or actually upon his body. The result of this was that the tombs of the kings, of his nobles and officials, were systematically robbed from the earliest times, for the rich booty awaiting the successful plunderer was too tempting to be resisted. Thus we shall find that the pyramids and rock-hewn tombs, which we shall later visit, have all been completely cleared out, and in most cases the body has disappeared.

The tomb of this king before us was early robbed, but the later kings, seeing their inability to protect the old royal tombs, took out many of the bodies of their ancestors and concealed them in a common hiding place, where they were discovered by the natives, and in 1881 were taken out, revealing to the astonished modern world, the faces of men who had swayed the destinies of a great nation, and held the dominant power in western Asia 3,500 years ago. When we reach Thebes, we shall see the place where these royal bodies were concealed (Position 74). Meantime before we leave the museum, let us at least glance at the splendid jewelry worn by these antique kings, in the days of Abraham, which proved so disastrous an appurtenance of the royal dead.