Cairo to Kisumu

How would you like to own an Egyptian mummy princess, perhaps two thousand years old? On my second visit to Egypt I was offered one at the museum. The price was just one hundred dollars in cash, and accompanying it was a certificate showing that it had not been made in Germany. The excavations going on in the valley of the Nile had unearthed so many relics that the museum at Cairo had mummies and other antiques to sell. Hundreds of the ancient dead were being shipped to all parts of the world, and the ghoul-like officials added to their revenues by disposing of the surplus bodies of nobles who lived and ruled ages ago. The lady who was offered to me, with the usual accompaniment of a certificate of age, lay in the clothes in which she was buried. She was wrapped around with linen as yellow as saffron and her black face appeared to smile as I looked at her. She had been put up in spices, and I could almost smell the perfumes with which she was embalmed.

There is no place like this Museum of Cairo in which to study the Egypt of the past. Room after room is walled with the coffins of monarchs who reigned thousands of years ago, and in other caskets the bodies embalmed are exposed to view. I looked a long time upon the face of King Rameses who is supposed to have gone to school with Moses. The king who built Thebes, Karnak, and other great cities, was the man who oppressed the Israelites, although not the one whom the Lord afflicted with plagues thereby causing the Exodus. He was the Alexander of Egypt, the Napoleon of the Nile valley three thousand odd years ago. He conquered the countries about him and was rolling in wealth. “... now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence.”

Rameses is remarkably well preserved. His iron jaw is as firm as when he uttered commands in his capital, the hundred-gated city of Thebes. His enormous nose is still prominent. The face, though black, is wonderfully life-like and the teeth shine out as white as when he brushed them after his morning tub, something like four thousand years ago. I noted the silky, fuzzy hair over his black ears and longed for a lock of it for my collection of relics.

Then I looked up and saw a great curled wig of black hair which the records state was made for King Rameses, and wondered why the spiced old gentleman below did not match his wig to his natural flaxen hair.

Near this casket is one containing Seti I, the Pharaoh who preceded Rameses, another great warrior and conqueror, who is said to have made a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea. Not so far away is the mummy of Meneptah, the tyrant who hardened his heart against the Israelites and would not let them go. Seti lies in his coffin with his black arms crossed and his black head cushioned on yellow grave clothes. His features are as peaceful as perhaps they seldom were in life and he appears to sleep well.

The dead past became marvellously real when I looked at another box in which lay a mummied princess with the body of her tiny baby, not many days old, in the coffin beside her, and when I saw gold bracelets of the same patterns that our belles wear to-day and earrings quite as beautiful as those made by Tiffany, I felt that human nature was the same six thousand years ago as it is now, and that these people of the past had the loves and hates, the cares and the vanities of the world of to-day. I wondered what Rameses took for the colic and whether Queen Akhotupu, who lived before Moses, and who now lies here, had hysterics. I noted the flowers which were put in another mummy case beside a king and I could not reconcile the beautiful teeth and the fine intellectual face of King Seti, whose daughter is supposed to have found Moses in the bulrushes, with the fat, bloated fingers, showing that he had the gout. There was as good living in the days of the Israelites as there is in Egypt to-day, but then as now, only the rich had fancy cooks and the poor ate scraps. In the tomb of Ti near Memphis I saw in chambers of granite down under the sands of the desert, wall after wall covered with painted pictures of the life of the time when the tomb was made thousands of years before Christ.

I saw the body of a princess standing upright against the side of the wall. Her face was plated with gold, and the mummy cloths which wrapped her round and round were embroidered. One might make a similar bundle of any modern girl. Another of these ladies had hair which appeared to have been done up in curl papers, and its colour was as red as my own.

Many of the mummy caskets are splendid. They are made of fine woods, painted inside and out with pictures describing the life of the occupants. Some are covered with carvings and some with heads which may have been likenesses of those who lay within.

It costs much to die now. It must have cost more then. The expense of making a first-class mummy was twelve hundred dollars, and the money of that day was worth ten times what it is now. The caskets, which were more expensive than any of the coffins we have to-day, were incased in great sarcophagi of stone or wood, a single one of which must have cost a fortune.

I have asked the archæologists why the Egyptians made their mummies. Their reply is that the desire for mummification came from the religion of the ancient Egyptians, who believed in the transmigration of souls. They thought that the spirit wandered about for several thousand years after death and then came back to the home it had upon earth. For this reason it was desirable to keep the body intact, for every one looked to his mummihood as his only chance of re-creation hereafter.

When the art of embalming began no one knows, but it certainly dates back to the building of the Pyramids. We know that when Jacob died in Egypt, his son Joseph had him embalmed and the Bible says it took forty days to do the job properly. It also relates that when Joseph died the Egyptians embalmed him and put him away in a coffin. Herodotus, who was one of the best travel writers of all times, describes how embalming was done and tells the details of mummy-making. He says the art was carried on by a special guild, whose members were appointed by the government and who had to work at fixed prices. The bodies were mummified in three different ways. By the first and most costly method, the brains were extracted through the nose by means of an iron probe, and the intestines were taken out through an incision made in the side. The intestines were cleaned and washed in palm wine, covered with aromatic gum, and set aside in jars. The cavity of the body was next filled with spices, including myrrh, cassia, and other fragrant substances, and it was then sewn up. After this it was soaked in a solution of natron, a kind of carbonate of soda, being allowed to lie in it for a couple of months or more. When it had been taken out and wrapped in fine linen so smeared over with gum that it stuck to the skin, the mummy was ready for burial.

The second process, though cheaper, took about the same time. In this the brains were not extracted and the body was so treated in a solution that everything except the skin and bones was dissolved. There was a third process which consisted of cleaning the corpse and laying it down in salt for seventy days. The first process cost about twelve hundred dollars; the second, one hundred dollars; and the third, considerably less.

Other authorities describe different methods of mummification. Most of the mummies discovered, however, have been preserved by means of gums of some kind and by pitch and carbonate of soda. The mummies prepared with gums are usually green in colour with skins which look as though they were tanned. They often break when they are unrolled. The bodies preserved with pitch are black and hard, but the features are intact, and it is said that such mummies will last forever. In those treated with soda the skin is hard and rather loose, and the hair falls off when it is touched. The pitch mummy ordinarily keeps its hair and teeth.

There are mummies of children in this Egyptian museum. There are some also in London, but I know of none anywhere else. The children were embalmed for the same reason as the grown-ups, the parents believing that they could have no union with their little ones unless they met them in their original bodies after the resurrection. The faces on some of these are gilded, while the pictures on the bandages represent the children offering sacrifices to the gods. Above the feet is sometimes seen the funeral boat, showing the little child lying upon its bier, and upon other parts of the coffin are tiny people who seem to be engaged in propelling the boat. This probably represents the ferry of the dead to their tombs in the mountains on the banks of the Nile. In other cases the caskets of the children are beautifully decorated and some are even plated with gold.

I mused long over two statues as old as any in the world. These are life-size sitting figures, representing Prince Ra-Hotep and his wife, the Princess Nefert, who lived something like four thousand years before Christ, and whose statues are as perfect now as when they were made, before the Pyramids were built. The Prince has African features, and his light attire reminds one of the inhabitants of the valley of the Congo. The Princess is dressed in a sheet, and looks as though she were just out of her bath. Her husband evidently cut her hair, and it takes considerable imagination to believe that she can be so old and still look so young. There is no doubt of her age, however, for the scientists say that she has seen over six thousand years, and the scientists know.

One of the most important records of the customs and beliefs of the Pharaohs concerning the dead has been taken away from Egypt. This is a papyrus manuscript which is now in the British Museum. It is known as the Book of the Dead and contains two hundred chapters. It is written in hieroglyphics, but many of the passages have been translated. It sets forth that every man was believed to consist of seven different parts of which the actual body was only one and the other parts related to the soul and its transmigration. Upon the preservation of the body depended the bringing together of these seven parts in the after life. On this account corpses were mummified, and for the same reason they were hidden away in tombs under the desert and in the great Pyramids, which their owners believed would be inaccessible to the men of the future.

This Book of the Dead contains, also, some of the Egyptian ideals of right living, reminding one of the Psalm which, in Rouse’s version, begins:

The Book of the Dead reads:

There is no doubt that the Egyptians believed in the immortality of the soul. They thought man would live again, and gave the soul the name of Bai, representing it in the form of a human-headed hawk. They had their own ideas of heaven which one of their pictures of the future state represents as follows:

According to one opinion, the Egyptian heaven was situated above the sky. It was separated from the earth by a great iron plate, to which lamps were fastened, these lamps being the stars. According to another theory, the heaven was in the delta, or in one of the oases. The sky was thought to be a cow, Hathor, whose four feet stood firm upon the soil; or else a vast face, in which the right eye was the sun and the left eye the moon. Some thought that the sky was the goddess Nut, whom the god of the atmosphere, Show, held aloof from her husband Keb, the earth, on whose back grew the plants and trees.

The ancient Egyptian idea of creation was that it began with the rising of the sun, which was brought about by a god, and men and women came from the tears which dropped from the eyes of that god. This is somewhat better than the old Chinese tradition of the world’s making. According to the latter, the god Pwanku chiselled out the universe, putting eighteen thousand years on the job. At the end of that time he died, and his head turned into mountains, his breath became the wind, and his voice the thunder. From his flesh came the fields, from his beard the stars, and from his skin and hair the trees. All minerals originated from his teeth and bones. The rain is his sweat, and, lastly, man was created from the insects that stuck to his body!

In examining these gods of the ancient Egyptians as shown in the relics from the tombs, it is easy to see where the Israelites got their ideas of the golden calf. The oppressors from whom they were fleeing revered certain animals. They looked upon hawks as emblems of the sun, moon, and stars, and at their death often turned them to mummies. The cat was sacred to one of their gods. They had also statues of cows, the cow being considered emblematic of Hathor, the goddess of beauty, love, and joy. You may see her statues scattered up and down the Nile valley. Sometimes she is depicted as a cow and at others as a woman wearing cow horns with the sun hung between them. There is a carving of Queen Cleopatra decked out in that way.

But the jewels of which the Israelites made that calf! If you will look up the Bible record in Exodus you will see that Moses advised the Israelites that every man should borrow of his Egyptian neighbour jewels of silver and jewels of gold. A little farther on it is stated that they did so, the paragraph concluding as follows:

In the museums here in Cairo you may see pints and quarts of jewellery such as the Israelites borrowed and took with them into the wilderness to melt down to make that golden calf. The place is filled with great cases containing ornaments of gold and silver taken from the tombs. Some date back almost to the early days of the Pyramids, and many were in use before the Israelites left Egypt. Some are golden snakes with spring coils so that they will fit any arm; others are solid rings of massive gold. I saw armlets to be worn above the elbow, golden girdles for the waist, and a chain of gold with a goose head at each end. Among the finest of these ornaments are those owned by a queen who lived 600 B.C. and whose mummy came from a tomb not far from Thebes.