All day long I have been wandering about through the tombs of the kings who ruled Egypt three or four thousand years ago. I have gone into the subterranean chambers which the Pharaohs dug out of the solid rocks for their burial vaults, and I have visited the tombs of kings older than they. The last resting places of more than fifty of these monarchs of early Egypt have been discovered, and the work is still going on. Some of the best work of excavation all along the Nile valley is being done by Americans. While at Cairo I found the money of Harvard College and the Boston Museum uncovering the cemeteries of the nabobs and paupers who were buried at the time of King Cheops under the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh. The Egyptian Exploration Fund, which is supported by Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, has a small army of workmen operating near Luxor, the University of Pennsylvania has made important discoveries, and a large part of the uncovering of the valley in which these royal tombs lie has been done by the Americans.

The Egyptologists of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and Lord Carnarvon of England are responsible for some of the most remarkable finds of this generation. During my trip of to-day I met a young archæologist, in charge of the American operations, who showed me through the tombs of the kings and explained the symbols and pictures on the walls. I went to that part of the valley where the excavation is now going on and took pictures of a gang of one hundred and fifty Egyptian men and boys who are working there.

Let me describe the place that the ancient Egyptian monarchs selected for their burials, the Valley of the Kings. They wanted to hide their remains so that posterity could never find them, and to cover them so that future generations would have no idea that they and their treasures lay beneath. Our cemeteries are chosen for the beauty of their surroundings. We like to turn up our toes to the daisies and to have leafy trees whisper a requiem over our heads. The old Egyptian kings wanted to lie under the sterile desert waste and chose a region about as far up the Nile valley as Cleveland is inland from the Atlantic, and fully six miles back from the fertile strip on which their people lived. I can imagine no place more dreary. At this point the Nile is walled on the west by limestone mountains. As far as the moisture reaches, the valley is the greenest of green, but beyond lies a desert as brown as any part of the Sahara. There is not a blade of grass, nor a sprig of vegetation of any kind. There is nothing but sand and arid mountains, the latter almost as ragged in outline as the wildest parts of the Rockies. Some of their stony sides are built up in great precipices while in other places there are fort-like bluffs and similar convulsions of nature.

To visit this valley one first comes to Luxor, which is very nearly on the site of Old Thebes, the capital of Egypt in the days of its most brilliant past. The ancient city lay on both sides of the Nile, but Luxor is on the east bank. Crossing the river in a ferry boat, I rode for an hour or more through the desert before I came into the Valley of the Kings. My donkey boy was a good one and his donkeys were young. His name was Joseph, and the brute I bestrode was called “Gingerbread.”

We traversed green fields, winding in and out along the canals, until we came to the desert and entered a gorge walled with rocks of yellow limestone and a conglomerate mixture of flint and limestone of curious formation. The gorge shows evidences of having been cut out by some mighty stream of the past. There are masses of débris along the sides, and the way is rough except on the road which has been made by the explorers.

Looking at the valley from the Nile one would not suppose it to be anything other than a desert ravine, so I did not at first realize that it was a cemetery. There are neither gravestones nor monuments, for the kings obliterated every sign that might indicate their burial places. They dug out great chambers under the bed of this dried-up river and built cisterns for their proper drainage, but when they had finished they did all they could to make the spot look as it was in nature. For this reason their tombs remained for ages untouched and unknown.

From time to time, however, one or another was discovered. Strabo, the Greek geographer, who was alive when Christ was born, speaks of forty of them as being worthy of a visit, and others are mentioned by subsequent writers. Later they were again lost, and not until in our generation when some Arabs began to sell curious antiquities was it learned that the tombs had been rediscovered and were being rifled by these vandals. The archæologists then went to work on their explorations which resulted in the opening up of tomb after tomb, until we now have what might almost be called a subterranean city of the dead in the heart of the desert.

The tombs are nothing like our burial vaults. They are large rooms cut out of the solid rock, with walls straight and smooth. They are reached by many steps, going down inclined planes until they bring one far below the surface of the valley and deep under the mountains. Each king had his own tomb, which he decorated with sketches and paintings representing the life of his time and the achievements of his reign. The ceilings are beautiful. From some of them the figures of gods and goddesses look down upon us. Others are decorated with geometric designs in beautiful colours. In some, men and women are carved in bas-relief out of the solid rock and then coloured. Many of the scenes are religious, so that from them the Egyptologist is able to learn what the people of that day believed. The carvings show, too, how they lived when our remotest ancestors were savages in the wilds of Europe and Asia.

The Americans have had remarkably good luck in their finds. One of them was the tomb of the parents of Queen Tiy in which all the objects were in as good condition as if they had been in a house just closed for the summer. There were armchairs beautifully carved and decorated with gold. The cushion on one of them was stuffed with down and covered with linen perfectly preserved. In another part of the chamber were two beds decorated with gold, while a light chariot stood in a corner. But most wonderful of all was the discovery in this tomb of a jar of honey, still liquid and still fragrant after thirty-three hundred years.

In some of the tombs I saw the massive stone boxes in which lay the mummies of the dead kings. I measured one ten feet long, six feet wide, and eight feet high. It was hollowed out of a block of granite, and would weigh many tons. That mighty burial casket was cut out of the quarries of Aswan far above here, on the banks of the Nile. It must have been brought down the river on a barge and carried to this place. When it was finally on the ground it had to be lowered into the vault. All these feats were done without modern machinery. As I went through the tombs I saw several such caskets, and the archæologist who guided me showed me the holes in the stone walls of the entrance ways where beams had been put across in order that ropes might be used to prevent these stone masses from sliding too far when let down. It is a difficult job for us to handle safes. One of these stone boxes would weigh as much as several safes, yet the old Egyptians moved them about as they pleased.

Indeed, I venture to say that the civil engineers of the Pharaohs could teach us much. All through this region there are enormous monuments which it would puzzle the engineers of to-day to handle. For instance, there are the Colossi of Memnon, the two mammoth stone statues that sit upon pedestals in the Nile valley within a few miles of where I am writing. Each is as high as a six-story building, and the stone pedestals rise thirteen feet above the ground. As I rode by them on my way home from the Valley of the Kings I climbed up and ran a tape measure over their legs. Each leg is nineteen feet from sole to knee. The feet are each over three yards in length, so long that one would fill the box of a farm wagon from end to end, and so wide that it could hardly be fitted within it. Each arm from finger tips to elbow measures five yards, and the middle finger of each hand is a yard and a half long. As I stood beside the pedestal, with my feet on Gingerbread’s saddle, I could not reach the top.

These two colossal figures sit side by side on the edge of the Nile valley with the desert mountains at their backs. They were set up in honour of an Egyptian king who lived more than thirty-five centuries ago. The temple he constructed behind them has now entirely disappeared. The statues overlook green fields, and as I gazed at the giant shapes I thought how they had watched the people sowing and reaping through all these centuries.

Not far from these monuments are the ruins of the temple of Rameses II, according to some authorities the Pharaoh who “would not let the people go.” Among them I saw the remains of a statue of that old king, once part of a structure at least sixty feet high. There is no granite nearer here than in the quarries of Aswan, so this mighty monument must have been cut there and brought down the Nile to Thebes, a distance of one hundred and thirty-five miles.

Consider the obelisks which the Egyptians made at those quarries and carried down the Nile to Thebes, to Cairo, and to Alexandria. There are two of them still at this place. You may see them in the great Temple of Karnak, which is not more than a twenty-minute walk from Luxor. They weigh something like four hundred tons each, and if they were broken up and loaded upon wagons it would take one thousand six hundred horses to haul them. Each is a single block of granite, and each was carried in that shape to this place. There are inscriptions on the Deir-el-Bahari Temple here which show that these two shafts were dug out of the quarries, covered with hieroglyphic carvings, brought here, and put up all in the space of seven months. I doubt whether our engineers could do such a job as quickly or as well.

We thought it a wonderful work to bring the Alexandria obelisk from Egypt to New York in the hold of a steamer. To load it a hole had to be cut in the bow of the vessel and the pillar dragged through. The Egyptian obelisk at Paris was carried across the Mediterranean on a barge, while that which now stands in London was taken there in an iron watertight cylinder which was shipped to Alexandria in pieces and built around the column as it lay upon the shore. When the great stone was thoroughly encased, the whole was rolled into the sea and thus towed to London. After the huge monoliths were landed, the modern engineers had great trouble to get them where they wanted them. The New York obelisk was rolled along upon iron balls running in iron grooves laid down for the purpose, while that of London was hauled over greased ways to the place where it now stands on the banks of the Thames.

The oldest temple of Egypt by five hundred years was unearthed here by the agents of the Egyptian Exploration Fund. This lies near the famous temple of Deir-el-Bahari, and in a valley which is a branch of that of the tombs of the kings. When I visited it to-day the excavators were at work, and the men in charge told me they had great hopes of making valuable discoveries. It was with the American representative of the Exploration Fund, that I went over the temple. I met him at the little one-story house which forms the laboratory and home of the foreign explorers, and had a chat with the other members as to the progress of the work. A number of specialists from Canada, England, and the United States, supported by the fund, are superintending the Egyptians, who do the hard labour. They have quite an army of men at work and have been successful. Of what they find one half goes to the museum at Cairo and the rest to the countries which subscribe to the fund in proportion to the amount of their subscriptions. The chief money from America has come from Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Washington, so that our share of what is now being unearthed will go to the museums of those cities.

More famous than this ancient temple itself is its shrine of the cow goddess, Hathor, from which the noted statue was excavated by the Egyptian Exploration Fund and taken to Cairo. I saw the place whence it came and talked to the men who dug it out of the earth. The statue, which is life-sized, is a perfect likeness of a beautiful cow carved out of stone. It is reddish-brown in colour, with spots shaped like a four-leaved clover. Traces still remain of the gold that once covered the head, neck, and horns. The head is crowned with lotus flowers and lotus stalks hang down each side the neck almost to the ground. Beneath the head stands the dead king whom Hathor protects, while the living king, whom she nourishes, kneels beneath her form. That image was probably worshipped at the time the Israelites were working in the valley of the Nile, and it may have been after one like her that they modelled their calf of gold.

Near the site of this oldest temple are the ruins of the great temple of Hatshepsut, the Queen Elizabeth of Egypt, who ruled fifteen hundred years before Christ was born. Her epitaph says that “Egypt was made to labour with bowed head for her.” The temple is really a tomb-chapel in memory of the royalties buried there—her father, her two brothers, and herself. Hatshepsut took most of the space, however, and put the bodies of her male relatives into as small quarters as she could. She called her temple “most splendid of all” and covered its walls with engravings and paintings showing her principal acts. Hers is a long record of kingly deeds. She discarded the dress of a woman, wore the crown, attached an artificial beard to her chin, and let it be known that she liked to be addressed as His Majesty by her courtiers and subjects. The New Woman is apparently as old as civilization itself!

It was the work of Americans, again, that unearthed here the tomb of the first great pacifist, Pharaoh Akhnaton, who reigned from 1375 to 1358 B.C. When he came to the throne Egypt, in the height of her power, was mistress of the chief parts of the civilized world. But the country was then ridden by the priesthood of Amon with its hosts of gods and its degraded worship. According to the inscriptions which have been deciphered young Akhnaton defied the priests of Amon and declared his belief in one God, a “tender and merciful Father and Mother of all that He had made,” the “Lord of Love,” the “Comforter of them that weep.” It is thought that he was the Pharaoh in Egypt when the Children of Israel came into the land and that the One Hundred and Fourth Psalm in our Bible was written by him. He did not believe that warfare or military conquests were consistent with his creed and when revolts broke out in his Syrian provinces he refused to fight, though his soldiers tried desperately hard to hold the different people of his empire faithful to their king.

Breaking entirely with the priests, Akhnaton left Thebes and set up his capital at Aton, one hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile. He died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving only daughters to succeed him. They reëstablished the court at Thebes, the city of Aton was abandoned, and its temples and palaces were left to crumble and decay.

I had thought of the Pharaoh who forced the Israelites to make bricks without straw as living at Memphis, near where Cairo now stands. The truth is, he had a great city there, but his capital and favourite home was at Thebes, over four hundred and fifty miles farther up the Nile valley. Thebes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity. It covered almost as much ground as Paris does now and is said to have had more than a million people. The metropolis had walls so thick that chariots drawn by half-a-dozen horses abreast could easily pass as they galloped along them. It had one hundred gates, and temples and residences which were the wonder of the world. Some of the houses were five stories high, the skyscrapers of those days. The riches of Thebes were increased by the successful wars which the kings waged with other nations. The monarchs of that day had mighty armies of infantry and cavalry. Some of the kings had twenty thousand war chariots, and ancient writers say that there were scattered along the Nile from here to Memphis one hundred stone stables, each large enough to accommodate two hundred horses.

It brings one close to the days of the Scriptures when he can put his hand on the very same things that were touched by old Pharaoh; and can visit the temples in which he worshipped, or sit on the monuments erected in his honour, and look at the tomb in which his royal bones were laid away. One feels closer still when he can look at the royal mummy itself and actually see the hardhearted old heathen almost as he was when alive, as I did at the museum the other day.

This Pharaoh, Rameses II, was one of the greatest kings of ancient Egypt. His temples are scattered throughout the Nile valley and his statues are the largest ever discovered. One was found in the Nile delta which measures forty-two feet in height, and there are others sixty-six feet high at Abu Simbel in Nubia, about as far up the Nile as Chicago is distant from the mouth of the Hudson. They are seated on thrones and are hewn from the solid rocks. These figures stand in front of the temple, also cut out of rock. This building is said to have been erected by him in honour of his favourite wife, Nefertari, and there are statues of his children about it. These show that he was very much of a family man, for inscriptions on the various monuments mention one hundred and sixty-two of his children by name.