A Trip Abroad: An Account of a Journey to the Earthly Canaan and the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs; To Which Are Appended a Brief Consideration of the Geography and History of Palestine, and a Chapter on Churches of Christ in Great BritainJanes, Don Carlos
Religion
A Trip Abroad: An Account of a Journey to the Earthly Canaan and the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs; To Which Are Appended a Brief Consideration of the Geography and History of Palestine, and a Chapter on Churches of Christ in Great Britain
Janes, Don Carlos
Churches of Christ -- Great Britain; Palestine -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
On the thirtieth of the month I visited the Museum, which has been
moved to the city and installed in its own commodious and substantial
building. This vast collection of relics of this wonderful old country
affords great opportunities for study. I spent a good deal of time there
seeing the coffins of wood, white limestone, red granite, and alabaster;
sacrificial tables, mummies, ancient paintings, weights and measures,
bronze lamps, necklaces, stone and alabaster jars, bronze hinges,
articles of pottery, and many other things. It is remarkable how some
of the embalmed bodies, thousands of years old, are preserved. I looked
down upon the Pharaoh who is supposed to have oppressed Israel. The body
is well preserved, but it brought thoughts to me of the smallness of the
fleshly side of man. He who once ruled in royal splendor now lies there
in very humble silence. In some cases the cloths wrapped around these
mummies are preserved almost perfectly, and I remember a gilt mask that
was so bright that one might have taken it for a modern product. After
the body was securely wrapped, a picture was sometimes painted over the
face, and now, after the lapse of centuries, some of these are very
clear and distinct. I saw a collection of scarabaei, or beetles, which
were anciently worshiped in this country. Dealers offer figures of this
kind for sale, but the most of them are probably manufactured for the
tourist trade.
On Lord's day, October thirtieth, I attended the evening services at the
American Mission, and went to Bedrashen the following day. This is the
nearest railway station to Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt, now an
irregular pile of ruined mud bricks. I secured a donkey, and a boy to
care for it and tell me where to go. We soon passed the dilapidated
ruins of the old capital. Two prostrate statues of great size were seen
on the way to the Step Pyramid of Sakkara, which is peculiar in that it
is built with great offsets or steps, still plainly visible, although
large quantities of the rock have crumbled and fallen down. The
Department of Antiquities has posted a notice in French, Arabic and
English, to the effect that it is dangerous to make the ascent, and that
the government will not be responsible for accidents to tourists who
undertake it. I soon reached the top without any special difficulty,
and with no more danger, so far as I could see, than one experiences
in climbing a steep hill strewn with rocks. I entered another pyramid,
which has a stone in one side of it twenty-five feet long and about five
and a half feet high. Some more tombs were visited, and the delicate
carving on the inner walls was observed. In one instance a harvest scene
was represented, in another the fish in a net could be discerned. The
Serapeum is an underground burial place for the sacred bull, discovered
by Mariette in 1850, after having been buried since about 1400 B.C. In
those times the bull was an object of worship in Egypt, and when one
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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