Egypt -- Antiquities; Egypt -- Description and travel
The restored apricot-colored columns outside look unhappily suburban
when you are near them. The white columns with their architraves are
more pleasant to the eyes. The niches full of bright hues, the arched
chapels, the small, white steps leading upward to shallow sanctuaries,
the small black foxes facing each other on little yellow
pedestals--attract one like the details and amusing ornaments of a
clever woman’s boudoir. Through this most characteristic temple one
roves in a gaily attentive mood, feeling all the time Hatshepsu’s
fascination.
You may see her, if you will, a little lady on the wall, with a face
decidedly sensual--a long, straight nose, thick lips, an expression
rather determined than agreeable. Her mother looks as Semitic as a Jew
moneylender in Brick Lane, London. Her husband, Thothmes II, has a weak
and poor-spirited countenance. Decidedly an accomplished performer on
the second violin. The mother wears on her head a snake, no doubt a
cobra-di-capello, the symbol of her sovereignty. Thothmes is clad in a
loin-cloth. And a god, with a sleepy expression and a very fishlike
head, appears in this group of personages to offer the key of life.
Another painting of the queen shows her on her knees drinking milk from
the sacred cow, with an intent and greedy figure, and an extraordinarily
sensual and expressive face. That she was well guarded is surely proved
by a brave display of her soldiers--red men on a white wall. Full of
life and gaiety, all in a row they come, holding weapons, and,
apparently, branches, and advancing with a gait of triumph that tells of
“spacious days.” And at their head is an officer, who looks back, much
like a modern drill sergeant, to see how his men are marching.
In the southern shrine of the temple, cut in the rock as is the northern
shrine, once more I found traces of the “Lady of the Under-world.” For
this shrine was dedicated to Hathor, though the whole temple was sacred
to the Theban god Amun. Upon a column were the remains of the goddess’s
face, with a broad brow and long, large eyes. Some fanatic had hacked
away the mouth.
The tomb of Hatshepsu was found by Mr. Theodore M. Davis, and the famous
_Vache_ of Deir-el-Bahari by Monsieur Naville as lately as 1905. It
stands in the museum at Cairo, but forever it will be connected in the
minds of men with the tiger-colored precipices and the Colonnades of
Thebes. Behind the ruins of the temple of Mentu-Hotep III, in a chapel
of painted rock, the Vache-Hathor was found.
It is not easy to convey by any description the
[Illustration: THE VACHE HATHOR OF DENDERAH]
impression this marvelous statue makes. Many of us love our dogs, our
horses, some of us adore our cats; but which of us can think, without a
smile, of worshiping a cow? Yet the cow was the Egyptian Aphrodite’s
sacred animal. Under the form of a cow she was often represented. And in
the statue she is presented to us as a limestone cow. And positively
this cow is to be worshiped.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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