The Palace and Park: Its Natural History, and Its Portrait Gallery, Together with a Description of the Pompeian CourtLatham, R. G. (Robert Gordon)
History
The Palace and Park: Its Natural History, and Its Portrait Gallery, Together with a Description of the Pompeian Court
Latham, R. G. (Robert Gordon)
Crystal Palace (Sydenham, London, England)
The originals, which had, as may be supposed, suffered considerably from
the effects of time, were restored by Thorwaldsen, the Dane, whose
conscientious spirit and thorough appreciation of the antique give
assurance of the correctness of the interesting examples now before us.
THE LECTURE ROOM.
Through the doorway which is in the corner to the right of the first set
of Ægina marbles, is fitted up a spacious Lecture Room, with every
accommodation for Dissolving Views and other illustrations. It comprises
the whole of the “Queen’s Corridor,” so called from the private
apartments of Her Majesty, which are to the left.
Continuing onwards, we obtain a fine view of the North Transept, with
its noble avenue of sphinxes and palm-trees, terminating with
THE COLOSSAL EGYPTIAN FIGURES,
which are from the temple of Rameses the Great at Aboo Simbel, in Nubia.
These immense seated statues towering to the roof of the Transept afford
us some adequate idea of the stupendous magnitude and passive grandeur
which characterise the monuments of ancient Egyptian art. Their height
is sixty-five feet.
It may be remembered that in the Egyptian Court we directed the
attention of the visitor to a model of the temple at Aboo Simbel; on the
façade of which were four statues of Rameses the Great. Two of these
statues are here reproduced on the scale of the originals, the smaller
figures around them representing the mother, wife, and daughter of the
king.
The temple of Aboo Simbel, in Nubia, is excavated from the rock, and was
first discovered by Burckhardt, the traveller; the accumulated sand of
centuries, which then covered it, was removed by order of Belzoni, the
first, with Captains Irby and Mangles, to pass its long-closed entrance.
The interior was covered with paintings and hieroglyphics relating to
Rameses the Great, and the date of the temple has been consequently
placed at about 1560 B.C.
The sphinxes which formed the avenue are cast from one preserved in the
Louvre, the writing engraved on which presents us with a curious but not
uncommon instance of a custom that prevailed amongst the Egyptian
monarchs, and to which we referred when describing the Egyptian Court.
On one side of the shoulder the name “Pthalomen Miotph” is written in
hieroglyphics, and on the other shoulder is the name of Shishak I. The
last-named lived about 1000 B.C., and the first nearly two hundred years
before him. Other instances occur where the name of the original founder
has been erased altogether, in order to make way for the name of some
comparatively modern king.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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