The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1886-10-16
THE STORY OF AN ANCIENT
EGYPTIAN CITY.

EGYPTIAN CITY.
Upon some spot of rising ground above
the level Of the annual inundation few
mud huts cluster round rude sanctuary.
The hut jewellers multiply; the village
spreads; the sanctuary is enlarged or re-
built. AS time goes on, the village be-
comes town; the town becomes city;
and the temple, enriched by successive
generations of kings, governors and pious
donors, becomes vast historical aggre-
gate of chapels, halls, courts, avenues,
pylons, and sacred enclosures. By and
by, whether ravaged by foreign foes or
shattered by some convulsion Of nat
ure, the splendid structure falls into
partial ruin. Hereupon the degenerate
princes of later age, careless of the past,
and eager to raise some memorial of their
own uneventful rule, lay profane hands
upon the monuments of their great pred
ecessors, cut them up for building mate
rial and use them in the construction
of debased limitations of earlier schools.
This process, in all probability, is again
and again repeated. Not merely stones,
but statues, sphinxes, obelisks, are appro-
priated and re-appropriated, worked and
re-worked, till at last there comes time
of disruption and change, when the old
religion is abolished, and the images Of
the gods are cast down, and the very
language of the Inscriptions is forgotten.
After this, the sacred places become
quarries for the builders Of Coptic
churches, Arab mosques and the palaces
of Turkish governors. Meanwhile the
actual city, consisting Of labyrinthine
lanes of mud built dwellings, gradually
disappears. The spacious houses of the
rich, the novels Of the poor, crumble, col
lapse and resolve themselves into mounds
of dust and potsherds. Such is the local
history of hundreds of ancient Egyptian
sites, and such is the history of Tanis.
A hundred years ago the grave Of this
dead city was yet inviolate. Then, as
as now, the great sand island was heap
ed high with desolate piles of reddish
brown rubbish. Then, as now, those
mounds enclosed low, level area of
large extent like the bed of dry lake,
or the crater of an extinct volcano. The
traveller who-once, perchance, in dec
ade-scaled those crumbling slopes aud
looked down into that area, beheld at
his feet an undulating waste enclosed by
what at first sight looked like quad
rangular rampant of earthworks, but
which proved, on closer inspection, to be
the remains of an extraordinarily mas
sive wall built of sun dried bricks. The
space thus bounded was strewn with
ruins.
Such was the aspect of the place when
surveyed in 1898 by the engineers of
the great French expedition. Meanwhile
there was war in Egypt, in India, in
Europe, on land, on sea-universal war,
followed, in 1915, by universal peace.
The rich, the learned, the adventurous,
the speculative, were once more free to
travel, and the world was speedily over
run by tourists and traders. The plct-
ure market and the antiquity market,
both long dormant, started into new and
vigorous life. In Egypt the soil was
strewn with treasures which it was not
only profitable but prsisewortby to res
cue from the destructive propensities of
native fellaheen and Turkish pashas. A
host of depredators laid hands accord
ingly upon every movable object within
their reach, and the collections so amass-
ed were sold for enormous sums to
crowned heads and wealthy Uirtuosi,
Thus were founded the great Egyptian
galleries of our European museums
Amelia B. EdaUards, in Horper's Maya
zine for October.