File:Photographic views of Egypt, past and present (1856) (14596901827).jpg

Identifier: photographicview01thom (find matches)
Title: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present
Year: 1856 (1850s)
Authors: Thompson, Joseph Parrish, 1819-1879. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, J. P. Jewett and company Cleveland, Ohio, Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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ofThebes. They are not ruins, but remains; for although oneof them — that renowned in history as the vocal Memnon — was marred more than two thousand three hundred yearsago, by the renowned Cambyses, yet it was afterwardsrestored, and it exhibits few marks either of the violenceof man, or of the ravages of time. Just where Amunophplaced them in the line of the majestic dromos, from hiseastern to his western palace temple, within seventy yearsafter the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, they nowstand; just as he had them chiselled, with the exceptionof the repairs upon the vocal statue, they now look forthover the plain with that contemplative majesty which theold kings of Egypt chose as the type of their power. And do not these monarchs of stone still assert thedominion of the eighteenth dynasty of Thebes over thisplain? Who rules here now, but the spirit that investsthem with the contemplative majesty of that old dynasty ?Not these puny, half clad Arabs, who by day scour the
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.MEMNON STILL SOUNDS. 153 plain begging a few pence of tlie Hawagee, or offering tlaemfragments of mummies and antiques, and by night hidethemselves in the arches of falling temples, and the brokentombs of kings. Not their present master, the redoubtableAbbas Pasha, as distinguished in vice as his grandfatherMohammed Ali was in policy and in arms, whose relentlessconscription for his hybrid army now drives the peasantryfrom the plain to the mountains. Not the far off Sultan,whose tottering throne is braced by the bayonets of Englandand France, against the colossus of the North. No, noneof all these. The spirit that here rules is still the spiritof the old dynasty, symbolized by these colossi enthroned insolitary grandeur in the centre of the plain. It was meetthat these should stand, and stand alone; — that while alltheir fellows are prostrate and buried in the sand drifts, orin the mud of the Nile, and the temple that they guardedis a shapeless mound, they should stand amid the rip

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