Gaston Maspero
1875 and 1894
|
NOTE |
GASTON MASPERO (1846-1916) was an eminent French Egyptologist who conducted excavation work on the Sphinx, headed the Egyptian Museum, and instituted the first admission charge to visit the Giza monuments. He also followed his colleague and mentor Auguste Mariette in wrongly believing that the Inventory Stela was a genuine Fourth Dynasty text recording the excavation of the Sphinx by Khufu, implying a predynastic Sphinx. His views on the matter, recorded in books such as the two excerpted below, were influential among French writers who followed him, especially occult writers. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz read Dawn of Civilization and was influenced by it to ascribe the Sphinx to predynastic times. His book, Sacred Science (1958/1961), was in turn the direct source for fringe thinkers like John Anthony West, Robert Schoch, and Graham Hancock, who unknowingly follow this French scholar in his error.
|
The Ancient History of the Peoples of the East
1875 / Translated by Jason Colavito
pp. 18-19
... The Nile valley, on the arrival of the Hamitic settlers, as we have already said, presented a very different aspect from the richness and prosperity than the work of man knew how to bestow upon it. “The river, left to its own devices, was constantly changing its bed. It never reached, in its inundations, certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; elsewhere, on the contrary, it flooded so persistently that it changed the soil into pestilential quagmires. The Delta, half-drowned by the waters of the river, half-lost under the waves of the Mediterranean, was an immense marsh, strewn with some sandy islands, covered with papyrus, lotus, and enormous reeds, through which the branches of the Nile lazily fought a course without ceasing to move. On both banks, the desert invaded all of the soil that was not covered every year by the flood: there was no transition from the disorderly vegetation of the tropical marshes to absolute aridity. Little by little the newcomers learned to regulate the course of the river, to contain it, through irrigation canals to carry fertility to the most remote corners of the valley. Egypt emerged from the waters and became in the hands of man one of the most suitable countries for the peaceful development of a great civilization.
The formative period of the soil and of the nation lasted for a long time, myriads of years according to what the ancients themselves said, and between three and four thousand years according to the most moderate calculations of most contemporary scholars. With the instinctive naiveté that leads people to seek perfection in the past, the Egyptians had come to regard the first centuries of their stay on the banks of the Nile as the happiest period of all the ages, and they saw their half-savage ancestors as pious men who were usually called the Shemsu-Hor (Servants of Horus). It is upon these generations without history that we visit the honor of having constituted Egypt, as we know it from the beginning of the historical period. At first divided into a great number of tribes, they began by establishing small independent states simultaneously in different places, each of which had its own laws and its own worship. In the course of time these states merged into one another: there remained only two great principalities, Lower Egypt (To-mera) or the northern country (To-meh‘), in the Delta, Upper Egypt or the southern country (To-res) from the point of Delta to the first cataract. Their meeting under the same scepter formed the patrimony of the Pharaohs, or countries of Kemi-t, but this did not obliterate the primitive division: the small states became provinces and were the origin of the administrative districts which the Greeks called nomes. […]
p. 61
About a league west of Memphis, the Libyan range forms a vast plateau running in the same direction as the Nile, over a length of several leagues. At the northern extremity, a king who remains unknown, but whom it may be necessary to refer to the times before Menes, had cut into the rock an enormous sphinx, symbol of Harmakhis, the rising sun. Later a temple of alabaster and of granite, the only specimen which we possessed of the monumental architecture of the Old Kingdom, was built some distance from the image of the god; other temples now destroyed rose up here and there and made the whole plateau like a vast sanctuary consecrated to the funereal deities. The inhabitants of Memphis came to deposit their dead, to shelter them from the inundation. The common people were buried in the sand at a depth of one meter, most often bare and without coffins. Others were buried in small rectangular rooms, mostly built of yellow bricks, all surmounted by a vaulted ceiling, usually ogival in shape. No ornament, no precious object accompanied the dead to the grave: vases of common pottery were placed beside the corpse and contained the provisions that were given to him for the journey of the other life.
... The Nile valley, on the arrival of the Hamitic settlers, as we have already said, presented a very different aspect from the richness and prosperity than the work of man knew how to bestow upon it. “The river, left to its own devices, was constantly changing its bed. It never reached, in its inundations, certain parts of the valley, which remained unproductive; elsewhere, on the contrary, it flooded so persistently that it changed the soil into pestilential quagmires. The Delta, half-drowned by the waters of the river, half-lost under the waves of the Mediterranean, was an immense marsh, strewn with some sandy islands, covered with papyrus, lotus, and enormous reeds, through which the branches of the Nile lazily fought a course without ceasing to move. On both banks, the desert invaded all of the soil that was not covered every year by the flood: there was no transition from the disorderly vegetation of the tropical marshes to absolute aridity. Little by little the newcomers learned to regulate the course of the river, to contain it, through irrigation canals to carry fertility to the most remote corners of the valley. Egypt emerged from the waters and became in the hands of man one of the most suitable countries for the peaceful development of a great civilization.
The formative period of the soil and of the nation lasted for a long time, myriads of years according to what the ancients themselves said, and between three and four thousand years according to the most moderate calculations of most contemporary scholars. With the instinctive naiveté that leads people to seek perfection in the past, the Egyptians had come to regard the first centuries of their stay on the banks of the Nile as the happiest period of all the ages, and they saw their half-savage ancestors as pious men who were usually called the Shemsu-Hor (Servants of Horus). It is upon these generations without history that we visit the honor of having constituted Egypt, as we know it from the beginning of the historical period. At first divided into a great number of tribes, they began by establishing small independent states simultaneously in different places, each of which had its own laws and its own worship. In the course of time these states merged into one another: there remained only two great principalities, Lower Egypt (To-mera) or the northern country (To-meh‘), in the Delta, Upper Egypt or the southern country (To-res) from the point of Delta to the first cataract. Their meeting under the same scepter formed the patrimony of the Pharaohs, or countries of Kemi-t, but this did not obliterate the primitive division: the small states became provinces and were the origin of the administrative districts which the Greeks called nomes. […]
p. 61
About a league west of Memphis, the Libyan range forms a vast plateau running in the same direction as the Nile, over a length of several leagues. At the northern extremity, a king who remains unknown, but whom it may be necessary to refer to the times before Menes, had cut into the rock an enormous sphinx, symbol of Harmakhis, the rising sun. Later a temple of alabaster and of granite, the only specimen which we possessed of the monumental architecture of the Old Kingdom, was built some distance from the image of the god; other temples now destroyed rose up here and there and made the whole plateau like a vast sanctuary consecrated to the funereal deities. The inhabitants of Memphis came to deposit their dead, to shelter them from the inundation. The common people were buried in the sand at a depth of one meter, most often bare and without coffins. Others were buried in small rectangular rooms, mostly built of yellow bricks, all surmounted by a vaulted ceiling, usually ogival in shape. No ornament, no precious object accompanied the dead to the grave: vases of common pottery were placed beside the corpse and contained the provisions that were given to him for the journey of the other life.
Dawn of Civilization
1894 / Translated by A. H. Sayce
Notes to page 366
Notes to page 366
1 The Stele of the Sphinx bears, on line 13, the cartouche of Chephren in the middle of a blank (VYSE-PERING, Appendix to Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Oizeh, vol. iii. pl. B, facing page 115; LEPSIUS, Denkm., iii. 63; YOUNG, Hieroglyphics, pi. Ixxx.). We have here, I believe, an indication of the clearing of the Sphinx effected under this prince, consequently an almost certain proof that the Sphinx was already buried in sand in the time of Kheops and his predecessors.
2 Mariette identifies the temple which he discovered to the south of the Sphinx with that of Osiris, lord of the Necropolis, which is mentioned in the inscription of the daughter of Kheops (Le Sérapéum de Memphis, MASPERO’s edition, vol. i. pp. 99, 100). This temple is so placed that it must have been sanded up at the same time as the Sphinx; I believe, therefore, that the restoration effected by Kheops, according to the inscription, was merely a clearing away of the sand from the Sphinx analogous to that accomplished by Khephren.
3 These sepulchral chambers, several illustrations of which are to be found in Mariette (Les Mastabas de I’Ancien Empire, p. 513, et seq.), are not decorated in the majority of instances. The careful scrutiny to which I subjected them in 1885-86 causes me to believe that many of them must be almost contemporaneous with the Sphinx; that is to say, that they had been hollowed out and occupied a considerable time before the period of the IVth dynasty.
2 Mariette identifies the temple which he discovered to the south of the Sphinx with that of Osiris, lord of the Necropolis, which is mentioned in the inscription of the daughter of Kheops (Le Sérapéum de Memphis, MASPERO’s edition, vol. i. pp. 99, 100). This temple is so placed that it must have been sanded up at the same time as the Sphinx; I believe, therefore, that the restoration effected by Kheops, according to the inscription, was merely a clearing away of the sand from the Sphinx analogous to that accomplished by Khephren.
3 These sepulchral chambers, several illustrations of which are to be found in Mariette (Les Mastabas de I’Ancien Empire, p. 513, et seq.), are not decorated in the majority of instances. The careful scrutiny to which I subjected them in 1885-86 causes me to believe that many of them must be almost contemporaneous with the Sphinx; that is to say, that they had been hollowed out and occupied a considerable time before the period of the IVth dynasty.
