DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14564#0062
46
CITIES OF EGYPT.
CHAPTER IV.
THEBES.
No city of the old world can still show so much of her
former splendour as Egyptian Thebes. Her ancient
rival, Memphis, is marked alone by the vast necropolis,
Babylon by shapeless ruins, Nineveh by buried palaces.
Of imperial Rome not so much survives; luxurious
Baghdad has dwindled to a poverty-stricken provincial
town covering the niins of the palaces of the masters of
the East. Where are the sumptuous edifices of Constan-
tine in his seat of empire ? where the glittering domes of
Teemoor at Samarkand? Elsewhere the imagination
alone can revive the former glories of which the trace has
been swept away, or over which the monuments of later
time have cast new and transforming associations. At
Thebes alone can you live again in the midst of the
greatness of three thousand years ago, undisturbed by
CITIES OF EGYPT.
CHAPTER IV.
THEBES.
No city of the old world can still show so much of her
former splendour as Egyptian Thebes. Her ancient
rival, Memphis, is marked alone by the vast necropolis,
Babylon by shapeless ruins, Nineveh by buried palaces.
Of imperial Rome not so much survives; luxurious
Baghdad has dwindled to a poverty-stricken provincial
town covering the niins of the palaces of the masters of
the East. Where are the sumptuous edifices of Constan-
tine in his seat of empire ? where the glittering domes of
Teemoor at Samarkand? Elsewhere the imagination
alone can revive the former glories of which the trace has
been swept away, or over which the monuments of later
time have cast new and transforming associations. At
Thebes alone can you live again in the midst of the
greatness of three thousand years ago, undisturbed by