DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14564#0063
THEBES.
47
the changes of the times between and by the new life of
to-day.
Not one of the many temples of Thebes has wholly
disappeared; some are almost complete; many of the
royal and private tombs were, until the tourist came,
fresh with colours as of yesterday. Thebes yet stands,
in spite of the centuries of trouble that presaged the
Assyrian conquest, the ruthless sack by Assur-ban-habal,
true grandson of Sennacherib, the raging wantonness of
mad Cambyses, the iconoclastic zeal of the early Church,
the barbarism of the stupid, utilitarian Turk. The beauty
of the ancient city has even survived a worse enemy
than all these, the selfish and vain modern tourist, who
destroys a document of the world's history, or a record
of antique belief, to carry away a few hieroglyphics he
cannot understand, and, like a noxious reptile, marks his
trail with the vulgar scrawl of his unknown name, while
his asses are stalled in a royal tomb near by. One could
fill pages with the story of this worst plague, telling how
one tourist ordered her dragoman to cut out Joseph's
head, as she thought it, from the only picture of the
arrival of a Shemite family in Egypt; how others broke
in by night and demolished a sculptured wall, to steal
47
the changes of the times between and by the new life of
to-day.
Not one of the many temples of Thebes has wholly
disappeared; some are almost complete; many of the
royal and private tombs were, until the tourist came,
fresh with colours as of yesterday. Thebes yet stands,
in spite of the centuries of trouble that presaged the
Assyrian conquest, the ruthless sack by Assur-ban-habal,
true grandson of Sennacherib, the raging wantonness of
mad Cambyses, the iconoclastic zeal of the early Church,
the barbarism of the stupid, utilitarian Turk. The beauty
of the ancient city has even survived a worse enemy
than all these, the selfish and vain modern tourist, who
destroys a document of the world's history, or a record
of antique belief, to carry away a few hieroglyphics he
cannot understand, and, like a noxious reptile, marks his
trail with the vulgar scrawl of his unknown name, while
his asses are stalled in a royal tomb near by. One could
fill pages with the story of this worst plague, telling how
one tourist ordered her dragoman to cut out Joseph's
head, as she thought it, from the only picture of the
arrival of a Shemite family in Egypt; how others broke
in by night and demolished a sculptured wall, to steal