Thompson, Joseph P.: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present (Boston, 1854)

CHAPTER XXVI.

the tombs of thebes-manners and customs of the

ancient egyptians.

The tomb, in an American cemetery, is always unin-
viting ; — dark, damp, drear, an arched vault under ground;
or if above ground, overgrown with moss and trickling with
moisture — still sombre and drear. But the tombs of the
Egyptians were rather temples or palaces for the repose of
the dead — not dug under ground, but hewn from the solid
rock in mountains that have no surface of soil, but that
bleach evermore under an unclouded sun. These mountain
catacombs appear most striking in the neighborhood of
Thebes.

If the founders of Thebes showed their forecast in select-
ing for its site a plain to which the Nile brought its vast
tribute of alluvium from the mountains of Ethiopia, and its
still greater tribute of commercial wealth from the empires
of the south, and to which as a natural depot the caravans
from the Red Sea brought the treasures of Arabia, of Per-
sia, and of the Indies, they showed no less a sense of the
sublime and the beautiful in nature in choosing a plain,
embosomed within such mountains as on either hand pro-
tect this from the devouring desert. Mountains there are,
all along the valley of the Upper Nile. But nowhere do
they tower into peaks and break into spurs with minor val-
leys, as they do here. Still here, as throughout the valley,
the mountains are utterly bare of vegetation, and glare with
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