 this solitary obelisk, those giant heads rising in ghastly resurrection before the gates of the Temple, were magnificent still. But it was as the magnificence of a splendid prologue to a poem of which only garbled fragments remain. Beyond that entrance lay a smoky, filthy, intricate labyrinth of lanes and passages. Mud hovels, mud pigeon-towers, mud yards, and a mud mosque, clustered like wasps' nests in and about the ruins. Architraves sculptured with royal titles supported the roofs of squalid cabins. Stately capitals peeped out from the midst of sheds in which buffaloes, camels, donkeys, dogs, and human beings were seen herding together in unsavoury fellowship. Cocks crew, hens cackled, pigeons cooed, turkeys gobbled, children swarmed, women were baking and gossiping, and all the sordid routine of Arab life was going on, amid winding alleys that masked the colonnades and defaced the inscriptions of the Pharaohs. To trace the plan of this part of the building was then impossible.
All communication being cut off between the courts and the portico, we had to go round outside and through a door at the farther end of the Temple, in order to reach the sanctuary and the adjoining chambers. The Arab who kept the key provided an inch or two of candle. For it was very dark in there ; the roof being still perfect, with a large, rambling, modern house built on top of it – so that if this part of the Temple was ever partially lighted, as at Denderah and elsewhere, by small wedge-like openings in the roof, even those faint gleams were excluded.
The sanctuary, which was rebuilt in the reign of Alexander Ægus ; some small side chambers ; and a large hall, which was perhaps the hall of assembly, were all that remained under cover of the original roofing-stones. Some half-buried and broken columns on the side next the river showed, however, that this end was formerly surrounded by a colonnade. The sanctuary – an oblong granite chamber with its own separate roof – stands enclosed in a larger hall, like a box within a box, and is covered inside and outside with bas-reliefs. These sculptures (among which I observed a kneeling figure of the king, offering a kneeling image to Amen Ra) are executed in the mediocre style of the Ptolemies. That is to say, the forms are more natural but less refined than those of the Pharaonic period. The limbs are fleshy, the joints large, the features insignificant. Of actual portraiture one cannot detect a trace ; while every face wears the same objectionable smirk which disfigures the Cleopatra of Denderah.
In the large hall, which I have called the Hall of Assembly, one is carried back to the time of the founder. Between Amenhotep III and Alexander Ægus there lies a great gulf of 1200 years ; and their styles are as widely separated as their reigns. The merest novice could not possibly mistake the one for the other. Nothing is, of course, more common than to find Egyptian and Græco-Egyptian work side by side in the same temple ; but nowhere are the distinctive characteristics of each brought into stronger contrast than in these dark chambers of Luxor. In the sculptures that line the hall of Amenhotep we find the pure lines, the severe and slender forms, the characteristic heads, of a period when the art, having as yet neither gained nor lost by foreign influences, was entirely Egyptian. The subjects relate chiefly to the infancy of the King ; but it is difficult to see anything properly by the light of a candle tied to the end of a stick ; and here, where the bas-relief is so low and the walls are so high, it is almost impossible to distinguish the details of the upper tableaux.
I could make out, however, that Amen, Maut, and their son Khonsu, the three personages of the Theban triad, are the presiding deities of these scenes ; and that they are in some way identified with the fortunes of Thothmes IV, his queen, and their son, Amenhotep III. Amenhotep is born, apparently, under the especial protection of Maut, the Divine Mother ; brought up with the youthful god Khonsu ; and received by Amen as the brothe