Uarda : a Romance of Ancient Egypt — Complete by Georg Ebers (find a book to read txt) 📕

Pentaur became his most trusted adviser, and responsible for the weightiest affairs in the state.

Rameses learned from the papers found in Ani’s tent, and from other evidence which was only too abundant, that the superior of the House of Seti, and with him the greater part of the priesthood, had for a long time been making common cause with the traitor; in the first instance he determined on the severest, nay bloodiest punishment, but he was persuaded by Pentaur and by his son Chamus to assert and support the principles of his government by milder and yet thorough measures. Rameses desired to be a defender of religion—of the religion which could carry consolation into the life of the lowly and over-burdened, and give their existence a higher and fuller meaning—the religion which to him, as king, appeared the indispensable means of keeping the grand significance of human life ever present to his mind—sacred as the inheritance of his fathers, and useful as the school where the people, who needed leading, might learn to follow and obey.

But nevertheless no one, not even the priests, the guardians of souls, could be permitted to resist the laws of which he was the bulwark, to which he himself was subject, and which enjoined obedience to his authority; and before he left Tanis he had given Ameni and his followers to understand that he alone was master in Egypt.

The God Seth, who had been honored by the Semite races since the time of the Hyksos, and whom they called upon under the name of Baal, had from the earliest times never been allowed a temple on the Nile, as being the God of the stranger; but Rameses—in spite of the bold remonstrances of the priestly party who called themselves the ‘true believers’—raised a magnificent temple to this God in the city of Tanis to supply the religious needs of the immigrant foreigners. In the same spirit of toleration he would not allow the worship of strange Gods to be interfered with, though on the other hand he was jealous in honoring the Egyptian Gods with unexampled liberality. He caused temples to be erected in most of the great cities of the kingdom, he added to the temple of Ptah at Memphis, and erected immense colossi in front of its pylons in memory of his deliverance from the fire.

[One of these is still in existence. It lies on the ground among the ruins of ancient Memphis.]

In the Necropolis of Thebes he had a splendid edifice constructed-which to this day delights the beholder by the symmetry of its proportions in memory of the hour when he escaped death as by a miracle; on its pylon he caused the battle of Kadesh to be represented in beautiful pictures in relief, and there, as well as on the architrave of the great banqueting—hall, he had the history inscribed of the danger he had run when he stood “alone and no man with him!”

By his order Pentaur rewrote the song he had sung at Pelusium; it is preserved in three temples, and, in fragments, on several papyrus-rolls which can be made to complete each other. It was destined to become the national epic—the Iliad of Egypt.

Pentaur was commissioned to transfer the school of the House of Seti to the new votive temple, which was called the House of Rameses, and arrange it on a different plan, for the Pharaoh felt that it was requisite to form a new order of priests, and to accustom the ministers of the Gods to subordinate their own designs to the laws of the country, and to the decrees of their guardian and ruler, the king. Pentaur was made the superior of the new college, and its library, which was called “the hospital for the soul,” was without an equal; in this academy, which was the prototype of the later-formed museum and library of Alexandria, sages and poets grew up whose works endured for thousands of years—and fragments of their writings have even come down to us. The most famous are the hymns of Anana, Pentaur’s favorite disciple, and the tale of the two Brothers, composed by Gagabu, the grandson of the old Prophet.

Ameni did not remain in Thebes. Rameses had been informed of the way in which he had turned the death of the ram to account, and the use he had made of the heart, as he had supposed it, of the sacred animal, and he translated him without depriving him of his dignity or revenues to Mendes, the city of the holy rams in the Delta, where, as he observed not without satirical meaning, he would be particularly intimate with these sacred beasts; in Mendes Ameni exerted great influence, and in spite of many differences of opinion which threatened to sever them, he and Pentaur remained fast friends to the day of his death.

In the first court of the House of Rameses there stands—now broken across the middle—the wonder of the traveller, the grandest colossus in Egypt, made of the hardest granite, and exceeding even the well-known statue of Memnon in the extent of its base. It represents Rameses the Great. Little Scherau, whom Pentaur had educated to be a sculptor, executed it, as well as many other statues of the great sovereign of Egypt.

A year after the burning of the pavilion at Pelusium Rameri sailed to the land of the Danaids, was married to Uarda, and then remained in his wife’s native country, where, after the death of her grandfather, he ruled over many islands of the Mediterranean and became the founder of a great and famous race. Uarda’s name was long held in tender remembrance by their subjects, for having grown up in misery she understood the secret of alleviating sorrow and relieving want, and of doing good and giving happiness without humiliating those she benefitted. THE END.

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