her strength, and it was infinite; Put and Lubim were thy helpers. Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity; her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets; and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains."-Nahum iii. 8-10.

The following is the account of a recent traveller :"Forty miles above Dendera, stand, divided by the Nile, the mysteriously stupendous ruins of immortal Thebes,' of whose history the world knows (so little). Homer, 900 years before Christ, sings of the hundredgated Thebes. The prophets of Scripture, 300 years later, denounce vengeance on the multitude of populous No; to be 'rent asunder,' according to the word of the God of Israel; and fifty years had scarcely elapsed before the coming wrath denounced by Ezekiel was poured on the devoted city by the ruthless Persian, not found slack in the fulfilment of his unconscious commission to execute judgments upon No.' Cambyses thunders at the hundred gates of Thebes, and we find it as the frantic son of Cyrus left it, distressed, overthrown, desolate, and rent asunder. 'Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite; yet went she into captivity, and her children were dashed in pieces at the top of her streets !'

"The same inspired voice that tells the fate of NoAmon, warns the proudest capital upon earth with the words, Art thou better than she?' The prophet Nahum is supposed to have written nearly two centuries before Cambyses. . . The sea that he speaks of as her rampart, is of course the Nile, and the rivers the irrigating canals round about.

"On the eastern side of the river, which is here about three-quarters of a mile broad, stand Kurnou, the tombs of the kings, the Memnonium, and the temple of Medinet Aboo; westward, the Luxor, with the stupendous piles of Karnak... There is one sculptured scene in the great

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temple of Karnak, which excites a strong interest, from the supposition that it represents the defeat of Rehoboam by Shishak, B.C. 970. (2 Chron. xii.)

"The king Shishak is delineated as a gigantic figure, holding in his hand a bunch of several strings, by which he leads as many rows of captives to the throne of a seated god. The features of the prisoners are thought to be Jewish, and the interpreters are satisfied that they read king of Judah' in the cartouche of the principal captive, personifying the conquered nation, many of whom were probably brought to grace the triumph of the returning conqueror. They shall be his servants, that they may know my service, and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.' If this sculpture be contemporaneous with the event it commemorates, it must be about two thousand seven hundred years old.

"The general characteristic of all these sculptures is unmitigated ferocity. In the temple of Medinet Aboo, we see the conqueror seated in his chariot, looking complacently at an immense heap of human hands piled before him; the executioner, with a chopper under his arm, is just adding two more to the number. In another place, we find a priest at the head of a procession, just about to cut the throat of a poor boy on the altar of the gigantic idol, and an attendant is at the same moment letting loose a bird, the emblem of the departing spirit. The youngest and fairest captives of the bow and spear are supposed to have been thus immolated before the shrine of the bloody Moloch . . . The bull Apis makes a great figure, borne aloft upon men's shoulders, the original, perhaps, of the golden calf in Horeb.

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Pliny tells us that while Cambyses was looking unmoved at the flames which wrapped the city of Thebes, he was suddenly so struck with admiration of the great obelisk, that he ordered the conflagration to be extinguished in its neighbourhood. Some suppose that the Persian spared it, with its fellows, from religious reverence for the sun, to whose worship they were sacred."

"The walls of all the temples at Thebes are covered with sculptures and hieroglyphics, representing in gene ral the deeds of the kings who founded or enlarged those structures. Many of these afford happy illustrations of Egyptian history. To me, the most interesting was the scene which records the exploits of Sheshonk, the Shishak of the Scriptures, who made a successful expedition against Jerusalem in the fifth year of King Rehoboam, B. C. 971. These sculptures are on the exterior of the south-west wall of the great temple of Karnak. They represent a colossal figure of this monarch advancing, and holding in his hand ten cords, which are attached to as many rows of captives, one above another, behind him. These he presents to the deity of the temple.1

"The period in which Thebes enjoyed the greatest prosperity, was probably coeval with the reigns of David and Solomon, the earliest Jewish Kings. From the language of the prophet Nahum, who lived, according to Josephus, under King Jotham, about B.C. 750, and perhaps for some time later, we learn that the city had already in, or before, his day, been sacked, apparently by a foreign conqueror. This event may not improbably stand in connexion with the expedition of Tartan alluded to by the cotemporary prophet Isaiah (ch. xx.) Profane history is silent in respect to it, and speaks only of the capture of the city by Cambyses, B.C. 525, and of its final destruction by Ptolemy Lathyrus, after a siege of three years, B.C. 81. From this overthrow it never recovered; and in the time of Strabo, as at present, its site was occupied by several villages."— See ROBINSON'S Researches.

"It is impossible to wander among these scenes (the ruins of Thebes) and behold these hoary, yet magnificent ruins, without emotions of astonishment and deep solemnity. Everything around testifies of vastness, and of

1 To me most of them seemed to have Jewish features, with short, peaked beards.

utter desolation. Here lay once that mighty city, whose power and splendour were proverbial throughout the ancient world. The Jewish prophet, in reproaching great Nineveh, breaks forth into the bitter taunt: 'Art thou better than populous No (Thebes), that was situate among the rivers, the waters round about it, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall from the sea?' Yet even then Thebes had been carried away into captivity; her young children dashed in pieces at the top of all her streets; they had cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.' Subsequently she was again plundered by Cambyses, and destroyed by Ptolemy Lathyrus. Her countless generations have passed away, leaving their mighty works behind, to tell to wanderers from far distant and then unknown climes the story of her greatness and her fall. The desert hills around are filled with their corpses, for which they vainly strove to procure an exemption from the dread decree, Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' For twenty-five centuries they have indeed slept securely in their narrow abodes; from which they are now daily wrested, to be trampled into dust and scattered to the winds.

...

"The character of Egyptian architecture, as exhibited in the temple at Thebes and elsewhere, is heavy and vast yet this very vastness, coupled with the associations of the place, produces a strong impression of sublimity. All is gloomy, awful, grand. The most striking specimens. of this gigantic architecture, are the great colonnade at Luksor, which we first visited by moonlight; and especially the grand hall at Karnak, 170 feet by 329, supported by a central avenue of twelve massive columns, sixty-six feet high (without the pedestal and abacus) and twelve in diameter; besides 122 of smaller, or rather less gigantic dimensions . . . distributed in seven lines on either side of the former'

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"The two colossal statues of Amenoph (usually called of Memnon) seated majestically upon the plain, once

guarded the approach to the temple-palace of that king. They are sixty feet high, including the pedestal. The temple has perished; Memnon has long ceased to salute the rising sun and the two statues now sit in lonely grandeur, to tell what Thebes once was. The stupendous statue of Remeses II. a single block of Syenite

...

granite, now prostrate and shattered, still 'measures from the shoulder to the elbow twelve feet ten inches; twentytwo feet four inches across the shoulders; and fourteen feet four inches from the neck to the elbow.' How this enormous mass could ever have been transported from Upper Egypt and erected here, is a problem which modern science cannot solve; nor is there much less difficulty in accounting for the manner of its destruction.