File:Photographic views of Egypt, past and present (1856) (14596889927).jpg

Identifier: photographicview01thom (find matches)
Title: Photographic views of Egypt, past and present
Year: 1856 (1850s)
Authors: Thompson, Joseph Parrish, 1819-1879. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, J. P. Jewett and company Cleveland, Ohio, Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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hecustom here is to bury on the day of death; no coffin isused, but a grave is dug and the body, wrapped only in acloth, is put into it; the grave is then covered with anarched stone laid in cement. The graveyard presents thesingular appearance of a field of low stone mounds. The second procession consisted only of about twentypersons, in the centre of whom was a man who carried inhis arms a dead child wrapped in a shawl, of which it wouldbe divested at the grave, leaving only a light covering ofcloth. From Pompeys Pillar to Cleopatra^s Needles is a distanceof more than a mile through the city in a north-easterlydirection. These obelisks have no more relation to Cleopa-tra than the pillar has to Pompey. Their hieroglyphicsdate as far back as the Exodus,* and they were brought toAlexandria from the city of Heliopolis or On, about ahundred miles to the south. Each pillar is a single blockof red granite, about seventy feet high and nearly eight feet * Thothmes III. Wilkinson and Lepsius.
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ALEXANDRIA, ANCIENT AND MODERN. 9 in diameter at the base. How such huge blocks were cutfrom the quarry, transported hundreds of miles, and erectedupon their pedestals, is a mystery not solved by any thingyet discovered of ancient mechanic arts. But one of theobehsks is standing. The other was taken down to betransported to England, but now lies half buried in the mudand sand. On one side of the standing obelisk the hieroglyph-ics are distinctly legible, but on the northern or seawardside they are much defaced by the action of the weather.It stands upon the edge of the Great Harbor, in a line withthe rock of Pharos that forms the extreme northern pointof the horseshoe port. Besides the Pillar and the Needles nothing remains totestify the former splendor of Alexandria; — a capital thatonce vied with Rome, containing a population equal to thatof New York, (three hundred thousand freemen and asmany slaves,) and that so late as the seventh century, accord-ing to the testimony of Amrou,

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