In
Religion, In Art, In Beauty Under All Its Aspects, They Were As Much
Our Ancestors As Were The Aryans.
Later again, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, in one
of the apogees of the town which,
In the course of its interminable
duration, experienced so many fluctuations, some ostentatious kings
thought fit to build on this ground, already covered with temples,
that which still remains the most arresting marvel of the ruins: the
hypostyle hall, dedicated to the God Amen, with its forest of columns,
as monstrous as the trunk of the baobab and as high as towers,
compared with which the pillars of our cathedrals are utterly
insignificant. In those days the same gods reigned at Thebes as three
thousand years before, but in the interval they had been transformed
little by little in accordance with the progressive development of
human thought, and Amen, the host of this prodigious hall, asserted
himself more and more as the sovereign master of life and eternity.
Pharaonic Egypt was really tending, in spite of some revolts, towards
the notion of a divine unity; even, one might say, to the notion of a
supreme pity, for she already had her Apis, emanating from the All-
Powerful, born of a virgin mother, and come humbly to the earth in
order to make acquaintance with suffering.
After Seti I. and the Ramses had built, in honour of Amen, this
temple, which, beyond all doubt, is the grandest and most durable in
the world, men still continued for another fifteen centuries to heap
up in its neighbourhood those blocks of granite and marble and
sandstone, whose enormity now amazes us.
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