polished syenite, is about a third of that | Ramses the Great. The other two were of the obelisk of Luxor, which now adorns buried in the sixteenth and twenty-sixth the Place de la Concorde at Paris. years of Ramses respectively. Brugsch, who saw them soon after they were discovered, says that a couple of dozen men can stand and move freely in the cavity. An engraving of that which contained the mummy of the Apis which died in the fifty-first year of Ptolemy Euergetes II. (B.c. 119), will be found in the Magasin Pittoresque for 1855. The souterrains of the Serapeum, excavated with more or less care in the living calcareous rock, are divided into two principal parts. The first great trunk line of this vast subterranean cemetery had its entrance at the south end, and pursued a northerly direction, forming a vaulted gallery like a tunnel. Its sides were pierced by more than a score of sepulchral chambers, which were found to be tenanted by the remains of twentyfour Apis mummies. The oldest was buried in the thirtieth year of Ramses the Great, the Sesostris of the Greeks, and the youngest in the twenty-first year of Psammetichus I. (B. c. 647), showing, that at least that number of generations of cattle must have lived and died during that chronological interval. The sacred bulls whose memorials have been found in the debris of the Serapeum and its catacombs were not all, however, buried in these souterrains. There is a still earlier series of them, whose mummies seem to have been deposited each in its separate chapel or sanctuary. Five of these more ancient Apises belong to the Eighteenth Manethonian Dynasty, the first of them having died under Amenophthis III., the next under his immediate successor Tutankamen, the two next under Horus, and the last under a sovereign whose family-name has not yet been discovered, but whose throne-title or prenomen seems to read Acherres, which is the name of one of the later Pharaohs belonging to this Dynasty in the Manethonian lists. Following these were three bulls, the records of which were discovered by Mariette, all of which belong to the Nineteenth Dynasty, but to that epoch which preceded the opening of what we may style the Old Subterranean Gallery. One of these died under Seti or Sethos, the First, as he is commonly but as we now know erroneuosly numbered, the greater father of The other principal section of the Apis catacombs branched out into several gal leries, which were successively excavated as occasion required. The first bull whose mummy was deposited in this newer portion of the souterrains was buried in the fifty-second year of Psammetichus I., and the excavations were continued down to the first century of the Christian era and beyond it, in fact, till the transfer of the centre of the worship of Serapis to the new capital, Alexandria. It was here that the most magnificent sarcophagi were found, testifying to the ever-growing pomp and splendor of the Apis cultus. The least ponderous of these sacred monolith coffers of costly and exquisitely polished syenitic granite, quarried above the first cataract, and transported at immense expense to Memphis, weighs 65,000 French kilogrammes or about sixty-four tons. Twenty-four of them were found entire in the forty chambers of the subterranean labyrinth of Psammetichus. The lintels of the entrance to these chambers, but not the walls of the Apis vaults themselves, which were deemed too sacred, were covered with hieroglyphical and Demotic inscriptions, the latter greatly preponderating in this portion of the catacombs. These funerary stele or tablets, to the number of more than five hundred, are now deposited in the Salle d'Apis at the Louvre. They constitute a mine of archæological wealth, which will furnish profitable subjects of study to the Egyptologers of all nations for many a long year to come. Their immense importance in a chronological point of view, especially, is already universally recognized, although even yet it can hardly be said to be quite duly appreciated. At first it was somewhat overrated, it may frankly be admitted, and thence the reaction, or something like it, which a great disappointment naturally brings with it. For when Mariette's discovery began to be talked about amongst the learned, it was confidently expected that it would enable us to reconstruct with perfect certainty the chronology of the Pharaohs from Amenophthis III., the semi-mythical Memnon of the Greeks, or at least from their Sesostris, that is, from Ramses the Great, downwards. For the opinion | tervening centuries." Alas! the intelliwas universally prevalent, that the Apis gent and honest traveller who thus in Cycle of twenty-five Egyptian years, com- good faith promised to quench our thirst prising an exact number (309) of lunar only thought he saw water, and it was months, of which Plutarch speaks in his after all only a mirage of the Lybian destreatise on Isis and Osiris, was the inva- ert, whence he dates his letter! Plutarch's riable duration of the lifetime of the dei Apis Cycle of twenty-five vague Egyp fied bull, as it really proves to have been tian years, in the sense if sense that its normal term. Scholars did not stop to can be called which sense has none-put inquire how the sacred ox could be al- upon it by that lazy deference to great ways kept alive to the end of this some- names which is the special weakness of what unusual age. This notion, the irref- even the best scholars, has been tried by ragable authority of the official stele, re- the touchstone of monumental reality, cording the year, month, and day of the and demonstrated to be a chimera. birth, solemn enthronization as the royal Moreover, there are now known to be present deity, death, and burial of sev- terrible gaps, caused by the desolations eral successive Apises, has for ever ex- of two thousand years, in the series of ploded. Had it been well-founded, the Apis records. The sixty-four bulls of value of such a cycle is obviously incal- which traces are left, were by no means culable. It would have saved us many all whose epiphanies, installations, deaths, bitter but fiuitless lamentations over the and burials, were originally written down lacunæ, which are now known to exist in the papyrus and stone archives of the in this series of official Apis dates, given, Serapeum between Amenophthis III. and be it remembered, not in terms of any the Roman Emperor Caius. Still they era, but only in regnal years of the constitute a vast and precious augmentaPharaohs. The broken links in this tion of the paltry five or six of which wonderful chain of fifteen centuries of we find mention in the classical writers. chronological history before the Chris- One of these is that written of by Hetian era, would have been of infinitely rodotus and said by him to have been less importance than they are now felt stabbed by that mad King Cambyses in to be. But, indeed, it was at first im- a rage, caused by his mistaking the naagined that there were no broken links tional rejoicings at a new avatar of the at all, and that, at last, the long desid- god for exultation over the discomfiture erated monumental clew to the chronol- of his Ethiopian expedition. Mariette ogy of the only secular empire before asserts, with the assent of Lepsius, that of the Greeks and Romans, which Brugsch, and the rest of the Egyptolseems to have possessed one, had been ogers, that he has found the official obithappily recovered. Even SO accom- uary of this very Apis, and that it conplished an Egyptologer as Dr. Brugsch victs the Father of History of an altowrote to that effect to Europe from the gether erroneous statement. For they Serapeum itself, and after threading its identify the calf spoken of by the great mazy galleries, and spelling out the Greek with that born in the fifth year of scutcheons and dates of the inscriptions Cambyses on the twenty-eighth of the in the society of the discoverer. In his Egyptian month Tybi, and which it is Reiseberichte, or Notes of his Travels, certain lived till the fourth year of Darius. published in 1855, he says: "These For ourselves, we venture to move for stele have enabled Mariette completely an arrest of judgment on the proverbialto restore the series of the Apis Periods, ly honest historian, and shall insist, for and accordingly also that of the Pha- the present at least, that the Scotch verraohs, from Ramses the Great down to dict Not Proven, will amply meet the the Greek times, exclusively of the XX. justice of the case. For the Apis which (misprint, doubtless, for XXI.), XXIII, died under Darius, though born in the fifth and XXIX. Dynasties, and that in the month of the fifth of Cambyses, may not unbroken succession of kings. By this have been discovered till several months means an impregnable and immovable or even a year or two afterwards. The foundation has been secured on which finding of the Apis which was manifested to build up safely the Egyptian chronol- in the twenty-eighth year of Shishak III. ogy and imperial history during the in- did not take place till "his beauties, that is, the mysterious marks by which he was recognized, had been sought for three months," so the hieroglyphical stela records, "in all the nomes, or counties, of Upper and Lower Egypt." Polycenus, too, records that the finding of the Apis was so long delayed in one instance at the close of the reign of Darius, that Egypt threatened to break out into revolt, and the king was fain to offer a reward of one hundred talents to the man who should make the fortunate discovery. Hence, although, as the official stela prove, there were only six or seven months intervening between the funeral of the Apis in the Epiphi (the eleventh month) and in the fourth year of Cambyses, and the Apis birth in the end of Tybi in his-fifth, yet the interval between that funeral in his fourth, and the discovery of that born in his fifth (whose enthronization-date, it should be remarked, is lost) may have been quite long enough to allow of the transaction of the events which Herodotus records. And if these events did happen, then his Apis also, like that of Polycenus, and those of Diodorus, Josephus, and Spartian, is unfortunately missing in the extant Serapeum Series. In other words, not one of these classical Apises* appears in that Series, thus affording the direct proof of the existence of very many lacunæ, an inference which the due study of the stelæ converts into positive certainty. Let us not, however, be too much disheartened. Every one of these sixtyfour Apises bears a monumental date of the reign of some Pharaoh, and about one half of them are referred by the stela to a definite regnal year, mostly with the addition of the very month and day. This is something, especially' since in no instance are there wanting decisive monumental indications of the relative order in which each appeared. Moreover, if the Apis cycle has been effectually disposed of in a sense which ought never to have been put upon it, it may still have been, and there is reason to believe it was, the measure of the life of the god, as the well-informed Plutarch asserts, according to a less obvious, but certainly not less rational interpretation of the passage than that to which the Serapeum tablets have given the coup de grace. It is impossible to explain away the numerous other ancient testimonies to the effect that the Apis was not suffered to survive a certain term of life, which was prescribed in the sacred books of the Egyptians, and that when this fatal day was reached he was drowned by the priests in the holy well, to be bewailed by every inhabitant of the land of Ham more bitterly than the loss of the dearest relative, and to be buried seventy days afterwards with a pomp and magnificence of which it is not easy to form a just conception. If, now, this sacred limit, which the Apis was not suffered to survive, were one astronomically determined, the mention by Plutarch of an astronomical cycle in connection with the subject, is at once explained. This suggestion has already been thrown out by Dr. Hincks, one of the most penetrating geniuses of this or of any age. If his further suggestion, that the death of the Apis, as a general rule, and the enthronization invariably, occurred at the time of full moon, the revelations of the Serapeum tablets would reässert for themselves something more than the interest and value attaching to monuments recording the years of birth, death, and lifetime of any ordinary Egyptian. This, since the explosion of the Apis cycle, in its old acceptation, is now all their chronological value, according to Professor Lepsius. These stela would count for more if they be really the epitaphs of the Divine Pharaohs of Egypt, who, unlike their human vicegerents, lived and died according to a definitely ascertained astronomical rule. Still more striking would be the rehabilitation of these precious monuments of a people, the knowledge of whose history and chronology becomes daily of greater moment, if according to another suggestion, the Seventy Days of National Humiliation for the Apis were invariably marked, as often as not, precisely at commencement or close, but always within the sacred space of time, by eclipses of the celestial bodies, making heaven to sympathize with earth in the universal mourning for the god. Should this assertion prove to be well-founded—and the means of testing it with strict mathematical rigor are in our hands-one of the subtlest, we had almost written sublimest, master-pieces | brought together all the known hieroof ancient priestcraft, may be said to glyphical, names of the Pharaohs and have been placed by an overruling Provi- their Persian, Macedonian, and Roman dence within the reach of modern science, successors, with those of their queens as a powerful lever with which to lift the and the princes of their several royal lid of the sarcophagus which hides from houses, to the number of eight or nine our view the lifelike features of this em- hundred scutcheons, announced that the balmed nation. For history without era of monumental discovery might be chronology is forever impossible. Chro- deemed as good as closed, the statenology is the mathematics of time, and, ment by Egyptian scholars was receivconsequently, of the past and its events. ed with a sigh of disappointment. HapAs Scaliger long ago said, it is the eye pily, although quite true as regards the and soul of history. surface explorations, yet the subsequent finds of Mariette have proved that there is still a subsoil ploughing of the land to be accomplished. His delvings in If the discovery of the Serapeum be entitled to as high a rank in the field of historical science, as that other great achievement of our century, the discov-"the field of Zoan," in particular, ery of the sources of the Nile, occupies in the physical geography of the globe, it must be remembered that it is only the first instalment of a series of brilliant triumphs over the ravages of time and barbarism, for which the world is indebted to Mariette. It should be distinctly understood that he has inaugurated an entirely new era in the exploration of the antiquities of the Monumental Land, the Written Valley of the Nile. In general, it may be said with perfect truth, that former explorers, from those of the great French and Italian expeditions, down to the Prussian, led by that wonderful Egyptologer, Lepsius himself, and his amicable rival, Dr. Brugsch, scratched only the surface of the soil. How rich was the harvest which this mere tickling of the ground, to borrow Douglas Jerrold's felicitous expression, made it laugh to reward them, may be seen from the plates accompanying the Description de l' Egypt, the works of Rosellini and Champollion, and especially the nine hundred magnificent folio engravings, which with the still, alas, desiderated text, will make up that imperishable pile of monumental learning, to be found only in princely libraries, Lepsius's Denkmaeler. But, strange as the assertion may seem, yet it is strictly true, as the words we have cited from Dr. Birch above strikingly prove, that the mountain of materials has only stimulated the desire for more, and that the hunger for texts has grown with what it fed on. Hence, when, in 1858, Dr. Lep sius, on the occasion of presenting to the world that other opus magnum of his life, the Königsbuch, in which are that is, on the site of the Tanis of the the judgment of the sensibility and understanding, acting by a law of harmony with his eclectic imagination, resulted in that evenness, appropriateness, and symmetry of production, in which he stands alone. In imaginative passion he is unrivalled; his genius has energized through all their spheres, and embodied each with individual traits so perfectly that his characters, whether their ideal be beauty or power, goodness or evil, are more like the natural creations of a human deity, so to speak, than the productions of a poet artist. Everywhere he is equal to his subject, which he treats with a grasp and subtlety of delineation which places him above the assumption of parallelism in ancient and modern days. In his knowl and the Memphis Tablet itself. Of these, and particularly of the last, which may be said to furnish for the first time the backbone of the history and chronology of the Old Empire, just as the Apis Series does that of the New, we hope to have an opportunity to speak more at length. Meanwhile, we may remark, by way of conclusion, that in the photographic reproduction also of the monuments, of which his "Sérapéum furnishes so admirable a specimen, Mariette has opened up a new era, and introduced a reform which was imperatively required. And although, owing to circumstances to which we cannot refer, that noble work has been discontinued, yet it is a consolation to know that the same happy application of the art of photo-edge of dramatic art-for that of nature lithography will be resorted to, whenever necessary, in the tenfold more extensive work, Les Fouilles de M. Mariette, now in course of preparation. May its author no longer dim his shining merits by his inveterate sin of keeping the world waiting too long. Dublin University Magazine. GOETHE'S FAUSTUS.* was as constantly present to him as the air he breathed-he exhibits a regular advance (with the exception of a brief interval in his middle period, in which his shorter plays, among them "Timon" and a couple more, which have the appearance of first and untouched sketches, were written) from his first to his last dramas. In the "Tempest" and "Othello" he has produced (in the latter especially) the most perfect symmetry of effect. His language partakes of the universality of his genius, it remains at COMPARISONS have frequently been in- once the truest, most natural, and versastituted between the representative poets tile illustration of imaginative utterance of England and Germany, but the points-whether reflecting passion, thought, of difference are much more numerous beauty-which can be discovered in than those of analogy. As natural geni- poetry. uses, the one represents at best but a segment of the soul of the other. Shakspeare, indeed, is the amplest gifted spirit that has ever appeared in any literature. Never was there such an imagination for character in union with such endless and appropriate versatility of poetic power, such an abnormal development of a sensitive emotional and passionate system, controlled by such lofty, various, and subtle intellectual gifts. No one has ever given such natural truth to such an extensive range of the creations of person ality, since, to use his own words, "mind at first in character was done!" An ideal of individuality once formed in his brain became forthwith evolved with the most perfect consistency; and this justness of *Translated by JoHN ANSTER, LL.D. London: Longman, Green, and Co. 1864. NEW SERIES-VOL. I., No. 1. The appearance of a Natural Genius so vast as that of Shakspeare circumstantially elicited in the age of Elizabeth, is an anomaly not less striking than that of Goethe, the Poet of Culture, in the Germany of his youth, as yet with a scanty imitative literature, and in an atmosphere and surroundment which, so far from fostering, appears solely calculated. to neutralize and annihilate a spirit of such peculiar tendency. As he says, in "Wilhelm Meister," "The people among whom I lived had not the slightest tinge of literature or science. They were German courtiers, a class of men at that time destitute of mental culture." With their peculiar relative gifts, however to the one the age of action in which he livedto the other, that in which the book world was open to any inquiring intelligence, became influential in their special 7 |