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Postcolonial Screen
Adaptation and
the British Novel

Vivian Y. Kao
Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British
Novel
 Vivian Y. Kao

Postcolonial Screen
Adaptation and the
British Novel
Vivian Y. Kao
Lawrence Technological University
Southfield, MI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-54579-6    ISBN 978-3-030-54580-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54580-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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To my parents
 Acknowledgments

I have received much help and many blessings while working on this book.
I must first thank a good number of people at Rutgers, where I began this
book as a doctoral dissertation in the English department. I am grateful,
first of all, to Dianne Sadoff for her many contributions to my intellectual
and personal development as my dissertation advisor and mentor. John
Kucich was always ready to offer expertise and empathy throughout my
graduate school experience. Kate Flint, Jonah Siegel, Colin Jager, William
Galperin, Brad Evans, Edyta Bojanowska, Rebecca Walkowitz, Martin
Gliserman, Cheryl Wall, Evie Shockley, Stéphane Robolin, and Larry
Scanlon played instrumental roles in my life at Rutgers. They have always
been quick to offer support whenever I have needed it. I must thank
Mukti Lakhi Mangharam and Meheli Sen as well for graciously agreeing
to join my dissertation committee and for offering me advice and encour-
agement. A special thank-you must also go to Ann Jurecic for her guid-
ance and friendship in the home stretch.
Emily Crossen deserves special acknowledgment as my closest comrade
throughout the entire process of formulating, writing, and revising this
project, and getting through all the days in between. The Nineteenth-­
Century Interest Group improved this project immensely by their mem-
bers’ helpful suggestions and engaging criticisms. Naomi Levine and Mark
DiGiacomo generously offered their sharp editorial eyes and sound sug-
gestions to early versions of these chapters. Fellow panelists and interlocu-
tors at the American Comparative Literature Association conferences in
2014 and 2015, the North American Victorian Studies Association in
2015, and the Association of Adaptation Studies in 2016 contributed

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

valuable comments to all of the book’s chapters, as did my editors and

anonymous reviewers at Kipling Journal and Genre, journals in which
portions of chapters “Conquest and Improvement in the “Graveyard of
Empires”: The Men Who Would Be Kings in Afghanistan and Vietnam”
and “Unaccounted Modernities in Tess and Trishna” appear in earlier
versions.
My colleagues in the Department of Liberal Studies at Kettering
University and the Department of Humanities at Lawrence Technological
University have enriched this project with their interest in it, their careful
readings and comments on drafts, and their fellowship. I would like to
mention especially Paul Jaussen, Dan Shargel, Franco Delogu, Dan Moyer,
Julia Kiernan, Christine Levecq, Laura Miller-Purrenhage, and David
Golz for challenging, inspiring, and supporting me. I must also thank my
department chairs and administrators at all levels at both universities for
granting me time and funds to pursue my scholarship. I am especially
indebted to Joy Arbor, colleague, friend, and editor extraordinaire, with-
out whom this book could not have come to fruition.
I am humbled by the librarians at every institution at which I con-
ducted research for this project. I am ever grateful for their awesome
expertise, their resourcefulness, and their willingness to help me track
down every last text I asked for. During these austere times for research,
for libraries, and for the humanities, the work that academic librarians do
goes woefully underappreciated.
So many friends, near and far, have enriched my life during the writing
of this book. I cannot possibly hope to name all of them here, but I would
like to mention a few: Mimi Winick, Nami Shin, John Miller, Lauren
Kimball, Amanda Kotch, April Graham, Christina Doonan, Lincoln
Addison, Adrienne Mills, Devon Sherman, Benjie Peters and the Peters
clan, Laura and Andy Mebert, Karen Wilkinson, Heather Laube, Shane
Clary, Elizabeth Jordan, Jim Cohen, Caroline Kellogg, Emily Kelley, Deb
Herron, and Jan Worth-Nelson. I must also thank the food service staff at
The Flint Institute of Arts and Totem Books, where I wrote so many of
the words contained in this volume. My families—Kaos, Leis, Paulis,
Bastians, and Galligans—have been dedicated, patient, and infinitely sup-
portive: I have felt their presence always despite the miles that separate us.
I often refer to this project as my third child, since my older son, Julian,
was born while it was still a dissertation, and my younger son, Flynn,
arrived during its transformation into a book. But while it was the last to
make its entrance into the world, it is older than either of them, and has
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

enjoyed an unfair share of my attention throughout their young lives. I

thank Julian and Flynn for giving their oldest/youngest sibling many of
mom’s waking hours they would have liked to have for themselves.
My most profound gratitude goes to Benjamin Pauli, my partner in
every single day, my constant source of goodness.
 Contents


Adapting Improvement: Screen Afterlives of­
Nineteenth-Century Progress  1
Elective Affinities: From Improvement Ideology to Development
Discourse   8
Heritage Improved: Postcolonial Adaptation as Beneficial
Development  23
References  40


Improvement, Development, and Consumer Culture
in Jane Austen and Popular Indian Cinema 47
Austen’s Unprogressive Change  50
Emma: Moving Forward and Looking Back  53
Development and Discontent in Popular Indian Cinema  61
The Shoppers’ Worlds of Bride and Prejudice and Aisha  65
References  86


Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre
and I Walked with a Zombie 91
Jane Eyre’s Enclosed Spaces  93
From Plantation to Nation: The Transformation
of Colonial Space in I Walked with a Zombie 105

xi
xii Contents

Improvement on the Plantation 114

The Houmfort and the Great House: Voodoo Rising 120
References 134


Conquest and Improvement in the “Graveyard of Empires”:
The Men Who Would Be Kings in Afghanistan and Vietnam139
New Britons and Old Greeks: Conquest and Improvement in India
and Afghanistan 142
Unlikely Improvers: Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” 150
The West, Conquered But Improved: Huston’s The Man
Who Would Be King 157
The Long Road to Vietnam 161
From “Men on the Spot” to Sympathetic Survivors: Reading
Huston’s Film 164
Anti-War but Pro-Empire: Saving American Imperialism 172
References 183

Unaccounted Modernities in Tess and Trishna189

Hardy’s Improving Men 194
Tess: Counterfactual Evolution as Alternative Modernity 202
Trishna’s Unclaimed Voice and the Right to Silence 210
References 231

 Afterword and a Word Before: “Strategic Presentism” as

An
Heritage Improved235
References 244

Index247
 Adapting Improvement: Screen Afterlives
of Nineteenth-Century Progress

The introduction to Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for
Women Worldwide tells the story of Srey Rath, a young Cambodian
woman, who at age fifteen was tricked by a man who promised her a job
as a dishwasher in Thailand but sold her instead to a brothel in Malaysia.
After a daring escape across the tenth-floor balcony of the dormitory Rath
occupied with other sex-trafficked girls, she threw herself on the mercies
of a Malaysian policeman who shuttled her across the Thai border and
sold her to another brothel (Kristof and WuDunn 2010, pp. xi–xiii).
Rath’s story, however, ends happily. After escaping from the Thai brothel,
Rath found her way back to Cambodia and was put in touch with an
American humanitarian agency that helps victims of sex trafficking begin
new lives. The agency set her up with a small street cart on the border
between Thailand and Cambodia, and there, Rath sold “shirts and hats,
costume jewelry, notebooks, pens, and small toys” (p. xvii). Her business
venture turned her “good looks and outgoing personality”—“perilous
bounties for a rural Cambodian girl” (p. xi)—into the useful resources of
“an effective saleswoman” (p. xvii). She worked hard, saved her earnings,
and grew her business from a cart to a stall, and then to a double stall by
buying the store next door. She even diversified by charging local people
to use her mobile phone while tourists combed through her souvenirs.
The authors of Half the Sky, New York Times journalists Nicholas
D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (2010), offer the following interpretation
of Rath’s journey: “Rath’s eventual triumph is a reminder that if girls get

© The Author(s) 2020 1

V. Y. Kao, Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54580-2_1
2 V. Y. KAO

a chance, in the form of an education or a microloan, they can be more

than baubles or slaves; many of them can run businesses. […] Many of the
stories in this book are wrenching, but keep in mind this central truth:
Women aren’t the problem but the solution. The plight of girls is no more a
tragedy than an opportunity” (p. xviii; italics original). The authors’ analy-
sis illustrates how the entanglement between uplift and global capitalism
goes uncritically accepted in narratives about how to develop the develop-
ing world. The “problem” to which women are the “solution” actually
collapses two problems into one: gender inequality and global poverty
become a double-headed hydra that women solve with their participation
in economic development. Giving women the ability to sell baubles instead
of being sold as baubles gives women agency (thus solving the inequality
problem) and increases the gross national product of the state that cur-
rently underutilizes them as resources (thus solving the poverty problem).
The double meaning of “opportunity,” in the book’s subtitle and the itali-
cized passage, implies that Rath’s success lies in capitalizing on her own
talents (and western charity) to establish a new life inextricable from a
capitalist economic system.
Although Half the Sky’s championing of women’s rights and its desire
to draw attention to grave human rights abuses are commendable, it col-
lapses the difference between a broad, capacious definition of develop-
ment, as self-determined change that benefits an individual or community
in a self-defined way, with development as an ideology in which all states
and individuals must participate in the system of global capital in order to
achieve progress. This collapse makes it difficult to question whether
development as capitalist economic discourse actually fosters beneficial
change. It constricts the capaciousness of the concept of development and
reduces the plenitude of possibilities for different understandings of what
it means to improve. Non-capitalist and anti-capitalist understandings of
modernization get pushed out of consideration. Questions of whether
development discourse, its beneficiaries, and its policies are responsible for
any of the suffering that people in the developing world experience find no
room to be voiced. The issue of whether Rath’s souvenir stall and the
brothels in which she was once held captive participate in the same global
economic system goes unexplored, not only in Half the Sky, but in much
mainstream economic literature.
Take, for instance, the language used by a popular macroeconomic
textbook to describe the problems faced by underdeveloped countries.
International Economics: Theory and Policy, by Paul Krugman, Marc
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 3

Melitz, and Maurice Obstfeld (2018), opens its single chapter on develop-
ing countries by explaining how such countries ought to be conceived:

Until now, we have studied macroeconomic interactions between industrial-

ized market economies like those of the United States and Western Europe.
Richly endowed with capital and skilled labor, these politically stable
countries generate high levels of income for their residents. And their mar-
kets, compared to those of some poorer countries, have long been relatively
free of direct government control. […]
This chapter studies the macroeconomic problems of developing coun-
tries and the repercussions of those problems on the developed world.
Although the insights from international macroeconomics that we gained in
previous chapters also apply to developing countries, the distinctive prob-
lems those countries have faced in their quest to catch up to the rich econo-
mies warrant separate discussion. (p. 720)

Whereas industrialized market economies such as the US and Europe are

defined by their plenitude—their rich endowments of capital and labor—
which lead directly to political and social stability, developing countries are
defined by their problems—their lack of the attributes of the developed
world that mark it as developed. Even worse, the problems of developing
countries have “repercussions” on the developed world—the contagion of
underdevelopment can spread even to the inoculated because of increased
interconnection through globalization. According to the authors, the
yardstick by which developed countries are measured, and the logic by
which they operate, should be applied to developing countries as well. The
historical trajectory of developing nations should be seen as a “quest” to
“catch up.” They have failed in their attempt to play the game that devel-
oped countries have won because, as the last sentence in the first quoted
paragraph explains, they have failed to free their markets from government
control. Being bad at capitalism means being backward, stunted, infec-
tious, and unfree.
The framing of developing countries as only developing, or in other
words, as characterized by what they lack, continues as the chapter lays out
its main concepts.

Poverty is the basic problem that developing countries face, and escaping
from poverty is their overriding economic and political challenge. Compared
with industrialized economies, most developing countries are poor in the
factors of production essential to modern industry: capital and skilled labor.
4 V. Y. KAO

The relative scarcity of these factors contributes to low levels of per capita
income and often prevents developing countries from realizing the econo-
mies of scale from which many richer nations benefit. But factor scarcity is
largely a symptom of deeper problems. Political instability, insecure property
rights, and misguided economic policies frequently have discouraged invest-
ment in capital and skills, while also reducing economic efficiency in other
ways. (Krugman et al. 2018, p. 721)

Developing countries are impoverished because they lack those things

“essential” to modernity: industry, capital, and skilled labor. They cannot
“realize” the “benefits” richer nations enjoy; they must “escape” from the
“scarcity” they face—scarcity that is not generated by the internal illogic
or failures of the economic system in which they are trying to participate,
but by “deeper problems” endemic to their own societies. Without proper
guidance—as their own policies have been “misguided”—how can they be
expected to become proper societies, ones that are stable, secure, right-­
minded, and efficient? They must be improved because they could not
improve themselves, developed because they did not develop themselves,
pushed and pulled toward progress because they were unable to make the
journey on their own.
I do not wish to claim that poor countries are not poor, that they do
not lack the goods, infrastructure, policies, and other material and imma-
terial conditions that make life safe, enjoyable, and sustainable. But we
need not characterize developing countries as lacking all that industrial
nations have achieved in order to recognize their real needs. We need not
see these communities as solely undeveloped or underdeveloped, or only
developing toward a successful capitalist economy. All communities are
developed in some ways and not others, and being aware of the plenitude
or alternative trajectories of developing societies prevents us from limiting
our understanding of their histories, cultures, and people to what kinds of
remediation they need.
This project argues that cultivating an awareness of the many forms that
plenitude can take begins by broadening our definition of what improve-
ment and development are, what they have been, and what they could be.
The work of broadening definitions, in turn, begins by distinguishing ben-
eficial and just social change from attempts to create ever greater numbers
of adequate players in the only game in town. Such distinction is impera-
tive if we want to ensure the flexibility of improvement and development
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 5

as concepts that contain the widest range of beneficial outcomes for

human beings.
This book approaches the study of international development from a
“global development ethics” perspective, which puts at its center “moral
reflection on the ends and means of ‘development,’ where ‘development’
most generically means beneficial social change” (Crocker 2008, p. 1).
Amartya Sen (1999) has written that development should be seen as “a
process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy,” rather than
defined narrowly as “the growth of gross national product,” “the rise in
personal incomes,” “industrialization,” “technological advance,” or
“social modernization” (p. 3). Martha Nussbaum (2011) has expanded
upon Sen’s notion of “real freedoms” using a “Capabilities Approach,”
defined as “an approach to comparative quality-of-life assessment and to
theorizing about basic social justice” (p. 18)—with quality of life and
social justice being, importantly, inseparable. The Capabilities Approach

holds that the key question to ask, when comparing societies and assessing
them for their basic decency or justice, is, ‘What is each person able to do
and to be?’ In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking
not just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities
available to each person. It is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the
crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of oppor-
tunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may not exercise
in action: the choice is theirs. It thus commits itself to respect for people’s
powers of self-definition. (Nussbaum 2011 p. 18, emphasis original)

Asking to what extent a society has made possible the basic conditions for
people to choose how to live dignified lives, and then facilitating their abil-
ity to translate such choice into action, is fundamentally different from
Krugman, Melitz, and Obstfeld’s (2018) understanding of development
as a country’s adherence to a liberalized market, a degree of political sta-
bility, and a surplus of skilled labor. People are not a means to generating
capital; capital is a means to securing people their well-being—and not the
only means. Thinking development conceptually, adequately, comprehen-
sively, responsibly, and humanely means unlinking it from its role in capi-
talist ideology.
Following Crocker, Sen, and Nussbaum, this book seeks to disentangle
development and its possibilities from its part in a discourse that works in
the interests of a capitalist global economy. Two primary concerns animate
6 V. Y. KAO

this project, both of which serve to distinguish development’s ideology

from its possibilities. First, I establish that development does not spring
from the post-Second World War era of benign western humanitarianism,
but instead from late eighteenth-century English capitalism and
nineteenth-­century British imperialism. The consolidation of capitalism
and imperialism in the long nineteenth century characterizes improve-
ment, an ideology combining the Enlightenment’s faith in progress with a
Victorian preoccupation with self-help and coercive reform that provides
the foundation for development as capitalist discourse in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries. Looking back to the late eighteenth century for
ideas informing twentieth-century development discourse runs counter to
mainstream accounts, which begin the “development age” with President
Truman’s Point Four Program, which sought to contain the spread of
communism by assisting developing countries willing to come into the
American fold. Truman’s Point Four represents a crucial stage in the cre-
ation of current assumptions about development, but the roots of those
assumptions go much farther back. Understanding the historical and con-
ceptual links between improvement ideology and development discourse
reveals the capitalist and imperialist interests behind development’s appeals
to humanitarian aid as its primary goal. Furthermore, focusing on such
links helps us see why development discourse closes down, rather than
opening up, a variety of opportunities and choices for dignified living—for
all possibilities for betterment must be yoked into the service of capital
and empire.
My second concern follows from the historical and conceptual impera-
tives of the first: if development’s problems—its interested intentions and
harmful effects—can be traced back to the long nineteenth century, so too
can its correctives and solutions. In addition to identifying the ways
improvement ideology informs development discourse, and thus, how a
colonial paradigm continues to exert influence on postcolonial societies, I
argue that nineteenth-century British fiction provides critiques of improve-
ment that remain useful in critiquing development today. To this end, I
examine postcolonial film adaptations of nineteenth-century British fic-
tion to demonstrate how contemporary texts use the tropes of anti-­
improvement they discover in old novels to challenge new antagonists,
such as transnational capitalists, tourists of the global south, and humani-
tarians whose self-improvement depends on improving others. These pro-
tagonists of development discourse reveal improvement’s post-Victorian
afterlives.
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 7

My claim that British fiction provides useful strategies of resistance

against the improvement ideology that continues to structure postcolonial
realities relies on discovering how British fiction has been reimagined and
appropriated in contemporary global culture. Film adaptations provide
evidence of which aspects of the novels get transcribed, how, and for what
purposes. Postcolonial film adaptations—films that, regardless of the
director’s country of origin, explore issues of imperialism from a critical
perspective—address the question of how British fiction is appropriated to
speak to contemporary global power inequalities. The adaptations I exam-
ine include British, American, and transnational feature-length films that
relocate and update the plotlines, characters, and settings of classic novels
to postcolonial societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Each of my chapters examines one or more film adaptations of
nineteenth-­ century British novels that demonstrate how colonial-era
improvement ideology appears in new guises in the postcolonial world.
Instead of responding to this legacy by resisting all British colonial heri-
tage, the films identify certain aspects of their source novels that critique
improvement and adapt those critiques to challenge new targets contem-
porary to their production and release. In doing so, the films challenge
some scholarship on heritage cinema by arguing that we must move
beyond thinking of the relationship between source text and adaptation as
one of either nostalgia or ironic distance, and in order to do so, we must
open up the genre of heritage film to include adaptations that do not cur-
rently fit its aesthetic and period demarcations. The particular relationship
that my films have with their source texts, that is, using them to critique
imperial legacies, also suggests that adaptation can be just as powerful in
providing postcolonial societies a method to deal with those legacies as
aggressive resistance.
The most important contributions this book hopes to make are to draw
attention to the differences between beneficial social change and coercive
capitalist development, and to provide new possibilities for undoing devel-
opment discourse. To lay the groundwork for these contributions, I will
offer, in this introductory chapter, a sense of the historical and conceptual
connections between improvement ideology and development discourse
in the nineteenth and post-nineteenth centuries. I begin by establishing a
history of capitalist development that takes us back to the late eighteenth
century when the propertied interests of the English countryside imple-
mented an order of land improvements that would inform Kristof and
8 V. Y. KAO

WuDunn’s interpretation of women’s economic “empowerment” two

and a half centuries later.

Elective Affinities: From Improvement Ideology

to Development Discourse

In eighteenth-century England, the term improvement described the

transformation of the English countryside from common land to private
property. Raymond Williams (1973) defines improvement as “agrarian
capitalism,” the regulation of agricultural production in terms of an orga-
nized market (p. 60). The landowning classes of the countryside turned
their estates, regarded as inheritance in earlier centuries, into “a calcula-
tion of rents and returns on investments of capital,” “an opportunity for
investment” (p. 60). This reconceptualization of the land and its inhabit-
ants as profit margin not only reorganized the English countryside, it
instituted an ideology that valued productive labor and regulation, and
“became significant and directive” (p. 60), “ruthlessly” modernizing all
areas of social life (p. 61).
Williams (1973) writes that the eighteenth-century novel reflected the
ways in which this ideology affected individual lives. Tom Jones, Clarissa,
and Defoe’s novels “dramatised […] the long process of choice between
economic advantage and other ideas of value” (p. 61). In Defoe’s novels
especially, Williams recognizes a “world of isolated individuals to whom
other people are basically transitory and functional” (p. 62), suggesting
the way human relations changed under improvement ideology. His argu-
ment implies that even moral behavior had to accommodate improve-
ment, becoming “the morality of a relatively consolidated, a more maturely
calculating society,” in which “cold greed” and “open coarseness” were
still bad, but “calculation” and considerations of “cost” became prudent
and good (p. 63). In the novels of the period, “personal satisfaction and
material advantage are reconciled, compatible, and even identical” (p. 63).
Improving the land, or in other words, reconceptualizing the use of
space in agrarian capitalist terms, participated in a larger Enlightenment
impulse to rationalize and economize all aspects of ordinary life. In the
Annals of Agriculture, Arthur Young connected land improvement with
“the other new social forces of the time”: mercantile capital, early indus-
trial techniques, advancements in the physical sciences, and the consolida-
tion of political power (Williams 1973, p. 66). James Thomson’s The
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 9

Castle of Indolence also illustrates the wider implications of improvement

(qtd in Williams 1973, p. 69):

Ye generous Britons, cultivate the Plow…

So with superior Boon may your rich Soil,
Exuberant, Nature’s better Blessings pour
O’er every Land; the naked Nations cloath,
And be th’exhaustless Granary of the World.

Young and Thomson illustrate how improvement participated in what Asa

Briggs (2000) calls the Enlightenment’s “cult of progress” (p. 341). In
Thomson’s praise of improvement’s virtues, we detect all the main ele-
ments of Enlightenment progress: man’s increasing power over nature; an
optimism for endless development toward an always-better future along a
single linear trajectory; the belief that despite the present uneven develop-
ment of nations, history’s progressive course was universal; and the more
developed nations should play a leadership role grounded in a sense of
stewardship.
Gilbert Rist (2002) has characterized the theory of progress during the
Enlightenment as a secularization of Christian eschatology, whereby
humans need not wait for divine salvation but could create their own para-
dise on earth through the consolidation of reason and knowledge down
the generations (pp. 36–38). Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of
the Progress of the Human Spirit (1795/2020) crystallized Enlightenment
ideals of secular progressivism. Condorcet divided human history into
nine stages that societies must pass before arriving at the final utopic state
in which all inequality would be abolished. For Condorcet, human societ-
ies are formed when individuals, naturally endowed with the capability to
feel and prefer pleasure over pain, realize that forming groups bound by
“the ties of interest and duty” (p. 2) promotes more pleasure and less pain.
Once humans are bound to one another in societies, those societies pass
from pastoral to agricultural to literate; after which the sciences flourish,
decline, then flourish again; and finally, print literacy allows for revolution-
ary ideas of freedom and liberty to spread, resulting in the final tenth stage
of radical equality, a stage that lasts forever and witnesses the infinite
increase of the human intellect (pp. 3–20). Condorcet (1795) saw his
method as “strictly historical” rather than philosophical, for philosophy
would no longer need to conjecture what human progress looked like
when all that was needed was “to collect and arrange facts, and exhibit the
10 V. Y. KAO

useful truths which arise” when comparing the relative positions of differ-
ent cultures (p. 14). Condorcet’s comparative study of cultures flattened
world history and assumed that all societies were traveling along the same
path consisting of the same stages. Thus, at any given moment in history,
different cultures would be at different places along that path, making it
possible to compare which were ahead and which behind. Condorcet’s
(1795) theory also made it possible to think of world history as the “his-
tory of a single people,” and to think of humanity’s progress in the largest
aggregate possible:

It is between this degree of civilization [exhibited by select European

nations] and that in which we still find the savage tribes, that we must place
every people whose history has been handed down to us, and who, some-
times making new advancements, sometimes plunging themselves again into
ignorance, sometimes floating between the two alternatives or stopping at a
certain limit, sometimes totally disappearing from the earth under the sword
of conquerors, mixing with those conquerors; or living in slavery; lastly,
sometimes receiving knowledge from a more enlightened people, to trans-
mit it to other nations,—form an unbroken chain of connection between
the earliest periods of history and the age in which we live, between the first
people known to us, and the present nations of Europe. (pp. 11–12)

Thus, some societies of the world that coexisted in the same “present”
as the “nations of Europe” may still be wallowing in the stage exhibited by
“the first people known to us.” Once a particular society has developed
“an enlightened class of men” whose “language shall have become univer-
sal, and [whose] whole commercial intercourse shall [have] embraced the
whole extent of the globe” (Condorcet 1795, p. 15), “this class will be
considered as the friends of human kind, exerting themselves in concert to
advance the improvement and happiness of the species” (p. 15). Such
enlightened men would “expose the origin and trace the history of general
errors, which have more or less contributed to retard or suspend the advance
of reason, and sometimes even, as much as political events, have been the
cause of man’s taking a retrograde course towards ignorance” (p. 15,
emphasis added). Thus, nations further along the trajectory of progress
had not only the right but, indeed, the responsibility to colonize the
world: their arrival at an advanced stage of progress was the basis, cause,
and justification for their imperialism.
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 11

Enlightenment philosophers in Scotland were more skeptical than their

Continental counterparts of the speed at which progress might be
obtained, as well as the notion that reason what was drove it forward.
Nevertheless, they likewise viewed human history as meaningful, teleo-
logical, and empirically observable.1 In his 1758 essay “Of National
Characters,” David Hume (1889/1987) writes that the difference
between the “characters” of the people of each nation lies in “moral
causes,” or “all the circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as
motives or reasons” to “render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us”
(p. 198). Because “the human mind is of a very imitative nature,” people
living in close proximity will “acquir[e] a similitude of manners” (p. 202),
and common “passions and inclinations” will “run, as it were, by conta-
gion, through the whole club or knot of companions” (p. 203). Thus, it
is not reason that makes us think and act as we do but the influence of the
particular opinions, customs, and prejudices of those around us. John
Millar’s The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1778/2012) uses Hume’s
understanding of fellow-feeling as the foundation of national character to
conceptualize human progress as slow and steady evolution. Millar
(1778/2012) writes that although man has “a disposition and capacity for
improving his condition, by the exertion of which, he is carried on from
one degree of advancement to another” (p. 84), the progress of societies
must be gradual and without “any violent reformation,” confined only to
“moderate improvements” because people tend to “deviat[e] little from
the former usage,” preferring instead to be “supported by experience”
and to “coincid[e] with the prevailing opinions of the country” (p. 87).
Our exposure and desire to be like those around us makes prudence and
conservatism the natural state of being for individuals and societies, thus
delaying the speed and extent of progress. For Millar, some societies
remain “so destitute of culture” that their citizens “appear little above the
condition of brute animals” (p. 84), while others have reached the point
of being “at liberty to cultivate the feelings of humanity” (p. 85).
Furthermore, “unfavourable circumstances” can “render them [the unde-
veloped nations] long stationary at a particular period,” and “habituat[e]”
the people “to the peculiar manners of that age” (p. 85). Despite this
observable variation, however, “when we peruse the remote history of
polished nations, we have seldom any difficulty in tracing them to a state
of the same rudeness and barbarism” (p. 84) as that of present undevel-
oped nations. Like Condorcet, Millar (1778/2012) suggests that there is
a “remarkable uniformity in the several steps of [man’s] progression” by
12 V. Y. KAO

which a “nation of savages” (p. 84) may become learned and civilized
through shared knowledge passed down through generations. Thus,
although all societies are equally able to achieve the highest state of refine-
ment, those who happen to be ahead will remain so, and those behind will
never manage to catch up.
The conceptual elements of (1) particular stages of progress through
which all societies must pass to become civilized, (2) the ability to com-
pare societies with one another due to a common developmental end
point, and (3) the responsibility of more advanced nations to shepherd
those lagging behind survived the end of the eighteenth century and
retained their prominence in the discourse on improvement in the nine-
teenth century. Briggs (2000), who defines the period between 1783 and
1867 as “the age of improvement,” uses the term to indicate the step-by-­
step process by which progress occurs, a series of changes to an inherited
past undertaken in the faith that history was meaningfully advancing. At
times, he describes improvement as a “‘march’ of events” (p. 1), at other
times, to indicate the older sense of agricultural improvement but also the
Victorians’ own industrial improvements, the expansion of the franchise,
and the rise of the middle class. He uses it as a synonym for “achievement”
(p. 2) to indicate an “increase in material wealth,” “the rise of British
power in the world,” and “the creation of an ‘intellectual empire’ as well
as a ‘workshop of all the nations’” (p. 2). Quoting the Victorian historian
H. T. Buckle, Briggs writes that nineteenth-century improvement was
“not [made] by any great external event nor by any sudden insurrection of
the people, but by the unaided action of moral force” (Briggs 2000,
p. 309). For the Victorians, improvement described a microscopic view of
progress and brought together the four main elements of “Victorianism”—
the gospel of work, seriousness of character, respectability, and self-help
(Briggs 2000, p. 391)—driving progress ahead, little by little. Those who
remained in degraded stages of development, both the lumpenproletariat
at home and the colonial populations abroad, were those who could not
yet “subject themselves to the discipline of labor and delayed gratifica-
tion,” and were “indulgent of their instinctive passions,” and therefore “at
the mercy of the forces of nature” (Stocking 1987, p. 36).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, improvement ideology
acquired an emphasis on racial categorization. George Stocking (1987)
writes that Enlightenment understandings of improvement assumed a
basic unity of all diverse groups of the world, a holdover from the Christian
tradition: “what separated savage man from civilized man was not a
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 13

difference in inherent mental makeup so much as the progress of refine-

ment and of civilization itself” (p. 18). What stage a society happened to
occupy in the present did not preclude it from advancing as far as the most
developed European societies. Around mid-century, however, “the idea
took firmer hold that skin color and other external physical characteristics
determined race (rather than climate, religion, or forms of government),
and that the different human races should remain separate from one
another” (Steinbach 2012, p. 61). The polygenist view, arguing that dif-
ferent races represented different species of human beings, each with its
own trajectory and limits as to its possibilities of progress, replaced the
earlier monogenist view that all races shared a common humanity and
destiny. Laura Peters (2013) writes that “such a shift, from monogenist to
polygenist views of race, marks a withdrawal of humanity from non-white
races; this shift heralds a biological pessimism in which racial nature is
viewed as fixed. Such a view will dominate racial thinking from the 1850s
onwards” (p. 55).
Later-century texts that expound polygenist views of improvement
include Robert Knox’s The Races of Men (1862), which argues that
“human character, individual and national, is traceable solely to the nature
of that race to which the individual or nation belongs” (p. v), and that
races originated, evolved, and remain so separate that an individual cannot
even “exist permanently on any continent to which he is not indigenous”
(p. vi).2 James Hunt, president of the polygenist Anthropological Society
of London, writes in “On the Negro’s Place in Nature” (1864/2020) that
the Negro race is more like ape than European, and that comparisons
between Negro and European body parts suggests that the Negro’s brain
resembles an infant European’s that ceased to develop past puberty. Thus,
the Negro would only become more civilized when subjugated by
Europeans. Josiah Clark Nott and George Gliddon’s Types of Mankind
(1854) draw upon earlier theories by Samuel George Morton and Louis
Agassiz to classify races into “types” (p. 80), “species” (p. 80), and
“groups” (p. 81), arguing for the “zoological” (p. 81) study of human
development and culture, just as one would study flora and fauna.
Deliberately scientific and rational, Nott and Gliddon’s tome is a rebuttal
against using the Bible as evidence for a monogenist view, and suggests
that Adam and Eve were but one of many pairs of progenitors for modern
humans.3
At times, polygenist views informed arguments supporting British
imperialism, as in Benjamin Kidd’s 1894 Social Evolution, in which Kidd
14 V. Y. KAO

naturalizes inequality, competition, and the extermination of some popu-

lations by others. Kidd argues that such conflict between races is exempli-
fied by the fact that wherever a superior race comes into contact with an
inferior one, the inevitable result is that the inferior race dies out, either
quickly (by conquest) or slowly (by settlement and intermarriage); thus,
superior races should realize that their colonial expansion represents the
inevitable workings of progress (1907/1987, pp. 50–51). At other times,
polygenesis also informed arguments against imperialism, as in J. R. Seeley’s
(1894) The Expansion of England, in which he suggests that the British
Empire in India is not a “natural” form of colonization (p. 37), like that
of the settler colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New
Zealand, for these were bound “of our own blood” by “community of
race, community of religion, [and] community of interest” (p. 11). India,
however, represented an “alien race and religion” bound to Britain only
by force, so Britain should withdraw from it gradually (p. 11).
Although polygenism grew in popularity after mid-century, notable fig-
ures maintained their belief in a common trajectory of development shared
by different cultures. Charles Darwin (1871) argued emphatically for the
unity of the human species and held that evolution by natural selection
could account for all observable differences in human beings. In the first
volume of The Descent of Man (1871), he writes,

Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair,
shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole organisation
be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in
a multitude of points. Many of these points are of so unimportant or of so
singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been
independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races.
(pp. 231–232)

Darwin believed that “when the principles of evolution are generally

accepted, as they surely will be before long, the dispute between the
monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death”
(p. 235).
John Stuart Mill’s (1990/2020) monogenist view of the progress of
Britain’s Indian subjects was more moralistic and prescriptive than
Darwin’s and emphasized not a shared origin for all humans, but, eventu-
ally, a shared destination. In the writings he produced while serving in the
Examiner’s Office of the East India Company, he expressed his view of
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 15

what he believed to be the special and peculiar responsibility of the

Company to force Indians to realize a stage of progress equal to that of
Britain’s own. Although he held in On Liberty that a representative gov-
ernment with universal suffrage was the best form of government, he felt
that this system could only be implemented in western European societies.
For Mill, the best form of government for India was a “benevolent despo-
tism” (Moir 1990/2020, par. 143) led by a “superior people” who had
reached “a more advanced state of society” (Moir 1990/2020, par. 143,
quoting Mill from Considerations on Representative Government). This
advanced state was one that Indians could, after a very long time, reach as
well, under guidance and tutelage from the right leaders. Mill believed the
Company was the best candidate for this forthright leadership, for the
Company had the best interests of the Indian people at heart, had been
long established in India, and had sufficient knowledge of the land and its
culture.
The view that Indian progress depended on English leadership and
protection permeates the writings Mill produced while employed by the
East India Company. His “Memorandum of the Improvements in the
Administration of India during the Last Thirty Years” (1858), for exam-
ple, argues that the sweeping changes to all areas of Indian public life
made by the Company—from land revenue reform to the wholesale trans-
formation of the judicial and education systems, healthcare, and public
works—were necessary to protect the Indian peasantry from “the ravages
of war,” “fiscal rapacity,” and “vexation and corruption” that character-
ized their own native governments, which exerted arbitrary rule rather
than principled leadership (Mill 1990/2020, par. 634, 619). Indians
needed to be protected from their own rulers no less, however, than from
the ignorance, corruption, and politics of the British government. In “A
Constitutional View of the Indian Question” (1858), an unsigned pam-
phlet aimed at persuading the public to support the maintenance of
Company rule in India during the 1858 Parliamentary debates that con-
sidered dissolving its power and transferring it to the Crown, Mill
(1990/2020) writes that India’s unfitness for representative government
“increases the mischief and danger of its administration by the unchecked
power of a Cabinet Minister”:

There is far more danger in India than in any Colony, of the ignorant or
corrupt misuse of Ministerial power; because India is less understood than
any Colony, because its people are less capable of making their voice heard,
16 V. Y. KAO

and because it is more difficult for Parliament to interfere in its administra-

tion with adequate knowledge, than in the affairs of any Colony. (par 859)

Both native despots and unrighteous foreigners stood as obstacles to an

already-determined path toward progress, and undeveloped populations
were vulnerable to both.
Although the monogenist view of the improvability of less developed
races represented the more optimistic interpretation of nineteenth-­century
improvement for colonized populations, it was also responsible for a par-
ticular aspect of nineteenth-century imperialism that remains the target of
much postcolonial criticism. By comparing all societies using the same
western developmental yardstick, “non-Western societies were deprived
both of their history (reduced to imitating the Western epic) and of their
culture (left only in vestiges that ought to be made rapidly to disappear)”
(Rist 2002, p. 43). Not only did non-western societies need to adjust
themselves to a European teleology and developmental arc, their forward
movement along improvement’s many stages would have to be guided or
coerced by a superior culture. Because they could not cultivate themselves
properly, they must be cultivated, worked on, labored over. Victorianism’s
consolidation of agricultural capitalism’s mastery over nature and the
Enlightenment’s faith in the future with its own focus on stadial progress
created an imperial ideology that built the basic tenets of improvement
into a relationship of power over the colonized.
Because improvement’s transformation into imperial domination was
so closely associated with central trends in Victorian social thought, it
would seem probable that as the Victorian period ended and the First
World War crushed what optimism remained in Enlightenment progress,
that Victorian improvement would have become an anachronism, or at
least increasingly peripheral after the first two decades of the twentieth
century. But faith in the core elements of improvement ideology—prog-
ress as teleological, the human ability to control our own fate by mastering
nature, the standardized stages of advancement, and the paternalistic bur-
den of the more advanced nations—remained strong, perhaps even gain-
ing ground, after the War. For instance, the language of improvement
permeates Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the text
that preceded the Treaty of Versailles in putting an end to the First World
War. Article 22 transformed improvement from a by-product of Victorian
culture into an internationally sanctioned justification for imperial domi-
nance of the Allied powers over the colonized countries of the world. The
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 17

Article redistributed the colonies of defeated Axis powers to the winners

for the purpose of continuing the colonies’ development along the stages
of progress.
The Article’s language reveals its affinity with the improvement ideol-
ogy that had incubated over the last two centuries. The first point reads:

To those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of the late war

have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly gov-
erned them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by
themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there
should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such
peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the perfor-
mance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant. (qtd in Rist
2002, p. 60)

The colonies, inhabited by those “not yet able to stand by themselves,”

are denied the responsibility for their own welfare on the basis of being
un-modern. Their “well-being” and “development” needs to be under-
taken by “civilization,” or in other words, the Allied powers, and such a
task should be sanctioned by the international community. The second
and third points go into further detail: the “tutelage of such peoples
should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources,
their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this
responsibility,” and the nature of that responsibility will “differ according
to the stage of the development of the people” (qtd in Rist 2002, p. 60).
These points echo the nineteenth century’s beliefs in teleology, stadial
advancement, and the role of already-improved nations. Rist (2002) iden-
tifies Article 22 as the beginning of “the making of a world system” (p. 47)
that evolved into the current notion of capitalist development. Article 22
is a key point in the narrative of improvement that connects an eighteenth-­
century English agrarian capitalism to the Continental Enlightenment,
and both of these to the Victorian national and imperial ideal and the way
we conceive of global north-south relations today.
Another important point along this narrative stretch is President
Truman’s 1949 inaugural address, the “Point Four Speech,” the fourth
point of which established “the ‘development age’” (Rist 2002, p. 71).
The fourth point emphasized the US’ dominance in a new world in which
“the old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place”
(p. 71). The US would make the “benefits” of their scientific and
18 V. Y. KAO

industrial progress “available for the improvement and growth of under-

developed areas,” areas whose “economic life is primitive and stagnant”
(p. 71). The US, being “pre-eminent among nations” (p. 71), possesses
“the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people” (p. 71),
and would do so by capital investment and increasing the industrial pro-
duction of the underdeveloped nations (pp. 71–72). Truman’s speech
represents the first wide circulation of the word “underdeveloped” (Rist
2002, p. 73), and ties development discourse to improvement ideology. It
presumes not just a linear trajectory of progress but that human labor is
responsible for moving toward the single target. The developed countries
would develop the underdeveloped ones, cultivating and working on
them to make them more productive and profitable, as the eighteenth-­
century agriculturalists produced and made profitable the English coun-
tryside. Because so many backward nations existed in the world, it could
be deduced that underdevelopment was the naturally occurring stage (Rist
2002, p. 73), and that hard work and discipline was what moved a nation
along its path. Furthermore, the concept recalls the monogenist theory of
races: we are all capable of arriving at the same end point despite our cur-
rent uneven statuses, provided that we all play the same game.
Robert J. C. Young (2001) has written that since the Second World
War, the “keystone” of global economic theories has been the concept of
“‘development,’ which is a way of describing the assumed necessity of
incorporating the rest of the world into the realm of modernity, that is, the
western economic system, in which capitalism produces progressive eco-
nomic growth” (p. 49). Postwar development added to nineteenth-­
century improvement’s understanding of stadial progress the belief that
such progress must be “given an impetus by large-scale industrial or infra-
structure projects undertaken by a centralized state” (p. 49). Massive state
investment would enable a traditional agricultural economy to “take off”
and become a “‘modern’ industrial one” (p. 49). In Development,
Geography, and Economic Theory, Paul Krugman (1995) refers to this
postwar-era notion of development “high development theory,” and sees
the 1950s as the age of prevalent belief in state-sponsored industrial invest-
ment among development economists. High development theory argued
that “strategic complementarity played a key role in development: external
economies arose from a circular relationship in which the decision to
invest in large-scale production depended on the size of the market, and
the size of the market depended on the decision to invest” (p. 23). In
other words, as investment would create the market, and the bigger the
 ADAPTING IMPROVEMENT: SCREEN AFTERLIVES… 19

former, the bigger the latter would become, incentivizing countries to

develop would create more wealth not only for those countries but a big-
ger pot for everyone, as more potential trading partners arose. High devel-
opment theory offered a more democratic model of international relations
than the old colonial system, for no longer would the post-colonies be
purposefully under-industrialized so that ex-colonial powers could use their
raw materials to industrialize their own nations. Postcolonial societies could
make themselves in the image of their former colonizers. High develop-
ment theory still made room for only one definition of what it meant to be
modern, and one path along which that modernity could be achieved.
As the latter half of the twentieth century wore on, however, the popu-
larity of high development theory declined, all but disappearing from the
field of economics by 1980 (Krugman 1995, p. 28). The reasons for this
were varied. In those same decades, the discipline moved toward mathe-
matical modeling, and accurate modeling of high development theory
proved difficult if not impossible. High development theory was also “dis-
credited by lack of practical success”: in Krugman’s formulation, “relative
to the hopes of the 1950s and even the 1960s, the performance of most
developing countries has been dismal” (p. 24). Such “dismal” perfor-
mance, despite the foreign aid supplied by richer nations, led to decreased
funding for the positions created to advise on such transactions, many of
which were held by development theorists (pp. 23–24). Still, the question
among economists was whether high development theory worked as a
theory—and whether the theory worked in practice—not, more funda-
mentally, whether we should reconceptualize the definition, means, mea-
sures, or purpose of development.
As high development theory waned, the economies of India and the
Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan)
grew rapidly when state bureaucracies scaled back control of their national
economies and opened them up to global free trade, as if to rub it in that
the theory was wrong all along. Starting in the 1960s, these countries
combined high rates of savings and investment with rapidly improving
education levels, moderate inflation rates, and a high degree of openness
to and integration with world markets (Krugman et al. 2018, p. 744).
These economic “miracles,” joined later in the 1970s and 1980s by
Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and eventually China, encouraged
economists to replace the primary mover in high development theory—
the centralized state—with the free market. Although there were local
differences in how their miraculous growth occurred (the establishment of
Another random document with
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some measurements making it more, and some less than the 100
feet here given.
When things were in their natural state, undisturbed by man, the
Birket el Keiroon was a lake, as it is now. In those days, as in our
own, it was supplied with water, just as the pool within the enclosure
of Karnak, and other pools, and all the wells in Egypt, by natural
infiltration; for the water of the river percolates readily through the
porous strata, and flows into any sufficiently deep depressions, or
excavations. The existence of the oases also in the desert must be
accounted for in this way.
The Bahr Jusuf Canal had, at some unrecorded date, been
brought along the foot of the Libyan range. Starting from Diospolis
Parva, by the air-line forty miles below Thebes, it had traversed the
whole of the rest of the valley; then, passing through the Delta, it had
reached the sea, somewhere in the neighbourhood of modern
Alexandria; a distance, again, in the air-line of 400 miles; though, of
course, this falls very far short of giving the measure of its ceaseless
sinuosities. This Grand Canal of old Egypt now carries off about a
twenty-eighth part of the water that passes over the cataract of
Philæ. In its course it flows along the depressed range that forms the
eastern boundary of the Faioum. In this depressed range there is a
ravine through which in early days, at the season of the inundation,
some of the overflow of the Bahr Jusuf found its way to the top level
of the Faioum. It is not easy now, to decide whether it got through
naturally at first, or whether the ravine was canalized to enable it to
pass through. At all events it is evident that, if there had originally
been a natural passage, it was levelled and enlarged by man
availing himself of natural fissures and depressions. But however
this might have been, the inundation having found its way on to the
upper level of the Faioum, appears to have formed there an
immense morass.
The first condition, then, of the district had been a dry desert,
precisely resembling any other part of the desert, except that it
slanted from what may be spoken of as the rim of its mussel-shell-
like depression down to the spring-fed Birket el Keiroon. Its second
condition, that now before us, is what was brought about by the
water of the inundation, that had in some way or other been let into
the district: it formed wherever it was retained, and chiefly on the
upper plateau, a vast extent of morasses. We have the evidence of
geology for the former—for we see that the original surface of the
district consisted of thin layers of limestone, alternating with layers of
clay—and of tradition for the latter.
We now come to the third, which is the historical, stage. By a
series of enormous dykes, some of them several miles in length, the
enclosed space having a breadth also of some miles, the inflowing
water was confined to certain portions of the upper plateau; perhaps
the whole of the upper plateau was by these means formed into a
lake. The water thus retained and secured, was amply sufficient for
the perennial irrigation of the whole of the descent reaching from the
upper southern plateau down to the Birket el Keiroon, and for a
district to the west and south, and, when the effects of the inundation
began to be exhausted in the valley of Egypt, for the contiguous
departments of Memphis and Heracleopolis. In this way the creation
of the Faioum, the most fertile province in Egypt, was far from being
the whole of the benefit derived from these vast waterworks.
The lake, or series of connected lakes, formed on the summit of
the plateau may have been twenty miles long, and two or three wide.
This was the famous Lake Mœris. The water was made to enter the
lake by a channel, which probably commenced at the modern
Howarah, and was drawn off for irrigation outside the Faioum by a
channel which appears to have passed out at Illahoun. In each of
these a sluice was constructed. The extreme costliness of opening
and shutting these sluices shows that they must have been
enormous structures: but this was only in proportion to the vast
volume of water that passed through them. To fill such lakes during
the time of the high water of the inundation nothing less than a
considerable river would have sufficed. We can only think it very
much to the credit of these primæval engineers that they managed
such sluices at all. Nothing like either the slatts, or the locks, on
some of our rivers for holding back the water, would have answered
their purpose. They wisely made the channel for letting out the water
quite distinct from that for letting it in; for, if one of the sluices got out
of order, then the other might be used while the damages of the
injured one were being repaired. In a matter of life and death to so
many it would not have done at all to have had only one string to
their bow.
But to revert to the gains of these vast hydraulic constructions. An
entirely new department had been added to Egypt. It was called the
Arsinoite, or Crocodilopolite nome, from Arsinöe or Crocodilopolis, its
capital; and turned out, from its more thorough exposure to air than
was possible in the valley of Egypt, the richest and most productive
part of the kingdom. Its produce was better and more varied. For the
six low-water months also during which the stored-up treasure of its
great lake flowed back into the valley, it maintained the irrigation of
the contiguous river-side departments. Some of the canals of India
may have done as much, but no work of man was ever grander in its
conception, more completely successful in all it aimed at achieving,
or of greater and more undoubted utility. It must have brought into
being, and kept in existence, more than 500,000 souls in the
department it created, and in those whose productiveness it
increased; for we are speaking of land which, we must remember,
was not cultivated as our farms, or even as our gardens are, and
which produced never less than two crops a year; and which not
being inundated, as the land in the valley, but irrigated, and warped,
regularly, and at will, all the year round, was capable of yielding three
crops annually. Every square foot of ground in the Faioum, all the
conditions of warmth, fertility, and moisture being always present,
was kept working, at the highest power, through every hour of the
twelve months.
In Lake Mœris the crocodile abounded, having come in with the
water. It thus became to the inhabitants of the nome the symbol of
the life-giving water; and, having become to their minds the
representative of that upon which everything depended, as had been
the case with other symbols, it was held sacred, and eventually
worshipped. Just so in the lower departments outside, where they
had once had too much water, and which had not become
inhabitable till the water had been drained, and dyked off, and
regulated, not the crocodile, but the ichneumon, the enemy of the
crocodile, had, by an analogous process, become an object of
worship. They had suffered from water, and could only with difficulty
keep it from overwhelming their lowlands; and so they made a
symbol, for the idea of regulating water that encroached and was
destructive, of that which was supposed to destroy what their
neighbours had made a symbol of water itself. Here was a symbol
upon a symbol. But these were people who thought in hieroglyphics;
and to get to an understanding of what they meant we must translate
their hieroglyphical modes of thought and expression into our own
direct modes.
This lake so abounded in fish—more than twenty species were
found in it—that the daily take, during the six months the water was
flowing out, was sold for a talent of silver, about two hundred pounds
of our money. During the time the water was flowing in the average
of the amounts of the daily sales was the third of a talent. The king
gave these proceeds of the lake fisheries to the queen for pin-
money. The quantity of fish taken was so great that there was at
times a difficulty in pickling and drying it.
Herodotus describes Lake Mœris as 450 miles in circumference.
These figures are probably not those of an ignorant copyist, but what
the historian himself set down in his original manuscript, for he gives
the measurement in schœni as well as in stadia. The statement, of
course, is an impossibility, for the true Lake Mœris could not have
been more than twenty miles in length, or more than four in width.
No one can suppose that Herodotus is here drawing a long bow to
astonish his countrymen with a traveller’s tale. If he had been at all
capable of doing anything of this kind, he never could have written a
book of such value as all competent judges have ever assigned to
his great work; and whatever he might have written would soon have
fallen into deserved contempt. It has occurred to me that we may
explain his figures by supposing that he meant them to give the
circumference of the whole water-system of the Faioum. On the
southern ridge of the mussel-shell he saw the great Lake Mœris;
along its northern side he saw what we distinguish by the name of
Birket el Keiroon; he saw the eastern extremities of the two
connected by a broad canal, and in like manner their western
extremities; and throughout the intervening descent he found a
complete network of irrigating canals. As he makes no separate
mention of the Birket el Keiroon, the probability is that he considered
it to be a part of Lake Mœris. Regarding, then, the two lakes as part
of the same plan, and as equally the work of man, and finding them
so intimately connected with canals, he looked upon the whole as
one lake enclosing the cultivated Faioum, and so he speaks of the
whole under a single name, and gives a measurement of the
circumference of the whole as that of Lake Mœris. What he says of
the difficulty he had in understanding what had become of the earth
raised in excavating the lake would apply to Birket el Keiroon,
supposing it to have been artificially formed. This is almost a
demonstration of his having regarded it as a part of Lake Mœris. Of
course there could have been no difficulty of this kind with respect to
the true Lake Mœris, for that had not been formed at all by
excavation, but by dykes: it was a great dam, or series of dams, and
the earth required for the construction of the dykes was all the earth
that had been moved. The difficulty, therefore, here must have been
just the very opposite to that which occurred to Herodotus, because,
before the water of the inundation had deposited any or much mud in
the district, the problem the engineer had to solve was, where he
was to get sufficient earth from to make the dykes.
Some travellers have spoken of the broad belt of shingly gravel on
the south side of Birket el Keiroon, as a phenomenon that needs
explanation. They ask—Where is the fertile soil that ought to be
there? The answer, I suppose, is—That it may be found precisely
where it ought to be, that is, at the bottom of the Birket el Keiroon. At
times a great deal of water has passed through the canals, as
formerly from Lake Mœris itself, into the Birket el Keiroon. This must
have been very great on the occasion of such a mishap as a break in
the dykes, which doubtless occurred at times, especially when things
were going out of order. The beach, therefore, of the Birket el
Keiroon has been very variable, having often been very considerably
advanced. To whatever point the water rose, so far the wash of the
waves, breaking on the beach, would float off the light particles of
soil, and transport them to the quiet bottom of deep water. What
there would be a difficulty in explaining would be, not the absence of,
but the finding of Nile-mud soil in this belt that margins the Birket el
Keiroon.
In some parts of the old bed of the now dry Lake Mœris we find
deposits of Nile-mud sixty feet thick. Again, this is what might have
been expected. The water of the inundation flowed into the lake
heavily charged with mud. The lake was still water. The sediment,
therefore, was speedily deposited at the bottom. This process was
repeated every year. Say that a film of the fourth of an inch was
deposited each year from Amenemha to Strabo, the whole of the
sixty feet will be accounted for. But this deposition of mud must also
have been going on during the antecedent unrecorded centuries of
the morass-period.
This will also account for something more, that is, for the disuse
and obliteration of the lake. The mud had at last taken the place of
the water. The dykes had not been made of any great height at first,
but, as the soil rose both within and on the outside, they had, in the
course of two thousand years, been frequently raised
correspondingly. Of course, the bed of the Nile, like that of the Po,
gradually rises, but the amount of this rise is not great, and would
bear but a small proportion to the rise of the bottom of the lake. Lake
Mœris, therefore, contained in itself, as so many natural lakes have
done, a suicidal element. What made it a lake was destined to make
it one day, what it has long been, dry land. This was, from the first,
only a question of time. Water could, of course, again at this day be
dammed up upon the site of the old lake, but only by taking it from
the river at a higher point than of old; higher, that is to say, than the
inlet of the Bahr Jusuf Canal at the old Diospolis Parva; for instance,
it might be necessary to take it now from above the Cataract of
Philæ, though, indeed, if that could be engineered, we cannot
suppose that it would pay, for the Faioum, including the bed of the
old lake, is pretty well irrigated now, though, of course, it has no
storage of water for the needs of the adjacent river-side lands.
It is obvious that we must connect with these vast and
scientifically-carried-out hydraulic works of the Faioum, the
registration of the height of the annual inundation Herodotus
mentions, and of which we have still existing evidence in the rock-cut
records at Semnéh, we referred to in our first chapter. He says this
registration was commenced in the time of Mœris. Now Mœris was
that Amenemha III., who constructed these great reservoirs of the
Faioum, and after whom they were ever afterwards called. The
connexion between the yearly marking of the height of the rising at
Semnéh, in Nubia, and the reservoirs of the Faioum might have
been that the register at Semnéh was a detective apparatus for
showing how much water ought each year to have been brought into
the reservoirs; it would also indicate what was the need for irrigation
in the contiguous departments outside the Faioum; and thus be a
guide for the regulation of the amount of water that ought to be let
out each year.
In the waterworks of the Faioum there was a grand utility with
which our thought is more than satisfied: in the Labyrinth was seen
the architectural glory of the newly-created province; it was the
greatest construction of the old Monarchy: the Pyramids had been a
rude introduction to it; and it suggested to the younger monarchy the
chief structures of Karnak. If we could now behold it, as it stood at
the time when the Hyksos broke into Egypt to become its masters for
between four and five centuries, we should regard it as one of the
most historically interesting and instructive buildings ever erected in
the world.
Its primary conception had been that of a place of assembly for the
Parliaments of old Egypt. At that time one court, to which were
attached 250 chambers, half being above, and half below ground,
appears to have been assigned to each of the twenty-seven
departments of the kingdom. Each of these chambers was roofed
with a single stone slab. No material but stone had been used
throughout the structure. Its pillars were monoliths of red granite, and
of a limestone so white as to have been mistaken for Parian marble,
and of so compact a texture as to receive a good polish. The
sculptures of the courts and chambers were singularly bold and
good. Those of each court, and its connected chambers, had
reference to the history, the peculiarities, and the religion of the
department to which it had been assigned. Besides the chambers
were numerous halls, porticoes, and passages. The area of the roof,
composed of the enormous slabs just mentioned, may have formed
the actual place of assembly for the collected deputies of the
departments. On the north side stood the Pyramid in which was
buried Amenemha III., who, if he had not originally designed the
Labyrinth, had, at all events, been its chief constructor, for his
scutcheon is frequently found in the existing remains. This Pyramid
was cased with the white limestone used in the Labyrinth itself. The
dimensions of the figures sculptured upon it were unusually large.
This form having been incorporated into the general design, for it
was placed in front of the north, which was the open side, must have
gone some way towards breaking the monotony of the horizontal
and perpendicular lines of the Labyrinth itself.
Herodotus saw it after its partial restoration by the Dodecarchs.
They had restored twelve of its courts, one for each of themselves.
Those were days of decadence, when what would contribute to the
greatness, not of the kingdom, but of the individual ruler, was the
governing idea in royal minds. It had first fallen into decay, because
into disuse, during the long period of Hyksos occupation; and on the
rise of the new monarchy the place of assembly had been removed
to Thebes, where Sethos had constructed his grand hypostyle hall
for that very purpose. It had, therefore, at the time when the twelve
kings took it in hand, been disused and dilapidated for a period of
between fifteen and twenty centuries, probably for as long a time as
has elapsed from the days of Augustus to our own day. In that long
period we can imagine to what an extent it had been resorted to as a
quarry for limestone, and building materials. This will account for the
restorations of the twelve kings having been so considerable, that
Herodotus speaks of them as having been the builders of the
structure he saw.
Above two thousand years more have since elapsed, the whole of
which have been years of neglect, and wilful dilapidation; and sad,
indeed, is now the state of the grand building, once the grandest in
all the world, upon which men had bestowed so much labour and
thought, and of which those, to whom it belonged, had been so
proud. An Arab canal has been carried through the centre of it. What
remains is buried in the rubbish-heaps formed by its own overthrow
and destruction. Still, there must be much within and beneath those
heaps that might be disinterred. The whole ought to be carefully and
critically examined. It is evident that these remains, from their extent
and their connexion with the old monarchy, of which the original
structure was the chief and most historical monument, are the most
promising of all fields for Egyptological investigation.
 CHAPTER XV.
HELIOPOLIS.

A sense of our connexion with the past vastly enlarges our sympathies, and
supplies additional worlds for their exercise.—Edinburgh Review.

In going to Heliopolis I turned out of the way a few steps to look at

the old sycamore many a pilgrim visits in the belief that Joseph and
Mary, and the young Child, during their flight into Egypt, rested in its
shade. There is no intimation that the Holy Family went beyond
Pelusium, or Bubastis. To have gone so far would satisfy the
requirements of the sacred narrative. As they were poor, probably
they did not go far into the land, except that it might have been in the
exercise of Joseph’s trade: though indeed I cannot imagine any one
in Egypt, except a Jew, employing a Jewish carpenter. Of course, of
the Jews who went down into Egypt there would be some who would
be desirous of visiting Heliopolis, the On of Genesis, which was very
interestingly connected with Jewish history; and, therefore, it is just
possible the Holy Family may have gone so far.
But as to this tree. If one of its kind could possibly have lived so
many centuries in Egypt, which is highly improbable, even under all
the circumstances most favourable for the supply of water and
protection from the wind, it would have required an oft-repeated
miracle to have saved it from the axe during the many long periods
of disorder Egypt has passed through since Joseph’s sojourn. The
wood of a large tree is, in Egypt, too tempting at such times to be
long spared.
I do not know the date of the first mention of this tree, but I think
two hundred and fifty years would amply satisfy all the appearance
of age it presents. Pococke, from whom I may observe in passing,
that a great deal of the information, and many of the learned
references contained in several modern works on Egypt, have been
borrowed without acknowledgment, and in some cases taken
verbatim, tells us that at the date of his visit, which was in 1737, a
tree, I conclude the one still standing, was shown by the Copts as
the one that afforded shelter to the Holy Family; but that the Latins
denied its genuineness, affirming that they had cut down the true
tree, that is to say, the one that had previously done duty in
supplying a visible object for the legend, and had carried it to
Jerusalem. This was probably false. Supposing it, however, to be
true, it was a discreditable act, such as you might have expected
from such monks.
But we have arrived at the tree. It at once appears that the feelings
of some of the party are too deep for utterance. On these occasions
knowledge and reason have to fight, against something or other, a
battle that is lost often before it is begun. Belief is so much more
natural and pleasant than iconoclasm. If you would but let yourself
alone—of course you say nothing that would disillusion other people
—their devout and heart-contenting imaginations would be reflected
in yourself. As it is, you cannot help feeling the contagion. The
upshot of the matter is, you are not altogether satisfied with your own
unbelief, nor at all benefited by your half disposition to participate in
the belief of your friends. As to the believer, his emotions are every
way pleasant and satisfactory to himself.
But what took me to On was not to see the tree, but that I might
stand before the Obelisk of Osirtasen, the oldest obelisk in Egypt,
which has been pointing to the sky now for more than four thousand
years—from the days of the old monarchy, previous to the invasion
of the Hyksos. To them we may feel thankful for having allowed it to
stand; and there was no International in those days. It had been
erected for some centuries, when Abraham came down into Egypt.
Joseph and Moses, who had both been admitted to the Priest Caste,
and were learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, stood before it,
and read the inscription, word for word, as the erudite Egyptologer
reads it this day. Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato all studied
here. Heliopolis was then the most celebrated university in the world
for philosophy and science. Strabo was shown the house in which
Plato had resided. Herodotus found the priests here in better repute
for their learning than any elsewhere in Egypt. All these, and a host
of other well-known Greeks, Romans, and Jews resided and studied
here, during the many centuries of its renown. They all visited again
and again, and walked round and deciphered, or had deciphered to
them, the inscription on each side of this spit of granite. In those
days it seemed to them a wonderful monument of hoar antiquity—far
beyond anything that could be seen in their own countries.
Everything they then saw at Heliopolis has been reduced to mounds
of rubbish now, excepting this single stone. What a halo of interest
invests it! Who would not wish to see it? Who can be unmoved as he
looks upon it? Fifty centuries of history, and all the wisdom of Egypt
are buried in the dust under his feet. You shift your position, and then
smile at yourself—a sort of feeling had come upon you that you were
obstructing the view of Joseph, or of Herodotus; that you were
standing in the way of Plato, or of Moses.
But though the carking tooth of time has in no way set its mark on
the monument of Osirtasen, a small fly has for the present
obliterated, on three sides of it, the record he placed upon them. It
has done this by filling up the incised hieroglyphics with its mud-
cells. Whether it be a mason-wasp, or a bee, I was unable to
discover, the cells being out of reach. I saw the same temporary
eclipse of the sculptures and hieroglyphics going on at Dendera and
elsewhere. The venom of this little insect is, I was told, equal to what
I saw of its impudence.
The drive to Heliopolis is well worth taking on its own account. I
found by the wayside a greater variety of culture, and of plants, than
elsewhere in Egypt; oranges, lemons, ricinus, (which, with its spikes
of red flowers and broad leaves, is, here, a handsome plant,)
cactuses, vineyards, olive-trees, Australian eucalyptuses, and many
other trees and plants.
Before I went to Heliopolis I asked a Scotchman I found myself
seated next to at dinner one day at the table d’hôte, whether it was
worth one’s while to go? ‘I will tell you just how it is,’ he replied. ‘I
have been there. There is nothing to see; but it will give you a
pleasant afternoon. It is like going out a fishing. The day is fine. The
country looks well. You have a pleasant friend, and a good luncheon,
with cigars and whisky. You come home without having seen a fish;
but you are not dissatisfied with yourself for having gone.’ Having
again met this gentleman after I had been there, he asked me how I
had liked Heliopolis? He seemed so thoroughly satisfied with his own
matter-of-fact, and very intelligible, way of regarding the world, and
all it contains, that I refrained from telling him what I had thought. In
his presence I almost doubted whether any pearls, excepting his,
were not counterfeits: at all events, I was sure they would appear so
to him. This, however, was but a momentary misgiving. There are
some other sorts which, though not so common, are quite as
genuine as his; perhaps, too, (but when one writes in English this
must not be said without expressions of humility, and of readiness to
receive correction,) they may have been formed by animals, the
ingredients of whose food were somewhat more varied than is the
case with the ordinary mollusk. But, be this as it may, those that are
of the rarer sort have the advantage that, while they do not in the
least interfere with the enjoyment of the sunshine, the pleasant
scene, the friend, the good cigar, and the old whisky (perhaps rather
giving depth to the enjoyment, because refining it), they are in
themselves, and even without these agreeable adjuncts, a source of
never-failing enjoyment. They are, as was said of such things long
ago, as good for the night as for the day. They go with us into the
country, and accompany us on our travels. It may, however, be
objected to them that, in this country, they generally make their
possessor unpractical, and leave him poorer, except in ideas, than
they found him. There is no denying that it is so here, very often. Is
the reason of this that our governing class, whether we interpret
those words to mean the class from which our legislators, and
administrators, have hitherto very generally been taken, or the class
that put them in their places, that is, the shopocracy (can we hope
anything better from our new governing class, that of the British
artizan?) have cared but little for these things? Influences of this kind
have made us a money-worshipping people—not that we have loved
money more than other people, but that money has had too much
power amongst us—so that too many of us, like my Scotch
acquaintance, have learnt to pooh-pooh everything which does not
fetch money—that is to say, nature and history, which are the
materials out of which truth is constructed; and art, poetry,
philosophy, and science, which are the construction itself: everything
but money, and what will bring money in the market. And so, too, it
came about that our highest education was merely a form of
classicism accommodated to a narrow and shortsighted theology:
what both nature and history might have taught would have been
inconvenient, or, be that as it may, was not needed.
We know that in certain exceptional cases (they ought not to be so
very exceptional) a man may possess the world that is to come, as
well as the world my Scotch acquaintance had so tight a grip of. This
is a difficult thing to do: on our system, and with our ideas, a very
difficult thing; still one that may be done. The difficulty, however,
appears to be very considerably increased, when the attempt is
made to add to these two the possession of the world that has been.
It is hard to keep two balls up in the air, and going, at the same time;
but, to add a third, and to attend to all three properly, to give each its
own due space and time, and to get them all to work harmoniously
together, is a feat that reveals a very un-English mind, but still it is
the master-mind. What were the performances of Egyptian Proteus
to this? By turns he was many things, but here is a man who, at one
and the same time, has three souls, and lives three lives. It is so,
however, only in appearance: the interpretation of the Parable is that
the man has passed mentally out of the flat-fish stage of being, in
which sight is possible only in one direction; and has reached the
higher stage in which it is possible to look in every direction; and so
to connect all that is seen all around, as that the different objects
shall not reciprocally obscure, but illumine each other.
 CHAPTER XVI.
THEBES—LUXOR AND KARNAK.

For all Egyptian Thebes displays of wealth,

Whose palaces its greatest store contain:
That hundred-gated city that sends forth
Through every gate an hundred cars of war,
Well horsed, well manned.—Homer’s Iliad.

Luxor, Karnak, and Thebes, are three fragments of the hundred-

gated city of Homer. The landing, to which you moor your boat, is
about two hundred yards from the great temple of Luxor. The open
space, between the landing and the temple, is a slight acclivity, and
is completely covered with sand. To the right and left of the open
space are the mean buildings of the modern town. Those on the right
cluster round and conceal the greater part of the temple, leaving only
a grand colonnade visible from the water, at the further side of the
open sandy acclivity. As you enter this colonnade, and stand in the
roofed hall among the mighty pillars that support the roof, a feeling
comes over you that you have shrunk to the dimensions and
feebleness of a fly. The oldest sanctuary, of which there are any
remains still standing here, was built by Amenophis III., who
belonged to the dynasty that expelled the Hyksos. It was now seen
that Thebes would be a safer capital than Memphis, which was too
near the Semitic border. The close connexion also that had now
been formed with Ethiopia, sometimes being that of its complete
subjection, made a more southern capital desirable. The erection of
the splendid temple of Amenophis indicates the complete triumph of
the new policy. This took place about four thousand years ago.
Rameses the Great, the most magnificent and prolific architect the
world has ever seen, was not satisfied with the original structure.
Following the example of his father, Sethos, he conceived a plan for
investing Thebes with a grandeur and a glory that none of the
Empires, that have grown to greatness during the thousands of
years that have passed since his day, have done anything to rival, or
approach. And this plan he carried out to a successful completion.
Part of it was the architectural connexion of Luxor and Karnak. For
this purpose it was necessary to give additional height and
massiveness to Luxor. This he did by attaching to the extremity of
the temple of Amenophis, nearest to Karnak, a grand court, enriched
externally with colossal statues of himself and two obelisks; one of
which is now standing where he placed it; the other is in the Place de
la Concorde at Paris. Having made the Temples of Luxor and
Karnak, by their height and massiveness, their lofty courts, propylæa
and obelisks, reciprocally conspicuous and imposing from each
other, the direct connexion was effected by a broad straight road, or
street, nearly two miles in length, guarded on either side by a row of
sphinxes. Some of these, at the Karnak end of the connecting street,
still remain; they are ram-headed. Fragments of others are found in
the débris nearer Luxor.
Along the line of this old street, which, however, except at its
northern end, is quite obliterated by rubbish mounds, cultivation, and
palm-groves, you ride to Karnak. As you pass no houses by the way
the distance seems great. Here was for many centuries the splendid
centre of the most splendid city in the world. On nothing like it did the
sun shine. The dwelling-houses, many of them Diodorus tells us four,
some even five, stories high, were, we may be sure, not allowed to
approach so near as to interfere with the solemnizing effect of the
long dromos of sphinxes. This effect was the very object of these
avenues of sphinxes and colossi, which were prefixed to the
temples. They shut out the world as the worshipper approached the
temple, and prepared his mind for the services and the influences of
the house of God.
The area of the sacred enclosure at Karnak was a square of about
2,000 feet each way. The enclosing wall is still everywhere traceable.
In some parts it is but little injured by time. There were twenty-six
temples within the enclosure. It was a city of temples. The axis of the
main series points across the river to the gorge of the valley, in the
Libyan hills, at the head of which were placed the tombs of the kings.
Another series of temples reached down to the south-west entrance
of the enclosure, where was the termination of the Luxor-Karnak
street. These two series of temples may be roughly described as
close and parallel to the north-eastern and north-western sides of the
enclosure. The rest of the space was filled with more or less
detached structures.
Here was, if not the sublimest—for the mass and simplicity of the
Great Pyramid may contest that—yet certainly the most magnificent
architectural effort ever made by man. What prompted it? At what did
it aim? Of course it was the embodiment of an idea, and that idea
was, in its simplest expression, the same as the idea contained in
the Greek temple, and the Christian cathedral. It was the glorification
of the builders conception of the Deity. The difference in the
structures, in their fashion and effect, arose out of the differences in
the conceptions these people had respectively formed of the Deity.
In the conception of the Egyptian awe was the predominant feature.
Whatever else Deity might be, awfulness was its first attribute.
Beauty, if at all, came in a comparatively low degree. With the
Greeks and the Christians it was very different. The gods of the
Greeks were connected with and took delight in Nature. The God of
the Christians was the author of Nature. With them, therefore, the
recognition, the creation, and the exhibition of what was beautiful,
formed a part of the service of God. They felt that in religion a sense
of, and the sight of, the beautiful dispose to love. The Egyptian
beholder and worshipper was not to be attracted and charmed, but
overwhelmed. His own nothingness, and the terribleness of the
power and will of God, was what he was to feel. The soul of the
Greek, and of the Christian, was to be elevated, not crushed; to be
calmed, to be harmonized. One was the work of minds in which the
instinct of freedom was operative; the other of minds which felt the
powerlessness, the helplessness of man in the face of an
unchangeable iron order alike of Nature and of society.
Moreover, as we have already seen, in Egypt Nature herself did
not originate and nurture the thought of beauty. In Egypt were no
rocky, moss-margined streams, no hanging woods, no shady groves,
no lovely valleys. The two paramount objects in Nature, as they
presented themselves to the eye and the thought of the Egyptian,
suggested to him absolute power on the part of Nature, and absolute
dependence on the part of man. These two objects were a singularly
dull and monotonous river, but without which the Egyptian world
would be a desert, and the scorching sun, but without which all
would be darkness and death. They did everything. Without them
everything was nothing.
These stupendous structures, then, expressed the feebleness of
the worshipper by magnifying the power of the object of his worship.
They awed him, as was intended, into a sense of personal
nothingness, while they called into being and fed a sense of
irresistible power, external to man, the idea of which the peculiarities
of everything Egyptian gave rise to. Moral ideas, engendered by the
structure and working of Egyptian society, and ideas of the physical
forces which were ever before them, and to which they felt their
subjection, were entangled in their minds in an inextricable knot, and
that knot was their religion.
On the walls of these stupendous structures is written and
sculptured the history, as well as the religion, of Egypt, from
Osirtasen I., who reigned four thousand five hundred years ago,
down to the Roman Augustus: these are the earliest and the latest
names inscribed on the lithotomes of Karnak. The included space of
time embraces the two last dynasties of the primæval monarchy; the
Hyksos period; the whole of the new monarchy, when Egypt rose to
its zenith of power, glory, art, wealth, and wisdom; the domination of
Persia; the Ptolemaic sovereignty; and a part of the Roman rule.
None inscribed so much history on these walls as the two mightiest
of Egyptian conquerors and builders, Sethos, and the stronger son of
a strong father, his successor, Rameses the Great. These two
Pharaohs themselves made more history than all who had gone
before them; and none who followed them attained to their
eminence. The buildings they erected are history, as much as their
conquests.
The Coliseum is a part of Roman history. Its magnitude and its
purpose are history. It tells us that Cæsar could issue a decree that
all the world should be taxed; that Cæsar found it necessary to
dazzle and amuse the populace; that the amusements of the
populace were brutal; that amusement, not religion, was the order of
the day. So in the stones of Karnak we see the plunder and the
tribute of Asia and Ethiopia. Many a city had been made a desolate
heap, and many a fair region had been ravaged, and the silver and
the gold collected, and the surviving inhabitants swept into the
Egyptian net, and carried away captive into Egypt, to assist in
building the grand hypostyle Court of Karnak, the grandest hall ever
constructed by man. In the direction of the axis of the connected
series of temples this hall is 170 ft. long. Its width is 329 ft. It is
supported by one hundred and thirty-four columns. The central
twelve are 62 ft. high in the shaft, and 36 ft. in circumference. The
remaining one hundred and twenty-two columns are 42 ft. in height,
and 28 ft. in circumference. The lintel stone of the great doorway is
within 2 in. of 41 ft. in length. Every part of the walls, the pillars, and
the roof is covered with coloured sculptures cut by the chisel of
history, and of religion, which, however, as far as we are concerned,
belongs to history. The purpose of this hall was to provide a fitting
place for the great religious diets of the nation. It must have
appeared to the thoughts of those times that the gods had assisted
the king—who was already becoming their associate—in designing
and erecting such a structure. We, however, are aware that no
people can imagine, or undertake such structures, unless they are
inspired with the sentiment that they are the greatest among the
nations, and at the head of the world. Great things—it is more true of
literature than of architecture, but it is true of everything—are not
done by imitation but by inspiration, and nothing inspires great things
but greatness itself.
To the north-west of this stupendous and overpowering hall is an
hypæthral court 100 ft. longer, and of the same width of 329 ft. A
double row of columns traverses its central avenue. It has corridors
on each side. It was left incomplete. This is plain from the enormous
pyramidal propylons, by which it is entered, never having been
sculptured. None who came after the Great Rameses were able to
rise to the height of his conceptions. In the unsculptured walls of
these propylons are the sockets, drilled, horizontally, through their
whole thickness, for holding the beams which supported the lofty
staffs for the flags which were used on great occasions. These lofty
towers and these far-seen flags connected the temples of Karnak
with the temples on the western bank of the river, and with the
funeral processions to the catacombs of the kings in the opposite
valley of the Libyan range, just as the south-western propylons, and
the dromos of sphinxes, connected them with Luxor.
Though the name of Sesortosen, or Ositarsen I., is the first that
appears on this series of temples, it would be a mistake to suppose
that the date of the greatness of the city must be taken from his
reign. This is impossible, for he was the founder of the dynasty which
came from Thebes. Thebes, therefore, in his time—4,500 years ago
—had become sufficiently powerful to give a dynasty to Egypt. And
when we look at its site, the island in the river, the great extent of
fertile land on the east bank, with no inconsiderable extent also on
the west, and the convenient approach of the Libyan Hills to the river
side, we see that this was a spot designed by nature for one of the
great cities of old Egypt. It was great under the old monarchy, and
gave to the country the two last dynasties of that first monumentally-
known period of its history. During the succeeding 400 years of the
Hyksos domination, a cloud of almost impenetrable darkness settled
down upon it, as upon everything else Egyptian. It rose under, and
with the new monarchy. The disadvantages of the site of Memphis,
and the conveniences of that of Thebes, had been discovered. It,
therefore, now became unreservedly the repository of all the glories,
and the chief shrine of the religion of the country. The spoils of war,
the tribute of subject nations, the rent of the royal demesne, which
comprised one-third of the land of Egypt, were spent here. Next to
the court came the numerous and wealthy body of the priests; and
they, too, were chiefly—though they had also other sources of
income—supported by the rents of their estates. Besides these there
was the official class, which again we know was numerous and
wealthy. Trade also must have largely contributed to the wealth of
Thebes; for it was the emporium for the camel-borne produce of the
interior of the continent, and for the water-borne commerce with
Egypt of the East Coast of Africa, of Arabia, and of India. We may
form an estimate of the extent of this trade from the magnificence of
the Temples, which, of old times, in the East was generally
proportionate to the amount and value of the commerce carried on