The ancient engineers, p.6
The Ancient Engineers, page 6
In any case, the subsequent kings drove tunnels into real mountains, mostly on the west bank of the Nile opposite the city of Opet (the Egyptian Thebes of the Greeks, and the modern Luxor), which was the capital of the New Empire. Although these Pharaohs tried to hide their tombs, grave robbers gained access to all but one: that of the boy-king Tutankhamon (—XIV). The entrance to this tomb was covered by debris thrown out in digging the tomb of the later Rameses VI (—XII); and thus it was buried, forgotten, and saved for posterity.
Relieved of the staggering costs of pyramids, the kings put more of their wealth into temples and monuments, like the obelisks. Obelisks were monuments to the sun god Amon-Ra, in the form of a tall tapering shaft of Aswan granite, surmounted by a pyramidion (little pyramid) originally plated with metal—copper, gold, or electrum—to reflect the rays of the divine sun. On these shafts the kings usually included, besides the dedicatory inscription, boasts of their own virtues and feats. A 90-footer still lies in the quarry at Aswan where it was abandoned after flaws appeared in the rock. To raft the obelisks down the Nile, Egyptian rulers built 200-foot barges, the largest ships that the world had yet seen.
At one time several score of these monuments dotted the land of Khem, but only five remain. Some were felled and broken by earthquakes or settling. Many were carried off by Roman emperors to decorate Rome and Constantinople.
Others were given away to foreigners by the nineteenth-century rulers of Egypt, especially Mehmet Ali, the crafty and energetic Albanian tyrant. Mehmet Ali cared nothing for monuments and everything for money and power. Having demolished several ancient temples to make factories of the stones, he proposed to take the Great Pyramid apart for its stone and was only dissuaded when told that it would be more efficient to use a quarry nearer Cairo. As a result of the Albanian's open-handedness with the relics of the Days of Ignorance, Paris, London, and New York have one obelisk apiece.
The largest obelisk of ancient Egypt was the 105-footer made by Thothmes III (—XV) now at the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome. The largest still standing in Egypt is one of four erected for the famous Queen Hatshepsut, the aunt of Thothmes III, by her architect and favorite Senmut.
It is likely that Senmut was named Royal Architect because he was Hatshepsut's favorite, not that he became her favorite because he was such a good architect. In lowering Hatshepsut's surviving obelisk into place, Senmut's crew missed the groove along the upper edge of one side of the pedestal. Such a groove was cut in all obelisk plinths to insure that the monument should settle into place squarely centered on the pedestal. As a result of Senmut's blunder, this obelisk is several inches off-center and slightly askew. Poor Senmut was probably liquidated, along with Hatshepsut's other supporters, when Thothmes III took the throne and tried to obliterate the memory of his hated aunt by chiseling her name off all her monuments.
For moving these shafts, the Egyptians used methods like those employed in moving pyramid blocks. To erect an obelisk, they probably hauled it up an earthen ramp and dug the earth away under the butt until the obelisk had tipped up to an angle of about 45°. When the lowest edge was seated in the groove along the upper edge of the pedestal, they hauled the obelisk upright with ropes and shear legs.18 We can imagine their taking many precautions with guy ropes, braces, and cushions of brushwood to make sure that the stone did not get away from them.
In 1961 the archeologist Millet watched an Egyptian crew erect an obelisk of Rameses II in a park in the Gezira ("Island") of Cairo by much the same methods, except that two modern steel winches took the place of "the huge gangs of men who had erected the monolith in its original setting in the great temple at Tanis." Millet adds: "I went off home in the snug glow that affects every self-respecting archaeologist when he sees a survival of the past holding its own in the present. It proves what he has always secretly believed—that they did things better in those ancient days."19
Similar methods were probably used by the primitive Britons at about the time of Thothmes III in setting up the circle of upright twenty-six-ton stones for their outdoor temple at Stonehenge. In prehistoric times, thousands of similar stones were also set up in long parallel rows near Carnac, in Brittany.
Of the later Egyptian temples, the most impressive is that of Amon of Opet, usually called after the modern village of Karnak. Parts of it go back as far as —2000. Some of the early buildings were demolished to make room for grander structures, whereas others were allowed to stand while later buildings rose around them. In the course of the centuries, the temple acquired the form of a long rectangle, about 400 by 1,200 feet.
However, the symmetry of this rectangle was spoiled by kings who haphazardly added more buildings and monuments, until the vast temenos became a chaos of walls, columns, pylons, courts, temples, statues, obelisks, and shrines. Small detached temples stood here and there outside the main mass or inside the courts of the larger temples. The walls were covered with painted reliefs, showing the kings dispatching their foes and adoring their gods.
The most impressive part of the Temple of Amon is the Hypostyle Hall built by Rameses II (—XIII). Rameses was one of the ablest, most aggressive, and most self-conceited of all the kings—nearly 300 of them —who ruled the land of Khem before the Persians came. He had a mania for statues of himself, the bigger the better. After his time, Egypt was dotted with colossi displaying idealized versions of Rameses' lanky form and large hooked nose.
One colossus, dug up near Saqqara, now stands in front of the railroad station in Cairo. Remains of another, fallen and broken into three pieces at Rameses' mortuary temple in the City of the Dead, across the Nile from Opet, inspired Shelley's Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.20
The fact that the real Ramesseum and its fallen colossus do not answer at all well to Shelley's description does not detract from the beauty of the poem, which across the gulfs of time and space has awakened in the minds of millions a sense of the mighty stream of human history.
The most astonishing feature of the Hypostyle Hall is the forest of 134 immense columns. Of these, the columns of the two central rows, twelve in all, are 69 feet tall and almost 12 feet in diameter. They are topped by 11-foot foliage capitals. The regaining 122 columns are smaller. All are carved with reliefs and inscriptions. Whereas most ancient columns were built up of drums—cylindrical stones fitting one above the other— the columns of the Hypostyle Hall are made of half-drums, as whole drums would have been so large as to be awkward to handle.
Although the Hypostyle Hall is one of the world's most celebrated buildings, a closer look shows it to be more an expression of Rameses' megalomania than a worthy house for the gods. The construction is gimcracky. The columns had no foundations other than pavements of small stones. As a result, when the Nile rose to record heights in 1899, eleven columns fell over. Since then the archeologists have reset them, secured them, and erected a concrete roof over them. But the columns are so massive that a worshiper within could see practically nothing of what was going on at the far end of the temple.
Although to our skeptical age it might seem that the Egyptians devoted undue effort to tombs and temples, Egyptian engineers also worked at more mundane projects. A bas-relief on an ornamental stone mace shows an early king, known only as "Scorpion," grasping a hoe as he officiates at a canal-digging ceremony.
From Scorpion's time on, the construction of canals was a major concern of the Pharaohs and their servants. Among the first duties of a provincial governor were the digging and repair of canals. These canals were used to flood large tracts of the country during the Nile's high water, which occurs in the autumn as a result of summer rains in the lands to the south of Egypt.
The land to be flooded was cut up by dykes into a checkerboard pattern of small basins. When the basins were full, the dykes were closed up and the water was kept standing until, perhaps a month later, the ground was thoroughly soaked. Then the surplus water was drained off into the canals. .
Although the Nile js the world's most reliable river, an excessively high or low rise of the Nile spelled disaster. If the river did not rise high enough, it failed to flood the tracts laid out for that purpose, and no crops grew. If it rose too high, it washed away the dykes and nearby villages, drowning thousands.
Where fields were not low enough to be flooded directly, the peasants drew water from the canals and from the Nile by means of the swape or shaduf. The swape consisted of a bucket on the end of a cord, which hung from the long end of a pivoted boom, coimterweighted at the short end. Such swapes, mostly of very rough construction, are still used in Egypt. The posts bearing the axle on which the boom is pivoted are made of dried mud. The boom is a tree trunk with the branches lopped, and the counterweight is another mass of mud. A farmer in such a rainless land may spend up to half his working time irrigating his little plot.
Canal building continued down the centuries. Senusert III (—XXI) was such a vigorous canal builder that he became known as "the king who built the canals," and later storytellers ascribed to this one king the deeds of many. At length he became the legendary "Sesostris" of the Greek historians, whose mythical deeds included damming the Fayyfim depression west of the Nile and conquering the whole civilized world.
The Egyptians did in truth know how to build dams. At some time-perhaps as far back as King Khufu's reign—they built one in the Wadi Garawi, twenty miles southeast of Cairo, to store water for the use of workers in the nearby quarries. This dam is of rough masonry 33 feet high, between 200 and 370 feet long, and between 150 and 270 feet thick. Later—perhaps about —1300—Egyptian engineers threw a much larger stone dam across the Orontes River in Syria. This dam, a mile and a quarter long, created the Lake of IJoms. Lake and dam are both still there and still in use for local irrigation.
As a result of Egyptian canal building, Herodotos noted:
. . . whereas Egypt had formerly been a region suited for horses and carriages, henceforth it became entirely unfit for either. Though a flat country throughout its whole extent, it is now unfit for either horse or carriage, being cut up by the canals, which are extremely numerous and run in all directions.21
This is an exaggeration; the many Egyptian pictures of chariots and the remains of the chariots themselves show that there were always some fairly good roads. Borrowing the idea of the chariot from Mesopotamia, Egyptian wainwrights developed a fight, openwork chariot of refined design for sport and war.
The most far-sighted of all the canal projects, however, was begun by Nikau II22 about —600. This was a ship canal to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. But it did not run north and south through the Serbonian Swamp, between Egypt and Sinai, as does the present Suez Canal.
Instead, Nikau's canal ran east and west, from the easternmost branch of the Nile (near modern Zagazig) to Lake Timsah, the mid-point of the present Suez Canal. Thence it turned south and followed more or less the course of the Suez Canal, skirting the Bitter Lakes to the head of the Red Sea.
Nikau gave up the project, we are told, when an oracle warned him that he was laboring for the benefit of "the foreigner." Three-quarters of a century later the foreigner arrived/ under the standards of the conquering army of Cambyses23 the Persian. After the conquest of Egypt, the great Darius I24 completed the canal.
From then on the canal was alternately open and closed, as careless rulers let it fill up with sand and energetic ones dredged it out again. Ptolemaios II (—III) not only restored it but added some sort of lock or water gate. The Roman emperor Trajan restored it again; so did the Arab general 'Amr ibn-al-'As, who conquered Egypt in the +640s.
In +VIII, however, the canal went out of use for good. At this time, disorderly Arab rule allowed the whole Egyptian canal system to fall into disrepair, with the result that the teeming population of Egypt was halved by starvation. Communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea was not reopened until the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, with bands, fireworks, and Empress Eugenie. Verdi composed A'ida for the event but was two years late.
So ends the story of engineering in the days of independent ancient Egypt. To learn more about the great public works of ancient times, we must turn to that other great watershed culture, the civilization of Mesopotamia. For, if the Egyptians surpassed all other pre-classical peoples in the art of building in stone, the Mesopotamians excelled in many other aspects of civilization. We derive much more of our science, religion, and commerce from ancient Iraq than from Egypt; and in engineering, too, the ancient Mesopotamians were second to none.
THREE
THE MESOPOTAMIAN
ENGINEERS
Save in the extreme north, Iraq is an enormous flat plain, fading off into the Arabian deserts. It is barren and desolate except where irrigation brings in the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which wander placidly over its level surface. The Greeks called this land Mesopotamia—"the land between the rivers."
So vital is irrigation to Mesopotamia that an ancient Babylonian curse was: "May your canal be filled with s&nd!"1 Many of the ancient laws dealt with canals and water rights, like this one from about —VI:
The gentleman who opened his wall for irrigation purposes, but did not make his dyke strong and hence caused a flood and inundated a field adjoining his, shall give grain to the owner of the field on the basis of those adjoining.2
The great Khammurabi, called the Law-giver, who lived about —1700, was constantly writing his governors about the repair of canals:
Unto Governor Sid-iddinam say: Thus saith Khammurabi. Thou shalt call out the men who hold lands along the banks of the Damanum-canal that they may clear out the Damanum-canal. Within the present month shall they complete the work . . .3
Khammurabi also let the thirty-third year of his reign be known as the year in which he "redug the canal called 'Khammurabi-spells-abundance-for-the-people, the Beloved-of-Anu-and-Enlil,' thus he provided Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, and Isin with a permanent and plentiful water supply . . ."4 after these cities had been threatened with destruction by the drying up of the Euphrates.
In southern Mesopotamia, at the beginning of recorded history, the Sumerians—a people of unknown origin—built the city walls and temples and dug the canals that comprised the world's first engineering works. Here, for over two thousand years, little city-states bickered and fought over water rights.
The Sumerian element in the population was gradually swamped beneath a tide of Arabian nomads, who drifted in from the desert to take up the lives of farmery and city dwellers. The Semitic Akkadian tongue replaced Sumerian and spread all over the Near East as a trade language. Lugalannemundu of Sumer, Sargon of Akkad, Ur-Engur of Ur, Khammurabi of Babylon, Gandash the Kassite, and Nebuchadrezzar I of Babylon founded short-lived empires until the Assyrians overcame them all (-XII).
Before the rise of cities, the Sumerians lived in round huts built by the stud-and-mud or wattle-and-daub method. A number of slender rods —canes, saplings, or withes—were stuck in the ground in a circle. These were then plastered over with clay or mud to form a wall. Similar houses were built in Egypt and are still made in Iraq today.
When cities arose and wealth accumulated, city-dwellers changed from these circular huts to rectangular houses of brick. The Sumerian brick mold, still in use there, may be called the world's first mass-production device. Asphalt from the natural oil well of Id5 was used for mortar. A house might be whitewashed or, if pretentious enough, might be coated with plaster.
Instead of hinges like ours, the door had a pair of vertical pins at the hinge corners. The bottom pin rested in a stone door socket, usually the only piece of stone in the house. The upper pin was held in place by a strap, and the door frame was painted red to scare away demons. Windows were often barred by a grille or shutter of brick.
Most of the roofs were made of palm logs laid in a row from wall to wall. Over the logs was spread a layer of palm fronds and, over that, a layer of earth, rolled flat with a stone roller. After every rain, the Mesopotamians climbed up to their flat roofs to re-roll them, as some still do today. Many householders even raised vegetable gardens in the earth of their roofs.
Some houses had, over one or more rooms, roofs in the form of corbelled domes. These domes, like clusters of magnified beehives, are still seen in Syrian villages.
As houses grew larger, they took on the shape that ever since has been popular in southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean region. The rooms formed a hollow square; the doors and windows faced the open court or garden in the middle of the square. The larger homes often had two stories, the upper one being of flimsy mud-and-reed construction for lightness. The outside of the house, except for the front door, presented a blank brick wall to the outer world.
There were several reasons for this outside-in construction. One was the intense summer heat of the region. A learned man who went east with Alexander the Great wrote that at Susa,6 "when the sun is hottest, at noon, the lizards and snakes could not cross the streets in the city quickly enough to prevent their being burnt to death in the middle of the streets" and "barley spread out in the sun bounces like parched barley in ovens."7 The hollow square allowed the house owner to sit outdoors in the shade at all times of day.
