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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 Excerpt:...Europe. We can yet read upon its walls the achievements of the great king. We see him leading on his armies, slaughtering his enemies, receiving the spoils of captured cities, or peacefully administering his mighty empire, then co-extensive with the known world. Over all towered the colossal image of Pharaoh himself. No description, no measurement, gives any adequate idea of the bulk of this enormous statue, now prostrate in the dust. It was formed out of a block of syenite granite, estimated to weigh when entire nearly nine hundred tons. It measures twenty-two feet from shoulder to shoulder; a toe is three feet long, the foot five feet across. Near the Rameseum are the temples of Medinet-Abou, or, as it should be written, Medina-Tabou, the city of Thebes. The largest of this group of buildings was erected by Rameses 1n., the last of the great warrior-kings of Egypt, about 1200 B.c. As in the case of his predecessors, we can trace his history on-the walls of the temple. The glowing words of Lord Lindsay do not exaggerate the impressiveness of this marvellous edifice: "I will only say that all I had anticipated of Egyptian magnificence fell short of the reality, and that it was here, surveying those Osiride pillars, that splendid corridor, with its massy circular columns; those walls lined, within and without, with historical sculptures of the deepest interest, the monarch's wars with the Eastern nations bordering on the Caspian and Bactriana--study for months, years rather!--it was here, I say, here, where almost every peculiarity of Egyptian architecture is assembled in perfection, that I first learnt to appreciate the spirit of that extraordinary people, and to feel that, poetless as they were, they had a national genius, and had stamped it on the wo...