Chapter 1164: The Spirit of Louvre (1)

The lower floor of the glass pyramid of the Louvre is both an entrance and a reception hall. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or intentional. This hall is called the Napoleon Hall.

In the image of many people, the pyramid is used to bury the pharaoh, but not all the tombs of the pharaoh are under the pyramid.

Below the pyramid is a lost underground world with tunnels and caves, and not only the elite are buried, ordinary people and even animal mummies can also be buried under the pyramid. In one of the tombs, there is an altar dedicated to Osiris, and the wall depicts Osiris, the ruler of the underworld, who is responsible for judging the dead.

In fact, before Napoleon, many royal tombs in Egypt had been stolen. The lime layers on the pyramids were transported to Cairo for construction, and valuable burial objects were also looted by tomb robbers.

It would be better if they just took away the gold and silverware. The point is that the tomb robbers will destroy the murals on the wall and leave traces of their past. Even without Napoleon, Egyptian cultural relics are "naturally consumed".

As early as the burial of the first pharaoh, the phenomenon of tomb robbery has existed. In order to guard against these tomb robbers, the designers of the tomb have tried their best to defend them with numerous mechanisms.

Quicksand shafts, giant stone doors, hidden entrances. The entrance to the tomb is hidden, and with the strong structure of the pyramid itself, tomb robbers cannot enter.

In addition, the designer of the tomb will also design a "maze", as long as the intruder does not enter the place where the coffin is parked, there is no need to worry about the burial objects being stolen.

However, even with such a lot of trouble, the pharaohs who were in high positions during their lifetime still couldn't stop the tomb robber's pickaxe.

Not only the tombs of the nobles will be stolen, in fact, everyone will not be spared. If the situation is difficult, the living on the ground will "borrow money" from the dead. Family members would steal ancestral property, and these "house thieves" were harder to guard against than wandering grave robbers.

The tomb robbers come from all walks of life, not just the poor and crazy, the nobles who once ruled Thebes, and the high priest of Amon have also entered the Valley of the Kings many times, opening the local tombs one by one, and taking away everything they think is valuable items.

No matter how ingeniously designed the mechanism is, it cannot stop someone who knows how to crack it.

The biggest difference between tomb robbery and archaeology is the speed of excavation. Archaeologists will use a small brush to brush away the sealing soil and dust on the tomb layer by layer.

Grave robbers loot everything that can be quickly packaged, such as jewelry and utensils, and then take it to the market to sell.

Westerners are more ruthless in "archaeology". Even those stone sculptures that cannot be moved are taken away after being bombed.

Jean-François Champollion, the first curator of the Egyptian Museum of the Louvre, known as the "Father of Egyptology", moved the entire ancient Egypt here, trying to restore a complete ancient Egyptian world.

Not only the coffin of the pharaoh, but also the writing tools, crop specimens, clothing, musical instruments, and toys used by the ancient Egyptians are all collected. Perhaps Westerners know more about ancient Egypt than modern Egyptians know about their ancestors.

Pomona didn't look at the sitting statues of pharaohs, nor did she look at the famous sculpture of the scribe. She focused on a small sculpture.

Its base is inlaid with silver, and in front of a huge golden eagle with disproportionate size kneels a man kneeling, holding two spherical objects in his hands.

The eagle symbolizes the sacred in Egypt. Horus, the son of Osiris, is a falcon-headed god, but Seth only took away one eye of Horus, which is the left eye representing the moon. This sculpture seems to be Horus Both eyes are lost.

The right eye of Horus represents the sun, and the Egyptians also worshiped the sun. What made the Egyptians lose the sun?

Pomona thought of the ten plagues of Egypt, one of which was the plague of darkness.

It is also possible that this sculpture is not used for "realism", but expresses a certain emotion of the Egyptians, the fear of the dark.

However, there are many stone statues sculpted in black stone in the Egyptian Pavilion. Black always gives people a solemn and solemn feeling, and it is the most suitable for burials.

Black skirts originally represented mourning clothes, but now they have become everyday wear, and it seems that people no longer care about this taboo.

Sirius Black, his name "Sirius" represents the Sirius worshiped by the ancient Egyptians. Whenever Sirius rises from the eastern horizon, it is also the time when the Nile River floods once a year.

A flooded river does not represent a disaster, but a good harvest. It will wash the fertile soil from the upstream to the downstream.

Of course, there will be sacrifices on such an important day. The ancient Egyptians would build temples to enshrine sculptures and offer sacrifices to sculptures.

The ancient Egyptians did this not to find psychological comfort, but to hold a ceremony to let the gods live in the enshrined sculptures and portraits.

In addition to chanting scriptures to worship the God of the Nile, an eagle should be used to take eleven drops of blood and sprinkle it next to the sculpture of the God of the Nile, inviting the spirit of the God of the Nile to possess the sculpture.

It means that these sculptures stored in the Egyptian Pavilion are likely to have held a spiritual séance ceremony, and they have some kind of supernatural power.

Many Egyptian sculptures have lost their noses, including the famous Sphinx. According to popular science books, it is due to natural weathering.

In the era when science was underdeveloped, people tested whether a person was dead or alive, usually by probing through the nose, and if the breath was gone, the person died.

The ancient Egyptian statues are alive, and this "life" is different from the ancient Greek sculptures seen in the Goddess Column Hall. In other words, the ancient Egyptians did not have the concept of art, and all these sculptures were "equipment".

The statue represents the intersection of the gods and the world. To destroy the sculpture is to destroy the powerful power contained in the sculpture. Breaking the nose of the sculpture will make the statue unable to breathe.

Of course, not all sculptured noses will be destroyed. Those who destroy sculptures can accurately destroy the sculpture’s nose without destroying other parts of the sculpture, which at least proves that they are well-trained.

During the time of early Christianity, these statue-possessed ancient Egyptian gods were regarded as pagan demons.

Before Chinese papermaking was introduced to the West, papyrus and parchment were the main writing tools, especially papyrus, which was the official writing tool of the church, and even the Pope’s decrees were written on it. Kraft and parchment are more durable in wet environments.

At the same time, Egypt is also an important place for the spread of Christianity.

If the early Christian monks knew the hieroglyphs written on the papyrus, then they may have destroyed those sculptures on purpose according to the description on the inscriptions.

As time went by, after a thousand years, there were almost no people who knew hieroglyphics. It was not until the Rosetta Stone was unearthed that people regained the ability to decipher this language.

Champollion was the first scholar to decipher hieroglyphics and decipher the Rosetta Stone. He is like a star, he will be treated courteously wherever he goes. Pope Leo XII wants to appoint him as a cardinal. In order to pay tribute to him, the French Academy specially gave him a chair of Egyptology.

But he was forty-one when he died of a stroke. Most strokes occur in people over the age of sixty-five, and a small number of young people also have strokes. There is no specific age limit for strokes. After all, there are many causes of strokes.

For example, on a cool summer night, Champollion forgot to close the window, let the night wind blow his face, and then died.

When Champollion's reputation was in full swing, a young man named John Gardner Wilkinson came to Alexandria.

He was not as keen on excavation as other "Egyptologists", but copied the copies of the rubbings of the inscriptions and sorted them out silently.

He worked almost alone, when translating Egyptian hieroglyphs was almost a nationalistic affair. The French took the lead in finding a way to translate, and almost all the cultural relics with text were searched by the British to the British Museum.

Coupled with the popular collection of high society at that time, each family would have one or two Egyptian cultural relics in its display cabinet, so the translation of Egyptian text was supported by government funds.

Unlike Champollion, who had the support of huge resources, Wilkinson completely overthrew Champollion's domineering authority with the least resources.

At that time, it was generally believed that Champollion had deciphered hieroglyphs, but Wilkinson believed that Champollion only knew part of the characters, not enough to decipher them.

Unlike the social authority in bustling Paris, Wilkins lived in a long-looted tomb on the west bank of Thebes, with carpets, his Egyptian home, and library , while admiring the sunset on the Nile, while copying those ancient scrolls.

According to Albus, Egyptologists at that time had a strange habit of burning mummies' wooden coffins in the fireplace in winter.

I don't know who started the custom. The burning wood will emit an extremely bad smell. Before the mummies are buried, they will be embalmed, sprinkled with spices, and will not be penetrated by substances such as corpse oil and corpse water. Pass the shroud and pollute the wood.

But Wilkinson didn't care about these details. He was very happy to entertain friends in his seclusion, and the smell was pungent but very light. A good breakfast was enough to dispel it, far less than Paris The stench from the dung hill was unpleasant.

Wilkinson lived a long life and lived until 1875. Only because of his research results, the ruins of Thebes were destroyed, the stone materials of the temple were removed to build factories, and many stone statues were thrown into the Nile River.

Albus liked chamber music, and there was a dirge he heard in Cairo when he was young, sung by a harpist:

How is their dwelling?

Their walls are broken.

Their dwelling has disappeared.

Like they never existed.

Perhaps that was why he valued his friendship with the historian Bagshot so much.

Even though he has been on the chocolate frog card and remembered by every contemporary wizard, he still hopes that future wizards will know him.

'do not forget me. '

This may be Albus' true inner thoughts.

However, he said that he will really leave when everyone has forgotten him.

But when did Albus say that?

Pomona frowned and recalled, there was no image at all. She turned her head and looked at the person who told her this sentence strangely. At the moment, he was looking at a very realistic sculpture. A clerk spread out the papyrus scroll, Read in front of a statue of a baboon.

The words written on the papyrus in the hands of the sculpted Facebook clerk are clearly legible, but the nose of the baboon has been "weathered". Nature really knows how to find a place.

She shook her head with a sneer, without asking where Severus heard Albus say this, and continued to visit this formerly glorious but now forgotten exhibition hall.