{ \\\c 8te«t tgictt s, 
 
 ^, ni 
 
 O PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 Shelf.. 
 
 Division . D..T.M. 
 Section . .«. .IP. . .*3. . 21. 
 
 Number 
 

THE 
 
 CITIES OF 
 
 EGYPT 
 
.■+ 
 
 
THE 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT 
 
 BY 
 
 REGINALD STUART 'POOLE 
 
 KEEPER OF COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM 
 CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE 
 
 The Lay 0/ the Himyerites 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH,. ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1882 
 
 [ All rights reserved ] 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2016 
 
 https://archive.org/details/citiesofegyptOOpool 
 
TO MY MOTHER 
 
 IN RECOLLECTION OF THE YEARS WE PASSED TOGETHER IN EGYPT 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This work, a reprint of articles on the Cities of Egypt 
 mentioned in the Bible, has been written with the object 
 of awaking such a popular interest in the famous sites 
 described as may lead to their farther exploration. The 
 Biblical notices of these cities, slight as they often are, 
 have been chosen for their liveliness and human interest 
 as the key-notes of each subject. 
 
 REGINALD STUART POOLE. 
 
 October 1S82. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Aspect of Egypt — True limits — Formation by Nile-deposit — 
 Names of Egypt and the Nile — Conflict of the Nile and the 
 desert : its place in Egyptian mythology— How the Hebrews 
 regarded Egypt and the desert i 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MEMPHIS. 
 
 Necropolis alone remaining : its grandeur — Foundation of 
 city — Dyke of Menes — Names of Memphis — Religion 
 — Great temple : remains described by ’Abd-el-Lateef — 
 
 The Pyramid-field — belief of Egyptians in the future state 
 the cause of their costly tombs . . . . . 1 5 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 HANES. 
 
 Identity of Hanes with Heracleopolis proved by Mariette 
 — Religion of city — Heracleopolite Kings of Egypt : their 
 period a blank — Hanes in the time of the Assyrian Wars 
 — The Tablet of Naples — Need of exploration . . .30 
 
X 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THEBES. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Splendid remains of city — Origin — Site — Names — Worship 
 — History — Temple of El-Kamak : edifices on western 
 bank : tombs 46 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ZOAN. 
 
 Historical importance of eastern border : its peculiar popula- 
 tion — History of Zoan — The Shepherd Kings — The Hebrews 
 — The Empire — Zoan rebuilt asRameses — Shemite influence 
 on Egyptian literature — Zoan during Oppression — Decline 
 — Names — Religion — Description by an ancient Egyptian 
 scribe — Ruins — Field for exploration . . . .64 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GOSHEN. 
 
 Local tradition as to Exodus untrue — Identification of city 
 and land of Goshen — Local worship— Shemite colonists — 
 History of Hebrew sojourn — Present state of the district 
 and of the site of the capital 89 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PITHOM. 
 
 Story of the Oppression of the Hebrews — Town of Pithom — 
 Fragmentary Egyptian illustrations of the age — Brick- 
 makers represented at Thebes — Shemite colonists in 
 Goshen— Excavations would supply more information . 102 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xi 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MIGDOL. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 route of the Exodus — Geological changes in Lower Egypt 
 — Chain of lakes between the Mediterranean and the 
 Red Sea— Migdol, the last camping-place, identified — Place 
 where the Hebrews crossed — Dr. Brugsch’s theory of the 
 route 1 12 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ON. 
 
 On, or Heliopolis, the Egyptian university — Origin 
 — Names — Religious centre — The temple as described 
 by the Ethiopian king Pianchi — History of city — Influence 
 of the university on Alexandria — Teaching at Heliopolis — 
 
 Its survival at Cairo — Remains of On — Tradition of visit 
 of the Holy Family 131 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PI-BESETH. 
 
 1 of city — Its great antiquity — Name and worship — Shishak 
 
 and his family : record of his campaign in Palestine — - 
 Remains of temples — Festival of Bubastis — Historical 
 character of Egyptian remains . . . . . .150 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SIN. 
 
 The approaches to Egypt- -Strong position of Sin or Pelusium 
 — Names — History — The Persian conquests of Egypt here 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 xii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 decided — The murder of Pompey at Pelusium — The site — 
 Historical lesson — Neighbouring stronghold Tahpanhes, 
 probably Daphn* . . . . . . . .166 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 Foundation by Alexander — Plan — Advantages of situation — 
 Civil history : greatness under earlier Ptolemies : decline : 
 the Alexandrian mob — Alexandria as an intellectual centre : 
 worship of Sarapis : Museum and Library : faculties of uni- 
 versity : extent of collections of books — Alexandrian philoso- 
 phy: influence of Platonism seen in Egyptian temple : meet- 
 ing of Greek and Hebrew thought: Platonism and Judaism : 
 Philo — Christianity at Alexandria — Influence of Platonism, 
 and action and reaction of Greek, Hebrew, and Egyptian 
 thought — Clement of Alexandria: Origen — Separation of 
 philosophers and churchmen: continued action of philosophy 
 on dogma : asceticism a gift of Egypt— Athanasius and 
 Arius : Julian : fall of paganism : fanaticism — Arab con- 
 quest — Scanty remains — Temple of Arsinoe and story of 
 Berenice’s hair dedicated there — Farewell to Egypt . .178 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH 21 1 
 
 NOTES 215 
 
 MAP. 
 
 Sketch Map to illustrate the Route of the J To be placed between 
 Exodus / pages 120 and 121 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Egypt is a land of light. The landscape lacks the charm 
 of form, the majesty of the Alps, the solemn line of Atlas, 
 the asperity of the Lycian crags which tower above the 
 turbulent gulf of Adalia, the solid mass of snow-clad 
 Lebanon, the pastoral softness of the Galilean hills. 
 Plain and highland, meadow and forest, do not succeed 
 one another as in those varied lands which are each a 
 little world complete in itself. The colouring is mono- 
 tonous. The fields change with the yearly course of 
 nature or the threefold harvest which rewards the labour 
 of man. The mountains of Egypt are white or yellow or 
 tawny ; on their rocky sides grows neither moss nor 
 heather ; no pines clothe their steep heights ; no firs 
 
2 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 crown their level tops. The fields are varied alone by 
 long avenues of stately palms in measured colonnades, or 
 by the welcome shade of a rare sycamore. Nature does 
 not transform the scene with a rain-storm or make it 
 mysterious with vapours. There is neither rain nor 
 cloud nor any mist. But those unvarying features are 
 lighted up with ever-changing expression like a sym- 
 pathetic face which takes its beauty from the influence of 
 things around, reflecting pain or pleasure, joy or grief. 
 Each day brings a rhythmic sequence of colour, from the 
 moment when the long streaks of ruddy light in which 
 Homer saw the rosy fingers of the Dawn begin to stretch 
 across the eastern sky, until the olive after-glow reflects 
 in its mirror the last rays of the sun fallen below the 
 Libyan waste. But neither for the cloudless sunrise and 
 sunset, nor for the herald of the one and the rear-guard 
 of the other, does nature take most care. It is when the 
 sun is in his strength and all he shines on is only relieved 
 by the quivering of intense heat, a white heat as of a 
 furnace, that the shadows are painted with sunset hues, 
 and the sides of the barren mountains become luminous 
 with liquid rose and purple and violet, like marvels of 
 cloudland dropped on the earth. There are moments 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 3 
 
 when we witness the same glow in the Greek islands, 
 where the banished Apostle saw the Holy City descend 
 from the skies in its splendour of sard and beryl, of 
 sapphire and amethyst. At night the yellow glory of the 
 moon walking in brightness makes but a softer day, 
 or the deep blue sky of Egypt is lit up by many- 
 coloured stars. The plague that foreshadowed the last 
 and heaviest of all was the darkness that could be felt. 
 
 We must think of this strange beauty of Egypt if we 
 would know why she has drawn to herself the Arab and 
 the Hebrew from their life of freedom, and has yet a 
 witchery for modern hearts, to prove the truth of the 
 native saying that he who has drunk of the water of the 
 Nile must return to drink of it again. We can see why 
 the Egyptian has clung to his land with a love that is not 
 patriotism, but a blind instinct of enjoyment, the sense 
 of life that in the North wakens the world in spring 
 alone. For all moves in harmony with nature, and ex- 
 istence is not without joy be the taskmaster’s rod ever 
 so heavy. 
 
 Egypt on the maps is not this wonderful land. We 
 look and see a vast oblong space squared out in the 
 north-eastern corner of Africa. This is a fiction of the 
 
4 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of 
 Greek legend, or the Lyonesse of mediaeval romance, 
 both sunk beneath the ocean to explain their disap- 
 pearance. The true Egypt of the old monuments, of 
 the Hebrews, of the Greeks and Romans, of the Arabs, 
 and of its own people in this day, is a mere fraction of 
 this vast area of the maps, nothing more than the valley 
 and plain watered by the Nile, for nearly seven hundred 
 miles by the river’s course from the Mediterranean south- 
 ward. On either side are the great wastes, the highlands 
 of the eastern desert, the undulating lowlands of the 
 western, both parts of that great belt which runs across 
 Africa and is nowhere broken but by the course of the 
 Nile. The very populations are different. The scanty 
 tribes which roam in the deserts are in manners, and 
 some even in race, alien to the settled dwellers on the 
 banks of the Nile. The strongest ruler of Egypt cannot 
 call the wanderers his subjects. One tribe on the west 
 moves from the Nile to the Atlantic. It would need a 
 mighty Pharaoh to control the Benee ’Alee. 
 
 The story of Egypt is graven in its rocks, and written 
 in its soil. Countless ages ago the mighty river gathered 
 his forces in Central Africa, where the equatorial rains 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 5 
 
 still yearly replenish a series of vast lakes. Forcing a 
 way northward to lower levels, the mass of water cut a 
 great trench in the rocky surface of the desert. In 
 Upper Egypt this stupendous work is about three hun- 
 dred feet deep from the top of the mountains to the 
 river’s bed, and from eight miles to less than a mile in 
 breadth. As the Nile found a way to the sea, the waters 
 sank to the base of the trench, leaving usually a level 
 space on either side. With the rainy season of the equa- 
 torial region, the Nile still rises every year and carries 
 northward the rich soil washed down from the highlands 
 of Abyssinia, which with the beautiful regularity of nature 
 is spread equally on the whole surface covered by the 
 inundation, renewing the land, which never need lie 
 fallow, nor have any artificial aid to make it fertile. 
 This deposit has been carefully measured where in the 
 course of centuries it has risen up the sides of monuments 
 of known date. The rate of increase is only about four 
 inches and a half in a century, yet this is amply enough 
 to fertilize the land. Near Cairo the trench of the Nile- 
 valley opens out into a great triangular plain, the Delta, 
 or Lower Egypt, won, like all deltas, from the ocean. 
 Two great branches of the river water it, following its 
 
6 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 outline. This vast surface, formed of successive deposits, 
 shows how much of the gift of the Nile man suffers to be 
 yearly poured away into the sea and lost for ever. Were 
 a cutting made anywhere from the river into the desert, 
 the stream would carry Egypt with it in its course. No 
 sooner was the Freshwater Canal cut and the waters 
 of the Nile admitted, than the wilderness bloomed with 
 mysterious herbage. 
 
 The natural division into valley and plain, and the 
 character of Egypt, give us a clue to the names of the 
 country. In the older books of the Bible we find 
 Mizraim a dual word, the two Mazors, like the two 
 Sicilies. In the Prophets Mazor sometimes occurs, and 
 even Mizraim for the Delta, while Pathros is their name 
 for Upper Egypt, the native Pa-ta-res, the Southland. 
 The derivation of Mazor is obscure, and conjecture is 
 mere learned idling ; but it is interesting to know that 
 the old name survives in Misr, in the vulgar speech 
 Masr, the Arabic name of Egypt, and strangely also of 
 its capital. The old Egyptians do not leave us in doubt 
 as to their definition of their country ; with them it was 
 ‘ Kem,’ the ‘ Black,’ from the colour of its soil : there is 
 no place for the yellow desert in this descriptive name. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 7 
 
 The last use of Kem died out in the form Chemi in 
 Coptic, the descendant of the classical language, which 
 ceased to be spoken a century ago. It survives among 
 us in the terms ‘ chemistry ’ and ‘ alchemy,’ sciences 
 thought to be of Egyptian origin. 
 
 The Greek name which is the parent of our Egypt is 
 as obscure in its meaning as Mazor. We first find it in 
 the Homeric poems. In the Odyssey, it seems strangely 
 used for both country and river, only changing the gen- 
 der from feminine to masculine. There may be sound 
 reason in this. Once a year, when the fertilising flood 
 covers the whole valley and plain, river and country are 
 one, from desert to desert. This ancient use of the name 
 of Egypt ceases with Homer : thenceforward, the stream 
 is called the Nile. 
 
 Still more fit than the names of Egypt are those of 
 the Nile. The modern people call it * the sea,’ an Arab 
 way of speaking of the mightiest rivers ; and with them 
 ‘the Nile’ means the inundation. Nahum, when he 
 warns Nineveh, telling her how the Assyrian sacked her 
 rival and ancient conqueror Thebes, calls the water- 
 rampart of the Egyptian capital, not the river, but ‘ the 
 sea’ (Nah. iii. 8). The usual Hebrew name is ‘the 
 
8 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 river,’ ‘ yeor,’ but this is not the common word for river. 
 It is a special one almost reserved for the Nile and the 
 canals it feeds. A rarer name in Hebrew is Shichor, ‘ the 
 black,’ and we also find ‘ the river of Mizraim ’ where the 
 common Hebrew word for ‘ river ’ is used. Nile, the 
 Greek name, seems to mean ‘ dark blue ’ or ‘ black.’ 
 We may compare it to Shichor and to the modem Bahr- 
 el-Azrak, or ‘ Blue Sea,’ as the great stream which brings 
 down the fertilising soil to Egypt is now called, while its 
 rival is the Bahr-el-Abyad, or ‘ White Sea.’ The Nile 
 in Egypt is never clear, and its volume and depth give it 
 the deep hue which Shichor and Nile describe ; for the 
 vagueness of antiquity has not our fine sense of the tones 
 of colour. 
 
 The mystery of the source of the Nile struck the 
 fancy of the old Egyptians. Hence the sacred name 
 Hapi, ‘the Hidden,’ under which the river was wor- 
 shipped as a god. 
 
 Not, however, in this form does the Nile take high 
 rank in the Egyptian religion : Hapi is only the river 
 personified, the fruitful genius who with his water-plants 
 builds up the throne of Pharaoh. In a larger sense the 
 Nile is identified with Osiris, ‘ the good being,’ the source 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 9 
 
 of light and plenty, thus at once the sun and the Nile. 
 As the sun, Osiris ruled not only the world of light, but 
 also, and more specially, the world of darkness. He was 
 the sun of the night, the ruler of the shades. Each 
 Egyptian took his name after death, that as Osiris he 
 might conquer darkness and return in light. 
 
 As the Nile, Osiris is the hidden source of fertility 
 and nourishment, in perpetual warfare with barrenness 
 and famine. His enemy was Set, whom the Greeks 
 called Typhon, the desert, the sea, the storm, darkness, 
 and destruction. The force of this opposition lies in the 
 contrast of the desert to Egypt. Take one step from 
 the valley or plain, rich with teeming vegetation, full of 
 life, and you are at once in a waste utterly barren and 
 dead, whether it be the mountainous region on the east 
 or the rolling stretch of lowland on the west. There are 
 the marks of a perpetual conflict ; here the Nile has 
 won for Egypt a new strip of the desert, there the sand 
 has poured in and obliterated the fertile land. N o won- 
 der that the Egyptians saw in this the war of good and 
 evil. No wonder that in another and gentler sense the 
 western expanse, to them illimitable, impassable, mys- 
 terious, wherein the sun daily sank and disappeared, 
 
IO 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 became the region of death, the symbol of ‘ God’s under- 
 world,’ ‘ the hidden land,’ ‘ the West, the ancient, the 
 perfect, the vast.’ 
 
 It is in such figures as these, in the use of an epithet, 
 in the natural expression of surprise or pleasure or awe, 
 that the ancients show us their sense of nature in terse 
 utterances whose force puts to shame our modern 
 attempts to picture in words. Thus the sudden view of 
 the plain of the Delta as its green expanse refreshes the 
 eye wearied with the monotony of the parched yellow 
 desert is brought before us in a single sentence. The 
 plain of Jordan ere it was blasted was ‘well watered 
 everywhere,’ ‘ as the garden of the Lord, like the land of 
 Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoan ’ (Gen. xiii. io). 1 
 
 After the long and bitter bondage Egypt did not 
 always wear this pleasant colour to the Hebrew eye. It 
 had a Janus face. It was the land of plenty where they 
 had eaten freely the abundant and varied produce of the 
 earth, the land of kindly folk who did not share in the 
 stern policy of their rulers, and had always a welcome 
 
 1 Zoan for Zoar here seems the better reading, unless we may 
 suppose Zal or Zar, the Egyptian name of Zoan, to be meant : Zoar 
 of Palestine can scarcely be intended, for the passage would then 
 be unlike the simple style of Genesis. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 il 
 
 for the fugitive from Palestine ; but it was also the house 
 of bondage, where as in a furnace of iron they had toiled 
 under the burning sun, while the taskmaster smote their 
 bare shoulders with a continual stroke. The meaner 
 souls, as they grew weary of the wilderness or waxed 
 feeble in the struggle for existence against Canaanite and 
 Assyrian, could not forget the flesh-pots of Egypt. The 
 runaway Saneha, whose adventures are preserved in 
 a papyrus roll, when he tells us in the story of his flight 
 how he wandered on the border faint and hungry, mea- 
 sures his progress by the Egyptian supper-time. 
 
 To the land of plenty the Hebrew and the Arab have 
 always fled when their pastures have been smitten by 
 drought. Rarely have they come in vain. For there 
 can be no dearth in Egypt unless the river fail, and this 
 is most unusual. Thus the regular rise of the Nile 
 came to be expected, and was no doubt ascribed by the 
 people to the river-god, rather than to the Divine Ruler 
 of all things. Perhaps this tendency struck the native 
 poet who in his beautiful hymn to the Nile makes the 
 genius of the river a manifestation of the hidden divin- 
 ity who cannot be graven by the sculptor, unseen, 
 whom no offering reaches, who cannot be drawn to the 
 
12 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 mysteries, his place unknown, whom no abode can 
 hold, w’hose mind none can attain unto. Yet to this 
 day the river is reverenced. Every year before the 
 festal ceremony of cutting the canal of Cairo, the signal 
 that the inundation has attained its needed height, a 
 pillar of mud is raised to be washed away by the rising 
 waters : it is called ‘ the bride,’ and legend says that it 
 represents a virgin who in ancient times was decked in 
 gay apparel and cast into the stream as a sacrifice, by a 
 fiercer marriage than that in which the Doge of Venice 
 was wont to wed the Adriatic. We see another indica- 
 tion that the common people did not look beyond the 
 Nile to Providence, in the contrast drawn in Deu- 
 teronomy between the husbandry of Egypt and that of 
 Palestine, the mechanical nature of the one, the faith 
 that watched the varying seasons in the other (Deut. 
 xi. 10-12). 
 
 The wonderful spectacle of Egypt flooded by the 
 inundation, the Delta one vast lake, a torrent between 
 desert and desert, in the valley of Upper Egypt, towns 
 and villages islanded in the swirling waters, the people 
 hurrying their cattle to places of safety — this sight, wel- 
 come as it is to the natives, is full of terror to the 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 13 
 
 stranger. Thus the Hebrew prophets, writing in days 
 when the memory of the sojourn had passed away, take 
 the Nile in flood-time as a figure for the onrush of a 
 mighty army of invasion (Jer. xlvi. 7, 8), and also for 
 utter destruction when a land is swept clean of its in- 
 habitants (Amos ix. 5). 
 
 The desert-like Egypt had a twofold aspect to the 
 Hebrews as it has to all who have since known it. To 
 the wayfarer it is terrible in its loneliness, its vastness, its 
 silence, its lack of all that makes the earth pleasant to 
 the eye with signs of life and verdure, with offer of food 
 and water. It is a dry and thirsty land, and that means 
 more than all the rest when the sun beats with unremit 
 ting force till the earth is as heated iron beneath a sky of 
 molten brass. Yet it had another face. There have 
 always been those who chose the desert life because they 
 desired to leave mankind for a time to be alone with 
 God. Abraham preferred the border of the desert to the 
 pleasant plain of Jordan. Moses fled to the desert for 
 those many years in which he prepared to be the leader 
 and lawgiver. Elijah went to Horeb when he would 
 solve the question whether he was indeed the last of the 
 faithful. In the desert the Baptist passed his early days, 
 
14 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 until the voice crying in the wilderness peopled the waste 
 with those who came from busy city and field to repent in 
 its solemn quiet. The old Egyptian hermits founded in 
 the desert the hardest monastic state, which surrendered 
 all the joys of life in exchange for the calm of the silent 
 valleys. For in those tremendous solitudes there is neither 
 sight nor sound to disturb the mind. In the mighty 
 rocks and the rolling hills, stretching far away to im- 
 measurable distance, not clothed by nature, untrod by 
 man, save in the rare tracks where his timorous uncertain 
 footprints are washed away by the first light air that stirs 
 the sand, under the luminous heavens, most of all when 
 the night has fallen, more than even in the midst of the 
 ocean, man seems conscious of the Divine Presence. 
 Nothing is between him and the heavens which open 
 their portals wide. The world need not be shut out, 
 with its changing shows, its restless movement, its many 
 voices of to-day : it is so far away that it is as though it 
 had never been. The scene which through countless 
 ages has known no change is full of the silence and the 
 rest of eternity. 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 i 
 
 3 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MEMPHIS. 
 
 No one of the great cities of the old world has so utterly 
 disappeared as Memphis. Her rival Thebes has yet four 
 splendid temples to attest the greatness which Homer 
 sang. Babylon and Nineveh are still marked by vast 
 mounds, the sepulchres of their treasures. Athens 
 nestles, as of yore, beneath her ancient citadel of rock. 
 Rome has endured for six-and-twenty centuries the 
 storms of changing fortune, and is growing once more. 
 Jerusalem, long shrunken within her first limits of near 
 three thousand years ago, is again enlarging herself. But 
 no temple or town attests the former wealth of Memphis, 
 or preserves a fragment of her once abounding life. 
 There is neither sacred building, nor palace, nor a trace 
 of common houses, nothing to show where the long 
 ramparts rose, or where the White Wall, the ancient 
 citadel, defended the capital. The mighty city, which 
 
i6 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 for three, four, or five thousand years was first or second 
 in Egypt ; the famous shrine, enriched by successive 
 kings, from the first who ruled the land to the Mace- 
 donian sovereigns who courted the powerful priesthood ; 
 all that stood within the ample circuit of the walls, is 
 levelled to the ground, and the traveller is shown a 
 fallen Colossus 1 and a few fragments near by, and told 
 that he stands in the precincts of the Temple of Ptah, 
 the Egyptian Vulcan, and that of Memphis herself 
 nothing else remains. 
 
 Yet no city in the world has so many or such costly 
 monuments. As you stand on the platform of the 
 Citadel of Cairo that commands the westward view, you 
 look across the vast modern city, the plantations of 
 mulberry trees and the rolling Nile, and the other side 
 of the valley rich in corn-lands, with the long line of 
 palms in which Memphis is just traced, and you see in 
 the farthest distance the low edge of the Libyan desert, 
 spreading like an even rampart, along whose summit rise 
 in four groups the shining masses of the Pyramids of 
 Memphis, like the boundary-marks of the mighty waste, 
 
 1 The Colossus is said to have been recently set up by an 
 English traveller. 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 1 7 
 
 the Egyptian land of the shades, the abode of the sun 
 after his setting. The city of the living has perished, the 
 city of the dead remains, remains with the royal 
 sepulchres, and around them the humbler tombs of 
 subjects, sculptured and inscribed with the lively records 
 of what was done in the remote past by those whose 
 mummies have crumbled to dust in the lapse of ages. 
 Memphis the lost is here recovered. We may walk 
 through the silent streets of the City of the Dead, as did 
 the hero of an old Egyptian romance, and read the 
 writings that are engraven on the outer walls of the 
 tombs, and we shall not listen to the words of any one 
 who, like the magician who accosted him, shall tell us 
 our interest is profitless. For we have discovered the 
 true magic in the recovery of the records of the past, in 
 giving speech to the long-silent utterances of the hopes 
 and fears, the joys and sorrows of the fathers of man- 
 kind, who return from the underworld and admit us to 
 their company, as, having interpreted the title without, 
 we can enter each sepulchral chapel and understand 
 when and why and for whom its pictured reliefs were 
 made in olden time. 
 
 The foundation of Memphis is the first event in 
 c 
 
i8 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Egyptian history, the one large historical incident in the 
 reign of the first king, who emerges a real man from the 
 shadowland which the Egyptians called the reign of the 
 gods. Let us try and span in our minds the vast 
 interval which has passed since the days of Menes. 
 Look once more with me from the Citadel of Cairo west- 
 Avard, and beneath our feet is spread out the greatest of 
 Eastern cities, Masr the Victorious, splendid yet with the 
 fast-decaying mosques of the Moslem rule, so numerous 
 that they foil the attempt to count them. In a series of 
 successive styles, the Eastern counterparts of the changes 
 of Western art, you pass in time through the base art of 
 the Turkish rule, to group after group, or memorial after 
 memorial, up to the earliest and greatest of all, whose 
 vast court, surrounded by colonnades with pointed arches, 
 marks the first stage in Arab art. A thousand years 
 have passed since it was built. Two centuries more take 
 us to the Arab conquest. This art, nobly massive or 
 delicately sumptuous, has passed through its phases 
 since, while the like changes have worked in the hearts 
 and minds of men, while race after race, dynasty after 
 dynasty, has ruled over Egypt. Yet this is but a mere 
 fragment of the time since Menes reigned. Memphis 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 19 
 
 was in her decay when the Arabs poured into the country, 
 and soon ceased to be a town. She had lived before as 
 the second city of Egypt through the Roman and the 
 Greek dominion; she had been taken by the Persian and 
 the Assyrian and the Ethiopian. We go back to the 
 dawn of Greek history, farther yet to the Exodus when 
 Israel became a nation, and still we have not reached the 
 age of the supremacy of Memphis. Still earlier, before 
 Abraham, we attain at last the long unmeasured period 
 of the six great lines of Egyptian kings who ruled at 
 Memphis, and were buried in the Pyramids that overlook 
 her obliterated site. The space of time from our days to 
 the starting-point of Egyptian history we cannot measure. 
 Authorities differ by some two thousand years. But 
 numbers make no clear impression. It is far more 
 striking to note the movements of history, not in Egypt 
 alone, but outside its limits, and to remember that the 
 existence of religions, the sway of empires, and the rule 
 of races, have taken up but fragments of this vast 
 interval. 
 
 Menes, or Mena, the first mortal king, who stands at 
 the head of our uncounted reckoning of time, leader of 
 the roll of thirty dynasties which filled the list of Manetho 
 
20 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the native annalist, — Menes, the founder of Memphis 
 and Egyptian history, came from the south. Civilisation 
 descended the Nile. His native place was Thinis, or 
 This, in Upper Egypt, a still older town, where his 
 shadowy predecessors ruled. He united under his single 
 sway ‘ the two regions ’ of Egypt, and at once erected a 
 new capital, from which he could control the whole 
 country. The site was happily chosen, and neither the 
 glory of Thebes nor the traffic of Alexandria ever took 
 away the seat of government for long — for a few centuries 
 only in each case — from the neighbourhood of the oldest 
 capital. It was •well called ‘the balance of the two 
 regions.’ Where the valley of Upper Egypt is about to 
 spread out into the plain of the Delta, a strong city could 
 rule both, and hold the entrance of the narrow Upper 
 Country, the first of many barriers which could stay the 
 advance of tire invader, and so give courage to a retiring 
 army. 
 
 The marvel of the origin of Memphis lies in the work 
 that went before. Here in the beginnings of history we 
 picture to ourselves a rude people, whose primitive 
 collection of huts grew to be a city. But it was not so. 
 A great engineering work was the first act of the builder. 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 21 
 
 He chose his site, and then boldly fought [the Nile, and 
 turned the mighty river from his course. The site 
 pleased him, but the stream was on the wrong side, 
 flowing below the Libyan chain, flowing over where the 
 city should be, offering no water-bulwark against the 
 invader from the eastern border. So he raised, a few 
 miles to the south, a mighty dyke, and turned the river 
 into the present course, founding the city on the west 
 bank, in the rich valley, with the desert behind and the 
 Nile before. The dyke can no longer be traced, but it 
 was known to the Greeks as the work of Menes. But 
 how are we sure that the tradition is true ? The dyke 
 was there, and Memphis stands in the former bed of the 
 river. If Menes did not turn the stream, the dyke must 
 have been a still earlier work. 
 
 Such an enterprise is one of the most difficult that man 
 can attempt; for you may stop or divert a stream, but if 
 you would do lasting work, you have to struggle with 
 gigantic forces, and the larger, the more rapid, and the 
 more varying in height the river, the greater your risks of 
 failure. Yet this work of skill meets us on the threshold 
 of Egyptian history. It contradicts our notions of the 
 gradual rise of the nation. It accords with the effect 
 
22 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the Pyramids produce on our mind, themselves not much 
 later than the age of Menes. 
 
 The new city received a name which reflects the 
 satisfaction of the ancient founder; he called it Men- 
 nufre, ‘ the Good ’ or ‘ Perfect Mansion.’ This was the 
 civil name : like the other towns of Egypt, it had a sacred 
 name, denoting its local worship, ‘ the House ’ or ‘ Abode 
 of Ptah.’ The citadel was not raised on a hill to over- 
 awe the townsfolk; it was merely the oldest quarter, the 
 primitive city, girt with a strong rampart of the light 
 yellow limestone afforded by the neighbouring desert, 
 and washed on one side by the river , — ‘ the White Wall.’ 
 The civil name is the parent of the Greek Memphis and 
 the Hebrew Moph, also found in the form Noph. 
 Lately, scholars have thought that the famous capital of 
 Ethiopia, the royal seat of Tirhakah, the classical Napata 
 and Egyptian Nap, is intended by Noph. But in favour 
 of the older opinion here adopted is the ready inter- 
 change of the initial letters in Hebrew, and the unlikeli- 
 hood that but a single notice should occur in the 
 prophets of the great city of Egypt of their days. To 
 them it must have been what Cairo now is to the dwellers 
 in Palestine, the centre of Egyptian power and wealth ; 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 23 
 
 if then rivalled by Thebes, it was nearest to the border, 
 and known better to the merchant and the fugitive, the 
 bourne to which politicians turned their longing eyes, 
 while the prophets w r amed them in vain. If we bear 
 this in mind, the notices better suit the northern 
 city than remote Napata. Ethiopia was far beyond the 
 Hebrew horizon, and is rather mentioned as a power 
 coming from the south than, as the Egyptians knew it, 
 a country with its cities and temples, a farther Egypt 
 that discovery has restored to the light from its long 
 oblivion. 
 
 Memphis was the Abode of Ptah, the Egyptian 
 Vulcan, not the metal-worker, as Greeks and Romans 
 imagined him, but the divine artificer, the creative power. 
 His name most strangely is Semitic, or in other words 
 Hebrew. Two classes of such words are found in 
 Egyptian, one as old as the language itself, the first gift 
 of the East, the other borrowed about the time of Moses, 
 when it was the fashion to mix as many Semitic words as 
 possible in the spoken language, as we and the Germans 
 have done with French. The name of Ptah is of the old 
 stock ; and finding so early an Eastern visitor, we are 
 inclined to ask whether the idea of which he is the 
 
24 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 centre, the notion of creation, came into Egypt from the 
 East. 
 
 The temple of Ptah, founded by Menes, grew, with 
 the costly additions of later kings to the main edifice, 
 and the new structures they built around it. Here must 
 have been a long line of tablets, inscriptions, statues, and 
 sphinxes, records of victory and proofs of subjugation, 
 all, like the successive works of a great cathedral, in an 
 order which told their historic sequence, unlike them 
 each inscribed with the names of the kings and great men 
 who ordered them to be graven. Here stood the statue 
 of king Sethos, the priest of Ptah, set up to commemorate 
 the destruction of Sennacherib. All are gone but the 
 broken Colossus of the great Ramses, the oppressor of 
 Israel, and a few fragments around. The false gods have 
 ceased out of Noph (see Ezek. xxx. 13). 
 
 Very different was the aspect which the ancient site 
 presented to the learned Arabian physician, philosopher, 
 and traveller, Abd-el-Lateef of Baghdad, who visited 
 Egypt about the beginning of the thirteenth century. 
 The beauty of the remains of the chief temple and its 
 surroundings struck him with wonder ; the great mono- 
 lithic shrine of breccia verde, nine cubits high, eight long, 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 25 
 
 and seven broad, the doors which swung on hinges of 
 stone, the well-carven statues, the lions terrific in their 
 aspect ; and he praises those former kings who took care 
 that these monuments should be preserved, and forbad 
 their injury or wanton destruction, although they were 
 hostile to those who made them. He adds four reasons 
 for ‘ the protection of ancient buildings : ’ first, because 
 they afford records for the reckoning of time ; secondly, 
 because they bear witness to the truth of the Kuran, 
 relating the history to which reference is there made ; 
 thirdly, because they admonish us whence we come and 
 whither we must return (pointing out the fate of our pre- 
 decessors); fourthly, because they display the condition 
 of ancient peoples, their mode of life, the abundance of 
 their learning, and the exactness of their thought ; — all 
 which matters incite the mind to desire fuller knowledge. 
 He then contrasts the license and cupidity of his time, 
 and portrays the treasure-seekers demolishing the beauti- 
 ful works of antiquity in their fruitless search. 
 
 His protest was in vain. The desire for treasure gave 
 way to the desire for building materials. The sultans 
 and princes of Cairo found in Memphis a ready quarry ; 
 the green monolith was demolished, and column after 
 
26 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 column carried away for the mosques and palaces of the 
 latest rival of Memphis. A reaction of bigotry added a 
 fresh motive; and the wise counsels of the old philosopher, 
 who claimed historical monuments as confirmations of 
 the truth, found no favour with those who ignorantly 
 made a merit of destroying the records of idolatry. 
 
 Thus has Memphis been carried away. Yet the great 
 necropolis still remains on the edge of the desert behind, 
 stretching north and south nearly twenty miles, with 
 its populous centres behind the city, its smaller suburbs 
 far away, marked by above sixty pyramids, some nearly 
 perfect, some in ruins, the greatest still preserving their 
 first shape when seen from afar. These are the royal 
 tombs ; around them, ranged in streets, are the sepulchres 
 of subjects, some massively built of stone, others cut in 
 the sides of the rock, where its form allowed, others again 
 mere pits leading to chambers of sepulture. The sub- 
 terranean tomb of the sacred bull Apis is a stupendous 
 excavation, mainly a series of grand galleries, from which 
 open out chambers, each large enough to hold the 
 massive sarcophagus of a mummied bull. 
 
 The vast extent of this city of the dead is some 
 measure of the long duration of Egyptian history. 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 27 
 
 Most of the many pyramids are the tombs of kings, and 
 all these belong to the earliest line, that of the Memphite 
 sovereigns whose power ended before the time of Abra- 
 ham. The rest of the tombs are of many dates ; some 
 ages are fully represented, some are without records, 
 as if another great burial-place had come into favour. 
 Even with these gaps, the accumulation is unequalled. 
 The Chaldaean city of Erech, the modern Warka, alone 
 approaches Memphis as a necropolis ; but the quantity 
 and the character of the sepultures is quite insignifi- 
 cant in comparison. The extent of the desert which 
 is occupied by the ancient Egyptian cemetery, and the 
 costliness of the tombs, have no parallel elsewhere. No 
 wonder that the Israelites, as they saw Pharaoh in 
 pursuit, thought of the burial-grounds of Egypt, when 
 in irony they said to Moses, ‘Because (there were) 
 no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die 
 in the wilderness?’ (Exod. xiv. 11), while with a more 
 pointed reference to the great necropolis, Hosea predicts 
 of the Israelite fugitives, ‘Egypt shall gather them up, 
 Moph shall bury them ’ (Hosea ix. 6). 
 
 The consequence thus given to the tomb by an active 
 and joyous people is at first perplexing. We must 
 
28 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 think of them as the only nation of the times before 
 later Judaism and Christianity who had a vital belief in 
 the future state. To the Egyptian all he did on earth 
 was sure to bring him happiness or misery hereafter. 
 He was to be judged according to his actions, acquitted 
 or condemned by the unerring test of truth. This noble 
 doctrine became in a measure corrupted by a system of 
 elaborate prayers and incantations, which would sub- 
 stitute the paid acts of the priesthood and magical rites 
 for a life led by the dictates of conscience or, as the 
 Egyptians would say, the heart. Still the sense of the 
 importance of the hereafter was never lost. Closely 
 bound up with this feeling was the desire to preserve 
 the body. It may be doubted if they believed it would 
 rise, but it must repose deep beneath the sepulchral 
 chapel, that there, on each festival, the kinsfolk might 
 resort to say the prayers for the dead. The chapel was 
 necessary for the soul’s welfare, and the mummy con- 
 nected the worship there with the identity of the 
 deceased. Moreover, the estates were taxed for the 
 services of the chapel, and thus the mummy became a 
 kind of title-deed, securing the estates to his descend- 
 ants so long as the dues were paid to the priests who 
 
MEMPHIS. 
 
 29 
 
 served the chapel. But this was accidental. The 
 Egyptian tomb was due to no mere convention ; faith 
 raised its mighty mass above the rock or cut its hidden 
 halls beneath. Those who accuse this great nation 0/ 
 a vain ostentation in these costly sepulchres, cannct 
 conceive the delight of lavishing gold and silver without 
 return in the commemoration of a noble idea. The 
 Egyptians raised monuments that have defied time, to 
 show to all who should come after them that they 
 believed in the immortality of the soul. 
 
30 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 HANES. 
 
 There are cities and men whom we meet but once in 
 written history. Some of them appear abruptly without 
 geographical place or note of descent, mere names to 
 us and nothing more. They shine for a moment out of 
 the darkness of the past and are lost. If we are careful 
 readers, desirous to understand, we open some dictionary 
 and follow our will-o’-the-wisps into a morass peopled 
 by the strange creations of the commentators. What 
 were names easily forgotten become riddles impossible 
 to remember. Suddenly some ancient monument, a 
 tablet, a statue, or a coin, newly dug out of the earth, 
 recalls the lost word and clothes it with all the circum- 
 stance of historical reality ; it becomes at once a living 
 thing, and we marvel how it could ever have been a dead 
 symbol. 
 
 Such has been the fate of the city of Hanes, once 
 
HANES. 
 
 31 
 
 only mentioned in the Bible. In the days of the 
 supreme struggle with Assyria, Hebrew ambassadors 
 went thither to beg for Egyptian aid. ‘His princes 
 w T ere at Zoan, and his ambassadors came to Hanes ’ 
 (Isa. xxx. 4). The envoys passed on their fruitless 
 errand through the terrible wilderness, their beasts laden 
 with costly presents (vers. 5-7). As w 7 e read we recog- 
 nise Zoan, the great frontier-town, the seat in that time 
 of the Pharaoh who enjoyed the right of descent from 
 an earlier line that claimed supremacy. The position of 
 Zoan is fixed in the Bible. Does not the name mean 
 * the place of departure,’ where the caravans left the last 
 great town of Egypt behind and were soon to enter on 
 the desert way? Was not Goshen hard by? Zoan 
 stands out prominent in Egyptian history, like the mighty 
 ruins which mark her desolate site, from which the story 
 of forgotten ages has been recovered for these later 
 times. But what and w'here w T as Hanes? The Greek 
 translators of the Old Testament, labouring in Egypt, 
 could not tell, the patient Chaldees who paraphrased the 
 Scripture in the vulgar tongue of Palestine could not 
 tell. Gesenius, that prince of modem Hebrew scholars, 
 guessed that Hanes must be the city which the Copts 
 
3 2 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT 
 
 called Hnes, the Greeks Heracleopolis, the town of 
 Hercules, one the civil, the other the religious name. 
 No hint of history confirmed the conjecture, which rested 
 on the likeness of a word of three Hebrew letters to 
 another of four Coptic ones. And the Greek translators 
 did not read it in the Hebrew text from which they 
 translated. So Gesenius was not convincing, and Hanes 
 remained a blank to the reader and a plaything for the 
 critics. 
 
 Research on the spot is better than study at home, 
 more especially when study has no materials to work 
 withal. It is hard to make bricks without straw, but 
 who can build without bricks ? Solid as they seem, the 
 old tomes of antiquarian research, now left to idle 
 curiosity and the industrious bookworm, are mere phan- 
 toms, airy constructions that could only live in the dead 
 calm of indifference. The breath of inquiry has blown 
 them away. We now know that it is worse than useless 
 to speculate where we can observe, to theorise when we 
 have only to reach out our hands and grasp the facts. 
 So in the great centres of antique civilisation people are 
 beginning to scratch the ground, here uncovering a wall, 
 there clearing a chamber, in the temples and palaces of 
 
HANES. 
 
 33 
 
 Egypt and Assyria. It may be that we shall even 
 dig in earnest, could a little money but be spared from 
 the pressing claims of show, and luxury, and folly, for 
 labours which are certain of their reward, if we dare 
 but exchange a lottery which is all blanks for a lottery 
 which is all prizes. The cost of a pack of hounds 
 would in a few years clear all the monuments of Egypt. 
 Sennacherib was a mighty hunter, but he found time 
 for literary work, and organised research that the records 
 of former times should be preserved for the times to 
 come. 
 
 Mariette, the great explorer of Egypt, whose loss we 
 still deplore, with small funds and in the teeth of endless 
 difficulties, by stern determination and the gallant spirit 
 of a Frenchman, achieved more than all who had gone 
 before him. He has fallen at last in the fight, killed by 
 overwork and difficulties, but not by failure ; failure he 
 refused to recognise. To him we owe the answer to 
 many a riddle of the mysterious Sphinx, all but the 
 Sphinx’s own riddle of origin and purpose. At his 
 bidding buried cities have thrown off the grave-clothes 
 which had enwrapped them for thousands of years, and 
 risen to tell us their story, and to fill the ages of oblivion 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 once more with the joy of overflowing life. He had 
 the peculiar instinct, the magic power, to know where 
 the precious metal lay beneath his feet. Wherever you 
 uncover the ground in any Egyptian site you find some 
 buried record, a tablet, or a bronze : on the very surface 
 lie the potsherds on which the schoolboys wrote out 
 precious fragments of what were classics in the days of 
 Moses : all are treasures, but of varying worth. Genius 
 alone can discriminate, leaving the dross, content with 
 nothing less than pure gold. So Mariette, not satisfied 
 with the whole field of Egyptian research, bethought 
 him of Ethiopia, and thus left all Lower Nubia un- 
 touched and sent his explorers across the desert in which 
 the army of Cambyses perished, to the far-off southland, 
 where under the sacred mountain rises the temple of 
 Napata, the capital of Tirhakah, greatest of Ethiopian 
 kings. Here he knew he would find records of that 
 royal line who stood for a while against all the might 
 of Assyria, the heroes of the great conflict for world- 
 dominion, in the tumult of which the kingdom of Israel 
 disappeared for ever. Nor was the adventurous ex- 
 plorer disappointed. Tablet after tablet rewarded the 
 search. Of all these the most weighty, though not the 
 
HANES. 
 
 35 
 
 most curious, was the famous stele of Pianchi, which 
 tells the story how Egypt was conquered by this king of 
 Ethiopia, about a generation before Isaiah. From this 
 record we learn that in those days the long-undivided 
 kingdom had broken up into many small states. Zoan 
 was then the seat of that Pharaoh who represented earlier 
 kings who claimed to rule all Egypt, while Chenensu, 
 the Hanes of Scripture and Heracleopolis of the Greeks, 
 was ruled by a powerful lesser king. This little episode 
 of discovery is a fitting prelude to the history of the 
 long-forgotten town. 
 
 The site of Hanes is one which has never been 
 touched by the explorer. The traveller who sails up the 
 Nile is unattracted by its mounds. Are not these brown 
 masses which cover each of them the history of an 
 ancient city far too numerous not to be passed by? 
 They may claim a moment’s notice if some famous 
 name like Sals or Bubastis is attached to them in the 
 map, and lingers like an echo of the past in the name of 
 the squalid modem village, that clings to a corner of the 
 ample space once crowded with the homes of plenty. 
 If you land, you find one poor street, in which are sold 
 the commonest Manchester cottons and the yet inferior 
 
 n 2 
 
36 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 work of the Egyptian looms, where once the fine linen 
 of Egypt and the gold and ivory of Ethiopia were 
 bartered against the embroider}' of the East, dyed with 
 Tyrian purple, and the splendid metal-work of the 
 Phoenician craftsmen. The wealth of antiquity, his- 
 torical as well as material, lies deep below your feet in 
 the layers of successive habitations. 
 
 Before his end, when he knew the hand of death 
 was upon him, Mariette, hitherto reticent of his secret, 
 even to the extent of what some called jealousy, though 
 the motive must have been the desire to exclude the 
 ignorant and the reckless from his mines of antiquity, the 
 year before last, the great explorer made his will, appoint- 
 ing the learned world at once his executor and legatee. 
 In a memoir, summing up all that he knew was most 
 urgent, he stated to the French Academy of Inscriptions, 
 who have published the document, what may be called 
 the claim of Egyptian exploration on the interest of 
 Europe. He left nothing untold in this memorable 
 paper, with a full trust that refutes the charge of jealousy. 
 One of the leading works he there proposed is the exca- 
 vation of Hanes. 
 
 Hanes lay in the most favoured part of Middle 
 
HANES. 
 
 37 
 
 Egypt. Hitherto we have spoken of Upper and Lower 
 Egypt only, the narrow valley and the wide plain. This 
 is the great natural division, and at all times it has been 
 the most usual. But Upper Egypt is again roughly 
 parted by nature into a broader and a narrower valley. 
 The Heptanomis, or region of the seven provinces or 
 nomes, the northernmost part, is far broader and more 
 productive than the Thebais, which takes its name from 
 Thebes, the southernmost district. In the Heptanomis, 
 about seventy miles by the river above Cairo, on the 
 western bank, stood the city of Hanes. The site is 
 marked by the extensive mounds around the Arab 
 village of Ahnas-el-Medeeneh, ‘ Ahnas the capital,’ a 
 name probably preserving the remembrance that in 
 earlier times this was the chief town of a province. 
 Our knowledge of its history is wholly due to literary 
 sources, Egyptian and classical. From the Egyptian we 
 learn that it was the seat of the worship of Hershefiu, 
 the Egyptian Hercules. His name means ‘the vigorous,’ 
 or ‘ strong,’ and this is why the Greeks call him Hercules, 
 thinking of their personification of bodily strength. The 
 two have no true connection. The Greek idea travelled 
 from Assyria, and as it took form in the curious works 
 
38 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 in gold and silver and bronze that the Phoenicians carried 
 to the islands of Greece, it gained the shapes we well 
 know, first the slayer of the Lion and the Hydra, ending 
 at last in the boxer with his swollen ears, the coarse 
 ideal of a depraved age. The Egyptian god of strength 
 was portrayed with a ram’s head, by that strange union 
 in which animal worship and a higher idolatry' met. 
 This divinity was a local form of Chnum the creator, 
 who is represented moulding the world as a potter on 
 his wheel. His force is thus creative, not combative. 
 No remains of the temple at Heracleopolis are known : 
 doubtless they are hidden beneath the rubbish in the 
 centre of the mounds. Sacred buildings are always to 
 be sought in depressions, for while the houses of age 
 after age rose as the ruins of each period elevated the 
 mounds, the temples always retained their primitive 
 site, and all the additions and restorations stood on the 
 first level of their sacred precincts. 
 
 It is not, however, for the curious details of the 
 tangled mythology of Egypt alone that search should be 
 made at Hanes. Temple and town, and the unknown 
 necropolis that must lie in the Libyan waste, should be 
 excavated for the materials of a lost book of history. 
 
HANES. 
 
 39 
 
 For here ruled two ancient dynasties of kings at the 
 second capital of Egypt. 
 
 Six royal lines held sway at Memphis, and the Pyra- 
 mids and lesser tombs around preserve their history. 
 e The Sixth Dynasty,’ says Mariette in the memoir which 
 is his legacy to knowledge, ‘ had scarcely closed when 
 there suddenly appears in the series of monuments a 
 deep gap which does not end until the accession of the 
 first king of the Eleventh Dynasty, four hundred and 
 thirty-six years later.’ ‘ This is a sort of chasm where, 
 in no part of Egypt, does a tablet, a statue, a tomb, not 
 the smallest fragment, show itself, during near four cen- 
 turies and a half.’ The very duration of time is doubtful, 
 and no royal name of the Egyptian hieroglyphic lists can 
 be assigned to any one of the four dynasties of the inter- 
 val. The native historian Manetho only says that the 
 first two of these were of Memphis, the second two of 
 Heracleopolis, and that the founder of the kingdom of 
 Hanes was Achthoes, a cruel tyrant worse than all his 
 predecessors, who did evil to all the people of Egypt, 
 until at length he went mad, and was killed by a 
 crocodile. This is the sole fragment of the history of 
 centuries lying between two luminous periods. These 
 
40 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Memphites and Heracleopolites, in their obscurity, are 
 very uninteresting. Who cares to pierce the darkness ? 
 Yet they lie between the men who built the greatest 
 wonders of the world, the Pyramids, which are still the 
 subjects of the romance of science, and those greater 
 sovereigns who conquered nature and did a work of 
 engineering skill, in making the Lake Moeris, an en- 
 terprise unrivalled in Egypt. Supposing we had no 
 history, neither chronicler nor charter, no monuments, 
 neither cathedral nor castle, between William the Con- 
 queror and Henry VII., — how curiously should we look 
 into the blank abyss, wondering how the people fared, 
 what kings ruled, what law controlled, what faith pre- 
 vailed ; yet Egypt in this dark time had her kings, her 
 laws, and her religion. As with us, so with those who 
 drank the waters of the Nile, the mighty work of progress 
 moved, and if it seemed arrested, yet again went on the 
 faster. And were we shown a mound somewhere in the 
 heart of England, and told that there our lost kings had 
 their royal seat, should we grudge a few thousand pounds 
 to restore the pedigree of the nation, to recover the lost 
 decades of our Livy ? Yet Mariette has pointed to 
 Ahnds-el-Medeeneh, and told us that there we must 
 
HANES. 
 
 41 
 
 strive to bring to life the long-lost records of the kings 
 whose royal seat it was, but, as yet has spoken in vain. 
 
 The fall of the kingdom of Hanes dates long before 
 the days of Abraham. Thousands of years pass by and 
 the city has no place in history, only is its worship men- 
 tioned here and there in the religious records. The life 
 of the Hebrew race from Abraham to Joseph, the sojourn 
 of four hundred and thirty years, the age of the Judges, 
 the empire of David and Solomon, all pass by — what a 
 measure of time is this ! — and two hundred years yet 
 later, in the last conflict of the Israelite kingdom, the old 
 capital reappears as a seat of royalty. 
 
 This age, when the portentous figure of the Assyrian 
 darkened the East, was a time of confusion. Egypt, like 
 a vast Colossus resting on a sandy foundation, had fallen 
 prone, and broken into fragments. The wide dominions 
 of Solomon had divided into a crowd of rival kingdoms. 
 All countries seemed to be resolved into their first ele- 
 ments, Egypt perhaps most of all. For Egypt was a 
 collection of small states, each with a distinctive variety 
 of religion of its own, bound together by the strong will 
 of a central government, that bond once broken, able 
 each to stand alone. Four leading kings thus disputed 
 
42 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 for supremacy. At Zoan ruled a pageant sovereign, may- 
 be he to whom the Hebrew envoys made their weary 
 journey, a man who had prestige enough to negotiate 
 for them, not vigour enough to act. At Hanes a scion 
 of the line of Shishak held his court. A brother king to 
 the south was of more pretension to the first place. On 
 the west a wary patriot, Tafnecht of Sai's, dared to lead 
 the popular party, which at last won its way after a 
 struggle which engages all our sympathy. Necho and 
 Hophra were his descendants. But, more powerful than 
 all, the representative of the priest-kings of Thebes ruled 
 from Napata all Ethiopia and southern Egypt, and, 
 called in by his partisans, met and conquered the Saite 
 and his allies. This is the story which Pianchi, the con- 
 queror, tells in his famous tablet. The prince of Hanes 
 had been forced into the Saite alliance, and on its defeat 
 he made his submission ‘ with tributes to Pharaoh,’ such 
 as the Hebrew envoys brought when they came to the 
 ancient city, ‘ gold, silver, and all precious stones, with 
 steeds the choicest of his stud.’ His little state lingered 
 on, and one of his successors is found as a tributary of 
 the Assyrian king Assur-ban-habal, some eighty years 
 later. Soon after it must have fallen, when the Saite 
 
HANES. 
 
 43 
 
 supremacy was at last finally won, and the little king- 
 doms that had worn away Egypt with their jealousies 
 abolished, by the strong hand of Psametik, the father 
 of Necho. 
 
 Once more does Hanes reappear in history. In the 
 Museum of Naples there is a curious votive tablet of 
 an Egyptian priest. He had obeyed the Persians and 
 gone to Asia in their service. He thanks Chnum, of 
 whom we recollect the god of Hanes to have been a 
 form. ‘ Thou.didst protect me,’ he says, ‘ in the war of 
 the Greeks, when thou didst repel Asia.’ The subject 
 then changes. The Egyptian priest has been present at 
 one of the great battles, either when Alexander crossed 
 the Granicus, or at the decisive field of Issus or of 
 Arbela. He is still in Asia, but he is called back by 
 Chnum, who commands him to go to Hanes, and alone 
 he traverses the ocean . 1 So from the Ionian or the 
 
 1 This tablet has been differently translated, in part by Dr. 
 Brugsch, and fully by the late Mr. Goodwin. {Records of the Past, 
 iv., 65 foil.) On careful examination of the text, Dr. Brugsch’s 
 views, generally adopted above, seem correct. It is curious that 
 the old priest mentions a king of Persia, but not by name, nor does 
 he name the Greek conqueror. Perhaps his record belongs to the 
 interval during which the Persian Empire was falling, but before 
 Alexander had received the submission of Egypt. 
 
44 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Cilician coast the old patriot made his way to the north 
 of Egypt, it may be while yet the route along Phoenicia 
 was unsafe, and sailed up one of the branches of the 
 Nile until at length he reached Hanes, and recorded in 
 thankfulness his double escape by land and by sea. This 
 tablet, set up, it may be, there, gives us the last glimpse 
 of the city in the old Egyptian times. 
 
 Under the Copts and Arabs Hanes still remained. 
 A Muslim writer tells us how in its neighbourhood there 
 was a convent, on the banks of the Nile, called the 
 Monastery of Light Its church was dedicated to the 
 archangel Gabriel. The donjon had six very lofty stages, 
 and was of beautiful architecture. Around the convent 
 was a circular wall, and in its circuit four hundred fruit- 
 ful date-palms. The convent has disappeared, at least 
 from the maps. Search should be made for its ruins, for 
 no doubt it was built of materials quarried from Egyptian 
 temples of the neighbouring town, and these relics may 
 have found a third use in the later mosques of the 
 villages. Not at the site of Hanes and in its burial- 
 ground alone must the old records be sought, but all 
 around, if indeed Mariette’s touching appeal be not dis- 
 regarded. A French scholar of eminence is already in 
 
HANES. 
 
 45 
 
 Egypt, and has appealed to English sympathy to carry 
 out researches which are of European interest. Great as 
 is the importance of the one site here noticed, there are 
 many others to which it must yield. Classical scholars 
 must remember the old settlement of the trading Greeks 
 at Naucratis, where the unearthing of the smallest 
 fragment of pottery or glass would supply a link between 
 the civilisations and the art of the northern and the 
 southern coasts of the Mediterranean. Students of the 
 Bible will not forget the land of Goshen, full of the 
 hidden records of the Hebrew ages, Zoan the capital of 
 Joseph’s Pharaoh, the residence of the Pharaoh of the 
 Exodus. To Goshen and to Zoan Mariette has markedly 
 pointed in the scheme which he has bequeathed us, 
 speaking with that foresight which seems to give a deep 
 significance to the last words of one who has worked in 
 earnest, and would tell us not what he has done, but 
 what remains to be achieved. His best memorial will 
 be the carrying through of this well-considered scheme. 
 A noble work will then go on unchecked to due fulfil- 
 
 ment. 
 
46 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THEBES. 
 
 No city of the old world can still show so much of her 
 former splendour as Egyptian Thebes. Her ancient 
 rival, Memphis, is marked alone by the vast necropolis, 
 Babylon by shapeless ruins, Nineveh by buried palaces. 
 Of imperial Rome not so much survives ; luxurious 
 Baghdad has dwindled to a poverty-stricken provincial 
 town covering the ruins of the palaces of the masters of 
 the East. Where are the sumptuous edifices of Constan- 
 tine in his seat of empire ? where the glittering domes of 
 Teemoor at Samarkand? Elsewhere the imagination 
 alone can revive the former glories of which the trace has 
 been swept away, or over which the monuments of later 
 time have cast new and transforming associations. At 
 Thebes alone can you live again in the midst of the 
 greatness of three thousand years ago, undisturbed by 
 
THEBES. 
 
 47 
 
 the changes of the times between and by the new life of 
 to-day. 
 
 Not one of the many temples of Thebes has wholly 
 disappeared ; some are almost complete ; many of the 
 royal and private tombs were, until the tourist came, 
 fresh with colours as of yesterday. Thebes yet stands, 
 in spite of the centuries of trouble that presaged the 
 Assyrian conquest, the ruthless sack by Assur-ban-habal, 
 true grandson of Sennacherib, the raging wantonness of 
 mad Cambyses, the iconoclastic zeal of the early Church, 
 the barbarism of the stupid, utilitarian Turk. The beauty 
 of the ancient city has even survived a worse enemy 
 than all these, the selfish and vain modern tourist, who 
 destroys a document of the world’s history, or a record 
 of antique belief, to carry away a few hieroglyphics he 
 cannot understand, and, like a noxious reptile, marks his 
 trail with the vulgar scrawl of his unknown name, while 
 his asses are stalled in a royal tomb near by. One could 
 fill pages with the story of this worst plague, telling how 
 one tourist ordered her dragoman to cut out Joseph’s 
 head, as she thought it, from the only picture of the 
 arrival of a Shemite family in Egypt ; how others broke 
 in by night and demolished a sculptured wall, to steal 
 
4 S 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the single known figure portraying the wife of a chief of 
 the land of spices ; both priceless documents of history 
 and ethnology. Besides the rage of conquerors and the 
 industrious destruction of our ignorant fellow-country- 
 men, for they are the worst offenders, nature at Thebes 
 is proving that even the massive architecture of Egypt 
 cannot resist her patient forces. The nitrous soil is 
 slowly undermining the vast columns of El-Karnak, 
 which will some day fall in confused ruin as by the shock 
 of an earthquake. But this final catastrophe of the 
 greatest temple has not yet come. There, as elsewhere, 
 we can still, in quiet chambers untouched by the army of 
 spoilers, see the former magnificence of the capital ; or, 
 yet more, can be carried back into the past, when we 
 descend into some little-visited royal tomb deep in the 
 rock of the silent valley of the west, on whose walls yet 
 shine the mystic pictures that portray the fate of the soul 
 in the world beyond the grave. 
 
 The origin of the great city is obscure. Unlike 
 Memphis, Thebes, her southern rival, rose to the head- 
 ship by slow degrees. It was towards the close of the 
 dark age marked by the rule of Hanes, that a new line 
 of kings arose in the upper country, with Thebes for 
 
THEBES. 
 
 49 
 
 their capital. At first they were merely nobles; then 
 one became a local king, and his successors won the 
 whole dominion of Egypt. These were the sovereigns 
 of the Eleventh Dynasty. Their date must be before 
 Abraham, probably some centuries earlier ; but it is not 
 yet certain, so obscure is the early chronology of Egypt. 
 
 Thus it was not by deliberate selection, as in the wise 
 choice of the site of Memphis by Menes, but by the 
 accident of success, that a small provincial town became 
 the capital of Egypt. The position was fit for a great 
 city, but too far south for the centre of government, 
 and nearer to the safe border of Ethiopia than to the 
 assailable frontiers on the north-east and north-west. 
 
 More than four hundred miles, by the river, south of 
 Cairo and Memphis, the Nile valley widens on the east, 
 forming a great amphitheatre, bounded by the distant 
 mountains ; while on the west the same rocky barrier, 
 after almost touching the river, retires, leaving a narrower 
 semicircle. Unlike the level desert- wall of the rest of 
 Egypt, the western mountain rises in a peak-like form to 
 the unusual height of twelve hundred feet, and in one 
 place falls to the plain in a sheer scarped cliff. The 
 view from either side of the river is marked by features 
 
 E 
 
5 ° 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 unusual in the country. We rarely see there so wide a 
 plain encircled by mountains, though there are far ampler 
 expanses with a rocky wall in the dim distance, and we 
 never see pointed heights closing in the view. No 
 monument stands on the river’s bank save the temple 
 of El-Uksur (Luxor), conspicuous with its long ranges 
 of columns. In the distance we discern other great 
 temples, the fortress-like gateway of El-Karnak, the 
 ruined Rameseum, the massive pile of Medeenet-Haboo, 
 and below the cliff the western hills, honeycombed with 
 the entrances of tombs. The size of the monuments 
 grows on us when we are near enough to gain a scale by 
 which to measure them from some passing figure, but 
 they lack the assertion of magnitude which the Pyramids, 
 when first seen, owe more to their surroundings than to 
 their dimensions. If the setting of Thebes is less advan- 
 tageous than that of Memphis to the works of man, it 
 is far more picturesque and beautiful. It has at once 
 charms of form and of well-defined expanse, both excep- 
 tions to the rules of the Egyptian landscape ; nor does it 
 lack the great river, here broadened by islands, and offer- 
 ing long reaches of rushing water, the richly-coloured 
 landscape, and the solemn desert-background of rock, all 
 
THEBES. 
 
 5i 
 
 shining beneath a sky of far deeper blue than northern 
 Egypt knows. Thus as at Memphis the Pyramids grow 
 upon us, at Thebes it is the beauty of the scene ; and 
 we do not wonder that the old Egyptians, in the days 
 of imperial power, preferred their own city to any other, 
 better fitted, indeed, for the control of the country, but 
 far less for repose, and that they loved to dwell in 
 this beautiful circle, where the mountains seem to shut 
 one in from the world around as in a quiet oasis. 
 
 Thebes, like the other cities of Egypt, had a civil and 
 a religious name. The civil name was Apiu, ‘ the city of 
 thrones,’ which, with the article ‘t’ or ‘ ta,’ became Ta- 
 Apiu, and was identified by the Greeks with the name of 
 their own famous city, by us corruptly called Thebes. 
 The sacred name was Nu-Amen, ‘the city of Amen,’ the 
 god of Thebes ; or simply Nu, ‘ the city,’ and Nu-a, ‘ the 
 great city .’ 1 In these names we recognise the No-Amon 
 and No of Scripture. 
 
 The religion of Thebes was centred round the worship 
 of Amen, ‘the hidden,’ in the form Amen-ra, which con- 
 nected this local divinity with Ra, the sun, reverenced 
 throughout Egypt. Thus when Thebes became the 
 
 1 See Diimichen in Oncken’s Allgemeine Geschichte, i. 77, 68. 
 
52 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 capital of Egypt, Amen-ra was sometimes placed at the 
 head of the Pantheon. He became both a solar divinity 
 and the king of the gods. During the Empire, when the 
 Theban line was supreme, it was to him that the kings 
 prayed, to his temple that they brought the spoils of 
 many wars and the tributes of many nations. It may be 
 that at this time Amen became the god of the oases, and 
 the famous oracle had its origin which carried his fame 
 and worship, under the name of Ammon, to Greece her- 
 self, long before Alexander made his pilgrimage to the 
 Oasis of Jupiter Ammon, and was saluted by the priest 
 as the son of the divinity of the temple. 
 
 Such was the site and such the religion of Thebes. 
 Her history cannot be told here, for it is the history of 
 Egypt, almost the political history of the ancient world, 
 for centuries. Yet the rise, the bloom, and the decay of 
 the great city must be sketched. The first line that ruled 
 there was succeeded by the Twelfth Dynasty, which 
 lasted a little over two centuries, the happiest age of 
 Egyptian history. The wise practical rulers of that time 
 devoted their energy and their revenues to developing 
 the vast agricultural wealth of the country : they watched 
 the rising of the Nile and marked its annual level far 
 
THEBES. 
 
 53 
 
 up in Ethiopia; and one of them constructed a great 
 artificial reservoir, the Lake Moeris, to drain off the 
 superfluous waters and store them for use in irrigating 
 the rich oasis in Middle Egypt, opening from the Nile 
 valley, now called the Feiyoom. The country was then 
 prosperous, and the rulers had no ambition of foreign 
 dominion. The weaker Theban kings who followed this 
 active line, or the yet obscurer rulers of Xois, were at 
 last forced to submit to foreign overlords, the Shepherd- 
 kings, whose story belongs to the city of Zoan. Centuries, 
 how many or how few we know not, passed, and at 
 last from Thebes arose the cry for independence. A 
 Theban tributary of the stranger-king threw off the yoke, 
 and led the nation in a long and terrible war, which only 
 closed when .Egypt was again free, and a king of Thebes 
 once more the ruler of an undivided state. This was 
 about d.c. 1600, when the Eighteenth Dynasty began. 
 
 The old capital was not abandoned. Perhaps a 
 sentiment clung to the memory of her former greatness ; 
 perhaps the new kings desired to touch the loyalty of 
 their own people, and to avoid the risk of moving the 
 seat of dominion ; perhaps they loved the restful beauty 
 in which Thebes was set, to which she owed the long 
 
54 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 favour of her rulers. Thus the kings of the Eighteenth, 
 Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties, or we might say 
 of the Egyptian Empire, which nearly equalled the 
 duration of those royal lines, had Thebes for their 
 capital. Temples and tombs alike bear witness to the 
 splendour of this age, not the happiest, but the most 
 brilliant, in the history of Egypt. 
 
 Then came the decline. Incessant wars abroad, 
 discontent at home, and the rule of feeble kings, worked 
 the fall of the Empire ; and the great city was no longer 
 the constant seat of government, though whoso held it 
 added to the adornment of its temples on the lesser 
 scale of the ever- waning power. Yet even in Homer’s 
 time, when the hand of decay had been heavy for some 
 three centuries, Thebes was the greatest city within the 
 poet’s horizon, both for her store of wealth and for her 
 mighty chariot-force which was then the backbone of war. 
 And about two centuries later the prophet Nahum wrote 
 a vivid description of Thebes and of her resources. In 
 this passage, where the name No-Amon alone occurs in 
 Scripture, the prophet warns Nineveh by the fate of a 
 rival not inferior to herself, and but lately sacked by the 
 Assyrian king. He says, * Art thou better than No-Amon, 
 
THEBES. 
 
 55 
 
 that was enthroned (“ the city of thrones ”) among the 
 Nile-streams, the waters round about her, whose ram- 
 part [was] the sea (the Nile), her wall of the sea. Cush 
 and Mizraim [were] her strength, and [it was] infinite, 
 Put and Lubim were thy helpers ’ (Nahum iii. 8, 9). 
 Then follows the piteous narrative of the sack, the 
 merciless slaughter, and the sale and captivity of even 
 the great men among the inhabitants (ver. 10). Assur- 
 ban-habal gives us the same story in the true Assyrian 
 regal style. He tells how Thebes was treated as a 
 conquered town, despoiled of gold and silver, of pre- 
 cious stones and costly stuffs, of horses, of the treasure of 
 the palace, of a booty which could not be counted, of 
 men and women, of works of the sculptor, all of which 
 were carried to Nineveh. This was in about b.c. 666 or 
 665. Before the century had closed, the same fate befel 
 Nineveh heiself. 
 
 From this great blow Thebes never recovered : suc- 
 ceeding kings endeavoured to repair her shattered edi- 
 fices, but Cambyses, the Persian conqueror, repeated the 
 vengeance of the Assyrian, and despite the care of the 
 earlier Greek kings, Thebes had the misfortune to be 
 twice the centre of revolt against the Ptolemies. At 
 
56 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the close of the reign of Philopator, an independent 
 dynasty was established, which was overthrown by 
 Epiphanes. The Thebans rose once more against 
 Lathyrus. The patriotic party made their last stand in 
 the old city, which endured a three years’ siege, but 
 was at length taken and dealt with by the successful king 
 according to his ruthless temper. This was the end of 
 the City of Thrones, since represented only by scattered 
 villages about the temples. 
 
 The final decline of Thebes before the fall of 
 paganism, and the distance of any later rival, have 
 saved the monuments from being used, like those of 
 Memphis, for the building materials of successive 
 capitals. Thus in the early part of this century the 
 aspect of the site must have been little changed from 
 that which it presented when Ptolemy Lathyrus drew 
 off his vindictive forces. The industry in detail of the 
 ignorant tourist, who labours like the rat and the worm, 
 has worked more mischief than any force of nature ; 
 and fifty years of systematic spoliation has been more 
 injurious than the swift rage of conquerors. Yet nearly 
 all the great edifices yet stand, and the sequence of 
 pictures in the royal tombs can still be followed. 
 
THEBES. 
 
 57 
 
 Of all the temples of Egypt, if not of the whole 
 world, the chief edifice of Thebes, now called the 
 temple of El-Kamak, on the eastern side, is probably 
 the greatest, certainly the most costly. It was dedi- 
 cated to Amen-ra, and was the central shrine of Egypt 
 throughout the days of the Empire. A patient German 
 scholar, Dr. Diimichen, has published a beautiful plan of 
 the whole structure with its surrounding lesser temples, 
 printing in different colours the successive additions ; 
 from which it appears that from the Twelfth Dynasty to 
 the Greek kings, during more than two thousand years, 
 we may discriminate the works of twenty-four periods, 
 six denoting royal lines, eighteen representing single 
 reigns which were chiefly remarkable for large additions. 1 
 
 No great cathedral or abbey shows such a vast suc- 
 cession of labour nor so continuous a history. It is not 
 alone that we have here the styles of many ages, and 
 the tastes of monarchs of different origin, but every part 
 of the vast accumulation is inscribed within and without 
 with religious representations and historical scenes, with 
 the stiff pictures of acts of homage to the gods, and the 
 lively portrayals of great victories, all with explanatory 
 1 See Dr. Diimichen’s History already referred to. 
 
58 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 inscriptions. It is not alone a temple, but a library of 
 historical records. Here is the long list of the conquests 
 of Shishak, which mentions the Levite cities of Israel 
 and the strongholds of Judah ; here the still earlier treaty 
 of Ramses II. with the Hittites, that long-forgotten 
 power, now only emerging from oblivion, which of old 
 successfully divided with Egypt the Empire of the East. 
 These are but items in the list of precious documents 
 which cover the walls of the temple. Yet more remains 
 below the earth, for every clearing of the chambers 
 yields new treasures. 
 
 This temple, all built of solid stone, is from its 
 stupendous size among temples what the Great Pyra- 
 mid is among tombs. The width of the great entrance- 
 gateway facing the west is over 360 feet. The first court 
 measures 329 feet broad by 275 feet long, and thence we 
 pass into the hall of assembly, supported by 134 columns, 
 those of the central avenue being near 70 feet high and 
 about 1 2 feet in diameter, those of the side avenues over 
 40 feet high and about 9 feet in diameter. The great 
 columns have capitals in the cup-like form of the papyrus, 
 the lesser ones capitals in the shape of the lotus bud. In 
 this vast hall the cathedral of Notre Dame could stand 
 
THEBES. 
 
 59 
 
 without touching the walls. Though marked by the 
 calamities of Thebes, this wondrous monument of her 
 greatness is still overpoweringly grand ; a forest of 
 columns rises on every side, and we can scarcely believe 
 we move amidst the work of men of our strength and our 
 measure. Going farther, we note the two standing obe- 
 lisks of red granite, one the work of an ambitious woman, 
 Queen Hatasu, a single block, 108 feet high, the tallest 
 in the world, formerly coated with fine gold, at once a 
 historic monument, an architectural adornment, and a 
 lightning-conductor. 1 The inscription on its pedestal 
 tells us that the whole labour of quarrying, engraving, 
 and setting up this great monolith took only nineteen 
 months. Here and beyond, the remains of the temple 
 are heaped up in confusion that makes us wonder at 
 the patience which could have destroyed no less than at 
 the patience which first constructed the mighty mass, 
 once in stately order, now piled up in mountainous heaps. 
 
 Another great temple, that of El-Uksur, is on the 
 same bank of the river ; but we must cross to the 
 
 1 The Egyptian obelisks had a threefold purpose. Standing 
 before the temple-gates, they bore dedicatory inscriptions, and 
 cut the long horizontal lines against which they were relieved, while 
 capped and coated with gold, they served as lightning-conductors. 
 
6o 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 western side, the side of the tombs, and note the suc- 
 cession of sepulchral temples. In yet older times, each 
 pyramid had its chapel, not within the building, as in 
 private tombs, but in front, for the greater security of the 
 royal sepulchre, which was finally closed when the king’s 
 great sarcophagus was slid down to its resting-place. 
 Similarly the Theban kings of the Empire were buried 
 in a secluded valley, behind the mountain, that seems to 
 guard their tombs as it rises to unwonted height, and 
 falls in a sharp precipice in front of the royal burial- 
 ground. Along the edge of the desert, beneath the 
 mountain, rises a series of temples, which, though dedi- 
 cated to gods, yet were the sepulchral chapels of the 
 kings, telling to future time the achievements of their 
 reigns, while the story of their fate in what the Egyp- 
 tians called ‘ the other world ’ was reserved for the walls 
 of their mysterious tombs. Beginning at the north, we 
 first see the temple which Ramses II. completed for his 
 father and grandfather. Then we reach the greater 
 monument he built for his own renown, the Rameseum. 
 Here, in the first court, lies a fallen Colossus of the king, 
 in red granite, once 60 feet in height, and weighing over 
 887 tons, one solid mass, the greatest monolithic statue 
 in Egypt or in the world, yet hurled down and broken 
 
THEBES. 
 
 61 
 
 by the Assyrian or the Persian. This temple, for purity 
 of curve and line in its columns, and for the liveliness 
 of its war-scenes, is nowhere excelled among Egyptian 
 monuments. The two Statues in the Plain, only second 
 in size to the fallen one of Ramses, are almost all that 
 remain of the great temple of Amenoph III., an earlier 
 sovereign. Yet farther is the vast pile of Medeenet 
 Haboo, the temple of Ramses III., on the walls of 
 which we see the story' of his wars with the maritime 
 nations of the Mediterranean, like a Homeric poem in 
 sculpture, and among them we take note of the oldest 
 portrayal of a naval battle, in which the Egyptian galleys 
 win the victory against the sea-folk of the Mediter- 
 ranean. Besides these, close under the cliff, is the 
 temple of Queen Hatasu and her brothers, Thothmes II. 
 and III., of which the chief interest lies in the tale told 
 both in pictures and words of the expedition the ad- 
 venturous queen sent to the land of spices, bringing 
 away its costly products, of which the balm-bearing trees 
 were planted in the capital. Of the third Thothmes, 
 the greatest Egyptian conqueror, the records are more 
 interesting at El-Kamak than here. 
 
 Between the temples and the mountain, either in 
 detached hills or in the plain, are the seemingly countless 
 
62 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 tombs of the Theban people, full, so far as the tourist 
 has spared them, of those marvellous pictures which 
 enable us to transport ourselves back to the everyday 
 life of three thousand years ago, yet all telling of the 
 other world, the preparations for the last rites, the funeral 
 procession, the life to come. In the delicate inscrip- 
 tions, of which every letter or word is a painted hiero- 
 glyphic, now ruthlessly mutilated, were repeated the 
 lament of the wailing women, the cry of the bereaved 
 wife, the dirge which at once saddened and cheered the 
 funeral feast. For that strange assembly, with eating 
 and drinking, music and dancing, while it paid the last 
 honours to the dead, was counselled in the plaintive 
 song of the harper to enjoy life, not unmindful of its 
 duties and of its end. Some idea of the splendour of 
 these monuments may be gained from the fact that the 
 largest tomb has an area in its excavations of over 23,000 
 square feet, and occupies nearly an acre and a quarter of 
 rock, all the walls of the series of chambers except 
 those of sepulture being sculptured ; but this is a giant 
 among the Theban sepulchres. 
 
 Far behind, in the hidden valley, are the tombs of 
 the kings of the Empire, deeply cut into the rock, and 
 covered with the mystic paintings and inscriptions which 
 
THEBES. 
 
 63 
 
 record the Egyptian belief as to the world to come, with 
 its trials, its rewards, and its punishments, all defaced by 
 the modern spoiler, though forty years ago some were 
 almost untouched. The royal tombs are vacant, but the 
 last discovery at Thebes has brought some of their most 
 famous tenants to the upper air. On this side the valley 
 under the western cliff, a great sepulchral hiding-place 
 was found, whither more than thirty mummies, mostly 
 regal, had been taken for safety in ancient times. Thus 
 Thothmes III., the great conqueror, and Ramses II., 
 the great oppressor, are once more seen in the light of 
 day. If the Museum of Boolak has escaped the fanatical 
 and greedy mob of Cairo, we may there in the presence 
 of her ancient kings feel, as at Thebes, how Egypt 
 obliterates time and brings the present and past together 
 as by magic art. 
 
 Such is the briefest catalogue of the wonders of 
 Egyptian Thebes, that great and ancient city, which 
 of all the capitals of the world speaks most eloquently of 
 the times that are past, and echoes the thoughts of for- 
 gotten ages, telling the story of the vicissitudes of earthly 
 fortune as a warning, uttering the cry of human hope 
 and fear for the hereafter as an encouragement. 
 
64 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ZOAN. 
 
 As we look at a country and try to connect the forms of 
 nature and the homes of men with the events of history, 
 we find that by degrees our eyes are attracted to the 
 points of special interest. These are usually the central 
 stronghold, sometimes one town, sometimes another, 
 always in the heart of the land, and the border that 
 could easily be assailed. The one has a history telling 
 how the nation grew, the other has lays recording how 
 it resisted the invader. The border has the more stirring 
 annals, falling of their own accord into the shape of 
 verse, save at those moments when this first line of 
 defence has been overleapt and the struggle for existence 
 fought under the ramparts of the capital, themselves 
 now the border of the land. Thus Paris, in the Norman 
 sieges, became far more interesting than Chalons or 
 Roncesvalles ; the Monastery of the Troitza, in the 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 65 
 
 great Polish war, than the shifting eastern limits of 
 Russia, where the Tartars were repulsed. In English 
 history the border is everything. What is Winchester, 
 or even Windsor or Westminster, beside Alnwick or Na- 
 worth ? Verse is silent as to the royal seats, save in the 
 poem of the captive Scottish king ; but for centuries sings 
 the story of the changeful wars and forays of the marches. 
 
 Egypt is no exception to the common rule. Secure 
 on the south and rarely assailed on the west, she was 
 ever open to attack on the east. True the desert where 
 Sabaco lost his way, as he fled alone from the rout of 
 Raphia, and only escaped by the friendly aid of a Philis- 
 tine shepherd ; and the treacherous footing of the Ser- 
 bonian bog, ‘where armies whole have sunk,’ were a 
 barrier against the invader. Yet an Arab tribe, bought 
 by money or attracted by the greed for plunder, could 
 lead him through the pathless waste, and the great plain 
 of Lower Egypt once in sight, he need not even bridge 
 the Nile, he had only to follow the right bank of the 
 eastern branch as far as Heliopolis, and then Memphis 
 on the other side of the single stream could be assailed 
 at leisure, when he had boats for the passage. Thus 
 while the centres of national life, Memphis and Thebes, 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 attract us, the border-land has a more potent charm. 
 There stood, from the days before Abraham, the for- 
 tresses, carefully constructed on principles we are pleased 
 in our ignorance to call modern, with scarp and counter- 
 scarp, and ditch and glacis, well manned by the best 
 troops, the sentinel on the ramparts day and night ; 
 there were fought the decisive battles, twice at Raphia 
 beyond the border, once at Pelusium within ; how many 
 more times we know not, for native history, eloquent of 
 success through long ages, is silent of disaster, which is 
 told only by the allusions of foreign annals. 
 
 The border population of all lands is the strongest. 
 None but vigorous races could live in the din of war, 
 varied by the dreadful calm that presages invasion. 
 Either the stoutest of the people were set in the front 
 rank by royal purpose or their own daring choice, or 
 strangers were chosen for a post which the natives were 
 not hardy enough to hold. Thus our own borderers, 
 from whom the Highland regiments are largely recruited, 
 are not alone partly of the finest Saxon stock, whether 
 they call themselves English or Scottish, but there flows 
 in their veins the blood of the Roman cohorts, Spaniards, 
 Gauls, Moors, Thracians, Dalmatians, and others, who 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 67 
 
 defended the Wall against the barbarians in the utmost 
 limits of the Empire as stoutly as those who in after time 
 followed the banners of the Howards and the Percies 
 against the Scots. 
 
 In Egypt, whether by settled design of the Pharaohs, 
 or by emigration and conquest, the disputed border fell 
 to the share of Shemite settlers ; and from Abraham’s 
 time to our own, a brave people, larger in bone, and 
 stronger in muscle, and of broader shoulders than the 
 Egyptians, and of a more independent temper, has 
 pastured its herds in the vast luxuriant plain, and fished 
 the prolific waters of the great eastern lake. 
 
 It is hard to define a border-land. We know how 
 with ourselves it shifted with the two Roman Walls, and 
 the changing overlordship of Northumberland. Yet it 
 may always be roughly sketched out, allowing for its 
 narrowness in times of peace, and its extension in the 
 strife of war, by the pressure of a conqueror from without, 
 or of a strong government from within. But the Egyp- 
 tian border never varied on its outer side : we have only 
 to determine its depth. Nature had drawn the boundary- 
 line on the east with final precision. Egypt, whether 
 ruled by native or by stranger, could never extend be- 
 
68 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 yond the limits of the great plain. No enemy could 
 establish himself within these limits unless he conquered 
 the whole Delta, for the broad desert was left behind 
 him. In prosperous times, the Pharaohs affected to rule 
 the waste of sand ; but all that they controlled was a 
 chain of castles which commanded the great road. They 
 could no more make the barren desert a part of fruitful 
 Egypt, than they could catch and tame the wild Arabs 
 who there roamed at their will. But while the eastern 
 limit was thus fixed, it is hard to say how far the border- 
 land, with its peculiar population, stretched to the west 
 and to the south. If we are guided by the names of 
 towns, which are either Shemite, or both Shemite and 
 Egyptian, by local worship, and by the peculiarities of 
 race, we may put the Tanitic branch of the Nile as the 
 general western limit, continuing the border along the 
 edge of Lake Menzeleh to its farther extremity, and may 
 take the old canal of the Red Sea as the southern 
 boundary. This is but a fragment of Lower Egypt, but 
 it is ‘ the best of the land ; ’ once wealthy in towns, each 
 a treasure-house of history, in part already told, but far 
 more lying beneath the earth awaiting the tardy explorer. 
 In the centre is the land of Goshen, southward of the 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 69 
 
 field of Zoan. The city of Zoan, the civil capital of 
 Joseph’s Pharaoh, the residence of the Pharaoh of the 
 Exodus, stood near the western limit The great strong, 
 hold of Pelusium, or Sin, marked the north-eastern point ; 
 not far to the south stood the scarcely inferior Migdol, 
 the frontier fortress in Ezekiel’s time ; a neighbouring 
 mound, some one of these sepulchres of forgotten great- 
 ness, must entomb the military settlement of Avaris, 
 which commanded the border, when it was at once the 
 place of arms and the last, possession of the mysterious 
 Shepherds who are soon to come into the field of our 
 view. 
 
 Of the towns which crowded this strip of land, by 
 far the most important was Zoan, or Tanis. This was 
 natural. The border bristled with fortresses in the old 
 days of the Pharaohs ; but in their rear, away from the 
 shock of war, must have lain a great city, far behind 
 the first river, as Pelusium stood before it. This city 
 must have been on the eastern bank of the second 
 stream, to hold the passage if the first line of defence 
 should be forced, and to be a rallying-point if that line 
 should be turned. 
 
 An isolated passage in the Bible, breaking like a note 
 
70 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the narrative of the journey of the Spies, follows the 
 mention of Hebron, and the mighty Anakim who ruled 
 there : ‘Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan 
 in Egypt’ (Numb. xiii. 22). What a glimpse of all we 
 have lost is here, like the epitaph of the forgotten nations 
 in Balaam’s prophecy. Once it was well known when 
 both these ancient cities were built, and now we can but 
 grope in the darkness. Perhaps it was written in one of 
 the lost books, the Book of Jasher or the Book of the 
 Wars of the Lord, lost as hopelessly as most of the con- 
 tents of the Alexandrian library, yet current in a literary 
 age, when there was a city of books (Kirjath Sepher) in 
 Canaan, and when the Hittite king who reigned in Syria 
 before the Exodus, took his ‘ writer of books ’ to battle 
 with him. 
 
 Leaving speculation, we must look to the scanty 
 records, few, but precious in information, which the 
 genius of Mariette first read in the ruins of Zoan. The 
 city was already standing in the remote days of the Sixth 
 Dynasty, the last powerful line of Memphis, and flourish- 
 ing under the prosperous Theban Twelfth Dynasty, in 
 the time of Abraham, if not much earlier. The position, 
 excellent, as we have seen, for the protection of the 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 7 1 
 
 border, had also every commercial advantage. A great 
 seat of land traffic should stand as near as possible to 
 the eastern border ; it should have a harbour secure 
 from war and storms, and conveniently situate to shelter 
 the galleys of the rich Phoenician marts. Such an em- 
 porium should be on the great water-way, so that the 
 loads of the camels of Midianite and Canaanite mer- 
 chants, and the cargoes of the ships of Tarshish, might 
 be at once carried on to Memphis and to Thebes. Such 
 was Zoan, wisely chosen to be the Alexandria of primitive 
 Egypt. 
 
 Zoan must have shared the general decline that fol- 
 lowed the bright days of the Twelfth Dynasty, and have 
 been almost the first town to fall under the rule of a 
 conquering race, who appear after a time of darkness as 
 the rulers of Egypt. These were the Shepherds, or 
 Hyksos, as to whom almost all our true information 
 has been found by Mariette in the mounds of the for- 
 gotten city. When they invaded the country, how they 
 conquered it, how long they ruled it, we do not know. 
 All we can say is that towards the close of their dominion 
 they raised the monuments we see at Zoan, the great 
 works of Apepi, who reigned about seventeen centuries 
 
72 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 before our Era, and seems to have been the Pharaoh of 
 Joseph. The strong military station of Avaris, probably 
 farther to the east, is spoken of as the royal residence at 
 this time. The sculptures of the Shepherds show, how- 
 ever, the importance at that day of Zoan, which is 
 thought, with reason, to have been the civil capital. 
 
 We must pause at the mention of J oseph’s Pharaoh, and 
 remember that the whole period of the Hebrew sojourn is 
 closely interwoven with the history of Zoan. Here ruled 
 the king in whose name Egypt was governed by the 
 Hebrew, who was no less than regent ; here ruled those 
 who still favoured the people of Israel. Under the great 
 Oppression, Zoan was a royal residence. Zoan was the 
 starting-point of the great journey of the deliverance. 
 Would that those who care for Bible history would 
 search here for the Egyptian annals of those days ! 
 
 In the reign of Apepi, the Theban kings, possibly 
 discontented with Joseph’s strong rule, began to make 
 head against their foreign overlords. A mighty struggle 
 ensued ; and at length the strangers were forced back on 
 Asia. Avaris was stormed, and Zoan once more fell into 
 the hands of the Egyptians. The Shepherds departed, 
 rulers and fighting men, as many as survived the long 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 73 
 
 war ; but the common folk remained, and Zoan and the 
 country round became a foreign city and land to the 
 Egyptians. 
 
 The Hebrews thus changed masters, and from sub- 
 jects of the Shepherds, became slaves of the Egyptians. 
 They had been invited to settle by a Shepherd king, 
 either Apepi or another like him, who, though he took 
 the style of the Pharaohs, had his sympathies in the East, 
 and would people his new country with races, if not akin 
 to his own, yet nearer to it than the Egyptians in their 
 ways of life. The Hebrews were welcomed as settlers, 
 and planted in the fertile land of Goshen. Suddenly, 
 instead of favoured subjects, they became part of a body 
 of serfs, hated and dreaded by their masters ; for to the 
 Shepherd name clung the memory of past rule, embit- 
 tered by the sense of oppression, and awaking the fear 
 that the olden condition might come back with a single 
 change of fickle fortune. So began the great Hebrew 
 servitude. 
 
 Aahmes, the king who conquered and expelled the 
 strangers, was head of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which 
 began about b.c. 1600. That family ruled during the 
 first period of the Egyptian Empire, a time of two 
 
74 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 centuries. The sympathies of the new rulers were with 
 Ethiopia. No doubt it was by aid from the south that 
 the mastery of Egypt was won : there are indications 
 which may point to an Ethiopian alliance. As the con- 
 quering kings, with all the energy of the leaders of a 
 race newly awakened to discover its strength, passed 
 eastwards, and speedily subdued an Empire which had 
 Assyria as the farthest province, the subject race of 
 Egypt could expect no favour. That race was but part 
 of the mass of the conquered, the prey of the new force 
 that impelled the Pharaohs, in expedition after expe- 
 dition, across the eastern border. 
 
 All this time history is silent as to Zoan and the 
 lands around. They were neglected and oppressed. No 
 doubt the frontier fortresses were strongly held ; but 
 much of the old commercial wealth found other channels. 
 Partly it followed the route of the Red Sea, and crossed 
 the desert of the Thebai's ; partly it may have been 
 diverted to the Phoenician towns, and passed by land 
 along the military roads, leaving Zoan, and following the 
 border of the cultivated country towards Memphis. 
 
 It is most remarkable that this same period is equally 
 a blank in the sacred history. For above two centuries, 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 75 
 
 from the death of Joseph to the birth of Aaron, or from 
 the end of the time of prosperity to the beginning of the 
 heaviest oppression, we have scarcely any hint of the 
 state of the Hebrews. Here again is a cogent reason for 
 exploration of sites in this district. 
 
 The Eighteenth Dynasty decayed and ended in the 
 confusion of a religious conflict. A new family, the 
 Nineteenth, the line of the kings nearly all of whom bore 
 the name of Ramses, the Ramessides, gained the throne, 
 and the second age of the Empire began ; another two 
 centuries of less extensive conquest but of more organised 
 rule abroad, and at home yet more fertile in memorials 
 of the time. It seems that these kings were akin to the 
 old rulers of Zoan, the Hyksos. Whether this be so or 
 not, the eastern border now became a favourite part of 
 Egypt. New cities, both frontier strongholds and centres 
 of trade, arose everywhere. Zoan was rebuilt, and called 
 Pe-Ramses, ‘the house of Ramses,’ carefully distin- 
 guished in the inscriptions as Ramses II., first apparently 
 the name of a quarter, then that of the whole city. The 
 name thus marks the new founder as Ramses II., the 
 great oppressor of the Israelites, who * built for Pharaoh 
 treasure-cities ’ (or store-cities), ‘ Pithom and Raamses ’ 
 
76 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 (Exod. i. n), the latter called elsewhere, as in the route 
 of the Exodus, Rameses. This was when the great heat 
 of the Oppression began. 
 
 How was it that a king, who seems to have had the 
 blood of the serf population in his veins, and who 
 specially favoured their part of Egypt, was at the same 
 time the great oppressor of the Hebrew section of the 
 people ? The Shepherds had been long subdued ; but, 
 by a subtle influence, they had conquered their conquerors 
 with the arms wherewith the Greeks led the Romans 
 captive. The age of the Ramessides is marked by a new 
 literary life. Hitherto the Egyptians had written much 
 on papyrus-paper and the pictured walls of the temples 
 and the tombs ; they had written for the sake of religion 
 and duty, with patient method and studious care. Now 
 they write for writing’s sake, not alone in the old manner, 
 but on every material, on the very potsherds that still 
 strew the ruins of their ancient towns. The old literature, 
 like a mummy come to life again, bursts the bonds of 
 priestly rule, and sings new verse with native freedom. 
 An epic poem and beautiful hymns are of this age. Of 
 the same time are a multitude of letters, now in European 
 museums, mostly written in the very town of Rameses. 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 77 
 
 This fresh literature is steeped with Shemite, or, if you 
 will, Hebrew, influence. When he knows a Hebrew 
 word, the scribe prefers to use it for the correspond- 
 ing one in the Egyptian. Words are but the vehicles of 
 ideas ; but they change the thoughts which they convey. 
 Here, however, their work is but insignificant ; the ideas 
 were already changed before they found a new expression. 
 This is a fresh outburst of feeling, the source of a young 
 and vigorous literary life. 
 
 Some may hesitate to believe that the Egyptians, 
 nourished by centuries of culture, had aught to learn 
 from wandering shepherds or serfs, who scarcely held 
 even their lives secure. But these are shallow doubts, 
 common enough to modern dwellers in great cities, sur- 
 rounded by the neglected wealth of ancient literatures. 
 Let them ask whether either Homer, or the writers of 
 the Sagas, or Llywarch Hen and Taliesin, or the ancient 
 Irish poets, or the Arabs before Mohammad, or the 
 unknown authors of the earlier Spanish ballads, lived as 
 we do. Were they not all wanderers ? Did most of 
 them even write ? The old Arabs were one of the most 
 literary nations in the world, whose warrior-poets con- 
 tended for the prize of verse alone in their native 
 
78 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Olympic meeting; yet they dwelt in tents, and rarely 
 wrote their complicated odes. Such were the ancient 
 dwellers in Lower Egypt. How many poets may have 
 sung before Moses we know not ; but the Egyptians 
 heard the songs of their captivity, and learnt melodies 
 unknown before. 
 
 So there grew a bond between the two races. The 
 Egyptians, unlike their rulers, showed kindness to the 
 Hebrews, and were remembered kindly for this in after 
 times. The races mixed. The Hebrews bore Egyptian 
 names. When we find a Moses (Messu), or a Phinehas 
 (Pi-nahsi), in the inscriptions, we need not think him an 
 Israelite. The Egyptians took Hebrew names, and if 
 Rui, the name of the high-priest of Thebes, is the same 
 as Levi, we need not infer that he is not an Egyptian. 
 
 In all this Ramses saw a danger. The state was fast 
 becoming oriental. What if the old masters should win 
 again what they had lost ? He could not stop the tide 
 of Egyptian thought, but he could separate and crush the 
 foreign element which had set it in action. Hence the 
 great persecution, during which the city Rameses, built 
 by serf-labour, rose to magnificence Zoan had never 
 known. 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 79 
 
 It was at this time that the city recovered her old 
 political and commercial consequence. Here Ramses 
 and his son Menptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, held 
 their court whenever any expedition was preparing. 
 Hence the presence of the Pharaohs during the Oppres- 
 sion, hence the 1 wonders in the field of Zoan,’ for so the 
 southern part of the nome or province was called. 
 
 These memorable events belong more fitly to the 
 story of the town and land of Goshen, the next subject. 
 We must here follow the fortunes of Zoan, which waned 
 with the decline of the Empire, and rose again when a 
 Tanite Dynasty, the Twenty-first, ruled Egypt, not with- 
 out the resistance of rival lines. This family has an 
 interest in history, from the alliance by treaty and mar- 
 riage with Solomon. A later Dynasty, the Twenty-third, 
 seems also to have reigned here ; and Zoan was 
 still important in Isaiah’s age, but henceforward her 
 decline was certain. Pelusium first, and Alexandria 
 later, usurped her place ; and now a miserable village 
 retains her name, and gives emphasis to the evidence of 
 the lofty mounds and demolished temples, as, startled by 
 the melancholy solitude around us, we remember the 
 glowing lines in which an old Egyptian poet, whom we 
 
8o 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 shall later quote, depicts the beauty which was the setting 
 of the city he calls incomparable even with Thebes. 
 
 History has much to say of Zoan ; the site can as yet 
 tell us little : what we gather there is rather general than 
 local. The temples are fallen, and their very fragments 
 shattered ; the tombs are still undiscovered. It will be 
 hard to gain any knowledge of the city on the spot, 
 until some one shall have taken the pains to dig into the 
 vast mounds which cover a store-house of historic 
 treasure, almost certainly containing contemporary 
 records of the sojourn, the oppression, and the Exodus 
 of the Hebrews. The book is there ; who will reach 
 down his hand for it and open and read its ancient 
 pages ? Yet from the fragments which lie on the very 
 surface, or have been found just beneath it, an outline 
 may be sketched, and other sources will help to tint a 
 canvas, which must remain blank in its details, like a 
 picture true in colouring, but so vague in form that it 
 should only be looked at from a distance. 
 
 The name of Zoan is mysterious. The modem San 
 preserves, like its Greek, Latin, and Coptic equivalents, 
 the same word as the Hebrew Zoan ; and Zoan again is 
 found in the Egyptian Za’n or Za’ in the phrase which 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 81 
 
 exactly represents the Hebrew ‘ field of Zoan.’ Thus 
 we have an uninterrupted pedigree to the time of Moses. 
 Yet the old Egyptian name of the city, as given in the 
 hieroglyphic inscriptions, is not Za’n, but Zal (Zar) or 
 Zalu. Both Za’n and Zal are not Egyptian, but foreign 
 words ; and we cannot consider them to be ordinary 
 varieties of dialect. It may be that they existed side 
 by side, that Zal was the classical, and Za’n the popular, 
 form, but this is mere conjecture. Pe-Ramses, short- 
 ened by the Hebrews to Raamses, or Rameses, presents 
 no difficulty. The name is historically important as a 
 link in the chain of evidence for the date of the Exodus. 
 The building of Rameses, as already shown, marks the 
 founder Ramses II. as the great oppressor of the 
 Hebrews. Consequently his son and successor Menptah 
 must have been the Pharaoh of the Exodus . 1 
 
 The worship of Zoan cannot be satisfactorily known 
 until the site has been thoroughly explored. It seems, 
 however, that the first divinity was Ptah, the creator, the 
 god of Memphis. This was during the rule of the Mem- 
 phites and the old Thebans. The Shepherds set up the 
 worship of Sutech, a form of Set or Typhon, reverenced 
 
 1 The geographical identifications are adopted from Dr. Brugsch. 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 in Egypt as physical evil, the embodiment of the desert, 
 and the sea, darkness, and the storm, the opponent of 
 Osiris, the good being, the Nile, and light. He was also 
 specially the patron of foreigners, the power who swept 
 the children of the desert like a sandstorm over the 
 fertile land. Sutech thus succeeded Ptah, and held this 
 place throughout the Empire. With the Empire, how- 
 ever, the worship of the sun-gods was introduced ; and 
 when at length Sutech or Set was expelled from the 
 Pantheon, through a confusion of moral with physical 
 evil, the chief divinity became Horus, the sun of the day. 
 There are thus three periods of the religion of Zoan, 
 corresponding to the three foundations of the city, those 
 of the Memphite, the Shepherd, and the mixed Theban 
 worship, and a fourth period due to an innovation. It 
 must not be thought, however, that ever, save for a time 
 under the Shepherds, there was one system to the exclu- 
 sion of the rest. At all other ages the general belief of 
 the whole country admitted the joint reverence of several 
 divinities. Thus while Ramses II. maintained the foreign 
 religion, he also preserved the still earlier worship, and 
 added to it the popular reverence for the sun-gods, whom 
 as the child of the sun, for so we understand his name, 
 he specially reverenced. 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 83 
 
 We have a picture of Zoan in the days of Ramses, 
 in the words of an Egyptian poet, which lights up its 
 sombre aspect of to-day with the vivid colours of three 
 thousand years ago 3 as when one passes from the barren, 
 deathly, sun-smitten desert into the refreshing cool of 
 a newly opened sepulchral chapel, lively with the 
 harmonious brightness in which the old nation re- 
 joiced. 
 
 4 1 arrived at the city of Ramses-mi-amen.’ 4 She is ’ 
 ‘beautiful, beautiful. There is nought like her among 
 the monuments of Thebes,’ ‘the very secret of the 
 pleasures of life. Her fields are full of lovely places, 
 abounding in the produce of food daily, her pools are 
 full of fish, her ponds of ducks, her meadows are verdant 
 with herbage, the bower with blooming garlands. The 
 garden is perfumed with the odour of honey 3 the 
 meadow-land is steeped in moisture. Her granaries are 
 full of wheat and barley, heaped up as high as heaven, 
 vegetables and reeds (are) in the garden of herbs ; 
 flowers for posies in the fruit-house 3 lemons, citrons of 
 two kinds, figs, in the orchard 3 sweet wine ’ there is 
 4 which one mixes with honey 3 ’ fish of various kinds, 
 some from the Euphrates, others such as are presented 
 
84 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 to the greatest of conquerors. ‘ The pond of Har-phra 
 (is there), containing salt, the well containing natron. 
 Her (ships) go and come daily, laden with products for 
 food. The joys have there fixed their seat, there is no 
 word of want ; the small are there as the great.’ Then 
 follows the invitation to keep the festival of the fourth 
 month. We see the joyous people bearing ‘ branches, 
 posies from the orchard, garlands from the garden, the 
 fowler with his thousands of birds.’ The sea brings 
 the king her tribute of fish, the distant lands their 
 tributes. The people bear on their heads fresh skins 
 of sweet drink. They stand at their doors, waving 
 posies, branches, and garlands, for the king is making 
 his entry in the morning . 1 This was not in spring-time, 
 but in our * chill October,’ when Egypt is awakened by 
 the cool north breeze, and refreshed with the waters of 
 the wide-spread inundation. Such was ‘ the best of the 
 land,’ ‘the land of Rameses ’ (Gen. xlvii. n). 
 
 The vast monotonous plain of the Delta is broken 
 when we see on the horizon the lofty mounds of Zoan. 
 All around is desolation. When the Nile has spread 
 over the land, marsh-plants spring up, and there are 
 
 M Chabas, Melanges Egyptologiqucs, II. ser., p. 132, foil. 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 85 
 
 scanty patches of vegetation to point a contrast ; but the 
 dry season withers all, and then the whole tract is one 
 brown space of desolate sameness. A few date-sellers 
 may cross the mound, and that is all the commerce. 
 Arabs of the western desert here chase the gazelle with 
 falcon and greyhound. No description need emphasize 
 these few words. There is indeed no scenery to de- 
 scribe ; one vast silent solitude, without variety of form 
 or colour, a weary wilderness ; all the sadder when we 
 think that the hard soil beneath our feet would yield a 
 triple harvest, if war, neglect, and tyranny had not de- 
 populated, and thus had marred, ‘ the best of the land.’ 
 The ruins of Zoan are far too confused to admit of 
 detailed description. We know their former magni- 
 ficence, but we cannot restore their ancient shape. The 
 sumptuous edifices lie in confused heaps, thrown down 
 by man’s violence or the force of an earthquake. There 
 are also striking evidences of the agency of fire ( cf. Ezek. 
 xxx. 14). Two temples stood there, both wholly built 
 of red granite of Syene, transported from the southern 
 limit of Egypt, almost seven hundred miles away, monu- 
 ments of a lavish expenditure, wonderful even in the days 
 of Ramses, the rebuilder of the great temple, and the 
 
86 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 founder of the temple on the east. No less than four- 
 teen obelisks adorned the great temple; and in this 
 respect Zoan seems to have been far richer than any other 
 Egyptian city, except perhaps Thebes and Heliopolis. 
 The architecture must also have been peculiar in con- 
 struction, for the proper place of the obelisks was in front 
 of the entrance of a temple ; and when, as at El-Kamak, 
 we find more than a pair, this is due to the enlargement 
 of the edifice in front of the old entrance. At Zoan 
 these monoliths must have stood in the courts as well as 
 in the approach. In cost of material and of work, the 
 two temples are unsurpassed, as though Ramses had 
 intended to astonish strangers with a splendid gateway 
 at the entrance into Egypt. Not the Rameseum of 
 Thebes, or the rock-cut temple of Aboo-Simbel in Nubia, 
 wholly his work, nor even the hall of columns of El- 
 Karnak, partly his, approach the magnificence of the 
 great temple of Zoan. This must have been his favourite 
 temple, at his chosen royal residence, and by it we can 
 measure the ancient glory of Zoan. 
 
 The crude brick wall around, and the massive crude 
 brick fort, must have been the result of such labours as 
 those of the oppressed Hebrews ; and as we look at 
 
ZOAN. 
 
 87 
 
 them we think of the solitary leader who dared 
 the successor of Ramses, and contrast the enduring 
 spiritual work of Moses with the shattered material 
 trophies of the great oppressor of his people . 1 
 
 Once more I would enforce what I have said and 
 written again and again, nor will yet cease to repeat, 
 that here in Zoan and the country round is the place 
 which we ought to explore that we may recover the lost 
 Egyptian annals of the Hebrew sojourn. Our failure in 
 this duty is a disgrace to our love of knowledge, a 
 scandal tc our love of the Bible. We have an evil 
 eminence in Europe for our neglect of research in Egypt. 
 It may be difficult to raise funds for work in Greece or 
 Turkey, bit there is no excuse for the polite indifference 
 of the edrcated class to a subject which deeply in- 
 terests the half-educated population, even to the chil- 
 dren of tie village schools. Would that some prophet 
 should arse to make a worthy protest, and call on the 
 
 1 Notices of Zoan will be found in the Description de VEgypte, 
 tom. v. pp 99. foil. : Wilkinson’s Modem Egypt and Thebes , i. 449, 
 foil. : Mariette, Notice des monuments (Cat. Boolak Museum). 
 Appendict : Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, J uly 
 1880, p. 133 ; Report by the Rev. Greville J. Chester. The next 
 paper, wlich will be on the town and land of Goshen, will be 
 illustrate! by a map useful for this paper also. 
 
88 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Pharaoh of wasted opportunity and ill-spent wealth, to 
 set free the priceless records his tyranny holds in bond- 
 age. The French have worked here and elsewhere in 
 Egypt with well-rewarded vigour; why should not we 
 give them our aid, and brighten the last years of our 
 boasted nineteenth century with the glory of great dis- 
 coveries, so that when we have ended our labours, our 
 children may say, ‘ We can remember the excavations in 
 the field of Zoan, and the land of Goshen ’ ? 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 89 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GOSHEN. 
 
 Tradition is an unsafe guide, and never more so than 
 in fixing the scenes of memorable events. Their interest 
 fades and vanishes. Should it revive, it attaches itself 
 to some new tale which wears the air of a recollection, 
 though it is no more than a guess or a theory. 
 
 When travellers began to visit Egypt, they asked to 
 be shown the land of Goshen, the ruins of the capital of 
 the Pharaohs of the sojourn, the route of the Exodus, the 
 place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. Nearly 
 three thousand years, or ninety generations of men, had 
 elapsed since the great event which began the national 
 history of Israel. The Egyptians had become absorbed 
 in the Arab race, and had forgotten their ancient learn- 
 ing. The travellers came with no better information 
 than that of the commentators on the Bible, Hebrew and 
 
9 ° 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Christian, to whom the names in the text were names 
 and nothing more. They inquired of the natives of 
 Egypt, and the answer was given from local tradition. 
 
 Standing on the western platform of the Citadel of 
 Cairo, the visitor beheld, as he thought, the sites of 
 sacred history spread out in the map of that splendid 
 prospect, unsurpassed in the world for beauty and 
 interest. Opposite were the pyramids of the great city 
 of Memphis, the capital of Joseph’s Pharaoh and of the 
 oppressors ; on the left, the mountains which hid the 
 ‘ Valley of the Wandering’ leading to the head of the 
 Red Sea, pointed out as the place where the Hebrews 
 crossed ; and on the right, in far distance, the glittering 
 green plain which spread north-eastwards to the land of 
 Goshen, the utmost limits of which could even be seen. 
 These mighty pyramids were the work of the enslaved 
 Hebrews; from that pleasant land they moved towards 
 the great capital, and waited for the signal of their free- 
 dom just below, perhaps where the many minarets and 
 domes of Cairo now rise, until at length they passed 
 safely behind the promontory, through the desert valley, 
 towards the Red Sea, where, under the solemn mountains, 
 the crowning deliverance was wrought. Nothing could 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 91 
 
 be more dramatic than such a noble frame for those great 
 events. 
 
 The Bible tells us nothing of Memphis at this time, 
 nor of a southward journey. Whence, then, came the 
 tradition? Not from the Bible, but from the Kuran. It 
 was at Memphis that Mohammad placed the residence of 
 the Pharaohs^of the sojourn; and this central fact once 
 believed by the Arabs as an article of faith, all the rest 
 followed. When the Kuran was written, the official 
 capital of Egypt was the fortress called Egyptian Babylon, 
 close to the south of Cairo ; and the renown of Memphis, 
 on the opposite bank of the Nile, was as yet undimmed 
 by time. Zoan had disappeared from memory. Whether 
 Mohammad fixed an old local tradition, or framed a new 
 one, little matters. Its persistence is clearly due to him. 
 
 We must turn reluctantly from this poetic vision, and, 
 as though awaking from a pleasant dream to the hard 
 work of life, face the severe critical inquiry which so 
 great a problem demands, now that modern science has 
 given us an array of facts. The result, in its truth, will 
 charm us not less than the old fancy. It will certainly 
 make our faith stronger in the venerable record which is 
 part of the title-deeds of religion ; for in place of the 
 
92 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 difficulties of the former identification, which would be 
 hard to reconcile with a historical narrative, we find that 
 beautiful agreement of place with circumstance which is 
 the very test of true history. 
 
 The facts we need have been collected with admirable 
 industry by Dr. Brugsch, who has devoted himself with 
 indomitable patience to searching them out of the ancient 
 Egyptian records of geography. The Egyptians were a 
 scientific people, but they did not write dictionaries for 
 our use. So the laborious scholar had to hunt up and 
 down in lists of the temples relating to local worship, as 
 well as in papyri recording royal donations, or giving in 
 some form or other geographical information. He has 
 published a series of volumes on the subject, the last of 
 which is a great geographical dictionary, entirely written 
 by lithography, for hieroglyphic type was too costly for 
 him. In this work we have all necessary information 
 that the old records have as yet yielded. For more 
 we need excavations, the crying want of all who care for 
 Bible history. 
 
 These new documents reveal this startling fact, that 
 the land of Goshen had for very long been sufficiently 
 defined on good authority. We possessed the informa- 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 93 
 
 tion and never generally received it. So it lay almost 
 useless for centuries. 
 
 The Septuagint, or Alexandrian Greek translation of 
 the Old Testament, tells us what Dr. Brugsch has con- 
 firmed from the monuments. As we now possess this 
 work, the dates of its various parts are different, repre- 
 senting a succession of labours ; but it is clear that the 
 Law is a very ancient translation, made in Egypt by 
 learned men who had a good knowledge of the country. 
 The geographical identifications thus represent the 
 scholarship of a date which we may put more than two 
 hundred years before the Christian Era, and tell us 
 what was then thought in Egypt. 
 
 Generally, the Greek translation renders Goshen by 
 Gesem or Gesen, but in one place it adds this mark of 
 position, ‘the land of Gesem of Arabia’ (Gen. xlv. io). 
 It seems very strange to find an Arabia in Egypt, but we 
 also find a Libya. The rich valley and plain formed the 
 boundary between the great deserts of the East and the 
 West, between Arabia and Libya. Thus one of the most 
 eastern districts was called the nome or province of 
 Arabia, and one of the most western that of Libya, as 
 though they had been won by the fertilising Nile from 
 
94 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the wastes on either side of the land it waters. This 
 Arabia of the Greek translation is the Arabian Nome. 
 Goshen was part of it, so the phrase ‘ Gesem of Arabia ’ 
 implies. Leaving this question for the moment, we note 
 that the Arabian Nome was bordered by that of Zoan on 
 the north (the Tanite Nome), the field of Zoan being the 
 nearest part of that neighbouring province. This explains 
 the emphasis laid on the ‘ wonders in the field of Zoan.’ 
 The eastern position of the Arabian Nome suited it for 
 the Hebrew settlement, for it held a border Shemite 
 population, and lay outside the purely Egyptian ter- 
 ritory, where shepherds were hateful (Gen. xlvi. 34). 
 Other passages show that the old translators were a little 
 perplexed with the geography of the district. Many 
 changes had taken place, and much had been forgotten 
 in a period of a thousand years : it is enough that they 
 fixed their eyes on the Arabian Nome as the scene of the 
 sojourn. 
 
 Dr. Brugsch has found the ancient Egyptian name 
 of Goshen. It is Kesem or Pa-Kesem, the capital 
 of the Arabian Nome, one reading transcribing the 
 Hebrew Goshen with sufficient exactness, the other 
 the classical Phaccusa. Thus there was a town as 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 95 
 
 well as a land of Goshen. Why then was Goshen in 
 Arabia, Gesem of Arabia, part, not the whole of the 
 Nome? This is because the old province was twofold, 
 so that when it was at last officially divided, the ter- 
 ritory of Goshen remained attached to the chief town 
 of the same name in the limited Arabian Nome, the 
 other portion being separated as another province. 
 This division actually took place under the Ptolemies ; 
 and it is at once a note of time, and a curious mark 
 of accuracy, that the translators of the Septuagint, 
 writing before the division, indicate Goshen as part of 
 the Arabian Nome. It is remarkable, too, that, while 
 they knew this much, they could not tell which part 
 was the old Hebrew settlement, for it seems from 
 two passages that they identified the land of Goshen 
 with the part that was ultimately cut off, in spite of the 
 part that remained carrying with it the old capital. All 
 this detail may seem very tiresome, but it is really very 
 important. It gives us two great results. When we do 
 not know where the events of history happened, they 
 become vague 3 moving, as it were, from place to place, 
 they lose their strength of outline and distinctness of 
 colour 3 no sooner are they fixed than they become real. 
 
96 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 This is what we feel with startling force as we actually 
 see Mount Carmel and Gilboa when the coast of 
 Palestine rises before our view. But this is not all. As 
 we fix the town of Goshen, the centre of the administra- 
 tion of the land of Goshen, we know where to dig for 
 the Egyptian records of the Hebrew sojourn. The 
 town is not a mere symbol in ancient maps ; its name 
 still survives on the old site, where extensive mounds 
 bear witness to its former wealth. There, a little below 
 the earth that we are too indifferent to turn, lie count- 
 less fragments of history, probably documents of the 
 rule of Joseph and of the age of the Oppression. 
 
 Thus we can place the land of Goshen on the. map, 
 with the chief town of the same name. In the case of 
 the town this was its civil name, which, as often happens 
 in the border- land, was not Egyptian but Hebrew. 
 There was another land of Goshen, conquered by 
 Joshua, in southern Palestine (Josh. x. 41 ; xi. 16). The 
 meaning of the name is doubtful ; perhaps it is ‘ watered 
 by rain,’ and thus ‘ fertile,’ the first sense suited to Pales- 
 tine and the second to Egypt. Eastern settlers would 
 have carried the name of a favoured territory with them, 
 and given it to a new home. The sacred name of the 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 97 
 
 town was Pe-Supt, the Abode of the god Supt : this we 
 find in the Assyrian records in the form Pasupti, as the 
 capital of one of the little kingdoms under which Egypt 
 was divided from the middle of the eighth to the middle 
 of the seventh century before the Christian Era. The 
 local divinity Supt was a form of Horns, the sun of the 
 day, and his sacred animal was probably the hawk. 
 Supt was reverenced as the protector of the frontier, 
 the subduer of the Shepherds. This was the Egyptian 
 notion. Yet they had another view of this god as an 
 object of worship of the stranger population. We see 
 him represented as a Shemite divinity, with a foreign 
 type of face and a foreign dress. Thus he is connected 
 with the local religion of the Shepherds. We already 
 saw in the history of Zoan that the Shepherds adored a 
 divinity of their own whom the Egyptians identified 
 ■with Set or Typhon. We now learn of another of their 
 gods. Supt is connected with other foreign divinities 
 worshipped in eastern Egypt, and consequently those 
 of the Shepherds. They are alluded to in a curious 
 passage in Amos (v. 25, 26, comp. Acts vii. 42, 43). 
 
 Not a vestige of the local worship of Goshen appears 
 to have clung to the Hebrew nation after the conquest 
 
 H 
 
9 8 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 of Palestine. Moses and Joshua must surely have put 
 it down with a strong hand. But it lasted long enough 
 to pass into history ; and so we learn that the religion 
 of the Hebrews did not grow from an old idolatry of 
 their own, a tribal worship, for the old idolatry of the 
 Israelites in Egypt has no connection with the true 
 Hebrew belief. It fell from its opposition to that belief, 
 which has nothing whatever in common with it. Let 
 this be well remembered. 
 
 As yet the early story of Goshen, land and city, is 
 alone told in the Bible ; we wait for the buried records 
 before we can supply the commentary and fill up the gaps. 
 Here Jacob came, bowed down with sorrow and age, to 
 pass his last days near the great and prosperous son who 
 ruled Egypt from the city of Zoan. An Egyptian wall- 
 painting of the age of the Twelfth Dynasty, in a tomb 
 at Benee-Hasan, pictures the coming of a Shemite 
 family to settle in Egypt, a people different from the 
 natives of the land, more fully and more richly clad, 
 armed, and one like a true Hebrew playing as he goes 
 on a musical instrument, the lyre. Asses bear the chil- 
 dren and the scanty goods. The women come too. It 
 is a real settlement. So journeyed the old patriarch till 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 9 
 
 he was met by Joseph’s wagons. So marched his tur- 
 bulent sons, bearing their weapons of war, and maybe 
 not without the music to which they sang the old songs 
 that have perished. 
 
 The Hebrews settled. In due course Jacob died, 
 
 and was borne forth by the powerful governor with a 
 mighty cavalcade, mummied as an Egyptian, and 
 mourned with the customary wailing of Egypt, across 
 the border to the ancient sepulchre which Abraham 
 
 H 2 
 
IOO 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 had bought, the cave wherein his fathers and sad Leah 
 already rested. And Joseph died, and he could not be 
 carried out ; the power of the Shepherds was waning. 
 So he took an oath of his people that they would take 
 his bones with them when God should lead them forth. 
 Thus he too was mummied, and the oath was remem- 
 bered by Moses. 
 
 With the death of Joseph a great obscurity falls on 
 the story of Goshen. Israel abode in Egypt four 
 hundred and thirty years. At the death of Joseph we 
 have only reached the close of the first seventy years, 
 and are probably near the beginning of the Oppression. 
 The great heat of the Oppression filled at least the 
 last eighty years of the sojourn, from the birth of Moses 
 to the Exodus. Of the time between Joseph’s death 
 and the birth of Moses we have but a solitary fact, the 
 pathetic story of how all Ephraim’s sons were cut off by 
 the men of Gath born in Egypt, because of a cattle- 
 lifting, on the part of Israelites or Gittites we cannot tell 
 (i Chron. vii. 20-22). It is a glimpse of a lawless and 
 a troubled age. This is the time of which we long to 
 know the history, and need not perhaps long in vain. 
 
 The darkness lifts, and Goshen has again a place in 
 
GOSHEN. 
 
 IOI 
 
 history in the lively picture of the terrible Oppression 
 and the great deliverance. Not that all the events here 
 took place. The policy of Pharaoh was to scatter the 
 people. Yet Goshen always remained their central 
 home, and from it they went forth on the night of the 
 Passover. 
 
 Again history is silent till the chief town is once 
 more of note, when, as already said, it became the 
 capital of one of the petty kings who divided Egypt 
 among them in the days of the Ethiopian supremacy. 
 Later still, under the Greek sovereigns, the place was a 
 rich emporium of Asiatic trade. 
 
 Of the present site only this can be said, that, like 
 many famous towns of Egypt, it is marked by extensive 
 mounds, and a scattered modern village, still preserving 
 the Greek form of the name, Fakoos, a little altered 
 from Phaccusa. The country around is yet iertile, 
 though the dwindled Nile-stream and neglected canals 
 do not enrich it as of old. Imagination only can picture 
 the prosperity that has passed away. 
 
102 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PITHOM. 
 
 To repeat in brief what has been already shown, — the 
 building by the Hebrews of the ‘treasure’ cities or, 
 better, ‘ store ’ cities (corap. 2 Chron. xxxii. 28), Pithom 
 and Raamses (Exod. i. n) or Rameses, seems to mark 
 the beginning of the heat of the Oppression. The name 
 Rameses points to Ramses II. as the great oppressor. 
 The date was about b.c. 1400, some eighty years before 
 the Exodus. After the expulsion of the Shepherds, who 
 protected the Israelites, the settlers became a serf popu- 
 lation. With the accession of Ramses a new policy 
 began. The border and the foreign provinces were now 
 organised upon a more settled basis of government than 
 before ; great forts were built to command the frontier ; 
 emporiums of trade were constructed. The growing 
 multitudes of the Hebrews caused uneasiness to the 
 Egyptian king, and their employment offered both a 
 
PITHOM. 
 
 103 
 
 means of carrying out his great building projects, and of 
 depriving the serfs of nationality and the power of com- 
 bination. 
 
 Rameses or Zoan, we have seen, was a great centre 
 of trade. Pithom, though we do not exactly know its 
 site, lay within the border, and on or near the line of 
 traffic by land. Thus both were store- cities rather than 
 forts. We need not return to Rameses : Pithom is our 
 present subject. Unfortunately, the Egyptian records 
 tell us little of this town. Its sacred name in hiero- 
 glyphics is Pe-tum, the abode of Turn, the setting 
 sun. The civil name was Tekut, which Dr. Brugsch 
 identifies with the Succoth of the Bible, a conclusion 
 which may be doubted. It was the capital of the 
 Sethro'ite Nome, the easternmost province of Lower 
 Egypt. Though the site is not yet fixed, we can have 
 little doubt that it is marked by one of the many mounds 
 which lie in this unexplored territory. 
 
 Round the subject of Pithom and Rameses, a great 
 French scholar, the lamented M. Chabas (Melanges, 2™ 
 sdr. p. 108 foil.), has grouped all the scattered illustra- 
 tions of the Oppression which the Egyptian records 
 afford. They are disappointing in their scantiness, and 
 
io4 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 from the absence of precise mention of the Hebrews. 
 This seems at first sight very strange. Of the reign of 
 Ramses II., now held to be the great oppressor, there 
 are abundant records ; that of his son Menptah, iden- 
 tified with the Pharaoh of the Exodus, is less amply 
 represented. The inscriptions of both taken together, 
 and of their great officers, and the correspondence and 
 memoranda of the scribes, would fill volumes. But when 
 we come to look into these documents, we find that they 
 cover a very limited space of the field which we call 
 history. The kings record their conquests and their 
 donations to the temples ; the officers deal with their 
 personal services to the crown, and the posts which they 
 held ; the scribes give us official correspondence. There 
 is no history of the people of Egypt, or of the strangers 
 in the land. That which modern history claims as its 
 most interesting province is here omitted, or told only 
 by accident, as when some detail of the life of the sub- 
 jects appears in connection with a command which a 
 scribe orders or executes. It is thus that the darkness 
 clears now and again, and we see the same picture of op- 
 pression whch the Bible portrays, the heavy forced labour 
 of multitudes toiling in the heat of the furnace of iron. 
 
PITHOM. 
 
 105 
 
 In these fragmentary notices the Hebrews are not 
 mentioned by name. M. Chabas indeed thought that 
 lie had discovered them in a foreign serf population, the 
 Aperiu, whose name is not very different from that ot 
 the Hebrews in their own language, with the important 
 exception that the change from b to p is most unlikely. 
 The identification was hailed with delight, but by degrees 
 difficulties presented themselves. First of all it was 
 found that there were still Aperiu in Egypt more than 
 half a century after the Exodus : these might perhaps be 
 a fragment of the people who stayed behind. Next it 
 was discovered that some were horsemen, which the 
 Hebrews never were ; and last of all, that they were 
 employed in public works before the Israelites came into 
 Egypt. Yet the name is so often used for foreign bonds- 
 men engaged in the very work of the Hebrews, and 
 especially during the Oppression, that it is hard not to 
 believe it to be a general term in which they are included 
 though it does not actually describe them. 
 
 The most precious pictorial illustration of the Oppres- 
 sion is a wall-painting in a tomb at Thebes, showing 
 prisoners taken in war by Thothmes III. engaged in 
 building some parts of the great # temple of Amen. The 
 
io6 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 date is long before the building of Rameses, perhaps a 
 century and a half. The labourers are captives, not 
 serfs, yet they are clearly Shemites, kinsfolk of the 
 Hebrews, and the work they are doing is the same as 
 that of the Hebrews, and organised in the same manner. 
 
 In the painting, we first see the captives drawing 
 water in jars from a deep tank in which lotus-lilies are 
 blooming, and around which trees are planted. Others 
 are engaged in breaking up masses of earth with hoes. 
 Others carry the moistened clay, which their comrades 
 place in wooden forms, and arrange the shaped bricks in 
 rows to dry in the sun. The bricks when dried are 
 stacked, and carried where needed in slings suspended 
 from yokes. Another gang bears stone and mortar 3 and 
 at the end of the scene is a carefully-constructed wall 
 topped and partly faced with stone. One overseer, with 
 his staff under his arm, sits watching 3 another, staff in 
 hand, follows the labourers. Dr. Brugsch reads the main 
 inscription, ‘(Here are seen) the captives who were 
 carried away as living prisoners in very great numbers : 
 they work at the building with dexterous fingers 3 their 
 overseers show themselves in sight 3 these attend with 
 strictness, obeying the orders of the great skilful lord 
 
PITHGM. 
 
 107 
 
 (who prescribes to them) the works, and gives directions 
 to the masters. (They are rewarded) with wine and all 
 kinds of good dishes ; they perform their service with a 
 mind full of love for the king ; they build for Thothmes 
 III. a holy of holies for (the gods) ; may it be rewarded 
 to him through a range of many endless years.’ The 
 overseer is made to say, ‘ The stick is in my hand, be 
 not idle.’ Very aptly Dr. Brugsch quotes these two 
 passages of Scripture : ‘They did set over them task- 
 masters (superintendents of works) to afflict them with 
 their burdens’ (Exod. i. 11); ‘And the taskmasters 
 hasted (them), saying, Fulfil your works, (your) daily 
 tasks’ (v. 13). Pharaoh’s retort to the complaint of 
 the Hebrew overseers, ‘Ye (are) idle, idle’ (ver. 17), 
 is even more pointedly illustrative of the text of our 
 picture. 
 
 These captives were engaged in two separate labours, 
 the building of a provision-house, and of a sanctuary. 
 (Brugsch, ‘History,’ 2 ed. i., p, 417 foil.) The chief work 
 here is brick-making and building with bricks. In the 
 narrative of Exodus, nothing is said of any other 
 labour : quarrying is, however, mentioned traditionally. 
 The great bulk of Egyptian building was with brick ; 
 
io8 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 houses, forts, circuit-walls of towns and temples, were 
 all in this material, and the mason’s labour was almost 
 limited to temples and tombs. 
 
 The climate of Egypt does not make it necessary to 
 burn the bricks. In the present day, unburnt brick is 
 in common use in the villages, except near the northern 
 coast, where rain is not infrequent. The bricks are 
 merely shaped and placed in the sun to dry. Anciently 
 this was done with more skill and care than now. The 
 oldest bricks, as in the case of those of the brick pyramids 
 in the Necropolis of Memphis, are, as a rule, bound with 
 pebbles and similar materials, while the later bricks of 
 the age of the Empire are bound with straw. This fact 
 disposes of the old fancy that the Israelites laboured for 
 the kings who built the pyramids. The brick-mould or 
 form was very carefully made : it was of wood, and some- 
 times bore on its inner face the name of the sovereign 
 under whose orders it was used. Thus we can frequently 
 date Egyptian buildings from the royal names occurring 
 on the bricks, precisely as we can date those of Assyria 
 and Babylonia from the bricks which are more frequently 
 stamped in the same manner. 
 
 The Bible mentions three degrees of officers who 
 
PITHOM. 
 
 109 
 
 controlled the Israelites, of whom one class only is 
 seen in the wall-picture. The whole scheme of the 
 Oppression was entrusted to superior taskmasters, who 
 are called ‘superintendents of works’ (Exod. i. n). 
 These seem to have organised the labour, for they do not 
 afterwards appear in the details of the narrative, in which 
 we read of taskmasters, probably Egyptians, and over- 
 seers, certainly Israelites (v. 6, foil.). The taskmasters 
 superintended the work staff in hand (comp. ver. 14), 
 and the overseers were merely selected labourers who 
 acted as interpreters and chiefs of gangs, and were 
 beaten, in the event of failure, like the common work- 
 men. While the wall-painting only represents the 
 ordinary Egyptian taskmaster, the occupant of the 
 tomb the chapel of which it adorns was probably one of 
 the higher superintendents. 
 
 A still closer agreement with the Scripture narrative 
 is found in the memorandum of a scribe of the age of 
 the great Oppression, which states that twelve men 
 engaged in the fields in making bricks, having neglected 
 their task, ‘of producing their tale of bricks every 
 day,’ were set to work in building a house, and it is 
 added that their toil was not to be relaxed. Nothing 
 
no 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 could be more exact. Similarly we read of the allow- 
 ance of grain for the Aperiu who were engaged in forced 
 labour. 
 
 One more illustration of the sojourn may be drawn 
 from the group of documents belonging to the same 
 period. It is a note of the authorisation given by Men- 
 ptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus, to certain Arab chiefs 
 of Edom, to settle near Pithom ‘ in order that they and 
 their cattle might live in the great farm of Pharaoh.’ 
 This, as M. Chabas points out, is precisely parallel to 
 the settlement of Jacob and his family. It may be 
 added that it is not impossible that these strangers 
 were invited, or allowed to come, in order that they 
 might take the place of the Israelites scattered in their 
 labour, and thus break up the nationality of the Hebrew 
 settlement. 
 
 Scanty as these illustrations are, it will be seen that 
 they show the accuracy of the narrative in the Bible. 
 Any day may afford such direct evidence as has been 
 hoped for ever since hieroglyphics were interpreted.. 
 Explorations in Egypt, especially in the sites of the Land 
 of Goshen and the neighbourhood, may yield the 
 wished-for result, or it may be found in some neglected 
 
P1TH0M. 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 papyrus, perhaps a mere fragment, in a small museum 
 or a private collection. A few lines scrawled by an 
 Egyptian scribe, the memorandum of what he thought 
 an indifferent everyday transaction, may be deciphered, 
 and tell us of the Hebrews by name, or even mention 
 some name already known to us from the Scripture 
 narrative. 
 
1 1 2 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MIGDOL. 
 
 The route of the Israelites out of Egypt to the sea 
 which they crossed is hard to trace. Nature, war, and 
 neglect have changed the face of the country, and swept 
 away the ancient landmarks. The traveller who journeys 
 on his camel to Palestine may follow the footsteps of 
 the Hebrews, but he knows it not ; the steamer which 
 carries her busy or careless freight of modern men up 
 the Canal of Suez must somewhere cut the very path of 
 the Exodus, but where none can tell. Sea and land are 
 not where they were three thousand years ago. The 
 coast line of the Mediterranean has little changed, but 
 the Lake Menzeleh behind it has very greatly in- 
 creased. The Red Sea has retired many miles. As the 
 prophet foretold, the tongue of the Egyptian Sea, the 
 head of the Gulf of Suez, has been dried up (Isa. xi. 15, 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 II 3 
 
 comp. xix. 5). The territory submerged by Lake Men- 
 zeleh can be seen by the maps laid down on the 
 authority of classical geographers. In the time of 
 Strabo, three branches of the Nile, the Mendesian, 
 Tanitic, and Pelusiac, all flowed into the Mediterranean. 
 The meres that lay at that time between these channels 
 have now merged in the one great lake, in whose wide- 
 spread waters the Nile-streams are lost. These waters 
 are spread over the fields, the orchards, and the vine- 
 yards of whole provinces ; while the islets bear the 
 mounds of long-forgotten cities once on the highroads 
 of traffic. The roads which the Roman Itinerary of 
 Antoninus shows connecting Pelusium with Tanis (Zoan) 
 and with Daphnae, more to the south, are obliterated in 
 the morasses. The fertile land through which the 
 Hebrews passed in their first two stages, is now a deso- 
 lation, uninhabited and untended ; in the season of the 
 inundation a morass, an extension of Lake Menzeleh 
 peopled alone by countless flocks of wild fowl ; for the 
 rest of the year, a stretch of dry mud, cracked by the 
 burning heat of the sun, a grey wilderness more dreary 
 even than the yellow wilderness which bounds it on the 
 east. For the desert of the third stage of the march is, 
 
 1 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 1 14 
 
 as of old, an expanse of shifting sand, unlike the rocky 
 desert to the south. It is only varied by the drifts, which 
 form low hills. Beyond the third stage, to the north- 
 east, stretches the Lake Serbonis, which has been at 
 times, as now, a sheet of water, at times a dangerous 
 morass, treacherously veiled by the wind-swept sand, 
 which indeed still covers its southern limits. The 
 frontier-wall has disappeared, with its forts, but the east- 
 ward road, whereby the great armies of Egypt went to 
 war in Syria, is yet followed by the caravans, which 
 pass mounds, each hiding one of the ancient castles 
 of the Pharaohs. The great wall and the forts, built of 
 crude brick, have crumbled into the plain, and been 
 buried by the drifting sand. It would be a costly labour 
 to unveil the remains hidden by the mounds, but the 
 result would be the recovery of many a lost chapter of 
 history. 
 
 It would seem hopeless to trace the Israelite route 
 along this land of oblivion. The map has been washed 
 out by the waters and worn out by the sand. And if we 
 could follow the emigrants to what was the shore of the 
 sea, that sea has withdrawn. Yet the work is not so 
 hard as it appears. It needs patience and a wise separa- 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 ”5 
 
 tion of fact from conjecture. We know the two most 
 important points of the great journey, and from them we 
 may find the direction of the march. The departure 
 was from Rameses, identified, as already shown, with the 
 great city of Zoan, still retaining its name in the Arabic 
 San. The last encampment before the sea was crossed 
 was near Migdol, and Migdol is so well fixed by classical 
 evidence that we may venture to say which mound in 
 the desert covers its remains. If we cannot point to 
 the sites of the two intermediate stations, Succoth and 
 Etham, we can draw a line from Zoan to Migdol, making 
 allowance in its direction for the difficulties of the 
 country, less in the age of the Exodus than now, and we 
 cannot be far wrong. 
 
 We have, however, much more than this to do. 
 Where was the sea at this time? Did it extend to near 
 Migdol, of which we know the site, and was it the Red 
 Sea? For as we look at the map, though we can trace 
 a chain of lakes and marshes between the south-eastern 
 angle of Lake Menzeleh and the Red Sea at Suez, 
 we must ascertain which of these represents the utmost 
 northern extension, in historical times, of the Gulf of 
 Suez, which now has its head at the town whence it 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 116 
 
 takes its name. When this is done, we must try and 
 see how far in this direction the sea extended in the 
 days of Moses, three thousand years ago. 
 
 We cannot always trace the causes of the changes we 
 notice in the extent of sea and land. We know, however, 
 that gulfs are filled up by rivers and the sea, or by the 
 sea alone. Rivers, bringing down alluvial matter, form 
 deltas at their mouths, like the Nile and the Mississippi. 
 The sea aids them by silting up sand from its bed. 
 Even in historical times, the Euphrates and Tigris, aided 
 by the Persian Gulf, have filled up the vast space between 
 the present sea-shore and Ur of the Chaldees, which 
 four thousand years ago was a port from whose terraced 
 pyramid were seen the ancient ships which went to and 
 fro on the Indian trade over the waters now covered by 
 dreary marsh-land, the perpetual home of the plague. 
 Here we trace a double agency. Where there is no 
 great river, the sea alone does the work, unless there is 
 also volcanic action. This last agency we may perhaps 
 omit in speaking of the Gulf of Suez, for ordinary silt- 
 ing is enough to account for what we see. 
 
 It may make the subject easier if we think of changes 
 on our own coast which are still going on. On the 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 U7 
 
 south of Sussex we notice that gradual retirement of the 
 sea, which has ruined Winchelsea and impoverished Rye. 
 Beyond the historic limits we may trace still more 
 ancient shore-lines at higher levels. The whole fen- 
 country is an instance of the same reclamation of land 
 on a much larger scale. Not that this has been regular 
 and without intermission for ages. We must remember 
 that once the Channel was bridged by an isthmus, and 
 Britain and Gaul were one, just as north-western Africa 
 was joined to Spain at the very time when the Great 
 Desert, the Sahara, was a sea. We need not, however, 
 perplex ourselves with remote geological conditions, but 
 bear in mind only that gulfs and bays are generally filled 
 up by the work of water agencies. The case of the 
 Egyptian Delta is an exception. It was indeed won 
 from the sea, yet the sea, or at least the water, has 
 since with success claimed back part of its old domain : 
 but of this later. 
 
 Looking at the chain of lakes on the map, we have 
 no difficulty in tracing three distinct pieces of water. 
 Nearest Suez is the marsh called the Bitter Lakes, then 
 Lake Timsah, and lastly Lake Ballah, on the north-east 
 of which is the site of Migdol. Not far northward is 
 
1 1 8 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the south-eastern extension of Lake Menzeleh. Without 
 historical evidence, it would be impossible to say whether 
 these waters were once part of the Red Sea or of the 
 Mediterranean, or to which sea we should assign some 
 or all of them. All we could infer would be that at 
 some time there was a communication between the 
 lakes. But the evidence we want is at hand. 
 
 The Greek geographer Strabo, a very accurate writer, 
 tells us that the town of Heroonpolis was in the angle 
 of the Arabian Gulf or Gulf of Suez, which Pliny a 
 little later calls, after the town, the Heroopolite Gulf. 
 This place must have stood on the north-west of the 
 present Lake Timsah, not far from the town of Isma’eel- 
 eeyeh (Ismailia), the modem inland port of the Suez 
 Canal. Thus in Strabo’s time, about nineteen cen- 
 turies ago, the Gulf extended over forty miles north- 
 ward of its present head at Suez. 
 
 This view has been combated on account of the 
 discovery of the line of an old canal running from Suez 
 northwards for more than twelve miles. The date of 
 this canal cannot be fixed. If it is of the time of the 
 Pharaohs, it must have been cut through the silt which 
 obstructed the sea between Suez and the Bitter Lakes. 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 1 19 
 
 Strabo says that in his time people embarked at Heroon- 
 
 t 
 
 polis for the voyage down the Red Sea. Thus though 
 it may have been necessary, in an earlier age, to unite 
 the broad parts of the Gulf by a canal, the head of the 
 Gulf was then still placed near Heroonpolis. If so 
 the inhabitants of Egypt had not forgotten the former 
 extension of the sea. 
 
 Heroonpolis, however, is over twenty miles farther 
 south than Migdol, as we know from a Roman docu- 
 ment giving the distances on the military roads, the 
 Itinerary of Antoninus. Did the Red Sea between the 
 time of Moses and that of Strabo retire this distance ? 
 In other words, is the marsh Lake Ballah, which is the 
 shrunken representative of a larger expanse of water, 
 and even now extends in a narrow arm almost as far as 
 the site of Migdol, the representative of the head of the 
 Gulf at the time of Moses ? Before we answer this 
 question we must put another. Could the Gulf at any 
 historical time extend beyond Heroonpolis northwards? 
 Where are we to draw the line of separation in the chain 
 of lakes between the domain of the Red Sea and that 
 of the Mediterranean ? The levels taken for the cutting 
 of the Suez Canal would seem at first sight to fix the 
 
120 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 limits of the former Gulf of Suez where they were in 
 Strabo’s time, at the north of Lake Tirnsah, and to 
 assign Lake Ballah to the Mediterranean system with 
 which it is now in connection. Between the two is the 
 sandy elevation of El-Gisr, rising in one place about 
 forty, in another about fifty feet, above the level of the 
 Red Sea at Suez, which is ten feet above that of the 
 Mediterranean. This elevation, to cut the canal through 
 which was an arduous labour, is not throughout a marine 
 deposit. The lowest part of one section reveals a tough 
 bed at the base above the Suez level. The rest is 
 wholly of sand, and might easily have been accumulated 
 by drifts. Thus the obstacle is not serious, but it does 
 not seem to have covered a recent sea-bed. If we look 
 at any large map, we perceive that the ancient ex- 
 tension of Lake Timsah could have avoided this tract, 
 and passed round it to the westward, where the levels 
 are low. The engineers of a direct canal had to face 
 the difficulty, and overcame it bravely. 
 
 Thus there is no reason why the Gulf of Suez should 
 not have extended, in historical times, so far north as to 
 include Lake Ballah ; yet we could not be sure of this 
 were it not for a curious piece of evidence. The great 
 
PelusimA, 
 
 SKETCH MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE ROUTE OF THE EXODUS. 
 

MIGDOL. 
 
 121 
 
 caravan route to Palestine now passes to the north of 
 the lake. It is the old Egyptian military road. This 
 is attested by the mounds which define its course, the 
 remains of the ancient stations. Obviously the Pharaohs 
 would have chosen the best line of march, north of the 
 Red Sea, and so between the two seas. 
 
 A word must be said of the Mediterranean and the 
 lakes which are fed by it and by the Nile, the great back- 
 waters on the northern coast, for the route of the Exodus 
 must have depended on the condition of the country 
 between the starting-point and the sea to be crossed. 
 Here again we see a startling change of level. The rise 
 of the land on the south of the Isthmus of Suez has been 
 balanced by a fall on the north. We have said that Lake 
 Mcnzeleh has swallowed up the populous and fertile tract 
 which once stretched around the meres from which it has 
 grown, and along the Nile streams. But to show that 
 there is no conjecture here we must speak for a moment 
 of the recent geological history of the northern part of 
 the Delta. 
 
 In spite of the change within, the coast-line of the 
 Mediterranean seems to have scarcely varied in historical 
 times. The depression has taken place in the long range 
 
122 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 of lakes. The outline of the Delta has remained the 
 same. The Nile, aided by the action of the sea, at first 
 filled up the great gulf which the Delta occupies, and 
 pushed a blunt wedge of land into the ocean northwards. 
 Probably currents sweeping along the coast, and the 
 want of good holding-ground for deposit, arrested the 
 farther conquest of the domain of the sea. But this does 
 not explain the loss of ground by the land in the lakes. 
 We should rather have expected that they would have 
 been filled up by the deposit of the Nile, especially since 
 the channels have been reduced from seven to two. For 
 instead of seven branches pouring the alluvial deposit 
 into the sea, only two do so, and most of the rest empty 
 themselves in the lakes. Of course something is due to 
 neglect of the dykes, and to war. Thus the westernmost 
 of the lakes, Mareotis, had dried up when the British 
 army cut a dam and filled it once more, for military pur- 
 poses, at the siege of Alexandria in the beginning of this 
 century ; since when the great port has been unhealthy. 
 We cannot explain the general process, which is most 
 remarkably seen in Lake Menzeleh, unless we suppose 
 a gradual fall of the land, at least in the north of the 
 Isthmus of Suez, and a corresponding rise in the south. 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 123 
 
 It is important here to notice that the long narrow lake 
 which is the most eastern of the whole series of back- 
 waters, the ancient Lake Serbonis, does not seem to 
 have changed its shape since the time of the classical 
 geographers. Its southern shore is protected by sand 
 hills, and it is free from the disturbing element of the 
 Nile streams. Unlike the rest, it is fed only by the ocean. 
 
 The place of Migdol may be determined by the 
 evidence already alluded to, that of the Itinerary of 
 Antoninus, according to which it stood at a distance 
 of twelve Roman miles from Pelusium. This would fix 
 its site at the mound now called Tell-es-Samoot, where 
 Dr. Brugsch places it. The modern name preserves 
 the ancient Egyptian Samut. 
 
 Migdol is mentioned in the Bible as near the third 
 camping-place of the Israelites (Exod. xiv. 2; Numb, 
 xxxiii. 7). The Hebrew name Migdol recurs in the 
 Maktal of the Egyptian monuments, the place having, 
 like Zoan, a double name, one Semitic and the other 
 (Samut) Egyptian. The classical form is Magdolos or 
 Magdolon. In an inscription of a king of the Eighteenth 
 Dynasty, Dr. Brugsch finds the limits of Egypt defined as 
 from Elephantine to Samut (Hist. i. p. 498). Similarly 
 
124 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Ezekiel speaks of these limits ‘from Migdol to Syene’ 
 (xxix. io, xxx. 6, margin). Elephantine is an island 
 opposite to Syene, the border-town on the south ; Samut, 
 as just remarked, still holds its place on the map. The 
 name of Migdol implies that it was a fort, but a town 
 must have grown around it, for it received a colony of 
 fugitive Jews in the time of Jeremiah (xliv. i). Under 
 the Pharaohs it had been apparently the most important 
 fort on the eastern frontier, but in the later days of the 
 monarchy, the great danger of attack by sea raised the 
 consequence of Pelusium or Sin, which became ‘ the 
 strength of Egypt’ (Ezek. xxx. 15). 
 
 We will now endeavour to trace the Israelite route 
 on the map. From Zoan to near Migdol the distance in 
 a straight line does not exceed thirty miles. As Mr. 
 Greville Chester has remarked, a much directer course 
 could have been followed at the time of the Exodus than 
 is now possible, if (as is certain), Lake Menzeleh was 
 anciently far less extensive (Quarterly Statement Palestine 
 Exploration Fund, July 1880, p. 146). Ten or twelve 
 miles a day would be as much as the Israelites could 
 accomplish. The journey was not through ‘ the way of 
 the land of the Philistines, although that (was) near’ 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 125 
 
 (Exod. xiii. 17). This confirms the identification of 
 Migdol with Magdolos. Having reached that point, 
 the natural course would have been to turn eastward 
 to Pelusium, and follow the coast-road leading to the 
 Philistine country ; but there was danger of war (Exod. 
 1. c.), and therefore the Hebrews were commanded to 
 ‘ return and encamp before Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol 
 and the sea, over against Baal-zephon.’ They were to 
 encamp by the sea, and Pharaoh would suppose that they 
 were entangled in the land, and shut in by the wilderness 
 (Exod. xiv. 2, 3). We cannot identify either Pi-hahiroth 
 or Baal-zephon. Dr. Brugsch, however, thinks with 
 reason that Pi-hahiroth should be read ‘ the mouth of the 
 abysses,’ indicating a place of quicksands. Baal-zephon 
 was no doubt the seat of the worship of a ‘ Baal of the 
 north,’ a name which tells us to look for this site in the 
 north of the isthmus. The worship of Baal did not 
 extend to the south of Egypt 3 the north of its eastern 
 territory is thus implied. 
 
 The position of Migdol is at first perplexing. The 
 encampment between Migdol and the sea would be 
 rather to the north-east than, as we should have ex- 
 pected, to the west of the ancient head of the gulf. 
 
126 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Two suppositions may explain this. The gulf may 
 have turned eastwards beyond where we can now trace 
 it, and passed to the southward of Migdol, a view which 
 agrees with the statement that the sea was driven back 
 by the strong east wind, which implies a sea flowing 
 from west to east as here supposed. In this case the 
 Israelites would have crossed from north to south. This 
 question can never be settled without a survey. On the 
 other hand, the obvious strategy of Pharaoh would have 
 been to wheel the left wing of his chariot-force and throw 
 it across the road to Palestine which the Israelites had 
 left to the north, and this movement might have forced 
 them back along the west side of the gulf if it ran 
 northward, and they would have ultimately crossed from 
 west to east. In this case the east wind would have 
 divided the sea, and not literally driven it back. 
 
 It is perhaps best to leave the majestic old narrative 
 without farther discussion. The sea has disappeared, 
 and curiosity cannot measure the depth. Like the 
 burial-place of Moses, the scene of the great deliverance 
 is unknown. It is enough that the conditions of the 
 country confirm the historical truth of the narrative, while 
 they baffle the inquiries of the critic. 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 127 
 
 ‘ Thy way (was) in the sea, and thy path in the great 
 waters, and thy footsteps were not known (Psalm lxxvii. 
 19). 1 
 
 The able German scholar, Dr. Brugsch, who has more 
 than any one illustrated the story of Israel in Egypt, 
 astonished the Oriental Congress held at London in 
 1874, with a theory of the route of the Exodus, which if 
 not new was enforced by a mass of new and curious 
 evidence. The idea that the Israelites did not cross the 
 Red Sea, but passed along the narrow and treacherous 
 way between Lake Serbonis and the Mediterranean, had 
 been already suggested by another learned German, Dr. 
 Schleiden, in his book on the Isthmus of Suez (Die 
 Landenge von Sues, 1858), but the brilliant revival of 
 the theory has hidden its first advocate in undeserved 
 oblivion. Having given him the credit due to an 
 originator, we may speak of the theory as Dr. Brugsch’s, 
 since he has put it in the form best known to the public. 
 His view is here adopted as far as the identification of 
 Migdol, with a reserve as to the sites of the two previous 
 encampments at Succoth and Etham. Pi-hahiroth he 
 
 1 The reading is from the Queen’s Printers’ Bible (Sunday School 
 Centenary Bible), which with the Aids to the Student gives the 
 main results of the study of the text of Scripture. 
 
128 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 places at the western end of the Serbonian Lake, and 
 Baal-zephon he identifies with the temple of Zeus, or 
 Jupiter, Casius on a headland, Mount Casius, in the strip 
 of land between the Mediterranean and the lake. The 
 objection to these identifications is that whereas in the 
 Bible Migdol, Pi-hahiroth, and Baal-zephon, are all 
 spoken of as together, Dr. Brugsch puts Migdol and 
 Baal-zephon as far apart as Zoan and Migdol, and thus 
 he makes the last day’s march as long as the three pre- 
 ceding stages. Again, he makes the change of route to 
 avoid the way of the Philistines, from the headland of 
 Mount Casius across the Serbonian Lake by an isthmus. 
 But the change took place before the last encampment 
 near Migdol, not after it, and Mr. Greville Chester 
 has shown that Dr. Brugsch’s isthmus is purely im- 
 aginary. He travelled by the strip of coast to test 
 the theory, and found it failed (Quart. Statement 
 Pal. Ex. Fund, July 1880, p. 154). So far for the 
 sites. With respect to the event, Dr. Brugsch holds 
 that the Israelites passed between the sea and the 
 lake by a practicable route, whereas the Egyptian army 
 perished by the overflow of the ocean, an event of 
 extremely rare occurrence ; and this view seems contrary 
 
MIGDOL. 
 
 129 
 
 to the narrative in Exodus. But it is a mistake into 
 which he has himself fallen, to suppose that the miracle 
 could thus be explained away. We cannot attempt to 
 define this or that cause as the essential part of a miracle : 
 it is best to view the event in its completeness and, in this 
 instance, to bear in mind the opportuneness of the con- 
 ditions needed for the passage of the Israelites and for 
 the overthrow of their pursuers. 
 
 In his ‘ Dictionnaire Geographique,’ Dr. Brugsch 
 seems to abandon the farther part of his route, and to 
 place the scene of the Exodus in the swamps of the 
 south-east of Lake Menzeleh, but he has not defined this 
 view. 
 
 To return for a moment to the explanation offered in 
 this chapter : it is confirmatory of its accuracy to see that 
 the Israelites came on the third day to the ‘ bitter ’ waters 
 of Marah, for in their southward journey about thirty 
 miles would bring them to the Bitter Lakes ; and this is 
 in agreement with the supposed rate of march to Migdol. 
 
 When we reflect on the vast period of time which has 
 passed since the Exodus, three thousand years, or ninety 
 generations of men, we may well wonder that any of the 
 places mentioned in the ancient narrative can yet be 
 
 K 
 
130 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 traced. When we recollect what changes time and war 
 have wrought, it is still more marvellous. There has 
 been no other history but that of the Bible, and this we 
 have to place side by side with documents which say 
 nothing of the event. Tradition does not help, but 
 misleads us. Yet enough remains, even without turning 
 the sand for the historical treasures it conceals, to enable 
 us to restore the main outlines of the map of the Exodus. 
 Future research may tell us more, but we can scarcely 
 doubt that to the end of time the actual place of the 
 passage of the Red Sea wall remain a mystery. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 ON. 
 
 A solitary obelisk of red granite, set up at least four 
 thousand years ago, alone marks the site of On, also 
 called the City of the Sun, in Hebrew Beth-shemesh, in 
 Greek Heliopolis ( see p. 134). Nothing else can be seen 
 of the splendid shrine and the renowned university 
 which were the former glories of the place. Amid the 
 memories of the site, a fable told to the Greek and 
 Roman visitors makes the solitude vocal with a lesson of 
 instruction. Here was wont to come, once in five 
 hundred years or more, that mysterious Arabian bird, the 
 phcenix. The winged wonder had no sooner settled than 
 he made his nest, only to set it in flames and perish, when 
 lo ! from his ashes arose a new phoenix, which spread 
 his red and golden wings and flew away to the unknown 
 land whence his parent came. The priests, after their 
 
 k 2 
 
132 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 manner, spoke in allegories. What they would have 
 taught we can only guess. They may have intended the 
 conjunction of the solar year with their wandering year, 
 which, as it wanted the intercalary day, was always losing 
 time, and went back through the seasons of nature. 
 They may have figured the resurrection. Learned men 
 have interpreted the riddle one way, the Fathers of the 
 Church the other. To us the story is fittest as a type of 
 the wisdom of the Egyptians, which at Heliopolis had a 
 chosen seat for thousands of years. The university to 
 which the wise men of Greece resorted perished when a 
 new centre of knowledge was founded in the Greek city of 
 Alexandria. It did not decay ; it was destroyed : the 
 schools were carried away or closed for want of students, 
 and most of the splendid obelisks were transplanted. But 
 the old learning lived again in fresh vigour in its second 
 home. In due course the university of Alexandria waned 
 and vanished, but not until it had reappeared in another 
 phase, at Baghdad and Cordova, under the protection 
 of the Arabs. For centuries, while the rest of the world 
 was dark, these and the kindred schools handed on the 
 unextinguished torch. At last they too disappeared, at 
 the very moment when their scholars had provided sue- 
 
ON 
 
 >33 
 
 cessors in the great cities of Christendom. Not a link 
 is wanting in this long chain ; though, as we visit Naples 
 and Bolognji, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, little do we 
 think of the forgotten parent who rests in the mouldering 
 ruins where the single obelisk still points heavenwards, 
 while in the carved hieroglyphics of its sides the wild 
 bees, types of the industry of scholars, make their nests. 
 
 The origin of both city and university at On is un- 
 known but there is good reason for carrying both back 
 to the very dawn of Egyptian history. Probably their foun- 
 dation was earlier than that of Memphis ; and Memphis 
 was built by Menes, the first king of Egypt. In the order 
 of the great gods, the chief objects of worship, we trace the 
 union of the system of Abydos in Upper Egypt with that 
 of Heliopolis in Lower Egypt. Abydos was close to 
 This, or Thinis, the primitive capital of Menes, aban- 
 doned for Memphis ; Heliopolis lay near the new city. 
 The ancient king seems, when he united the government 
 of the two divisions of the country, to have combined 
 the pantheons of two great seats of religion. The 
 position of the old city does not seem to have been 
 chosen for any political reason ; it commands no pass ; 
 yet there were times in the history of Egypt when Helio- 
 
134 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 polis. as the nearest place north of Memphis on the great 
 eastern road, gained some military consequence j but 
 this was a mere accident, due to the weakness of the 
 state. 
 
 The civil name of the town was An, the Hebrew On, 
 the sacred name, Pe-Ra, ‘ the Abode of the Sun.’ The 
 religion was the worship of Ra, the sun, in different per- 
 sonified forms. The ideas of the sun of the day and 
 that of the night, the visible and the invisible luminary, 
 were reverenced as Hunt and Turn. There were two 
 cities called An, one in Upper, and the other in Lower 
 Egypt, the southern the Hermonthis of the Greeks, and 
 the northern their Heliopolis ; and the solar worship 
 was divided, Munt being worshipped at the one city, 
 Turn at the other. Thus Turn, the sun of the night, was 
 the special god of Heliopolis, though the ordinary 
 general form of the sun, Ra, was also there worshipped, 
 with other solar divinities. It seems that Ra had a 
 temple, and Turn a separate edifice, perhaps a shrine. 
 The sacred animals of the sun-gods, several, not one as 
 usually elsewhere, were kept in the precincts. There 
 was the black bull, Mnevis, apparently a lion and lioness, 
 a cat, and the bennu, a crane, which was at once a living 
 
ON. 
 
 135 
 
 bird, and represented the mystical phoenix. This creature 
 cannot have been the same as the bird of legend, for the 
 inscriptions speak of the phoenix as living in a temple or 
 shrine of his own at Heliopolis, and yet as the phoenix 
 who creates himself. Here was also a sacred tree, the 
 persea, on the fruits of which the gods are portrayed 
 writing the name of the king. This accumulation of 
 revered objects is peculiarly characteristic of the City of 
 the Sun, and seems to show that it was a centre of 
 Egyptian religion, representing far more than the local 
 worship of other and greater cities. 
 
 In the story of the triumphal progress of Pianchi, the 
 Ethiopian priest-king, who conquered Egypt about b.c. 
 750, there is a curious narrative of the royal visit to the 
 shrines of Heliopolis. Coming towards the city, Pianchi 
 reached Merti, the modern Matareeyeh, and purified 
 himself in the basin of the cold spring, the famous Foun- 
 tain of the Sun. He made a great offering to the Sun, 
 at his rising, of white bulls, milk, perfume, incense, and 
 all kinds of sweet-scented woods. He next went to the 
 temple of Ra, and entered it, making two adorations. 
 The priest invoked the divinity as the king’s protectoi 
 against his enemies. The king then fulfilled the rites of 
 
136 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the door ; he assumed the sacred garments (?) ; he puri- 
 fied himself with incense ; he poured a libation ; he 
 carried the sacred flowers. Then he mounted the steps 
 to the great sanctuary, to see Ra there ; he went alone ; 
 he drew the bolt ; he opened the doors ; he saw his 
 father Ra in the sanctuary 3 he adored the boat of Ra 
 and the boat of Turn. He closed the doors, and sealed 
 them with sealing-earth, stamped with the seal of the 
 king. He then commanded the priests : 4 1 have placed 
 my seal 3 let no other king enter there ! ’ The priests 
 prostrated themselves before the sovereign. He then 
 entered the temple of Turn, and performed the sacred 
 rites there also (De Rouge, ‘ Chrestomathie f^gyptienne,’ 
 iv. pp. 58-61). 
 
 This narrative, taken almost word for word from the 
 hieroglyphic tablet, gives us a curious glimpse into the 
 most sacred rites of an Egyptian temple. The con- 
 queror, be it remembered, was himself of the sacerdotal 
 class, the descendant and representative of the high- 
 priest-kings of Thebes. Hence his claim to enter the 
 sanctuary of Ra, and his endeavour to exclude other 
 kings. What was contained within the door of which he 
 drew the bolt we can scarcely tell 3 certainly there were 
 
ON. 
 
 137 
 
 the arks or sacred boats, and perhaps a statue of Ra. 
 In other temples, as at Dendarah, the arks were in a part 
 of the edifice accessible to the priests, and carried in and 
 out. There was no sacred animal in this sanctuary, 
 otherwise it could not have been kept closed. 
 
 It is time to turn to the history of the City of the 
 Sun. The oldest record is the fine obelisk, raised by 
 Usurtesen I., of the Twelfth Dynasty, before the time of 
 Abraham. We next read of the place in the history of 
 Joseph, who married Asenath, ' daughter of Potipherah, 
 priest of On (Gen. xli. 45, 50). The name, of which 
 that of Potiphar may be another form, is found in 
 Egyptian as Pet-p-ra, ‘ Belonging to Ra,’ the Sun. It is 
 thus specially appropriate to a priest of On. Again in 
 the great papyrus of Ramses III., recording his dona- 
 tions to the temples of Egypt, those of Thebes, Memphis, 
 and Heliopolis hold the most prominent places. The 
 official inventory of the property of the temple is amazing, 
 and well deserves a special essay. Later, in the days of 
 the prophets, the splendour of the temples, adorned with 
 many obelisks, is hinted at in the prediction of J eremiah, 
 that Nebuchadnezzar should break ‘the pillars of Beth- 
 shemesh,’ distinguished as the Egyptian city from the 
 
138 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 three towns of the name in Palestine, and should burn 
 the temples of the gods of the Egyptians (Jer. xliii. 13), 
 so destroying the shrines of sun-worship with the very 
 element there adored. Ezekiel notices the military im- 
 portance of the place as standing on the way to Mem- 
 phis, like Pi-beseth (Bubastis), foretelling the slaughter 
 of their young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion (Ezek. 
 xxx. 17). Here the name is pointed to read ave?i, vanity 
 or idolatry ; but as the vowels were only inserted twelve 
 centuries ago, this is probably a mere Rabbinical fancy. 
 Without the vowels, the two words are the same ; and 
 the proper reading can only be decided by the general 
 sense of the passages. 
 
 Just as the City of the Sun disappears from sacred 
 history, it begins to be of interest in the story of the 
 infancy of Greek philosophy. For centuries the restless 
 tribes of Greece had been known to the Egyptians, first 
 as pirates who descended on the northern coast, and 
 then as mercenaries, ready to take any side for pay. 
 Under the Sa'ite kings they became an important ele- 
 ment in the army of the Pharaohs. In the same age 
 they obtained commercial privileges, and had their great 
 trading-station of Naucratis, in the north-west of the 
 
ON. 
 
 139 
 
 Delta. This was in the time when their love of adven- 
 ture took a fresh direction. They began to be curious 
 about other lands, their products, and their wonders, and 
 to seek the aid of older wisdom in the problems of the 
 universe, to which the wise men turned their thoughts. 
 Egypt was the nearest of the lands of primitive civilisa- 
 tion, and to Egypt the Greek philosophers journeyed, to 
 question the priests on the subjects which captivated 
 their minds. Here, if anywhere, would they find the 
 tradition of the beginning of history, and even of the 
 changes of the earth ; here the long record of the move- 
 ments of the heavenly bodies. Science had flourished 
 for ages in the Egyptian schools ; and Greeks came 
 there to learn, whose disciples were to return as the 
 teachers of the Egyptians. The first visitors were pro- 
 bably mere travellers, and met with a jealous reception. 
 The priests did not care to tell their secrets to strangers, 
 who could only speak through interpreters, and without 
 hesitation asked them deep questions which they had 
 scarcely ventured to look at even through the veil of 
 mythological language. The inquirers went much deeper 
 in speculation than the Egyptians, caring nothing for the 
 limits set by local religious teaching. And even prac- 
 
140 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 tical science was so mixed up in Egypt with sacred 
 things, that the Greek separation of the two must have 
 startled the conservative priests of Egypt. But in course 
 of time there came a change ; for when Greek was 
 better known in Egypt, the priests’ houses at Heliopolis 
 were opened to at least the most distinguished inquirers. 
 It was during the temporary independence of the 
 country under native kings after the first Persian rule, 
 that Plato the philosopher, and Eudoxus the mathe- 
 matician, studied at Heliopolis. The geographer Strabo, 
 when he visaed Egypt shortly before the Christian Era, 
 was shown as a sight the very houses where these illus- 
 trious strangers were lodged. The journey of Plato is 
 nowhere related in any detail ; but we have the story of 
 that of Eudoxus. He had studied under Plato, but 
 after he had been dismissed by him, his own friends paid 
 his expenses to Egypt, and gave him letters of recom- 
 mendation to Nectanabis, the reigning Pharaoh, who 
 passed him on to the priests. He shaved his beard and 
 conformed to their rule of life, and, after long study at 
 Heliopolis, came away with advanced knowledge of 
 astronomy. In his case we cannot doubt that Egyptian 
 science was of value ; rude as it was, it surpassed what the 
 
ON. 
 
 141 
 
 Greeks had hitherto possessed. How far Plato benefited 
 by his stay in Egypt we do not know. As, however, we 
 learn more and more of the ideas of the Egyptians, 
 we find the connection with Plato’s notions of divine 
 things more and more marked ; nor are there wanting in 
 his ‘ Dialogues ’ touches which show a personal knowledge 
 of Egyptian character. 
 
 Probably it was at Heliopolis, or Hermopolis, which 
 seems to have been the great university of the Empire, 
 that Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyp- 
 tians. What, -we ask, was the old instruction ? This we 
 can only discover from what the learned men knew ; for 
 we have no direct record of education. Just in the 
 same way modern books give us the measure of the 
 training of the learned in every country, though we do not 
 question them, for it is simpler to consult the calendars 
 of schools and universities. 
 
 First of all the Egyptian scribe must have learnt his 
 own language, with its different forms of writing ; and as 
 it was expressed by pictures of objects, some letters, 
 some syllables, some symbols, all of which in the finest 
 style had to be beautifully drawn, this subject included 
 some training in art. In the time of Moses, either 
 
142 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Hebrew, or a language akin to it, was also taught. The 
 documents of the scribes of that age not only show by 
 their accurate transliteration of Semitic words that the 
 writers had a mastery of the foreign sounds they wrote ; 
 but more than this, it was, as already noticed, the fashion 
 at this time to introduce Semitic words into the Egyptian 
 language. The sacred books, voluminous and hard to 
 interpret, were also studied by those who intended to 
 follow the career of priests. Some science was taught. 
 Astronomy was necessary for the calendar, and closely 
 connected with religion. Arithmetic was needed for the 
 common affairs of life. Geometry was of the highest 
 importance for the determination of the limits of the 
 fields after the inundation had withdrawn, carrying with 
 it all the land-marks between the deserts ; nor was it of 
 less value for the measurement of materials and all 
 matters connected with the cost of building. For the 
 architects and many of the scribes, mechanics, in which 
 the Egyptians were great, formed a necessary study. 
 Chemistry must have been a branch of learning. Medi- 
 cine was eagerly studied from the earliest ages ; yet the 
 Egyptians were far behind the Mosaic Law in sanitary 
 regulations, in which, indeed, that code has anticipated 
 
ON. 
 
 143 
 
 modern science. Those who would find a career in the 
 great body of official scribes must have learnt the 
 principles and practice of law. It seems strange that 
 philosophy does not seem to have been a regular branch 
 of study. We must recollect that the colleges were 
 under the control of the priests, and that the moralists, 
 the only Egyptian philosophers of the period before the 
 Greek rule, were their natural opponents. The writings 
 of some of the earlier moralists must, however, have 
 been studied as types of classical composition. 
 
 To us who are accustomed to the vast range of 
 studies at our universities, this seems a narrow scheme 
 of education ; but we must not forget that it contained 
 the germ of all later instruction ; and that the old 
 Egyptian universities may be favourably compared with 
 the other ancient seats of learning and with those of 
 the Middle Ages. 
 
 Such must have been the teaching at the university 
 of Heliopolis. If we had any doubt that Alexandria 
 succeeded to it, this would disappear when we learnt 
 that at the new university the subjects taught were, poetry 
 corresponding to literature in the older university, 
 mathematics astronomy, and medicine. It was merely 
 
144 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 the ancient system modified for the Greek population. 
 As the obelisks, the ornaments of the old city, were 
 carried away to beautify the new capital, so the seat of 
 learning was transferred from Heliopolis to Alexandria. 
 The earlier Ptolemies, desirous in all ways to develop 
 the capabilities of Egypt, adopted whatever they thought 
 useful in the civilisation of the country. Can it then 
 be doubted that they strove to maintain and extend the 
 native system of teaching? With a jealous and privi- 
 leged Greek population at the capital this was done with 
 caution ; but we can trace the motive throughout their 
 policy. Thus when the streets of Heliopolis became 
 silent, and the houses of the teachers were empty, 
 another university had grown up in the midst of the 
 busy centre of trade, the wealthy Alexandria, now the 
 second heart of Greek wisdom, the new Athens, destined 
 to a longer intellectual supremacy than the ancient ‘ Eye 
 of Greece.' 
 
 It would be interesting to continue the history of the 
 successive seats of learning down to our own time. 
 Through the centuries we should admire the winning 
 step by step of a sure way up the ladder on the lower 
 rungs of which the Egyptian philosopher could only get 
 
ON. 
 
 H5 
 
 a footing. For many ages we should reverence the pur- 
 suit of wisdom for her own sake, without desire of worldly 
 gain, in universities open to poor and rich alike. Then 
 we should see the sad change which has cast a deep 
 shadow over modem seats of learning, bringing with it 
 the idea that study is a means to an end, and that end 
 merely success in life. Hence the exclusion of the poor 
 students who crowded to Oxford in the days of the 
 Plantagenets ; hence the strain of competition, and the 
 speedy flinging away of the books which have exhausted 
 the brain. The inferior knowledge of the centuries that 
 are gone was better than our higher science, so far as it 
 taught the love of wisdom, and left men thirsting for 
 more learning, not surfeited with ‘cram.’ Perhaps in a 
 better time our children’s children may go back to the 
 ancient way, wherein wisdom was a delight because none 
 thought that she could be bought with money, or that 
 she held in her generous hands the coarse rewards of 
 trade. 
 
 Within sight of Heliopolis is the great city of Cairo, 
 Masr, the Mother of the World, where during the Arab 
 ages there flourished the greatest university of the East, 
 the centre of the learning of the Muslim nations, shorn 
 
 L 
 
146 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 of its glory only in our own days by the rivalry of new- 
 fashioned schools after the European model, like the 
 tawdry palaces which show their unblushing ugliness 
 beside the tender beauty of the Arab mosques. To the 
 Azhar, for so is that mosque called which holds the 
 university, still go afoot from all parts of the world, even 
 from the heart of Africa, poor scholars, to be housed 
 and fed at the cost of the endowment, and to be taught 
 without fee by the most learned men of modern Egypt. 
 The range of instruction may be narrow, but the method 
 is noble, and no one comes away disheartened who has 
 the power to learn. There is little doubt that this is the 
 tradition of the old teaching ; and many will ask whether 
 our modern system is likely to have so long a life while 
 it lacks the indispensable principle of vitality. 
 
 There is nothing to be said in description of the City 
 of the Sun but that the walls may yet be traced, enclosing 
 an irregular square of about half a mile in the measure of 
 each of its sides. This is about twenty times the area of 
 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Thus the city must have been 
 small ; and as the precincts of the sacred buildings take 
 up about half this space, the inhabited part was still less 
 than we think at first. Besides the obelisk, there is one 
 
ON. 
 
 147 
 
 interesting relic in the neighbourhood, a very ancient 
 sycamore, gnarled and crooked with age, the survivor of 
 the gardens of the city. To it clings the tradition that 
 the Holy Family rested beneath its shade when they fled 
 into Egypt. There was indeed a large Hebrew popula- 
 tion in the country in those days ; and the famous settle- 
 ment of Onias around the temple built for the worship of 
 his countrymen, was not far from Heliopolis. And near 
 the City of the Sun grew the Judsean balsam-trees, which 
 may have been tended by Hebrew gardeners. The 
 tradition is no more than a legend, yet there is no place 
 in Egypt to which the visit of the Holy Family would be 
 more fit than to the almost deserted seat of learning, 
 when it was already the parent of the great university 
 under whose wide-spreading shadow grew and flourished 
 those Hebrew and Christian schools which had so mighty 
 an influence in the annals of the early Church. Thus 
 Heliopolis then represented that which was passing away, 
 not without hope of that which was to come. The least 
 monumental of all the famous sites of Egypt, without 
 temple or tomb, nor any record but the obelisk, which, 
 splendid as it is, bears a barren official inscription, is yet 
 eloquent of greater things than the solemn pyramids of 
 
 L 2 
 
148 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Memphis, or the storied temples of Thebes. What these 
 tell is rather of Egypt’s history than of the world’s, and if 
 of the world’s history, only of one time and of one line 
 of thought. The idea that Heliopolis suggests is the 
 true progress of the whole human race ; for here was the 
 oldest link in the long chain of the schools of learning. 
 The conqueror has demolished the temple; the city, 
 with the houses of the wise men, has fallen into hopeless 
 ruin, down-trodden by the thoughtless peasant as he 
 drives his plough across the site of which he does not 
 know the name. Yet the name and fame of the City of 
 the Sun charm the stranger as of old, while, standing 
 beside the obelisk, he looks back through the long and 
 stately avenue of the ages that are past, and measures the 
 gain in knowledge that patient scholars have won. He 
 sees that phoenix-like power of renewing her youth which 
 gives all wisdom the deathlessness which is at once a 
 type and a presage of immortality. Forms may change 
 and perish, but the essence which they clothe, and often 
 conceal, knows no change but growth, and when it seems 
 to die, only begins a new and brighter life. Nor can the 
 forsaken form ever cease to speak, voiceless though it 
 be, of life which once dwelt within it, as the com of 
 
ON. 
 
 149 
 
 wheat in the cast-off husk, the human soul in the dried 
 and vacant mummy. So the obelisk still points to the 
 skies, though it no longer draws down by its golden 
 summit the fire which cleaves the clouds that hide the 
 face of heaven. 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 150 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PI-BESETH 
 
 On the eastern side of the Delta, more than half-way 
 from Memphis to Zoan, lay the great city of Pi-beseth, 
 or Bubastis. Vast mounds now mark the site and 
 preserve the name ; deep in their midst lie the shattered 
 fragments of the beautiful temple which Herodotus saw, 
 and to which in his days the Egyptians came annually in 
 vast numbers to keep the greatest festival of the year, the 
 assembly of Bast, the goddess of the place. Here after 
 the Empire had fallen, Shishak set up his throne, and for 
 a short space revived the imperial magnificence of Thebes. 
 A strange figure is this first king of Egypt mentioned by 
 name in Scripture, the enemy of Solomon, the ally of 
 Jeroboam, and the spoiler of Solomon’s foolish son, — 
 Shishak, the sovereign of oriental origin known to us as 
 the head of a house of Babylonian or Assyrian lineage, who, 
 despite their foreign names, are yet Egyptian Pharaohs, 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 I5i 
 
 with a devotion to the religion and the policy of their 
 adopted country. 
 
 The days of Shishak, though long before the date of 
 the foundation of Rome, are yet modern in the history of 
 ancient Egypt. He headed the Twenty-second of the 
 long array of Thirty Dynasties which mostly, if not all, 
 ruled in succession. For the first notice of Bubastis we 
 must go back to the Second Dynasty, under which, as 
 Manetho tells us, a great and destructive earthquake 
 here occurred. The origin of the city thus belongs to 
 the primaeval period ; and this agrees with the great 
 popularity of the local worship. For in Egypt it seems 
 that the chief religious centres are generally of remote 
 antiquity. The site had a twofold importance. Between 
 the Pelusiac, or most eastern branch of the Nile, and the 
 Tanitic, it commanded the land route to Palestine from 
 Memphis, and so became a military post when the state 
 was weak, while it remained a great commercial station. 
 The foundation may have been due to the need of a 
 chief town for the fertile country around, but the position 
 favoured its growth. 
 
 The Hebrew Pi-beseth and the Greek Bubastis pre- 
 serve the sacred name of the place, Pe-Bast, the abode 
 
152 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 of the great goddess Bast. She is portrayed with the 
 head of a lioness or a cat. The solar goddesses have 
 the heads of those animals whose eyes are luminous in 
 the dark, as the solar gods have the head of the strong- 
 eyed hawk who gazes at the sun. Like all the Egyptian 
 divinities, it is hard to distinguish the characteristics of 
 Bast. The priests held that the leading object of worship 
 of one temple must correspond to those of others. Hence 
 an interchange of attributes of different gods and a loss of 
 identity. But it seems that the essential idea of Bast was 
 that she represented solar heat in two forms, its life- 
 giving and its destructive power. If she was likened by 
 the Greeks to Artemis (Diana), she rather resembled the 
 twin-divinity Apollo. 
 
 The charm of the city is not due to that vast antiquity 
 which we fail to imagine, nor to the wild popular festival, 
 which shows us the worst aspect of Egyptian life, but to 
 the rise of the line of Shishak, whose history is associated 
 with that of its favourite seat. The house of the 
 Ramesside kings gradually grew weak, and the power 
 fell into the hands of the Theban high-priests of Amen-ra, 
 who at last put aside a feeble sovereign, and assumed 
 the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Usurpa- 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 153 
 
 tion was naturally followed by anarchy, and a strong 
 hand was needed to restore unity to the divided state. 
 It was then that Shishak rose. Whence he came we do 
 not know. In those days the Delta was full of foreign 
 settlers, of whom many were Shemites. But Shishak, 
 his ancestors, and his descendants are not only strangers : 
 almost all bear names which are either Assyrian or 
 Babylonian. His own appears in Hebrew as a name of 
 the city of Babylon : his father was called Nimrod, a 
 common name with this family. It is easy to trace by 
 what steps the throne was mounted. The grand- 
 father of Shishak intermarried into an Egyptian royal 
 family : his father Nimrod gained a great military office. 
 Shishak himself rose higher, and while almost king 
 secured his position by marrying his son to the daughter 
 of an Egyptian Pharaoh. This is quite natural when we 
 consider the great popularity at this time of all that was 
 Shemite, the Egyptian foreign alliances, and the power of 
 the mercenaries. Yet Dr. Brugsch has woven of these 
 scanty materials the idea of an Assyrian conquest of 
 Egypt. The objection to his view is that the Assyrians 
 were then in a condition of obscure depression. Their 
 First Empire, which carried the arms of Assyria into 
 
i54 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Phoenicia, had been utterly shattered by the Babylonians 
 and the Hittites, and the Israelite Empire of Solomon 
 had risen upon its ruins. That powerful and strongly- 
 governed state would have blocked the way to Egypt 
 against the warlike Assyrians, had they then had the 
 power to move, and against the pacific Babylonians. Yet 
 as the family of Shishak were held in great honour in 
 Egypt, it may be that they came of one of the eastern 
 reigning houses ; they may have been royal fugitives 
 from Assyria, like the Edomite and Israelite exiles who 
 in Solomon’s time took refuge at the Egyptian court. 
 As conquerors they certainly did not come, and Brugsch’s 
 idea would be paralleled if we imagined a conquest of 
 Greece by Denmark, because a Danish prince is now 
 king of that country. 
 
 The new sovereign Shishak, called in Egyptian 
 Sheshonk, was not of the same pacific temper as the last 
 degenerate heirs of the name of Ramses. Politic and 
 warlike, he bided his time until he could strike for 
 imperial power. So long as Solomon reigned he could 
 only encourage the discontent of the Israelites by shelter- 
 ing Jeroboam. With the death of Solomon and the 
 accession of the feeble Rehoboam, Jeroboam returned 
 
PI-BESE TH. 
 
 155 
 
 from Egypt with engagements to Shishak. The compact 
 was carried out when Pharaoh broke across the border, 
 captured the cities of Judah, and also the Levite cities of 
 Israel, which were true to the house of David. This 
 inroad of Shishak into Israelite territory is a new fact, 
 which we learn from his own record next to be noticed ; 
 it reveals the baseness of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, 
 marked with the distinctive term of opprobrium ‘ who 
 made Israel to sin.’ He disliked the Levites, and had 
 not the courage to make a direct attack upon them ; so 
 he called in his Egyptian patron to despoil and lead 
 captive his own brethren. Jerusalem escaped only by 
 the sacrifice of the treasures of the temple and the palace. 
 In one campaign Judah was humbled, and the work of 
 David and Solomon shattered : the great edifices 
 plundered symbolised the ruin of the state, its beauty 
 torn from it by the spoiler. 
 
 A vast sculpture on the wall of the great temple of 
 Amen-ra at El-Karnak is the triumphal record at Thebes 
 of Shishak’s success. With the dimensions of the like 
 works of the Empire, this long list of conquests is by 
 their side insignificant. Instead of countries and nations 
 we find cities and tribes, and even the same name 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 156 
 
 repeated, to tell the subjugation of another family of 
 nomads whom the older Pharaohs would scarcely have 
 mentioned. Yet the details are intensely historical. 
 Here we first read in a foreign document the names of 
 the cities of Israel and Judah in the days of their kings. 
 Unhappily it is a mere list, not a chronicle like the annals 
 of Thothmes and those of the Assyrian kings. The 
 conqueror’s list enumerates Levitical and probably 
 Canaanite cities of the kingdom of Israel, cities of the 
 kingdom of Judah, and Arab tribes of the south of 
 Palestine. We recognise at once Taanach, Shunem, 
 Rehob, Haphraim, Adoraim, Mahanaim, Gibeon, Beth- 
 horon, Kedemoth, Aijalon, Megiddo, Ibleam, Shoco, 
 Beth-tappuah, the Hagarites and the district of Negeb, 
 the one occurring seven times, the other three, quite 
 contrary to the usual practice in the tables of con- 
 quests. Early in the list, following a group of cities 
 of Israel, comes the strange name Iudah Malek, 
 followed by the determinative sign which distin- 
 guishes foreign countries. This name consists of two 
 words, in appearance the Hebrew ‘Judah king,’ which 
 gave rise to the notion that Rehoboam himself, the king 
 of Judah, was intended. This, however, could not be, 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 157 
 
 for the contents of these lists are always geographical. 
 If the meaning is kingdom of Judah, the words are 
 inverted, and the second misspelt. If we divide the words 
 differently as Iuda Hamelek, they would read ‘Judah 
 the king,’ but we know of no town of that name. For 
 the present we must be content with having read the 
 name of Judah in the list, leaving it to time to decide 
 whether the kingdom or a city was intended. 
 
 The splendour of the reign of Shishak was not main- 
 tained by his successors. It may have been followed 
 by a foreign invasion, for Zerah the Ethiopian, defeated 
 by Asa (2 Chron. xiv. 9-15), was possibly a priest-king 
 of Napata, and if so, he must have subdued Egypt for a 
 time, like later sovereigns of the same line. We soon find 
 the Bubastite king a feeble central authority, the shadow 
 of a departed power, nominally ruling a number of small 
 chiefs, who were in fact independent. This was due to 
 a fatal custom of the Bubastites, who divided their terri- 
 tories among princes of their family, by whose side 
 Egyptians and Libyans ultimately rose to the same rank ; 
 and thus, less than two centuries after the reign of 
 Shishak, Egypt was separated into about twenty petty 
 kingdoms without a head. The country was not so 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 158 
 
 much broken into fragments as resolved into its primi- 
 tive elements, the nomes, or provinces. Each nome had 
 retained its individual worship and customs, and was 
 still a little state, in spite of the ages of strong central 
 rule, and the moments of violent conquest. The central 
 power withdrawn or enfeebled, the nomes asserted their 
 natural independence. The house of Shishak was not 
 extinct, for among the little chiefs it had its represen- 
 tatives, who still ruled as late as the time of the great 
 conflict between the mighty powers of Assyria and 
 Ethiopia, when the divided princes served as tools of 
 the diplomatic antagonists, both of whom they disliked, 
 and striving to baffle only served. Thus all disappeared 
 but the one patriotic line, that of Sais, which overthrew 
 its rivals, and for nearly a century and a half restored 
 Egypt t0 a greatness she had not known since the reign 
 of Shishak. 
 
 Little can now be seen of the ancient splendour of 
 Bubastis. The lofty mounds rise above the level of the 
 temple, for the city grew, as the people of each period 
 built on the ruins of the fragile houses of their ancestors, 
 while the sacred precincts remained on their first site. 
 The old Egyptians were careful builders. In the Delta, 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 159 
 
 where they had not the dry desert for a foundation, and 
 the Nile moisture would destroy ordinary stone, they 
 used the most enduring material, the red granite of 
 Syene, and the columns, instead of being of several 
 blocks, were solid monoliths. The great temple at 
 Iseum, northward of Bubastis, was wholly built of this 
 splendid substance. The lavish cost of transporting from 
 the extreme south of Egypt these vast blocks, and cover- 
 ing them with finely-cut sculptures, is far beyond our 
 power of estimate. We cannot realise what such labour 
 would be, aided by none but the simplest mechanical 
 appliances, nor the difficulty of delicately engraving 
 every part of the masses with a sureness of hand that 
 is amazing. 
 
 Like all the other temples of the Delta, those of 
 Bubastis have fallen to the ground. This universal ruin 
 may be partly due to the rage of invaders, whose force 
 may be was almost spent when they reached Upper 
 Egypt, for there we see far less destruction. Yet it is 
 hard to account for the overthrow of all the sumptuous 
 edifices of the Delta, constructed of far stronger materials 
 than their southern rivals. The great temple of Iseum, 
 for instance was in its bulk a Ptolemaic work, and thus 
 
i6o 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 mainly of an age after the destructive invasions. It 
 seems to have been overthrown by an earthquake, for it 
 has fallen like a house of cards. Yet there is no record 
 of earthquakes in Egypt violent enough to hurl down 
 such solid walls and columns, put together on the 
 simplest constructive principles, and so forming a mass, 
 strong both in independent members, and as a whole. The 
 slender Arab minarets have suffered from such shocks, 
 but to no great extent, in spite of their comparative 
 weakness, and the neglect in recent centuries to take 
 the simplest measures for their preservation. 
 
 At Bubastis there are remains of two temples, that of 
 the goddess Bast and of Hermes (Mercury), by whom we 
 suppose Herodotus must mean the Egyptian god of 
 letters, Thoth. They show large use of granite, with the 
 usual columns in a single block. Excavation here would 
 yield interesting results. There is much obscurity in 
 the annals of the house of Shishak : this surely would be 
 cleared up. Earlier and later records would be certain 
 to afford pages of history, perhaps from the very oldest 
 period of the monarchy, for king after king would have 
 contributed to the great temple of the goddess. If 
 Thoth were here especially worshipped, there must have 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 161 
 
 been a college of learned men at the place, and the very 
 potsherds would give us the exercises of the pupils, for 
 such we remember were the slates on which they wrote 
 their copies of classical models of style. 
 
 Herodotus speaks of the annual festival of the goddess 
 as the greatest in Egypt, bringing vast numbers of people 
 here to a scene of wild revelry. Though the hamlet that 
 recalls the name of the old town has ceased to be a place 
 of resort, we may almost say that the festival survives, 
 and has been transferred to Tanta, in the centre 
 of the Delta, and is held in honour of a Muslim saint, 
 Seyyid Ahmad El-Bedawee. No one could have been 
 more averse than Mohammad to heathen customs, 
 most of all to those which were associated with religion, 
 yet he has been everywhere defeated by the human ten- 
 dency to cling to ancient superstitions and time-honoured 
 usages. So in Christian countries pagan customs have 
 survived. Thus a new saint, Muslim or Christian, 
 becomes the centre of the old reverence ; the name is 
 changed, but the surroundings are the same. At an Arab 
 saint’s tomb in Upper Egypt a sacred snake is still, or 
 lately was, revered ; the predecessors of the reptile were 
 no doubt put under the protection of a Coptic saint, to 
 
 M 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 162 
 
 whose shrine the ancient Egyptian worship had been in 
 turn transferred. Thus the Delta still witnesses one 
 great annual festival, at which under the name of 
 religion a fair is kept, with the accompaniments of the 
 heathen meeting to which the pilgrims in the days of 
 Herodotus resorted. A few go to join in religious ser- 
 vices in honour of the saint— services, be it remarked, 
 of a kind which Mohammad disliked for their connection 
 w’ith inonasticism, the wild zikrs of the darweeshes ; but 
 the many go to take their pleasure in witnessing the 
 spectacle of the dancing-girls, who are the true descen- 
 dants of the old Egyptian dancers, and in all kinds of 
 revelry, such as scandalised Herodotus. 
 
 The memory of the lower elements of the Egyptian 
 religion is nowhere stronger than here at Bubastis. No 
 such idea is suggested by the great necropolis of Mem- 
 phis, with the symbols of immortality in the vast 
 Pyramids, and that absence of figures of the gods in 
 the ancient tombs around them, which has led those 
 who cannot read the inscriptions to believe that they are 
 in the presence of records of a simple faith such as was 
 that of the few high-souled philosophers of that remote 
 age. At Thebes, though the temples are full of the 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 163 
 
 idolatry of the Empire, in the royal tombs we trace an 
 attempt to see in that confusion the many developments 
 of one great power. But at Bubastis there is nothing 
 to be traced but the debasing animal worship suggesting 
 the orgies that accompanied it. The golden calf and 
 the wild dancing multitude rise before our eyes, and 
 we feel with full force the need of those stem prohibitions 
 in which the Law and the Prophets abound. It is 
 a relief to turn to the tale of the house of Shishak, 
 the rise in Africa of a strong Asiatic power and its 
 speedy withering away, the first interference of Egypt 
 in the politics cf Israel, and the new light thrown on 
 the conflict of the two little Hebrew kingdoms which 
 were the surviving fragments of the great Empire of 
 Solomon, vanished for ever, to be the regretful retrospect 
 of history and the subject of golden legends. So many 
 and so various are the thoughts which rise at this one 
 site, a mere heap of mounds, strewn in their hollow with 
 the shattered fragments of the temples of Bubastis. 
 Below the surface lie the lost books of history, to be 
 taken up and read by whoso will. Egypt, the land of 
 history, hides in every mound the imperishable records 
 of the past. To the present belongs the rich inheritance, 
 
 M 2 
 
t64 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 waiting like a land of promise for the heir, who has only 
 to go in and take possession of this stored-up wealth. 
 Difficulties and dangers there are none to be encoun- 
 tered. The treasure-houses are unguarded by mighty 
 men, no mountains have to be passed on the way. The 
 very ease of the enterprise has discouraged those who 
 have mettle to scale the towering Alps and seek the 
 North Pole across its barriers of icy desert. Yet the 
 reward is far greater than the mere sense of achievement 
 which the other enterprises offer. The story of the 
 oldest civilisations, the far-reaching tradition of science 
 and art, the wanting links in the histories of ancient 
 nations, Egyptians, Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Hebrews, and 
 Greeks, such are the buried treasures of these neglected 
 mounds. At the touch of the pick the people of the 
 past rise like the mighty army of bones which the prophet 
 saw, are clothed again with flesh, and march in their 
 ranks along the ancient lines of primaeval history. It 
 is for us to awake them from their long sleep. 
 
 On the wild coast of Convwall, wffiere the black 
 craggy height of Tintagel faces the stormy Atlantic, there 
 lingers yet, coming and going, like a fitful breeze, the 
 legend of Arthur. Here he held his court. At Slaughter 
 
PI-BESETH. 
 
 165 
 
 Bridge, a few miles inland, in his last battle he faced the 
 traitor Modred and the heathen host So far may be 
 history, but the passing of the king and the casting of 
 Excalibur into such a mere as may be seen from the 
 heights of the granite-capped mountains, these are mere 
 fancies, delighting the imagination but baffling the desire 
 for true records. In Egypt all is pure history. Each 
 fresh discovery rescues the subjects of legend from its 
 misty realm. Within the memory of living men, the 
 great figures of Egyptian antiquity were such shadowy 
 types as Sesostris, a mere embodiment of a series of 
 conquerors, but knowledge of the monuments has given 
 us tire living materials out of which this Colossus of 
 legend was built. So too it is with the vagueness which 
 inevitably surrounds the early Pharaohs of Bible history, 
 whose names and dates are unrecorded. As each is 
 identified, with his great works and wise politics, it is as 
 if the pick of some Cornish labouring man were to strike 
 upon a tablet of King Arthur, in fair Latin, dated, and 
 with all historic circumstance. Such a thought makes 
 us feel it were wise to wake from dreaming of legends, 
 and to arise to explore the sure ways of history. 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 1 66 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SIN. 
 
 The approaches to Egypt give no promise of the beauty 
 of the land within, which, like such an oasis as the plain 
 of Damascus, fills the eye with fresh delight. From 
 the south you thread the narrow passage between the 
 tumbled rocks of the Cataract, while all around rise 
 masses of sterile granite, the more forbidding because 
 the restful charm of Philae is fresh in your memory; 
 from the west you cross the monotonous Libyan desert 
 by the dreary coast ; from the east you only leave the 
 quicksands of Lake Serbonis behind to enter a wide- 
 extending morass of dark-brown mud. Should you 
 come by sea, the stretch of low sandy shore is only less 
 uninviting than the desert routes. But the long and 
 weary way of which Homer speaks is now most true of 
 the journey from the east, which despite its historical 
 interest few care to undertake. On this side the Delta 
 
SIN. 
 
 167 
 
 pushes a sharp angle into the desert. Behind, as we 
 enter Egypt, is the treacherous Lake Serbonis ; in front, 
 the great marsh broadening towards the west ; on the right, 
 the level melancholy shore of the almost tideless Medi- 
 terranean. At the very point of the angle stood of old 
 the great stronghold Pelusium, Sin, in Ezekiel's days, 
 ‘ the strength of Egypt’ (xxx. 15). The most eastward 
 Nile-stream flowed behind the city, and on the north 
 was a port commodious enough to hold an ancient fleet. 
 There was no other harbour along the inhospitable 
 and dangerous coast, though, where Alexandria after- 
 wards arose, Greek ships had already found a shelter 
 when unable to enter the branch of the Nile which led 
 to their emporium Naucratis. Thus Pelusium was the 
 key of Egypt, whether the invader came by sea or by land. 
 
 The foundation of the stronghold is obscure. In 
 the days of the Empire, the Pharaohs, mindful of the 
 conquest of their country by the Shepherds, covered 
 the east of the Delta with fortresses. As they were 
 the first kings who maintained a fleet in the Mediter- 
 ranean, the harbour of Pelusium was probably con- 
 structed by them, and we may reasonably date the 
 importance of the city from that time, though Zoan, 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 1 68 
 
 more pleasantly placed amid well-watered meadow-lands, 
 was then the great emporium of the border. It may be 
 that Pelusium was far more ancient. Except Memphis 
 we do not know the date of the foundation of a single 
 Egyptian town of importance ; there are no young cities 
 in that old country ; even Alexandria grew round and 
 swallowed up the more ancient Rhakotis. It seems as 
 if Egypt were so populous in the very beginning of her 
 history that almost every good site was held before the 
 written records were graven for our instruction. 
 
 The Hebrew name Sin, like the Greek Pelusium, 
 means ‘ muddy,’ and is retained in the Arab ‘ Castle of 
 Teeneh,’ an outlying fort. If Dr. Bragsch’s conjecture 
 is right, the Egyptians called the city Ha-snetem, ‘ the 
 abode of sweet repose.’ The Shemites thought of the 
 weary waste of morass which here met their eyes, the 
 Egyptians of the delight of resting safely in the first 
 native town across the border. Lying, as the city did, 
 in the Shemite part of Egypt, the local worship under 
 the Empire was, like that of Zoan, a mixture of the 
 Egyptian and the Shepherd systems, according to the 
 policy of the Ramesside kings. 
 
 As the Egyptian monarchy waned, Pelusium grew in 
 
SIN. 
 
 169 
 
 importance, for it was the strongest city of the border. 
 Here the last king of the Saite line, Psarnmetichus III., 
 son of Amasis, awaited Cambyses. The battle of Pelu- 
 sium, which crushed the native power, may almost take 
 rank among the decisive battles of the world. Had the 
 Persians failed, they might never have won the command 
 of the Mediterranean, without which they could scarcely 
 have invaded Greece. Of the details of the action we 
 know nothing. The Egyptians were probably far out- 
 numbered, and the native soldiery disheartened by the 
 presence of Greek and Carian mercenaries, by whose 
 side they never fought their best. Yet it was a stubborn 
 conflict, but at last the Egyptian army gave way and fled 
 in rout to Memphis. Herodotus, some seventy years after- 
 wards, visited the battle-field, and saw the bones of the 
 
 <r 
 
 Egyptians and the Persians still strewn upon the ground, 
 apart from one another as they had fallen. Thus, the 
 Egyptians must have long held their own, and been slain 
 in their ranks, rather than in their flight 
 
 Egypt never recovered from this blow. True, 
 throughout the Persian rule there were patriotic revolts, 
 and the land had moments of independence, but it was 
 not until the great Eastern empire was far gone in decay 
 
170 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 that a native ruler at last expelled the stranger. Yet the 
 Persians under Artaxerxes Ochus once more invaded 
 Egypt, and again an Egyptian king, Nectanabis, awaited 
 them before Pelusium. Every preparation had been 
 made for a stout defence. But no great battle was 
 fought. On each side the best troops were Greek mer- 
 cenaries, and those in the Persian pay outmanoeuvred 
 their rivals. The position of Nectanabis was turned, 
 and he fled to Memphis, and without waiting the 
 fortune of war, gathered his treasures and disappeared 
 into Ethiopia. From that day to this no native prince 
 has sat upon the throne of Egypt. (Comp. Ezek. xxx. 
 12, 13 ; Zech. x. 11.) 
 
 Three centuries pass by, Egypt has welcomed Alex- 
 ander as her deliverer from the Persian yoke, the great 
 city Alexandria has been founded and has put Pelusium 
 into the shade, Greek kings have ruled Egypt, and their 
 mighty and prosperous empire has dwindled into a dis- 
 tracted kingdom, living only by favour of Rome. 
 Young Ptolemy, fourteenth of his name, who occupies 
 the throne, is a minor governed by unscrupulous min- 
 isters. One day a Roman fleet of galleys and transports, 
 with two thousand soldiers on board, appears before 
 
Pelusium. Pompey, defeated at Pharsalia, has come 
 with the remnants of his showy army to beg an asylum 
 from Ptolemy, whose father was secured by him on the 
 throne. At this moment Ptolemy and his sister, the 
 famous Cleopatra, are at war, and their armies lie near 
 Pelusium. The fugitive general at once sends a message 
 to the king. The ministers see that the force of Pompey 
 would determine the present conflict, but they fear 
 Caesar, and so resolve to get rid of the dangerous 
 visitor. A little boat is sent to Pompey’s galley, and he 
 enters it with a few attendants. The king stands with 
 his courtiers waiting by the seaside. At this moment 
 the Egyptian galleys are manned by armed men, and 
 troops are ranged along the shore. As Pompey rises to 
 step on land he is stabbed in the back by an infamous 
 Roman, once an officer of his own, now in the Egyptian 
 service. He draws his toga over his face with both 
 hands, and falls. Cornelia, his faithful wife, and his 
 friends, watching from his galley, see the deed in helpless 
 horror. The assassins carry away Pompey’s head, leaving 
 his naked body on the beach. The Roman fleet sails 
 away. A faithful freedman Philipp us, who had come 
 ashore in the boat with his master, washes the dead with 
 
172 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 sea-water, and raises a little funeral pyre of the frag- 
 ments of an old fishing-craft. Afterwards, the Egyptian 
 army having disappeared, the ashes were collected and 
 taken to the sad widow, who piously deposited them in 
 her husband’s villa near Alba. Caesar in hot pursuit 
 soon reached Egypt. The murderers offered him as a 
 welcome present the head and the signet-ring of Pompey. 
 He turned away in tears, and commanded the miscreants 
 to be put to death. Then he raised a monument to his 
 rival’s memory at the place where he was slain. It was 
 visited in later times, but its site is now lost in the sandy 
 coast. Three months after the treachery at Pelusium, 
 the young king of Egypt was drowned. 
 
 The scene of Pompey’s death is not less striking 
 than that of Caesar’s. The melancholy shore, crowded 
 with Alexandrian Greeks and Egyptians around the 
 puppet young king and his sinister advisers, the army of 
 many races and various accoutrements, the great Captain 
 falling with the gesture with which Caesar was soon to 
 fall, struck like Caesar by the treachery of a friend, the 
 dark blue sea in which the huge galleys lie reflected, 
 with high poops and with indented beaks, while on the 
 deck of one near to the shore may be seen the grief- 
 
SIN. 
 
 173 
 
 stricken Cornelia, and Pompey’s comrades — all this 
 seems to rise before us in the bright sunshine of an 
 Egyptian September, for it befell on the twenty-ninth of 
 that month, the day before Pompey’s birthday, in the 
 year b.c. 48. The dignity of Roman character, not yet 
 lost, elevates the event to the height of a tragedy, fitly 
 closing with the brave fidelity of the freedman and the 
 tenderness and respect of the rival leader. 
 
 The battlefield of Pelusium, the entrenchments of 
 Nectanabis, the tomb of Pompey, all have vanished, 
 and nothing now remains of the great stronghold but 
 mighty mounds with an outlying height of the same 
 kind near by, and a second farther away, rising from the 
 level of the dreary marsh, close to the seashore. It is 
 an awful desolation, wearying the eye with an unvaried 
 dark expanse, without a sign of life, and wearying the 
 feet with the treacherous soil, in which they sink deeper 
 and deeper on the way to Pelusium. And the air seems 
 heavy with sad memories, as if they were native to the 
 place. 1 
 
 1 The latest and best description of Pelusium and the neigh- 
 bouring sites is in Mr. Greville Chester’s Report (Quarterly State- 
 ment of Palestine Exploration Fund, Tuly 1880, p. 133, foil.) 
 
174 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 Pelusium has an historical lesson to tell, which ex- 
 plains the two great catastrophes her name recalls. The 
 two Persian invasions were successful at once because 
 the Egyptian kings staked all on the strength of the 
 eastern border. They thought that Pelusium and the 
 neighbouring forts were support enough for an army of 
 defence. This army defeated or outflanked, the whole 
 of Lower Egypt was at once open to the invader. Yet 
 the story of the war of independence, which almost 
 filled the time between the invasions, shows that Egypt 
 could be obstinately defended step by step. In fact it 
 is a country like Holland. The whole water-system, 
 natural and artificial, lends itself to military engineering, 
 and during the inundation it could be used with tre- 
 mendous effect. Psammetichus and Nectanabis failed 
 because they feared to lose the power of retreating to 
 Memphis, and from Memphis to Thebes and Ethiopia. 
 The same has been the case in other periods of Egyp- 
 tian history : a single battle has decided the fate of the 
 country. Scarcely at any time but during the patriotic 
 rise against the Persians has the defensive power of 
 nature been wisely used. 
 
 Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel speak of another great 
 
SIN. 
 
 175 
 
 frontier-town, variously written Tahpanhes, Tehaphnehes, 
 Tahaphanes, which has been identified with Daphnse, 
 which Herodotus calls the Pelusiac Daphnse, sixteen 
 Roman miles south-westward of Pelusium. The Hebrew 
 name is evidently of Egyptian origin. It also occurs in 
 the form Tahpenes as that of a queen who was probably 
 consort of Shishak’s predecessor (i Kings xi. 19, 20). 
 She is the only Egyptian queen, and the first Egyptian 
 royal personage, who is mentioned by name in the Bible. 
 The identity of the name of queen and town would not 
 be proof of Egyptian origin, for Semitic names were 
 then the rule in the foreign family of Shishak, and in 
 fashion with the natives. It is the uncertainty of the 
 orthography which shows that the source is not Hebrew. 
 The Greek name compared with it is clearly an adap- 
 tation, and until we know more from Egyptian sources we 
 cannot be sure that Daphnse was identical with the town 
 mentioned in the Bible. The evidence is, however, far 
 better than a mere likeness in sound. Clearly Tahpanhes 
 was a great military settlement (Jer. ii. 16), and a frontier- 
 fortress (Ezek. xxx. 18), where Pharaoh had a palace 
 (Jer. xliii. 9). The position on the border is farther 
 defined if we assume that this was the point first reached 
 
176 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 by the Jews in their flight after the murder of Gedaliah 
 (ver. 7), and the place may be even more clearly fixed as 
 between Migdol and Memphis (xliv. 1). Herodotus 
 speaks of the Pelusiac Daphnse as one of the three great 
 garrison-towns of Egypt, in the south, east, and west, 
 under the very kings in whose time the prophets lived 
 
 (ii. 30). 
 
 The site of Daphnse is supposed to be marked by 
 the lofty mounds of Tel-Defneh, occupying a position 
 which would agree with the evidence of geography, but no 
 remains of importance are seen above the ground. There 
 could be no better post to hold as a central position on 
 the frontier and as a support to Pelusium. 
 
 The disappearance from history of the towns of the 
 eastern border was due to the foundation of Alexandria, 
 and to the naval power of the Ptolemies. The capital 
 was thus removed far beyond the risk of sudden attack, 
 and could always be provisioned by sea, nor could an 
 invader venture to march on Memphis and the Upper 
 Country, while Alexandria remained unsubdued. Thus 
 for centuries the eastern fortresses lost their importance, 
 and the towns they enclosed or protected dwindled and 
 disappeared, until the transfer of the capital to the Arab 
 
SIN. 
 
 1 77 
 
 cities near Memphis, of which Cairo is the latest, made 
 it necessary to strengthen the border once more. The 
 researches of Brugsch have restored the old cities to the 
 map, but they are merely known as shapeless heaps 
 untouched by the explorer. A little labour in these 
 mounds would settle many a curious question that we 
 dispute about in vain. A single inscribed fragment 
 would reveal the Egyptian name of Daphn£e, and settle 
 the question whether it was identical with the city to 
 which Jeremiah came and predicted the very spot where 
 the king of Babylon should spread his royal tent and set 
 up his throne before Pharaoh’s house (Jer. xliii. 8-10). 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 Alexandria, the city of Alexander, is his best monu- 
 ment. His two leading ideas, the extension of commerce 
 and the fusion of the Greeks and the Orientals, led him 
 to choose the site of the city and to frame the constitu- 
 tion. It is equally characteristic of him that Homer 
 guided him to the place. Few men can travel without 
 favourite books, the companions by whom they may be 
 known. Alexander carried with him Homer. The 
 famous copy ‘ of the casket ’ took its name from the case 
 for unguents captured in the treasure of Darius, in which 
 the victor put the most precious work of man’s mind 
 in the costliest work of his hand. Thenceforward the 
 casket lay, with a dagger, beneath Alexander’s pillow 
 wherever he went. Can we doubt that he knew the 
 passage in the Odyssey where the poet describes the one 
 sheltered roadstead of the northern coast of Egypt, 
 the harbour behind the island of Pharos, a day’s voyage 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 179 
 
 for a ship sped with a fair wind from the nearest mouth 
 of the Nile ? 
 
 Upon the surging ocean wave there lies a rocky isle, 
 
 ’Tis Pharos called, which stands against the opening of the Nile, 
 So far as in a single day a hollow ship may fare, 
 
 If on her sheet the whistling wind shall favourably bear. 
 
 Behind the island is a port where galleys ride secure, 
 
 Until, their watery load baled out, they venture forth once more. 
 
 Here the old Greek merchantmen must have taken 
 shelter till they could run in fine weather for the river 
 and cross the bar to ascend to their emporium, Naucratis. 
 If Alexander had come to Egypt on a voyage of dis- 
 covery, he would have surveyed the whole coast. Instead 
 of this, he marches from Pelusium to Memphis, and from 
 Memphis makes almost direct for the site of Alexandria 
 on his way to the oracle of J upiter Ammon. 
 
 When Alexander reached the Egyptian military 
 station at the little town or village of Rhakotis, he saw 
 with the quick eye of a great commander how to turn this 
 petty settlement into a great city, and to make its road- 
 stead, out of which ships could be blown by a change of 
 wind, into a double harbour roomy enough to shelter the 
 navies of the world. All that was needed was to join 
 the island by a mole to the continent. The site was 
 
i8o 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 admirably secure and convenient, a narrow strip of land 
 between the Mediterranean and the great inland Lake 
 Mareotis. The whole northern side faced the two 
 harbours, which were bounded east and west by the 
 mole, and beyond by the long narrow rocky island of 
 Pharos, stretching parallel with the coast. On the south 
 was the inland port of Lake Mareotis. The length of 
 the city was more than three miles, the breadth more 
 than three-quarters of a mile ; the mole was above three- 
 quarters of a mile long and six hundred feet broad ; its 
 breadth is now doubled, owing to the silting up of the 
 sand. Modem Alexandria until lately only occupied the 
 mole, and was a great town in a comer of the space 
 which Alexander, with large provision for the future, 
 measured out The form of the new city was ruled by 
 hat of the site, but the fancy of Alexander designed it in 
 the shape of a Macedonian cloak or chlamys, such as a 
 national hero wears on the coins of the kings of Macedon, 
 his ancestors. 
 
 The situation is excellent for commerce. Alexandria, 
 with the best Egyptian harbour on the Mediterranean, 
 and the inland port connected with the Nile-streams 
 and canals, was the natural emporium of the Indian 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 181 
 
 trade. Port Said is superior now because of its grand 
 artificial port, and the advantage for steamships of an 
 unbroken sea-route. But in earlier days it was better 
 to diminish the length of the Indian voyage through 
 the dangerous route of the Red Sea, and so the Ptolemies 
 favoured the higher ports on the eastern coast, con- 
 nected by roads with the Nile in the Thebais. No 
 position in Egypt is so good for defence as that of Alex- 
 andria. The narrow strip of land, washed by the water 
 on the north and south, was only open to the east and 
 west. The east alone was the side by which a formidable 
 enemy would approach ; on the other side there were 
 only the roving tribes of Libyans. There were two 
 drawbacks, the difficulty of entering the double harbour 
 on account of the reefs which barred it, and the want of 
 water. Yet the harbour was the best on the coast, and a 
 splendid lighthouse, called the Pharos, on the eastern 
 point of the island, lessened the dangers of the ships. 
 A canal conducted fresh water to the city by the western 
 or less assailable side, and cisterns were cut in the rock 
 to store the rain. The practical wisdom of the choice 
 for trade and security was amply justified by history'. 
 Alexandria was for ages the pivot of the Indian traffic, 
 
1 82 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 and so long as invasion was attempted by land, before 
 the days of great naval expeditions, Egypt could not be 
 subdued as easily as before. It were useless to march 
 on Memphis while the capital remained untouched in 
 the rear of the enemy and could draw supplies of men 
 and munitions from the sea, for the Ptolemies maintained 
 a fleet, and Cyprus was to them a place of arms. 
 
 The interest of Alexandria is not so much political as 
 literary, yet a few words must be said of her place in 
 history during the nine centuries and a half of her great- 
 ness. To tell the story in detail would be to relate that 
 of Egypt. The capital of the Ptolemies, and till near 
 the time of the Arab conquest the seat of the Roman 
 governor, the one great centre of Greek life, was the 
 very heart of whatever lands she ruled. Here Ptolemy 
 fixed his seat of government, and he or his successor 
 with great solemnity brought the body of Alexander in 
 a golden coffin to rest in the city he had named. Here 
 he began to carryout the great schemes which Alexander 
 only lived long enough to plan. The Pharos was then 
 built to light the way into the harbour. The palace, the 
 arsenal, the docks, the temple of Sarapis, then rose from 
 the ground ; it may be that the old king witnessed the 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 183 
 
 foundation of the Library and the Museum. But the 
 magnificence of the capital was due to his son, the 
 wealthiest of ancient kings, Ptolemy, surnamed Philadel- 
 phus. During a long and peaceful reign he and his 
 consoit, the second Arsinoe, laboured to fill the city with 
 noble edifices and with the science and learning of Greece. 
 The Museum was crowded with teachers and students, 
 the Library with eager readers, the streets were thronged 
 with the crowds of traffickers, and with the idlers who 
 flocked to the great pageants of the king and the scenes 
 of the theatre. The picture of a royal pomp, as given by 
 Cillixenus with heraldic precision, that of the life of the 
 ridi ladies, as drawn by Theocritus with poetic liveliness, 
 are not so striking as the little story how the rich and 
 luxurious king looked from his palace-window, and as he 
 sav the naked children sporting on the sand, cried 
 ‘ Mould that I were one of them ! ’ It is the old sum- 
 ming up of Solomon, — £ Vanity of vanities, all is vanity ! ’ 
 The successor of Philadelphus, Ptolemy surnamed 
 Eaergetes, the Benefactor, is the first king who while still 
 a Greek began to be an Egyptian also. A quarrel with 
 tie Syrian ruler, for the sake of his sister, murdered by 
 a rival queen, led Euergetes to make war on his eastern 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 184 
 
 neighbour. In a splendid campaign he revived the fame 
 of the ancient Pharaohs, and the people of Egypt rejoiced 
 when he brought back to the shrines the statues vhich 
 the Persians had carried away. Berenice, beautiful and 
 virtuous, shared his throne, and the court and city of 
 Alexandria then reached their highest prosperity. The 
 first century of the city’s life now closed, and the decline 
 began. Weak kings could not govern well at home, nor 
 abroad make head against their turbulent neighbours of 
 Syria. Pretenders in their own family took advantage 
 of the difficulties of the heads of the house. Very soon 
 Rome began to protect, to interfere, and to weaken, aid 
 it was only under the splendid reign of Cleopatra, an- 
 bitious, unscrupulous, but yet the last brilliant heir of 
 Alexander’s genius, that Egypt for a while recovered ler 
 greatness. Then came the catastrophe, and the Roman 
 Empire gained a rich and turbulent province ; for under 
 the later kings a new force appeared in Egyptiin 
 politics, the restless Greek populace of Alexandra. 
 Strong enough to expel a tyrant, they had lost the Hd- 
 lenic sense of liberty, and only called in a fresh tyrant in 
 his stead. Their part was not a noble one. They were 
 more and more isolated from the rest of Egypt. The 
 efforts of patriots to establish a native dynasty found no 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 185 
 
 sympathy with the Alexandrians. The momentary inde- 
 pendence of Thebes, and later the noble struggle in which 
 the ancient capital perished, were witnessed with indif- 
 ference, if not with aversion. The Alexandrian mob 
 had sunk into a chaos of unrest where > they blindly 
 wandered, with no purpose but the desire of the moment 
 for pleasure or for revenge. 
 
 Yet this mob ruled Egypt under the weaker of the 
 Greek kings and Roman governors. The whole admin- 
 istration was centralised at Alexandria, and the pressure 
 of popular clamour could move the machine of the state 
 when it was uncontrolled by a master’s hand. Thus in 
 time the centre ceased to have any influence but that 
 of brute force on the rest of Egypt. In the later days 
 of the Roman rule this restless population was drawn 
 into the religious conflicts which made the country an 
 easy prey to the Arabs — but this belongs to a later part 
 of the subject. 
 
 One would curiously inquire whether Alexander 
 planned all that his city became under the Ptolemies, his 
 successors in the Egyptian part of his great empire. He 
 had thought of a commercial centre, and had designed 
 for it a constitution which should unite, after his favourite 
 policy, the Greek and the Egyptian in a common citizen- 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 1 86 
 
 ship. The Ptolemies maintained the interests of 
 trade. They varied the constitution by introducing 
 Hebrew citizens on a level with the Greeks, while 
 they gave the Egyptians an inferior place, thus injuring 
 the scheme in the very direction in which they enlarged 
 it. To their action, though the idea may have been 
 Alexander’s, it was due that their capital became a 
 second Athens, the centre of the Greek world, the meet- 
 ing-place of the intelligence of the East and the West in 
 a nobler commerce than that which filled the docks and 
 the markets with the merchandise of every sea which 
 Greek and Phoenician galleys traversed, of every land 
 into which caravans could penetrate. The Museum and 
 the Library of Alexandria have outshone the fame of her 
 luxury and trade. When her name is mentioned, we 
 think not of a stately city, but of the long roll of patient 
 students who there led the schools of thought which we 
 call Alexandrian, of the hardy pioneers of science, and 
 of our large debt to those early labourers who toiled for 
 our profit ; and we remember that greatest ancient 
 treasure of books, the loss of which we ceaselessly de- 
 plore, for most of them are known to us only by name 
 or from a tantalising fragment. 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 187 
 
 The intellectual activity of Alexandria was centred in 
 the Museum and the Library, but we cannot understand 
 these institutions unless we look at the whole atmosphere 
 of thought in which they grew up. We have not only 
 to trace the origin of a great school of philosophy, the 
 parent of other schools, and to observe a series of mo- 
 mentous movements in the early Church ; we must not 
 neglect the history of a new belief which was destined to 
 take a leading part in the final conflict of paganism and 
 Christianity. 
 
 The mixed Greek and Egyptian population of Alex- 
 andria needed a religion such as a centre of learning 
 could not give them. The introduction of the worn-out 
 creed of Egypt would have been distasteful to the Greeks, 
 a foreign worship would have met little favour with the 
 Egyptians. Accordingly the astute old king who founded 
 the Ptolemaic dynasty solved the difficulty by the in- 
 genious compromise which introduced an Egyptian 
 belief in a Hellenic form. On the pretext of a dream 
 he despatched messengers to Sinope on the Euxine, for 
 a sacred statue ; on its arrival he consulted the Egyptian 
 priests, and they pronounced it to represent Sarapis, a 
 form of Osiris, the ruler of the world of shades, supposed 
 
1 88 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 to be embodied in Apis, the living sacred bull of Mem- 
 phis. Thus the worship of Osiris, the most human phase 
 of the native religion, became the popular faith of the 
 capital. The animal worship was suppressed at Alex- 
 andria, but its relation to the Alexandrian divinity readily 
 introduced the new ideas at Memphis, where the Egyp- 
 tian Sarapis was already reverenced. This new belief, 
 touching as it did the hopes and fears of mankind, 
 speedily gained a unde popularity. It spread through- 
 out Egypt, and thence to the dominions of the Ptolemies 
 on the southern shore of Asia Minor. It crossed the 
 ^Egean to Greece, and the Adriatic to Rome. Yet it 
 was but a popular creed. The learned men of Alex- 
 andria treated it with indifference, if not with contempt, 
 until at length they sought its aid in the final conflict 
 with Christianity. 
 
 The Alexandrian schools of philosophy grew in and 
 around the Museum and the Library; of these we must learn 
 something if we would understand what they produced. 
 
 The first two Ptolemies, who for nearly eighty years 
 ruled the richest and most tranquil part of the Empire of 
 Alexander, had nothing more at heart than the welfare 
 of their capital. Their policy was so completely one 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 189 
 
 that we do not know to which of the two we should 
 assign the twin foundations which are the true glory of 
 the city, because they made it for at least seven centuries 
 the mainspring of the intellectual movement of the civil- 
 ised world. Like the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and 
 the Pharos of Alexandria, the Museum has given its 
 name to a whole class of successors. But it was not a 
 treasury of statues and pictures ; the masterpieces of art 
 were at that time enshrined in temples and palaces. 
 True to its name, the Temple of the Muses was a uni- 
 versity, yet it contained in its precincts some of the 
 elements of an ideal museum, and thus the large scope of 
 its plan hints that a museum should be a university, and 
 that a university cannot be complete without collections, 
 an unconscious satire on the modem divorce of two 
 institutions most necessary to each other’s life. 
 
 Nothing in Greece was the pattern of the Museum of 
 Alexandria. Although the Athenian youth had a regular 
 training, the idea of a centre not alone for instruction, 
 but also, it may be rather, for the prosecution of research, 
 was new to the Greeks. They owed it to the Egyptians, 
 and the very system of Heliopolis was carried on at 
 Alexandria. At each city the university was attached to 
 
190 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 a temple, at each there was a regular staff of professors 
 who at once taught and studied, at each the scope of the 
 subjects had a general similarity. 
 
 We know much of the learned men of the Museum ; 
 of the establishment itself we know but little. Thus 
 much is certain : there were four faculties, as we should 
 call them, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. 
 A botanical garden, which became a garden of acclima- 
 tisation, was attached to the Museum, as well as a mena- 
 gerie ; and thus natural history, partly as an aid to 
 medicine, partly for its own sake, had a place in the 
 teaching. Surprising as it seems, philosophy was left 
 out. It was the policy of the Ptolemies to avoid studies 
 which could cast doubt on the moral basis of their sys- 
 tem of government, and overthrow the religion of Egypt, 
 with its new development, the worship of Sarapis. Even 
 the priest of the Museum might have lost his influence. 
 He was an important functionary, who stood at the head 
 of the establishment like the rector of a modem college. 
 Next him were the professors. They were the most 
 learned men of the time, attracted by the dignity, the 
 influence, and the emoluments of their offices. For they 
 were salaried by the state. The buildings comprised a 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 191 
 
 great dining-hall, which was the common room of the 
 professors, their theatre for public disputations, their 
 columned corridor for peripatetic lectures, and their 
 private apartments. 
 
 It is so usual to speak of the Library of Alexandria, 
 that we need to be reminded that it -was twofold. The 
 Library proper was attached to the Museum, but a second 
 great collection was housed, probably for want of room, 
 far away in the Temple of Sarapis. Of the extent of the 
 collections as a whole various accounts are given, perhaps 
 owing to the usual confusion between books and volumes, 
 perhaps with reference to different times. One estimate 
 is 500,000 volumes ; and it is said that the library of the 
 Temple of Sarapis was by a single addition augmented 
 to the extent of 200,000 volumes, when the collection of 
 the kings of Pergamus was given by Mark Antony to 
 Cleopatra. If w r e take a low estimate, a library wholly 
 of manuscripts would not have been insignificant beside 
 its greatest modern successors of the earlier half of this 
 century, though in these recent libraries manuscripts are 
 but a small item beside the vast array of printed books. 
 But number is no test of value. That which sharpens our 
 regret is the quality of the books, of which the loss has 
 
192 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 cost the life’s labour of generations of scholars, striving 
 day and night to work back corrupt texts into the purity 
 in which the Alexandrian Library possessed them, or 
 hopelessly studying a broken fragment of a book which 
 was there complete. 
 
 There was a time of repose before the vast material 
 of the Library was brought to bear on speculative 
 thought. The limits of teaching at the Museum, and 
 the predominance of the practical side of knowledge, 
 made the Alexandrian learning at first sceptical and 
 critical. As sceptical it did not attach itself to any one 
 of the great schools of thought. As critical it devoted 
 itself to the heavy work of examining, comparing, and 
 revising the vast body of Greek literature now for the 
 first time brought together. The poets especially were 
 eagerly studied, and we owe our text of Homer to the 
 careful labour of the learned men of Alexandria. Thus 
 the earliest school of Alexandria was eminently prac- 
 tical. In the sphere of imagination it produced nothing. 
 The Alexandrian poetry is sometimes exotic, like the 
 Idylls of Theocritus, but is generally a copy more or 
 less tasteful of old masters. Original art was of neces- 
 sity absent. There is no style of Alexandria at the 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 193 
 
 very time when Pergamus and Rhodes were showing 
 great originality and mastery of form. When the Greeks 
 at Alexandria returned to the poetry and imagination 
 of philosophy, art, which cannot live without a perpetual 
 tradition, could no longer be revived. 
 
 The first traces of a definite school of philosophy at 
 Alexandria are seen where we should least expect them. 
 In an Egyptian temple of the Ptolemaic age, when we 
 are given the key which the genius of Mariette dis- 
 covered, we find ourselves in the presence of national 
 ideas transformed by Greek influence. The very art 
 has received a new impulse, and the graces of Greek 
 architecture, dead at Alexandria, live again in the 
 Thebais under an Egyptian shape. The system of the 
 different parts of the edifice is changed from the mere 
 chance of older times to a strict method. Each hall 
 and chamber has its proper purpose, its suitable sculp- 
 tures and inscriptions, leading up from the lower stages 
 of knowledge to initiation into the higher truths. At 
 the end of the temple, in the sanctuary, the king 
 worships the Ideas of Plato’s philosophy, the Beautiful, 
 the True, and the Good. 
 
 Yet this transfusion of new life into the long dead 
 
 o 
 
194 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 belief of Egypt was fatal in its effect. A religion which 
 had fallen into helpless decay could only disappear at 
 the touch of philosophy. Thus at the moment when 
 all its greatest thoughts were clothed in worthy form, a 
 deep and hopeless doubt seized on the minds of the 
 people, except those few who could accept the new view 
 without losing whatever was worth retaining in the old 
 doctrines. It was through them that the Alexandrian 
 thinkers received a current of Egyptian influence. 
 
 Still more remarkable was the meeting of Greek and 
 Hebrew thought, and the share which Plato took in 
 their fusion. The Jews of Alexandria, dwelling in a 
 Greek city and speaking its language, soon needed a 
 translation of the Law into their vulgar tongue. Tradi- 
 tion says that this important work was executed by the 
 desire of the second Ptolemy, but it is more reason- 
 able to think that it was due to the care of the Alex- 
 andrian sanhedrim. From that moment the logic and 
 philosophy of Greece gave a more fixed form to Hebrew 
 thought, and suggested its definition ; from that moment 
 the Platonists were offered that which they had long 
 desired, the reality of their great leader’s noble Ideas. 
 A whole literature of the Alexandrian Hebrews attested 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 195 
 
 their largeness of mind and their knowledge of Greek 
 philosophy. In our much -neglected Apocrypha, the 
 Wisdom of Solomon is a splendid instance of this new 
 direction of thought. But the most remarkable produc- 
 tions of this school are the writings of Philo, the earliest 
 Platonist of Alexandria. Philo is indeed the great 
 thinker of the age, in whom we first see the mighty 
 effect of the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into 
 Greek. He has found the philosophic grammar by 
 which to arrange the thoughts of the ancient teachers, 
 and at the same time he has given that grammar a living 
 speech. He has perceived in the Hebrew belief truths 
 obscurely mirrored in Platonism. Yet the exclusiveness 
 of Judaism bars the path of his progress. He has 
 reached the wall of the universe in which he lives, and 
 cannot overleap it. Beyond are the brethren to whom 
 he would fain stretch out brotherly arms, but cannot. 
 No farther could he go, nor could his successors, inferior 
 to him, for he had journeyed straight to the limits within 
 which they could only wander. But the path was made 
 and the rampart attained which was to fall at the 
 trumpet-sound of a victorious faith. 
 
 Alexandria, with her Greek and Hebrew philosophers, 
 o 2 
 
 f 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 196 
 
 early became a centre of Christian thought. Nowhere 
 so much as here did the new religion grow and prosper. 
 Nowhere did she receive so much from older modes 
 of thought. The Platonist saw in Christianity a fuller 
 and clearer embodiment of the noble Ideas of his 
 philosophy than could be seen in Judaism ; the Hebrew 
 saw in it the extension of the faith of Abraham and the 
 promises to the whole race of man ; the Egyptian saw 
 in it the great doctrines of the divine unity and man’s 
 future condition, which had only just disappeared from 
 his religion in the shock of its contact with philosophy. 
 The Greek vehicle which gave the expressions of Hebrew 
 thought a definiteness they had hitherto wanted, yet 
 which limited that luminous vagueness which has in 
 it the living principle of development, was of neces- 
 sity accepted by the Christianity as by the Judaism of 
 Alexandria. But Hebrew thought reacted upon Greek 
 form ; the first translations were the work of Hebrews, 
 and the medium was deeply coloured by their use. 
 Thus the Greek of the early Church was not purely 
 Hellenic ; rather it was an intermediate mode of ex- 
 pression, retaining somewhat of the old expansiveness, 
 marked by somewhat of the new limitation. Alexandrian 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 197 
 
 speculation was not without a native influence. The 
 Egyptian contributed his love of mystery, and that 
 strong desire for individual holiness without reference to 
 others which is the root of asceticism. 
 
 Two men are typical of this stirring age of the young 
 Church in the Greek city. Clement of Alexandria, the 
 learned Greek, eagerly read all philosophy, not to explain 
 or to define dogma, but because he felt that the truth 
 was to be discovered everywhere, in Greek and in Egyp- 
 tian as well as in Hebrew writings. To him there was 
 
 , f 
 
 nothing derogatory to the Scriptures in the belief that 
 there were other revelations, that indeed all wisdom was 
 necessarily a gift of God. Had he reasoned out his 
 view he would have been a modern of the modems. 
 As it is, he remains only a pious searcher, rejoicing in 
 each fresh treasure that rewards his unwearying labour. 
 In his simple nature and his true love of various know- 
 ledge combined, he stands quite alone among his fellows, 
 to the loss of later generations, for had there been more 
 like him, far less of ancient knowledge would have been 
 allowed to perish. 
 
 Origen, like Clement, was a great and loving student, 
 but he was more 3 he was one of the few original 
 
CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 198 
 
 thinkers the world has known. He is of the school of 
 Alexandria, yet one of ourselves, as the greatest men 
 have no time or country, but are the true brethren of 
 all mankind. He is of the Alexandrians, for by race 
 an Egyptian, by training a Greek, by choice a Christian, 
 he, the most learned man of the early Church, always 
 remained Egyptian and Greek as well as Christian. He 
 is one of us, and so the most interesting figure of his time, 
 because he alone looked at the problems of theology 
 with modern as well as with ancient eyes. He accepts 
 the doctrines of Christianity, and uses philosophy for 
 their definition ; so far he is ancient. Suddenly we see 
 him calling on his reason and his moral sense to explain 
 that which in its current form neither is willing to receive. 
 Then he betakes himself to Hebrew criticism, and trans- 
 lates afresh every passage of Scripture bearing on his 
 difficulty ; now he is modern. Thus it is with his 
 famous argument in favour of the restitution of all 
 things, which, be it remembered, he never advanced but 
 as a theory, with modesty and reverence. But the argu- 
 ment, if it deal with that which is beyond man’s reason, is 
 well worth reading for its imaginative force and that finer 
 tenderness which exalts him above his modern successors. 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 199 
 
 Origen was too learned and too deep a thinker for 
 promotion. He held no place of honour or control ; in 
 his life he suffered from the suspicion of narrow minds ; 
 after his death, he was not added to the splendid roll of 
 the saints ; nor is it usual to consider the most profound 
 philosopher, the most learned writer, the most laborious 
 editor of the early Church, him whose wearied body 
 held a soul of 1 brazen ’ strength and ‘ adamantine ’ acute- 
 ness, as one of the Fathers, still less as one of the 
 Doctors. Yet his fame shines out of ancient Alexandria 
 like her far-seen Pharos, illuminating our way and warn- 
 ing us against its dangers. 
 
 These men lived in days when the state and the 
 vulgar persecuted, but the philosophers sympathised. 
 With the triumph of Christianity came the separation of 
 the four schools of thought. The Hebrews, startled by 
 the catastrophe of Jerusalem, had shrunk back into their 
 old exclusiveness and so disappeared for centuries from the 
 field of controversy. For the time their work was done. 
 The philosophic and Egyptian parties united. Casting 
 about for a religion for the vulgar, the philosophers were 
 entrapped by the specious claims of the worship of 
 Sarapis, and thus their works are now tinctured with 
 
200 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 superstition and magic to an extent which makes us 
 wonder at the admiration with which many modem 
 critics regard them. The Church having drawn from 
 alien sources, no longer sought them as before. The 
 influence of these sources was, however, felt long after 
 they seemed to be dried up. Religion was strongly 
 coloured by the definitions of philosophy, constantly 
 increasing in precision, and by the introduction of 
 asceticism. Hence arose the great controversies which 
 raged in the early Church, and the new and false ideal 
 of Christian life which we call monastic. 
 
 The first effect of the translation of the Old Testa- 
 ment was, as we have seen, to give so much of definite 
 form to Hebrew thought as the Greek-speaking Hebrews 
 were able to accept. The publication of the New 
 Testament produced the same effect. But as the Chris- 
 tians studied philosophy and neglected Hebrew, this 
 Greek tendency became more and more determinate. 
 The very terms of theology were often philosophic, and 
 had been the subjects of subtle analysis and keen dis- 
 cussion. Hence arose those debates which occupied 
 the time and marred the usefulness of the Church for 
 nearly five centuries, and which now we fail to under- 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 201 
 
 stand. The questions which agitate believers of our day, 
 such as the authority of the Church, the future condition 
 of the dead, and a multitude of others, then never raised 
 a doubt, except with some rare minds born before their 
 time. Theologians busied themselves with deep mys 
 teries now never discussed, then handled as though they 
 had been matters capable of mathematical definition. 
 As we think of these forgotten controversies, when their 
 documents come before our eyes, we feel like a traveller 
 who suddenly beholds a range of extinct volcanoes. The 
 fires are quenched, and around their ashes rise the hol- 
 low walls which once glowed with ceaseless movement. 
 There is no sign that they will ever be active again. 
 Their life is gone, and they belong to the realm of the 
 dead things of a forgotten age. In other regions other 
 mountains are aglow, and enlighten while they threaten 
 other fields and vineyards. 
 
 Yet more remarkable and more lasting was the return 
 which the Egyptian religion made to Christianity when 
 she offered the doubtful gift of asceticism. The system 
 of a separate religious life in the seclusion of a convent 
 is foreign to the instincts of the Shemites. Those among 
 them who were bent on retirement always went from the 
 
202 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 peopled land to the silence of the desert. So did Elijah 
 and the Baptist. Yet they returned in renewed strength 
 to work among their fellow-men. There were then no 
 hermits, still less were there convents. The sons of the 
 prophets formed religious communities, and the Essenes 
 had their separate villages ; but neither of these were 
 monastic establishments, they were rather associations of 
 men, or men and women, who had a common purpose 
 in life, or would live away from the distractions of the 
 world. 
 
 In Egypt the fourth century .suddenly shows us the 
 hermit life and the conventual system in full vigour. 
 It is significant that the first hermit, St. Antony, was an 
 Egyptian, who did not speak Greek till he was past his 
 twentieth year. It is much more significant that St. 
 Pachomius, the founder of the first convent, was an 
 Egyptian monk in an Egyptian convent before he em- 
 braced the new faith and carried into its practices the 
 whole conventual system. That strange life, if life it 
 may be called, shows in every aspect its double parentage, 
 in its spiritual pride and its unworldliness, in its egotism 
 and its generosity, in its indolence and its industry, its 
 deadness and yet its vitality. It has never ceased to be 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 203 
 
 Egyptian, but it has never failed to be Christian. While 
 we admit what we owe to its many virtues, the learned 
 zeal which preserved the classics, and the missionary 
 zeal which transformed the wild tribes of the Swiss 
 valleys and the German forests, we must yet acknowledge 
 the wretched indolence and selfish quietism which marked 
 whole communities even in the most active times. Nor 
 is it less remarkable to see how the two principles alter- 
 nately triumphed, how a body of fierce inquisitors crossed 
 the ocean, and became like Las Casas, the firm yet 
 gentle protectors of the Indians against their Spanish 
 oppressors. 
 
 Religion had been coloured by philosophy, dogma 
 had been fixed, the monastic system had been instituted, 
 the Hebrews had drawn away, and the philosophers 
 were looking on in hostile apprehensiveness. Such was 
 the state of Alexandrian opinion at the moment of the 
 triumph of Christianity, when the scene of conflict was 
 no longer without but within the Church. It was a time 
 of great movements, in which we discern figures so large 
 that distance cannot dwarf them, one indeed, the primate 
 Athanasius, towering above the rest, the man of most 
 personal influence throughout the Roman Empire be- 
 
204 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 tween Julius Caesar and Charlemagne. The heresy of 
 Arius, a Libyan if not an Egyptian, was a compromise 
 between Christianity and philosophy, which must have 
 attracted the Hebrew and Greek elements in the Church, 
 led by a man of intellectual acuteness and persuasive 
 power. His opponent Athanasius, with inferior mental 
 gifts, had a supreme skill in rousing the loyalty of his 
 followers, an untiring energy, a tender tolerance, not 
 rarely the gentle counterpoise of a fiery nature, and an 
 entire forgetfulness of self. Throughout his most 
 dramatic career he retained the simplicity of his youth. 
 Persecuted and hunted down, five times an exile, and 
 often in danger of his life, he triumphed at last, and died 
 in peace, ruler of the patriarchal throne of Alexandria. 
 He was neither Greek, nor Hebrew, nor Egyptian, but 
 cast in the Roman mould ; not a thinker or enthusiast 
 or dreamer, but a man and a ruler of men. 
 
 The breach between the Church and the philosophers 
 was now complete. It was made impassable by the ill 
 fortune which gave the heathen party a temporary 
 triumph under the auspices of the Emperor Julian, 
 variously called the Apostate or the Philosopher. Julian 
 was a man of politic compromises. He did not actively 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 205 
 
 persecute the Church, but he set up the old religion of 
 Sarapis under the protection of philosophy. All was 
 overturned by his early death, except the mischief he 
 had done. The Church had learnt nothing but to 
 despise the philosophers, and at last began to persecute 
 the harmless quietists, who still lingered about the pre- 
 cincts of the Museum. The defeated party wins our full 
 sympathy when we witness the cruel death of Hypatia, 
 beautiful, gentle, and learned, who may almost be called 
 the last light of the Greek school of Alexandria. The 
 mob had become the agent of the fanatical churchmen. 
 The toleration of paganism had lately ceased with the 
 sack of the temple of Sarapis ; and now the teaching of 
 philosophy was about to be proscribed. 
 
 The Church could not, however, destroy the philo- 
 sophic tendency, which grew stronger and stronger within 
 it. The theologians wrangled over insoluble points of 
 doctrine, while learning was neglected and the state was 
 in danger. When they had achieved the final separation 
 of the Greek from the native Church, the Arabs came 
 and the hostility of the Egyptians to their rulers made 
 the conquest of Egypt easy. Alexandria alone offered a 
 stout defence. When the city was taken and the Library 
 
206 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 burnt, her history ceases. Never afterwards the capital 
 of Egypt, Alexandria only appears from time to time as 
 a seat of commercial wealth. We read, indeed, how an 
 Arab prince in the ninth century restored the Library and 
 the University, as though the old institutions had risen 
 from their ashes ; but in the vicissitudes of history there 
 was no stability in this revival, and we hear of it no more. 
 
 Our own days witnessed a return of the greatness of 
 Alexandria due to the establishment of the new route to 
 India. The old city had shrunk to the space on the 
 mole, when suddenly a new town grew on Alexander’s 
 mantle, an abode of Western merchants, not beautiful, 
 but with the stateliness of wealth in the great square 
 and the long lines of broad streets. The later Pelusium, 
 Port Said, on the ample harbour of the canal of the two 
 seas, despite a better site, fever-stricken by the air of 
 Lake Menzeleh, could not rival the older city. Then 
 came, as in the Roman time, revolt and the interference 
 of the West, Alexandria once more the centre of resis- 
 tance, once more stricken the hardest blow, and in the 
 destruction of the new town, the latest proof of the 
 wanton temper of the Alexandrian mob. 
 
 Unlike Rome and Athens, Alexandria has scarcely a 
 
ALEXANDRIA-. 
 
 207 
 
 trace of her ancient magnificence. Had her edifices 
 been Egyptian, they would not have disappeared, but at 
 the capital the Greek kings and the Roman emperors 
 built as Greeks, and not as Egyptians. Thus while their 
 temples stand in Upper Egypt in massive splendour, the • 
 capital is almost without record of their rule. Fragments 
 or sites alone recall her splendid edifices. At the en- 
 trance of the Great Harbour a lighthouse still marks the 
 place of the famous Pharos of Alexandria. Of the 
 Museum and Library, the Palaces, the royal mausoleum, 
 and the Temple of Sarapis, there are no remains which can 
 be recognised, unless indeed the recent discovery of a 
 great sepulchral vault has brought to light part of the royal 
 burial-place. Of the obelisks removed from older cities 
 to adorn the new capital, a pair remained till our own 
 time, one standing, the other fallen. Modem taste has 
 despoiled Alexandria of these striking monuments, to set 
 them up apart in London and in New York, amid 
 uncongenial surroundings. The great column which is 
 commonly known as Pompey’s Pillar yet stands, raised by 
 the prefect of Egypt in honour of Diocletian, probably 
 when he recovered the country after the revolt of the 
 usurper or patriot Achilleus. It is nearly a hundred feet 
 
208 
 
 CITIES OF EGYPT. 
 
 high, the shaft being a single block of red granite. In the 
 environs maybe seen the remains of an interesting monu- 
 ment, the temple of Queen Arsinoe as Aphrodite on the 
 promontory of Zephyrium, near Ramleh, ‘ the Sandy,’ a 
 favourite resort of the Alexandrian merchants of our day. 
 The position is very striking, on a high cliff looking over 
 the sea towards Cyprus, the island of the goddess here 
 worshipped. In the quiet of the ruin, where the silence 
 of the desert coast is only broken by the murmur of the 
 waves on the sandy shore below, memory recalls the tale 
 which gives this temple a place in history. When Euer- 
 getes went away on his great expedition into the far east, 
 Queen Berenice here vowed if her husband returned in 
 safety, to dedicate her beautiful hair to the sea-born 
 goddess to whom the sailors prayed. The vow was 
 kept, and the long golden tresses hung up within the 
 temple. Some daring thief, who feared neither goddess 
 nor king, carried off the costly offering. Ptolemy, 
 enraged by the loss, sought in vain, until Conon, the 
 state astronomer, discovered Berenice’s hair, not at 
 Alexandria, but in the sky, as a string of stars. The 
 stars had been there of old, and were only separated as 
 a new constellation by depriving the Lion of his tail ; 
 
ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 209 
 
 yet the conceit satisfied the king; and astronomy has 
 retained this curious memorial of the faithful pair. 
 
 At Alexandria, after the custom of travellers, we say 
 farewell to Egypt. At every other ancient site we have 
 learnt something of the marvellous history of the coun- 
 try, in itself most interesting, and touching in turn the 
 history of every great nation of the old world. Here at 
 Alexandria all is summed up, and Egypt passes away 
 from our sight where she completed her work and gave 
 her manifold knowledge to the world, more definite 
 through the skill of the scholars of the Museum, more 
 human through the faith of the fathers of the Church. 
 While other sites are Egyptian, Alexandria is in turn 
 Greek and Hebrew also, but most of all Christian, of the 
 family which knows no nationality but that of our uni- 
 versal humanity. Nowhere are we more sensible of the 
 dignity of ancient history, which takes us away from the 
 trifling events of our time and country to see within a 
 broader horizon the larger movements of nations as they 
 work out the Divine decrees. 
 
 p 
 

CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH. 
 
 The chronology of ancient Egypt is as yet undeter- 
 mined, the best authorities differing by many centuries 
 as to the whole duration of the monarchy. The basis 
 of reckoning is still the list of Thirty Dynasties under 
 which the native historian Manetho arranged the kings. 
 A comparison with the evidence of the monuments and 
 papyri has shown that this list was drawn up from 
 good sources, but is, in its present condition, hopelessly 
 corrupt. All that we can as yet do is to group the 
 Dynasties under great periods, of more or less uncertain 
 duration, until we reach the age of the Empire, the 
 reckonings of the rise of which do not greatly differ. 
 From that time the dates are more and more exact, 
 though but one of the Thirty Dynasties, the Twenty- 
 seventh, can be absolutely fixed in its beginning to a 
 particular year. 
 
212 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH. 
 
 It is usual to arrange the Dynasties in a tabular 
 form. This is objectionable, as we do not know whether 
 some of them did not overlap others, while it is probable 
 that a few were wholly contemporary with one another. 
 A statement is therefore here given in preference to 
 a table, as admitting of more clear explanation. The 
 designation of Dynasties as Thinite, Memphite, Theban, 
 &c. is avoided, because it tends to confuse the city of 
 the origin of a family with the chief city or true capital. 
 
 I. 
 
 PRE-MONUMENTAL AGE. 
 
 (Dynasties I., II., and greater part of III.) — Duration, 
 800 or 700 years (?). Capital of Egypt, Memphis. 
 
 II. 
 
 MEMPHITE KINGDOM. 
 
 Under Pyramid-builders (latter part of Dyn. III., IV., 
 V., VI.) — 700 or 600 yrs. Memphis. 
 
 * III. 
 
 OBSCURE PERIOD. 
 
 (Dyn‘. VII., VIII., IX., X.) — Capital a^ first Memphis 
 (VII., VIII.); then Hanes or Heracleopolis (IX., X.) 
 According to Manetho, Dyns. IX. and X. were of Heracleo- 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH. 
 
 213 
 
 polite kings, and the absence of monuments at Memphis 
 implies the decay of that city and the transfer of the 
 capital. This age is wholly without remains. We do not 
 know if the Dynasties were contemporary (VII. and VIII. 
 with IX. and X.) or successive, and the length of time they 
 filled is unknown. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THEBAN KINGDOM. 
 
 (Dyn 8 . XI., XII., XIII.) — Capital, Thebes ; at first pro- 
 vincial, afterwards of the whole country. The rise (XI.), 
 the greatness (XII.), and the decline (XIII.) of the The- 
 bans is marked by the division into Dynasties. The middle 
 period (XII.) is certain (213 yrs.), the others unknown. It 
 is possible that the XIVth Dynasty of Xo'ites succeeded the 
 Thebans and preceded the Shepherds. 
 
 V. 
 
 SHEPHERD-RULE. 
 
 (Dyn 8 . XV., XVI., contemporary with XVII., Theban, 
 and perhaps with XIV., Xo'ites). — Capital, Zoan or Tanis. 
 Length of Shepherd-rule probably 51 1 years; at the close 
 Egypt divided between (XVI.) Shepherds and (XVII.) 
 Thebans. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE EMPIRE. 
 
 (Dyn". XVIII., XIX., XX., in part.) — Capital, Thebes. 
 B.C. cir. 1600 to 1150. 
 
214 
 
 CHRONOLOGICAL SKETCH. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE DECLINE. 
 
 (Dyn. XX., part, to XXX.) — B.c. cir. 1150 to 
 The chief dates are the following : — 
 
 Sheshonk I., or Shishak (XXII.), rise of 
 
 Bubastites B.c. 
 
 Ethiopian conquest of Pianchi . . . „ 
 
 Psammetichus I., rise of Sai'tes (XXVI.) . „ 
 
 Conquest by Cambyses (XXVII.) . . „ 
 
 Independence (XXVIII.-XXX.) . . „ 
 
 Conquest by Ochus „ 
 
 cir. 345 
 
 cir. 970 
 
 » 75° 
 
 „ 665 
 „ 527 
 » 404 ? 
 >, 345 ? 
 
NOTES. 
 
 215 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 Page 129. From the expressions in the ‘ Dictionnaire Geo- 
 graphique,’ especially p. 919, one would be disposed to put 
 Dr. Brugsch’s modification in a definite form ; but since the pub- 
 lication in 1878 of the part of the work referred to, the second 
 English edition of the ‘ History of Egypt ’ (1881) puts the case less 
 positively (ii. p. 421 seqq.). As the author well remarks, survey 
 and excavation are needed to settle the geography of the route of 
 the Exodus (p. 432). 
 
 Page 134. I am aware that Dr. Brugsch considers the sacred 
 name of On to be Pe-Tum, the Abode of Turn, and places Pe-Ra, 
 the Abode of Ra, to the northward. {‘Diet. Geogr.’ under reff. 
 On, Heliopolis.) The difficulties of this view, which separates On 
 from Heliopolis, make me rather hold that the two names designate 
 two temples and quarters of Heliopolis. 
 
 Page 147. Dr. Brugsch, agreeing with the lamented Mariette, 
 maintains the primitive cultivation of the balsam-trees near Helio- 
 polis, on the strength of an early hieroglyphic inscription. (‘ Diet. 
 Geogr. ’ p. 1279.) If so, there was probably a continuous cultivation 
 till the Arab times, and the relations of Herod with Cleopatra 
 would naturally have led to the employment of Hebrew gardeners 
 for their famous native trees. 
 
 Page 202. The important discovery that St. Pachomius was 
 originally an Egyptian heathen recluse is due to M. Revillout 
 (‘Rev. Eg.’ i. p. 160). The ‘Revue Egyptologique ’ is full of 
 information of the highest value, derived from Coptic and Demotic 
 as well as Hieroglyphic sources.