*%'%lt or tni NATION —.«_ «~~ — _ fffisKjRjfif-." m m 0i j :3 I »*» 1 £ \ T | 2 hi M 1 ■•■" I V.J > 1 I .% ■■■■■■iMfiiHWmwwMaiiii iinnri n ijiuti ' ; THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN University of California Library Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 96 X" • Clje Story of tfje jQarions. ANCIENT EGYPT. THE STORY OF THE NATIONS. Large Crown 8z>o., Cloth, Illustrated, $s, i. ROME. Arthur Gilman, M.A. 2. THE JEWS. Prof. J. K. Hosmer. 3. GERMANY. Rev. S. Baring-Gould. 4. CARTHAGE. Prof. A.J. Church. 5. ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE. Prof. J. P. Mahaffy. 6. THE MOORS IN SPAIN. Stanley Lane-Poole. 7. ANCIENT EGYPT. Prof. George Rawlinson. 8. HUNGARY. Prof. A. Vambery. 9. THE SARACENS. A. Gilman, M.A. 10. IRELAND. Hon. Emily Lawless. 11. CHALDEA. Z. A. Ragozin. 12. THE GOTHS. Henry Bradley. 13. ASSYRIA. Z. A. Ragozin. 14. TURKEY. Stanley Lane-Poole. 15. HOLLAND. Prof. J. E. T. Rogers 16. MEDIEVAL FRANCE. Gustave Masson. 17. PERSIA. S. G. W. Benjamin. 18. PHOENICIA. Prof. Geo. Rawlinson. 19. MEDIA. Z. A. Ragozin. 20. THE HANSA TOWNS. Helen ZlMMERN. 21. EARLY BRITAIN. Prof. Alfred J. Church. 22. THE BARBARY CORSAIRS. Stanley Lane-Poole. 2^. RUSSIA. W. R. Morfill. London : T. FISHER TJNWTN, Paternoster Square, E.C. GREAT HALL OF COLUMNS AT KARNAK (RESTORED.) Zm ^- o 7 ^ » ANCIENT EGYPT GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A. CAMDEN PROFESSOR OF ANCIENT HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. AND CORRESFONDING MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF TURIN J AUTHOR OF "THE FIVE GREAT MONARCHIES OF THE ANCIENT EASTERN WORLD," ETC. ETC. WITH THE COLLABORATION OF ARTHUR GILMAN, M.A. AUTHOR OF "THE STOKY OF ROME," ETC FIFTH EDITION. T. FISHER UNWIN PATERNOSTER SQUARE NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS MDCCCXC PT85 K36 1886 Entered at Stationers' Hall By T. FISHER UNWIN Copyright by G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1886 (For the United States of Americaj. REGINALD STUART POOLE, KEEPER OF COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM, AND CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE. IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MUCH HELP AND MUCH PLEASURE DERIVED FROM HIS EGYPTIAN LABOURS. 1* o 'a j — J j> t ' E c u3 o a H 9 Jo „ MEDITERRANEAN SEA London T Fisher Unwin. Paternoster Square, EC. CONTENTS. The Land of Egypt PAGE 1-22 General shape of Egypt, I — Chief divisions : twofold division, 2 ; threefold division, 3— The Egypt of the maps unreal, 4— Egypt, " the gift of the river," in what sense, 5, 6 — The Fayoum, 7 — Egyptian speculations concerning the Nile, 7, 8— The Nile not beautiful, 8— Size of Egypt, 9— Fer- tility, 10— Geographical situation, II, 12— The Nile, as a means of communication, 12, 13 — Phenomena of the inunda- tion, 13, 14 — Climate of Egypt, 14 — Geology, 15 — Flora and Fauna, 16, 17 — General monotony, 19 — Exceptions, 20-22. II. The People of Egypt 23-45 Origin of the Egyptians, 23 — Phenomena of their language and type, 24 — Two marked varieties of physique, 25 — Two types of character : the melancholic, 25, 27 : the gay, 27-29 — Character of the Egyptian religion : polytheism, 30, 31 — Animal worship, 31-33 — Worship of the monarch, 33 — Osirid saga, 34, 35— Evil gods, 36 — Local cults, 37 — Esoteric religion, 38 ; how reconciled with the popular belief, 39 — Conviction of a life after death, 40, 41 — Moral code, 41-43 — Actual state of morals, 43 — Ranks of society, 44, 45. CONTENTS. III. The Dawn of History 46-64 Early Egyptian myths : the Seb and Thoth legends, 46, 47 — The destruction of mankind by Ra, 48 — Traditions concerning M'na, or Menes, 48 — Site of Memphis, 49 — Great Temple of Phthah at Memphis, 50, 51 — Names of Memphis, 51 — Question of the existence of M'na, 52, 53 — Supposed successors of M'na, 54 — First historical Egyptian, Sneferu, 55 — The Egypt of his time, 56 — Hieroglyphics, 57 — Tombs, 58 — Incipient pyra- mids, 59, 60 — Social condition of the people, 60 — Manners, 61 — Position of women, 62-64. IV. The Pyramid Builders ..... 65-94 Difficult to realize the conception of a great pyramid, 65 — Egyptian idea of one, 66 — Number of pyramids in Egypt : the Principal Three, 67 — Description of the "Third Pyramid," 67-71 ; of the "Second Pyramid," 72; of the "First" or "Great Pyramid," 75-81 — The traditional builders, Khufu, Shafra, and Menkaura, S2 ; the pyramids their tombs, 82 — Grandeur of Khufu 's conception, 83 — Cruelty involved in it, 84, 85 — The builders' hopes not realized, 85, 86 — Skill dis- played in the construction, 86 — Magnificence of the archi- tectural effect, 89 — Inferiority of the "Third Pyramid," 90 — Continuance of the pyramid period, 91-94. The Rise of Thebes to Power, and the Early Theban Kings 95 -112 Shift of the seat of power — site of Thebes, 95 — Origin of the name of Thebes, 96 — Earliest known Theban king, Antef I., 97 — His successors, Mentu-hotep I. and "Antef the Great," 98— Other Antefs and Mentu-hoteps, 98, 99 — Sankh-ka-ra and his fleet, 99, 100 — Dynasty of Usurtasens and Amenemhats : CONTENTS. XI PAGE spirit of their civilization, ioo, 101 — Reign of Amenemhat I., 102 — His wars and hunting expeditions, 103, 104 — Usurtasen I. : his wars, 105 — His sculptures and architectural works, 106 — His obelisk, 107-109 — Reign of Amenemhat II. : tablet belonging to his time, 109, no — Usurtasen II. and his con- quests, in, 112. VI. The Good Amenemhat and his Works . 1 13-123 Dangers connected with the inundation of the Nile, twofold, 113 — An excessive inundation, 114; a defective one, 115 — Sufferings from these causes under Amenemhat III. , 115, 1 16 — Possible storage of water, 117 — Amenemhat 's reservoir, the "Lake Moeris," 118 — Doubts as to its dimensions, 119, 120 — Amenemhat's " Labyrinth," 121 — His pyramid, and name of Ra-n-mat, 122, 123. VII. Abraham in Egypt ..... 124-131 Wanderings of the Patriarch, 124 — Necessity which drove him into Egypt, 125 — Passage of the Desert, 126 — A dread anxiety unfaithfully met, 127 — Reception on the frontier, and removal of Sarah to the court, 128 — Abraham's material well-being, 129 — The Pharaoh restores Sarah, 130 — Probable date of the visit, 130 — Other immigrants, 131. VIII. The Great Invasion — The Hyksos or Shep- herd Kings — Joseph and Apepi . . 132-146 Exemption of Egypt hitherto from foreign attack, 132 — Threatening movements among the«pepulations of Asia, 133 — Manetho's tale of the " Shepherd " invasion, 134 — The prob- able reality, 135, 136 — Upper Egypt toot overrun, 137 — The Xll CONTENTS. PAGB first Hyksos king, Set, or Saites, 138 — Duration of the rule, doubtful, 139 — Character of the rule improves with time, 140 — Apepi's great works at Tanis, 144 — Apepi and Ra-sekenen, 145 — Apepi and Joseph, 146. IX. How the Hyksos were Expelled from Egypt 147-169 Rapid deterioration of conquering races generally, 147, 148 — Recovery of the Egyptians from the ill effects of the invasion, 149 — Second rise of Thebes to greatness, 150 — War of Apepi with Ra-sekenen III., 151 — Succession of Aahmes ; war continues, 152 — The Hyksos quit Egypt, 153 — Aahmes perhaps assisted by the Ethiopians, 154-157. The First Great Warrior King, Thothmes I. 158-169 Early wars of Thothmes in Ethiopia and Nubia, 158-160 — His desire to avenge the Hyksos invasion, 161 — Condition of Western Asia at this period, 162, 163 — Geographical sketch of the countries to be attacked, 164, 165 — Probable informa- tion of Thothmes on these matters, 167 — His great expedi- tion into Syria and Mesopotamia, 167 — His buildings, 168 — His greatness insufficiently appreciated, 169. XI. Queen Hatasu and her Merchant Fleet . 170-1! High estimation of women in Egypt, 170 — Early position of Hatasu as joint ruler with Thothmes II., 173 — Her buildings at this period, 173 — Her assumption of male attire and titles, 174-177 — Her nominal regency for Thothmes HI., and real sovereignty, 177, 178 — Construction and voyage of her fleet, 178-183 — Return of the expedition to Thebes, 184 — Construc- tion of a temple to commemorate it, 185 — Joint reign of Hatasu with Thothmes III. — Her obelisks, 186 — Her name obliterated by Thothmes. 187. CONTENTS. Xlii PAGH XII. Thothmes the Third and Amenhotep the Second ....... 189-207 First expedition of Thothmes III. into Asia, 1S9-191 — His second and subsequent campaigns, 191, 192 — Great expedition of his thirty-third year, 192, 193 — Adventure with an elephant, 194 — Further expeditions : amount of plunder and tribute, 195 — Interest in natural history, 196 — Employment of a navy, 197 — Song of victory on the walls of the Temple of Karnak, 198-199 — Architectural works, 199-201 — Their present wide diffusion, 202 — Thothmes compared with Alexander, 203 — Description of his person, 204 — Position of the Israelites under Thothmes III., 205 — Short reign of Amenhotep II., 206. XIII. Amen-hotep III. and his Great Works — The Vocal Memnon ..... 208-: The "Twin Colossi" of Thebes : their impressiveness, 208- 211 — The account given of them by their sculptor, 212 — The Eastern Colossus, why called "The Vocal Memnon," 213, 214 — Earliest testimony to its being "vocal," 214 — Rational ac- count of the phenomenon, 215-217 — Amenhotep's temple at Luxor, 217, 21S — His other buildings, 219 — His wars and ex- peditions, 219, 220 — His lion hunts ; his physiognomy and character, 221, 222. XIV. Khuenaten and the Disk-Worshippers . 223-230 Obscure nature of the heresy of the Disk-worshippers, 223- 225 — Possible connection of Disk-worship with the Israelites, 226 — Hostility of the Disk-worshippers to the old Egyptian religion, 227— The introduction of the "heresy" traced to Queen Taia, 228 — Great development of the "heresy" under her son, Amenhotep IV., or Khuenaten, 229 — Other changes introduced by him, 230. xiv CONTENTS. PAGB XV. Beginning of the Decline of Egypt . 231-25? Advance of the Hittite power in Syria, 231 — War of Saplal with Ramesses I., 231 — War of Seti I. with Maut-enar, 232 — Great Syrian campaign of Seti, followed by a treaty, 233-235 — Seti's other wars, 236 — His great wall, 237 — Hittite war of Ramesses II., 238-240 — Poem of Pentaour, 241 — Results of the battle of Kadesh, a new treaty and an inter-marriage, 242, 243 — Military decline of Egypt, 244 — Egyptian art reaches its highest point : Great Hall of Columns at Karnak, 245 — Tomb of Seti, 246, 247— Colossi of Ramesses II., 248 — Ramesses II. the great oppressor of the Israelites, 249 — Physiognomies of Seti I. and Ramesses II., 250-252. XVI. Menephthah I., the Pharaoh of the Exodus 253-268 Good prospect of peace on Menephthah 's accession, 253 — General sketch of his reign, 254 — Invasion of the Maxyes, 255 — Their Mediterranean allies, 256,257 — Repulseof theinvasion, 258-261 — Israelite troubles, 262-264 — Loss of the Egyp- tian chariot force in the Red Sea, 265 — Internal revolts and difficulties, 265— General review of the civilization of the period, 266-268. XVII. The Decline of Egypt under the later Ramessides .... . 269-287 Temporary disintegration of Egypt, 269 — Reign of Setnekht, 270 — Reign of Ramesses III., 271 — General restlessness of the nations in his time, 272 — Libyan invasion of Egypt, 273, 274 — Great invasion of the Tekaru, Tanauna, and others, 275, 276 — First naval battle on record, 277, 27S — Part taken by Ramesses in the fight, 278-281 — Campaign of revenge, 2S2 — Later years of Ramesses peaceful, 283— General decline of Egypt, 284 — Insignificance of the later Ramessides, 284, 285 — ■ Deterioration in art, literature, and morals, 285-287. CONTENTS. XV PAGE XVIII. The Priest-Kings — Pinetem and Solomon . 288-297 Influence of the priests in Egypt, 2S8 — Ordinary relations between them and the kings, 289 — High-priesthood of Amnion becomes hereditary ; Herhor, 290 — Reign of Pinetem I., 293 — Reign of Men-khepr-ra, 294 — Rise of the kingdom of the Israelites, 295 — Friendly relations established between Pine- tem II. and Solomon, 296— Effect on Hebrew art and archi- tecture, 297. XIX. SHISHAK AND HIS DYNASTY .... 298-3 I 3 Shishak's family Semitic, but not Assyrian or Babylonian, 298 — Connected by marriage with the priest-kings, 299, 300 — Re- ception of Jeroboam by Shishak, 301 — Shishak's expedition against Rehoboam, 302 — Aid lent to Jeroboam in his own kingdom, 303 — Arab conquests, 304 — Karnak inscription, 305 — Shishak's successors, 306 — War of Zerah (Osorkon II. ?) with Asa, 308 — Effect of Zerah's defeat, 309— Decline of the dynasty, 310 — Disintegration of Egypt, 310, 31 1 — Further deterioration in literature and art, 311-313. XX. The Land Shadowing with Wings — Egypt under the ethiopians .... 314-330 Vague use of the term Ethiopia, 314 — Ethiopian kingdom of Napata, 315 — Wealth of Napata, 316— Piankhi's rise to power, 317 — His protectorate of Egypt, 318— Revolt of Taf- nekht and others, 318 — Suppression of the revolt, 319-322 — Death of Piankhi, and revolt of Bek-en-ranf, 323 — Power of Shabak established over Egypt, 324 — General character of the Ethiopian rule, 324 — Advance of Assyria towards the Egyptian border, 325 — Collision between Sargon and Shabak, 326 — Reign of Shabatok — Sennacherib threatens Egypt, 327 — Reign of Tehrak, 328-330. XVI CONTENTS. PAGE XXI. The Fight over the Carcase — Ethiopia v. Assyria ....... 331-341 Egypt attacked by Esarhaddon, 331, 332 — Great battle near Memphis, 333 — Memphis taken, and flight of Tehrak to Napata, 334 — Egypt split up into small states by Esarhaddon, 334, 335 — Tehrak renews the struggle, 336 — Tehrak driven out by Asshur-bani-pal, 337 — His last effort, 337 — Attempt made by Rut-Ammon fails, 338 — Temporary success of Mi- Ammon-nut, 339 — Egypt becomes once more an Assyrian dependency, 340 — Her wretched condition, 341. XXII. The Corpse comes to Life again — Psamatik I. and his Son, Neco ..... 342-359 Foreign help needed to save a sinking state, 342— Libyan origin of Psamatik I., 344 — His revolt connected with the decline of Assyria, 345 — Assistance rendered him by Gyges, 345 — His struggle with the petty princes, 346 — Reign of Psamatik : place assigned by him to the mercenaries, 347 — His measures for restoring Egypt to her former prosperity, 348, 349 — He encourages intercourse between Egypt and Greece, 350-352 — Egypt restored to life : character of the new llTe, 353 — Later years of Psamatik : conquest of Ashdod, 354 — Reign of Neco : his two fleets, 355 — His circumnavigation of Africa, 356 — His conquest of Syria, 357 — Jeremiah on the battle of Carchemish, 358 — Neco's dream of empire termi- nates, 359. XXIII The later Sa'ite Kings — Psamatik II., Apries, and Amasis ...... 360-367 The Saitic revival in art and architecture, 360 — Some recovery of military strength, 361 — Expedition of Psamatik II. into Ethiopia, 362 — Part taken by Apries in the war between CONTENTS. XVlT Nebuchadnezzar and Zedekiah, 363 — His Phoenician conquests, 364 — His expedition against Cyrene, 364 — Invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar, 365 — Quiet reign of Amasis, 366 — The Sa'itic revival not the recovery of true national life, 367. XXIV. The Persian Conquest . 368-380 Patient acquiescence of Amasis in his position of tributary to Babylon, 368 — Rise of the Persian power under Cyrus, and appeal made by Crcesus to Amasis, League of Egypt, Lydia, and Babylon, 369, 370 — Precipitancy of Crcesus, 371 — Fall of Babylon, 371 — Later wars of Cyrus, 372 — Preparations made against Egypt by Cambyses, 373, 374 — Great battle of Pelu- sium, 375 — Psamatik III. besieged in Memphis, 376 — Fall of Memphis, and cruel treatment of the Egyptians by Cambyses, 377» 37S — His iconoclasm checked by some considerations of policy, 379 — Conciliatory measures of Darius Hystaspis, 379, 380. XXV. Three Desperate Revolts .... 380-386 First revolt, under Khabash, easily suppressed by Xerxes, 381, 3S2 — Second revolt under Inarus and Amyrtasus, assisted by Athens, 382, 383 — Suppressed by Megabyzus, 384 — Hero- dotus in Egypt, 3S5 — Third revolt, under Nefaa-rut, attains a certain success ; a native monarchy re-established, 386. XXVI. Nectanebo I. — A Last Gleam of Sunshine . 387-392 Unquiet time under the earlier successors of Nefaa-rut, 387 — Preparations of Nectanebo (Nekht Hor-heb) for the better protection of Egypt against the Persians, 388 — Invasion of Egypt by Pharnabazus and Iphicrates, 389 — Failure of the expedition, 390 — A faint revival of art and architecture, 391. ia XV111 CONTENTS. XXVII. The Light goes out in Darkness 393-402 Reign of Te-her (Tacho), 393 — Reign of Nectanebo II. (Nekht- nebf ), 394 — Revolt of Sidon, and great expedition of Ochus, 394> 395 — Sidon betrayed by Tennes and Memnon of Rhodes, 396 — March upon Egypt : disposition of the Persian forces, 397 — Skirmish at Pelusium, and retreat of Nekht-nebf to Memphis, 398, 399 — Capture of Pelusium, 399 — Surrender of Bubastis, 400 — Nehkt-nebf flies to Ethiopia, 401 — General reflections, 402. Index 403 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PILLARED HALL OF SETI I. DOM AND DATE PALM TREES FIGURES OF TAOURT .... FIGURE OF BES .... TABLET OF SNEFERU AT WADV-MAGHARAH PYRAMID OF MEYDOUM . GREAT PYRAMID OF SACCARAH SECTION OF THE SAME . GROUP OF STATUARY — HUSBAND AND WIFE SECTION OF THE THIRD PYRAMID . TOMB CHAMBER IN THE SAME SARCOPHAGUS OF MYCERINUS . SECTION OF THE SECOND PYRAMID SECTION OF THE GREAT PYRAMID KING'S CHAMBER AND CHAMBERS OF IN THE GREAT PYRAMID . THE GREAT GALLERY IN THE SAME VIEW OF THE FIRST AND SECOND PYRAMIDS PAGE Frontispiece »7 36 37 55 59 61 61 63 69 69 73 73 76 CONSTRUCTION 77 79 87 XX LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE SPEARING THE CROCODILE 103 OBELISK OF USURTASEN I. ON THE SITE OF HELI- OPOLIS 107 BUST OF A SHEPHERD KING 141 HEAD OF NEFERTARI-AAHMES 155 BUST OF THOTHMES 1 159 HEAD OF THOTHMES II 171 HEAD OF QUEEN HATASU 171 GROUND-PLAN OF TEMPLE AT MEDINET-ABOU . . 175 EGYPTIAN SHIP IN THE TIME OF HATASU . . .179 HOUSE BUILT ON PILES IN THE LAND OF PUNT. . l8l THE QUEEN OF PUNT AT THE COURT OF HATASU . 183 SECTION OF THE PILLARED HALL OF THOTHMES III. AT KARNAC 201 BUST OF THOTHMES III 205 TWIN COLOSSI OF AMENHOTEP III. AT THEBES . . 209 BUST OF AMENHOTEP III 221 KHUENATEN WORSHIPPING THE SOLAR DISK . . 225 HEAD OF AMENHOTEP IV. OR KHUENATEN . . . 229 HEAD OF SETI 1 250 BUST OF RAMESSES II 25 I HEAD OF MENEPHTHAH 255 SEA-FIGHT IN THE TIME OF RAMESSES III. . . . 279 CARICATURE OF THE TIME OF THE SAME . . . 286 HEAD OF HER-HOR 29I FIGURE RECORDING THE CONQUEST OF JUDiEA BY SHISHAK 305 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. XXI PAGE HEAD OF SHISHAK 307 PIANKHI RECEIVING THE SUBMISSION OF TAFNEKHT AND OTHERS 320 HEAD OF SHABAK 325 SEAL OF SHABAK 327 HEAD OF TIRHAKAH 329 FIGURE OF ESAR-HADDON AT THE NAHR-EL-KELB . 335 HEAD OF PSAMATIK 1 344 BAS-RELIEFS OF THE TIME OF PSAMATIK I. . . .351 HEAD OF NECO . . 355 THE STORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT. i. THE LAND OF EGYPT. IN shape Egypt is like a lily with a crooked stem. A broad blossom terminates it at its upper end ; a button of a bud projects from the stalk a little below the blossom, on the left-hand side. The broad blossom is the Delta, extending from Aboosir to Tineh, a direct distance of a hundred and eighty miles, which the projection of the coast — the graceful swell of the petals — enlarges to two hundred and thirty. The bud is the Fayoum, a natural depression in the hills that shut in the Nile valley on the west, which has been rendered cultivable for many thousands of years by the introduction into it of the Nile water, through a canal known as the " Bahr Yousouf." The long stalk of the lily is the Nile valley itself, which is a ravine scooped in the rocky soil for seven hundred miles from the First Cataract to the apex of the Delta, sometimes not more than a mile broad, never more than eight or ten miles. No other country in the world is so strangely 2 2 THE LAND OF EGYPT. shaped, so long compared to its width, so straggling, so hard to govern from a single centre. At the first glance, the country seems to divide itself into two strongly contrasted regions ; and this was the original impression which it made upon its inhabitants. The natives from a very early time designated their land as " the two lands," and repre- sented it by a hieroglyph in which the form used to express " land " was doubled. The kings were called " chiefs of the Two Lands," and wore two crowns, as being kings of two countries. The Hebrews caught up the idea, and though they sometimes called Egypt " Mazor " in the singular number, preferred commonly to designate it by the dual form " Mizraim," which means " the two Mazors." These " two Mazors," " two Egypts," or " two lands," were, of course, the blossom and the stalk, the broad tract upon the Mediterranean known as " Lower Egypt," or " the Delta," and the long narrow valley that lies, like a green snake, to the south, which bears the name of " Upper Egypt," or " the Said." Nothing is more striking than the contrast between these two regions. Entering Egypt from the Mediterranean, or from Asia by the caravan route, the traveller sees stretching before him an apparently boundless plain, wholly un- broken by natural elevations, generally green with crops or with marshy plants, and canopied by a cloud- less sky, which rests everywhere on a distant fiat horizon. An absolute monotony surrounds him. No alternation of plain and highland, meadow and forest, no slopes of hills, or hanging woods, or dells, or gorges, or cascades, or rushing streams, or babbling rills, meet THE CHIEF DIVISIONS. 3 his gaze on any side ; look which way he will, all is sameness, one vast smooth expanse of rich alluvial soil, varying only in being cultivated or else allowed to lie waste. Turning his back with something of weariness on the dull uniformity of this featureless plain, the wayfarer proceeds southwards, and enters, at the distance of a hundred miles from the coast, on an entirely new scene. Instead of an illimitable prospect meeting him on every side, he finds himself in a com- paratively narrow vale, up and down which the eye still commands an extensive view, but where the prospect on either side is blocked at the distance of a few miles by rocky ranges of hills, white or yellow or tawny, sometimes drawing so near as to threaten an obstruc- tion of the river course, sometimes receding so far as to leave some miles of cultivable soil on either side of the stream. The rocky ranges, as he approaches them, have a stern and forbidding aspect. They rise for the most part, abruptly in bare grandeur ; on their craggy sides grows neither moss nor heather ; no trees clothe their steep heights. They seem intended, like the mountains that enclosed the abode of Rasselas, to keep in the inhabitants of the vale within their narrow limits, and bar them out from any commerce or ac- quaintance with the regions beyond. Such is the twofold division of the country which impresses the observer strongly at the first. On a longer sojourn and a more intimate familiarity, the twofold division gives place to one which is three- fold. The lower differs from the upper valley, it is a sort of debatable region, half plain, half vale ; the cultivable surface spreads itself out more widely, the 4 THE LAND OF EGYPT. enclosing hills recede into the distance ; above all, to the middle tract belongs the open space of the Fayoum nearly fifty miles across in its greatest diameter, and containing an area of four hundred square miles. Hence, with some of the occupants of Egypt a triple division has been preferred to a twofold one, the Greeks interposing the " Heptanomis " between the Thebais and the Delta, and the Arabs the " Vostani " between the Said and the Bahari, or " country of the sea." It may be objected to this description, that the Egypt which it presents to the reader is not the Egypt of the maps. Undoubtedly it is not. The maps give the name of Egypt to a broad rectangular space which they mark out in the north-eastern corner of Africa, bounded on two sides by the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and on the two others by two imaginary lines which the map-makers kindly draw for us across the sands of the desert. But "this Egypt," as has been well observed, " is a fiction of the geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of Greek legend, or the Lyonnesse of mediaeval romance, both sunk beneath the ocean to explain their disappearance. 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 southwards." * The great wastes on either side of the Nile valley are in no sense Egypt, neither the un- 1 R. Stuart Poole, " Cities of Egypt," p. 4. NATURE PREFERABLE TO MAPS. 5 dulattng sandy desert to the west, nor the rocky and gravelly highland to the east, which rises in terrace after terrace to a height, in some places, of six thou- sand feet. Both are sparsely inhabited, and by tribes of a different race from the Egyptian — tribes whose allegiance to the rulers of Egypt is in the best times nominal, and who for the most part spurn the very idea of submission to authority. If, then, the true Egypt be the tract that we have described — the Nile valley, with the Fayoum and the Delta — the lily stalk, the bud, and the blossom — we can well understand how it came to be said of old, that " Egypt was the gift of the river." Not that the lively Greek, who first used the expression, divined exactly the scientific truth of the matter. The fancy of Herodotus saw Africa, originally, doubly severed from Asia by two parallel fjords, one running inland northwards from the Indian Ocean, as the Red Sea does to this day, and the other penetrating inland southwards from the Mediterranean to an equal or greater distance ! The Nile, he said, pouring itself into this latter fjord, had by degrees filled it up, and had then gone on and by further deposits turned into land a large piece of the " sea of the Greeks," as was evident from the projection of the shore of the Delta beyond the general coast-line of Africa eastward and westward ; and, he added, " I am convinced, for my own part, that if the Nile should please to divert his waters from their present bed into the Red Sea, he would fill it up and turn it into dry land in the space of twenty thousand years, or maybe in half that time — for he is a mighty river and a most energetic 6 THE LAND OF EGYPT. one." Here, in this last expression, he is thoroughly right, though the method of the Nile's energy has been other than he supposed. The Nile, working from its immense reservoirs in the equatorial regions, has gradually scooped itself out a deep bed in the sand and rock of the desert, which must have originally extended across the whole of northern Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Having scooped itself out this bed to a depth, in places, of three hundred feet from the desert level, it has then proceeded partially to fill it up with its own deposits. Occupying, when it is at its height, the entire bed, and presenting at that time the appearance of a vast lake, or succession of lakes, it deposes every day a portion of sediment over the whole space which it covers : then, con- tracting gradually, it leaves at the base of the hills, on both sides, or at any rate on one, a strip of land fresh dressed with mud, which gets wider daily as the waters still recede, until yards grow into furlongs, and furlongs into miles, and at last the shrunk stream is content with a narrow channel a few hundred yards in width, and leaves the rest of its bed to the embraces of sun and air, and, if he so wills, to the industry ol man. The land thus left exposed is Egypt — Egypt is the temporarily uncovered bed of the Nile, which it reclaims and recovers during a portion of each year, when Egypt disappears from view, save where human labour has by mounds and embankments formed artificial islands that raise their heads above the waste of waters, for the most part crowned with build- ings. There is one exception to this broad and sweeping THE NILE. 7 statement. The Fayoum is no part of the natural bed of the Nile, and has not been scooped out by its energy. It is a natural depression in the western desert, separated off from the Nile valley by a range of limestone hills from two hundred to five hundred feet in height, and, apart from the activity of man, would have been arid, treeless, and waterless. Still, it derives from the Nile all its value, all its richness, all its fertility. Human energy at some remote period introduced into the depressed tract through an artificial channel from the Nile, cut in some places through the rock, the life-giving fluid ; and this fluid, bearing the precious Nile sediment, has sufficed to spread fertility over the entire region, and to make the desert blossom like a garden. The Egyptians were not unaware of the source of their blessings. From a remote date they speculated on their mysterious river. They deified it under the name of Hapi, " the Hidden," they declared that "his abode was not known ; " that he was an inscrutable god, that none could tell his origin : they acknow- ledged him as the giver of all good things, and espe- cially of the fruits of the earth. They said — " Hail to thee, O Nile ! Thou showest thyself in this land, Coming in peace, giving life to Egypt ; O Amnion, thou leadest night unto day, A leading that rejoices the heart ! Overflowing the gardens created by Ra ; Giving life to all animals ; Watering the land without ceasing : The way of heaven descending : Lover of food, bestower of corn, Giving life to every home, O Phthah ! . . . 8 THE LAND OF EGYPT. O inundation of Nile, offerings are made to thee : Oxen are slain to thee ; Great festivals are kept for thee ; Fowls are sacrificed to thee ; Beasts of the field are caught for thee ; Pure flames are offered to thee ; Offerings are made to every god, As they are made unto Nile. Incense ascends unto heaven, Oxen, bulls, fowls are burnt ! Nile makes for himself chasms in the Thebaid : Unknown is his name in heaven, He doth not manifest his forms ! Vain are all representations ! Mortals extol him, and the cycle of gods ! Awe is felt by the terrible ones ; His son is made Lord of all, To enlighten all Egypt. Shine forth, shine forth, O Nile ! shine forth ! Giving life to men by his omen : Giving life to his oxen by the pastures ! Shine forth in glory, O Nile ! " * Though thus useful, beneficent, and indeed essential to the existence of Egypt, the Nile can scarcely be said to add much to the variety of the landscape or to the beauty of the scenery. It is something, no doubt, to have the sight of water in a land where the sun beats down all day long with unremitting force till the earth is like a furnace of iron beneath a sky of molten brass. But the Nile is never clear. During the inundation it is deeply stained with the red argillaceous soil brought down from the Abyssinian highlands. At other seasons it is always more or less tinged with the vegetable matter which it absorbs on its passage from Lake Victoria to Khartoum ; and this vegetable 1 Translation by F. C. Cook. SMALL SIZE OF EGYPT. g matter, combined with its depth and volume, gives it a dull deep hue, which prevents it from having the attractiveness of purer and more translucent streams. The Greek name, Neilos, and the Hebrew, Sichor, are thought to embody this attribute of the mighty river, and to mean " dark blue " or " blue-black," terms sufficiently expressive of the stream's ordinary colour. Moreover, the Nile is too wide to be picturesque. It is seldom less than a mile broad from the point where it enters Egypt, and running generally between flat shores it scarcely reflects anything, unless it be the grey-blue sky overhead, or the sails of a passing pleasure boat. The size of Egypt, within the limits which have been here assigned to it, is about eleven thousand four hundred square miles, or less than that of any European State, except Belgium, Saxony, and Servia. Magnitude is, however, but an insignificant element in the greatness of States — witness Athens, Sparta, Rhodes, Genoa, Florence, Venice. Egypt is the richest and most productive land in the whole world. In its most flourishing age we are told that it con- tained twenty thousand cities. It deserved to be called, more (probably) than even Belgium, " one great town." But its area was undoubtedly small. Still, as little men have often taken the highest rank among warriors, so little States have filled a most important place in the world's history. Palestine was about the size of Wales ; the entire Peloponnese was no larger than New Hampshire ; Attica had nearly the same area as Cornwall. Thus the case of Egypt does not stand by itself, but is merely oneout of many exceptions to what may perhaps be called the general rule. 10 THE LAND OF EGYPT. If stinted for space, Egypt was happy in her soil and in her situation. The rich alluvium, continually growing deeper and deeper, and top-dressed each year by nature's bountiful hand, was of an inexhaust- ible fertility, and bore readily year after year a three- fold harvest — first a grain crop, and then two crops of grasses or esculent vegetables. The wheat sown returned a hundredfold to the husbandman, and was gathered at harvest-time in prodigal abundance — " as the sand of the sea, very much," — till men " left numbering" (Gen. xli. 49). Flax and doora were largely cultivated, and enormous quantities were produced of the most nutritive vegetables, such as lentils, garlic, leeks, onions, endive, radishes, melons, cucumbers, lettuces, and the like, which formed a most important element in the food of the people. The vine was also grown in many places, as along the flanks of the hills between Thebes and Memphis, in the basin of the Fayoum, at Anthylla in the Mareotis at Sebennytus (now Semnood), and at Plisthine, on the shore of the Mediterranean. The date-palm, springing naturally from the soil in clumps, or groves, or planted in avenues, everywhere offered its golden clusters to the wayfarer, dropping its fruit into his lap. Wheat, however, was throughout antiquity the chief product of Egypt, which was reckoned the granary of the world, the refuge and resource of all the neighbouring nations in time of dearth, and on which in the later republican, and in the imperial times, Rome almost wholly depended for her sus- tenance. If the soil was thus all that could be wished, still more ADVANTAGES OF GEOGRAPHIC POSITION. IT advantageous was the situation. Egypt was the only nation of the ancient world which had ready access to two seas, the Northern Sea, or " Sea of the Greeks," and the Eastern Sea, or " Sea of the Arabians and the Indians." Phoenicia might carry her traffic by the painful travel of caravans across fifteen degrees of desert from her cities on the Levantine coast to the inner recess of the Persian Gulf, and thus get a share in the trade of the East at a vast expenditure of time and trouble. Assyria and Babylonia might for a time, when at the height of their dominion, obtain a temporary hold on lands which were not their own, and boast that they stretched from the "sea of the rising" to " that of the setting sun " — from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean ; but Egypt, at all times and under all circumstances, commands by her geographic position an access both to the Mediter- ranean and to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea, whereof nothing can deprive her. Suez must always be hers, for the Isthmus is her natural boundary, and her water-system has been connected with the head of the Arabian Gulf for more than three thousand years ; and, in the absence of any strong State in Arabia or Abyssinia, the entire western coast of the Red Sea falls naturally under her influence with its important roadsteads and harbours. Thus Egypt had two great outlets for her productions, and two great inlets by which she received the productions of other countries. Her ships could issue from the Nilotic ports and trade with Phoenicia, or Carthage, or Italy, or Greece, exchanging her corn and wine and glass and furniture and works in metallurgy for 12 THE LAND OF EGYPT. Etruscan vases, or Grecian statues, or purple Tyrian robes, or tin brought by Carthaginian merchantmen from the Scilly islands and from Cornwall ; or they could start from Heroopolis, or Myos Hormus, or some port further to the southward, and pass by way of the Red Sea to the spice-region of " Araby the Blest," or to the Abyssinian timber-region, or to the shores of Zanzibar and Mozambique, or round Arabia to Teredon on the Persian Gulf, or possibly to Ceylon or India. The products of the distant east, even of " far Cathay," certainly flowed into the land, for they have been dug out of the ancient tombs ; but whether they were obtained by direct or by indirect commerce must be admitted to be doubtful. The possession of the Nile was of extraordinary advantage to Egypt, not merely as the source of fer- tility, but as a means of rapid communication. One of the greatest impediments to progress and civiliza- tion which Nature offers to man in regions which he has not yet subdued to his will, is the difficulty of locomotion and of transport. Mountains, forests, torrents, marshes, jungles, are the curses of " new countries," forming, until they have been cut through, bridged over, or tunnelled under, insurmountable barriers, hindering commerce and causing hatreds through isolation. Egypt had from the first a broad road driven through it from end to end — a road seven hundred miles long, and seldom much less than a mile wide — which allowed of ready and rapid communica- tion between the remotest parts of the kingdom. Rivers, indeed, are of no use as arteries of commerce or vehicles for locomotion until men have invented EGYPT DURING THE INUNDATION. 1 3 ships or boats, or at least rafts, to descend and ascend them ; but the Egyptians were acquainted with the use of boats and rafts from a very remote period, and took to the water like a brood of ducks or a parcel of South Sea Islanders. Thirty-two centuries ago an Egyptian king built a temple on the confines of the Mediterranean entirely of stone which he floated down the Nile for six hundred and fifty miles from the quarries of Assouan (Syene) ; and the passage up the river is for a considerable portion of the year as easy as the passage down. Northerly winds — the famous " Etesian gales " — prevail in Egypt during the whole of the summer and autumn, and by hoisting a sail it is almost always possible to ascend the stream at a good pace. If the sail be dropped, the current will at all times take a vessel down-stream ; and thus boats, and even vessels of a large size, pass up and down the water-way with equal facility. Egypt is at all seasons a strange country, but pre- sents the most astonishing appearance at the period of the inundation. At that time not only is the lengthy valley from Assouan to Cairo laid under water, but the Delta itself becomes one vast lake, interspersed with islands, which stud its surface here and there at intervals, and which reminded Herodotus of " the islands of the JEgean." The elevations, which are the work of man, are crowned for the most part with the white walls of towns and villages sparkling in the sunlight, and sometimes glassed in the flood beneath them. The palms and sycamores stand up out of the expanse of waters shortened by some five or six feet of their height. Everywhere, when the 14 THE LAND OF EGYPT. inundation begins, the inhabitants are seen hurrying their cattle to the shelter provided in the villages, and, if the rise of the water is more rapid than usual, numbers rescue their beasts with difficulty, causing them to wade or swim, or even saving them by means of boats. An excessive inundation brings not only animal, but human life into peril, endangering the villages themselves, which may be submerged and swept away if the water rises above a certain height. A deficient inundation, on the other hand, brings no immediate danger, but by limiting production may create a dearth that causes incalculable suffering. Nature's operations are, however, so uniform that these calamities rarely arise. Egypt rejoices, more than almost any other country, in an equable climate, an equable temperature, and an equable productive- ness. The summers, no doubt, are hot, especially in the south, and an occasional sirocco produces intense discomfort while it lasts. But the cool Etesian wind, blowing from the north through nearly all the summer- time, tempers the ardour of the sun's rays even in the hottest season of the year ; and during the remaining months, from October to April, the climate is simply delightful. Egypt has been said to have but two seasons, spring and summer. Spring reigns from October into May — crops spring up, flowers bloom, soft zephyrs fan the cheek, when it is mid-winter in Europe ; by February the fruit-trees are in full blossom ; the crops begin to ripen in March, and are reaped by the end of April ; snow and frost are wholly unknown at any time ; storm, fog, and even rain are rare. A bright, lucid atmosphere rests upon GEOLOGY AND FLORA. 1 5 the entire scene. There is no moisture in the air, no cloud in the sky ; no mist veils the distance. One day follows another, each the counterpart of the preceding; until at length spring retires to make room for summer, and a fiercer light, a hotter sun, a longer day, show that the most enjoyable part of the year is gone by. The geology of Egypt is simple. The entire flat country is alluvial. The hills on either side are, in the north, limestone, in the central region sandstone, and in the south granite and syenite. The granitic forma- tion begins between the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth parallels, but occasional masses of primitive rock are intruded into the secondary regions, and these extend northward as far as lat. 2y°io'. Above the rocks are, in many places, deposits of gravel and sand, the former hard, the latter loose and shifting. A portion of the eastern desert is metalliferous. Gold is found even at the present day in small quantities, and seems anciently to have been more abundant. Copper, iron, and lead have been also met with in modern times, and one iron mine shows signs of having been anciently worked. Emeralds abound in the region about Mount Zabara, and the eastern desert further yields jaspers, carnelians, breccia verde, agates, chalcedonies, and rock-crystal. The flora of the country is not particularly interest- ing. Dom and date palms are the principal trees, the latter having a single tapering stem, the former divid- ing into branches. The sycamore {Ficus sycamorns) is also tolerably common, as are several species of acacia The acacia seyal, which furnishes the gum l6 THE LAND OF EGYPT. arabic of commerce, is " a gnarled and thorny tree, somewhat like a solitary hawthorn in its habit and manner of growth, but much larger." Its height, when full grown, is from fifteen to twenty feet. The persea, a sacred plant among the ancient Egyptians, is a bushy tree or shrub, which attains the height of eighteen or twenty feet under favourable circumstances, and bears a fruit resembling a date, with a subacid flavour. The bark is whitish, the branches gracefully curved, the foliage of an ashy grey, more especially on its under surface. Specially characteristic of Egypt, though not altogether peculiar to it, were the papyrus and the lotus — the Cyperus papyms and NympJicea lotus of botanists. The papyrus was a tall smooth reed, with a large triangular stalk containing a delicate pith, out of which the Egyptians manufactured their paper. The fabric was excellent, as is shown by its continu- ance to the present day, and by the fact that the Greeks and Romans, after long trial, preferred it to parchment. The lotus was a large white water-lily of exquisite beauty. Kings offered it to the gods ; guests wore it at banquets ; architectural forms were modelled upon it ; it was employed in the ornamentation of thrones. Whether its root had the effect on men as- cribed to it by Homer may be doubted ; but no one ever saw it without recognizing it instantly as "a thing of beauty," and therefore as " a joy for ever." Nor can Egypt have afforded in ancient times any very exciting amusement to sportsmen. At the present day gazelles are chased with hawk and hound during the dry season on the broad expanse of the Delta ; but anciently the thick population scared off the DOM AND DATE TALMS. MONOTONY OF EGYPT. ig whole antelope tribe, which was only to be found in the desert region beyond the limits of the alluvium. Nor can Egypt, in the proper sense of the word, have ever been the home of red-deer, roes, or fallow-deer, of lions, bears, 1 hyaenas, lynxes, or rabbits. Animals of these classes may occasionally have appeared in the alluvial plain, but they would only be rare visitants driven by hunger from their true habitat in the Libyan or the Arabian uplands. The crocodile, however, and the hippopotamus were actually hunted by the ancient Egyptians ; and they further indulged their love of sport in the pursuits of fowling and fishing. All kinds of waterfowl are at all seasons abundant in the Nile waters, and especially frequent the pools left by the retiring river — pelicans, geese, ducks, ibises, cranes, storks, herons, dotterels, kingfishers, and sea-swallows. Quails also arrive in great numbers in the month of March, though there are no pheasants, snipe, wood- cocks, nor partridges. Fish are very plentiful in the Nile and the canals derived from it ; but there are not many kinds which afford much sport to the fisherman. Altogether, Egypt is a land of tranquil monotony. The eye commonly travels either over a waste of waters, or over a green plain unbroken by elevations. The hills which inclose the Nile valley have level tops, and sides that are bare of trees, or shrubs, or flowers, or even mosses. The sky is generally cloudless. No fog or mist enwraps the distance in mystery ; no rainstorm sweeps across the scene ; no rainbow spans the empyrean ; no shadows chase each other over the landscape. There is an entire absence of picturesque 20 THE LAND OF EGYPT. scenery. A single broad river, unbroken within the limits of Egypt even by a rapid, two flat strips of green plain at its side, two low lines of straight-topped hills beyond them, and a boundless open space where the river divides itself into half a dozen sluggish branches before reaching the sea, constitute Egypt, which is by nature a southern Holland — " weary, stale, flat and un- profitable." The monotony is relieved, however, in two ways, and by two causes. Nature herself does some- thing to relieve it. Twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, the sky and the landscape are lit up by hues so bright yet so delicate, that the homely features of the prospect are at once transformed as by magic, and wear an aspect of exquisite beauty. At dawn long streaks of rosy light stretch themselves across the eastern sky, the haze above the western horizon blushes a deep red ; a ruddy light diffuses it- self around, and makes walls and towers and minarets and cupolas to glow like fire ; the long shadows thrown by each tree and building are purple or violet. A glamour is over the scene, which seems trans- figured by an enchanter's wand ; but the enchanter is Nature, and the wand she wields is composed of sun- rays. Again, at eve, nearly the same effects are pro- duced as in the morning, only with a heightened effect; "the redness of flames" passes into "the redness of roses " — the wavy cloud that fled in the morning comes into sight once more — comes blushing, yet still comes on — comes burning with blushes, and clings to the Sun-god's side. 1 Night brings a fresh transfiguration. The olive 1 Adapted from Mr. Kinglake's "Eothen," p. iSS. MONOTONY BROKEN BY ARCHITECTURE. 21 after-glow gives place to a deep blue-grey. The yellow moon rises into the vast expanse. A softened light diffuses itself over earth and sky. The orb of night walks in brightness through a firmament of sapphire ; or, if the moon is below the horizon, then the purple vault is lit up with many-coloured stars. Silence profound reigns around. A phase of beauty wholly different from that of the day-time smites the sense ; and the monotony of feature is forgiven to the changefulness of expression, and to the experience of a new delight. Man has also done his part to overcome the dulness and sameness that brood over the " land of Mizraim." Where nature is most tame and commonplace, man is tempted to his highest flights of audacity. As in the level Babylonia he aspired to build a tower that should " reach to heaven " (Gen. xi. 4), so in Egypt he strove to startle and surprise by gigantic works, enor- mous undertakings, enterprises that might have seemed wholly beyond his powers. And these have consti- tuted in all ages, except the very earliest, the great attractiveness of Egypt. Men are drawn there, not by the mysteriousness of the Nile, or the mild beauties of orchards and palm-groves, of well-cultivated fields and gardens — no, nor by the loveliness of sunrises and sunsets, of moonlit skies and stars shining with many hues, but by the huge masses of the pyramids, by the colossal statues, the tall obelisks, the enormous tem- ples, the deeply-excavated tombs, the mosques, the castles, and the palaces. The architecture of Egypt is its great glory. It began early, and it has con- tinued late. But for the great works, strewn thicklv 22 THE LAND OF EGYPT. over the whole valley of the Nile, the land of Egypt would have obtained but a small share of the world's attention ; and it is at least doubtful whether its " story " would ever have been thought necessary to complete " the Story of the Nations." II. THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. Where the Egyptians came from, is a difficult question to answer. Ancient speculators, when they could not derive a people definitely from any other, took refuge in the statement, or the figment, that they were the children of the soil which they had always occupied. Modern theorists may say, if it please them, that they were evolved out of the monkeys that had their primitive abode on that particular portion of the earth's surface. Monkeys, however, are not found everywhere ; and we have no evidence that in Egypt they were ever indigenous, though, as pets, they were very common, the Egyptians delighting in keeping them. Such evidence as we have reveals to us the man as anterior to the monkey in the land of Mizraim Thus we are thrown back on the original question — Where did the man, or race of men, that is found in Egypt at the dawn of history come from ? It is generally answered that they came from Asia ; but this is not much more than a conjecture. The physical type of the Egyptians is different from that of any known Asiatic nation. The Egyptians had no traditions that at all connected them with Asia. Their language, indeed, in historic times was partially 24 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT Semitic, and allied to the Hebrew, the Phoenician, and the Aramaic ; but the relationship was remote, and may be partly accounted for by later intercourse, with- out involving original derivation. The fundamental character of the Egyptian in respect of physical type, language, and tone of thought, is Nigritic. The Egyptians were not negroes, but they bore a resem- blance to the negro which is indisputable. Their type differs from the Caucasian in exactly those respects which when exaggerated produce the negro. They were darker, had thicker lips, lower foreheads, larger heads, more advancing jaws, a flatter foot, and a more attenuated frame. It is quite conceivable that the negro type was produced by a gradual degeneration from that which we find in Egypt. It is even con- ceivable that the Egyptian type was produced by gradual advance and amelioration from that of the negro. Still, whencesoever derived, the Egyptian people, as it existed in the flourishing times of Egyptian history, was beyond all question a mixed race, showing diverse affinities. Whatever the people was originally, it re- ceived into it from time to time various foreign elements, and those in such quantities as seriously to affect its physique — Ethiopians from the south, Libyans from the west, Semites from the north-east, where Africa adjoined on Asia. There are two quite different types of Egyptian form and feature, blending together in the mass of the nation, but strongly de- veloped, and (so to speak) accentuated in individuals. One is that which we see in portraits of Rameses III., and in some of Rameses II.— a moderately high fore- EGYPTIAN PHYSIQUE — TWO TYPES. 25 head, a large, well -formed aquiline nose, a well-shaped mouth with lips not over full, and a delicately rounded chin. The other is comparatively coarse — forehead low, nose depressed and short, lower part of the face prognathous and sensual-looking, chin heavy, jaw large, lips thick and projecting. The two types of face are not, however, accompanied by much differ- ence of frame. The Egyptian is always slight in figure, wanting in muscle, flat in foot, with limbs that are too long, too thin, too lady-like. Something more of muscularity appears, perhaps, in the earlier than in the later forms ; but this is perhaps attributable to a modification of the artistic ideal. As Egypt presents us with two types of physique, so it brings before us two strongly different types of character. On the one hand we see, alike in the pic- tured scenes, in the native literary remains, and in the accounts which foreigners have left us of the people, a grave and dignified race, full of serious and sober thought, given to speculation and reflection, occupied rather with the interests belonging to another world than with those that attach to this present scene of existence, and inclined to indulge in a gentle and dreamy melancholy. The first thought of a king, when he began his reign, was to begin his tomb. The desire of the grandee was similar. It is a trite tale how at feasts a slave carried round to all the guests the repre- sentation of a mummied corpse, and showed it to each in turn, with the solemn words — " Look at this, and so eat and drink ; for be sure that one day such as this thou shalt be." The favourite song of the Egyptians, according to Herodotus, was a dirge. The " Lay of 26 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. Harper," which we subjoin, sounds a key-note that was very familiar, at any rate, to large numbers among the Egyptians. The Great One * has gone to his rest, Ended his task and his race ; Thus men are aye passing away, And youths are aye taking their place. As Ra rises up every morn, And Turn every evening doth set, So women conceive and bring forth, And men without ceasing beget. Each soul in its turn draweth breath — Each man born of woman sees Death. Take thy pleasure to-day, Father ! Holy One ! See, Spices and fragrant oils, Father, we bring to thee. On thy sister's bosom and arms Wreaths of lotus we place ; On thy sister, dear to thy heart, Aye sitting before thy face. Sound the song ; let music be played And let cares behind thee be laid. Take thy pleasure to-day ; Mind thee of joy and delight ! Soon life's pilgrimage ends, And we pass to Silence and Night. Patriarch perfect and pure, Nefer-hotep, blessed one ! Thou Didst finish thy course upon earth, And art with the blessed ones now. Men pass to the Silent Shore, And their place doth know them no more. They are as they never had been, Since the sun went forth upon high ; They sit on the banks of the stream That floweth in stillness by. 1 Nefer-hotep, a deceased king. TWO TYPES OF CHARACTER. 2J Thy soul is among them ; thou Dost drink of the sacred tide, Having the wish of thy heart — At peace ever since thou hast died. Give bread to the man who is poor, And thy name shall be blest evermore. Take thy pleasure to-day, Nefer-hotep, blessed and pure. What availed thee thy other buildings ? Of thy tomb alone thou art sure. On the earth thou hast nought beside, Nought of thee else is remaining ; And when thou wentest below, Thy last sip of life thou wert draining. Even they who have millions to spend, Find that life comes at last to an end. Let all, then, think of the day Of departure without returning— 'Twill then be well to have lived, All sin and injustice spurning. For he who has loved the right, In the hour that none can flee, Enters upon the delight Of a glad eternity. Give freely from out thy store, And thou shalt be blest evermore. On the other hand, there is evidence of a lightsome, joyous, and even frolic spirit as pervading numbers, especially among the lower classes of the Egyptians. " Traverse Egypt," says a writer who knows more of the ancient country than almost any other living person, " examine the scenes sculptured or painted on the walls of the chapels attached to tombs, consult the inscriptions graven on the rocks or traced with ink on the papyrus rolls, and you will be compelled to modify your mistaken notion of the Egyptians 28 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. being a nation of philosophers. I defy you to find anything more gay, more amusing, more freshly simple, than this good-natured Egyptian people, which was fond of life and felt a profound pleasure in its existence. Far from desiring death, they addressed prayers to the gods to preserve them in life, and to give them a happy old age — an old age that should reach, if possible, to the 'perfect term of no years.' They gave themselves up to pleasures of every kind ; they sang, they drank, they danced, they delighted in making excursions into the country, where hunting and fishing were occupations reserved especially for the nobility. In conformity with this inclination towards pleasure, sportive proposals, a pleasantry that was perhaps over-free, witticisms, raillery, and a mocking spirit, were in vogue among the people, and fun was allowed entrance even into the tombs. In the large schools the masters had a difficulty in training the young and keeping down their passion for amusements. When oral exhortation failed of success, the cane was used pretty smartly in its place; for the wise men of the land had a saying that ' a boy's ears grow on his back.' " I Herodotus tells us how gaily the Egyptians kept their festivals, thousands of the common people — men, women, and children together — crowding into the boats, which at such times covered the Nile, the men piping, and the women clapping their hands or striking their castanets, as they passed from town to town along the banks of the stream, stopping at the various landing-places, and challenging the inhabi- ' Brugsch, "Histoire d'Egypte," p. 15. EGYPTIAN DROLLERY. 29 tants to a contest of good-humoured Billingsgate. From the monuments we see how the men sang- at their labours — here as they trod the wine-press or the dough-trough, there as they threshed out the corn by driving the oxen through the golden heaps. In one case the words of a harvest-song have come down to us : " Thresh for yourselves," they sang, " thresh for yourselves, O oxen, thresh for yourselves, for yourselves — Bushels for yourselves, bushels for your masters ! " Their light-hearted drollery sometimes found vent in caricature. The grand sculptures wherewith a king strove to perpetuate the memory of his warlike exploits were travestied by satirists, who reproduced the scenes upon papyrus as combats between cats and rats. The amorous follies of the monarch were held up to derision by sketches of a harem interior, where the kingly wooer was represented by a lion, and his favourites of the softer sex by gazelles. Even in serious scenes depicting the trial of souls in the next world, the sense of humour breaks out, where the bad man, transformed into a pig or a monkey, walks off with a comical air of surprise and dis- comfiture. It does not, however, help us much towards the true knowledge of a people to scan their frames or study their facial angle, or even to contemplate the outer aspect of their daily life. We want to know their thoughts, their innermost feelings, their hopes, their fears — in a word, their belief. Nothing tells the character of a people so much as their religion ; and we are only dealing superficially with the outward 30 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. shows of things until we get down to the root of their being, the conviction, or convictions, held in the recesses of a people's heart. What, then, was the Egyptian religion ? What did they worship ? What did they reverence ? What future did they look forward to ? Enter the huge courts of an Egyptian temple, or temple-palace, and you will see portrayed upon its lofty walls row upon row of deities. Here the king makes his offering to Ammon, Maut, Khons, Neith, Mentu, Shu, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Set, Horus ; there he pours a libation to Phthah, Sekhet, Turn, Pasht, Anuka, Thoth, Anubis ; elsewhere, it may be, he pays his court to Sati, Khem, Isis, Nephthys, Athor, Harmachis, Nausaas, and Nebhept. One monarch erects an altar to Satemi, Turn, Khepra, Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Netpe, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, Horus, and Thoth, mentioning on the same monument Phthah, Num, Sabak, Athor, Pasht, Mentu, Neith, Anubis, Nishem, and Kartak. Another represents himself on a similar object as offering adoration to Ammon, Khem, Phthah-Sokari, Seb, Nut, Thoth, Khons, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Athor, Uat (Buto), Neith, Sekhet, Anata, Nuneb, Nebhept, and Hapi. All these deities are represented by distinct forms, and have distinct attributes. Nor do they at all exhaust the Pantheon. One modern writer enumerates seventy- three divinities, and gives their several names and forms. Another has a list of sixty-three "principal deities," and notes that there were " others which per- sonified the elements, or presided over the operations of nature, the seasons, and events." The Egyptians EGYPTIAN POLYTHEISM. 3 1 themselves speak not unfrequently of " the thousand gods," sometimes further qualifying them, as " the gods male, the gods female, those which belong to the land of Egypt." Practically, there were before the eyes of worshippers some scores, if not some hundreds, of deities, who invited their approach and challenged their affections. Nor was this the whole, or the worst. The Egyp- tian was taught to pay a religious regard to animals. In one place goats, in another sheep, in a third hippo- potami, in a fourth crocodiles, in a fifth vultures, in a sixth frogs, in a seventh shrew-mice, were sacred crea- tures, to be treated with respect and honour, and under no circumstances to be slain, under the penalty of death to the slayer. And besides this local animal- cult, there was a cult which was general. Cows, cats, dogs, ibises, hawks, and cynocephalous apes, were sacred throughout the whole of Egypt, and woe to the man who injured them ! A Roman who accidentally caused the death of a cat was immediately " lynched" by the populace. Inhabitants of neighbouring villages would attack each other with the utmost fury if the native of one had killed or eaten an animal held sacred in the other. In any house where a cat or a dog died, the inmates were expected to mourn for them as for a relation. Both these and the other sacred animals were carefully embalmed after death, and their bodies were interred in sacred repositories. The animal-worship reached its utmost pitch of grossness and absurdity when certain individual brute beasts were declared to be incarnate deities, and treated accordingly. At Memphis, the ordinary 32 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. capital, there was maintained, at any rate from the time of Aahmes I. (about B.C. 1650), a sacred bull, known as Hapi or Apis, which was believed to be an actual incarnation of the god Phthah, and was an object of the highest veneration. The Apis bull dwelt in a temple of his own near the city, had his train of attendant priests, his harem of cows, his meals of the choicest food, his grooms and currycombers who kept his coat clean and beautiful, his chamber- lains who made his bed, his cup-bearers who brought him water, &c, and on fixed days was led in a festive procession through the main streets of the town, so that the inhabitants might see him, and come forth from their dwellings and make obeisance. When he died he was carefully embalmed, and deposited, to- gether with magnificent jewels and statuettes and vases, in a polished granite sarcophagus, cut out of a single block, and weighing between sixty and seventy tons ! The cost of an Apis funeral amounted some- times, as we are told, to as much as ^20,000. To contain the sarcophagi, several long galleries were cut in the solid rock near Memphis, from which arched lateral chambers went off on either side, each con- structed to hold one sarcophagus. The number of Apis bulls buried in the galleries was found to be sixty- four. Nor was this the only incarnate god of which Egypt boasted. Another bull, called Mnevis, was maintained in the great temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, and, being regarded as an incarnation of Ra or Turn, was as much reverenced by the Heliopolites as Apis by the Memphites. A third, called Bacis or Pacis, was THE KING RECKONED A GOD. 33 kept at Hermonthis, which was also an incarnation of Ra. And a white cow at Momemphis was reckoned an incarnation of Athor. Who can wonder that foreign nations ridiculed a religion of this kind — one that " turned the glory " of the Eternal Godhead " into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay " ? The Egyptians had also a further god incarnate, who was not shut up out of sight like the Apis and Mnevis and Bacis bulls and the Athor cow, but was continu- ally before their eyes, the centre of the nation's life, the prime object of attention. This was the monarch, who for the time being occupied the throne. Each king of Egypt claimed not only to be " son of the Sun," but to be an actual incarnation of the sun — " the living Horus." And this claim was> from an early date, received and allowed. " Thy Majesty," says a courtier under the twelfth dynasty, "is the good God . . . the great God, the equal of the Sun- God. ... I live from the breath which thou givest." Brought into the king's presence, the courtier " falls on his belly," amazed and confounded. " I was as one brought out of the dark ; my tongue was dumb ; my lips failed me ; my heart was no longer in my body to know whether I was alive or dead ; " and this, although " the god " had " addressed him mildly." Another courtier attributes his long life to the king's favour. Ambassadors, when presented to the king, K raised their arms in adoration of the good god," and declared to him — " Thou art like the Sun in all that thou doest : thy heart realizes all its wishes ; shouldest thou wish to make it day during the night, it is so forthwith. ... If thou sayest to the water, ' Come 4 34 TlIE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. from the rock,' it will come in a torrent suddenly at the words of thy mouth. The god Ra is like thee in his limbs, the god Khepra in creative force. Truly thou art the living image of thy father, Turn. . . . All thy words are accomplished daily." Some of the kings set up their statues in the temples by the side of the greatest of the national deities, to be the objects of a similar worship. Amid this wealth of gods, earthly and heavenly, human, animal, and divine, an Egyptian might well feel puzzled to make a choice. In his hesitation he was apt to turn to that only portion of his religion which had the attraction that myth possesses — the introduction into a supramundane and superhuman world of a quasi-human element. The chief Egyptian myth was the Osirid saga, which ran somewhat as follows: "Once upon a time the gods were tired of ruling in the upper sphere, and resolved to take it in turns to reign over Egypt in the likeness of men. So, after four of them had in succession been kings, each for a long term of years, it happened that Osiris, the son of Seb and Nut, took the throne, and became monarch of the two regions, the Upper and the Lower. Osiris was of a good and bountiful nature, beneficent in will and words : he set himself to civilize the Egyptians, taught them to till the fields and cultivate the vine, gave them law and religion, and instructed them in various useful arts. Unfortunately, he had a wicked brother, called Set or Sutekh, who hated him for his goodness, and resolved to compass his death. This he effected after a while, and, having placed the body in a coffin, he threw it into the Nile, whence it floated down to LEGEND OF OSIRIS. 35 the sea. Isis, the sister and widow of Osiris, together with her sister Nephthys, vainly sought for a long time her lord's remains, but at last found them on the Syrian shore at Byblus, where they had been cast up by the waves. She was conveying the corpse for embalmment and interment to Memphis, when Set stole it from her, and cut it up into fourteen pieces, which he concealed in various places. The unhappy queen set forth in a light boat made of the papyrus plant, and searched Egypt from end to end, until she had found all the fragments, and buried them with due honours. She then called on her son, Horus, to avenge his father, and Horus engaged him in a long war, wherein he was at last victorious and took Set prisoner. Isis now relented, and released Set, who be it remembered, was her brother ; which so enraged Horus that he tore off her crown, or (according to some) struck off her head, which injury Thoth re- paired by giving her a cow's head in place of her own. Horus then renewed the war with his uncle, and finally slew him with a long spear, which he drove into his head." The gods and goddesses of the Osirid legend, Seb, Nut or Netpe, Osiris, Isis, Neph- thys, Set, and Horus or Harmachis, were those which most drew towards them the thoughts of the Egyp- tians, the greater number being favourite objects of worship, while Set was held in general detestation. It was a peculiar feature of the Egyptian religion, that it contained distinctively evil and malignant gods. Set was not, originally, such a deity ; but he became such in course of time, and was to the later Egyptians the very principle of evil — Evil personified. 3 6 THE PEOPLE OE EGYPT. Another evil deity was Taour or Taourt, who is represented as a hippopotamus standing on its hind- legs, with the skin and tail of a crocodile dependent down its back, and a knife or a pair of shears in one hand. Bes seems also to have been a divinity of the same class. He was represented as a hideous dwarf, with large outstanding ears, bald, or with a plume of feathers on his head, and with a lion-skin down his back, often carrying in his two hands two knives. FIGURES OF TAOURT. Even more terrible than Bes was Apep, the great serpent, with its huge and many folds, who helped Set against Osiris, and was the adversary and accuser of souls. Savak, a god with the head of a crocodile, seems also to have belonged to the class of malignant beings, though he was a favourite deity with some of the Ramcssidc kings, and a special object of worship in the Fayoum. The complex polytheism of the monuments and EVIL DEITIES — TAOURT, BES. 37 the literature was not, however, the practical religion of many Egyptians. Local cults held possession of most of the nomes, and the ordinary Egyptian, instead of dissipating his religious affections by distributing them among the thousand divinities of the Pantheon, concentrated them on those of his nome. If he was a Memphite, he worshipped Phthah Sekhet, and Turn ; if a Theban, Ammon-Ra, Maut, FIGURE OF BES. Khons, and Neith ; if a Heliopolite, Turn, Nebhebt, and Horus ; if a Elephantinite, Kneph, Sati, Anuka, and Hak ; and so on. The Egyptian Pantheon was a gradual accretion, the result of amalgamating the various local cults ; but these continued predominant in their several localities ; and practically the only deities that obtained anything like a general recog- 38 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. nition were Osiris, Isis, Horus, and the Nile-god; Hapi. Besides the common popular religion, the belief of the masses, there was another which prevailed among the priests and among the educated. The primary doctrine of this esoteric religion was the real essential unity of the Divine Nature. The sacred texts, known only to the priests and to the initiated, taught that there was a single Being, " the sole producer of all things both in heaven and earth, himself not pro- duced of any," " the only true living God, self-origi- nated," " who exists from the beginning," " who has made all things, but has not himself been made." This Being seems never to have been represented by any material, even symbolical, form. It is thought that he had no name, or, if he had, that it must have been unlawful to pronounce or write it. He was a pure spirit, perfect in every respect — all-wise, almighty, supremely good. It is of him that the Egyptian poets use such expressions as the following : " He is not graven in marble ; he is not beheld ; his abode is not known ; no shrine is found with painted figures of him ; there is no building that can contain him ; " and, again : " Unknown is his name in heaven ; he doth not manifest his forms ; vain are all representa- tions ;" and yet again : " His commencement is from the beginning ; he is the God who has existed from old time ; there is no God without him ; no mother bore him ; no father hath begotten him ; he is a god- goddess, created from himself ; all gods came into existence when he began." The other gods, the gods of the popular mythology, ESOTERIC RELIGION. 39 were understood in the esoteric religion to be either personified attributes of the Deity, or parts of the nature which he had created, considered as informed and inspired by him. Num or Kneph represented the creative mind, Phthah the creative hand, or act of creating ; Maut represented matter, Ra the sun, Khons the moon, Scb the earth, Khem the generative power in nature, Nut the upper hemisphere of the heavens, Athor the lower world or under hemisphere ; Thoth personified the Divine Wisdom, Ammon per- haps the Divine mysteriousness or incomprehensibility, Osiris the Divine Goodness. It is difficult in many cases to fix on the exact quality, act, or part of nature intended ; but the principle admits of no doubt. No educated Egyptian conceived of the popular gods as really separate and distinct beings. All knew that there was but One God, and understood that, when worship was offered to Khem, or Kneph, or Maut, or Thoth, or Ammon, the One God was worshipped under some one of his forms or in some one of his aspects. He was every god, and thus all the gods' names were interchangeable, and in one and the same hymn we may find a god, say Ammon, addressed also as Ra and Khem and Turn and Horus and Khepra ; or Hapi, the Nile-god, invoked as Ammon and Phthah ; or Osiris as Ra and Thoth ; or, in fact, any god invoked as almost any other. If there be a limit, it is in respect of the evil deities, whose names are not given to the good ones. Common to all Egyptians seems to have been a belief, if not, strictly speaking, in the immortality of the soul, yet, at any rate, in a life after death, and a 40 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. judgment of every man according to the deeds which he had done in the body while upon earth. It was universally received, that, immediately after death, the soul descended into the Lower World, and was conducted to the " Hall of Truth," where it was judged in the presence of Osiris and of the forty-two assessors, the " Lords of Truth " and judges of the dead. Anubis, " the director of the weight," brought forth a pair of scales, and, placing in one scale a figure or emblem of Truth, set in the other a vase containing the good actions of the deceased ; Thoth standing by the while, with a tablet in his hand, whereon to record the result. According to the side on which the balance inclined, Osiris, the presi- dent, delivered sentence. If the good deeds prepon- derated, the blessed soul was allowed to enter the " boat of the Sun," and was led by good spirits to Aahlu (Elysium), to the "pools of peace" and the dwelling-place of Osiris. If, on the contrary, the good deeds were insufficient, if the ordeal was not passed, then the unhappy soul was sentenced, accord- ing to its deserts, to begin a round of transmigrations into the bodies of more or less unclean animals, the number, nature, and duration of the transmigrations depending on the degree of the deceased's demerits, and the consequent length and severity of the punish- ment which he deserved or the purification which he needed. Ultimately, if after many trials purity was not attained, then the wicked and incurable soul underwent a final sentence at the hands of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, and being condemned to annihila- tion, was destroyed upon the steps of heaven by Shu, EGYPTIAN MORALITY. 41 the Lord of Light. The good soul, having first been completely cleansed of its impurities by passing through the basin of purgatorial fire guarded by the four ape-faced genii, was made the companion of Osiris for a period of three thousand years ; after which it returned from Amenti, re-entered its former body, and lived once more a human life upon the earth. The process was repeated till a mystic number of years had gone by, when, finally, the blessed attained the crowning joy of union with God, being absorbed into the Divine Essence, from which they had ema- nated, and thus attaining the true end and full perfection of their being. Such a belief as this, if earnest and thorough, should be productive of a high standard of moral action ; and undoubtedly the Egyptians had a code of morality that will compare favourably with that of most ancient nations. It has been said to have contained " three cardinal requirements — love of God, love of virtue, and love of man." The hymns suffi- ciently indicate the first ; the second may be allowed, if by " virtue " we understand justice and truth ; the third is testified by the constant claim of men, in their epitaphs, to have been benefactors of their species. " I was not an idler," says one ; " I was no listener to the counsels of sloth ; my name was not heard in the place of reproof ... all men respected me; I gave water to the thirsty ; I set the wanderer on his path ; I took away the oppressor, and put a stop to violence." " I myself was just and true," writes another : "without malice, having put God in my heart, and being quick to discern His will. I have done good upon earth ; 42 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. I have harboured no prejudice ; I have not been wicked ; I have not approved of any offence or iniquity ; I have taken pleasure in speaking the truth. . . . Pure is my soul ; while living I bore no malice. There are no errors attributable to me ; no sins of mine are before the judges. . . . The men of the future, while they live, will be charmed by my re- markable merits." And another: " I have not oppressed any widow ; no prisoner languished in my days ; no one died of hunger. When there were years of famine, I had my fields ploughed. I gave food to the in- habitants, so that there was no hungry person. I gave the widow an equal portion with the married ; I did not prefer the rich to the poor." The moral standard thus set up, though satisfactory, so far as it went, was in many respects deficient. It did not comprise humility ; it scarcely seems to have comprised purity. The religious sculptures of the Egyptians were grossly indecent ; their religious fes- tivals were kept in an indecent way ; phallic orgies were a part of them, and phallic orgies of a gross kind. The Egyptians tolerated incest, and could de- fend it by the example of the gods. Osiris had married his sister ; Khem was " the Bull of his mother." The Egyptian novelettes are full of indecency and immorality, and Egyptian travellers describe their amours very much in the spirit of Ferdinand, Count Fathom ; moreover, the complacency with which each Egyptian declares himself on his tomb to have possessed every virtue, and to have been free from all vices, is most remarkable. " I was a good man before the king ; I saved the population in the dire DIVISIONS OF SOCIETY. 43 calamity which befell all the land ; I shielded the weak against the strong ; I did all good things when the time came to do them ; I was pious towards my father, and did the will of my mother ; I was kind- hearted towards my brethren ... I made a good sarcophagus for him who had no coffin. When the dire calamity befell the land, I made the children to live, I established the houses, I did for them all such good things as a father does for his sons." And, notwithstanding all this braggadocio, per- formance seems to have lagged sadly behind profession. Kings boast of slaying their unresisting prisoners with their own hand, and represent themselves in the act of doing so. They come back from battle with the gory heads of their slain enemies hanging from their chariots. Licentiousness prevailed in the palace, and members of the royal harem intrigued with those who sought the life of the king. A belief in magic was general, and men endeavoured to destroy or injure those whom they hated by wasting their waxen effigies at a slow fire to the accompaniment of incantations. Thieves were numerous, and did not scruple even to violate the sanctity of the tomb in order to obtain a satisfactory booty. A famous " thieves' society," formed for the purpose of opening and plundering the royal tombs, contained among its members persons of the sacerdotal order. Social ranks in Egypt were divided somewhat sharply. There was a large class of nobles, who were mostly great landed proprietors living on their estates, and having under them a vast body of dependents, servants, labourers, artizans, &c. There was also a 44 THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT. numerous official class, partly employed at the court, partly holding government posts throughout the country, which regarded itself as highly dignified, and looked down de haut en bas on " the people." Commands in the army seem to have been among the prizes which from time to time fell to the lot of such persons. Further, there was a literary class, which was eminently respectable, and which viewed with contempt those who were engaged in trade or handicrafts. Below these three classes, and removed from them by a long interval, was the mass of the population — "the multitude " as the Egyptians called them. These persons were engaged in manual labour of different kinds. The greater number were employed on the farms of the nobles, in the cultivation of the soil or in the rearing of cattle. A portion were boatmen, fishermen, or fowlers. Others pursued the various known handicrafts. They were weavers, workers in metal, stone-cutters, masons, potters, carpenters, up- holsterers, tailors, shoe-makers, glass-blowers, boat- builders, wig-makers, and embalmers. There were also among them painters and sculptors. But all these employments " stank " in the nostrils of the upper classes, and were regarded as unworthy of any one who wished to be thought respectable. Still, the line of demarcation, decided as it was, might be crossed. It is an entire mistake to suppose that caste existed in Egypt. Men frequently bred up their sons to their own trade or profession, as they do in all countries, but they were not obliged to do so — there was absolutely no compulsion in the matter. CONDITION OF THE LOWER ORDERS. 45 The " public-schools " of Egypt were open to all comers, and the son of the artizan sat on the same bench with the son of the noble, enjoyed the same education, and had an equal opportunity of dis- tinguishing himself. If he showed sufficient promise, he was recommended to adopt the literary life ; and the literary life was the sure passport to State employ- ment. State employment once entered upon, merit secured advancement ; and thus there was, in fact, no obstacle to prevent the son of a labouring man from rising to the very highest positions in the administra- tion of the empire. Successful ministers were usually rewarded by large grants of land from the royal domain ; and it follows that a clever youth of the labouring class might by good conduct and ability make his way even into the ranks of the landed aristocracy. On the other hand, practically, the condition of the labouring class was, generally speaking, a hard and sad one. The kings were entitled to employ as many of their subjects as they pleased in forced labours, and monarchs often sacrificed to their inordinate vanity the lives and happiness of thousands. Private employers of labour were frequently cruel and exacting ; their overseers used the stick, and it was not easy for those who suffered to obtain any redress. Moreover, taxation was heavy, and inability to satisfy the collector sub- jected the defaulter to the bastinado. Those who have studied the antiquities of Egypt with most care, tell us that there was not much to choose between the condition of the ancient labourers and that of the unhappy fellaldn l of the present day. 1 A fellah is a peasant, one of the labouring class, just above the slave. III. THE DAWN OF HISTORY. ALL nations, unless they be colonies, have a pre- historic time — a dark period of mist and gloom, before the keen light of history dawns upon them. This period is the favourite playground of the myth- spirits, where they disport themselves freely, or lounge heavily and listlessly, according to their different natures. The Egyptian spirits were of the heavier and duller kind — not light and frolicsome, like the Greek and the Indo-Iranian. It has been said that Egypt never produced more than one myth, the Osirid legend ; and this is so far true that in no other case is the story told at any considerable length, or with any considerable number of exciting incidents. There are, however, many short legends in the Egyptian remains, which have more or less of interest, and show that the people was not altogether devoid of imagination, though their imagination was far from lively. Seb, for instance, once upon a time, took the form of a goose, and laid the mundane egg, and hatched it. Thoth once wrote a wonderful book, full of wisdom and science, which told of everything con- cerning the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea, and the four-footed beasts of the earth. He who knew EGYPTIAN MYTHS. 47 a single page of the book could charm the heaven, the earth, the great abyss, the mountains, and the seas. Thoth took the work and enclosed it in a box of gold, and the box of gold he placed within a box of silver, and the silver box within a box of ivory and ebony, and that again within a box of bronze ; and the bronze box he enclosed within a box of brass, and the brass box within a box of iron ; and the box, thus guarded, he threw into the Nile at Coptos. But a priest discovered the whereabouts of the book, and sold the knowledge to a young noble for a hundred pieces of silver, and the young noble with great trouble fished the book up. But the possession of the book brought him not good but evil. He lost his wife ; he lost his child ; he became entangled in a disgraceful intrigue. He was glad to part with the book. But the next possessor was not more fortunate ; the book brought him no luck. The quest after unlawful knowledge involved all who sought it in calamity. Another myth had for its subject the proposed destruction of mankind by Ra, the Sun-god. Ra had succeeded Phthah as king of Egypt, and had reigned for a long term of years in peace, contented with his subjects and they with him. But a time came when they grew headstrong and unruly ; they uttered words against Ra ; they plotted evil things ; they grievously offended him. So Ra called the council of the gods together and asked them to advise him what he should do. They said mankind must be destroyed, and committed the task of destruction to Athor and Sekhet, who proceeded to smite the men over the whole land. But now fear came upon 48 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. mankind ; and the men of Elephantine made haste, and extracted the juice from the best of their fruits, and mingled it with human blood, and filled seven thousand jars, and brought them as an offering to the offended god. Ra drank and was content, and ordered the liquor that remained in the jars to be poured out ; and, lo ! it was an inundation which covered the whole land of Egypt ; and when Athor went forth the next day to destroy, she saw no men in the fields, but only water, which she drank, and it pleased her, and she went away satisfied. It would require another Euhemerus to find any groundwork of history in these narratives. We must turn away from the "shadow-land "which the Egyptians called the time of the gods on earth, if we would find trace of the real doings of men in the Nile valley, and put before our readers actual human beings in the place of airy phantoms. The Egyptians them- selves taught that the first man of whom they had any record was a king called M'na, a name which the Greeks represented by Men or Menes. M'na was born at Tena (This or Thinis) in Upper Egypt, where his ancestors had borne sway before him. He was the first to master the Lower country, and thus to unite under a single sceptre the " two Egypts " — the long narrow Nile valley and the broad Delta plain. Having placed on his head the double crown which thenceforth symbolized dominion over both tracts, his first thought was that a new capital was needed. Egypt could not, he felt, be ruled conve- niently from the latitude of Thebes, or from any site in the Upper country ; it required a capital which SUPPOSED FIRST KING. 49 should abut on both regions, and so command both. Nature pointed out one only fit locality, the junction of the plain with the vale — " the balance of the two regions," as the Egyptians called it ; the place where the narrow " Upper Country " terminates, and Egypt opens out into the wide smiling plain that thence spreads itself on every side to the sea. Hence there would be easy access to both regions ; both would be, in a way, commanded ; here, too, was a readily defensible position, one assailable only in front. Ex- perience has shown that the instinct of the first founder was right, or that his political and strategic foresight was extraordinary. Though circumstances, once and again, transferred the seat of government to Thebes or Alexandria, yet such removals were short- lived. The force of geographic fact was too strong to be permanently overcome, and after a few centuries power gravitated back to the centre pointed out by nature. If we may believe the tradition, there was, when the idea of building the new capital arose, a difficulty in obtaining a site in all respects advantageous. The Nile, before debouching upon the plain, hugged for many miles the base of the Libyan hills, and was thus on the wrong side of the valley. It was wanted on the other side, in order to be a water-bulwark against an Asiatic invader. The founder, therefore, before building his city, undertook a gigantic work. He raised a great embankment across the natural course of the river ; and, forcing it from its bed, made it enter a new channel and run midway down the valley, or, if anything, rather towards its eastern side. He 5 50 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. thus obtained the bulwark against invasion that he required, and he had an ample site for his capital between the new channel of the stream and the foot of the western hills. It is undoubtedly strange to hear of such a work being constructed at the very dawn of history, by a population that was just becoming a people. But in Egypt precocity is the rule — a Minerva starts full- grown from the head of Jove. The pyramids them- selves cannot be placed very long after the supposed reign of Menes ; and the engineering skill implied in the pyramids is simply of a piece with that attributed to the founder of Memphis. In ancient times a city was nothing without a temple ; and the capital city of the most religious people in the world could not by any possibility lack that centre of civic life which its chief temple always was to every ancient town. Philosophy must settle the question how it came to pass that religious ideas were in ancient times so universally prevalent and so strongly pronounced. History is only bound to note the fact. Coeval, then, with the foundation of the city of Menes was, according to the tradition, the erection of a great temple to Phthah — " the Revealer," the Divine artificer, by whom the world and man were created, and the hidden thought of the remote Supreme Being was made manifest to His creatures, Phthah's temple lay within the town, and was ori- ginally a naos or " cell," a single building probably not unlike that between the Sphinx's paws at Ghizeh, situated within a temenos, or " sacred enclosure," watered from the river, and no doubt planted with MEMPHIS AND ITS TEMPLE. 5 1 trees. Like the medieval cathedrals, the building grew with the lapse of centuries, great kings continu- ally adding new structures to the main edifice, and enriching it with statuary and painting. Herodotus saw it in its full glory, and calls it " a vast edifice, very worthy of commemoration." Abd-el-Latif saw it in its decline, and notes the beauty of its remains : " the great monolithic shrine of breccia verde, nine cubits high, eight long, and seven broad, the doors which swung on hinges of stone, the well-carven statues, and the lions terrific in their aspect." x At the present day scarcely a trace remains. One broken colossus of the Great Ramesses, till very recently prostrate, and a few nondescript fragments, alone continue on the spot, to attest to moderns the position of that antique fane, which the Egyptians themselves regarded as the oldest in their land. The new city received from its founder the name of Men-nefer — " the Good Abode." It was also known as Ei-Ptah — " the House of Phthah." From the former name came the prevailing appellations — the " Memphis " of the Greeks and Romans, the " Moph " of the Hebrews, the " Mimpi " of the Assy- rians, and the name still given to the ruins, " Tel- Monf." It was indeed a "good abode" — watered by an unfailing stream, navigable from the sea, which at once brought it supplies and afforded it a strong pro- tection, surrounded on three sides by the richest and most productive alluvium, close to quarries of excel- lent stone, warm in winter, fanned by the cool northern breezes in the summer-time, within easy reach of the 1 R. Stuart Poolei " Cities of Egypt," pp. 24, 25. j2 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. sea, yet not so near as to attract the cupidity of pirates. Few capitals have been more favourably placed. It was inevitable that when the old town went to ruins, a new one should spring up in its stead. Memphis still exists, in a certain sense, in the glories of the modern Cairo, which occupies an ad- jacent site, and is composed largely of the same materials. The Egyptians knew no more of their first king than that he turned the course of the Nile, founded Memphis, built the nucleus of the great temple of Phthah, and " was devoured by a hippopotamus." This last fact is related with all due gravity by Manetho, notwithstanding that the hippopotamus is a graminivorous animal, one that " eats grass like an ox" (Job xi. 15). Probably the old Egyptian writer whom he followed meant that M'na at last fell a victim to Taourt, the Goddess of Evil, to whom the hippopotamus was sacred, and who was herself figured as a hippopotamus erect. This would be merely equivalent to relating that he succumbed to death. Manetho gave him a reign of sixty-two years. The question is asked by the modern critics, who will take nothing on trust, " Have we in Menes a real Egyptian, a being of flesh and blood, one who truly lived, breathed, fought, built, ruled, and at last died ? Or are we still dealing with a phantom, as much as when we spoke of Seb, and Thoth, and Osiris, and Set, and Horus ? " The answer seems to be, that we can- not tell. The Egyptians believed in Menes as a man ; they placed him at the head of their dynastic lists ; but they had no contemporary monument to show M*NA AND HIS SUCCESSORS. 53 inscribed with his name. A name like that of Menes is found at the beginning of things in so many nations, that on that account alone the word would be suspicious ; in Greece it is Minos, in Phrygia Manis, in Lydia Manes, in India Menu, in Germany Mannus. And again, the name of the founder is so like that of the city which he founded, that another suspicion arises — Have we not here one of the many instances of a personal name made out of a local one, as Nin or Ninus from Nineveh (Ninua), Romulus from Roma, and the like ? Probably we shall do best to acquiesce in the judgment of Dr. Birch : "Menes must be placed among those founders of monarchies whose personal existence a severe and enlightened criticism doubts or denies." The city was, however, a reality, the embankment was a reality, the temple of Phthah was a reality, and the founding of a kingdom in Egypt, which included both the Upper and the Lower country some con- siderable time before the date of Abraham, was a reality, which the sternest criticism need not — nay, cannot — doubt. All antiquity attests that the valley of the Nile was one of the first seats of civilization. Abraham found a settled government established there when he visited the country, and a consecutive series of monuments carries the date of the first civilization at least as far back as B.C. 2700 — probably further. If the great Menes, then, notwithstanding all that we are told of his doings, be a mere shadowy person- age, little more than magni nominis timbra, what shall we say of his twenty or thirty successors of the 54 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. first, second, and third dynasties? What but that they are shadows of shadows ? The native monuments of the early Ramesside period (about B.C. 1400-1300) assign to this time some twenty-five names of kings ; but they do not agree in their order, nor do they altogether agree in the names. The kings, if they were kings, have left no history — we can only by conjecture attach to them any particular buildings, we can give no account of their actions, we can assign no chronology to their reigns. They are of no more importance in the " story of Egypt " than the Alban kings in the " story of Rome." " Non ragionam di loro, ma guarda e passi." The first living, breathing, acting, flesh-and-blood personage, whom so-called histories of Egypt present to us, is a certain Sneferu, or Seneferu, whom the Egyptians seem to have regarded as the first monarch of their fourth dynasty. Sneferu — called by Manetho, we know not why, Soris — has left us a representation of himself, and an inscription. On the rocks of Wady Magharah, in the Sinaitic peninsula, may be seen to this day an incised tablet representing the monarch in the act of smiting an enemy, whom he holds by the hair of his head, with a mace. The action is apparently emblematic, for at the side we see the words Ta satic, " Smiter of the nations ; " and it is a fair explanation of the tablet, that its intention was to signify that the Pharaoh in question had re- duced to subjection the tribes which in his time in- habited the Sinaitic regions. The motive of the attack was not mere lust of conquest, but rather the desire of gain. The Wady Magharah contained SNEFERU) THE FIRST CERTAIN KING. 55 mines of copper and of turquoise, which the Egyptians desired to work ; and for this purpose it was necessary to hold the country by a set of military posts, in order that the miners might pursue their labours without molestation. Some ruins of the fortifications are still to be seen ; and the mines themselves, now exhausted, pierce the sides of the rocks, and bear in TABLET AT SNEFERU AT WADY-MAGIIARAII. many places traces of hieroglyphical inscriptions The remains of temples show that the expatriated colonists were not left without the consolations of religion, while a deep well indicates the care that was taken to supply their temporal needs. Thousands of stone arrow-heads give evidence of the presence of a strong garrison, and make us acquainted with the 56 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. weapon which they found most effectual against their enemies. Sneferu calls himself Neter aa, " the Great God," and Neb mat : "the Lord of Justice." He is also " the Golden Horus," or " the Conqueror." Neb mat is not a usual title with Egyptian monarchs ; and its as- sumption by Sneferu would seem to mark, at any rate, his appreciation of the excellence of justice, and his desire to have the reputation of a just ruler. Later ages give him the title of " the beneficent king," so that he would seem to have been a really unselfish and kindly sovereign. His form, however, only just emerges from the mists of the period to be again concealed from our view, and we vainly ask ourselves what exactly were the benefits that he conferred on Egypt, so as to attain his high reputation. Still, the monuments of his time are sufficient to tell us something of the Egypt of his day, and of the amount and character of the civilization so early attained by the Egyptian people. Besides his own tablet in the Wady Magharah, there are in the neighbourhood of the pyramids of Ghizeh a number of tombs which belong to the officials of his court and the members of his family. These tombs contain both sculptures and inscriptions, and throw consider- able light on the condition of the country. In the first place, it is apparent that the style of writing has been invented which is called hiero- glyphical, and which has the appearance of a picture writing, though it is almost as absolutely phonetic as any other. Setting apart a certain small number of " determinatives," each sign stands for a sound — the CIVILIZATION OF SNEFERU'S TIME. 57 greater part for those elementary sounds which we express by letters. An eagle is a, a leg and foot b, a horned serpent/", a hand t, an owl m, a chicken u, and the like. It is true that there are signs which express a compound sound, a whole word, even a word of two syllables. A bowl or basin represents the sound of neb, a hatchet that of neter, a guitar that of nefer, a crescent that of aah, and so on. Secondly, it is clear that artistic power is considerable. The animal forms used in the hieroglyphics — the bee, the vulture, the urseus, the hawk, the chicken, the eagle — are well drawn. In the human forms there is less merit, but still they are fairly well proportioned and have spirit. No rudeness or want of finish attaches either to the writing or to the drawing of Sneferu's time ; the artists do not attempt much, but what they attempt they accomplish. Next, we may notice the character of the tombs. Already the tomb was more important than the house ; and while every habitation constructed for the living men of the time has utterly perished, scores of the dwellings assigned to the departed still exist, many in an excellent condition. They are stone buildings resembling small houses, each with its door of entrance, but with no windows, and forming internally a small chamber generally decorated with sculptures. The walls slope at an angle of seventy- five or eighty degrees externally, but in the interior are perpendicular. The roof is composed of large fiat stones. Strictly speaking, the chambers are not actual tombs, but mortuary chapels. The embalmed body of the deceased, encased in its wooden coffin 58 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. (Gen. 1. 26), was not deposited in the chamber, but in an excavation under one of the walls, which was carefully closed up after the coffin had been placed inside it. The chamber was used by the relations for sacred rites, sacrificial feasts, and the like, held in honour of the deceased, especially on the anniversary of his death and entrance into Amenti. The early Egyptians indulged, like the Chinese, in a worship of ancestors. The members of a family met from time to time in the sepulchral chamber of their father, or their grandfather, and went through various cere- monies, sang hymns, poured libations, and made offerings, which were regarded as pleasing to the departed, and which secured their protection and help to such of their descendants as took part in the pious practices. Sometimes a tomb was more pretentious than those above described. There is an edifice at Meydoum, improperly termed a pyramid, which is thought to be older than Sneferu, and was probably erected by one of the " shadowy kings " who preceded him on the throne. Situated on a natural rocky knoll of some considerable height, it rises in three stages at an angle of 74 10' to an elevation of a hundred and twenty- five feet. It is built of a compact limestone, which must have been brought from some distance. The first stage has a height a little short of seventy feet ; the next exceeds thirty-two feet ; the third is a little over twenty-two feet. It is possible that originally there were more stages, and probable that the present highest stage has in part crumbled away ; so that we may fairly reckon the original height to have been PYRAMID OF MEYDUUM. 59 between a hundred and forty and a hundred .and fifty feet. The monument is generally regarded as a tomb, from its situation in the Memphian necropolis and its remote resemblance to the pyramids ; but as yet it has not been penetrated, and consequently has not been proved to have been sepulchral. A construction, which has even a greater appear- ance of antiquity than the Meydoum tower, exists at PYRAMID OF MEYDOUM. Saccarah. Here the architect carried up a monument to the height of two hundred feet, by constructing it in six or seven sloping stages, having an angle of 73 30'. The core of his building was composed of rubble, but this was protected on every side by a thick casing of limestone roughly hewn, and apparently quarried on the spot. The sepulchral intention of the construction is unquestionable. It covered a spacious chamber excavated in the rock, whereon the monument was 60 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. built, which, when first discovered, contained a sarco- phagus and was lined with slabs of granite. Carefully concealed passages connected the chamber with the outer world, and allowed of its being entered by those in possession of the " secrets of the prison- house." In this structure we have, no doubt, the tomb of a king more ancient than Sneferu — though for our own part we should hesitate to assign the monument to one king rather than another. If we pass from the architecture of the period to its social condition, we remark that grades of society already existed, and were as pronounced as in later times. The kings were already deities, and treated with superstitious regard. The state-officials were a highly privileged class, generally more or less con- nected with the royal family. The land was partly owned by the king (Gen. xlvii. 6), who employed his own labourers and herdsmen upon it ; partly, mainly perhaps, it was in the hands of great landed proprie- tors — nobles, who lived in country houses upon their estates, maintaining large households, and giving em- ployment to scores of peasants, herdsmen, artizans, huntsmen, and fishermen. The "lower orders" were of very little account. They were at the beck and call of the landed aristocracy in the country districts, of the state-officials in the towns. Above all, the monarch had the right of impressing them into his service whenever he pleased, and employing them in the " great works " by which he strove to perpetuate his name. There prevailed, however, a great simplicity of man- ners. The dress of the upper classes was wonderfully THE GREAT PYRAMID OF SACCARAH. Ol plain and unpretending-, presenting little variety and scarcely any ornament. The grandee wore, indeed, an elaborate wig, it being imperative on all men to shave great PYRAMID OJi SACCARAH (Present appearance'). CT?^ mnrJUJ ■' SECTION OF THE SAME, SHOWING ORIGINAL CONSTRUCTION. the head for the sake of cleanliness. But otherwise, his costume was of the simplest and the scantiest. Ordinarily, when he was employed in the common duties of life, a short tunic, probably of white linen. 62 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. reaching from the waist to a little above the knee, was his sole garment. His arms, chest, legs, even his feet, were naked ; for sandals, not to speak of stock- ings or shoes, were unknown. The only decoration which he wore was a chain or riband round the neck, to which was suspended an ornament like a locket — probably an amulet. In his right hand he carried a long staff or wand, either for the purpose of be- labouring his inferiors, or else to use it as a walking- stick. On special occasions he made, however, a more elaborate toilet. Doffing his linen tunic, he clothed himself in a single, somewhat scanty, robe, which reached from the neck to the ankles ; and having exchanged his chain and locket for a broad collar, and adorned his wrists with bracelets, he was ready to pay visits or to receive company. He had no carriage, so far as appears, not even a palanquin ; no horse to ride, nor even a mule or a donkey. The great men of the East rode, in later times, on " white asses " (Judges v. 10) ; the Egyptian of Sneferu's age had to trudge to court, or to make calls upon his friends, by the sole aid of those means of locomotion which nature had given him. Women, who in most civilized countries claim to themselves far more elaboration in dress and variety of ornament than men, were content, in the Egypt of which we are here speaking, with a costume, and a personal decoration, scarcely less simple than that of their husbands. The Egyptian materfamilias of the time wore her hair long, and gathered into three masses, one behind the head, and the other two in front of either shoulder. Like her spouse, she had STATUARY OF SNEFERU'S TIME. 63 but a single garment — a short gown or petticoat reaching from just below the breasts to half way down the calf of the leg, and supported by two broad straps passed over the two shoulders. She exposed her GROUP OF STATUARY, CONSISTING OF A HUSBAND AND WIFE. arms and bosom to sight, and her feet were bare, like her husband's. Her only ornaments were bracelets. There was no seclusion of women at any time among the ancient Egyptians. The figure of the wife 64 THE DAWN OF HISTORY. on the early monuments constantly accompanies that of her husband. She is his associate in all his oc- cupations. Her subordination is indicated by her representation being on an unduly smaller scale, and by her ordinary position, which is behind the figure of her " lord and master." In statuary, however, she appears seated with him on the same seat or chair. There is no appearance of her having been either a drudge or a plaything. She was regarded as man's true " helpmate," shared his thoughts, ruled his family, and during their early years had the charge of his children. Polygamy was unknown in Egypt during the primitive period ; even the kings had then but one wife. Sneferu's wife was a certain Mertitefs, who bore him a son, Nefer-mat, and after his death became the wife of his successor. Women were entombed with as much care, and almost with as much pomp, as men. Their right to ascend the throne is said to have been asserted by one of the kings who pre- ceded Sneferu ; and from time to time women actually exercised in Egypt the royal authority. IV. THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. It is difficult for a European, or an American, who has not visited Egypt, to realize the conception of a Great Pyramid. The pyramidal form has gone en- tirely out of use as an architectural type of monu- mental perfection ; nay, even as an architectural embellishment. It maintained an honourable position in architecture from its first discovery to the time of the Maccabee kings (i Mac. xiii. 28) ; but, never having been adopted by either the Greeks or the Romans, it passed into desuetude in the Old World with the conquest of the East by the West. In the New World it was found existent by the early discoverers, and then held a high place in the regards of the native race which had reached the furthest towards civiliza- tion ; but Spanish bigotiy looked with horror on everything that stood connected with an idolatrous religion, and the pyramids of Mexico were first wantonly injured, and then allowed to fall into such a state of decay, that their original form is by some questioned. A visit to the plains of Teotihuacan will not convey to the mind which is a blank on the subject the true conception of a great pyramid. It requires a pilgrimage to Ghizeh or Saccarah, or a 6 66 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. lively and well-instructed imagination, to enable a man to call up before his mind's eye the true form and appearance and impressiveness of such a structure. Lord Houghton endeavoured to give expression to the feelings of one who sees for the first time these wondrous, these incomprehensible creations in the following lines : After the fantasies of many a night, After the deep desires of many a day, Rejoicing as an ancient Eremite Upon the desert's edge at last I lay : Before me rose, in wonderful array, Those works where man has rivalled Nature most, Those Pyramids, that fear no more decay Than waves inflict upon the rockiest coast, Or winds on mountain-steeps, and like endurance boast. Fragments the deluge of old Time has left Behind in its subsidence — long long walls Of cities of their very names bereft, — Lone columns, remnants of majestic halls, Rich traceried chambers, where the night-dew falls, — All have I seen with feelings due, I trow, Yet not with such as these memorials Of the great unremembered, that can show The mass and shape they wore four thousand years ago. The Egyptian idea of a pyramid was that of a structure on a square base, with four inclining sides, each one of which should be an equilateral triangle, all meeting in a point at the top. The structure might be solid, and in that case might be either of hewn stone throughout, or consist of a mass of rubble merely held together by an external casing of stone ; or it might contain chambers and passages, in which case the employment of rubble was scarcely possible THE THREE PYRAMIDS OF GHIZEH. 67 It has been demonstrated by actual excavation, that all the great pyramids of Egypt were of the latter character — that they were built for the express pur- pose of containing chambers and passages, and of preserving those chambers and passages intact. They required, therefore, to be, and in most cases are, of a good construction throughout. There are from sixty to seventy pyramids in Egypt, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Memphis. Some of them are nearly perfect, some more or less in ruins, but most of them still preserving their ancient shape, when seen from afar. Two of them greatly exceed all the others in their dimensions, and are appropriately designated as " the Great Pyramid " and " the Second Pyramid." A third in their immediate vicinity is of very inferior size, and scarcely deserves the pre-emin- ence which has been conceded to it by the designation of " the Third Pyramid." Still, the three seem, all of them, to deserve descrip- tion, and to challenge a place in " the story of Egypt," which has never yet been told without some account of the marvels of each of them. The smallest of the three was a square of three hundred and fifty-four feet each way, and had a height of two hundred and eighteen feet. It covered an area of two acres, three roods, and twenty-one poles, or about that of an or- dinary London square. The cubic contents amounted to above nine million feet of solid masonry, and are calculated to have weighed 702,460 tons. The height was not very impressive. Two hundred and twenty feet is an altitude attained by the towers of many churches, and the "Pyramid of the Sun" at Teotihua- 68 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. can did not fall much short of it ; but the mass was immense, the masonry was excellent, and the in- genuity shown in the construction was great. Sunk in the rock from which the pyramid rose, was a series of sepulchral chambers. One, the largest, almost directly under the apex of the pyramid, was empty. In another, which had an arched roof, constructed in the most careful and elaborate way, was found the sarcophagus of the king, Men-kau-ra, to whom tradi- tion assigned the building, formed of a single mass of blue-black basalt, exquisitely polished and beautifully carved, externally eight feet long, three feet high, and three feet broad, internally six feet by two. In the sarcophagus was the wooden coffin of the monarch, and on the lid of the coffin was his name. The chambers were connected by two long passages with the open air ; and another passage had, apparently, been used for the same purpose before the pyramid attained its ultimate size. The tomb-chamber, though carved in the rock, had been paved and lined with slabs of solid stone, which were fastened to the native rock by iron cramps. The weight of the sarcophagus which it contained, now unhappily lost, was three tons. The " Second Pyramid," which stands to the north- east of the Third, at the distance of about two hundred and seventy yards, was a square of seven hundred and seven feet each way, and thus covered an area of almost eleven acres and a half, or nearly double that of the greatest building which Rome ever produced — the Coliseum. The sides rose at an angle of 52 10' ; and the perpendicular height was four hundred and fifty-four feet, or fifty feet more than that of the spire SO 100 150 SECTION OF THE THIRD PYRAMID, SHOWING PASSAGES. TOMB-CHAMBER OF THE THIRD PYRAMID. MASS OF THE SECOND PYRAMID. Jl of Salisbury Cathedral. The cubic contents are estimated at 71,670,000 feet; and their weight is cal- culated at 5,309,000 tons. Numbers of this vast amount convey but little idea of the reality to an ordinary reader, and require to be made intelligible by comparisons. Suppose, then, a solidly built stone house, with walls a foot thick, twenty feet of frontage, and thirty feet of depth from front to back ; let the walls be twenty-four feet high and have a foundation of six feet ; throw in party-walls to one-third the extent of the main walls — and the result will be a building containing four thousand cubic feet of masonry. Let there be a town of eighteen thousand such houses, suited to be the abode of a hundred thousand inhabitants — then pull these houses to pieces, and pile them up into a heap to a height exceeding that of the spire of the Cathedral of Vienna, and you will have a rough representation of the " Second Pyramid of Ghizeh." Or lay down the contents of the structure in a line a foot in breadth and depth — the line would be above 13,500 miles long, and would reach more than half-way round the earth at the equator. Again, suppose that a single man can quarry a ton of stone in a week, then it would have required above twenty thousand to be employed constantly for five years in order to obtain the material for the pyramid ; and if the blocks were required to be large, the number employed and the time occupied would have had to be greater. The internal construction of the " Second Pyramid " is less elaborate than that of the Third, but not very different. Two passages lead from the outer air to a 72 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. sepulchral chamber almost exactly under the apex ol the pyramid, and exactly at its base, one of them commencing about fifty feet from the base midway in the north side, and the other commencing a little outside the base, in the pavement at the foot of the pyramid. The first passage was carried through the substance of the pyramid for a distance of a hundred and ten feet at a descending angle of 25 55', after which it became horizontal, and was tunnelled through the native rock on which the pyramid was built. The second passage was wholly in the rock. It began with a descent at an angle of 21 40', which continued for a hundred feet ; it was then horizontal for fifty feet ; after which it ascended gently for ninety-six feet, and joined the first passage about midway between the sepulchral chamber and the outer air. The sepulchral chamber was carved mainly out of the solid rock below the pyramid, but was roofed in by some of the basement stones, which were sloped at an angle. The chamber measured forty-six feet in length and sixteen feet in breadth ; its height in the centre was twenty-two feet. It contained a plain granite sarcophagus, without inscription of any kind, eight feet and a half in length, three feet and a half in breadth, and in depth three feet. There was no coffin in the sarcophagus at the time of its discovery, and no inscription on any part of the pyramid or of its contents. The tradition, however, which ascribed it to the immediate predecessor of Men-kau-ra, may be accepted as sufficient evidence of its author. Come we now to the " Great Pyramid," " which is still," says Lenormant, "at least in respect of its mass, SARCOPHAGUS OF MYCERINUS. ~J& fw SECTION OF THE SECOND PYRAMID. THE GREAT PYRAMID. 75 the most prodigious of all human constructions." The " Great Pyramid," or " First Pyramid of Ghizeh," as it is indifferently termed, is situated almost due north- east of the " Second Pyramid," at the distance of about two hundred yards. The length of each side at the base was originally seven hundred and sixty- four feet, or fifty-seven feet more than that of the sides of the " Second Pyramid." Its original per- pendicular height was something over four hundred and eighty feet, its cubic contents exceeded eighty- nine million feet, and the weight of its mass 6,840,000 tons. In height it thus exceeded Strasburg Cathedral by above six feet, St. Peter's at Rome by above thirty feet, St. Stephen's at Vienna by fifty feet, St. Paul's, London, by a hundred and twenty feet, and the Capitol at Washington by nearly two hundred feet. Its area was thirteen acres, one rood, and twenty-two poles, or nearly two acres more than the area of the " Second Pyramid," which was fourfold that of the " Third Pyramid," which, as we have seen, was that of an ordinary London square. Its cubic contents would build a city of twenty-two thousand such houses as were above described, and laid in a line of cubic squares would reach a distance of nearly seventeen thousand miles, or girdle two-thirds of the earth's cir- cumference at the equator. Herodotus says that its construction required the continuous labour of a hundred thousand men for the space of twenty years, and moderns do not regard the estimate as exaggerated. The " Great Pyramid " presents, moreover, many other marvels besides its size. First, there is the massiveness of the blocks of which it is composed. 7 6 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. The basement stones are in many cases thirty feet long by five feet high, and four or five wide : they must contain from six hundred to seven hundred and fifty cubic feet each, and weigh from forty-six to fifty- seven tons. The granite blocks which roof over the upper sepulchral chamber are nearly nineteen feet long, by two broad and from three to four deep. The relieving stones above the same chamber, and those SFCTIOX OF THE GREAT PYRAMID. of the entrance passage, are almost equally massive. Generally the external blocks are of a size with which modern builders scarcely ever venture to deal, though the massiveness diminishes as the pyramid is as- cended. The bulk of the interior is, however, of comparatively small stones ; but even these are care- fully hewn and squared, so as to fit together compactly. Further, there are the passages, the long gallery, THE GREAT PYRAMID. 77 the ventilation shafts, and the sepulchral chambers all of them remarkable, and some of them simply astonishing. The " Great Pyramid " guards three chambers. One lies deep in the rock, about a hundred and twenty feet beneath the natural surface of the ground, and is placed almost directly below the apex king's chamber and chambers OF construction, GREAT PYRAMID. of the structure. It measures forty-six feet by twenty- seven, and is eleven feet high. The access to it is by a long and narrow passage which commences in the north side of the pyramid, about seventy feet above the original base, and descends for forty yards through the masonry, and then for seventy more in the same 78 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. line through the solid rock, when it changes its direction, becoming horizontal for nine yards, and so entering the chamber itself. The two other chambers are reached by an ascending passage, which branches off from the descending one at the distance of about thirty yards from the entrance, and mounts up through the heart of the pyramid for rather more than forty yards, when it divides into two. A low horizontal gallery, a hundred and ten feet long, leads to a chamber which has been called "the Queen's " — a room about nineteen feet long by seventeen broad, roofed in with sloping blocks, and having a height of twenty feet in the centre. Another longer and much loftier gallery continues on for a hundred and fifty feet in the line of the ascending passage, and is then con- nected by a short horizontal passage with the upper- most or "King's Chamber." Here was found a sarcophagus believed to be that of King Khufu, since the name of Khufu was scrawled in more than one place on the chamber walls. The construction of this chamber — the very kernel of the whole building — is exceedingly remarkable. It is a room of thirty-four feet in length, with a width of seventeen feet, and a height of nineteen, composed wholly of granite blocks of great size, beautifully polished, and fitted together with great care. The construction of the roof is particularly admirable. First, the chamber is covered in with nine huge blocks, each nearly nineteen feet long and four feet wide, which are laid side by side upon the walls so as to form a complete ceiling. Then above these blocks is a low chamber similarly covered in, and this is GALLERY IN THE GREAT PYRAMID. «I repeated four times ; after which there is a fifth opening, triangular, and roofed in by a set of huge sloping blocks, which meet at the apex and support each other. The object is to relieve the chamber from any superincumbent weight, and prevent it from being crushed in by the mass of material above it ; and this object has been so completely attained that still, at the expiration of above forty centuries, the entire chamber, with its elaborate roof, remains intact, without crack or settlement of any kind. Further, from the great chamber are carried two ventilation-shafts, or air - passages, northwards and southwards, which open' on the outer surface of the pyramid, and are respectively two hundred and thirty- three and one hundred and ninety-four feet long, These passages are square, or nearly so, and have a diameter varying between six and nine inches. They give a continual supply of pure air to the chamber, and keep it dry at all seasons. The Great Gallery is also of curious construction. Extending for a distance of one hundred and fifty feet, and rising at an angle of 26° 18', it has a width of five feet at the base and a height of above thirty feet. The side walls are formed of seven layers of stone, each pro- jecting a few inches over that below it. The gallery thus gradually contracts towards the top, which has a width of four feet only, and is covered in with stones that reach across it, and rest on the walls at either side. The exact object of so lofty a gallery has not been ascertained ; but it must have helped to keep the air of the interior pure and sweet, by increasing the space through which it had to circulate. 7 82 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. The " Pyramid Builders," or kings who constructed the three monuments that have now been described, were, according to a unanimous tradition, three con- secutive monarchs, whose native names are read as Khufu, Shafra, and Menkaura. These kings belonged to Manetho's fourth dynasty ; and Khufu, the first of the three, seems to have been the immediate successor of Sneferu. Theorists have delighted to indulge in speculations as to the objects which the builders had in view when they raised such magnificent construc- tions. One holds that the Great Pyramid, at any rate, was built to embody cosmic discoveries, as the exact length of the earth's diameter and circumfe- rence, the length of an arc of the meridian, and the true unit of measure. Another believes the great work of Khufu to have been an observatory, and the ventilating passages to have been designed for " tele- scopes," through which observations were to be made upon the sun and stars ; but it has not yet been shown that there is any valid foundation for these fancies, which have been spun with much art out of the deli- cate fabric of their propounders' brains. The one hard fact which rests upon abundant evidence is this — the pyramids were built for tombs, to contain the mum- mies of deceased Egyptians. The chambers in their interiors, at the time of their discovery, held within them sarcophagi, and in one instance the sarcophagus had within it a coffin. The coffin had an inscription upon it, which showed that it had once contained the body of a king. If anything more is necessary, we may add that every pyramid in Egypt — and there are, as he have said, more than sixty of them — was built PYRAMIDS NOT GRADUAL ACCRETIONS. 83 for the same purpose, and that they all occupy sites in the great necropolis, or burial-ground opposite Memphis, where the inhabitants are known to have laid their dead. The marvel is, how Khufu came suddenly to have so magnificent a thought as that of constructing an edifice double the height of any previously existing, covering five times the area, and containing ten times the mass. Architecture does not generally proceed by " leaps and bounds ; " but here was a case of a sudden extraordinary advance, such as we shall find it difficult to parallel elsewhere. An attempt has been made to solve the mystery by the supposition that all pyramids were gradual accretions, and that their size marks simply the length of a king's reign, each monarch making his sepulchral chamber, with a small pyramid above it, in his first year, and as his reign went on, adding each year an outer coating ; so that the number of these coatings tells the length of his reign, as the age of a tree is known from the number of its annual rings. In this case there would have been nothing ideally great in the conception of Khufu — he would simply have happened to erect the biggest pyramid because he happened to have the longest reign ; but, except in the case of the " Third Pyramid," there is a unity of design in the structures which implies that the architect had conceived the whole structure in his mind from the first. The lengths of the several parts are proportioned one to another. In the " Great Pyramid," the main chamber would not have needed the five relieving chambers above it unless it was known that it would have to be 84 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. pressed down by a superincumbent mass, such as actually lies upon it. Moreover, how is it possible to conceive that in the later years of a decrepid monarch, the whole of an enormous pyramid could be coated over with huge blocks — and the blocks are largest at the external surface — the work requiring to be pushed each year with more vigour, as becoming each year greater and more difficult ? Again, what shall we say of the external finish ? Each pyramid was finally smoothed down to a uniform sloping sur- face. This alone must have been a work of years. Did a pyramid builder leave it to his successor to finish his pyramid ? It is at least doubtful whether any pyramid at all would ever have been finished had he done so. We must hold, therefore, that Khufu did suddenly conceive a design without a parallel — did require his architect to construct him a tomb, which should put to shame all previous monuments, and should with difficulty be surpassed, or even equalled. He must have possessed much elevation of thought, and an intense ambition, together with inordinate selfishness, an overweening pride, and entire callousness to the sufferings of others, before he could have approved the plan which his master-builder set before him. That plan, including the employment of huge blocks of stone, their conveyance to the top of a hill a hun- dred feet high, and their emplacement, in some cases, at a further elevation of above 450 feet, involved, under the circumstances of the time, such an amount of human suffering, that no king who had any regard for the happiness of his subjects could have consented TYRANNY OF THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. 85 to it. Khufu must have forced his subjects to labour for a long term of years — twenty, according to Hero- dotus — at a servile work which was wholly unproduc- tive, and was carried on amid their sighs and groans for no object but his own glorification, and the sup- posed safe custody of his remains. Shafra must have done nearly the same. Hence an evil repute attached to the pyramid builders, whose names were handed down to posterity as those of evil-minded and impious kings, who neglected the service of the gods to gratify their own vanity, and, so long as they could exalt themselves, did not care how much they oppressed their people. There was not even the poor apology for their conduct that their oppression fell on slaves, or foreigners, or prisoners of war. Egypt was not yet a conquering power ; prisoners of war were few, slaves not very common. The labourers whom the pyramid builders employed were their own free sub- jects whom they impressed into the heavy service. It is by a just Nemesis that the kings have in a great measure failed to secure the ends at which they aimed, and in hope of which they steeled their hearts against their subjects' cries. They have indeed handed down their names to a remote age : but it is as tyrants and oppressors. They are world-famous, or rather world-infamous. But that preservation of their cor- poreal frame which they especially sought, is exactly what they have missed attaining. Let not a monument give you or me hopes, Since not a pinch of dust remains of Che6ps, says the doggerel of the satiric Byron ; and it is the 86 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. absolute fact that while thousands of mummies buried in common graves remain untouched even to the present day, the very grandeur of the pyramid builders' tombs attracted attention to them, caused the monuments to be opened, the sarcophagi to be rifled, and the remains inclosed in them to be dis- persed to the four winds of heaven. Still, whatever gloomy associations attach to the pyramids in respect of the sufferings caused by their erection, as monuments they must always challenge a certain amount of admiration. A great authority de- clares : " No one can possibly examine the interior of the Great Pyramid without being struck with astonish- ment at the wonderful mechanical skill displayed in its construction. The immense blocks of granite brought from Syene, a distance of five hundred miles, polished like glass, and so fitted that the joints can scarcely be detected ! Nothing can be more wonderful than the extraordinary amount of knowledge displayed in the construction of the discharging chambers over the roof of the principal apartment, in the alignment of the sloping galleries, in the provision of the ventilating shafts, and in all the wonderful contrivances of the structure. All these, too, are carried out with such precision that, notwithstanding the immense super- incumbent weight, no settlement in any part can be detected to an appreciable fraction of an inch. Nothing more perfect mechanically has ever been erected since that time." l The architectural effect of the two greatest of the pyramids is certainly magnificent. They do not 1 Fergusson, "History of Architecture," vol. i. pp. 91, 92. .*v';: ,, I. 1 IMPRESSIVENESS OF THE PYRAMIDS. 89 greatly impress the beholder at first sight, for a pyra- mid, by the very law of its formation, never looks as large as it is — it slopes away from the eye in every direction, and eludes rather than courts observation. But as the spectator gazes, as he prolongs his exami- nation and inspection, the pyramids gain upon him, their impressiveness increases. By the vastness of their mass, by the impression of solidity and dura- bility which they produce, partly also, perhaps, by the symmetry and harmony of their lines and their perfect simplicity and freedom from ornament, they convey to the beholder a sense of grandeur and majesty, they produce within him a feeling of aston- ishment and awe, such as is scarcely caused by any other of the erections of man. In all ages travellers have felt and expressed the warmest admiration for them. They impressed Herodotus as no works that he had seen elsewhere, except, perhaps, the Baby- lonian. They astonished Germanicus, familiar as he was with the great constructions of Rome. They furnished Napoleon with the telling phrase, " Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you from the top of the pyramids." Greece and Rome reckoned them among the Seven Wonders of the world. Moderns have doubted whether they could really be the work of human hands. If they possess only one of the elements of architectural excellence, they possess that element to so great an extent that in respect of it they are unsurpassed, and probably unsurpassable. These remarks apply especially to the first and second pyramids. The " Third " is not a work of any very extraordinary grandeur. The bulk is not QO THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. greater than that of the chief pyramid of Saccarah, which has never attracted much attention ; and the height did not greatly exceed that of the chief Mexi- can temple-mound. Moreover, the stones of which the pyramid was composed are not excessively mas- sive. The monument aimed at being beautiful rather than grand. It was coated for half its height with blocks of pink granite from Syene, bevelled at the edges, which remain still in place on two sides of the structure. The entrance to it, on the north side, was conspicuous, and seems to have had a metal orna- mentation let into the stone. The sepulchral chamber was beautifully lined and roofed, and the sarcophagus was exquisitively carved. Menkaura, the constructor, was not regarded as a tyrant, or an oppressor, but as a mild and religious monarch, whom the gods ill-used by giving him too short a reign. His religious temper is indicated by the inscription on the coffin which contained his remains: " O Osiris," it reads, "King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Menkaura, living eternally, engendered by the Heaven, born of Nut, substance of Seb, thy mother Nut stretches herself over thee in her name of the abyss of heaven. She renders thee divine by destroying all thy enemies, O King Men- kaura, living eternally." The fashion of burying in pyramids continued to the close of Mahetho's sixth dynasty, but no later monarchs rivalled the great works of Khufu and Shafra. The tombs of their successors were monu- ments of a moderate size, involving no oppression of the people, but perhaps rather improving their condition by causing a rise in the rate of wages. CONDITION OF EGYPT UNDER THEM. 9 1 Certainly, the native remains of the period give a cheerful representation of the condition of all classes. The nation for the most part enjoys peace, and applies itself to production. The wealth of the nobles increases, and the position of their dependents is improved. Slaves were few, and there was ample employment for the labouring classes. We do not see the stick at work upon the backs of the labourers in the sculptures of the time ; they seem to accomplish their various tasks with alacrity and gaiety of heart. They plough, and hoe, and reap ; drive cattle or asses ; winnow and store corn ; gather grapes and tread them, singing in chorus as they tread ; cluster round the winepress or the threshingfloor, on which the animals tramp out the grain ; gather lotuses ; save cattle from the inundation ; engage in fowling or fishing ; and do all with an apparent readiness and cheerfulness which seems indicative of real content. There may have been a darker side to the picture, and undoubtedly was while Khufu and Shafra held the throne ; but kings of a morose and cruel temper seem to have been the exception, rather than the rule f in Egypt ; and the moral code, which required kind- ness to be shown to dependents, seems, at this period at any rate, to have had a hold upon the consciences, and to have influenced the conduct, of the mass of the people. " Happy the nation that has no history ! " Egypt during this golden age was neither assailed by any aggressive power beyond her borders, nor had herself conceived the idea of distant conquest. An occasional raid upon the negroes of the South, or chastisement of the nomades of the East, secured her Q2 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. interests in those quarters, and prevented her warlike virtues from dying out through lack of use. But otherwise tranquillity was undisturbed, and the ener- gies of the nation were directed to increasing its material prosperity, and to progress in the arts. Among the marvels of Egypt perhaps the Sphinx is second to none. The mysterious being with the head of a man and the body of a lion is not at all uncommon in Egyptian architectural adornment, but the one placed before the Second Pyramid (the Pyramid of Shafra), and supposed to be contem- porary with it, astonishes the observer by its gigantic proportions. It is known to the Arabs as Abul- hol, the father of terror. It measures more than one hundred feet in length, and was partially carved from the rocks of the Lybian hills. Between its out- stretched feet there stands a chapel, uncovered in 1816, three walls of which are formed by tablets bearing inscriptions indicative of its use and origin. A small temple behind the great Sphinx, probably also built by Shafra, is formed of great blocks of the hardest red granite, brought from the neighbour- hood of Syene and fitted to each other with a nicety astonishing to modern architects, who are unable to imagine what tools could have proved equal to the difficult achievement. Mysterious passages pierce the great Sphinx and connect it with the Second Pyramid, three hundred feet west of it. In the face of this mystery all questions are vain, and yet every visitor adds new queries to those that others have asked before him. THE GREAT SPHINX. Qj Since what unnumbered year Hast thou kept watch and ward, And o'er the buried land of fear So grimly held thy guard ? No faithless slumber snatching, Still couched in silence brave, Like some fierce hound, long watching Above her master's grave. . . . Dost thou in anguish thus Still brood o'er CEdipus? And weave enigmas to mislead anew, And stultify the blind Dull heads of human-kind, And inly make thy moan, That, mid the hated crew, Whom thou so long couldst vex, Bewilder and perplex, Thou yet couldst find a subtler than thine own? Even now, mcthinks that those Dark, heavy lips which close In such a stern repose, Seem burdened with some thought unsaid, And hoard within their portals dread Some fearful secret there, Which to the listening earth She may not whisper forth, Not even to the air 1 Of awful wonders hid In yonder dread Pyramid, The home of magic fears ; Of chambers vast and lonely, Watched by the Genii only, Who tend their masters' long-forgotten biers, And treasures I hat have shone On cavern walls alone, For thousand, thousand years. Would she but tell. She knows Of the old Pharaohs ; 94 THE PYRAMID BUILDERS. Could count the Ptolemies' long line ; Each mighty myth's original hath seen, Apis, Anubis, — ghosts that haunt between The bestial and divine, — (Such he that sleeps in Philse, — he that stands In gloom unworshipped, 'neath his rock-hewn fane, And they who, sitting on Memnonian sands, Cast their long shadows o'er the desert plain :) Hath marked Nitocris pass, And Oxymandyas Deep-versed in many a dark Egyptian wile,— The Hebrew boy hath eyed Cold to the master's bride ; And that Medusan stare hath frozen the smile Of all her love and guile, For whom the Caesar sighed, And the world-loser died, — The darling of the Nile. V. THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER, AND THE EARLY THEBAN KINGS. Hitherto Egypt had been ruled from a site at the junction of the narrow Nile valley with the broad plain of the Delta — a site sufficiently represented by the modern Cairo. But now there was a shift of the seat of power. There is reason to believe that some- thing like a disruption of Egypt into separate king- doms took place, and that for a while several distinct dynasties bore sway in different parts of the country. Disruption was naturally accompanied by weakness and decline. The old order ceased, and opportunity was offered for some new order — some new power — to assert itself. The site on which it arose was one three hundred and fifty miles distant from the ancient capital, or four hundred and more by the river. Here, about lat. 26 , the usually narrow valley of the Nile Dpens into a sort of plain or basin. The mountains on either side of the river recede, as though by com- mon consent, and leave between themselves and the river's bank a broad amphitheatre, which in each case is a rich green plain — an alluvium of the most pro- ductive character — dotted with dom and date palms, sometimes growing single, sometimes collected into 96 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. clumps or groves. On the western side the Libyan range gathers itself up into a single considerable peak, which has an elevation of twelve hundred feet. On the east the desert-wall maintains its usual level character, but is pierced by valleys conducting to the coast of the Red Sea. The situation was one favour- able for commerce. On the one side was the nearest route through the sandy desert to the Lesser Oasis, which commanded the trade of the African interior ; on the other the way led through the valley of Ham- mamat, rich with breccia verde and other valuable and rare stones, to a district abounding in mines of gold, silver, and lead, and thence to the Red Sea coast, from which, even in very early times, there was com- munication with the opposite coast of Arabia, the region of gums and spices. In this position there had existed, probably from the very beginnings of Egypt, a provincial city of some repute, called by its inhabitants Ape or Apiu, and, with the feminine article prefixed, Tape, or Tapiu, which some interpret " The city of thrones." To the Greeks the name " Tape " seemed to resemble their own well-known " Thebai," whence they trans- ferred the familiar appellation from the Baeotian to the Mid-Egyptian town, which has thus come to be known to Englishmen and Anglo-Americans as " Thebes." Thebes had been from the first the capital of a " nome." It lay so far from the court that it acquired a character of its own — a special cast of religion, manners, speech, nomenclature, mode of writing, and the like — which helped to detach it from Lower or Northern Egypt more even than its isola- ANTEF I., THE FIRST KNOWN THEBAN KING. 97 tion. Still, it was not until the northern kingdom sank into decay from internal weakness and exhaus- tion, and disintegration supervened in the Delta and elsewhere, that Thebes resolved to assert herself and claim independent sovereignty. Apparently, she achieved her purpose without having recourse to arms. The kingdoms of the north were content to let her go. They recognized their own weakness, and allowed the nascent power to develop itself unchecked and unhindered. The first known Theban monarch is a certain Antef or Enantef, whose coffin was discovered in the year 1827 by some Arabs near Qurnah, to the west of Thebes. The mummy bore the royal diadem, and the epigraph on the lid of the coffin declared the body which it contained to be that of " Antef, king of the two Egypts" The phrase im- plied a claim to dominion over the whole country, but a claim as purely nominal as that of the kings of England from Edward IV. to George III. to be monarchs of France and Navarre. Antef s rule may possibly have reached to Elephantine on the one hand, but is not likely to have extended much beyond Coptos on the other. He was a local chieftain posing as a great sovereign, but probably with no intention to deceive either his own contemporaries or posterity. His name appears in some of the later Egyptian dynastic lists ; but no monument of his time has come down to us except the one that has been mentioned. Antef I. is thought to have been succeeded by Mentu-hotep I., a monarch even more shadowy, 98 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. known to us only from the " Table of Karnak." This prince, however, is followed by one who possesses a greater amount of substance — Antef-aa, or " Antef the Great," grandson, as it would seem, of the first Antef — a sort of Egyptian Nimrod, who delighted above all things in the chase. Antefaa's sepulchral monument shows him to us standing in the midst of his dogs, who wear collars, and have their names engraved over them. The dogs are four in number, and are of distinct types. The first, which is called Ma/iut, or " Antelope," has drooping ears, and long but somewhat heavy legs ; it resembles a foxhound, and was no doubt both swift and strong, though it can scarcely have been so swift as its namesake. The second was called Abakaru, a name of unknown meaning ; it has pricked up, pointed ears, a pointed nose, and a curly tail. Some have compared it with the German spitz dog, but it seems rather to be the original dog of nature, a near congener of the jackal, and the type to which all dogs revert when allowed to run wild and breed indiscriminately. The third, named Paliats or Kamu, i.e. " Blacky," is a heavy animal, not unlike a mastiff; it has a small, rounded, drooping ear, a square, blunt nose, a deep chest, and thick limbs. The late Dr. Birch supposed that it might have been employed by Antefaa in " the chase of the lion ; " but we should rather regard it as a watch-dog, the terror of thieves, and we suspect that the artist gave it the sitting attitude to indicate that its business was not to hunt, but to keep watch and ward at its master's gate. The fourth dog, who bears the name of Tekal, and walks between his master's legs, has ears that seem ANTEF II. AND HIS DOGS. 99 to have been cropped. He has been said to resemble "the Dalmatian hound"; but this is questionable. His peculiarities are not marked ; but, on the whole, it seems most probable that he is " a pet house-dog " 1 of the terrier class, the special favourite of his master. Antefaa's dogs had their appointed keeper, the master of his kennel, who is figured on the sepulchral tablet behind the monarch, and bears the name of Tekenru. The hunter king was buried in a tomb marked only by a pyramid of unbaked brick, very humble in its character, but containing a mortuaty chapel in which the monument above described was set up. An in- scription on the tablet declared that it was erected to the memory of Antef the Great, Son of the Sun, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, in the fiftieth year of his reign. Other Mentu-hoteps and other Antefs continued on the line of Theban kings, reigning quietly and inglo- riously, and leaving no mark upon the scroll of time, yet probably advancing the material prosperity of their country, and preparing the way for that rise to greatness which gives Thebes, on the whole, the fore- most place in Egyptian history. Useful projects occupied the attention of these monarchs. One of them sank wells in the valley of Hammamat, to pro- vide water for the caravans which plied between Coptos and the Red Sea. Another established military posts in the valley to protect the traffic and the Egyptian quarrymen. Later on, a king called Sankh-ka-ra launched a fleet upon the Red Sea waters, 1 So Mr. A. D. Bartlett, F.Z.S., in the " Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archseology," vol. iv. p. 195. 100 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. and opened direct communications with the sacred land of Punt, the region of odoriferous gums and of strange animals, as giraffes, panthers, hunting leopards, cynocephalous apes, and long-tailed monkeys. There is some doubt whether " Punt " was Arabia Felix, or the Somauli country, In any case, it lay far down the Gulf, and could only be reached after a voyage of many days. The dynasty of the Antefs and Mentu -hoteps, which terminated with Sankh-ka-ra, was followed by one in which the prevailing names were Usurtasen and Amenemhat. This dynasty is Manetho's twelfth, and the time of its rule has been characterized as " the happiest age of Egyptian history ? " x The second phase of Egyptian civilization now set in — a phase which is regarded by many as outshining the glories of the first. The first civilization had subordinated the people to the monarch, and had aimed especially at eternizing the memory and setting forth the power and greatness of king after king. The second had the benefit and advantage of the people for its primary object ; it was utilitarian, beneficent, appealing less to the eye than to the mind, far-sighted in its aims, and most successful in the results which it effected. The wise rulers of the time devoted their energies and their resources, not, as the earlier kings, to piling up undying memorials of themselves in the shape of monuments that " reached to heaven," but to useful works, to the excavation of wells and reservoirs, the making of roads, the encouragement of commerce, and the development of the vast agricultural wealth 1 R. Stuart Poole, "Cities of Egypt," p. 52. ACCESSION OF AMENEMHAT I. 101 of the country. They also diligently guarded the frontiers, chastised aggressive tribes, and checked invasion by the establishment of strong fortresses in positions of importance. They patronized art, em- ploying themselves in building temples rather than tombs, and adorned their temples not only with reliefs and statues, but also with the novel architectural embellishment of the obelisk, a delicate form, and one especially suited to the country. The founder of the " twelfth dynasty," Amenemhat I., deserves a few words of description. He found Thebes in a state of anarchy ; civil war raged on every side ; all the traditions of the past were forgotten ; noble fought against noble ; the poor were oppressed ; life and property were alike insecure ; " there was stability of fortune neither for the ignorant nor for the learned man." One night, after he had lain down to sleep, he found himself attacked in his bed- chamber ; the clang of arms sounded near at hand. Starting from his couch, he seized his own weapons and struck out ; when lo ! his assailants fled ; detected in their attempt to assassinate him, they dared not offer any resistance, thus showing themselves alike treacherous and cowardly. Amenemhat, having once taken arms, did not lay them down till he had defeated every rival, and so fought his way to the crown. Once acknowledged as king, he ruled with moderation and equity; he "gave to the humble, and made the weak to live ; " he " caused the afflicted to cease from their afflictions, and their cries to be heard no more ; " he brought it to pass that none hungered or thirsted in the land ; he gave such orders to his 102 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. servants as continually increased the love of his people towards him. At the same time, he was an energetic warrior. He " stood on the boundaries of the land, to keep watch on its borders," personally leading his soldiers to battle, armed with the khopesJi or falchion. He carried on wars with the Petti, or bowmen of the Libyan interior, with the Sakti or Asiatics, with the Maxyes or Mazyes of the north- west, and with the Ua-uat and other negro tribes of the south ; not, however, as it would seem, with any desire of making conquests, but simply for the pro- tection of his own frontier. With the same object he constructed on his north-eastern frontier a wall or fortress "to keep out the Sakti," who continually harassed the people of the Eastern Delta by their incursions. The wars of Amenemhat I. make it evident that by his time Thebes had advanced from the position of a petty kingdom situated in a remote part of Egypt, and held in check by two or more rival kingdoms in the lower Nile valley and the Delta, to that of a power which bore sway over the whole land from Elephantine to the Mediterranean. "I sent my messengers up to Abu (Elephantine) and my couriers down to Athu " (the coast lakes), says the monarch in his "Instructions" to his son — the earliest literary production from a royal pen that has come down to our days ; and there is no reason to doubt the truth of his statement. In the Delta alone could he come into contact with either the Mazyes or the Sakti, and a king of Thebes could not hold the Delta without being master also of the lower Nile valley from AMENEMHATS HUNTING PROWESS. 103, Coptos to Memphis. We must regard Egypt, then, under the " twelfth dynasty," as once more consoli- dated into a single state — a state ruled, however, not from Memphis, but from Thebes, a decidedly inferior position. Amenemhat I. is the only Egyptian king who makes a boast of his hunting prowess. " I hunted the lion," he says, " and brought back the crocodile a prisoner." Lions do not at the present time frequent Egypt, and, indeed, are not found lower down the Nile valley than the point where the Great Stream SPEARING THE CROCODILE. receives its last tributary, the Atbara. But anciently they seem to have haunted the entire desert tracts on either side of the river. The Roman Emperor Hadrian is said to have hunted one near Alexandria, and the monuments represent lions as tamed and used in the chase by the ancient inhabitants. Some- times they even accompanied their masters to the battlefield. We know nothing of Amenemhat's mode of hunting the king of beasts, but may assume that it 104 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. was not very different from that which prevailed at a later date in Assyria. There, dogs and beaters were employed to rouse the animals from their lairs, while the king and his fellow- sportsmen either plied them with flights of arrows, or withstood their onset with swords and spears. The crocodile was certainly sometimes attacked while he was in the water, the hunters using a boat, and endeavouring to spear him at the point where the head joins the spine ; but this could not have been the mode adopted by Amenem- hat, since it would have resulted in instant death, whereas he tells us that he "brought the crocodile home a prisoner." Possibly, therefore, he employed the method which Herodotus says was in common use in his day. This was to bait a hook with a joint of pork and throw it into the water at a point where the current would carry it out into mid-stream ; then to take a live pig to the river-side, and belabour him well with a stick till he set up the squeal familiar to most ears. Any crocodile within hearing was sure to come to the sound, and falling in with the pork on the way, would instantly swallow it down. Upon this the hunters hauled at the rope to which the hook was attached, and, notwithstanding his struggles, drew " leviathan " to shore. Amenemhat, having thus " made the crocodile a prisoner," may have carried his captive in triumph to his capital, and exhibited him before the eyes of the people. Amenemhat, having reigned as sole king for twenty years, was induced to raise his eldest son, Usurtasen, to the royal dignity, and associate him with himself in the government of the empire. Usurtasen was a REIGN OF USURTASEN I. I05 prince of much promise. He " brought prosperity to the affairs of his father. He was, as a god, without fears ; before him was never one like to him. Most skilful in affairs, beneficent in his mandates, both in his going out and in his coming in he made Egypt flourish." His courage and his warlike capacity were great. Already, in the lifetime of his father, he had distinguished himself in combats with the Petti and the Sakti. When he was settled upon the throne, he made war upon the Cushite tribes who bordered Egypt upon the south, employing the services of a general named Ameni, but also taking a part per- sonally in the campaign. The Cushites or Ethiopians, who in later times became such dangerous neighbours to Egypt, were at this early period weak and insigni- ficant. After the king had made his expedition, Ameni was able with a mere handful of four hundred troops to penetrate into their country, to " conduct the golden treasures " which it contained to the presence of his master, and to capture and carry off a herd of three thousand cattle. It was through his sculptures and his architectural works that the first Usurtasen made himself chiefly conspicuous. Thebes, Abydos, Heliopolis or On, the Fayoum and the Delta, were equally the scenes of his constructive activity, and still show traces of his presence. At Thebes, he carried to its completion the cell, or naos, of the great temple of Amraon, in later times the innermost sanctuary of the building, and reckoned so sacred, that when Thothmes III. rebuilt and enlarged the entire edifice he reproduced the structure of Usurtasen, unchanged in form, and I06 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. merely turned from limestone into granite. At Abydos and other cities of Middle Egypt, he con- structed temples adorned with sculptures, inscriptions, and colossal statues. AtTanis, he set up his own statue, exhibiting himself as seated upon his throne. In the Fayoum he erected an obelisk forty-one feet high to the honour of Ammon, Phthah, and Mentu, which now lies prone upon the ground near the Arab village of Begig. Indications of his ubiquitous activity are found also at the Wady Magharah, in the Sinaitic peninsula, and at Wady Haifa in Nubia, a little above the Second Cataract ; but his grandest and most elaborate work was his construction of the great temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, and his best memorial is that tall finger pointing to the sky which greets the traveller approaching Egypt from the east as the first sample of its strange and mystic wonders. This temple the king began in his third year. After a consultation with his lords and counsellors, he issued the solemn decree : " It is determined to execute the work ; his majesty chooses to have it made. Let the superintendent carry it on in the way that is desired ; let all those employed upon it be vigilant ; let them see that it is made without weariness ; let every due ceremony be performed ; let the beloved place arise." Then the king rose up, wearing a diadem, and holding the double pen ; and all present followed him. The scribe read the holy book, and extended the measuring cord, and laid the foundations on the spot which the temple was to occupy. A grand building arose ; but it has been wholly demolished by the ruthless hand of time and the barbarity of conquerors. Of all its REIGN OF THE SECOND USURTASEN. log glories nothing now remains but the one taper obelisk of pink granite, which rises into the soft sleepy air above the green cornfields of Matariyeh, no longer tipped with gold, but still catching on its summit the earliest and latest sun-rays, while wild-bees nestle in the crannies of the weird characters cut into the stone. Usurtasen, after reigning ten years in conjunction with his father and thirty-two years alone, associated his son, Amenemhat II., who became sole king about three years later. His reign, though long, was undis- tinguished, and need not occupy our attention. He followed the example of his predecessors in associating a son in the government ; and this son succeeded him, and is known as Usurtasen II. One event of interest alone belongs to this time. It is the reception by one of his great officials of a large family or tribe of Semitic immigrants from Asia, who beg permission to settle permanently in the fertile Egypt under the protection of its powerful king. Thirty-seven Amu, men, women, and children, present themselves at the court which the great noble holds near the eastern border, and offer him their homage, while they solicit a favourable hearing. The men are represented draped in long garments of various colours, and wear- ing sandals unlike the Egyptian — more resembling, in fact, open shoes with many straps. Their arms are bows, arrows, spears, and clubs. One plays on a seven-stringed lyre by means of a plectrum. Four women, wearing fillets round their heads, with gar- ments reaching below the knee, and wearing anklets but no sandals, accompany them. A boy, armed with IIO THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. a spear, walks at the side of the women ; and two children, seated in a kind of pannier placed on the back of an ass, ride on in front. Another ass, carrying a spear, a shield, and a pannier, precedes the man who plays on the lyre. The great official, who is named Khnum-hotep, receives the foreigners, accompanied by an attendant who carries his sandals and a staff, and who is followed by three dogs. A scribe, named Nefer-hotep, unrolls before his master a strip of papyrus, on which are inscribed the words, "The sixth year of the reign of King Usurtasen Sha-khepr- ra : account rendered of the Amu who in the lifetime of the chief, Khnum-hotep, brought to him the mineral, mastemut, from the country of Pit-shu — they are in all thirty-seven persons." The mineral mastemut is thought to be a species of stibium or antimony, used for dying the skin around the eyes, and so increasing their beauty. Besides this offering, the head of the tribe, who is entitled kliak, or "prince," and named Abusha, presents to Khnum-hotep a magnificent wild- goat, of the kind which at the present day frequents the rocky mountain tract of Sinai. He wears a richer dress than his companions, one which is ornamented with a fringe, and has a wavy border round the neck. The scene has been generally recognized as strikingly illustrating the coming of Jacob's family into Egypt (Gen. xlvi. 28-34), and was at one time thought by some to represent that occurrence ; but the date of Abusha's coming is long anterior to the arrival in Egypt of Jacob's family, the number is little more than half that of the Hebrew immigrants, the names do not accord ; and it is now agreed on all hands, AFRICAN CONQUESTS OF USURTASEN III. Ill that the interest of the representation is confined to its illustrative force. Usurtasen II. reigned for nineteen years. He does not seem to have associated a son, but was succeeded by another Usurtasen, most probably a nephew. The third Usurtasen was a conquering monarch, and advanced the power and glory of Egypt far more than any other ruler belonging to the Old Empire. He began his military operations in his eighth year, and starting from Elephantine in the month Epiphi, or May, moved southward, like another Lord Wolseley, with a fixed intention, which he expressed in writing upon the rocks of the Elephantine island, of per- manently reducing to subjection " the miserable land of Cush." His expedition was so far successful that in the same year he established two forts, one on either side of the Nile, and set up two pillars with inscriptions warning the black races that they were not to proceed further northward, except with the object of importing into Egypt cattle, oxen, goats, or asses. The forts are still visible on either bank of the river a little above the Second Cataract, and bear the names of Koommeh and Semneh. They are massive constructions, built of numerous squared blocks of granite and sandstone, and perched upon two steep rocks which rise up perpendicularly from the river. Usurtasen, having made this beginning, proceeded, from his eighth to his sixteenth year, to carry on the war with perseverance and ferocity in the district between the Nile and the Red Sea — to kill the men, fire the crops, and carry off the women and children, much as recently did the Arab traders whom Baker and Gordon strove to crush. The 112 THE RISE OF THEBES TO POWER. memory of his razzias was perpetuated upon stone columns set up to record his successes. Later on, in his nineteenth year he made a last expedition, to complete the conquest of " the miserable Kashi," and recorded his victory at Abydos. The effect of these inroads was to advance the Egyptian frontier one hundred and fifty miles to the south, to carry it, in fact, from the First to above the Second Cataract. Usurtasen drew the line between Egypt and Ethiopia at this period, very much where the British Government drew it between Egypt and the Soudan in 1885. The boundary is a somewhat artificial one, as any boundary must be on the course of a great river ; but it is probably as convenient a point as can be found between Assouan (Syene) and Khartoum. The conquest was regarded as redound- ing greatly to Usurtasen's glory, and made him the hero of the Old Empire. Myths gathered about his name, which, softened into Sesostris, became a favourite one in the mouths of Egyptian minstrels and minnesingers. Usurtasen grew to be a giant more than seven feet high, who conquered, not only all Ethiopia, but also Europe and Asia ; his columns were said to be found in Palestine, Asia Minor, Scythia, and Thrace ; he left a colony at Colchis, the city of the golden fleece ; he dug all the canals by which Egypt was intersected ; he invented geometry ; he set up colossi above fifty feet high ; he was the greatest monarch that had ruled Egypt since the days of Osiris ! No doubt these tales were, in the main, imaginary ; but they marked the fact that in Usurtasen III. the military glories of the Old Empire culminated. VI. THE GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. THE great river to which Egypt owes her being, is at once the source of all her blessings and her chiefest danger. Swelling with a uniformity, well calculated to call forth man's gratitude and admiration, almost from a fixed day in each year, and continuing to rise steadily for months, it gradually spreads over the lands, covering the entire soil with a fresh coating of the richest possible alluvium, and thus securing to the country a perpetual and inexhaustible fertility. Nature's mechanism is so perfect, that the rise year after year scarcely varies a foot, and is almost exactly the same now as it was when the first Pharaoh poured his libation to the river-god from the embankment which he had made at Memphis ; but though this uniformity is great, and remarkable, and astonishing, it is not absolute. There are occasions, once in two or three centuries, when the rainfall in Abyssinia is excessive. The Blue Nile and the Atbara pour into the deep and steady stream of the White Nile torrents of turbid water for months together. The windows of heaven seem to have been opened, and the rain pours down as if it would never cease. Then the river of the Egyptians assumes a threatening character ; faster 9 114 TH U GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. and faster it rises, and higher and higher ; and further and further it spreads, until it begins to creep up the sides of the two ranges of hills. Calamitous results ensue. The mounds erected to protect the cities, the villages, and the pasture lands, are surmounted, or undermined, or washed away ; the houses, built often of mud, and seldom of any better material than crude brick, collapse ; cattle are drowned by hundreds ; human life is itself imperilled ; the population has to betake itself to boats, and to fly to the desert regions which enclose the Nile valley to the east and west, regions of frightful sterility, which with difficulty support the few wandering tribes that are their normal inhabitants. If the excessive rise continues long, thousands or millions starve ; if it passes off rapidly, then the inhabitants return to find their homes deso- lated, their cattle drowned, their household goods washed away, and themselves dependent on the few rich men who may have stored their corn in stone granaries which the waters have not been able to penetrate. Disasters of this kind are, however, ex- ceedingly rare, though, when they occur, their results are terrible to contemplate. The more usual form of calamity is of the opposite kind. Once or twice in a century the Abyssinian rainfall is deficient. The rise of the Nile is deferred beyond the proper date. Anxious eyes gaze daily on the sluggish stream, or consult the " Nilometers " which kings and princes have constructed along its course to measure the increase of the waters. Hopes and fears alternate as good or bad news reaches the in- habitant^ of the lower valley from those who dwell EVILS OF A DEFICIENT INUNDATION. 1 1 5 higher up the stream. Each little rise is expected to herald a greater one, and the agony of suspense is prolonged until the " hundred days," traditionally assigned to the increase, have gone by, and there is no longer a doubt that the river has begun to fall. Then hope is swallowed up in despair. Only the lands lying nearest to the river have been inundated ; those at a greater distance from it lie parched and arid during the entire summer-time, and fail to pro- duce a single blade of grass or spike of corn. Famine stares the poorer classes in the face, and unless large supplies of grain have been laid up in store previously, or can be readily imported from abroad, the actual starvation of large numbers is the inevitable con- sequence. We have heartrending accounts of such famines. In the year 457 of the Hegira (A.D. 1064) a famine began, which lasted seven years, and was so severe that dogs and cats, and even human flesh, were eaten ; all the horses of the Caliph but three perished, and his family had to fly into Syria. Another famine in A.D. 1199 is recorded by Abd-el- Latif, an eye-witness, in very similar terms. There is reason to believe that, under the twelfth dynasty, some derangement of meteoric or atmo- spheric conditions passed over Abyssinia and Upper Egypt, either in both the directions above noticed, or, at any rate, in the latter and more ordinary one. An official belonging to the later part of this period, in enumerating his merits upon his tomb, tells us, " There was no poverty in my days, no starvation in my time, even when there were years of famine. I ploughed all the fields of Mali to its southern and northern Il6 THE GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. boundaries ; I gave life to its inhabitants, making its food ; no one was starved in it. I gave to the widow as to the married woman." As the late Dr. Birch observes, " Egypt was occasionally subject to famines ; and these, at the time of the twelfth dynasty, were so important, that they attracted great attention, and were considered worthy of record by the princes or hereditary lords who were buried at Beni-Hassan. Under the twelfth dynasty, also, the tombs of Abydos show the creation of superintendents, or storekeepers of the public granaries, a class of functionaries ap- parently created to meet the contingency." * The distress of his subjects under these circum- stances seems to have drawn the thoughts of " the good Amenemhat " to the devising of some system which should effectually remedy these evils, by pre- venting their occurrence. In all countries where the supply of water is liable to be deficient, it is of the utmost importance to utilize to the full that amount of the life-giving fluid, be it more or be it less, which the bounty of nature furnishes. Rarely, indeed, is nature absolutely a niggard. Mostly she gives far more than is needed, but the improvidence or the apathy of man allows her gifts to run to waste Careful and provident husbanding of her store will generally make it suffice for all man's needs and re quirements. Sometimes this has been effected in a thirsty land by conducting all the rills and brooks that flow from the highlands or hills into subterranean conduits, where they are shielded from the sun's rays, and prolonging these ducts for miles upon miles, till * " Records of the Past," vol. xii. p. 6o» POSSIBLE MODES OF STORING WATER. 11/ every drop of the precious fluid has been utilized for irrigation. Such is the kareez or kanat system of Persia. In other places vast efforts have been made to detain the abundant supply of rain which nature commonly provides in the spring of the year, to store it, and prevent it from flowing off down the river- courses to the sea, where it is absolutely lost. For this purpose, either huge reservoirs must be construc- ted by the hand of man, or else advantage must be taken of some facility which nature offers for storing the water in convenient situations. Valleys may be blocked by massive dams, and millions of gallons thus imprisoned for future use, as is done in many parts of the North of England, but for manufacturing and not for irrigation purposes. Or naturally land-locked basins may be found, and the overflow of streams at their flood-time turned into them and arrested, to be made use of later in the year. In Egypt the one and only valley was that of the Nile, and the one and only stream that which had formed it, and flowed along it, at a lower or higher level, ceaselessly. It might perhaps have been possible for Egyptian engineering skill to have blocked the valley at Silsilis, or at the Gebelein, and to have thus turned Upper Egypt into a huge reservoir always full, and always capable of supplying Lower Egypt with enough water to eke out a deficient inundation. But this could only have been done by an enormous work, very difficult to construct, and at the sacrifice of several hundred square miles of fertile territory, thickly inhabited, which would have been covered permanently by the artificial lake. Moreover, the Il8 THE GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. Egyptians would have known that such an embank- ment can under no circumstances be absolutely secure, and may have foreseen that its rupture would spread destruction over the whole of the lower coun- try. Amenemhat, at any rate, did not venture to adopt so bold a design. He sought for a natural depression, and found one in the Libyan range of hills to the west of the Nile valley, about a degree south of the latitude of Memphis — a depression of great depth and of ample expanse, fifty miles or more in length by thirty in breadth, and containing an area of six or seven hundred square miles. It was sepa- rated from the Nile valley by a narrow ridge of hills about two hundred feet high, through which ran from south-east to north-west a narrow rocky gorge, giving access to the depression. It is possible that in very high floods some of the water of the inundation passed naturally into the basin through this gorge ; but whether this were so or no, it was plain that by the employment of no very large amount of labour a canal or cutting might be carried along the gorge, and the Nile water given free access into the depres- sion, not only in very high floods, but annually when the inundation reached a certain moderate height. This is, accordingly, what Amenemhat did. He dug a canal from the western branch of the Nile — the modern Bahr Yousuf — leaving it at El-Lahoun, carried his canal through the gorge, in places cutting deep into its rocky bottom, and by a system of sluices and flood-gates retained such an absolute control over the water that he could either admit or exclude the inundation at his will, as it rose ; and when it AMENEMHAT'S GREAT RESERVOIR. Iig fell, could either allow the water that had flowed in to return, or imprison it and keep it back. Within the gorge he had thus at all times a copious store of the invaluable fluid, banked up to the height of high Nile, and capable of being applied to purposes of cultivation both within and without the depression by the opening and shutting of the sluices. So much appears to be certain. The exact size and position of Amenemhat's reservoir within the depression, which a French savant was supposed to have discovered, are now called in question, and must be admitted to be still sub judice. M. Linant de Bellefonds regarded the reservoir as occupying the south-eastern or upper portion of the depression only, as extending from north to south a distance of four- teen miles only, and from east to west a distance varying from six to eleven miles. He regarded it as artificially confined towards the west and north by two long lines of embankment, which he considered that he had traced, and gave the area of the lake as four hundred and five millions of square metres, or about four hundred and eighty millions of square yards. Mr. Cope Whitehouse believes that the water was freely admitted into the whole of the depression, which it filled, with the exception of certain parts, which stood up out of the water as islands, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet high. He believes that it was in places three hundred feet deep, and that the circuit of its shores was from three hundred to five hundred miles. It is to be hoped that a scientific expedition will ere long set this dispute at rest, and enable the modern student 120 THE GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. distinctly to grasp and understand the great work of Amenemhat. Whatever may be the truth regarding " Lake Mceris," as this great reservoir was called, it is certain that it furnished the ancients one of the least explicable of all the many problems that the remark- able land of the Nile presented to them. Herodotus added to the other marvels of the place a story about two sitting statues based upon pyramids, which stood three hundred feet above the level of the lake, and a famous labyrinth, of which we shall soon speak. Whether the reservorr of Amenemhat had the larger or the smaller dimensions ascribed to it, there can be no doubt that it was a grand construction, undertaken mainly for the benefit of his people, and greatly con- ducing to their advantage. Even if the reservoir had only the dimensions assigned to it by M. de Belle- fonds, it would, according to his calculations, have contained water sufficient, not only for irrigating the northern and western portions of the Fayoum through- out the year, but also for the supply of the whole western bank of the Nile from Beni-Souef to the embouchure at Canopus for six months. This alone would in dry seasons have been a sensible relief to a large portion of the population. If the dimensions exceeded those of De Bellefonds, the relief would have been proportionately greater. The good king was not, however, content merely to benefit his people by increasing the productiveness of Egypt and warding off the calamities that occasionally befell the land ; he further gave employment to large numbers, which was not of a severe or oppressive kind, but promoted their comfort and welfare. In HIS LABYRINTH. 121 connection with his hydraulic works in the Fayoum he constructed a novel species of building, which after ages admired even above the constructions of the pyramid-builders, and regarded as the most wonderful edifice in all the world. " I visited the place," says Herodotus, 1 " and found it to surpass description ; for if all the walls and other great works of the Greeks could be put together in one, they would not equal, either for labour or expense, this Labyrinth ; and yet the temple of Ephesus is a building worthy of note, and so is the temple of Samos. The pyramids like- wise surpass description, and are severally equal to a number of the greatest works of the Greeks ; but the Labyrinth surpasses the pyramids. It has twelve courts, all of them roofed, with gates exactly opposite one another, six looking to the north, and six to the south. A single wall surrounds the whole building. It contains two different sorts of chambers, half of them underground, and half above-ground, the latter built upon the former ; the whole number is three thousand, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper chambers I myself passed through and saw, and what I say of them is from my own observation ; of the underground chambers I can only speak from report, for the keepers of the building could not be induced to show them, since they contained (they said) the sepulchres of the kings who built the Labyrinth, and also those of the sacred crocodiles. Thus it is from hearsay only that I can speak of them ; but the upper chambers I saw with my own eyes, and found them to excel all other human pro- 1 Euterpe, ch. 148. 122 THE GOOD AMENEMHAT AND HIS WORKS. ductions ; for the passages through the houses, and the varied windings of the paths across the courts, excited in me infinite admiration, as I passed from the courts into chambers, and from the chambers into colonnades, and from the colonnades into fresh houses, and again from these into courts unseen before. The roof was, throughout, of stone, like the walls ; and the walls were carved all over with figures ; every court was surrounded with a colonnade, which was built of white stones, exquisitely fitted together. At the corner of the Labyrinth stands a pyramid, forty fathoms high, with large figures engraved upon it, which is entered by a subterranean passage." The pyramid intended is probably that examined by Perring and Lepsius, which had a base of three hundred feet, and an elevation, probably, of about one hundred and eighty-five feet. It was built of crude brick mixed with a good deal of straw, and cased with a white silicious limestone. The same material was employed for the greater part of the so-called " Labyrinth," but many of the columns were of red granite, and some perhaps of porphyry. Most likely the edifice was intended as a mausoleum for the sacred crocodiles, and was gradually enlarged for their accommodation — Amenemhat, whose prae- nomen was found on the pyramid, being merely the first founder. The number of the pillared courts, and their similarity, made the edifice confusing to foreigners, and got it the name of " The Labyrinth " ; but it is not likely the designers of the building had any intention to mislead or to confuse. Amenemhat's praenomen, or throne-name, assumed HIS NAME OF M(ERIS. 123 (according to ordinary custom) on his accession, was Ra-n-mat, " Sun of Justice " or " Sun of Righteous- ness." The assumption of the title indicates his desire to leave behind him a character for justice and equity. It is perhaps noticeable that the name by which the Greeks knew him was Mceris, which may mean " the beloved." With him closes the first period of Theban greatness. A cloud was impending, and darker days about to follow ; but as yet Egypt enjoyed a time of progressive, and in the main peaceful, development. Commerce, art, religion, agriculture, occupied her. She did not covet other men's lands, nor did other men covet hers. The world beyond her borders knew little of her, except that she was a fertile and well- ordered land, whereto, in time of dearth, the needy of other countries might resort with confidence. VII. ABRAHAM IN EGYrT. " Now there was a famine in the land of Canaan ; and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there " (Gen. xii. 10). Few events in the history of mankind are more interesting than the visit which the author of the Pentateuch thus places before us in less than a dozen words. The " father of the faithful," the great apostle of Monotheism, the wanderer from the distant " Ur of the Chaldees," familiar with Baby- lonian greatness, and Babylonian dissoluteness, and Babylonian despotism, having quitted his city home and adopted the simple habits of a Syrian nomadic sheikh, finds himself forced to make acquaintance with a second form of civilization, a second great organized monarchy, and to become for a time a sojourner among the people who had held for cen- turies the valley of the Nile. He had obeyed the call which took him from Ur to Haran, from Haran to Damascus, from Damascus to the hills of Canaan ; he had divorced himself from city life and city usages ; he had embraced the delights of that free, wandering existence which has at all times so singular a charm for many, and had dwelt for we know not how many years in different parts of Palestine, the chief of a tribe rich in flocks and herds, moving with them from WHY ABRAHAM VISITED EGYPT. 125 place to place as the fancy took him. It was assuredly with much reluctance that he quitted the open downs and fresh breezes and oak groves of Canaan — the land promised to him and to his seed after him, and took his way through the " desert of the south " to the great kingdom with which he and his race could never hope to be on terms of solid friendship. But the necessity which constrained him was imperative. When, from the want of the ordinary spring rains, drought and famine set in on the Palestinian uplands, there was in ancient times but one resource. Egypt was known as a land of plenty. Whether it were Hebrew nomads, or Hittite warriors, or Phoenician traders that suffered, Egypt was the sole refuge, the sole hope. There the river gave the plenteous sus- tenance which would be elsewhere sought in vain. There were granaries and storehouses, and an old established system whereby corn was laid up as a reserve in case of need, both by private individuals of the wealthier classes and by the kings. There among the highest officers of state was the " steward of the public granary," whose business it was, when famine pressed, to provide, so far as was possible, both for natives and foreigners, alleviating the distress of all, while safeguarding, of course, the king's interests (Gen. xlvii. 13-26). Abraham, therefore, when he found that "the famine was grievous in the land " of Canaan, did the only thing that it was possible for him to do — left Pales- tine, and wended his way through the desert to the Egyptian frontier. What company he took with him is uncertain. A few years later we find him at the 126 ABRAHAM IN EGYPT. head of a body of three hundred and eighteen men capable of bearing arms — " trained servants born in his house " — which implies the headship over a tribe of at least twelve hundred persons. He can scarcely have entered Egypt with a much smaller number. It was before his separation from his nephew, Lot, whose followers were not much fewer than his own. And to leave any of his dependents behind would have been to leave them to starvation. We must suppose a numerous caravan organized, with asses and camels to carry provisions and household stuff, and with the women and the little ones conveyed as we see them in the sculpture representing the arrival of Abusha from the same quarter, albeit with a smaller entourage. The desert journey would be trying, and probably entail much loss, especially of the cattle and beasts ; but at length, on the seventh or eighth day, as the water was getting low in the skins and the camels were beginning to faint and groan with the scant fare and the long travel, a dark low line would appear upon the edge of the horizon in front, and soon the line would deepen into a delicate fringe, sparkling here and there as though it were sown with diamonds. 1 Then it would be recognized that there lay before the travellers the fields and gardens and palaces and obelisks of Egypt, the broad flood and rich plain of the Nile, and their hearts would leap with joy, and lift themselves up in thanksgiving to the Most High, who had brought them through the great and terrible wilderness to a land of plenty. But now a fresh anxiety fell upon the spirit of the 1 Adapted from Kinglake's " Eothen," p. 201. HIS DECEIT RESPECTING SARAH. I27 chief. Tradition tells us that already in Babylonia he had had experience of the violence and tyranny ol earthly potentates, and had with difficulty escaped from an attempt which the king of Babylon made upon his life. Either memory recalled this and similar dangers, or reason suggested what the un- bridled licence of irresponsible power might conceive and execute under the circumstances. The Pharaohs had, it is plain, already departed from the simple manners of the earlier times, when each prince was contented with a single wife, and had substituted for the primitive law of monogamy that corrupt system of hareem life which has kept its ground in the East from an ancient date to the present day. Abraham was aware of this, and " as he was come near to enter into Egypt," but was not yet entered, he was seized with a great fear. " Behold," he said to Sarai his wife, " Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon ; therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife : and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive." Under these circumstances Abraham, with a craft not unnatural in an Oriental, but cer- tainly far from commendable, resolved to dissemble his relationship towards Sarah, and to represent her as not his wife, but his sister. She was, in point of fact, his half-sister, as he afterwards pleaded to Abi- melech (Gen. xx. 12), being the daughter of Terah by a secondary wife, and married to her half-brother " Say, I pray thee," he said, " thou art my sister, that it may be well with me for thy sake ; and my soul shall live because of thee." Sarah acquiesced ; and 128 ABRAHAM IN EGYPT. no doubt the whole tribe was made acquainted with the resolution come to, so that they might all be in one story. The frontier was then approached. We learn from the history of Abusha, as well as from other scattered notices in the papyri, how carefully the eastern border was always guarded, and what precautions were taken to apprise the Court when any consider- able body of immigrants arrived. The chief official upon the frontier, either Khnumhotep or some one occupying a similar position, would receive the in- comers, subject them to interrogation, and cause his secretary to draw up a report, which would be for- warded by courier to the capital. The royal orders would be awaited, and meantime perhaps fresh reports would be sent by other officials of the neighbourhood. In the present instance, we are told that several " princes of Pharaoh," having been struck with the beauty of Sarah, commended her to their royal master, who sent for her and had her brought into his own house. Abraham himself was well received and treated with much distinction "for her sake." According to Eupolemus, he and his were settled in the sacred city of On or Heliopolis ; and there, in that seat of learning and religion, the Patriarch, as the same authority declares, lived peacefully for many years and taught the Egyptians the sciences of as- tronomy and arithmetic. The author of Genesis says nothing of the place of his abode, but simply informs us of his well-being. " Pharaoh entreated Abram well for Sarai's sake ; and he had sheep, and oxen, and he-asses, and men-servants, and maid-servants, and HIS DECEIT DISCOVERED. 120, she-asses, and camels." The collocation of the clauses implies that all these were presents from the king. The pleased monarch lavished on his brother-in-law such gifts of honour as were usual at the time and suitable to his circumstances. Abraham became "very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold " (Gen. xiii. 2). He flourished greatly, whether for months or for years the scripture does not say. He was separated from his wife, and she was an inmate of Pharaoh's hareem ; but he kept his secret, and no one ' betrayed him. Apparently, he was content. Ere long, however, a discovery was made. Calamity came upon the royal house in some marked way, pro- bably either in the form of sickness or of death. The king became convinced that he was the object of a Divine chastisement, and cast about for a cause to which his sufferings might reasonably be attributed. How had he provoked God's anger ? Either, as Josephus thinks, the priests had by this time found out the truth, and made the suggestion to him, that he was being punished for having taken another man's wife into his seraglio ; or possibly, as others have surmised, Sarah herself divined the source of the calamities, and made confession of the truth. At any rate, by some means or other, the facts of the case became known ; and the Pharaoh thereupon hastened to set matters right. Sarah, though an inmate of the hareem, was probably still in the probationary condition, undergoing the purification necessary before the final completion of her nuptials (Esth. ii. 12), and could thus be restored intact. The Pharaoh sent for Abraham, reproached him with his deceit, pointed out the ill consequences 10 130 ABRAHAM IN EGYPT. which had followed, and, doubtless in some displea- sure, required him to take his wife and depart. The famine was at an end, and there was no reason why he should linger. Beyond reproach, however, Pharaoh inflicted no punishment. He " commanded his men concerning Abraham ; and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that lie had." Such is the account which has come down to us of Abraham's sojourn in Egypt. If it be asked, Why is it inserted into the " story of Egypt " at this point ? the reply must be, because, on a dispassionate con- sideration of all the circumstances, chronological and other, which attach to the narrative, it has been gene- rally agreed that the event belongs to about this time. There is no special reign to which it can be definitely assigned ; but the best critics acquiesce in the judg- ment of Canon Cook upon the point, who says : " For my own part, I regard it as all but certain that Abra- ham visited Egypt in some reign between the middle of the eleventh and the thirteenth dynasty, and most probably under one of the earliest Pharaohs of the twelfth." * This is not the only entrance of Hebrews or people of Semitic race into Egypt. Emigrants from less favoured countries had frequently looked with interest to the fertile Delta of the Nile, hoping that there they might find homes free from the vicissitudes of their own. Previous to this, one Amu had entered Egypt, perhaps from Midian, with his family, counting thirty- seven, the little ones riding upon asses, and had sought the protection of the reigning sovereign. It was again 1 See " Speaker's Commentary/' vol. i. p. 447, col. i. OTHER SEMITIC IMMIGRANTS. 131 the experience of Egypt to receive emigrants from the north-east, from Syria or Northern Arabia, at a little later period, when the nomads in those regions looked over to the south and, by contrast with their over- peopled country, thought they saw a sort of " fairy- land of wealth, culture, and wisdom," which they hoped to enjoy by force ; and they were not the last to seek asylum there. We shall soon have to remark on the familiar case of the immigration of the sons of Jacob with their households. In process of time the Semitic wanderers increased so materially that the population in the eastern half of the Delta became half Asiatic, prepared to submit readily to Asiatic rule and to worship Semitic deities ; they had already imposed a number of their words upon the language of Egypt. VIII. THE GREAT INVASION — THE HYKSOS OR SHEPHERD KINGS — JOSEPH AND APEPI. The prowess of the Egyptians had not yet been put to any severe proof. They had themselves shown little of an aggressive spirit. Attracted by the mineral wealth of the Sinaitic peninsula, they had indeed made settlements in that region, which had involved them in occasional wars with the natives, whom they spoke of as " Mena " or " Menti " ; and they had had a contest of more importance with the tribes of the south, negro and Ethiopic, in which they had shown a decided superiority over those rude barbarians ; but, as yet, they had attempted no im- portant conquest, and had been subjected to no serious attack. The countries upon their borders were but sparsely peopled, and from neither the Berber tribes of the northern African coast, nor from the Sinaitic nomads, nor even from the negroes of the south, with their allies — the " miserable Cushites " — was any dangerous invasion to be apprehended. Egypt had been able to devote herself almost wholly to the cultivation of the arts of peace, and had not been subjected to the severe ordeal, which most nations pass through in their infancy, of a struggle for existence with warlike and powerful enemies- MOVEMENTS IN ASIA. 133 The time was now come for a great change. Move- ments had begun among the populations of Asia which threatened a general disturbance of the peace of the world. Asshur had had to " go forth " out of the land of Shinar, and to make himself a habitation further to the northward, which must have pressed painfully upon other races. In Elam an aggressive spirit had sprung up, and military expeditions had been conducted by Elamitic kings, which started from the shores of the Persian Gulf and terminated in Southern Syria and Palestine. The migration of the tribes which moved with Terah and Abraham from Ur to Haran, and from Haran to Hebron, is but one of many indications of the restlessness of the period. The Hittites were growing in power, and required an enlarged territory for their free expansion. It was now probably that they descended from the hills of Cappadocia upon the region below Taurus and Amanus, where we find them dominant in later ages. Such a movement on their part would dis- place a large population in Upper Syria, and force it to migrate southwards. There are signs of a pressure upon the north-eastern frontier of Egypt on the part of Asiatics needing a home as early as the com- mencement of the twelfth dynasty ; and it is probable that, while the dynasty lasted, the pressure was con- tinually becoming greater. Asiatics were from time to time received within the barrier of Amenemhat I., some to sojourn and some to dwell. The eastern Delta was more or less Asiaticized ; and a large portion of its inhabitants was inclined to welcome a further influx from Asia. 134 THE GREAT INVASION. We have one account only of the circumstances of the great invasion by which Egypt fell under a foreign yoke. It purports to come from the native historian, Manetho ; but it is delivered to us directly by Josephus, who, in his reports of what other writers had narrated, is not always to be implicitly trusted. Manetho, according to him, declared as follows : " There was once a king of Egypt named Timaeus, in whose reign the gods being offended, for I know not what cause, with our nation, certain men of ignoble race, coming from the eastern regions, had the courage to invade the country, and falling upon it unawares, conquered it easily without a battle. After the submission of the princes, they conducted themselves in a most barbarous fashion towards the whole oi the inhabitants, slaying some, and reducing to slavery the wives and the children of the others. Moreover they savagely set the cities on fire, and demolished the temples of the gods. At last, they took one of their number called Salatis, and made him king over them. Salatis resided at Memphis, where he received tribute both from Upper and Lower Egypt, while at the same time he placed garrisons in all the most suitable situations. He strongly forti- fied the frontier, especially on the side of the east, since he foresaw that the Assyrians, who were then exceedingly powerful, might desire to make' them- selves masters of his kingdom. Having found, moreover, in the Sethroite nome, to the east of the Bubastite branch of the Nile, a city very favourably situated, and called, on account of an ancient theo- logical tradition, Avaris, he rebuilt it and strengthened ITS OVERWHELMING FORCE. I35 it with walls of great thickness, which he guarded with a body of two hundred and forty thousand men. Each summer he visited the place, to see their sup- plies of corn measured out for his soldiers and their pay delivered to them, as well as to superintend their military exercises, in order that foreigners might hold them in respect." The king, Timaeus, does not appear either in the lists of Manetho or upon the monuments, nor is it possible to determine the time of the invasion more precisely than this — that it fell into the interval be- tween Manetho's twelfth and his eighteenth dynasties. The invaders are characterized by the Egyptians as Menti or Sati ; but these terms are used so vaguely that nothing definite can be concluded from them. On the whole, it is perhaps most probable that the invading army, like that of Attila, consisted of a vast variety of races — "a collection of all the nomadic hordes of Syria and Arabia " — who made common cause against a foe known to be wealthy, and who all equally desired settlements in a land reputed the most productive in the East. An overwhelming flood of men — a quarter of a million, if we may believe Manetho — poured into the land, impetuous, irresistible. All at once, a danger had come beyond all possible previous calculation — a danger from which there. was no escape. It was as when the northern barbarians swooped down in their count- less thousands on the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire, or as when the hordes of Jingis Khan overran Kashgar and Kharesm — the contest was too unequal for anything that can be called a struggle to 136 THE GREAT INVASION. be made. Egypt collapsed before the invader. Manetho says that there was no battle ; and we can readily understand that in the divided condition of the country, with two or three subordinate dynasties ruling in different parts of the Delta, and another dynasty at Thebes, no army could be levied which could dare to meet the enemy in the field. The inhabitants fled to their cities, and endeavoured to defend themselves behind walls ; but it was in vain. The walls of the Egyptian cities were rather banks to keep out the inundation than ramparts to repel an enemy. In a short time the strongholds that re- sisted were taken, the male population put to the sword, the women and children enslaved, the houses burnt, the temples ruthlessly demolished. An icono- clastic spirit possessed the conquerors. The gods and worship of Egypt were hateful to them. Where- ever the flood passed, it swept away the existing civilization, deeply impregnated as it was with religion ; it covered the ground with the debris of temples and shrines, with the fragments of statues and sphinxes ; it crushed existing religious usages, and for a time, as it would seem, substituted nothing in their place. "A study of the monuments," says M. Francois Lenormant, " attests the reality of the fright- ful devastations which took place at the first moment of the invasion. With a solitary exception, all the temples anterior to the event have disappeared, and no traces can be found of them except scattered ruins which bear the marks of a destructive violence. To say what during these centuries Egypt had to endure in the way of upsetting of her past is impos- LIMITS TO WHICH IT EXTENDED. I37 sible. The only fact which can be stated as certain is, that not a single monument of this desolate epoch has come down to our days to show us what became of the ancient splendour of Egypt under the Hyksos. We witness under the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties a fresh shipwreck of Egyptian civilization. Vigorous as it had been, the impulse given to it by the Usurtasens suddenly stops ; the series of monu- ments is interrupted, and Egypt informs us by her very silence of the calamities with which she was smitten." J It was, fortunately, not the entire country that was overrun. So far as appears, the actual occu* pation of Egypt by the Hyksos was confined to the Delta, to the Lower Nile valley, and to the district of the Fayoum. Elephantine, Thebes, Abydos, escaped the destroyers, and though forced to certain formal acts of submission, to an acknowledgment of the Hyksos suzerainty, and to the payment of an annual tribute, retained a qualified independence. The Theban monuments of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties were undisturbed. Even in Lower Egypt there were structures that suffered little or nothing at the conqueror's hands, being too humble to attract his attention or too massive to yield to the means of destruction known to him. Thus the pyramids scarcely suffered, though it is possible that at this time their sanctity was first violated and their con- tents rifled. The great obelisk of Usurtasen I., which still stands at Heliopolis, was not overthrown. The humbler tombs at Ghizeh, so precious to the antiquary, 1 " Manuel d'Histoire Ancienne de l'Orient," vol i. p. 360. 138 THE GREAT INVASION. were for the most part untouched. Amenemhat's buildings in the Fayoum may have been damaged, but they were not demolished. Though Egyptian civilization received a rude shock from the invasion, it was not altogether swallowed up or destroyed ; and when the deluge had passed it emerged once more, and soon reached, and even surpassed, its ancient glories. The Hyksos king who led the invasion, or who, at any rate, was brought to the front in its course, bore, we are told, either the name of Salatis, or that of Saites. Of these two forms the second is undoubtedly to be preferred, since the first has in its favour only the single authority of Josephus, while the second is sup- ported by Africanus, Eusebius, George the Syncellus, and to a certain extent by the monuments. The " tablet of four hundred years " contains the name of Sut-Aapehti as that of a king of Egypt who must have belonged to the Middle Empire, and this name may fairly be regarded as represented in an abbre- viated form by the Greek " Saites." Saites, having made himself absolute master of the Lower Country, and forced the king of the Upper Country to become his tributary, fixed his residence at Memphis, at the same time strongly fortifying and garrisoning various other towns in important positions. Of these the most considerable was the city, called Auaris, or Avaris, in the Sethroi'te nome, which lay east of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, and was probably not far from Pelusium itself, if indeed it was not identical with that city. Another strong fort, by means of which the Delta was held and overawed, seems to have been DURATION OF THE HYKSOS RULE. I39 Zan or Tanis, now San, situated on what was called the Tanitic branch of the Nile, the next most easterly branch to the Pelusiac. A third was in the Fayoum, on the site now called Mit-Fares. A large body of troops must also have been maintained at Memphis, if the king, as we are told, ordinarily held his court there. How long the Egyptians groaned under the tyranny of the " Shepherds," it is difficult to say. The epitomists of Manetho are hopelessly at variance on the subject, and the monuments are silent, or nearly so. Moderns vary in the time, which they assign to the period between two centuries and five. On the whole, criticism seems to incline towards the shorter term, though why Manetho, or his epitomists, should have enlarged it, remains an insoluble problem. There is but one dynasty of " Shepherd Kings " that has any distinct historical substance, or to which we can assign any names. This is a dynasty of six kings only, whose united reigns are not likely to have exceeded two centuries. Nor does it seem possible that, if the duration of the foreign oppression had been much longer, Egypt could have returned, so nearly as she did, to the same manners and customs, the same reli- gious usages, the same rules of art, the same system of government, even the very same proper names, at the end of the period, as had been in use at its begin- ning. One cannot but think that the bouleversement which Egypt underwent has been somewhat exagge- rated by the native historian for the sake of rhetorical effect, to enhance by contrast the splendour of the New Empire. 140 THE GREAT INVASION. In another respect, too, if he has not misrepresented the rule of the " Shepherd Kings," he has failed to do it justice. He has painted in lurid colours the advent of the foreign race, the war of extermination in which they engaged, the cruel usage to which they subjected the conquered people ; he has represented the in- vaders as rude, savage, barbarous, bent on destruction, careless of art, the enemies of progress and civiliza- tion. He has neglected to point out, that, as time went on, there was a sensible change. The period of constant bitter hostilities came to an end. Peace suc- ceeded to war. In Lower Egypt the " Shepherds " reigned over quiet and unresisting subjects ; in Upper Egypt they bore rule over submissive tributaries. Under these circumstances a perceptible softening of their manners and general character took place. As the Mongols and the Mandchus in China suffered themselves by degrees to be conquered by the superior civilization of the people whom they had overrun and subdued, so the Hyksos yielded little by little to the influences which surrounded them, and insensibly assimilated themselves to their Egyptian subjects. They adopted the Egyptian dress, titles, official lan- guage, art, mode of writing, architecture. In Tanis, especially, temples were built and sculptures set up under the later " Shepherd Kings," differing little in their general character from those of purely Egyptian periods. The foreign monarchs erected their effigies at this site, which were sculptured by native artists according to the customary rules of Egyptian glyptic art, and only differ from those of the earlier native Pharaohs in the head-dress, the expression of the BUST OF A SHEPHERD KING. RELIGION OF THE HYKSOS. 143 countenance, and a peculiar arrangement of the beard. A friendly intercourse took place during this period between the kings of the North, established at Tanis and Memphis, and those of the South, resident at Thebes ; frequent embassies were interchanged ; and blocks of granite and syenite were continually floated down the Nile, past Thebes, to be employed by the " Shepherds " in their erections at the southern capitals. The " Shepherds " brought with them into Egypt the worship of a deity, whom they called Sut or Sutekh, and apparently identified with the sun. He was described as " the great ruler of heaven," and identified with Baal in later times. The kings re- garded themselves as especially under his protection. At the time of the invasion, they do not seem to have considered this deity as having any special connection with any of the Egyptian gods, and they consequently made war indiscriminately against the entire Egyptian Pantheon, plundering and demolishing all the temples alike. But when the first burst of savage hostility was gone by, when more settled times followed, and the manners and temper of the conquerors grew softened by pacific intercourse with their subjects, a likeness came to be seen between Sutekh, their own ancestral god, and the " Set " of the Egyptians. Set in the old Egyptian mythology was recognized as " the patron of foreigners, the power which swept the children of the desert like a sand-storm over the fertile land." He was a representative of physical, but not of moral, evil ; a strong and powerful deity, worthy of reverence and worship, but less an object of 144 THE GREAT INVASION. love than of fear. The " Shepherds " acknowledged in this god their Sutekh ; and as they acquired settled habits, and assimilated themselves to their subjects, they began to build temples to him, after the Egyptian model, in their principal towns. After the dynasty had borne rule for five reigns, covering the space perhaps of one hundred and fifty years, a king came to the throne named Apepi, who has left several monuments, and is the only one of the " Shepherds " that stands out for us in definite historical consistency as a living and breathing person. Apepi built a great temple to Sutekh at Zoan, or Tanis, his principal capital, com- posed of blocks of red granite, and adorned it with obelisks and sphinxes. The obelisks are said to have been fourteen in number, and must have been dis- persed about the courts, and not, as usual, placed only at the entrance. The sphinxes, which differed from the ordinary Egyptian sphinx in having a mane like a lion and also wings, seem to have formed an avenue or vista leading up to the temple from the town. They are in diorite, and have the name of Apepi engraved upon them. The pacific rule of Apepi and his predecessors allowed Thebes to increase in power, and her monu- ments now recommence. Three kings who bore the family name of Taa, and the throne name of Ra- Sekenen, bore rule in succession at the southern capital. The third of these, Taa-ken, or "Taa the Victorious," was contemporary with Apepi, and paid his tribute punctually, year by year, to his lawful suzerain. He does not seem to have had any desire to provoke war ; but Apepi probably thought that he APEPI AND JOSEPH. 145 was becoming too powerful, and would, if unmolested, shortly make an effort to throw off the Hyksos yoke. He therefore determined to pick a quarrel with him, and proceeded to send to Thebes a succession of embassies with continually increasing demands. First of all he required Taa-ken to relinquish the worship of all the Egyptian gods except Amen-Ra, the chief god of Thebes, whom he probably identified with his own Sutekh. It is not quite clear whether Taa-ken consented to this demand, or politely evaded it. At any rate, a second embassy soon followed the first, with a fresh requirement ; and a third followed the second. The policy was successful, and at last Taa- ken took up arms. It would seem that he was suc- cessful, or was at any rate able to hold his own ; for he maintained the war till his death, and left it to his successor, Aahmes. There was an ancient tradition, that the king who made Joseph his prime minister, and committed into his hands the entire administration of Egypt, was Apepi. George the Syncellus says that the synchron- ism was accepted by all. It is clear that Joseph's arrival did not fall, like Abraham's, into the period of the Old Empire, since under Joseph horses and chariots are in use, as well as wagons or carts, all of which were unknown till after the Hyksos invasion. It is also more natural that Joseph, a foreigner, should have been advanced by a foreign king than by a native one, and the favour shown to his brethren, who were shepherds (Gen. xlvi. 32), is consonant at any rate with the tradition that it was a " Shepherd King" who held the throne at the time of their rr 146 THE GREAT INVASION. arrival. A priest of Heliopolis, moreover, would scarcely have given Joseph his daughter in marriage unless at a time when the priesthood was in a state of depression. Add to this that the Pharaoh of Joseph is evidently resident in Lower Egypt, not at Thebes, which was the seat of government for many hundred years both before and after the Hyksos rule. If, however, we are to place Joseph under one of the " Shepherd Kings," there can be no reason why we should not accept the tradition which connects him with Apepi. Apepi was dominant over the whole of Egypt, as Joseph's Pharaoh seems to have been. He acknowledged a single god, as did that monarch (Gen. xli. 38, 39). He was a thoroughly Egyptianized king. He had a council of learned scribes, a magni- ficent court, and a peaceful reign until towards its close. His residence was in the Delta, either at Tanis or Auaris. He was a prince of a strong will, firm and determined ; one who did not shrink from initiating great changes, and who carried out his resolves in a somewhat arbitrary way. The arguments in favour of his identity with Joseph's master are, perhaps, not wholly conclusive ; but they raise a presumption, which may well incline us, with most modern his- torians of Egypt, to assign the touching story of Joseph to the reign of the last of the Shepherds. IX. HOW THE HYKSOS WERE EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. At first sight it seems strange that the terrible warriors who, under Set or Sai'tes, so easily reduced Egypt to subjection, and then still further weakened the population by massacre and oppression, should have been got rid of, after two centuries or two cen- turies and a half, with such comparative ease. But the rapid deterioration of conquering races under cer- tain circumstances is a fact familiar to the historian. Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, rapidly succeeded each other as the dominant power in Western Asia, each race growing weaker and becoming exhausted, after a longer or a shorter interval, through nearly the same causes. Nor are the reasons for the deterioration far to seek. Each race when it sets out upon its career of conquest is active, energetic, inured to warlike habits, simple in its manners, or at any rate simpler than those which it conquers, and, comparatively speaking, poor. It is urged on by the desire of bettering its condition. If it meets with a considerable resistance, if the conquest occupies a long space, and the conquered are with difficulty held under, rebelling from time to time, and making frantic efforts to throw off the yoke 3^8 HYKSOS EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. which galls and frets them, then the warlike habits of the conquerors are kept up, and their dominion may continue for several centuries. Or, if the nation is very energetic and unresting, not content with its earlier conquests, or willing to rest upon its oars, but continually seeking out fresh enemies upon its borders, and regarding war as the normal state of its existence, then the centuries may be prolonged into millennia, and it may be long indeed before any tendency to decline shows itself ; but, ordinarily, there is no very prolonged resistance on the one side, and no very constant and unresting energy on the other. A poor and hardy people, having swooped down upon one that is softer and more civilized, easily carries all before it, acquires the wealth and luxury which it desires, and being content with them, seeks for nothing further, but assimilates itself by degrees to the character and condition of the people whom it has conquered. A standing army, disposed in camps and garrisons, may be kept up ; but if there is a ces- sation of actual war even for a generation, the seve- rity of military discipline will become relaxed, the use of arms will grow unfamiliar, the physical type will decline, the belligerent spirit will die away, and the conquerors of a century ago will have lost all the qualities which secured them success when they made their attack, and have sunk to the level of their sub- jects. When this point is reached, thoughts of rebel- lion are apt to arise in the hearts of these latter ; the old terror which made the conqueror appear irre- sistible is gone, and is perhaps succeeded by contempt —the subjects feel that they have at least the ad van- POSITION OF THEBES UNDER THEM. 149 rage of numbers on their side ; they have also pro- bably been leading harder and more bracing lives; they see that, man for man, they are physically stronger than their conquerors ; and at last they rebel, and are successful. * In Egypt there was, further, this peculiarity — the conquered people occupied two entirely distinct posi- tions. In the Delta, the Fayoum, and the northern Nile valley, they were completely reduced, and lived intermixed with their conquerors, a despised class, suffering more or less of oppression. In Upper Egypt the case was different. There the people had sub- mitted in a certain sense, acknowledged the Hyksos monarchs as their suzerains, and indicated their sub- jection by the payment of an annual tribute ; but they retained their own native princes, their own adminis- tration and government, their own religion, their own laws ; they did not live intermixed with the new comers ; they were not subject to daily insult or ill- treatment ; the fact that they paid a tribute did not hinder their preserving their self-respect, and conse- quently they suffered neither moral nor physical deterioration. Further, it would seem to have been possible for them to engage in wars on their own account with the races living further up the Nile, or with the wild tribes of the desert, and thus to maintain warlike habits among themselves, while the Hyksos were becoming unaccustomed to them. The Ra- Sekenens of Thebes, who called themselves " great " and " very great," had probably built up a considerable power in Upper Egypt during the reigns of the later " Shepherd Kings ; " had improved their military 150 HYKSOS EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. system by the adoption of the horse and the chariot, which the Hyksos had introduced ; had practised their people in arms, and acquired a reputation as warriors. More particularly must this have been the case with Ra-Sekenen III., the contemporary of Apepi. Ra- Sekenen the Third called himself " the great victorious Taa." He surrounded himself withacouncil of "mighty chiefs, captains, and expert leaders." He acquired so much repute, that he provoked Apepi's jealousy before he had in any way transgressed the duties which he owed him as a feudatory. In the long negotiation between the two, of which the " First Sallier Papyrus " gives an account, it is evident that, while Ra-Sekenen has committed no act whereof Apepi has any right to complain, he has awoke in him feelings of such hos- tility, that Apepi will be content with nothing less than either unqualified submission to every demand that he chooses to make, or war d ontrance. Never was a subject monarch more goaded and driven into rebellion against his inclination by over-bearing con- duct on the part of his suzerain than was Ra-Sekenen by the last " Shepherd King." The disinclination of himself and his court to fight is almost ludicrous : they " are silent and in great dismay ; they know not how to answer the messenger sent to them, good or ill." Ra-Sekenen, powerful as he had become, " victorious " as he may have been against Libyans and negroes, and even Cushites, dreaded exceedingly to engage in a struggle with the redoubted people which, two centuries previously, had shown itself so irresistible. WAR FORCED UPON RA-SEKENEN. 151 It would seem, however, that he was forced to take up arms at last. We have, unfortunately, no descrip- tion of the war which followed, so far as it was con- ducted by this monarch. But it is evident that Apepi was completely disappointed in his hope of crushing the rising native power before it had grown too strong. He had in fact delayed too late. Ra- Sekenen, compelled to defend himself against his aggressive suzerain, raised the standard of national independence, invited aid from all parts of Egypt, and succeeded in bringing a large army into the field. At the first he simply held his own against Apepi, but by degrees he was able to do more. The Hyksos, who marched against Thebes, found enemies rise up against them in their rear, as first one and then another native chief declared against them in this or that city ; their difficulties continually increased ; they had to re-descend the Nile valley and to concen- trate their forces nearer home. But each year they lost ground. First the Fayoum was yielded, then Memphis, then Tanis. At last nothing remained to the invaders but their great fortified camp, Uar or Auaris, which they had established at the time of their arrival upon the eastern frontier, and had ever since kept up. In this district, which was strongly fortified by walls and moats, and watered by canals derived from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, they had concentrated themselves, we are told, to the number of 240,000 men, determined to make there a final stand against the Egyptians. It was when affairs were in this position that Ra- Sekenen died, and was succeeded by a king of a 152 HYKSOS EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. different family, the first monarch of the " Eighteenth Dynasty," Aahmes. Aahmes was a prince of great force of character, brave, active, energetic, liberal, beloved by his subjects. He addressed himself at once to the task of completing the liberation of his country by dislodging the Hyksos from Auaris, and driving them beyond his borders. With this object he collected a force, which is said to have amounted to nearly half a million of men, and at the same time placed a flotilla of ships upon the Nile, which was of the greatest service in his later operations. Auaris was not only defended by broad moats connected with the waters of the Nile, but also bordered upon a lake, or perhaps rather a lagoon, of considerable dimensions. Hence it was necessary that it should be attacked not only by land, but also by water. Aahmes seems to have commanded the land forces in person, riding in a war-chariot, the first of which we have distinct mention. A favourite officer, who bore the same name as his master, accompanied him, sometimes marching at his side as he rode in his chariot, sometimes taking his place in one of the war- vessels, and directing the movements of the fleet After a time formal siege was laid to Auaris ; the fleet was ordered to attack the walls on the side of the lagoon, while the land force was engaged in battering the defences elsewhere. Assaults were made day after day with only partial success ; but at last the defenders were wearied out — a panic seized them, and, hastily evacuating the place, they retired towards Syria, the quarter from which they had originally come. Aahmes may have been willing AAHMES TAKES AUARIS. 153 that they should escape ; since, if they had been completely blocked in and driven to bay, they might have made a desperate resistance, and caused the Egyptians an enormous loss. He followed, however, upon their footsteps, to make sure that they did not settle anywhere in his neighbourhood, and was not content till they had crossed the desert and entered the hill country of Palestine. Even then he still hung upon their rear, harassing them and cutting off their stragglers ; finally, when they made a stand at Sharuhen in Southern Palestine, he laid siege to the town, took it, and made a great slaughter of the hapless defenders. The war did not terminate until the fifth year of Aahmes' reign. Its result was the complete defeat of the invading hordes which had held Lower and Middle Egypt for so long, and their expulsion from Egypt with such ignominy and loss that they made no effort to retaliate or to recover themselves. Vast numbers must have been slain in the battles, or have perished amid the hardships of the retreat ; and many thousands were, no doubt, made prisoners and carried back into Egypt as slaves. It is thought that these captives were so numerous as to become an important element in the population of the eastern Delta, and even to modify the character of the Egyptian race in that quarter. The lively imagination of M. Francois Lenormant sees their descendants in the " strange people, with robust limbs, an elongated face, and a severe expression, which to this day inhabits the tract bordering on Lake Menzaleh." J 1 "Manuel d'Histoire Ancienne de l'Orient," vol. i. p. 368. 154 HYKSOS EXPELLED FROM EGYPT. It is probable that Aahmes had for allies in his war with the " Shepherds " the great nation which adjoined Egypt on the south, and which was continually grow- ing in power — the Kashi, Cushites, or Ethiopians. His wife appears by her features and complexion to have been a Cushite princess, and the marriage is likely to have been less one of inclination than of policy. The Egyptians admired fair women rather than dark ones, as is plain from the unduly light complexions which the artists, in their desire to flatter, ordinarily assign to women, as well as from the attrac- tiveness of Sarah, even in advanced age. When a Theban king contracted marriage with an Ethiopian of ebon blackness, we are entitled to assume a political motive ; and the most probable political motive under the circumstances of the time was the desire for military assistance. Though in the early wars be- tween the Kashi and the Egyptians the prowess of the former is not represented as great, and the desig- nation of " miserable Cushites " is evidently used in depreciation of their warlike qualities, yet the very use of the epithet implies a feeling of hostility which could scarcely have been provoked by a weak people And the Cushites certainly advanced in prowess and in military vigour as time went on. They formed the most important portion of the Egyptian troops for some centuries ; at a later period they conquered Egypt, and were the dominant power for a hundred years ; still further on, they defied the might of Persia when Egypt succumbed to it. Aahmes, in contracting his marriage with the Ethiopian princess, to whom he gave the name of Nefertari-Aahmes — or HEAD OF NEFERTARI-AAHMES AAIIMES HELPED BY THE CUSHITES. 157 " the good companion of Aahmes" — was, we may be tolerably sure, bent on obtaining a contingent of those stalwart troops whose modern representatives are either the Blacks of the Soudan or the Gallas of the highlands of Abyssinia. The " Shepherds " thus yielded to a combination of the North with the South, of the Egyptians with the Ethiopians, such as in later times, on more than one occasion, drove the Assyrians out of the country. X. THOTHMES I., THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. THOTHMES I. was the grandson of the Aahmes who drove out the Hyksos. He had thus heredi- tary claims to valour and military distinction. The Ethiopian blood which flowed in his veins through his grandmother, Nefertari-Aahmes, may have given him an additional touch of audacity, and certainly showed itself in his countenance, where the short depressed nose and the unduly thick lips are of the Cushite rather than of the Egyptian type. His father, Amen-hotep I., was a somewhat undistin- guished prince; so that here, as so often, where superior talent runs in a family, it seems to have skipped a generation, and to have leapt from the grand- sire to the grandson. Thothmes began his military career by an invasion of the countries upon the Upper Nile, which were still in an unsettled state, notwith- standing the campaigns which had been carried on, and the victories which had been gained in them, during the two preceding reigns, by King Aahmes, and by the generals of Amen-hotep. He placed a flotilla of ships upon the Nile above the Second Cataract, and supporting it with his land forces on ACCESSION OF THOTHMES I. 159 either side of the river, advanced from Semneh, the boundary established by Usurtasen III., which is in lat. 21 50' to Tombos, in lat. 19°, conquering the tribes, Nubian and Cushite, as he proceeded, and from time to time distinguishing himself in personal combats with his enemies. On one occasion, we are told, "his majesty became more furious than a panther," and placing an arrow on his bowstring, BUST OF TIIOTHMEs I. directed it against the Nubian chief so surely that it struck him, and remained fixed in his knee, where- upon the chief " fell fainting down before the royal diadem." He was at once seized and made a prisoner ; his followers were defeated and dispersed ; and he himself, together with others, was carried off on board the royal ship, hanging with his head downwards, to the royal palace at the capital. This victory was the l6o THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. precursor of others ; everywhere " the Petti of Nubia were hewed in pieces, and scattered all over their lands," till " their stench filled the valleys." At last a general submission was made, and a large tract of territory was ceded. The Egyptian terminus was pushed on from the twenty-second parallel to the nineteenth, and at Tombos, beyond Dongola, an inscription was set up, at once to mark the new frontier, and to hand down to posterity the glory of the conquering monarch. The inscription still remains, and is couched in inflated terms, which show a departure from the old official style. Thothmes declares that " he has taken tribute from the nations of the North, and from the nations of the South, as well as from those of the whole earth; he has laid hold of the barbarians ; he has not let a single one of them escape his gripe upon their hair ; the Petti of Nubia have fallen beneath his blows ; he has made their waters to flow backwards ; he has overflowed their valleys like a deluge, like waters which mount and mount. He has resembled Horus, when he took possession of his eternal kingdom ; all the countries included within the circumference of the entire earth are prostrate under his feet." Having effected his conquest, Thothmes sought to secure it by the ap- pointment of a new officer, who was to govern the newly-annexed country under the title of " Prince of Cush," and was to have his ordinary residence at Semneh. Flushed with his victories in this quarter, and intoxicated with the delight of conquest, Thothmes, on his return to Thebes, raised his thoughts to a still HOW MOVED TO INVADE ASIA. l6l grander and more adventurous enterprize. Egypt had a great wrong to avenge, a huge disgrace to wipe out. She had been invaded, conquered, plundered, by an enemy whom she had not provoked by any aggression ; she had seen her cities laid in ashes, her temples torn down and demolished, the images of her gods broken to pieces, her soil dyed with her children's blood ; she had been trampled under the iron heel of the conqueror for centuries ; she had been exhausted by the payment of taxes and tribute ; she had had to bow the knee, and lick the dust under the conqueror's feet — was not retribution needed for all this ? True, she had at last risen up and expelled her enemy, she had driven him beyond her borders, and he seemed content to acquiesce in his defeat, and to trouble her no more ; but was this enough ? Did not the law of eternal justice require something more t " Nee lex justior ulla est, Quam necis artifices arte perire sua." Was it not proper, fitting, requisite for the honour of Egypt, that there should be retaliation, that the aggressor should suffer what he had inflicted, should be attacked in his own country, should be made to feel the grief, the despair, the rage, the shame, that he had forced Egypt to feel for so many years ; should expiate his guilt by a penalty, not only proportioned to the offence, but its exact counterpart ? Such thoughts, we may be sure, burned in the mind of the young warrior, when, having secured Egypt on the south, he turned his attention to the north, and asked himself the question how he should next employ the power 12 1 62 THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. that he had inherited, and the talents with which nature had endowed him. It is uncertain what amount of knowledge the Egyptians of the time possessed concerning the in- ternal condition, population, and resources, of the continent which adjoined them on the north-east. We cannot say whether Thothmes and his counsellors could, or could not, bring before their mind's eye a fairly correct view of the general position of Asiatic affairs, and form a reasonable estimate of the pro- babilities of success or discomfiture, if a great ex- pedition were led into the heart of Asia. Whatever may have been their knowledge or ignorance, it will be necessary for the historical student of the present day to have some general ideas on the subject, if he is to form an adequate conception either of the dangers which Thothmes affronted, or of the amount of credit due to him for his victories. We propose, therefore, in the present place, to glance our eye over the previous history of Western Asia, and to describe, so far as is possible, its condition at the time when Thothmes began to contemplate the invasion which it is his great glory to have accomplished. Western Asia is generally allowed to have been the cradle of the human race. Its more fertile portions were thickly peopled at a very early date. Monarchy, it is probable, first grew up in Babylonia, towards the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates. But it was not long ere a sister kingdom established itself in Susiana, or Elam, the fertile tract between the Lower Tigris and the Zagros mountains. The ambition of con- quest first showed itself in this latter country, whence STATE OF ASIA AT THE TIME. 1 63 Kudur-Nakhunta, about B.C. 2300, made an attack on Erech, and Chedor-laomer (about B.C. 2000) established an empire which extended from the Zagros mountains on the one hand to the shores of the Mediterranean on the other (Gen. xiv. 1-4) Shortly after this, a third power, that of the Hittites, grew up towards the north, chiefly perhaps in Asia Minor, but with a tendency to project itself southward into the Mesopotamian region. Upper Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, were at this time inhabited by weak tribes, each under its own chief, with no co- herence, and no great military spirit. The chief of these tribes, at the time when Thothmes I. ascended the Egyptian throne, were the Rutennu in Syria, and the Nahari or Nairi in Upper Mesopotamia. The two monarchies of the south, Elam and Babylon were not in a flourishing condition, and exercised no suzerainty beyond their own natural limits. They were, in fact, a check upon each other, constantly engaged in feuds and quarrels, which prevented either from maintaining an extended sway for more than a few years. Assyria had not yet acquired any great distinction, though it was probably independent, and ruled by monarchs who dwelt at Asshur (Kileh- Sherghat). The Hittites, about B.C. 1900, had received a severe check from the Babylonian monarch, Sargon, and had withdrawn themselves into their northern fortresses. Thus the circumstances of the time were, on the whole, favourable to the enterprize of Thothmes. No great organized monarchy was likely to take the field against him, or to regard itself as concerned to interfere with the execution of his projects, unless 164 THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. they assumed extraordinary dimensions. So long as he did not proceed further north than Taurus, or further east than the western Khabour, the great affluent of the Euphrates, he would come into contact with none of the " great powers " of the time ; he would have, at the worst, to contend with loose confederacies of tribes, distrustful of each other, un- accustomed to act together, and, though brave, possessing no discipline or settled military organiza- tion. At the same time, his adversaries must not be regarded as altogether contemptible. The Philistines and Canaanites in Palestine, the Arabs of the Sinaitic and Syrian deserts, the Rutennu of the Lebanon and of Upper Syria, the Nai'ri of the western Mesopo- tamian region, were individually brave men, were inured to warfare, had a strong love of independence, and were likely to resist with energy any attempt to bring them under subjection. They were also, most of them, well acquainted with the value of the horse for military service, and could bring into the field a number of war-chariots, with riders well accustomed to their management. Egypt had only recently added the horse to the list of its domesticated animals, and followed the example of the Asiatics by or- ganizing a chariot force. It was open to doubt whether this new and almost untried corps would be able to cope with the experienced chariot-troops of Asia. The country also in which military operations were to be carried on was a difficult one. It consisted mainly of alternate mountain and desert. First, the sandy waste called El Tij— the " Wilderness of the DESCRIPTION OF THE TOPOGRAPHY. IV>5 Wanderings " — had to be passed, a tract almost wholly without water, where an army must carry its own supply. Next, the high upland of the Negeb would present itself, a region wherein water may be pro- cured from wells, and which in some periods of the world's history has been highly cultivated, but which in the time of Thothmes was probably almost as unproductive as the desert itself. Then would come the green rounded hills, the lofty ridges, and the deep gorges of Palestine, untraversed by any road, in places thickly wooded, and offering continually greater obstacles to the advance of an army, as it stretched further and further towards the north. From Palestine the Lebanon region would have to be entered on, where, though the Ccele-Syrian valley presents a comparatively easy line of march to the latitude of Antioch, the country on either side of the valley is almost untraversable, while the valley itself contains many points where it can be easily blocked by a small force. The Orontes, moreover, and the Litany, are difficult to cross, and in the time of Thothmes I. would be unbridged, and form no contemptible obstacles. From the lower valley of the Orontes, first mountains and then a chalky desert had to be crossed in order to reach the Euphrates, which could only be passed in boats, or else by swimming. Beyond the Euphrates was another dreary and in- fertile region, the tract about Haran, where Crassus lost his army and his life. How far Thothmes and his counsellors were aware of these topographical difficulties, or of the general con- dition of Western Asia, it is, as already observed, im- l66 THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. possible to determine. But, on the whole, there are reasons for believing that intercourse between nation and nation was, even in very early times, kept up, and that each important country had its " intelligence department," which was not badly served. Merchants, refugees, spies, adventurers desirous of bettering their condition, were continually moving, singly or in bodies, from one land to another, and through them a consi- derable acquaintance with mundane affairs generally was spread abroad. The knowledge was, of course, very inexact. No surveys were made, no plans of cities or fortresses, no maps ; the military force that could be brought into the field by the several nations was very roughly estimated ; but still, ancient con- querors did not start off on their expeditions wholly in the dark as to the forces which they might have to encounter, or the difficulties which were likely to beset their march. Thothmes probably set out on his expedition into Asia in about his sixth or seventh year. He was accompanied by two officers, who had served his father and his grandfather, known respectively as " Aahmes, son of Abana," and " Aahmes Pennishem." Both of them had been engaged in the war which he had conducted against the Petti of Nubia and their Ethiopian allies, and both had greatly distinguished themselves. Aahmes, the son of Abana, boasts that he seven times received the prize of valour — a collar of gold — for his conduct in the field ; and Aahmes Pennishem gives a list of twenty-nine presents given to him as military rewards by three kings. It does not appear that any resistance was offered to the INVASION OF ASIA. 167 invading force as it passed through Palestine ; but in Syria Thothmes engaged the Rutennu, and " exacted satisfaction " from them, probably on account of the part which they had taken in the Hyksos struggle ; after which he crossed the Euphrates and fell upon the far more powerful nation of the NaTri. The NaTri, when first attacked by the Assyrians, had twenty-three cities, and as many kings ; they were rich in horses and mules, and had so large a chariot force that we hear of a hundred and twenty chariots being taken from them in a single battle. At this time the number of the chariots was probably much smaller, for each of the two officers named Ahmes takes great credit to himself on account of the capture of one such vehicle. It is uncertain whether more than a single battle was fought. All that we are told is, that " His Majesty, having arrived in Naharina " (i.e. the NaTri country), " encountered the enemy, and organized an attack. His Majesty made a great slaughter of them ; an im- mense number of live captives was carried off by His Majesty." These words would apply equally to a single battle and to a series of battles. All that can be said is, that Thothmes returned victorious from his Asiatic expedition, having defeated the Rutennu and the NaTri, and brought with him into Egypt a goodly booty, and a vast number of Asiatic prisoners. The warlike ambition of Thothmes I. was satisfied by his Nubian and Asiatic victories. On his return to Egypt at the close of his Mesopotamian campaign, he engaged in the peaceful work of adorning and beautifying his capital cities. At Thebes he greatly enlarged the temple of Ammon, begun by Amenem- 1 68 THE FIRST GREAT EGYPTIAN CONQUEROR. hat I., and continued under his son, the first Usurtasen, by adding to it the cloistered court in front of the central cell — a court two hundred and forty feet long by sixty-two broad, surrounded by a colonnade, of which the supports were Osirid pillars, or square piers with a statue of Osiris in front. This is the first known example of the cloistered court, which became afterwards so common ; though it is possible that constructions of a similar character may have been made by the " Shepherd Kings " at Tanis. Thoth- mes also adorned this temple with obelisks. In front of the main entrance to his court he erected two vast monoliths of granite, each of them seventy-five feet in height, and bearing dedicatory inscriptions, which indicated his piety and his devotion to all the chief deities of Egypt. Further, at Memphis he built a new royal palace, which he called " The Abode of Aa-khepr-ka-ra," a grand building, afterwards converted into a magazine for the storage of grain. The greatness of Thothmes I. has scarcely been sufficiently recognized by historians. It may be true that he did not effect much ; but he broke ground in a new direction ; he set an example which led on to grand results. To him it was due that Egypt ceased to be the isolated, unaggressive power that she had re- mained for perhaps ten centuries, that she came boldly to the front and aspired to bring Asia into subjection. Henceforth she exercised a potent influence beyond her borders— an influence which affected, more or less, all the western Asiatic powers. She had forced her way into the comity of the great nations. Henceforth, GREATNESS OF THOTHMES I i6g whether it was for good or for evil, she had to take her place among them, to reckon with them, as they reckoned with her, to be a factor in the problem which the ages had to work out — What should be the general march of events, and what states and nations should most affect the destiny of the world. XL QUEEN HATASU AND HER MERCHANT FLEET. HASHEPS, or Hatasu, was the daughter of the great warrior king, Thothmes the First, and, according to some, was, during his later years, associated with him in the government. An inscription is quoted in which he assigns to her her throne-name of Ra-ma-ka, and calls her " Queen of the South and of the North." But it was not till after the death of her father that she came prominently forward, and assumed a position not previously held by any female in Egypt, unless it were Net-akret (Nitocris). Women in Egypt had been, it is true, from very early times held in high estimation, were their husbands' companions, not their playthings or their slaves, appeared freely in public, and enjoyed much liberty of action. One of the ancient mythical monarchs, of the time before Sneferu, is said to have passed a law permitting them to exercise the sove- reign authority. Nitocris of the sixth dynasty of Manetho ruled, apparently, as sole queen ; and Sabak- nefru-ra of the twelfth, the wife of Amenemhat IV., reigned for some years conjointly with her husband. Hatasu's position was intermediate between these. Her father had left behind him two sons, as well as a daughter ; and the elder of these, according to Egyp- HEAD OF T1IOTHMES II. HF.AD OF HATASU. HATASU AS REGENT FOR THOTHMES II. 1 73 tian law, succeeded him. He reigned as Thothmes- nefer-shau, and is known to moderns as Thothmes the Second. He was, however, a mere youth, of a weak and amiable temper ; while Hatasu, his senior by some years, was a woman of great energy and of a masculine mind, clever, enterprizing, vindictive, and unscrupulous. The contrast of their portrait busts is remarkable, and gives a fair indication of the character of each of them. Thothmes has the appearance of a soft and yielding boy : he has a languishing eye, a short upper lip, a sensuous mouth and chin. Hatasu looks the Amazon : she holds her head erect, has a bold aquiline nose, a firmly-set mouth, and a chin that projects considerably, giving her an indescribable air of vigour and resolution. The effect is increased, no doubt, by her having attached to it the male appen- dage of an artificial beard ; but even apart from this, her face would be a strong one, expressive of firmness, pride, and decision. It is thought that she contracted a marriage with her brother, such unions being admissible by the Egyptian marriage law, and not infrequent among the Pharaohs, whether of the earlier or the later dynasties. In any case, it is certain that she took the direction of affairs under his reign, reducing him to a cipher, and making her influence paramount in every department of the government. At this period of her life the ambition of Queen Hatasu was to hand her name down to posterity as a constructor of buildings. She made many additions to the old temple of Ammon at Karnak ; and she also built at Medinet Abou, in the vicinity of Thebes, a temple of a more elaborate character than any that 174 QUEEN HATASU AND HER MERCHANT FLEET. had preceded it, the remains of which are still standing, and have attracted much attention from architects. Egyptian temple-architecture is here seen tentatively making almost its first advances from the simple cell of Usurtasen I. towards that richness of com- plication and multiplicity of parts which it ulti- mately reached. Pylons, courts, corridors supported by columns, pillared apartments, meet us here in their earliest germ ; while there are also indica- tions of constructive weakness, which show that the builders were aspiring to go beyond previous models. The temple is cruciform in shape, but the two arms of the cross are unequal. In front, two pylons of moderate dimensions, not exceeding twenty-four feet in height, and built with the usual sloping sides and strongly projecting cornice, guarded a doorway which gave entrance into a court, sixty feet long by thirty broad. At the further end of the court stood a porch, thirty feet long and nine deep, supported by four square stone piers, emplaced at equal distances. The porch led into the cell, a long, narrow chamber of extreme plainness, about twenty-five feet long by nine wide, with a doorway at either end. At either side of the cell were corridors, supported, like the porch, by square piers, and roofed in by blocks of stone from nine to ten feet long. These blocks have in some instances shown signs of giving way ; and, to counter- act the tendency, octagonal pillars have been intro- duced at the weak points, without regard to exact regularity or correspondence. Behind the cell are chambers for the officiating priests, which are six in number, and on either side of the porch are also ZLtC in J*\ n a — vJ Li \J Ln_ o 3 o ^i a u © a o o G Q