A. H. Sayce

“ The annual festival in honour of Isis was observed all over Egypt in the same way.
As the Greek traveller approached Memphis the pyramids of Gizeh were shown to him towering over the water on his right. His visit to them was reserved to another day, and he continued to sail on to the ancient capital of the country. Memphis was still in all its glory. Its lofty walls of crude brick, painted white, shone in the sun, and its great temple of Ptah still preserved the monuments and records of the early dynasties of Egypt. ”

“ The wooden figure of the 'Sheikh el-Beled'—the sleek and well-to-do farmer, who gazes complacently on his fertile fields and well-stocked farm—is one of the noblest works of human genius. And yet it belongs to the age of the fifth or the sixth dynasty, like the pictures in low relief, resembling exquisite embroidery on stone, [pg 011] which cover the walls of the tombs of Ti and Ptah-hotep at Saqqârah.
The first six dynasties constitute what Egyptologists call the Old Empire. They ended with a queen, Nit-aqer (the Greek Nitôkris) , and Egypt passed under sudden eclipse. ”

“ Athens has taken its place as leader not only in art and literature, but also in war, and under the shelter of her name the Ionians of Asia Minor have ventured to defy their Persian lord, and the Ionic dialect has ceased to be an object of contempt. The Greek, always restless and curious to see and hear “some new thing,” is now beginning to indulge his tastes at leisure, and to visit as a tourist the foreign shores of the Mediterranean. Art has leaped at a single bound to its perfection in the sculptures of Pheidias ”

“ When Herodotos visited it, it had lost none of its architectural magnificence. He saw there the palace from which Apries had gone forth to attack Amasis, and to which he returned a prisoner; the great temple of Neit, with its rows of sphinxes and its sacred lake; and the huge naos of granite which two thousand men spent three whole years in bringing from Assuan. It had been left just outside the enclosure within which the temple stood, as well as the tombs of Apries and Amasis, and even of the god Osiris himself. ”

“ Hardly is it over before the native population joins in one great body the new religion. Osiris and Isis make way for Christ and the Blessed Virgin, the Coptic alphabet replaces the demotic script of heathenism, and the bodies of the dead cease to be embalmed. It is difficult to account for the suddenness and completeness of the change. The decay of the Roman power, and therewith the barriers between Greek and Egyptian, may have had something to do with it. So too may the revolt in Upper Egypt, which united in one common feeling of nationality all the elements of the population. ”

“ The Asiatic empire of Egypt is falling to pieces, its enemies are enclosing it on every side; the Hittites have robbed it of its northern provinces, and revolt is shaking it from within. The governors and vassals of the Pharaoh send more and more urgent requests for instant aid: “If troops come this year, then there will remain both provinces and governors to the king, my lord; but if no troops come, no provinces or governors will remain.” ”

“ Menes, its founder, had been king of This (or Girgeh) in Upper Egypt, and starting from his ancestral dominions had succeeded in bringing all Egypt under his rule. But the memory of an earlier time, when the valley of the Nile was divided into two separate sovereignties, survived to the latest age of the monarchy. Up to the last the Pharaohs of Egypt called themselves “kings of the two lands,” and wore on their heads the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. The crown of Upper Egypt was a tiara of white linen, that of Lower Egypt a throne-like head-dress of red. ”

“ Under the Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, Egypt, for the first time in its history, became a great military state. Army after army [pg 016] poured out of the gates of Thebes, and brought back to it the spoils of the known world. Ethiopia and Syria alike felt the tread of the Egyptian armies, and had alike to bow the neck to Egyptian rule. Canaan became an Egyptian province, Egyptian garrisons were established in the far north on the frontiers of the Hittite tribes, and the boundaries of the Pharaoh's empire were pushed to the banks of the Euphrates. ”

“ The old attempts to form artificial schemes of chronology—which, however, satisfied no one but their authors—upon the supposition that some of the dynasties reigned together are now discredited for ever. Every fresh discovery made in Egypt, which adds to our knowledge of ancient Egyptian history, makes the fact still more certain. There were epochs, indeed, when more than one line of kings claimed sway in the valley of the Nile, but when such was the case, Manetho selected what he or his authorities considered the sole legitimate dynasty, and disregarded every other. ”

“ But Herodotos was never at Thebes, and had consequently never heard of the superb temple and palace Ramses had built there. All that he knows of the architectural works of the Pharaoh are the insignificant additions he made to the temple of Memphis. Of the real Pharaoh he is equally ignorant. In place of the vanquisher of the hordes of the north, the monarch who annihilated the invaders from the Ægean and captured or sunk their ships, the conqueror who carried his arms into Palestine and Syria, we have the hero of a folk-tale. ”

“ In Judah and Assyria we are dealing with history, in the story of Sethos with a folk-tale, and it is impossible therefore not to believe that the conduct of the priest of Ptah has been modelled upon that of Hezekiah and Assur-bani-pal. The basis of it is Semitic rather than Egyptian; it would have been told more appropriately of Sennacherib than of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Perhaps it had its source among the Phœnicians of the Tyrian camp at Memphis, or even among the Egyptianised Jews who carried Jeremiah into Egypt. Whatever may have been its origin, it does not belong to the realm of history. ”

“ Abu-Simbel, indeed, where a mountain has been hollowed into a temple, and a cliff carved into the likeness of four sitting figures, each with an unrivalled expression of divine calm upon its countenance, justly claims to be one of the wonders of the world. ”

“ In jewellery, as in all things else in ancient Egypt, the earlier art is the best.
From Amon-em-hat iii. of the twelfth dynasty to the founder of the twenty-sixth, two thousand years later, is a far cry, and how the Labyrinth came to be connected with the latter by the guides of Herodotos it is hard to say. The bronze helmet of Psammetikhos indicates that the story is of Greek origin. That was a Greek head-dress; no Egyptian, much less an Egyptian Pharaoh, would ever have worn it. The head-dress of the Egyptian monarch was of linen, coloured red for Lower Egypt, white for the south. ”

“ But the age of the twentieth dynasty was still distant when Jacob and his sons journeyed into Egypt, or even when his descendants, under the leadership of Moses, succeeded in escaping from the land of their slavery. Before that age arrived more than one revolution was destined to pass over the valley of the Nile, which had momentous consequences for the foreign settlers in Goshen. The Hyksos were driven back into Asia, and a united Egypt once more obeyed the rule of a native Pharaoh. ”

“ Herodotos must have reached Egypt in the summer. When he arrived, the whole of the Delta was under water. He describes with the vividness of an eye-witness how its towns appeared above the surface of the water, like the islands in the Ægean, and how the traveller could sail, not along the river, but across the plain. At the time of the inundation, he says, all Egypt “becomes a sea, above which the villages alone show themselves.” The voyage from Naukratis to Memphis was direct and rapid, and the tourists in making it passed by the pyramids instead of the apex of the Delta. ”

“ Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all things!” One of Khu-n-Aten's officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in similar terms: “Thou, O god, who in truth art the [pg 056] living one, standest before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth.”
The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the worship of Baal with the philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the worship of the Egyptian Sun-god, Ra, at Heliopolis. ”

“ Canaan was the country in which the two streams of Babylonian and Egyptian culture met together, and we now know that Canaan was the centre of that literary activity which the Tel el-Amarna tablets have revealed to us. Canaan, in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, was emphatically the land of scribes and letter-writers. If libraries existed anywhere in Western Asia, they would surely have done so in the cities of Canaan. ”

“ It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war. But the priesthood proved too strong for the king. He quitted the capital of his fathers and built himself a new city farther north. It is the site of this city which is now covered by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna.
Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. ”

“ Egypt ceases to be isolated: its history will be henceforth part of the history of the world. Foreign wars, however, and the organisation of a strong government at home, did not absorb the whole energies of the court. Temples and obelisks were erected, art was patronised, and the creation of the Fayyûm, whereby a large tract of fertile land was won for Egypt, not only proved the high engineering skill of the age of the twelfth dynasty, but constituted a solid claim for gratitude to its creator, Amon-em-hat iii., on the part of all succeeding generations. ”

“ We are reading in the story a Greek tragedy rather than a history of Egypt.
It was part of the punishment of Mykerinos that he should lose his daughter, and the dragomen thus managed to connect the pyramid at Gizeh with a gilded wooden image of a cow in the palace at Sais, which, since the reign of Psammetikhos, must have been well-known to them. The cow, which was really a symbol of Neit in the form of Hathor, with what Herodotos supposed to be the disk of the sun between its horns, though it was really the moon, was imagined to be hollow, and to be the coffin of the daughter of the Pharaoh. ”

“ Egypt preserved its independence. More than once the Persians sought to recover it, but they were foiled by the Spartan allies of the Pharaoh or by the good fortune of the Egyptians. But civil feuds and cowardice sapped the strength of the Egyptian resistance. Greek mercenaries and sailors now fought in the ranks of the Persians as well as in those of the Egyptians, and the result of the struggle between Persia and Egypt was in great measure dependent on the amount of pay the two sides could afford to give them. ”

“ It is a proof that the Amorite population in southern Palestine was still strong in the days of Rehoboam and Shishak. The Jews would have been predominant only in Jerusalem and the larger cities and fortresses of the kingdom. Elsewhere the older race survived with all its characteristic features; the Israelitish conquest had never rooted it out. Hence it is that it still lives and flourishes in its ancient home. The traveller in the country districts of Judah looks in vain for traces of the Jewish race, but he may still see there the Amorite just as he is depicted on the monuments of Egypt. ”

“ But the whole story was an invention of the dragomen. The disintegration of the crude brick of which the houses of Egypt are built makes them quickly decay and give place to other buildings, which are erected on the mound they have formed. As the city grows in age, so does the tel or mound whereon it stands grow in height, and had Herodotos travelled in Upper Egypt he would have seen the process going on under his eyes. In the Delta, moreover, there was a special cause for the great height of the city-mounds. ”

“ It is dated in the eighteenth year of a king, who was probably one of the Ethiopian princes that reigned over southern Egypt in the troublous age of the fourth and fifth Ptolemies. According to Dr. Brugsch's translation, it states that the king sent to the governor of Nubia saying: “I am sorrowing upon my high throne over those who belong to the palace. In sorrow is my heart for the vast misfortune, because the Nile flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain; there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food. Each man has become a thief to his neighbour. ”

“ Like his father, he surrounded himself with foreigners: the Greeks and Karians, with whose help he had gained his throne, were high in favour, and constituted the royal body-guard. The native Egyptian army, we are told, deserted the king in disgust and made their way to Ethiopia. However that may be, Greek troops were settled in “camps” in the Delta, Greek merchants were allowed to trade and even to build in Egypt, and the Karians became dragomen, guides, and interpreters between the natives and the European tourists who began to visit the Nile. ”