Upper Egypt

“ By this, chiefly, public monuments are built, and citizens stand by one another in battle; and these feelings were certainly strong in Upper Egypt in the days of its greatness. But, when the throne was moved to Lower Egypt, when the kingdom was governed by the kings of Saïs, and even afterwards, when it was struggling against the Persians, these virtues were wanting, and they trusted to foreign hirelings in their struggle for freedom. The Delta was peopled by three races of men, Kopts, Greeks, and Phoenicians, or Arabs ”

“ The condition of Egypt was thus inviting enough to induce a power, strongly established in the South, to extend its dominion to the North, at least over Upper Egypt. Upper Egypt was naturally from an ancient period in closer relation to Nubia and Napata than Lower Egypt. ”

“ In reality, the regulation of the inundation and the making of cultivable land are the work of unrecorded generations who peopled the valley. The kings of the historic period had only to maintain and develop certain points of what had already been done, and Upper Egypt is to this day chequered by the network of waterways with which its earliest inhabitants covered it. ”

“ The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menés of Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honour of having fused the two Egypts into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human dynasties. ”

“ Looking at this period of the history of Egypt as a whole, we can see its main characteristic to be that Egypt has now, instead of the comparatively homogeneous native population which it had under the old Pharaohs, two strata of population living together within its borders — the upper stratum constituted by a European ruling race and the lower stratum constituted by the great subject mass of Egyptians. ”

“ They silt up, close, open again, replace each other, and ramify in innumerable branches over the surface of the soil, spreading life and fertility on all sides. As the land rises towards the south, this web contracts and is less confused, while black mould and cultivation alike dwindle, and the fawn-coloured line of the desert comes into sight. The Libyan and Arabian hills appear above the plain, draw nearer to each other, and gradually shut in the horizon until it seems as though they would unite. And there the Delta ends, and Egypt proper has begun. ”

“ Its domes and minarets, and the long serrated line of the Mokattam Hills were carved against the sky in the yellow-rose of pink topaz. Shafts of light gave to jagged shapes and terraces of rock on the low mountains an appearance of temples and palaces, very noble and splendid, as must have been the first glimpse of Ancient Egypt to desert-worn fugitives from famine in Palestine. Between us and the Nile, hiding the sparkling water as we rode, went a dark line of palms, purple, with glints of peacock-feather green, in the distance. ”

“ The modern mind, no long terrified by speed, to which it has grown contemptuously accustomed, yet shrinks a little before this display of titanic and bewildering size, Egypt makes it realise that it has no handy stand of measurement. It listens to words that are are meaningless. The vast proportions uplift, then stupefy. The girth of the Pyramids, the height of the Colossi, the cubic content of the granite columns and the visage of the Sphinx expressed in yards⁠—these convey as little truth as the numbered leagues of the frightening desert or the length of that weary and interminable Nile. ”

“ Before Menes Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms. It has always been a country of mysteries, with the mighty Nile, and its inundations, so little understood by the ancients; its trackless desert; its camels and caravans; its tombs and temples; its obelisks and pyramids, its groups of gods: Ra, Osiris, Isis, Apis, Horus, Hathor—the very names breathe suggestions of mystery, cruelty, pomp, and power. In the sciences and in the industrial arts the ancient Egyptians were highly cultivated. ”

“ The cities in this region formed at their origin so many individual and, for the most part, petty states, whose kings and patron gods claimed to be independent of all the neighbouring kings and gods: one city, one god, one lord—this was the rule here as in the ancient feudal districts from which the nomes of Egypt arose. The strongest of these principalities imposed its laws upon the weakest: formed into unions of two or three under a single ruler, they came to constitute a dozen kingdoms of almost equal strength on the banks of the Euphrates. ”

“ I listen to the childish, quavering voice, twittering almost like a bird, and one word alone came up to me—the word one hears in Egypt from all the lips that speak and sing: from the Nubians round their fires at night, from the little boatmen of the lower reaches of the Nile, from the Bedouins of the desert, and the donkey boys of the villages, from the sheikh who reads one’s future in water spilt on a plate, and the Bisharin with buttered curls who runs to sell one beads from his tent among the sand-dunes. ”

“ Apart from its wonderful river, the country itself has no very striking features. It is rather a monotonous land—a long ribbon of green running through a great waste of yellow desert and barren hills. But the great charm that draws people's minds to Egypt, and gives the old land a never-failing interest, is its great story of the past, and all the relics of that story which are still to be seen. ”

“ Egypt is truly a land of marvels! It has not only, like Assyria and Chaldæa, Greece and Italy, preserved for us monuments by which its historic past may be reconstructed, but it has handed on to us the men themselves who set up the monuments and made the history. Her great monarchs are not any longer mere names deprived of appropriate forms, and floating colourless and shapeless in the imagination of posterity: they may be weighed, touched, and measured; the capacity of their brains may be gauged ”

“ The only difference between Nubian Egypt and Egypt proper lay in the greater heat and smaller wealth of the former, where the narrower, less fertile, and less well-watered land supported a smaller population and yielded less abundant revenues.
The Pharaoh kept the charge of the more important strategical points in his own hands. Strongholds placed at bends of the river and at the mouths of ravines leading into the desert, secured freedom of navigation, and kept off the pillaging nomads. ”

“ All that is characteristic of Egypt is in sight; to the west, the Libyan hills and the limitless stretch of yellow desert sand; to the north, desert also and the ruined pyramid of Abooroâsh; to the south, that long necropolis of the desert marked by the pyramids of Abooseér, Sakkarah, and Dashoor; on the east, the Nile and its broad meadows widening into the dim Delta northward, the white line of Cairo under the Mokattam hills, and the grey desert beyond. Egypt is a ribbon of green between two deserts. ”

“ But the kings of the XIth dynasty were careful not to wander too far from the valley of the Nile. Egypt presented a sufficiently wide field for their activity, and they exerted themselves to the utmost to remedy the evils from which the country had suffered for hundreds of years. They repaired the forts, restored or enlarged the temples, and evidences of their building are found at Koptos, Gebelên, El-Kab, and Abydos. Thebes itself has been too often overthrown since that time for any traces of the work of the XIth dynasty kings in the temple of Amon to be distinguishable ”

“ The composition, unlike so many other triumphal inscriptions, is not a mere piece of official rhetoric, in which the poverty of the subject is concealed by a multitude of common-places whether historical or mythological. Egypt indeed ruled the world, either directly or through her vassals, and from the mountains of Abyssinia to those of Cilicia her armies held the nations in awe with the threat of the Pharaoh. ”

“ The old Memphite kings prided themselves on these armed pursuits as though they were real victories, and had them recorded in triumphal bas-reliefs; but under the XIIth dynasty they were treated as unimportant frontier incidents, almost beneath the notice of the Pharaoh, and the glory of them—such as it was—he left to his captains then in command of those districts.
Egypt had always kept up extensive commercial relations with certain northern countries lying beyond the Mediterranean. ”

“ The Turks, the wealthy Egyptians, the European merchants dwelt in the modern town, which was the only part preserved. A few Arabs lived among the ruins of the ancient city: an old wall, flanked by towers, enclosed the new and the old town, and all around extended those sands which in Egypt are sure to advance wherever civilisation recedes. The four thousand French led by Bonaparte arrived there at daybreak. Upon this sandy beach they met with Arabs only, who, after firing a few musket-shots, fled to the desert. Napoleon divided his men into three columns. ”

“ This is the race that gave the world the great civilizations of Egypt, of Crete, of Phœnicia including Carthage, of Etruria, of Mycenæan Greece, of Assyria and much of Babylonia. It gave us, when mixed and invigorated with Nordic elements, which probably predominated in the upper and ruling classes and imposed their guidance upon the masses, the most splendid of all civilizations, that of ancient Hellas, and the most enduring of political organizations, the Roman state. ”

“ The vastness of her monuments, the splendour of her tombs, the pomp of her ceremonies, the dignity and variety of her religious formulas, attracted their curiosity and commanded their respect: the wisdom of the Egyptians had passed into a proverb with them, as it had with the Hebrews. But if they had penetrated behind the scenes, they would have been obliged to acknowledge that beneath this attractive exterior there was hopeless decay. As with all creatures when they have passed their prime, Egypt had begun to grow old, and was daily losing her elasticity and energy. ”

“ It is plain that the Valley of the Nile was once a part of this desert, but the river, with its tremendous volume, set to work to cut down its bed. The channel, so worn down, is the present valley. "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 labor has by mounds and embankments formed artificial islands that raise their heads above the waste of waters, for the most part crowned with buildings." ”

“ In comparison with its extent of arable land, Egypt possesses one of the densest populations in the world. Indeed, Egypt proper consists entirely of lowlands which could be brought within the zone of irrigation. The rocky or sandy tracts which stretch beyond the valley of the Nile form a portion of Libya on the west, or of "Arabia," as it is called, on the east. ”

“ Henceforth Egyptian civilization runs an uninspired and undeveloping course till the days of the Saïtes and the Ptolemies. This point in the history of Egypt, therefore, forms a convenient stopping-place at which to pause, while we turn once more to Western Asia, and ascertain to what extent recent excavations and research have thrown new light upon the problems connected with the rise and history of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires. ”

“ Theban Egypt was, before all things, a community recognizing a theocratic government, in which the kingly office was merged in that of the high priest. Separated from Asia by the length of the Delta, it turned its attention, like the Pharaohs of the VIth and XIIth dynasties, to Ethiopia, and owing to its distance from the Mediterranean, and from the new civilization developed on its shores, it became more and more isolated, till at length it was reduced to a purely African state. Northern Egypt, on the contrary, maintained contact with European and Asiatic nations ”

“ Many restless souls fall into the rhythm of Egypt and feel themselves part of a great and satisfying grandeur. It is borne in upon the mind that the rich have always lived in a certain way in Egypt, and that the grandeur of Pharaoh and of Antony and Cleopatra are one and the same with the grandeur of to-day. A living thread of crimson and gold runs through the centuries of Egypt and is caught to-day, unbroken. Cairo is the capital of the Desert, and yet I do not know. ”

“ They are squat, thick, and heavy in form, and seem oppressed by the weight of the woollen covering with which the Chaldeans enveloped themselves; when viewed closely, they excite at once the wonder and repulsion of an eye accustomed to the delicate grace, and at times somewhat slender form, which usually characterized the good statues of the ancient and middle empire of Egypt. But when we have got over the effect of first impressions, we can but admire the audacity with which the artists attacked their material. ”

“ EGYPTIAN ART. According to their most ancient traditions, the Egyptian race descended from a point high up on the Nile, or the land of Ethiopia, but modern science proves them to belong to a Caucasian race, and not of the Negro type. The name Egypt has been derived from “Het-ka-Ptah,” one of the titles of the city of Memphis, which means “The Temple of the Genius of Ptah,” and has been interpreted by the Greeks as “Aiguptos,” the latter being the old name for the Nile. ”