Kitabı oku: «Eastern Life», sayfa 9

I was tempted by the invitation of a sort of cairn on the top of a hill not far inland, to go there; and thence I obtained another glimpse of the Libyan Desert, and saw two more purple peaks rising westwards, soft and clear.

There is a host of names carved on the accessible side of Abooseer. We looked with interest on Belzoni's and some few others. We cut ours with a nail and hammer. Here, and here only, I left my name. On this wild rock, and at the limit of our range of travel, it seemed not only natural but right to some who may come after us. Our names will not be found in any temple or tomb. If we ever do such a thing, may our names be publicly held up to shame, as I am disposed to publish those of the carvers and scribblers who have forfeited their right to privacy by inscribing their names where they can never be effaced!

The time arrived when we must go. It was with a heavy heart that I quitted the rock, turned my back on the south, and rode away.

We found our boat prepared in the usual manner for the descent of the river; the mainmast removed, and laid along overhead, to support the awning; the kitchen shifted and turned; and the planks of the decks taken up to form seats for the rowers, so as sadly to restrict our small space. – One of our dishes at dinner was an excellent omelette, made of part of the contents of an ostrich's egg. Two of these eggs were bought for six piastres (1 s. 2 d.). The contents were obtained by boring a hole with a gimlet. The contents of this egg were found to be equal to twenty-nine of the small hen's eggs of this part of the country.

We began our return voyage about 6 P.M., floating, sometimes broadside down, and sometimes in towards the bank, when it became the business of the rowers to bring us out again into the middle of the stream. The wind was hostile, cold, and strong enough to be incessantly shoving us aside. Our progress was very slow. The first night we moored at six miles only from Wadee Halfa.

The next evening (January 6th) we were within half an hour of Aboo-Simbil, when duty ordered me to my cabin. When I left the deck, the moon had risen, the rocks were closing in, and the river was like a placid lake.

In the morning we were to enter upon a new kind of life, as travellers. We were to begin our course of study of the Monuments.

IX. Historical Sketch, from Menes to the Roman Occupation of Egypt

Before entering upon the study of the Monuments, it seems necessary to obtain something like an orderly view of the state of the country before and during their erection. At best, our conceptions must be obscure enough; but we can form none unless we arrange in our minds what we know of the history of Egypt, of which these monuments are at once the chief evidence and the eternal illustration.

The early history of Egypt differs from that of every other explored country in the nature of its records. Elsewhere, we derive all our knowledge from popular legends, which embody the main ideas to be preserved in forms which are not, and were never meant to be, historically true. It is the business of the philosophical historian to separate the true ideas from their environment of fiction, and to mark the time when the narrative, from being mythical, becomes historically true; – to classify the two orders of ancient historians – both inestimable in their way – the Poets who perpetuate national Ideas, and the Historians who perpetuate national Facts. – With regard to Egypt, we are in possession of as much of this early material as any nation has furnished; and we have the monuments besides.

These monuments consist of buildings or excavations, – of the sculptures upon them, – and of their inscriptions. From the edifices or caves we may learn much of the condition, mind, and manners of the people who wrought them, and, if their dates can be obtained, in historical order. – From their sculptures we may learn much of the personages, divine and human, about whom they thought most; and their inscriptions are of inestimable use in identifying these personages, and in declaring their dates. Being thus in possession of mythical legends, of the writings of historians, and of edifices and excavations covered with sculptures and inscriptions, we are as well supplied with records of the early history of Egypt as we can probably ever be with regard to any ancient people; and better than we yet are with regard to any other of the nations of the old world.

The legends relating to ancient Egypt are preserved in the works of its historians. It is the business of modern inquirers to separate them from the true historical material, and to extract from them, where possible, the essential Ideas which they embody.

The chief historians of Egypt are Hecataeus of Miletus, who was at Thebes about half a century before Herodotus, and some fragments of whose writings have come down to us: – Herodotus, from whom we learn more than from any other: – the writer of the book of Genesis: – Hecataeus of Abdera, from whose narrative extracts may be found in the works of Diodorus Siculus: – Manetho, an Egyptian, of whom also we have only extracts in other authors, but who supplies very valuable information: – Eratosthenes of Cyrene, whose writings are at once illustrative of those of Manetho and a check upon them: Diodorus Siculus, who travelled in Egypt and wrote a history of it, rather more than half a century before the Christian era: Strabo, who has left us a full account of what he saw in Egypt, between Alexandria and the First Cataract: and Abdallatif, an Arabian physician, who supplies a valuable report of the state of the Nile Valley and its people when he visited them in the twelfth century. – It is the business of modern inquirers to separate what these historians derived from the depositories of the national mythi from what they personally observed: to compare their works with one another, and to apply them as a key (where this can be done) to the monumental records.

As to the use of the monumental records, several precautions are necessary. Modern inquirers must beware of interpreting what they see by their own favourite ideas – as travellers do who contrive to see Hebrew groups among the Egyptian sculptures: they must diligently and patiently work out the knowledge of the ancient language and its signs, and beware of straining the little they know of these to accommodate any historical theory they may carry in their minds: and they must remember that the edifice and its sculptures are not always of the same date, and that therefore what is true of the one is not necessarily true of the other.

Without going into any detail (which would fill a volume if entered upon at all) about the respective values of these authorities, and their agreements and conflicts, I may give a slight sketch of what competent modern inquirers believe we have learned from them.

For our first glimpse into ancient Egyptian life we must go back upon the track of Time far further than we have been accustomed to suppose that track to extend. People who had believed all their lives that the globe and Man were created together, were startled when the new science of geology revealed to them the great fact that Man is a comparatively new creation on the earth, whose oceans and swamps and jungles were aforetime inhabited by monsters never seen by human eye but in their fossil remains. People who enter Egypt with the belief that the human race has existed only six thousand years, and that at that date the world was uninhabited by men, except within a small circuit in Asia, must undergo a somewhat similar revolution of ideas. All new research operates to remove further back the date of the formation of the Egyptian empire. The differences between the dates given by legendary records and by modern research (with the help of contemporary history) are very great; but the one agrees as little as the other with the popular notion that the human race is only six thousand years old.

When Hecataeus of Miletus was at Thebes, about 500 B.C., he spoke, as Herodotus tells us,⁵ to the priests of Amun, of his genealogy, declaring himself to be the sixteenth in descent from a god. Upon this, the priests conducted him into a great building of the temple, where they pointed out to him (as afterwards to Herodotus) the statues of their high priest. Each high priest placed a colossal wooden statue of himself in this place during his life; and each was the son of his predecessor. The priests would not admit that any of these was the son of a god. From first to last they were of human origin; and here, in direct lineal succession, were 345. Taking the average length of human life, how many thousand years would be occupied by the succession of 345 high priests, in a direct line from father to son! According to the priests, it was nearly 5000 years from the time of Horus. They further informed Herodotus that gods did reign in Egypt before they deputed their power to mortals.⁶ They spoke of eight gods who reigned first, among whom was one answering to Pan of the Greeks: then came twelve of another series; and, again, twelve more, the offspring of the second series; and of these Osiris was one; and it was not till after the reign of his son Horus that the first of these 345 high priests came into power. From Osiris to king Amasis the priests reckoned 15,000 years, declaring that they had exact registers of the successive lives which had filled up the time.⁷ – Such is the legendary history as it existed 500 years before Christ. We can gather from it thus much, that the priests then looked back upon a long reach of time – and believed the art of registering to be of an old date.

Here we have the earliest report of dates offered us. According to the latest researches,⁸ we cannot place the formation of the Egyptian empire under Menes nearer to us than 5500 years ago. And the Egyptians were then a civilised people, subject to legislation and executive authority, pursuing trade, and capable of the arts. A longer or shorter series of centuries must be allotted for bringing them up to this state, according to the views of the students of social life; but the shortest must bring us back to the current date of the creation of man. How these five or six thousand years are filled up we may see hereafter;

Leaving it to my readers to fix for themselves the point of time for our survey of the most ancient period of Egyptian history, I may be permitted to appoint the place. Let us take our stand above the Second Cataract; – on the rock of Abooseer, perhaps, where I could only look over southwards, and not go and learn. This is a good station, because it is a sort of barrier between two chains of monuments – a frontier resting-place, whence one may survey the area of ancient Egyptian civilisation from end to end.

Looking down the river, northwards, beyond the Nubian region (then Ethiopia), beyond the First Cataract, and far away over the great marsh which occupied the Nile valley, we see, coming out of the darkness of oblivion, Menes, the first Egyptian king, turning the river from its course under the Libyan mountain into a new bed, in the middle of the valley.⁹ Thus the priests of Thebes told Herodotus, saying that Menes made the dykes by which the land was reclaimed on which Memphis afterwards stood. It must strike everyone that this period 5500 years ago, must have been one of an advanced civilisation, such a work as this embankment requiring scientific ideas and methods, apt tools, and trained men. The priests ascribed to this same king the building of Memphis, and of the great temple of Phthah (answering to Vulcan) in that city. They read to Herodotus a long list of sovereigns (three hundred and thirty) who succeeded Menes, of whom one was an Egyptian woman and eighteen were Ethiopian kings,¹⁰ That there should have been a temple of Phthah implies the establishment of a priesthood. That a woman should have occupied the throne seems to imply the establishment of a principle of hereditary succession; or, at least, it tells of the subordination, in this early age, of force to authority. That there should have been Ethiopian sovereigns among the Egyptian implies a relation between the two countries, whether of warfare or commerce. During all this time the plain of Thebes lay bare.

The next sovereignty that was established in the valley was at This, about sixty miles below Thebes. A succession of monarchs reigned here, some say sixteen, some more, while the plain of Thebes still lay bare.

While these sovereigns were reigning at This, and before Thebes was heard of, the kings of Memphis were building the Pyramids of Geezeh. It is certain that the builders of these pyramids were learned men. How much science is requisite for the erection of such edifices need hardly be pointed out; – the mathematical skill and accuracy, the astronomical science shown in the placing of them true to the cardinal points, the command of mechanical powers which are at this day unknown to us, and the arts of writing and decoration shown in the inscriptions which covered their outside in the days of Herodotus,¹¹ though the casing which contained them is now destroyed. In the neighbouring tombs, however, we have evidence, as will be shown hereafter, of the state of some of the arts at that date; and I may mention here that the sign of the inkstand and reed pen are among the representations in the tombs. There is no doubt as to who built the Pyramids. Colonel Howard Vyse found the kings' names inscribed in them. When the Pyramids were built, it was a thousand years before Abraham was born, and the plain of Thebes still lay bare.

Now we must turn southwards, and look over as far as Dongola. For a long way above the Second Cataract there are no monuments. This is probably owing to the river not being navigable there, so that there were no trading stations. There are obvious reasons why temples and other monuments should rise where commerce halts, where men congregate, and desire protection of person and property, and exercise their social passions and affections. So, for the twenty-five days' journey where the river is impracticable, there are few monuments. Then some occur of a rather modern date: and far beyond them – up in Dongola – we come upon traces of a time when men were trafficking, building, and worshipping, while yet the plain of Thebes lay bare. To this point did the sovereigns of Memphis and of This extend their hand of power, erecting statues as memorials of themselves, and by their subjects, trading in such articles of use and luxury as they derived from the east. While the Ethiopian subjects of these early Pharaohs were building up that character for piety and probity which spread over the world, and found its way into the earliest legends and poems of distant nations, the plain of Thebes still lay wild and bare: not one stone yet placed upon another.

And now the time had arrived for the Theban kings to arise, give glory to the close of the Old Monarchy, and preserve the national name and existence during the thousand years of foreign domination which were to follow. In the course of reigns at which we have now arrived, El-Karnac began to show its massive buildings, and the plain of Thebes to present temptation to a foreign conqueror.

We have now arrived at the end of the First great Period of ascertained Egyptian history; – a period supposed, from astronomical calculation and critical research, to comprehend 889 years. – A dark and humiliating season was now drawing on.

Considering the great wealth and power of the kings now reigning at Memphis and at Thebes, we are obliged to form a high opinion of the strength of the Shepherd Race who presently subdued Egypt. Whence they came, no one seems to know, – further than that it was somewhere from the East. Whether they were Assyrians, as some have conjectured, or the Phoenicians, who were encroaching upon the Delta at a subsequent time, or some third party, we cannot learn, the Egyptians having always, as is natural, kept silence about them. The pride of the Egyptians was in their agriculture and commerce; and to be conquered by a pastoral people, whose business lay anywhere among the plains of the earth, rather than in the richly-tilled, narrow valley of the Nile, was a hard stroke of adversity for them. So, in their silence, all that we know of their strong enemy is that the Shepherd Race took Memphis, put garrisons in all the strong places of Egypt, made the kings of Memphis and Thebes tributary to them, and held their empire for 929 years – that is, for a time equal to that which extends from the death of our King Alfred to our own: a long season of subjugation, from which it is wonderful that the native Egyptian race should have revived. This dark season, during which the native kings were not absolutely dethroned, but depressed and made tributary, is commonly called the Middle Monarchy. It is supposed to extend from B.C. 2754 to B.C. 1825.

About this time, a visitor arrived in Egypt, and remained a short while, whose travels are interesting to us, and whose appearance affords a welcome rest to the imagination, after its wanderings in the dim regions of these old ages. The richest of the Phoenicians, who found themselves restricted for room and pasturage by the numbers of Chaldeans who moved westwards into Syria, found their way, through Arabia, to the abundance of corn which Lower Egypt afforded. Among these was Abraham, a man of such wealth and distinction that he and his followers were entertained as guests at Memphis, and his wife was lodged in the palace of the king. He must have looked up at the Pyramids, and learned some of the particulars which we, following on his traces, long in vain to know: – how they were reared, and for what purpose precisely; and perhaps many details of the progress of the work. It is true these pyramids had then stood somewhere about 1500 years: the builders, tens of thousands in number, had slept for many centuries in their graves: the kings who had reared them lay embalmed in the stillness of ages, and the glory of a supremacy which had passed away; and these edifices had become so familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants, that they were like natural features of the landscape: but as Abraham walked round those vast bases, and looked up at the smooth pictured surfaces of their sides, he might have had explained to him those secrets of ancient civilisation which we seek to pry into in vain.

We now come to the brilliant Third Period.

The Theban kings had been growing in strength for some time; and at length they were able to rise up against the Shepherd Race, and expel them from Memphis, and afterwards from their stronghold, Abaris. On the surrender of this last place, the enemy were permitted to march out of the country in safety, the number of their men being recorded as 240,000. – The period of 1300 years now entered upon was the grandest of Egyptian history – if, we may add, the Sesostris of old renown was, as some recent students have supposed, the Ramases II. of this Period. Some high authorities, as Lepsius and Bunsen, believe Sesostris to have belonged to the old Monarchy. However this may be, all agree that the deeds of many heroes are attributed to the one who now bears the name of Sesostris; and the achievements of Ramases the Great are quite enough to glorify his age, whether he had a predecessor like himself or not. Of these achievements I shall say nothing here, as they will come before us quite often enough in our study of the temples. Suffice it that the empire of Egypt was extended by conquest southwards to Abyssinia; westwards over Libya; northwards over Greece; and eastwards beyond the banks of the Ganges. The rock statues and stelae of Sesostris may yet be seen in countries far apart, but within this range: his Babylonian captives were employed on some of the great edifices we have seen, and were afterwards permitted to build a city for themselves near the point of the Delta; and the tributary kings and chiefs of all the conquered countries were required to come up to Egypt once a year, to pay homage by drawing the conqueror's chariot, in return for which they received gifts and favour. The kings of Lower Egypt appear to have declined about this period; if even they were not tributary to those of Upper Egypt. Of these kings, one was he who received Joseph into favour,¹² and made him his prime minister; and another was he who afterwards »knew not Joseph.« Of Joseph's administration of the affairs of Lower Egypt we know more than of the rule of any other minister of the Pharaohs. I have walked upon the mounds which cover the streets of Memphis, through which Joseph rode, on occasion of his investiture, and where the king's servants ran before him, to bid the people bow the knee. And when at Heliopolis, I was on the spot where he married his wife – the daughter of the priest and governor of On, afterwards Heliopolis.

It was in the early part of this Third Period of the Egyptian Monarchy that Cecrops is supposed (fable being here mingled with history) to have led a colony from Sais, and to have founded the kingdom of Athens,¹³ beginning here the long series of obligations that Greece, and, through Greece, Rome and the world, have been under to Egypt. It is almost overpowering to the imagination to contemplate the vast antiquity of the Egyptian empire, already above two thousand years, in the day when Cecrops was training his band of followers, to lead them in search of a place whereon to build Athens; – in a day long preceding that when Ceres was wandering about the earth in search of her daughter.

It was about this time that a still more important event than even the founding of Athens had taken place. We all know how a certain Egyptian lady went out one day to bathe, and what was found by her maidens in a rushy spot on the banks of the Nile. That lady was the daughter of one of the Pharaohs of Memphis, at a time (as some think) shortly before the union on one head of the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. When she brought home the child found among the rushes, she little thought that that infant head was to become the organ of a wisdom that should eclipse the glory of Sesostris, and mainly determine the spiritual destinies of the human race for a longer course of centuries than even Egypt had yet seen.

When the Shepherd kings and their army were driven out of Egypt, many of their people remained as slaves, and were employed on the public works. The Hebrews were also thus employed – latterly on the fortifications of Thoum and Heliopolis; and the Egyptians confounded the two races of aliens in a common hatred. From the prevalence of leprosy among the Hebrews, and other causes, they were considered an unclean people; and they were sent by the Pharaoh of their day, under the warning of the priests, to live by themselves in the district allotted to them. Whether the Pharaoh who opposed the departure of this army of slaves was Thothmes III., or his son, Amunoph II., or some later king, is undetermined; but it is believed on high authority that it was Thothmes III.,¹⁴ and that he reigned many years after the Exodus. The date of the Exodus is agreed upon as about B.C. 1491, whoever was the Pharaoh reigning at the time. There is no assertion in the Mosaic narrative that Pharaoh himself was lost in the Red Sea,¹⁵ nor that the whole of his host perished; nor is there any allusion in the Song of Moses to the death of the sovereign: and some of the Hebrew traditions declare¹⁶ that Pharaoh survived, and extended his conquests afterwards into Assyria. Thus the supposition that the Israelites marched out in an early year of the reign of this monarch is not irreconcileable with his having reigned thirty-nine years, as Egyptian history declares that he did. Manetho mentions their numbers to have been eighty thousand when they were sent to live by themselves; and it is curious on this account, and on some others, to find the number assigned by the Mosaic history so high as six hundred thousand, besides women and children. Even if we suppose a proportion of these to have been their fellow-slaves of the Shepherd Race, who, being confounded with the Hebrews by their masters, took this opportunity of leaving the country, it gives us a high idea of the power and population of Egypt in those days that such a body could be abstracted from the working class of the country, and leave behind a sufficient force for the achievement of such wars and arts as we know were prosecuted after their departure.¹⁷

As our chief interest in Egypt was till lately from its being the scene of the early life of the Hebrew nation, we are apt to look for records of the Hebrews on the monuments wherever we go. I am convinced that none have been found relating to their connection with Egypt – none relating to them at all, till the long subsequent time when Jerusalem was conquered by Sheshonk (Shishak). In my opinion, it would be more surprising if there had been such records than that there are not. There is nothing in the presence of a body of slaves to require or suggest a monumental record, unless those slaves were made so by conquest, and had previously been a nation. The Hebrews were not a nation, and had no dream of being so till Moses began the mighty work of making them one. When they had a confirmed national existence; when their great King Solomon had married into the line of the Pharaohs, and their national interests came into collision with those of Egypt, we find them, among other nations, in the train of the captives of Sheshonk, on the walls of El Karnac. Some Hebrew names among those of the Egyptian months,¹⁸ and a sprinkling of Hebrew words in the Coptic language, are, I believe, the only traceable memorials in Egypt of the residence of the Israelites.

According to Pliny, one of the Ramases was on the throne of Egypt when Troy was taken: and within thirty years of that time, King Solomon married a daughter of one of the Pharaohs. How great Thebes had long been is clear from the mention of Upper Egypt in Homer, who says, perhaps truly enough in one sense, that it was the birthplace of some of tile Greek gods; and that its inhabitants were so wise as to be favourites, and even hosts of those gods. It was with these wise Thebans (then one with the Ethiopians) that Jupiter and his family were supposed by the Greeks to be making holiday, when out of reach, as it seemed, of the prayers of the besiegers of Troy. The Theban family of monarchs, however, was by this time declining in power; and after a century or two of weakness, they were displaced by stronger men from a higher station up the river; and Egypt was governed by princes from the hitherto subordinate province of Ethiopia. In three generations, Thebes ceased to be the capital of Egypt; and the seat of government was removed to Saïs in the Delta. This event happened nearly 700 years B.C. From this time, we have the advantage of certainty of dates, within, at least, the range of a few months. We have come down to the record of Babylonian eclipses, and the skies light up the history of the earth.

It was in this age that the downfall of old Egypt was provided for by the introduction of Greek influences into the Delta, at the time when the seat of sovereignty was there. While the national throne stood at Thebes, the religion, philosophy, learning, and language of the ancient race could be little, if at all, affected by what was doing in other parts of the world: but when the Thebaid became a province, and the metropolis was open to visits from the voyagers of the Mediterranean, the exclusively Egyptian character began to give way; and while Egypt furnished, through these foreigners, the religion, philosophy, and art of the whole civilised world, she was beginning to lose the nationality which was her strength. Nechepsus, one of the kings of Saïs, was a learned priest, and wrote on astronomy. His writings were in the Greek language. The kings of Sais now began to employ Greek mercenaries. Psammitichus I. not only employed as soldiers large numbers of Ionian and Carian immigrants, but, as Herodotus tells us,¹⁹ committed to them the children of the Egyptians, to be taught Greek, and gave them lands and other advantages for settlement in the Delta. Of course, this was displeasing to his native subjects, and the national unity was destroyed. One curious circumstance occurred under this king, which reveals much of the popular temper, and which has left some remarkable traces behind it, as will be seen in my next chapter. Psammitichus placed three armies of Egyptians on the three frontiers of Egypt,²⁰ That on the southern frontier, stationed at Elephantine, grew impatient, after a neglect of three years. Finding their petitions for removal unanswered, and their pay not forthcoming, they resolved to emigrate, and away they marched, up the river, as far beyond Meroë as Meroë is beyond Elephantine, and there lands were given them, where their descendants were found, three centuries afterwards. The king himself pursued and overtook them, and endeavoured by promises and prayers, and by appeals to them not to forsake their gods and their homes, to induce them to return. They told him, however, that they would make homes for themselves, and marched on. Their numbers being, as Herodotus tells, two hundred and forty thousand men, it was impossible to constrain them. The king took with him a force of Greek mercenaries, whom he sent some way, as we shall see by-and-by, after the deserters; but it appears that he did not go higher than Elephantine.

While we thus see how Egypt became weakened in preparation for downfall, it is pretty clear, on the other hand, how the process went on by which the rest of the world became enlightened by her knowledge, and ripened by her wisdom.