The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos
by A. H. Sayce · English · Gutenberg #38843 · 465,036 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos
Author: A. H. Sayce
Release date: February 12, 2012 [eBook #38843]
Most recently updated: June 17, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38843
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EGYPT OF THE HEBREWS AND HERODOTOS ***
The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos
By
The Rev. A. H. Sayce
Professor of Assyriology at Oxford
London
Rivington, Percical & Co.
1895
CONTENTS
Preface
Chapter I. The Patriarchal Age.
Chapter II. The Age Of Moses.
Chapter III. The Exodus And The Hebrew Settlement In Canaan.
Chapter IV. The Age Of The Israelitish Monarchies.
Chapter V. The Age Of The Ptolemies.
Chapter VI. Herodotos In Egypt.
Chapter VII. In The Steps Of Herodotos.
Chapter VIII. Memphis And The Fayyûm.
Appendices.
Appendix I.
Appendix II. Biblical Dates.
Appendix III. The Greek Writers Upon Egypt.
Appendix IV. Archæological Excursions In The Delta.
Index.
Footnotes
PREFACE
A few words of preface are needful to justify the addition of another
contribution to the over-abundant mass of literature of which Egypt is the
subject. It is intended to supplement the books already in the hands of
tourists and students, and to put before them just that information which
either is not readily accessible or else forms part of larger and cumbrous
works. The travels of Herodotos in Egypt are followed for the first time
in the light of recent discoveries, and the history of the intercourse
between the Egyptians and the Jews is brought down to the age of the Roman
Empire. As the ordinary histories of Egypt used by travellers end with the
extinction of the native Pharaohs, I have further given a sketch of the
Ptolemaic period. I have moreover specially noted the results of the
recent excavations and discoveries made by the Egypt Exploration Fund and
by Professor Flinders Petrie, at all events where they bear upon the
subject-matter of the book. Those who have not the publications of the
Fund or of Professor Petrie, or who do not care to carry them into Egypt,
will, I believe, be glad to have the essence of them thus extracted in a
convenient shape. Lastly, in the Appendices I have put together
information which the visitor to the Nile often wishes to obtain, but
which he can find in none of his guide-books. The Appendix on the nomes
embodies the results of the latest researches, and the list will therefore
be found to differ here and there from the lists which have been published
elsewhere. Those who desire the assistance of maps should procure the very
handy and complete _Atlas of Ancient Egypt_, published by the Egypt
Exploration Fund (price 3s. 6d.). It makes the addition of maps to this or
any future work on Ancient Egypt superfluous.
Discoveries follow so thickly one upon the other in these days of active
exploration that it is impossible for an author to keep pace with them.
Since my manuscript was ready for the press Dr. Naville, on behalf of the
Egypt Exploration Fund, has practically cleared the magnificent temple of
Queen Hatshepsu at Dêr el-Bâhari, and has discovered beneath it the
unfinished sepulchre in which the queen fondly hoped that her body would
be laid; Professor Petrie has excavated in the desert behind Zawêdeh and
opposite Qoft the tombs of barbarous tribes, probably of Libyan origin,
who settled in the valley of the Nile between the fall of the sixth and
the rise of the eleventh dynasty; Mr. de Morgan has disinterred more
jewellery of exquisite workmanship from the tombs of the princesses of the
twelfth dynasty at Dahshûr; and Dr. Botti has discovered the site of the
Serapeum at Alexandria, thus obtaining for the first time a point of
importance for determining the topography of the ancient city.
The people whose remains have been found by Professor Petrie buried their
dead in open situated in the central court. But his most interesting
discovery is that of long subterranean passages, once faced with masonry,
and furnished with niches for lamps, where the mysteries of Serapis were
celebrated. At the entrance of one of them pious visitors to the shrine
have scratched their vows on the wall of rock. Those who are interested in
the discovery should consult Dr. Botti’s memoir on _L’Acropole
d’Alexandrie et le Sérapeum_, presented to the Archæological Society of
Alexandria, 17th August 1895.
Two or three other recent discoveries may also find mention here. A
Babylonian seal-cylinder now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York
has at last given me a clue to the native home of the Hyksos leaders. This
was in the mountains of Elam, on the eastern frontier of Chaldæa. It was
from these mountains that the Kassi descended upon Babylonia and founded a
dynasty there which lasted for nearly 600 years, and the same movement
which brought them into Babylonia may have sent other bands of them across
Western Asia into Egypt. At all events, the inscription upon the seal
shows that it belonged to a certain Uzi-Sutakh, “the son of the Kassite,”
and “the servant of Burna-buryas,” who was the Kassite king of Babylonia
in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. As the name of Sutakh is
preceded by the determinative of divinity, it is clear that we have in it
the name of the Hyksos deity Sutekh.
In a hieroglyphic stela lately discovered at Saqqârah, and now in the
Gizeh Museum, we read of an earlier parallel to the Tyrian Camp at Memphis
seen by Herodotos. We learn from the stela that, in the time of King Ai,
in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, there was already a similar
“Camp” or quarter at Memphis which was assigned to the Hittites. The
inscription is further interesting as showing that the authority of Ai was
acknowledged at Memphis, the capital of Northern Egypt, as well as in the
Thebaid.
Lastly, Professor Hommel seems to have found the name of the Zakkur or
Zakkal, the kinsfolk and associates of the Philistines, in a broken
cuneiform text which relates to one of the Kassite kings of Babylonia not
long before the epoch of Khu-n-Aten. Here mention is made not only of the
city of Arka in Phœnicia, but also of the city of Zaqqalû. In Zaqqalû we
must recognise the Zakkur of Egyptian history. I may add that Khar or
Khal, the name given by the Egyptians to the southern portion of
Palestine, is identified by Professor Maspero with the Horites of the Old
Testament.
By way of conclusion, I have only to say that those who wish to read a
detailed account of the manner in which the great colossus of Ramses II.
at Memphis was raised and its companion statue disinterred must refer to
the Paper published by Major Arthur H. Bagnold himself in the
_Proceedings_ of the Society of Biblical Archæology for June 1888.
A. H. Sayce.
_October 1895._
CHAPTER I. THE PATRIARCHAL AGE.
“Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there.” When he entered the country
the civilisation and monarchy of Egypt were already very old. The pyramids
had been built hundreds of years before, and the origin of the Sphinx was
already a mystery. Even the great obelisk of Heliopolis, which is still
the object of an afternoon drive to the tourist at Cairo, had long been
standing in front of the temple of the Sun-god.
The monuments of Babylonia enable us to fix the age to which Abraham
belongs. Arioch of Ellasar has left memorials of himself on the bricks of
Chaldæa, and we now know when he and his Elamite allies were driven out of
Babylonia and the Babylonian states were united into a single monarchy.
This was 2350 B.C.
The united monarchy of Egypt went back to a far earlier date. 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. The double crown was a symbol of
the imperial power.
To Menes is ascribed the building of Memphis, the capital of the united
kingdom. He is said to have raised the great dyke which Linant de
Bellefonds identifies with that of Kosheish near Kafr el-Ayyât, and
thereby to have diverted the Nile from its ancient channel under the
Libyan plain. On the ground that he thus added to the western bank of the
river his new capital was erected.
Memphis is the Greek form of the old Egyptian Men-nefer or “Good Place.”
The final _r_ was dropped in Egyptian pronunciation at an early date, and
thus arose the Hebrew forms of the name, Moph and Noph, which we find in
the Old Testament,(1) while “Memphis” itself—Mimpi in the cuneiform
inscriptions of Assyria—has the same origin. Another name by which it went
in old Egyptian times was Anbu-hez, “the white wall,” from the great wall
of brick, covered with white stucco, which surrounded it, and of which
traces still remain on the northern side of the old site. Here a fragment
of the ancient fortification still rises above the mounds of the city; the
wall is many feet thick, and the sun-dried bricks of which it is formed
are bonded together with the stems of palms.
In the midst of the mounds is a large and deep depression, which is filled
with water during the greater part of the year. It marks the site of the
sacred lake, which was attached to every Egyptian temple, and in which the
priests bathed themselves and washed the vessels of the sanctuary. Here,
not long ago, lay the huge colossus of limestone which represented Ramses
II. of the nineteenth dynasty, and had been presented by the Egyptian
Khedive to the British Government. But it was too heavy and unwieldy for
modern engineers to carry across the sea, and it was therefore left lying
with its face prone in the mud and water of the ancient lake, a prey to
the first comer who needed a quarry of stone. It was not until after the
English occupation of Egypt that it was lifted out of its ignoble position
by Major Bagnold and placed securely in a wooden shed. While it was being
raised another colossus of the same Pharaoh, of smaller size but of better
workmanship, was discovered, and lifted beyond the reach of the
inundation.
The two statues once stood before the temple of the god Ptah, whom the
Greeks identified with their own deity Hephæstos, for no better reason
than the similarity of name. The temple of Ptah was coeval with the city
of Memphis itself. When Menes founded Memphis, he founded the temple at
the same time. It was the centre and glory of the city, which was placed
under the protection of its god. Pharaoh after Pharaoh adorned and
enlarged it, and its priests formed one of the most powerful organisations
in the kingdom.
The temple of Ptah, the Creator, gave to Memphis its sacred name. This was
Hâ-ka-Ptah, “the house of the double (or spiritual appearance) of Ptah,”
in which Dr. Brugsch sees the original of the Greek Aigyptos.
But the glories of the temple of Ptah have long since passed away. The
worship of its god ceased for ever when Theodosius, the Roman Emperor,
closed its gates, and forbade any other religion save the Christian to be
henceforth publicly professed in the empire. Soon afterwards came the
Mohammedan conquest of Egypt. Memphis was deserted; and the sculptured
stones of the ancient shrine served to build the palaces and mosques of
the new lords of the country. Fostât and Cairo were built out of the
spoils of the temple of Ptah. But the work of destruction took long to
accomplish. As late as the twelfth century, the Arabic writer ’Abd
el-Latîf describes the marvellous relics of the past which still existed
on the site of Memphis. Colossal statues, the bases of gigantic columns, a
chapel formed of a single block of stone and called “the green
chamber”—such were some of the wonders of ancient art which the traveller
was forced to admire.
The history of Egypt, as we have seen, begins with the record of an
engineering feat of the highest magnitude. It is a fitting commencement
for the history of a country which has been wrested by man from the waters
of the Nile, and whose existence even now is dependent on the successful
efforts of the engineer. Beyond this single record, the history of Menes
and his immediate successors is virtually a blank. No dated monuments of
the first dynasty have as yet been discovered. It may be, as many
Egyptologists think, that the Sphinx is older than Menes himself; but if
so, that strange image, carved out of a rock which may once have jutted
into the stream of the Nile, still keeps the mystery of its origin locked
up in its breast. We know that it was already there in the days of
Khephrên of the fourth dynasty; but beyond that we know nothing.
Of the second dynasty a dated record still survives. Almost the first gift
received by the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford was the lintel-stone of an
ancient Egyptian tomb, brought from Saqqârah, the necropolis of Memphis,
by Dr. Greaves at the end of the seventeenth century. When, more than a
century later, the hieroglyphics upon it came to be read, it was found
that it had belonged to the sepulchre of a certain Sheri who had been the
“prophet” of the two Pharaohs Send and Per-ab-sen. Of Per-ab-sen no other
record remains, but the name of Send had long been known as that of a king
of the second dynasty.
The rest of Sheri’s tomb, so far as it has been preserved, is now in the
Gizeh Museum. Years after the inscription on the fragment at Oxford had
been deciphered, the hinder portion of the tomb was discovered by
Mariette. Like the lintel-stone in the Ashmolean Museum, it is adorned
with sculptures and hieroglyphics. Already, we learn from it, the
hieroglyphic system of writing was complete, the characters being used not
only to denote ideas and express syllables, but alphabetically as well.
The name of Send himself is spelt in the letters of the alphabet. The art
of the monument, though not equal to that which prevailed a few
generations later, is already advanced, while the texts show that the
religion and organisation of the empire were already old. In the age of
the second dynasty, at all events, we are far removed from the beginnings
of Egyptian civilisation.
With Snefru, the first king of the fourth dynasty, or, according to
another reckoning, the last king of the third, we enter upon the
monumental history of Egypt. Snefru’s monuments are to be found, not only
in Egypt, but also in the deserts of Sinai. There the mines of copper and
malachite were worked for him, and an Egyptian garrison kept guard upon
the Bedouin tribes. In Egypt, as has now been definitely proved by
Professor Petrie’s excavations, he built the pyramid of Medûm, one of the
largest and most striking of the pyramids. Around it were ranged the tombs
of his nobles and priests, from which have come some of the most beautiful
works of art in the Gizeh Museum.
The painted limestone statues of Ra-nefer and his wife Nefert, for
instance, are among the finest existing specimens of ancient Egyptian
workmanship. They are clearly life-like portraits, executed with a
delicacy and finish which might well excite the envy of a modern artist.
The character, and even the antecedents of the husband and wife, breathe
through their features. While in the one we can see the strong will and
solid common-sense of the self-made man, in the other can be traced the
culture and refinement of a royal princess.
The pyramids of Gizeh are the imperishable record of the fourth dynasty.
Khufu, Khaf-Ra and Men-ka-Ra, the Kheops, Khephrên and Mykerinos of
Herodotos, were the builders of the three vast sepulchres which, by their
size and nearness to Cairo, have so long been an object of pilgrimage to
the traveller. The huge granite blocks of the Great Pyramid of Khufu have
been cut and fitted together with a marvellous exactitude. Professor
Petrie found that the joints of the casing-stones, with an area of some
thirty-five square feet each, were not only worked with an accuracy equal
to that of the modern optician, but were even cemented throughout. “Though
the stones were brought as close as 1/500 inch, or, in fact, into contact,
and the mean opening of the joint was 1/50 inch, yet the builders managed
to fill the joint with cement, despite the great area of it and the weight
of the stone to be moved—some sixteen tons. To merely place such stones in
exact contact at the sides would be careful work; but to do so with cement
in the joints seems almost impossible.”(2)
Professor Petrie believes that the stones were cut with tubular drills
fitted with jewel points—a mode of cutting stone which it was left to the
nineteenth century to re-discover. The lines marked upon the stone by the
drills can still be observed, and there is evidence that not only the tool
but the stone also was rotated. The great pressure needed for driving the
drills and saws with the requisite rapidity through the blocks of granite
and diorite is indeed surprising. It brings before us the high mechanical
knowledge attained by the Egyptians in the fourth millennium before our
era even more forcibly than the heights to which the blocks were raised.
The machinery, however, with which this latter work was effected is still
unknown.
The sculptured and painted walls of the tombs which surround the pyramids
of Gizeh tell us something about the life and civilisation of the period.
The government was a highly organised bureaucracy, under a king who was
already regarded as the representative of the Sun-god upon earth. The land
was inhabited by an industrious people, mainly agricultural, who lived in
peace and plenty. Arts and crafts of all kinds were cultivated, including
that of making glass. The art of the sculptor had reached a high
perfection. One of the most striking statues in the world is that of
Khaf-Ra seated on his imperial throne, which is now in the Museum of
Gizeh. The figure of the king is more than life-size; above his head the
imperial hawk stretches forth its wings, and on the king’s face, though
the features bear the unmistakable impress of a portrait, there rests an
aspect of divine calm. And yet this statue, with its living portraiture
and exquisite finish, is carved out of a dioritic rock, the hardest of
hard stone.
The fourth dynasty was peaceably succeeded by the fifth and the sixth.
Culture and cultivation made yet further progress, and the art of the
painter and sculptor reached its climax. Those whose knowledge of Egyptian
art is derived from the museums of Europe have little idea of the
perfection which it attained at this remote period. The hard and
crystallised art of later ages differed essentially from that of the early
dynasties. 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, 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. For several centuries it lies concealed from the eye
of history. A few royal names alone are preserved; other records there are
as yet none. What befell the country and its rulers we do not know.
Whether it was foreign invasion or civil war, or the internal decay of the
government, certain it is that disaster overshadowed for a while the
valley of the Nile. It may be that the barbarian tribes, whose tombs
Professor Petrie has lately discovered in the desert opposite Qoft, and
whom he believes to have been of Libyan origin, were the cause. With the
tenth dynasty light begins again to dawn. Mr. Griffith has shown that some
at least of the tombs cut out of the cliffs behind Siût belonged to that
era, and that Ka-meri-Ra, whose name appears in one of them, was a king of
the tenth dynasty. The fragmentary inscription, which can still be traced
on the walls of the tomb, seems to allude to the successful suppression of
a civil war.
The eleventh dynasty arose at Thebes, of which its founders were the
hereditary chiefs. It introduces us to the so-called Middle Empire. But
the Egypt of the Middle Empire was no longer the Egypt of the Old Empire.
The age of the great pyramid-builders was past, and the tomb carved in the
rock begins to take the place of the pyramid of the earlier age. Memphis
has ceased to be the capital of the country; the centre of power has been
transferred to Thebes and the south. The art which flourished at Memphis
has been superseded by the art with which our museums have made us
familiar. With the transfer of the government, moreover, from north to
south, Egyptian religion has undergone a change. Ptah of Memphis and Ra of
Heliopolis have had to yield to Amon, the god of Thebes. The god of the
house of the new Pharaohs now takes his place at the head of the pantheon,
and the older gods of the north fall more and more into the background.
The Egypt of the Middle Empire was divided among a number of great
princes, who had received their power and property by inheritance, and
resembled the great lords of the feudal age. The Pharaoh at first was
little more than the chief among his peers. But when the sceptre passed
into the vigorous hands of the kings of the twelfth dynasty, the influence
and authority of the feudal princes was more and more encroached upon. A
firm government at home and successful campaigns abroad restored the
supreme rule of the Pharaoh and made him, perhaps more than had ever been
the case before, a divinely-instituted autocrat.
The wars of the twelfth dynasty extended the Egyptian domination far to
the south. The military organisation of the Middle Empire was indeed its
most striking point of contrast to the Old Empire. The Egypt of the first
six dynasties had been self-contained and pacific. A few raids were made
from time to time against the negroes south of the First Cataract, but
only for the sake of obtaining slaves. The idea of extending Egyptian
power beyond the natural boundaries of Egypt has as yet never presented
itself. The Pharaohs of the Old Empire did not need an army, and
accordingly did not possess one. But with the Middle Empire all this was
changed. 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.
The thirteenth dynasty followed in the footsteps of its predecessor. We
possess the names of more than one hundred and fifty kings who belonged to
it, and their monuments were scattered from one end of Egypt to the other.
The fourteenth dynasty ended in disaster. Egypt was invaded by Asiatic
hordes, and the line of native Pharaohs was for a time extinct.
The invaders were called by Manetho, the Egyptian historian, the Hyksos or
Shepherd Princes: on the monuments they are known as the Aamu or
“Asiatics.” At first, we are told, their progress was marked by massacre
and destruction. The temples were profaned and overthrown, the cities
burned with fire. But after a while the higher culture of the conquered
people overcame the conquerors. A king arose among the invaders who soon
adopted the prerogatives and state of the Pharaohs. The fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth dynasties were Hyksos.
Recent discoveries have proved that at one time the dominion of the Hyksos
extended, if not to the first cataract, at all events far to the south of
Thebes. Their monuments have been found at Gebelên and El-Kab. Gradually,
however, the native princes recovered their power in Upper Egypt. While
the seventeenth Hyksos dynasty was reigning at Zoan, or Tanis, in the
north, a seventeenth Egyptian dynasty was ruling at Thebes. But the
princes of Thebes did not as yet venture to claim the imperial title. They
still acknowledged the supremacy of the foreign Pharaoh.
The war of independence broke out in the reign of the Hyksos king Apopi.
According to the Egyptian legend, Apopi had sent messengers to the prince
of Thebes, bidding him worship none other god than Baal-Sutekh, the Hyksos
divinity. But Amon-Ra of Thebes avenged the dishonour that had been done
him, and stirred up his adorers to successful revolt. For five generations
the war went on, and ended with the complete expulsion of the stranger.
Southern Egypt first recovered its independence, then Memphis fell, and
finally the Hyksos conquerors were driven out of Zoan, their capital, and
confined to the fortress of Avaris, on the confines of Asia. But even here
they were not safe from the avenging hand of the Egyptian. Ahmes I., the
founder of the eighteenth dynasty, drove them from their last refuge and
pursued them into Palestine.
The land which had sent forth its hordes to conquer Egypt was now in turn
to be conquered by the Egyptians. The war was carried into Asia, and the
struggle for independence became a struggle for empire. Under the Pharaohs
of the eighteenth dynasty, Egypt, for the first time in its history,
became a great military state. Army after army 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.
It is probable that Abraham did not enter Egypt until after the Hyksos
conquest. But before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian
chronology is uncertain. We have to reckon it by dynasties rather than by
years. According to Manetho, the Old Empire lasted 1478 years, and a
considerable interval must be allowed for the troublous times which
intervened between its fall and the beginning of the Middle Empire. We
learn from the Turin papyrus—a list of the Egyptian kings and dynasties
compiled in the time of Ramses II., but now, alas! in tattered
fragments—that the tenth dynasty lasted 355 years and 10 days, the
eleventh dynasty 243 years. The duration of the twelfth dynasty is known
from the monuments (165 years 2 months), that of the thirteenth, with its
more than one hundred and fifty kings, cannot have been short. How long
the Hyksos rule endured it is difficult to say. Africanus, quoting from
Manetho, as Professor Erman has shown, makes it 953 years, with which the
fragment quoted by Josephus from the Egyptian historian also agrees. In
this case the Hyksos conquest of Egypt would have taken place about 2550
B.C.
Unfortunately the original work of Manetho is lost, and we are dependent
for our knowledge of it on later writers, most of whom sought to harmonise
its chronology with that of the Septuagint. When we further remember the
corruptions undergone by numerical figures in passing through the hands of
the copyists, it is clear that we cannot place implicit confidence in the
Manethonian numbers as they have come down to us. Indeed, the writers who
have recorded them do not always agree together, and we find the names of
kings arbitrarily omitted or the length of their reigns shortened in order
to force the chronology into agreement with that of the author. The
twelfth dynasty reigned 134 years according to Eusebius, 160 years
according to Africanus; its real duration was 165 years, 2 months, and 12
days.
With the help of certain astronomical data furnished by the monuments, Dr.
Mahler, the Viennese astronomer, has succeeded in determining the exact
date of the reigns of the two most famous monarchs of the eighteenth and
nineteenth dynasties, Thothmes III. and Ramses II. Thothmes III. reigned
from the 20th of March B.C. 1503 to the 14th of February B.C. 1449, while
the reign of Ramses II. lasted from B.C. 1348 to B.C. 1281. The date of
Thothmes III. enables us to fix the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty
about B.C. 1570.
The dynasties of Manetho were successive and not contemporaneous. This
fact was one of the main results of the excavations and discoveries of
Mariette Pasha. 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. Of the two rival twenty-first
dynasties which the monuments have brought to light, the lists of Manetho
recognise but one, and the Assyrian rule in Egypt at a subsequent date is
ignored in favour of the princes of Sais who were reigning at the same
time.
If, then, any reliance is to be placed on the length of time ascribed to
the Hyksos dominion in the valley of the Nile, and if we are still to hold
to the old belief of Christendom and see in the Hebrew wanderer into Egypt
the Abram who contended against Chedor-laomer and the subject kings of
Babylonia, it would have been about two centuries after the settlement of
the Asiatic conquerors in the Delta that Abraham and Sarah arrived at
their court. The court was doubtless held at Zoan, the modern Sân. Here
was the Hyksos capital, and its proximity to the Asiatic frontier of Egypt
made it easy of access to a traveller from Palestine. We are told in the
Book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan
in Egypt; and it may be that the building here referred to was that which
caused Zoan to become the seat of the Hyksos power.
Asiatic migration into Egypt was no new thing. On the walls of one of the
tombs of Beni-Hassan there is pictured the arrival of thirty-seven Aamu or
Asiatics “of Shu,” in the sixth year of Usertesen II. of the twelfth
dynasty. Under the conduct of their chief, Ab-sha, they came from the
mountains of the desert, bringing with them gazelles as well as kohl for
the ladies of the court. Four women in long bright-coloured robes walk
between groups of bearded men, and two children are carried in a pannier
on a donkey’s back. The men are armed with bows, their feet are shod with
sandals, and they wear the vari-coloured garments for which the people of
Phœnicia were afterwards famed.
After the Hyksos conquest Asiatic migration must naturally have largely
increased. Between northern Egypt and Palestine there must have been a
constant passage to and fro. The rulers of the land of the Nile were now
themselves of Asiatic extraction, and it may be that the language of
Palestine was spoken in the court of the Pharaoh. At all events, the
emigrant from Canaan no longer found himself an alien and a stranger in
“the land of Ham.” His own kin were now supreme there, and a welcome was
assured to him whenever he might choose to come. The subject population
tilled their fields for the benefit of their foreign lords, and the
benefit was shared by the inhabitants of Canaan. In case of famine,
Palestine could now look to the never-failing soil of Egypt for its supply
of corn.
If, therefore, Abraham lived in the age when northern Egypt was subject to
the rule of the Hyksos Pharaohs, nothing was more natural than for him, an
Asiatic emigrant into Canaan, to wander into Egypt when the corn of
Palestine had failed. He would but be following in the wake of that larger
Asiatic migration which led to the rise of the Hyksos dynasties
themselves.
There is, however, a statement connected with his residence at the court
of the Pharaoh which does not seem compatible with the evidence of the
monuments. We are told that among the gifts showered upon him by the king
were not only sheep and oxen and asses, but camels as well. The camel was
the constant companion of the Asiatic nomad. As far back as we can trace
the history of the Bedouin, he has been accompanied by the animal which
the old Sumerian population of Babylonia called the beast which came from
the Persian Gulf. Indeed, it would appear that to the Bedouin belongs the
credit of taming the camel, in so far as it has been tamed at all. But to
the Egyptians it was practically unknown. Neither in the hieroglyphics,
nor on the sculptured and painted walls of the temples and tombs, do we
anywhere find it represented. The earliest mention of it yet met with in
an Egyptian document is in a papyrus of the age of the Exodus, and there
it bears the Semitic name of _kamail_, the Hebrew _gamal_.(3) Naturalists
have shown that it was not introduced into the northern coast of Africa
until after the beginning of the Christian era.
Nevertheless it does not follow that because the camel was never used in
Egypt by the natives of the country, it was not at times brought there by
nomad visitors from Arabia and Palestine. It is difficult to conceive of
an Arab family on the march without a train of camels. And that camels
actually found their way into the valley of the Nile has been proved by
excavation. When Hekekyan Bey, in 1851-54, was sinking shafts in the Nile
mud at Memphis for the Geological Society of London, he found, among other
animal remains, the bones of dromedaries.(4)
The name of the Pharaoh visited by Abraham is not told to us. As elsewhere
in Genesis, the king of Egypt is referred to only by his official title.
This title of “Pharaoh” was one which went back to the early days of the
monarchy. It represents the Egyptian Per-âa, or “Great House,” and is of
repeated occurrence in the inscriptions. All power and government emanated
from the royal palace, and accordingly, just as we speak of the “Sublime
Porte” or “Lofty Gate” when we mean the Sultan of Turkey, so the Egyptians
spoke of their own sovereign as the Pharaoh or “Great House.” To this day
the king of Japan is called the Mi-kado, or “Lofty Gate.”
That the Hyksos princes should have assumed the title of their
predecessors on the throne of Egypt is not surprising. The monuments have
shown us how thoroughly Egyptianised they soon became. The court of the
Hyksos Pharaoh differed but little, if at all, from that of the native
Pharaoh. The invaders rapidly adopted the culture of the conquered people,
and with it their manners, customs, and even language. The most famous
mathematical treatise which Egypt has bequeathed to us was written for a
Hyksos king. It may be that the old language of Asia was retained, at all
events for a time, by the side of the language of the subject population;
but if so, its position must have been like that of Turkish by the side of
Arabic in Egypt during the reign of Mohammed Ali. For several centuries
the Hyksos could be described as Egyptians, and the dynasties of the
Hyksos Pharaohs are counted by the Egyptian historian among the legitimate
dynasties of his country.
It was only in the matter of religion that the Hyksos court kept itself
distinct from its native subjects. The supreme god of the Hyksos princes
was Sutekh, in whom we must see a form of the Semitic Baal. As has already
been stated, Egyptian legend ascribed the origin of the war of
independence to a demand on the part of the Hyksos Pharaoh Apopi that the
prince and the god of Thebes should acknowledge the supremacy of the
Hyksos deity. But even in the matter of religion the Hyksos princes could
not help submitting to the influence of the old Egyptian civilisation. Ra,
the sun-god of Heliopolis, was identified with Sutekh, and even Apopi
added to his name the title of Ra, and so claimed to be an incarnation of
the Egyptian sun-god, like the native Pharaohs who had gone before him.
When next we hear of Egypt in the Old Testament, it is when Israel is
about to become a nation. Joseph was sold by his brethren to merchants
from Arabia, who carried him into Egypt. There he became the slave of
Potiphar, “the eunuch of Pharaoh and chief of the executioners,” or royal
body-guard. The name of Potiphar, like that of Potipherah, the priest of
On, corresponds with the Egyptian Pa-tu-pa-Ra, “the Gift of the Sun-god.”
It has been asserted by Egyptologists that names of this description are
not older than the age of the twenty-second dynasty, to which Shishak, the
contemporary of Rehoboam, belonged; but because no similar name of an
earlier date has hitherto been found, it does not follow that such do not
exist. As long as our materials are imperfect, we cannot draw positive
conclusions merely from an absence of evidence.
That Potiphar should have been an eunuch and yet been married seems a
greater obstacle to our acceptance of the story. This, however, it need
not be. Eunuchs in the modern East, who have risen to positions of power
and importance, have possessed their harems like other men. In ancient
Babylonia it was only the service of religion which the eunuch was
forbidden to enter. Such was doubtless the case in Egypt also.
Egyptian research has brought to light a curious parallel to the history
of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. It is found in one of the many tales, the
equivalents of the modern novel, in which the ancient Egyptians delighted.
The tale, which is usually known as that of “The Two Brothers,” was
written by the scribe Enna for Seti II. of the nineteenth dynasty when he
was still crown-prince, and it embodies the folk-lore of his native land.
Enna lived under Meneptah, the probable Pharaoh of the Exodus, and his
work was thus contemporaneous with the events which brought about the
release of the Israelites from their “house of bondage.” How old the
stories may be upon which it is based it is impossible for us to tell.
Here is Professor Erman’s translation of the commencement of the tale:—
“Once upon a time there were two brothers, born of one mother and of one
father; the elder was called Anup, the younger Bata. Now Anup possessed a
house and had a wife, whilst his younger brother lived with him as a son.
He it was who wove (?) for him, and drove his cattle to the fields, who
ploughed and reaped; he it was who directed all the business of the farm
for him. The younger brother was a good (farmer); the like of whom was not
to be found throughout the country.” One day Anup sent Bata from the field
to the house to fetch seed-corn. “And he sent his younger brother,(5) and
said to him: Hasten and bring me seed-corn from the village. And his
younger brother found the wife of his elder brother occupied in combing
her hair. And he said to her: Rise up, give me seed-corn that I may return
to the field, for thus has my elder brother enjoined me, to return without
delaying. The woman said to him: Go in, open the chest, that thou mayst
take what thine heart desires, for otherwise my locks will fall to the
ground. And the youth went within into the stable, and took thereout a
large vessel, for it was his will to carry out much seed-corn. And he
loaded himself with wheat and dhurra and went out with it. Then she said
to him: How great is the burden in thy arms? He said to her: Two measures
of dhurra and three measures of wheat make together five measures which
rest on my arms. Thus he spake to her. But she spake to the youth and
said: How great is thy strength! Well have I remarked thy power many a
time. And her heart knew him.... And she stood up and laid hold of him and
said unto him: Come let us celebrate an hour’s repose; the most beautiful
things shall be thy portion, for I will prepare for thee festal garments.
Then was the youth like unto the panther of the south for rage on account
of the wicked word which she had spoken to him. But she was afraid beyond
all measure. And he spoke to her and said: Thou, oh woman, hast been like
a mother to me and thy husband like a father, for he is older than I, so
that he might have been my begetter. Wherefore this great sin that thou
hast spoken unto me? Say it not to me another time, then will I this time
not tell it, and no word of it shall come out of my mouth to any man at
all. And he loaded himself with his burden and went out into the field.
And he went to his elder brother, and they completed their day’s work. And
when it was evening, the elder brother returned home to his house. And his
younger brother followed behind his oxen, having laden himself with all
the good things of the field, and he drove his oxen before him to bring
them to the stable. And behold the wife of his elder brother was afraid
because of the word which she had spoken, and she took a jar of fat and
was like to one to whom an evil-doer had offered violence, since she
wished to say to her husband: Thy younger brother has offered me violence.
And her husband returned home at evening, according to his daily custom,
and found his wife lying stretched out and suffering from injury. She
poured no water over his hands, as was her custom; she had not lighted the
lights for him, so that his house was in darkness, and she lay there ill.
And her husband said to her: Who has had to do with thee? Lift thyself up!
She said to him: No one has had to do with me except thy younger brother,
since when he came to take seed-corn for thee, he found me sitting alone
and said to me, ‘Come, let us make merry an hour and repose: let down thy
hair!’ Thus he spake to me; but I did not listen to him (but said), ‘See!
am I not thy mother, and is not thy elder brother like a father to thee?’
Thus I spoke to him, but he did not hearken to my speech, but used force
with me that I might not tell thee. Now if thou allow him to live I will
kill myself.
“Then the elder brother began to rage like a panther: he sharpened his
knife and took it in his hand. And the elder brother stood behind the door
of the stable in order to kill the youth when he came back in the evening
to bring the oxen into the stable. Now when the sun was setting and he had
laden himself with all the good things of the field, according to his
custom, he returned (to the house). And his cow that first entered the
stable said to him: Beware! there stands thy elder brother before thee
with his knife in order to kill thee; run away from him! So he heard what
the first cow said. Then the second entered and spake likewise. He looked
under the door of the stable, and saw the feet of his brother, who was
standing behind the door with his knife in his hand. He threw his burden
on the ground and began to run away quickly. His elder brother ran after
him with his knife in his hand.”
Ra, the sun-god, however, came to the help of the innocent youth, and
interposed a river full of crocodiles between him and his pursuer. All
night long the two brothers stood on either side of the water; in the
morning Bata convinced his brother that he had done no wrong, and
reproached him for having believed that he could be guilty. Then he added:
“Go home now and see after thine oxen thyself, for I will no longer stay
with thee, but will go to the acacia valley.” So Anup returned to his
house, put his wife to death, and sat there in solitude and sadness.
Joseph, more fortunate than Bata, rose from his prison to the highest
office of state. The dreams, through which this was accomplished, were in
full keeping with the belief of the age. Dreams even to-day play an
important part in the popular faith of Egypt. In the days of the Pharaohs
it was the same. Thothmes IV. cleared away the sand that had overwhelmed
the Sphinx, and built a temple between its paws, in consequence of a dream
in which Ra-Harmakhis had appeared to him when, wearied with hunting, he
had lain down to sleep under the shadow of the ancient monument. A
thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned by a dream to march
into Egypt. In Greek days, when the temple of Abydos had fallen into ruin,
an oracle was established in one of its deserted chambers, and those who
consulted it received their answers in the “true dreams” that came to them
during the night. The dreams, however, needed at times an interpreter to
explain them, and of such an interpreter mention is made in a Greek
inscription from the Serapeum at Memphis. At other times the dreamer
himself could interpret his vision by the help of the books in which the
signification of dreams had been reduced to a science.
The dreams of Pharaoh and “his two eunuchs,” however, “the chief butler”
and “the chief baker,” were of a strange and novel kind, and there were no
books that could explain them. Even the “magicians” and “wise men” of
Egypt failed to understand the dream of Pharaoh. And yet, when the Hebrew
captive had pointed out its meaning, no doubt remained in the mind of
Pharaoh and his servants that he was right. From time immemorial the Nile
had been likened to a milch-cow, and the fertilising water which it spread
over the soil to the milk that sustains human life. The cow-headed goddess
Hathor or Isis watched over the fertility of Egypt. It was said of her
that she “caused the Nile to overflow at his due time,” and the “seven
great Hathors” were the seven forms under which she was worshipped. In the
seven kine, accordingly, which stood “upon the bank of the river” the
Egyptian readily saw the life-giving powers of the Nile.
It needed but the word of the Pharaoh to change the Hebrew slave into an
Egyptian ruler, second only to the monarch itself. His very name ceased to
be Semitic, and henceforth became Zaphnath-paaneah. He even allied himself
with the exclusive priesthood of Heliopolis or On, marrying Asenath, the
daughter of the priest of Ra. By name and marriage, as well as by
position, he was thus adopted into the ranks of the native aristocracy.
Such changes of name are not unknown to the inscriptions. From time to
time we meet with the records of foreigners who had settled down in the
valley of the Nile and there received new names of Egyptian origin. Thus a
monument found at Abydos tells us of a Canaanite from Bashan called
Ben-Azan, who received in Egypt the new name of Yu-pa-â and was the father
of a vizier of Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The Hittite wife of
Ramses II. similarly adopted an Egyptian name, and the tombstones of two
Karians are preserved, in which the Karian names of the dead are written
in the letters of the Karian alphabet, while a hieroglyphic text is
attached which gives the Egyptian names they had borne in Egypt.
The exact transcription in hieroglyphics of the Egyptian name of Joseph is
still doubtful. But it is plain that it contains the Egyptian words
_pa-ânkh_, “the life,” or “the living one,” which seem to be preceded by
the particle _nti_, “of.” The term _pa-ânkh_ is sometimes applied to the
Pharaoh, and since Kames, the last king of the seventeenth dynasty,
assumed the title of Zaf-n-to, “nourisher of the land,” it is possible
that in Zaphnath-paaneah we may see an Egyptian Zaf-nti-pa-ânkh,
“nourisher of the Pharaoh.” But the final solution of the question must be
left to future research.
It is now more easy to explain the cry which was raised before Joseph when
he went forth from the presence of the Pharaoh with the golden chain
around his neck and the royal signet upon his finger. “_Abrêk!_” they
shouted before him, and an explanation of the word has been vainly sought
in the Egyptian language. It really is of Babylonian origin. In the
primitive non-Semitic language of Chaldæa _abrik_ signified “a seer” or
“soothsayer,” and the term was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians under
the two forms of _abrikku_ and _abarakku_. Joseph was thus proclaimed a
seer, and his exaltation was due to his power of foreseeing the future. It
was as a divinely-inspired seer that the subjects of the Pharaoh were to
reverence him.
How a Babylonian word like _abrek_ came to be used in Egypt it is idle for
us to inquire. Those who believe in the late origin and fictitious
character of the story of Joseph would find an easy explanation of it. But
easy explanations are not necessarily true, either in archæology or in
anything else. And since we now know that Canaan, long before the time of
Joseph, had fallen under Babylonian influence, that the Babylonian
language and writing were employed there, and that Babylonian words had
made their way into the native idiom, it does not require much stretch of
the imagination to suppose that such words may have also penetrated to the
court of the Asiatic rulers of northern Egypt. Up to the era of the
Exodus, Egypt and Canaan were for several centuries as closely connected
with each other as were England and the north of France in the age of the
Normans and Plantagenets.
The prosperity of Egypt depends upon the Nile. If the river rises to too
great a height during the period of inundation, the autumn crops are
damaged or destroyed. If, on the other hand, its rise is insufficient to
fill the canals and basins, or to reach the higher ground, the land
remains unwatered, and nothing will grow. Egypt, in fact, is the gift of
the Nile; let the channel of the great river be diverted elsewhere, and
the whole country would at once become an uninhabited desert.
A low Nile consequently brings with it a scarcity of food. When provisions
cannot be imported from abroad, famine is the necessary result, and the
population perishes in thousands. Such was the case in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries of our era, when the inundation was deficient for
several successive years. The Arabic writers, El-Makrîzî and Abd-el-Latîf,
describe the famines that ensued in terrible terms. Abd-el-Latîf was a
witness of that which lasted from A.D. 1200 to 1202, and of the horrors
which it caused. After eating grass, corpses, and even excrement, the
wretched inhabitants of the country began to devour one another. Mothers
were arrested in the act of cooking their own children, and it was unsafe
to walk in the streets for fear of being murdered for food.
The famine described by El-Makrîzî lasted, like that of Joseph, for seven
years, from A.D. 1064 to 1071, and was similarly occasioned by a deficient
Nile. A hieroglyphic inscription, discovered in 1888 by Mr. Wilbour in the
island of Sehêl, contains a notice of another famine of seven years, which
occurred at an earlier date. The island of Sehêl lies in the Cataract,
midway between Assouan and Philæ, and the inscription is carved on a block
of granite and looks towards the south. 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. They desire to hasten
and cannot walk; the child cries, the youth creeps along and the old man;
their souls are bowed down. Their legs are bent together and drag along
the ground, and their hands rest in their bosoms. The counsel of the great
ones of the court is but emptiness. Torn open are the chests of
provisions, but instead of contents there is air. Everything is
exhausted.” The text then goes on to declare how Khnum the Creator came to
the help of the Pharaoh, and caused the Nile once more to inundate the
lands. In return for this the king gave the priests of Khnum at
Elephantinê twenty miles of river bank on either side of the island,
together with tithes of all the produce of the country.
Dr. Brugsch has brought to light yet another record of a famine in Upper
Egypt which belongs to an older period. Among the rock-cut tombs of
El-Kab, where the princes of Thebes held their court in the days of the
Hyksos, is one which commemorates the name of a certain Baba. The name
occurs elsewhere at El-Kab, and was that of the father of “Captain Ahmes,”
whose tomb is one of the most interesting there, and who, in his youthful
days, assisted Ahmes of the eighteenth dynasty in driving the Hyksos from
their last fortress in Egypt. Baba enumerates his wealth and many good
deeds, and adds: “When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out
corn to the city.”
It may be that the famine here referred to is the famine of Joseph. All we
know about the date of Baba is that he lived in the age of the Hyksos. If
he flourished before the war of independence and in days when the
authority of the Hyksos Pharaoh was still paramount in Upper Egypt, we
should have good reason for believing that the famine of which he speaks
was the same as that described in Genesis. One of the results of the
latter was that the Egyptians parted with their lands and stock to Joseph,
so that henceforth they became the tenants of the Pharaoh, to whom they
paid a fifth of all their produce. If this statement is historical, the
administration of Joseph must have extended from one end of Egypt to the
other. His Hyksos master must have been like Apopi, of whom the Sallier
Papyrus tells us that “the entire country paid him tribute, together with
its manufactured products, and so loaded him with all the good things of
Egypt.”
The account of Joseph’s famine, however, betrays in one respect a sign of
later date. The famine is said to have extended to Canaan. But a famine in
Egypt and a famine in Canaan were not due to the same cause, and the
failure of the waters of the Nile would have no effect upon the crops of
Palestine. In Canaan it was the want of rain, not of the inundation of the
Nile, which produced a failure of corn. We hear from time to time, in the
inscriptions, of corn being sent from Egypt to Syria, but it was when
there was plenty on the banks of the Nile and a scarcity of rain on the
Syrian coast. The Hebrew writer has regarded the history of the past from
a purely Asiatic rather than an Egyptian point of view.
Joseph must have entered Egypt when it was still under Hyksos domination.
The promise made to Abraham (Gen. xv. 13) is very explicit: “Know of a
surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and
shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.” Equally
explicit is the statement of the book of Exodus (xii. 40, 41): “The
sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred
and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and
thirty years, even the self-same day it came to pass, that all the hosts
of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” Here thirty years—the length
of a generation—are added to the four hundred during which the Israelites
were to be afflicted in the land of the foreigner. If the Exodus took
place in the latter years of the nineteenth dynasty—-and, as we shall see,
the Egyptian monuments forbid our placing it elsewhere—the four hundred
and thirty years of the Biblical narrative bring us to the beginning of
the last Hyksos dynasty.
It is a curious fact that Egyptian history also knows of an epoch of four
hundred years which covers almost the same period as the four hundred
years of Genesis. Mariette Pasha, when excavating at Sân, the ancient
Zoan, found a stela which had been erected in the reign of Ramses II. by
one of his officers, the governor of the Asiatic frontier. The stela
commemorates a visit to Sân made by the governor, on the fourth day of the
month Mesori, in the four hundredth year of “the king of Upper and Lower
Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the Sun who loved him, also named
Set-Nubti.” Since Set or Sutekh was the god of the Hyksos, while Sân was
the Hyksos capital, it is clear that Set-âa-pehti or Set-Nubti was a
Hyksos prince who claimed rule over the whole of Egypt, and with whom a
Hyksos era commenced. Professor Maspero and Dr. de Cara consider the
prince in question to have been really the god Sutekh himself; this,
however, is not the natural interpretation of the titles assigned to him,
and it is not improbable that Professor Wiedemann is right in identifying
him with a certain Hyksos Pharaoh, Set-[Nub?]ti, mentioned on a monument
discovered by Mariette at Tel-Mokdam. This latter Pharaoh is entitled “the
good god, the star of Upper and Lower Egypt, the son of the Sun, beloved
by Sutekh, the lord of Avaris.”
But whether or not the Hyksos Pharaoh of Tel-Mokdam is the same as
Set-Nubti of Sân, it would seem probable that the era connected with his
name marked the rise of the last Hyksos dynasty. According to Eusebius,
the leader of this dynasty was Saitês, a name which reminds us of
Set-âa-[pehti]. Eusebius makes the length of the dynasty 103 years, but
Africanus, a more trustworthy authority, gives it as 151 years. This would
assign the rise of the seventeenth dynasty, the last of Hyksos rule, to
about B.C. 1720, a date which agrees very well with that of the monument
of Sân.(6) The Exodus of the Israelites, if it took place in the reign of
Meneptah, would have happened about B.C. 1270 (or B.C. 1250, if it
occurred in the reign of Seti II., as Professor Maspero maintains); in
this case the 430 years of sojourning in the land of Egypt brings us to
B.C. 1700 (or 1680). This would be about twenty years after the
establishment of the last Hyksos line of Pharaohs, and one hundred and
thirty years before the foundation of the eighteenth dynasty. Joseph would
thus have been vizier of the country long before the war of independence
broke out, and there would have been time in abundance for him to have
lived and died before his friends and protectors were driven from the land
they had so long occupied.
Chronologically, therefore, the Biblical narrative fits in with the
requirements of Egyptian history, and allows us to see in the Hebrew
captive the powerful minister of a race of kings who, like himself, had
come from the highlands of Asia. But it must be remembered that it was
only in the north of Egypt that Hyksos rule made itself actually visible
to the eyes of the people. Southern Egypt was nominally governed by its
native princes, though they did not assume the title of king or Pharaoh.
They were _hiqu_, “hereditary chieftains,” the last representatives of the
royal families of earlier days. They acknowledged the supremacy of the
Hyksos Pharaoh, and tribute was sent to him from Thebes and El-Kab.
Though Memphis, the ancient capital of the country, was in the hands of
the strangers, Zoan, the Tanis of classical geography, was rather the seat
of Hyksos power. Protected by the marshes which surrounded it, Zoan, the
modern Sân, lay on the eastern side of the Delta at no great distance from
the frontier of Asia and the great Hyksos fortress of Avaris. From Zoan,
the “road of the Philistines,” as it is called in the Pentateuch, ran
almost in a straight line to Pelusium and the south of Palestine, skirting
on one side the Mediterranean Sea, and leaving to the right the lofty
fortress-rock of El-Arîsh on the waterless “river of Egypt.” Tanis had
existed in the days of the Old Empire, but either the Hyksos conquest or
earlier invasions had caused it to decay, and when the Hyksos court was
established there its ancient temple was already in ruins. The restoration
of the city was due to the Hyksos kings, who have left in it memorials of
themselves. The Hyksos sphinxes in the Museum of Gizeh, on one of which
the name of Apopi is engraved, were found there by Mariette, as well as a
curious group of two persons with enormous wigs holding fish and
water-fowl in their laps. When it is stated in the book of Numbers (xiii.
22) that “Hebron was built seven years before Zoan,” it is probable that
the building of Zoan by the Shepherd kings is meant.
In journeying from southern Palestine to Zoan, Jacob and his sons had no
very long distance to traverse. Nor had they to pass through a long tract
of Egyptian territory. From the desert, with its roving bands of kindred
Bedouin, to the Pharaoh’s court at Zoan, was hardly more than a day’s
journey. There was little fear that the Semitic traveller would meet with
insult or opposition from the Egyptian _fellahin_ on the way. The
_fellahin_ themselves were doubtless then, as now, mixed with Semitic
elements; it was needful to go westward of Zoan in order to find Egyptians
of pure blood.
Nor was the land of Goshen, the modern Wadi Tumilât, far from the Hyksos
capital. It lay to the south of Zoan, on the banks of a canal whose course
is now marked by the Freshwater Canal of Lesseps. The tourist who takes
the train from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig traverses the whole length of the
land of Goshen. The tradition that here was the territory assigned by
Joseph to his brethren lingered long into the Christian centuries, and had
been revived by more than one Egyptologist in later years. But the
question was finally settled by Dr. Naville, and the excavations he
undertook for the Egypt Exploration Fund. In 1883 he disinterred the
remains of Pa-Tum, or Pithom, one of the two “store-cities” which the
children of Israel were forced to build. The ruins are now known as Tel
el-Maskhuteh, “the mound of the Statue,” about twelve miles to the
south-east of Ismailîyeh, and the monuments discovered there show that the
Pharaoh for whom the city was built was Ramses II. There was more than one
Pa-Tum, or temple-city of the Sun-god of the evening, and the Pa-Tum of
the eastern Delta is referred to in papyri of the nineteenth dynasty.
Thus, in the eighth year of Meneptah II., an official report speaks of the
passage of certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom through the
frontier-fortress of Thukut or Succoth, to “the pools of the city of
Pa-Tum of Meneptah-hotep-hir-ma, in the district of Thukut.”
In 1884 Dr. Naville excavated, at Saft el-Henneh, an ancient mound close
to the railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. His excavations resulted
in the discovery that Saft el-Henneh marks the site of the ancient Qesem
or Qos (Pha-kussa in the Greek geographers), the capital of the nome of
the Egyptian Arabia. Qesem corresponds exactly with Geshem, which
represents in the Septuagint the Hebrew Goshen, and points to the fact
that the Egyptian Jews, to whom the Greek translation of the Old Testament
was due, recognised in the Biblical Goshen the Qeshem of Egyptian
geography.
The district immediately around Saft el-Henneh is fertile, but the name of
the Egyptian Arabia which it once bore shows unmistakably who its
cultivators must have been. They were the Semitic nomads from the East
who, like their descendants to-day, occasionally settled on the
frontier-lands of Egypt, and became more or less unwilling agriculturists.
But the larger part of them remained shepherds, leading a nomad life with
their flocks and camels, and pitching their tents wherever the monotony of
the desert was broken by water and vegetation. The Wadi Tumilât, into
which the district of Saft el-Henneh opened, was thus eminently suited for
the residence of the Hebrew Bedouin. Here they had food for their flocks,
plenty of space for their camping-grounds, and freedom from interference
on the part of the Egyptians, while in the background was a fertile
district, in close connection with the capital, where those of them who
cared to exchange a pastoral for an agricultural life could find rich soil
to sow and cultivate.
Hard by Zagazig are the mounds of the ancient Bubastis, and here the
excavations carried on by the Egypt Exploration Fund have brought to light
remains of the Hyksos Pharaohs, including one of Apopi. Bubastis,
therefore, must have been a Hyksos residence, and its temple was adorned
by the Hyksos kings. Between Bubastis and Heliopolis stood Pa-Bailos, and
of this town Meneptah II. says at Thebes that “the country around was not
cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers,
having been abandoned since the times of old.” What better proof can we
have that the Arabian nome was in truth what the land of Goshen is
represented to be?
By a curious coincidence, the Wadi Tumilât, the old land of Goshen, has,
in the present century, again been handed over to Bedouin and Syrians, and
again been the scene of an Exodus. Mohammed Ali was anxious to establish
the culture of the silk-worm in Egypt, and accordingly planted
mulberry-trees in the Wadi Tumilât, and settled there a large colony of
Syrians and Bedouin. The Bedouin were induced to remain there, partly by
the pasturage provided for their flocks, partly by a promise of exemption
from taxes and military conscription. When Abbas Pasha became Khedive,
however, the promise was forgotten; orders were issued that the free
Bedouin of the Wadi Tumilât should be treated like the enslaved
_fellahin_, compelled to pay the tax-gatherer, and to see their children
driven in handcuffs and with the courbash to serve in the army. But the
orders were never carried out. Suddenly, in a single night, without noise
or warning, the whole Bedouin population deserted their huts, and with
their flocks and other possessions disappeared into the eastern desert.
The Pasha lost his slaves, the culture of the silk-worm ceased, and when
the Freshwater Canal was cut not a single mulberry-tree remained.
In the land of Goshen, the Israelitish settlers throve and multiplied. But
a time came when a new king arose “which knew not Joseph,” and when the
descendants of Jacob seemed to the Egyptians a source of danger. Like
Abbas Pasha in a later century, the Pharaoh determined to reduce the
free-born Israelites into the condition of public slaves, and by every
means in his power to diminish their number. The male children were
destroyed, the adults compelled to labour at the cities the Egyptian
monarch was building in their neighbourhood, and the land in which they
lived was surrounded by Egyptian garrisons and controlled by Egyptian
officers.
The slaves, however, succeeded in escaping from their “house of bondage.”
Under the leadership of Moses they made their way into the eastern desert,
and received, at Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea, the laws which were henceforth
to govern them. The army sent to pursue them was swallowed up in the
waters of the sea, and the district they had occupied was left desolate.
A variety of reasons had led Egyptologists to the belief that in the
Pharaoh of the Oppression we were probably to see Ramses II. Ramses II.,
the Sesostris and Osymandyas of Greek story, was the third king of the
nineteenth dynasty, and one of the most striking figures of Egyptian
history. His long reign of sixty-seven years was the evening of Egyptian
greatness. With his death the age of Egyptian conquests passed away, and
the period of decay set in. Like Louis XIV. of France, the _grand
monarque_ of ancient Egypt exhausted in his wars the resources and
fighting population of his country.
But it was as a builder rather than as a conqueror that Ramses II. was
famous. Go where we will in Egypt or Nubia, we find traces of his
architectural activity. There is hardly a place where he has not left his
name. His whole reign must have been occupied with the construction of
cities and temples, or the restoration and enlargement of previously
existing ones, and, in spite of its length, it is difficult to understand
how so vast an amount of work could have been accomplished in the time.
Much of the work, however, is poor and scamped; it bears, in fact, marks
of the feverish haste with which it was carried through. Much of it, on
the other hand, is grandiose and striking in its colossal proportions and
boldness of design. The shattered granite colossus at the Ramesseum, once
nearly sixty feet in height, the fragment of a standing figure of granite
found by Professor Flinders Petrie at Sân, which must originally have been
over a hundred feet high, the great hall of columns at Karnak, the temple
of Abu-Simbel in Nubia, are all so many witnesses of vast conceptions
successfully realised. 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.
Apart from the colossal proportions of so many of them, the buildings of
Ramses II. are distinguished by another trait. They were erected to the
glory of the Pharaoh rather than of the gods. It is the name and titles of
Ramses that everywhere force themselves upon our notice, and often
constitute the chief decoration of the monument. He must have been
vainglorious above all other kings of Egypt, filled with the pride of his
own power and the determination that his name should never be forgotten
upon the earth.
It is not strange, therefore, that Ramses II. should be the most prominent
figure in ancient Egyptian history. His name and the shattered relics of
his architectural triumphs force themselves upon the attention of the
traveller wherever he goes. His long reign, moreover, was a period of
great literary activity, and a considerable portion of the literary papyri
which have survived to us was written during his lifetime. He was,
furthermore, the last of the conquering Pharaohs; the last of the Theban
monarchs whose rule was obeyed from the mountains of Lebanon and the
plateau of the Haurân to the southern frontiers of Ethiopia. With his
death the empire, which had been founded by the military skill and energy
of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, began to pass away. His son and
successor, Meneptah, had to struggle for bare existence against an
invasion of barbarian hordes, and the sceptre dropped from the feeble
hands of Seti II., who next followed, into those of rival kings. The
nineteenth dynasty ended in the midst of civil war and foreign attack: for
a while Egypt submitted to the rule of a Syrian stranger, and when
Setnekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty, restored once more the
native line of kings, he found a ruined and impoverished country, scarcely
able to protect itself from hostile assault.
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.
But the centre of power had been shifted from the north to the south.
Memphis and Zoan had to make way for Thebes, and it is probable that the
monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty, under whom Egypt recovered its
independence, had Nubian blood in their veins. A new life was breathed
into the ancient kingdom of Menes, and for the first time in its history
Egypt became a great military power. The war was transferred from the
Delta to Asia itself; Canaan and Syria were conquered, and an Egyptian
empire established, which extended as far as the Euphrates. With this
empire in Asia, however, came Asiatic influences, ideas, and beliefs. The
Pharaohs intermarried with the royal families of Asia, and little by
little their court became semi-Asiatic. Then followed reaction and
counter-revolution. A new king arose—the founder of the nineteenth
dynasty—“who knew not Joseph,” representing the national antagonism to the
Asiatic foreigner and his religious faith. For a while the Asiatic was
proscribed; and the expulsion of the stranger and his religion, which
Arabi endeavoured to effect in our time, was successfully effected in the
troublous days which saw the fall of the eighteenth dynasty. In this war
against the hated Asiatic the Israelites were involved; their children
were destroyed lest they should multiply, and they themselves were
degraded into public slaves. We have now to trace the events which led to
such a result, and to show how the political history of Egypt was the
ultimate cause of the Israelitish Exodus.
CHAPTER II. THE AGE OF MOSES.
On the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Assiout,
the traveller from Cairo to Assouan passes a line of mounds which are
known by the name of Tel el-Amarna. _Tel_ is the name given to the
artificial mounds which cover the remains of ancient cities, while
_el-Amarna_ denotes the Bedouin tribe of Beni-Amran whose descendants
inhabit the district in which the line of mounds is found. Between the
mounds and the Nile is a fertile strip of bank, green with corn in the
winter and spring, and shaded with groves of lofty palms. On the other
side of them is a tawny desert plain, shut in by an amphitheatre of hills.
The limestone cliffs of the latter are broken in three places, where
ravines lead through them to the Arabian plateau beyond. The central
ravine is short and rugged; that to the north, however, though its lofty
walls of rock seem at times almost to meet, eventually carries the
explorer by a slow ascent into the heart of the Arabian desert. About
three miles from its mouth, and in a side-valley, the tomb has lately been
discovered of the founder of the city, of which the mounds of Tel
el-Amarna are now the sole representatives. The tomb is worthy of the
monarch for whom it was intended. In the distant solitude of the desert
gorge, it is cut deep into the solid rock. Steps first convey the visitor
downwards to the huge door of the sepulchre. Within is a broad sloping
passage, to the right of which are the sculptured chambers in which the
body of one of the Pharaoh’s daughters once rested, while at the end of it
is a vast columned hall, within which the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh
himself was placed.
The Pharaoh had been named by his father, Amenôphis III., after himself,
but Amenôphis IV. had not long mounted the throne before he gave himself a
new name, and was henceforth known as Khu-n-Aten, “the Glory of the Solar
Disk.” The change of name was the outward sign and token of a religious
revolution. The king publicly renounced the ancient religion of Egypt, of
which he was the official representative, and declared himself a convert
to an Asiatic form of faith. The very name of Amon, the supreme god of
Thebes and of the royal family to which Khu-n-Aten belonged, was
proscribed, and erased from the monuments wherever it occurred. In the
temples and tombs and quarries alike it was defaced; even the name of the
king’s own father, which contained it, was not spared. When the arm of the
persecutor was thus extended to the written and sculptured monument, we
cannot suppose that the adherents of the ancient cult would be treated
with a gentle hand.
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. The walls and columns were
inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned
with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may
judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the
highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn
with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the
nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before
Christ.
The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it
were the houses of the nobles and officers of the court. They too
reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their
walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of
every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which
the documents of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the
foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with
the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of
foreign states.
In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk,
the new object of the Pharaoh’s adoration. Though the name was Egyptian,
the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to
whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-god,
whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-god who
was not only supreme over all other gods; they were absorbed into him, and
existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus
that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-god, is addressed by the Pharaoh’s
queen: “Thou disk of the Sun, thou living god, there is none other beside
thee! 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 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. The worship of Baal had lost its
grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism
was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one god to whom
adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The
personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the
Aten worship of Egypt.
Along with the new religion came a new style of art. Asiatic artists and
workmen manufactured the variegated glass and bright-coloured porcelain of
Tel el-Amarna, or discarded the conventionalism of Egyptian art in their
delineation of animal and vegetable life, while architecture branched out
in new directions, and the sculptor exaggerated the peculiarities of the
king’s personal appearance. Every effort, in fact, was made to break away
from the past, and from the mannerisms and traditions of Egyptian art.
That art had been closely associated with the ancient religion of the
country, and with the change of religion came a change in all things else.
The causes of the change can now in great measure be traced. To some
extent it was due to the character of the king himself. A plaster cast of
his face, taken immediately after death, has been found by Professor
Petrie, and is an eloquent witness of what the man himself was like. It is
the face of a philosopher and a mystic, of one whose interest lay rather
in the problems of religious belief than in the affairs of state. In
studying it we feel that the man to whom it belonged was destined to be a
religious reformer.
But this destiny was assisted by the training and education which
Khu-n-Aten had received. His mother, Teie, bore a foremost part in the
introduction of the cult of Aten. She must have been a woman of strong
character, and her influence over her son must also have been great. If,
as is probable, Khu-n-Aten was very young when he ascended the throne, the
religious reform he endeavoured to effect must have been in great measure
his mother’s work. That she had aroused deep feelings of hatred among the
adherents of the older creed may be gathered from the condition of
Khu-n-Aten’s tomb. Though the body of the Pharaoh was despoiled, and the
sarcophagus in which it rested shattered into fragments, they had
nevertheless been deposited in the sepulchre that had been constructed to
receive them. But no trace of the queen-mother’s mummy has been met with,
and the corridor in the royal tomb, which seems to have been excavated for
her, has never been finished, any more than the two or three tombs which
were cut in the immediate neighbourhood. After the death of her son, Queen
Teie seems to have found no protector from the vengeance of her enemies.
It is probable that Teie was of Asiatic birth, though no certain proof of
it has yet been found. Her husband, Amenôphis III., was fond of connecting
himself by marriage with the royal houses of Asia, and more than one of
the wives who occupied a secondary rank in the Pharaoh’s household were of
Asiatic extraction. His own mother had been an Asiatic princess, the
daughter of the king of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament.
From Mitanni also had come two of his own wives, as well as the wife of
his son and successor, Amenôphis IV. (Khu-n-Aten).
There is little room for wonder that, with their Asiatic proclivities and
half-Asiatic descent, the later Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty should
have surrounded themselves with Asiatic officials and courtiers. The
conquest of Western Asia by Thothmes III. had brought Asiatic fashions
into Egypt. Thothmes himself, on the walls of his temple at Karnak, shows
the spirit of an Asiatic rather than of an Egyptian conqueror. The
inscriptions engraved upon them differ wholly from those which usually
adorn the walls of an Egyptian temple. There are no praises or lists of
the gods, no description of the offerings made to them, no interminable
catalogue of the empty titles of the Pharaoh; we have, on the contrary, a
business-like account of his campaigns, much of it copied from the
memoranda of the scribes who accompanied the army on its march. It reads
like an inscription on the walls of an Assyrian palace rather than one
belonging to an Egyptian temple. It is, in fact, unique, the solitary
example of a historical text which the great monuments of Egypt have
bequeathed to us. It is, of itself, an eloquent testimony to the influence
which Asia had already acquired in the valley of the Nile.
The conquests of Thothmes III. placed the northern boundary of the
Egyptian empire at the banks of the Euphrates. The kingdoms to the east,
including Assyria, offered tribute to the Egyptian monarch, and those of
northern Syria and eastern Asia Minor paid him homage. Farther south,
Palestine, Phœnicia, and the land of the Amorites, which lay to the north
of Palestine, became Egyptian provinces, garrisoned by Egyptian troops and
administered by Egyptian officers. Even the country beyond the Jordan,
Bashan and the Haurân, formed part of the Egyptian empire.
In many cases the native princes were left to manage the affairs of their
several states, like the protected princes of modern India, but they were
controlled by “commissioners” sent from the valley of the Nile. More
frequently their place was taken by Egyptian governors, a very
considerable number of whom, however, were of Canaanitish descent. This,
indeed, is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the Egyptian
empire in Asia; it was governed for the Pharaoh by natives rather than by
Egyptians. But this was not all. Under Khu-n-Aten Egypt itself was invaded
by the Asiatic stranger. The high places about the court were filled with
foreigners whose names proclaim their Canaanitish origin; even the Vizier
was called Dudu, the Biblical Dodo, to which the name of David is akin.
The adherents of the cult of Aten who gathered round the Pharaoh at Tel
el-Amarna seem largely to have belonged to Asia instead of Egypt.
Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The
language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of
the same country. The Babylonian script and language were used from the
banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium
of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an
Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the
reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office.
The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to
explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to
the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became
a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of
Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian
cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element
in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the
expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be
employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western
Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script.
All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of
Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which
adjoined the royal palace, the _fellahin_ found a collection of clay
tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned
out to be the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When
Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and
to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself
received.
Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on
the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of
deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before
they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British
Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses
56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.
The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the
past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common
medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the
century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more
startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era.
Letters passed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling
subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court
of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin
chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the
Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal;
the vassal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him
against his personal enemies; the governors of Phœnicia and the land of
the Amorites describe the threatening attitude of the Hittites in the
north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his
relationship to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of
Assyria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it
is as plentiful as “the dust,” or discuss questions of international
policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much
like our own;—a world in which education is widely spread, where schools
and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist.
The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate
that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily
difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no assistance was
afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and
external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted
merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the
Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely
large, and each character not only represented more than one phonetic
value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus
the same character may not only represent the phonetic values _kur_,
_mat_, _nat_, _lat_, _sat_, and _gin_; it may also denote the ideas of
“country,” “mountain,” and “conquest.” But this was not all. The original
picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been
invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldæa, from whom it
had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors.
Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in
Sumerian—the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldæa—were taken over by
the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course,
with a totally different pronunciation. In Sumerian, for example,
_mer-sig_ signified “trousers,” but though the two characters _mer_ and
_sig_ continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the
word, the pronunciation attached to them was _sarbillu_, the modern Arabic
_shirwâl_.
The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all
thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of
Chaldæa. It was far more necessary in his case than a knowledge of Latin
would be in our own. Moreover, it was necessary for him to learn the
various forms which the same cuneiform character assumed in different
countries or at different periods in the same country. These various forms
were very numerous, and they often differed more than black letter differs
from ordinary modern type.
The fact, then, that the cuneiform syllabary was studied and used from the
banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile, brings with it the further
fact that throughout this area there must have been numerous schools and
teachers. Time and persevering labour were needed for its acquisition,
while a knowledge of the Babylonian language which accompanied its study
could not have been obtained without the help of teachers. It is
accordingly a matter of no small astonishment that the letters received at
the Egyptian foreign office were written, not only by professional
scribes, but also by officials and soldiers.
Naturally the study of the foreign syllabary and language was facilitated
in every possible way. In his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, Professor
Flinders Petrie has discovered fragments of lists of cuneiform characters,
as well as of comparative dictionaries of Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian.
Moreover, a Babylonian mythological text has been found, in which the
words have been divided from one another by dots of red paint, in order to
assist the learner in making his way through the legend.
This mythological text is not the only one which has been met with among
the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The existence of such texts is a proof that
the literature of Babylonia, as well as its language and script, was
carried to the West. From very remote times public libraries, consisting
for the most part of clay-books, were to be found in the Babylonian and
Assyrian cities, and when Babylonian culture made its way to the West,
similar libraries must have sprung up there also. The revelations made to
us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna show that these libraries, like those
of Babylonia, were stocked with books written upon clay, many of which
contained copies of Babylonian legends and myths.
One of the mythological tales discovered at Tel el-Amarna is the latter
portion of a story which described the creation of the first man, Adapa or
Adama, and the introduction of death into the world. Adapa had broken the
wings of the south wind, and was accordingly ordered to appear before Anu,
the lord of the sky. There he refused to touch the food and water of
“death” that were offered him, and when subsequently the heart of Anu was
“softened” towards him, he refused also the food and water of “life.”
Whereupon “Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: ‘O
Adapa, wherefore eatest thou not? wherefore drinkest thou not? The gift of
life cannot now be thine.’ ”
The beginning of the story has been in the British Museum many years. It
is a fragment of a copy of the myth which was made for the library of
Nineveh some eight centuries after the rest of the story, which has now
been disinterred on the banks of the Nile, had been buried under the ruins
of Khu-n-Aten’s city. I copied it nearly twenty years ago, but had to wait
for the discovery of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna before ascertaining its
true meaning and significance. Nineveh and Tel el-Amarna had to unite in
the restoration of the old Babylonian myth.
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.
One of these cities, Kirjath-Sepher, or “Book-town,” is mentioned in the
Old Testament. It was also called Kirjath-Sannah, or “City of
Instruction,” doubtless from the school which was attached to its library.
The site of it is unfortunately lost; should it ever be recovered, we may
expect to find beneath it literary treasures similar to those which the
mounds of Assyria and Babylonia have yielded. Perhaps some day the papyri
of Egypt will tell us where exactly to look for it.
A reference to it has already been met with. In the time of Ramses II., an
Egyptian scribe composed an ironical account of the adventures of a
military officer in Palestine. The officer in question was called a Mohar,
a word borrowed from the Babylonians, in whose language it signified “an
envoy.”
The Egyptian work is consequently usually known as _The Travels of a
Mohar_, and it gives us an interesting picture of Canaan shortly before
the Israelitish Exodus. The author was clearly very proud of his
geographical knowledge, and has therefore introduced the names of a large
number of places. In one passage he asks: “Hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab
together with Beth-Sopher? Dost thou not know Adullam and Zidiputha?” Dr.
W. Max Müller, to whom the correct reading of the passage is due, points
out that the scribe has interchanged the words Kirjath, “city,” and Beth,
“house,” and that he ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher.
That he was acquainted, however, with the meaning of the Canaanitish word
Sopher (in Egyptian Thupar) is shown by his adding to it the determinative
of “writing.” _Sopher_, in fact, means “scribe,” just as _sepher_ means
“book,” and indicates the fact that Kirjath-Sepher was not only a town of
books, but of book-writers as well. It will be remembered that Beth-Anab,
“the house of grapes,” in the abbreviated form of Anab, is associated with
Kirjath-Sepher in the Old Testament (Josh. xi. 21; xv. 49, 50), just as it
is in the Egyptian papyrus.
In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we have a picture of Canaan in the century
which preceded the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. As we have seen,
it was at that time an Egyptian province. We can thus understand why, in
the tenth chapter of Genesis, Canaan is made a brother of Mizraim, or
Egypt. For a while it obeyed the same sovereign and was administered by
the same laws; the natives of Canaan held office in the court of the
Pharaoh, and Egyptian governors ruled in the Canaanitish cities. It was
not until after the death of Ramses II., of the nineteenth dynasty, and
about the very time when the Israelites were escaping from their house of
bondage, that Canaan ceased to be an Egyptian dependency. From that time
forward it was politically and geographically severed from the valley of
the Nile, and the geographer could never again couple it with the land of
Egypt.
When Khu-n-Aten was Pharaoh, the cities of Canaan were numerous and
wealthy. The people were highly cultured, and excelled especially as
workers in gold and silver, as manufacturers of porcelain and
vari-coloured glass, and as weavers of richly-dyed linen. Their merchants
already traded to distant parts of the known world. The governors
appointed by the Pharaoh were for the most part of native origin, and at
times a representative of the old line of kings was left among them,
though an Egyptian prefect was often placed at his side. The governors
were controlled by the presence of Egyptian garrisons, as well as by the
visits of an Egyptian “commissioner.” Their rivalries and quarrels form
the subject of many of the letters which have been found at Tel el-Amarna,
both sides appealing to the Pharaoh for protection and help, and alike
protesting their loyalty to him. It seems to have been the part of
Egyptian policy to encourage these quarrels, or at all events to hold an
even balance between the rival governors.
As long as the power of Egypt remained intact, _these quarrels_, which
sometimes _resulted in open war_, offered no cause for alarm. Egyptian
troops could always be sent to the scene of disturbance before it could
become dangerous. But in the troublous days of Khu-n-Aten’s reign, when
Egypt itself was restless and inclined for revolt, the position of affairs
was changed. The Egyptian forces were needed at home, and the Pharaoh was
compelled to turn a deaf ear to the piteous appeals that were made to him
for assistance. The enemies of Egyptian rule began to multiply and grow
powerful. In the south the Khabiri or “Confederates” threatened the
Egyptian domination; in the north, Amorite rebels intrigued with the
Hittites and with the kings of Naharaim and Babylonia, while in all parts
of Palestine the Sute or Bedouin were perpetually on the watch to take
advantage of the weakness of the government.
It was the vassal-king of Jerusalem, Ebed-tob by name, who was especially
menaced by the Khabiri. In his letters he describes himself as unlike the
other governors, in that he had been appointed to his office by the “arm”
or “oracle” of “the Mighty King,” the supreme deity of his city. It was
not from his father or his mother, consequently, that he had derived his
royal dignity. He was, in fact, a priest-king, like his predecessor
Melchizedek, to whom Abram had paid tithes. Ebed-tob, however, was unable
to make head against his enemies the Khabiri. One by one the towns which
were included in the territory of Jerusalem, from Keilah and Gath-Karmel
to Rabbah, fell into their hands; the Pharaoh was unable to send him the
help for which he so earnestly begged, and we finally hear of his having
fallen into the hands of his Bedouin enemy, Labai, along with the cities
of which he was in charge. Labai was in alliance with a certain Malchiel,
who also writes letters to the Egyptian monarch, as well as with Tagi of
Gath and the Khabiri. The latter seem to have given the name of Hebron,
“the Confederacy,” to the old city of Kirjath-Arba.
Megiddo was the seat of an Egyptian governor, like Gaza, near Shechem. The
name of Shechem has not been found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, but a
reference is made to its “mountain,” in the _Travels of a Mohar_. Either
Mount Ebal or Mount Gerizim must consequently have been already well known
in Egypt. Another Egyptian governor was in command of Phœnicia. Gebal,
north of Beyrût, was his chief residence, but he had palaces also at Tyre
and Zemar, in the mountains of the interior. In one of his letters he
alludes to the wealth of Tyre, which must therefore have been already
famous.
Phœnicia and Palestine are alike included under the name of “Canaan” in
the cuneiform documents, though in the hieroglyphic records they are
called Zahi and Khal (or Khar). North of Palestine came “the land of the
Amorites,” of which Ebed-Asherah and his son, Aziru or Ezer, were
governors, and to the east of the Jordan was “the field of Bashan.” The
Egyptian supremacy was acknowledged as far south as the frontier of Edom;
the latter country preserved its independence.
Such was the condition of Canaan when the cuneiform correspondence of Tel
el-Amarna comes suddenly to an end. The death of Khu-n-Aten had been the
signal for a revolt against the faith which he had endeavoured to impose
upon Egypt, as well as against the Asiatic influences by which he had been
surrounded. He left daughters only behind him. One of them was married to
a prince who, in order to secure the throne, was forced to return to the
old religion of the country, and to call himself by the name of
Tutânkh-Amon. But his reign was short, like those of one or two other
relations and followers of Khu-n-Aten who have left traces of themselves
upon the monuments. A rival king, Ai by name, held possession of Egypt for
a while, and after his death Hor-m-hib, the Armais of Manetho, ruled once
more at Thebes over a united Egypt, and the worship of the solar disk was
at end.
But the ruins of Tel el-Amarna show that the restoration of the old creed
and the overthrow of Khu-n-Aten’s adherents had not been without a
struggle. Most of the tombs in the cliffs and sandhills which surround the
old city have been unfinished: the followers of the new cult for whom they
were intended have never been allowed to occupy them. The royal sepulchre
itself, as we have seen, is in an equally unfinished condition, and the
sarcophagus in which the body of the king rested was violated soon after
his mummy had been placed in it. Indeed, it had never been deposited in
the niche that had been cut to receive it; its shattered fragments were
discovered far away on the floor of the great columned hall. The capital
of the “heretic king” was destroyed by its enemies soon after his death,
and never inhabited again. The ruins of its palace and houses were full of
broken statues and other objects which their owners had no time to carry
away. The city lasted only for about thirty years, and the sands of the
desert then began to close over its fallen greatness. How sudden and
complete must have been its overthrow is proved by the cuneiform tablets;
not only were these imperial archives not carried elsewhere, the
correspondence contained in them breaks off suddenly with a half-told tale
of disaster and dismay. 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.” But no answer was returned to these
pressing appeals, and the sudden cessation of the correspondence under the
ruins of the Egyptian foreign office itself gives us the reason why.
One of the first acts of Hor-m-hib after the settlement of affairs at home
was to chastise the Asiatics, who had doubtless taken advantage of the
momentary weakness of Egypt. With the death of Hor-m-hib, after a reign of
five years,(7) the eighteenth dynasty came to an end. Ramses I., the
founder of the nineteenth dynasty, introduced a new type of royal name,
and also, as we learn from the monuments, a new type of royal face. After
a short reign of two years, he was succeeded by his son, Seti I., in whose
name we have an evidence that the proscribed worship of the god Set—the
god of the Delta—was again taken under royal patronage. It was an
indication that the new dynasty traced its descent from northern Egypt.
Seti I. once more led the Egyptian armies to victory in Asia. With the
spoils of conquest temples were built and decorated, and the names of
conquered nations engraved upon their walls. One of these temples was at
Abydos, the most beautiful of all those which have been left to us in
Egypt. But Seti’s fame as a builder was far eclipsed by that of his son
and successor, Ramses II., and even the temples which he had raised at
Abydos and Qurnah were completed, and to a certain extent appropriated, by
his better-known son.
We are told in the Book of Exodus that two of the “treasure cities” which
the Israelites built for the Pharaoh of the Oppression were “Pithom and
Raamses.” The discovery of Pithom was, as we have already seen, the
inaugural work of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The discovery, as has been
already stated, was made by Dr. Naville, who was led to the site by
certain monuments of Ramses II., which had been found there by the French
engineers of M. de Lesseps. These monuments consisted of a great tablet
and monolith of red granite, two sphinxes of exquisitely polished black
granite, and a broken shrine of red sandstone which had been transported
to Ismailîyeh, where they formed the chief ornament of the little public
garden. As they all showed that Tum, the setting sun, was the supreme
deity of the place from which they had come, Dr. Naville concluded that it
would prove to be Pi-Tum, “the abode of Tum,” the Pithom of Scripture, and
not the companion city of Raamses, as Lepsius had believed.
The mounds from which the monuments had been disinterred are about twelve
miles to the west of Ismailîyeh, and are called Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the
Mound of the Image.” In the last century, however, they were known as Abu
Kêshêd, and were famous for a half-buried monolith of granite representing
Ramses II. seated between Tum and Râ, the hieroglyphic inscription on the
back of which has been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson. The canal made
by the Pharaohs for uniting the Nile with the Red Sea, and afterwards
cleared of the sand that choked it by Darius, by Trajan, and by the Arab
conqueror ’Amru, skirted the southern side of the mounds. At present the
modern Freshwater Canal runs along their northern edge, to the north of
which again is the line of the railway from Cairo to Suez. The
fortifications erected by Arabi, however, hide the site of the old city
from the traveller in the train.
Dr. Naville’s excavations proved him to have been right in identifying Tel
el-Maskhuteh with Pithom. The inscriptions he found there showed that its
ancient name was Pi-Tum, and that it stood in the district of Thukut, the
Succoth of the Old Testament. The name of this district was already known
from papyri of the age of the nineteenth dynasty, and Dr. Brugsch had
pointed out its identity with the Biblical Succoth.
But the discovery of the ancient name was not the only result of the
explorer’s work. It turned out that the city had been built by Ramses II.,
and that it contained a number of large brick buildings which seem to have
been intended for magazines. Here, then, at last was a proof that the
Egyptologists were correct in making Ramses II. the Pharaoh of the
Oppression.
The site of Raamses or Ramses, the companion city of Pithom, has still to
be discovered. But it cannot be far distant from Tel el-Maskhuteh, and,
like the latter, must have been in that land of Goshen in which the
Israelites were settled. The discoveries which enabled Dr. Naville to
determine the boundaries of the land of Goshen and to fix the site of its
ancient capital have already been described. The site of Zoan, the modern
Sân, had long been known, and the excavations, first of Mariette Pasha and
then of Professor Flinders Petrie, have laid bare the foundations of its
temple and brought to light the monuments of the kings who enriched and
adorned it. Built originally in the age of the Old Empire, it was restored
by the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and became under them a centre of
influence and power.
Goshen, Zoan and Pithom, the sites around which the early history of
Israel gathered, have thus been brought to light. The disputes which have
raged about them are at last ended. Here and there a persistent sceptic,
who has been reared in the traditions of the past, may still express
doubts concerning the discoveries of recent years, but for the
Egyptologist and the archæologist the question has been finally settled.
We can visit “the field of Zoan” and explore the mounds of Pithom with no
misgivings as to their identity. When the train carries us from Ismailîyeh
to Cairo, we may feel assured that we are passing through the district in
which Jacob and his family were settled, and where the kinsfolk of Moses
had their homes. The Egypt of the patriarchs and the Exodus was an Egypt
narrow in compass and easily traversed in these days of steam; it
represented the western part of the Delta, more especially the strip of
cultivable land which stretches along the banks of the Freshwater Canal
from Zagazig to Ismailîyeh: that is all. The eastern and northern Delta,
Upper Egypt—even the district in which Cairo now stands—lay outside it.
The history which attaches itself to them is not the history of the early
Israelites.
CHAPTER III. THE EXODUS AND THE HEBREW SETTLEMENT IN CANAAN.
Ramses II. was the last of the conquering Pharaohs of native Egyptian
history. The Asiatic empire of Thothmes III. was in some measure restored
by the victories of his father and himself. The cities of Palestine
yielded him an unwilling obedience. Gaza, and the other towns in what was
afterwards the territory of the Philistines, were garrisoned by Egyptian
troops, and on the walls of the Ramesseum were depicted his conquest of
Shalem or Jerusalem, Merom, Beth-Anath, and other Canaanite states, in his
eighth year. Egyptian armies again marched northward into Syria along the
highroad that led past the Phœnician cities, and on the banks of the Nahr
el-Kelb, or Dog’s River, near Beyrût, the Pharaoh erected a tablet in
commemoration of his successes. On the eastern side of the Jordan also
Egyptian authority once more prevailed. In front of the northern pylon of
the temple of Luxor, Ramses erected six colossal figures of himself, and
on their recently-uncovered bases are inscribed the names of the various
nations he claimed to have subdued. Among them we find, for the first time
in the Egyptian records, the name of Moab, following immediately upon that
of Assar, the Asshurim of Genesis xxv. 3. That the insertion of the name
was not an idle boast we learn from a discovery lately made by Dr.
Schumacher. On the eastern side of the Jordan, but at no great distance
from the Lake of Tiberias, is a monolith called the “Stone of Job.” On
this the German explorer has found Egyptian sculptures and hieroglyphs.
Above the figure of the Pharaoh are the cartouches of Ramses II., and
opposite the king, on the left, a local deity is represented with a full
face and the crown of Osiris, over whom is written the name of Akna-zapn,
or “Yakin of the North.” The monument is an evidence of a permanent
occupation of the country by the Egyptians, as the name and figure of the
god indicate that it was erected, not by the Egyptians themselves, but by
the Egyptianised natives of the land.
Along the Syrian coast Seti I. had already carried his arms. His campaigns
were followed by those of his son. Arvad, the shores of the Gulf of
Antioch, and even Cilicia, are enumerated among the conquests of the
Pharaoh. He even claims to have defeated the armies of Assyria, of Matena
or Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of Scripture, and of Singar in Mesopotamia.
At Luxor, on the western walls of the newly excavated court, we hear of
his having been at Tunip (now Tennib), “in the land of Naharaim,” of his
capture of a fortress of the Kati in the same district, and of how “the
Pharaoh” had taken a city in “the land of Satuna.” Satuna was one of those
countries in the far north whose name is never mentioned elsewhere in the
Egyptian texts.
The Syrian conquests, however, could never have been long in the Pharaoh’s
possession. Between them and Palestine lay the southern outposts of the
Hittite race. In the troublous times which followed the death of
Khu-n-Aten, the Hittites had overrun “the land of the Amorites” to the
north of Canaan, and fixed their southern capital in the holy city of
Kadesh, on the Orontes. It was a stronghold against which the forces of
Ramses were hurled in vain. For twenty years did the struggle continue
between the Pharaoh of Egypt and “the great king of the Hittites,” and at
last, exhausted by the long conflict, in which neither party had gained
the advantage, the two enemies agreed upon peace. A treaty was signed on
the twenty-first of the month Tybi, in the twenty-first year of the reign
of Ramses (B.C. 1327), “in the city of Ramses,” to which the Hittite
ambassadors had come. Ramses, on the one side, and Khita-sir, the son of
Mul-sir, the Hittite prince, on the other, bound themselves in it to
eternal friendship and alliance. In case of war they were to send troops
to one another’s help, and they agreed to put to death any criminals who
might fly from the one country to the other. Political offenders, however,
who had taken refuge in the territory of one or other of the two
contracting parties, were not to be injured. It was of course the
Canaanitish subjects of the Pharaoh, who adjoined the Hittite kingdom,
that were principally affected by these stipulations. It was further
determined that on no pretext whatever should any change be made in the
boundaries of the two monarchies. The treaty was placed under the
protection of the deities of Egypt and the Hittites, and a Hittite copy of
it was engraved on a silver plate. The agreement was cemented by the
marriage of Ramses to a daughter of the Hittite king, who thereupon
assumed an Egyptian name.
Northern Syria was thus formally conceded to the powerful conquerors who
had descended from the mountains of Kappadokia, while Palestine remained
under Egyptian dominion. But it was not destined to do so long. Ramses was
succeeded by Meneptah, the fourteenth of his many sons, who had reigned
only four years when the very existence of his kingdom was threatened by a
formidable invasion from the west and north. “The peoples of the north”
swarmed out of their coasts and islands, and a great fleet descended upon
Egypt, in conjunction with the Libyans and Maxyes of northern Africa.
Aqaiush or Achæans, Shardana or Sardinians, Tursha or Tyrsenians appear
among them, as well as Leku from Asia Minor, and Zakkur, who a little
later are the colleagues and brethren of the Philistines. Part of the
Delta was overrun and devastated before the Pharaoh could make head
against his foes. But a decisive battle was at length fought at
Pa-Alu-sheps, not far from Heliopolis, which ended in the complete
overthrow of the invading hordes. Egypt was saved from the danger which
had threatened it, but it seems never to have recovered from the shock.
The power of the government was weakened in the valley of the Nile itself,
and one by one the foreign conquests passed out of its grasp. The sceptre
of Seti II., who followed Meneptah, seems to have dropped into the hands
of a usurper, Amon-messu by name: the history of the period is, however,
involved in obscurity, and all that is certain is that the empire of
Ramses II. was lost, and that Egypt itself fell into a state of decadence.
With Si-Ptah the nineteenth dynasty came to an inglorious end.
Its fall was the signal for internal confusion and civil war. A Syrian
foreigner, Arisu by name, possessed himself of the throne of the Pharaohs,
and Egypt for a while was compelled to submit to Canaanitish rule. Its
leading nobles were in banishment, its gods were deprived of their
customary offerings, and famine was added to the horrors of war. A
deliverer came in the person of Set-nekht, the founder of the twentieth
dynasty. He drove the stranger out the country, and restored it again to
peace and prosperity. Hardly had his task been completed when he died, and
was succeeded by his son, Ramses III. Under him a transient gleam of
victory and conquest visited once more the valley of the Nile.
It was well for Egypt that she possessed an energetic general and king.
The same hordes which had threatened her in the reign of Meneptah now
again attacked her with increased numbers and greater chances of success.
In the fifth year of Ramses III., the fair-skinned tribes of the western
desert poured into the Delta. The Maxyes, under their chieftains Mdidi,
Mâshakanu, and Mâraiu, and the Libyans, under Ur-mâr and Zut-mâr, met the
Pharaoh in battle at a place which ever afterwards bore a name
commemorative of their defeat. The victory of the Egyptians was, in fact,
decisive. As many as 12,535 slain were counted on the field of battle, and
captives and spoil innumerable fell into the hands of the victors.
But Ramses was allowed only a short breathing-space. Three years after the
Libyan invasion, and doubtless in connection with it, came a still more
formidable invasion on the part of the barbarians of the north. This time
they came partly by land, partly by sea. Vast hordes of them had marched
out of Asia Minor, overrunning the kingdoms of the Hittites, of Naharaim,
of Carchemish, and of Arvad, and carrying with them adventurers and
recruits from the countries through which they passed. First they pitched
their camp in “the land of the Amorites,” and then marched southward
towards the frontiers of Egypt. The place of the Aqaiush was taken by the
Daanau or Danaans, but the Zakkur again formed part of the invading host,
this time accompanied by Pulsata or Philistines, and Shakalsh or
Siculians. By the side of the land army moved a fleet of ships, and fleet
and army arrived together at the mouths of the Nile. The cities in the
extreme south of Palestine, once occupied by Egyptian garrisons, were
captured by the Philistines, and became henceforward their assured
possession.
But the main body of the invaders were not so fortunate. The Egyptian
forces were ready to receive them, and their ships had scarcely entered
the mouth of the Nile before they were attacked by the Egyptian fleet. The
battle ended in the complete annihilation of the attacking host. A picture
of it is sculptured on the walls of Medînet Habu at Thebes, the
temple-palace which Ramses built to commemorate his victories, and we can
there study the ships of the European barbarians and the features and
dress of the barbarians themselves. In the expressive words of the
Egyptian scribe, “they never reaped a harvest any more.”
Ramses, however, was even now not left at rest. Three years later the
Maxyes again assailed Egypt under Mashashal, the son of Kapur, but once
more unsuccessfully. Cattle, horses, asses, chariots and weapons of war in
large quantities fell into the hands of the Egyptians, as well as 2052
captives, while 2175 men were slain. From this time forward Egypt was
secure from attack on its western border.
Freed from the necessity of defending his own territories, Ramses now
carried the war into Asia. What in later days was the land of Judah was
overrun by his forces; Gaza and the districts round Hebron and Salem or
Jerusalem were occupied, and the name of the Dead Sea appears on the walls
of Medînet Habu for the first time in Egyptian history. The Egyptian army
even crossed to the eastern side of the Jordan and captured the Moabite
capital.
Another campaign led it along the Phœnician coast into northern Syria.
Hamath was taken, and Ramses seems to have penetrated as far as the slopes
of the Taurus. He even claims to have defeated the people of Mitanni or
Aram-Naharaim on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The kings of the
Hittites and the Amorites, like the chiefs of the Zakkur and the
Philistines, were already prisoners in his hands.
But the northern campaigns of Ramses were intended to strike terror rather
than to re-establish the Asiatic empire of Egypt. No attempt was made to
hold the cities and districts which had been overrun. Though a temple was
erected to Amon on the frontiers of the later Judæa, even Gaza was given
up, and the fortress which had so long defended the road from Canaan into
Egypt was allowed to pass into Philistine hands. It was the same with the
campaign which the Pharaoh conducted at a later date against the “Shasu”
or Bedouin of Edom. For the first time an Egyptian army succeeded in
making its way into the fastnesses of Mount Seir, slaying the warriors of
Edom, and plundering their “tents.” The Edomite chief himself was made a
prisoner. The expedition had the effect of protecting the Egyptian mining
establishments in the Sinaitic peninsula as well as the maritime trade
with southern Arabia. Large quantities of malachite were brought year by
year from the Egyptian province of Mafka or Sinai, and the
merchant-vessels of Ramses coasted along the Red Sea, bringing back with
them the precious spices of Yemen and Hadhramaut.
Ramses III. died after a reign of more than thirty-two years, and the
military renown of Egypt expired with him. His exact date is still a
matter of doubt, but his accession must have fallen about B.C. 1200. The
date is important, not only because it closes the history of Egypt as a
conquering power, but also as it marks a great era of migration among the
northern populations of the Mediterranean, as well as the permanent
settlement of the Philistines in Palestine. It was, moreover, the period
to which the Israelitish invasion of Canaan must belong.
When Ramses III. overran the southern portion of Palestine, and built the
temple of the Theban god at the spot now known as Khurbet Kan’an, not far
from Hebron, the Israelites could not as yet have entered the Promised
Land. There is no reference to the Egyptians in the Pentateuch, and there
is no reference to the Israelites in the hieroglyphic texts of Medînet
Habu. Hebron, Migdal, Karmel of Judah, Ir-Shemesh and Hadashah, all alike
fell into the hands of the Egyptian invaders, but neither in the Egyptian
nor in the Hebrew records is there any allusion to a struggle between
Egypt and Israel. When Joshua entered Canaan all these cities belonged to
the Canaanites, and when Ramses III. attacked them this was also the case.
The Palestinian campaign of Ramses must have prepared the way for the
Israelitish conquest; it could not have followed after it.
Moreover, “the five lords of the Philistines” seem to have already been
settled in the extreme south when the Israelitish invasion took place
(Josh. xiii. 3). Yet it also seems clear from the Egyptian monuments that
the settlement was not fully completed until after the Asiatic campaigns
of the Pharaoh had occurred. The Philistines indeed formed part of the
great invading host which poured through Syria and assailed Egypt in the
early part of his reign, but Gaza was one of his conquests, and its
possession enabled him to march into Canaan. Before Gaza could become a
Philistine city it was needful that its Egyptian garrison should be
withdrawn. Professor Prášek believes that the Philistine occupation of
southern Canaan took place in the year B.C. 1209, since the Roman
historian Justin tells us that in this year a king of Ashkelon stormed the
city of Sidon, and that the Sidonians fled to a neighbouring part of the
coast, and there founded Tyre. However this may be, the Philistine
settlement in Canaan must be ascribed to the age of Ramses III., and it
was already with the Philistines that the Israelites came into conflict
under almost the earliest of their judges.
But the date of the Israelitish conquest of Canaan is closely bound up
with that of the Exodus out of Egypt. It is true that when we are told of
the forty years’ wandering in the desert, the word “forty” is used, as it
is elsewhere in the Old Testament, as well as upon the Moabite Stone, to
denote an indeterminate period of time. It was a period during which the
greater part of the generation that had left Egypt had time to die. Joshua
and Caleb indeed remained, and Othniel, the brother of Caleb, lived to
deliver Israel from the king of Aram-Naharaim, and to be the first of the
judges. But otherwise it was a new generation which was led to conquest by
Joshua.
If Ramses II. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the Exodus
must have been one of his immediate successors. Egyptologists have
hesitated between Meneptah, Seti II., and Si-Ptah. There is much to be
said in favour of each. None of them reigned long, and after the death of
Meneptah the sceptre fell into feeble hands, and the Egyptian monarchy
went rapidly to decay.
Native tradition, as reported by the historian Manetho, made Meneptah the
Pharaoh under whom the children of Israel escaped from their house of
bondage. Amenôphis or Meneptah, it was said, desired to see the gods. He
was accordingly instructed by the seer Amenôphis, the son of Pa-apis, to
clear the land of the leprous and impure. This he did, and 80,000 persons
were collected from all parts of Egypt, and were then separated from the
other inhabitants of the country and compelled to work in the quarries of
Tûra, on the eastern side of the Nile. Among them there happened to be
some priests, one of whom was Osarsiph, a priest of On, and the
sacrilegious act of laying hands on them was destined to be avenged by the
gods. The seer prophesied that the impure lepers would find allies, and
with their help would govern Egypt for thirteen years, when a saviour
should arise in the person of Amenôphis himself. Not daring to tell the
king of this prediction, he put it in writing and then took away his own
life. After a time the workers in the quarries were removed to Avaris, the
deserted fortress of the Hyksos, on the Asiatic frontier of the Egyptian
kingdom. Here they rose in rebellion under Osarsiph, who organised them
into a community, and gave them new laws, forbidding them to revere the
sacred animals, and ordering them to rebuild the walls of Avaris. He also
sent to the descendants of the Hyksos at Jerusalem, begging for their
assistance. A force of 200,000 men was accordingly despatched to Avaris,
and the invasion of Egypt decided on. Amenôphis retired into Ethiopia
without striking a blow, carrying with him his son Sethos, who was also
called Ramesses after his grandfather, as well as the sacred bull Apis,
and other holy animals. The images of the gods were concealed, lest they
should be profaned by the invaders. Amenôphis remained in Ethiopia for
thirteen years, while Osarsiph, who had taken the name of Moses, together
with his allies from Jerusalem, committed innumerable atrocities. At last,
however, Amenôphis and his son Sethos returned, each at the head of an
army; the enemy were defeated and overthrown, and finally pursued to the
borders of Syria.
The tradition is a curious mixture of fact and legend. Osarsiph is but an
Egyptianised form of Joseph, the first syllable of which has been
explained as representing the god of Israel (as in Ps. lxxxi. 5), and has
accordingly been identified with Osar or Osiris. The ancient Egyptian
habit of regarding the foreigner as impure has been interpreted to mean
that the followers of Osarsiph were lepers. The Exodus of the Israelites
has been confounded with the invasion of the northern barbarians in the
reign of Meneptah, as well as with the troublous period that saw the fall
of the nineteenth dynasty when the throne of Egypt was seized by the
Syrian Arisu. And, lastly, the hated Hyksos have been introduced into the
story; their fortress Avaris is made the rallying-place of the revolted
lepers, and it is through the help they send from Jerusalem that the rule
of Osarsiph or Moses is established in the valley of the Nile.
An interesting commentary on the legend has been furnished by a papyrus
lately acquired by M. Golénischeff, and dating from the age of Thothmes
III. On the last page is a sort of Messianic prophecy, the hero of which
has the name of Ameni, a shortened form of Amenôphis. “A king,” it says,
“will come from the south, Ameni the truth-declaring by name. He will be
the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in.... He will assume the
crown of Upper Egypt, and will lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt. He
will unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the son of man
(_sic_) will rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They will be
far from evil, and the wicked will humble their mouths for fear of him.
The Asiatics (Âmu) will fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his
flame. The wicked will wait on his judgments, the rebels on his power. The
royal serpent on his brow will pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built,
even that of the prince, so that the Asiatics may no more enter into
Egypt.” In this Ameni we should probably see the Amenôphis of the
Manethonian story.
Against the identification of Meneptah with the Pharaoh of the Exodus it
has, however, been urged that he seems on the whole to have been a
successful prince. His kingdom passed safely through the shock of the
Libyan and northern invasions, and notices which have survived to us show
that, at all events in the earlier part of his reign, Gaza and the
neighbouring towns still acknowledged his authority. At Zaru, on the
Asiatic frontier of Egypt, a young scribe, Pa-ebpasa by name, was
stationed, whose duty it was to keep a record of all those who entered or
left the country by “the way of the Philistines.” Some of his notes, made
in the third year of Meneptah, are entered on the back of his school
copybook, which is now in the British Museum. One of them tells us that on
the fifteenth of Pakhons Baal— ... the son of Zippor of Gaza, passed
through with a letter to Baal-marom(?)-ga[b]u, the prince of Tyre; another
that Thoth, the son of Zakarumu, and the policeman Duthau, the son of
Shem-baal, as well as Sutekh-mes, the son of Epher-dagal, had come from
Gaza with a message to the king.
A curious despatch, dated in Meneptah’s eighth year, goes to show that at
that time the kinsfolk of the Israelites still had liberty to pass from
the desert into the land of Goshen and there find pasturage for their
flocks. One of his officials informs him that certain Shasu or Bedouin
from Edom had been allowed to pass the Khetam or fortress of Meneptah
Hotep-hima in the district of Succoth, and make their way to the lakes of
the city of Pithom, in the district of Succoth, “in order to feed
themselves and their herds on the possessions of Pharaoh, who is there a
beneficent sun for all peoples.” The document may be interpreted in two
ways. It may be taken as a proof that the Israelites had not yet fled from
Egypt, and that there was consequently as yet no restraint placed by the
Egyptians upon the entrance of the Asiatic nomads into their country, or
it may be regarded as implying that the land of Goshen was already
deserted, so that there was abundance of room for both shepherds and
flocks. On behalf of this view a passage may be quoted from the great
inscription of Meneptah at Karnak, in which we read that “the country
around Pa-Bailos (the modern Belbeis) was not cultivated, but left as
pasture for cattle because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the
time of the ancestors.” More probably, however, this means that the land
in question was not inhabited by Egyptian _fellahin_, but given over to
the Hebrew shepherds and the “mixed multitude” of their Bedouin kinsmen.
A more serious objection to making Meneptah the Pharaoh of the Exodus is
the fact that his son Seti II. was already acknowledged as heir to the
throne during his father’s lifetime. The “tale of the two brothers,” to
which we have already had to refer, was dedicated to him while he was
still crown-prince. Indeed, it would even appear that he was associated
with his father on the throne, since the cartouches of Meneptah and Seti
II. are found side by side in the rock-temple of Surarîyeh. It would seem,
therefore, that the first-born of the Pharaoh, who was destroyed on the
night of the Passover, could not have been a son of Meneptah—at all
events, if his heir and future successor were his first-born son. That
Meneptah should have been buried in one of the royal tombs of Bibân
el-Molûk at Thebes, and received divine honours after his death, is of
less consequence. As has often been remarked, no mention is made in the
narrative of the Exodus that the Pharaoh himself was drowned, and though
Meneptah’s tomb (No. 8) is unfinished, the cult that was paid to his
memory indicates that his mummy was deposited in it. It was plundered
centuries ago, and the numerous Greek inscriptions on its walls make it
clear that it was open to visitors in the Roman age.
Professor Maspero has suggested that the Pharaoh of the Bible was Seti II.
We know that Seti must have been a weak prince, and that his rule was
disputed. A usurper, Amon-messu by name, seized the crown either during
his lifetime or at his death, and governed at Thebes, while the authority
of the lawful line of princes was still acknowledged in the north. We also
know that he must have died suddenly, for his tomb at Thebes (No. 15),
though begun magnificently, was never finished. Its galleries and halls
were hewn out of the rock, but never adorned with sculptures and
paintings, and, except at the entrance, we have merely outline sketches,
which were never filled in. His cartouches, however, are found in another
tomb, not far off (No. 13), and after his death worship was paid to him
and his wife.
A despatch, written during his reign, relates to the escape of two
fugitives who had travelled along the very road which the Israelites
attempted to take. The scribe tells us that he set out in pursuit of them
from the royal city of Ramses on the evening of the 9th of Epiphi, and had
arrived at the Khetam or fortress of Succoth the following day. Two days
later he reached another Khetam, and there learned that the slaves were
already safe in the desert, having passed the lines of fortification to
the north of the Migdol of King Seti. The account is an interesting
illustration of the flight, on a far larger scale, that must have taken
place about the same time. The geography of the despatch is in close
harmony with that of the Book of Exodus, and bears witness to the
contemporaneousness of the latter with the events it professes to record.
It is a geography which ceased to be exact after the age of the nineteenth
dynasty.
It is thus possible that Seti II., instead of Meneptah, is the Pharaoh
whose host perished in the waves of the Red Sea. But there is yet another
claimant in Si-Ptah, with whom the nineteenth dynasty came to an end. Dr.
Kellogg has argued ably on behalf of him, and it is possible that the
views of this scholar are correct. Si-Ptah’s right to the throne was
derived from his wife, Ta-user, and he reigned at least six years. That he
followed Seti II. has long been admitted, on the authority of Manetho,
though doubts have been cast on it in consequence of a statement of
Champollion that he found the name of Seti written over that of Si-Ptah in
the tomb of the latter at Bibân el-Molûk (No. 14). All doubts, however,
are now set at rest by an inscription I copied at Wadi Halfa two years
ago, in which the writer, Hora, the son of Kam, declares that he had
formerly belonged to the palace of Seti II., and had engraved the
inscription in the third year of Si-Ptah. In another inscription in the
same place, dated also in Si-Ptah’s reign, the author states that he had
been an ambassador to the land of Khal or Syria. Intercourse with Asia was
therefore still maintained.
Si-Ptah’s tomb at Thebes was usurped by Setnekht, the founder of the
twentieth dynasty. It is even doubtful whether the king for whom it was
made was ever buried in it. In the second sepulchral hall the lid of his
sarcophagus was discovered, but of the sarcophagus itself there was no
trace. Perhaps it had been appropriated by Set-nekht. At any rate, those
who believe that the Pharaoh of the Exodus perished in the Red Sea will
find in Si-Ptah a better representative of him than in Meneptah or Seti.
And the period of anarchy which followed upon his death may be regarded as
the natural sequel of the disasters that befel Egypt before the children
of Israel were permitted to go.
However this may be, the question of the date of the Exodus is reduced to
narrow limits. The three successors of Ramses II. reigned altogether but a
short time. Manetho gives seven years only to Si-Ptah, five years to
Amon-messu, and we know from the monuments that Meneptah and Seti II. can
have reigned but a very few years. Thirty or forty years at most will have
covered the period that elapsed between the death of the great Ramses and
the downfall of his dynasty. Then came a few years of confusion and
anarchy, followed by the reign of Setnekht. If we place the accession of
Ramses III. in B.C. 1230, we cannot be far wrong.
When that happened, the Israelites were hidden out of the sight of the
great nations of the world among the solitudes of the desert. They were
pitching their tents on the frontiers of Mount Seir, in the near
neighbourhood of their kinsmen in Edom and Midian. There, at Sinai and
Kadesh-barnea, they were receiving a code of laws, and being fitted to
become a nation and the conquerors of Canaan. Were they included among the
Shasu of Mount Seir whose overthrow is commemorated by Ramses III.?
For an answer we must turn to the twenty-first chapter of the Book of
Numbers. There we read how it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord:
“Waheb in Suphah and the brooks of Arnon, and the stream of the brook that
goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab.” Of
the war against the Amorites on the banks of the Arnon we know something,
but the Old Testament has preserved no record of the other war, which had
its scene in Suphah. Where Suphah was we know from the opening of the Book
of Deuteronomy, which tells us that the words of Moses were addressed to
the people “in the plain over against Suph.” Suph, in fact, was the
district which gave its name to the _yâm Sûph_ or “Sea of Suph,” the Red
Sea of the authorised version, the modern Gulf of Akabah. Here were the
Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, where Solomon built his fleet of
merchantmen (1 Kings ix. 26), and here too was the region which faced “the
plain” on the southern side of Moab.
The barren ranges of Mount Seir run down southward to Ezion-geber and
Eloth, at the head of the Gulf of Akabah. And it was just in the ranges of
Mount Seir that Ramses III. tells us he smote the Shasu and plundered
their tents. When he made this expedition, the Israelites were probably
still encamped on the borders of Edom. They had not as yet entered Canaan
when he marched through the later Judæa, and crossed the Jordan into Moab,
and his campaign against the Shasu of the desert did not take place many
years later. At Medînet Habu, the “chief of the Shasu” figures among his
prisoners by the side of the kings of the Hittites and the Amorites.
Was “the war of the Lord” in Suphah waged against the Pharaoh of Egypt?
Chronology is in favour of it, and if the enemies of the Israelites were
not the Egyptian army, it is hard to say who else they could have been. We
know from the Pentateuch that they were not the people of Edom; “meddle
not with them,” the Israelites were enjoined; the children of Esau were
their “brethren,” and God had “given Mount Seir unto Esau for a
possession.”
But whether or not Ramses III. and the tribes of Israel ever came into
actual conflict, it must have been during his reign that the first
Israelitish conquests in Canaan were made. The settlement of the twelve
tribes in Palestine was coeval with the final decay of the Egyptian
monarchy.
CHAPTER IV. THE AGE OF THE ISRAELITISH MONARCHIES.
Ramses III. was the last of the great Pharaohs in whose veins ran native
Egyptian blood. His successors all bore the same name as himself, but they
possessed neither his energy nor his power to rule. He had saved Egypt
from further attack from without, and it was well he had done so, for the
feeble monarchs of the twentieth dynasty would have been unable to resist
the foe. They ceased even to build or to erect the monuments which
testified to the prosperity of the country and the progress of its art.
The high-priests of Amon gradually usurped their authority, and a time
came at length when the last of the Ramses fled into exile in Ethiopia,
and a new dynasty governed in his stead. But the rule of the new monarchs
was hardly acknowledged beyond the Delta; Thebes was practically
independent under its priest-kings, and though they acknowledged the
authority of the Tanite Pharaohs in name, they acted, in real fact, as if
they were independent sovereigns. One of them, Ra-men-kheper, built
fortresses not only at Gebelên in the south, but also at El-Hîbeh in the
north, and thus blocked the river against the subjects of the Tanite
princes, as well as against invaders from the south. At times, indeed, the
Tanite Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty exercised an actual
sovereignty over Upper Egypt, and Smendes, the first of them, quarried
stone at Dababîyeh, opposite Gebelên, with which to repair the canal of
Luxor; but, as a general rule, so far as the south was concerned, they
were Pharaohs only in name. The rival dynasty of Theban high-priests was
at once more powerful and more king-like. They it was who, in some moment
of danger, concealed the mummies of the great monarchs of the eighteenth
and nineteenth dynasties in the pit at Dêr el-Bahâri, and whose own
mummies were entombed by the side of those of a Thothmes and a Ramses.
The Egyptian wife of Solomon was the daughter of one of the last Pharaohs
of the twenty-first dynasty. She brought with her as a dowry the
Canaanitish city of Gezer. Gezer had been one of the leading cities of
Palestine in the days of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, and through all
the years of Israelitish conquest it had remained in Canaanitish hands. It
was a Pharaoh of Tanis, and not an Israelite, into whose possession it was
destined finally to fall.
The waning power of Solomon in Israel coincided with the waning power of
the twenty-first dynasty. Long before the death of the Hebrew monarch, a
new dynasty was reigning over Egypt. Shishak, its founder, was of Libyan
origin. His immediate forefathers had commanded the Libyan mercenaries in
the service of the Pharaoh, and inscriptions lately discovered in the
Oasis of El-Khargeh write the name Shashaka. The Egyptians slightly
changed its pronunciation and made it Shashanq, but in the Old Testament
the true form is preserved.
Shishak brought new vigour into the decaying monarchy of the Nile. The
priest-kings of Thebes went down before him, along with the effete
Pharaohs of Tanis. It may be that Solomon attempted to assist his
father-in-law; if he did so, the only result was to bring trouble upon
himself. His rebel subject Jeroboam fled to Egypt, and found shelter and
protection in Shishak’s court.
Shishak must have looked on with satisfaction while the neighbouring
empire of Israel fell to pieces, until eventually the central power itself
was shattered in twain. The rebel he had so carefully nurtured at his own
court was the instrument which relieved him of all further fear of danger
on the side of Asia. So far from being a menace to Egypt, Jerusalem now
lay at the mercy of the Egyptian armies, and in the fifth year of
Rehoboam, Shishak led his forces against it. The strong walls Solomon had
built were of no avail; its temple and palace were plundered, and the
golden shields in its armoury were carried away. A record of the campaign
was engraved by the conqueror on the southern wall of the temple of Amon
at Karnak. There we read how he had overthrown the Amu or Asiatics, and
the Fenkhu or people of Palestine, and underneath are the cartouches, each
with the head of a captive above it, which contain the names of the
conquered places. At the outset come the names of towns in the northern
kingdom of Israel. But, as Professor Maspero remarks, this does not prove
that they were actually among the conquests of Shishak. If Jeroboam had
begged his aid against Judah, and thereby acknowledged himself the vassal
of the Pharaoh, it would have been a sufficient pretext for inserting the
names of his cities among the subject states of Egypt. But it may be that
the campaign was directed quite as much against Israel as against Judah,
and that Judah suffered most, simply because it had to bear the brunt of
the attack.
In any case, the list of vanquished towns begins first with Gaza, the
possession of which was necessary before the Egyptian army could force its
way into Palestine; then come Rabbith of Issachar, Taanach, near Megiddo,
Hapharaim and Beth-Horon, while Mahanaim, on the eastern side of the
Jordan, is also included among them. But after this the list deals
exclusively with the towns and villages of Judah, and of the Bedouin
tribes in the desert to the south of it. Thus we have Ajalon and Makkedah,
Socho and Keilah, Migdol and Beth-anoth. Then we read the names of Azem
and Arad, farther to the south, as well as of the Hagaraim or “Enclosures”
of Arad, and Rabbith ’Aradai, “Arad the capital.” Next to Arad comes the
name of Yurahma, the Jerahme-el of the Old Testament, the brother of Caleb
the Kenizzite (1 Chron. ii. 42) whose land was ravaged by David (1 Sam.
xxx. 29). But the larger portion of the list is made up of the names of
small villages and even Bedouin encampments, or of such general terms as
Hagra, “enclosure,” Negebu, “the south,” ’Emeq, “the valley,” Shebbaleth,
“a torrent,” Abilim, “fields,” Ganat, “garden,” Haideba, “a quarry,” and
the Egyptian Shodinau, “canals.”(8) Among them we look in vain even for
names like those of Gezer and Beer-sheba. Jerusalem, too, is conspicuous
by its absence, unless we agree with Professor Maspero in seeing it in the
last name of the list (No. 133), of which only the first syllable is
preserved. Were it not for the record in the First Book of Kings, we
should never have known that the campaign of Shishak had inflicted such
signal injury on the kingdom of Judah.
Champollion, indeed, the first discoverer of the list and of its
importance, believed that he had found in it the name of the Jewish
capital. The twenty-ninth cartouche reads Yaud-hamelek, which he explained
as signifying “the kingdom of Judah,” while Rosellini made it “the king of
Judah.” But both interpretations are impossible. _Melek_, it is true,
means “king” in Hebrew, but “king of Judah” would have to be
_melek-Yaudah_; “kingdom of Judah,” _malkûth-Yaudah_. In the Semitic
languages the genitive must follow the noun that governs it.
Yaud-hamelek is the Hebrew Ye(h)ud ham-melech “Jehud of the king.” Jehud
was a town of Dan (Josh. xix. 45), which Blau has identified with the
modern El-Yehudîyeh, near Jaffa, and the title attached to it in the
Egyptian list implies that it was an appanage of the crown. The faces of
the prisoners who surmount the cartouches are worthy of attention. The
Egyptian artists were skilled delineators of the human features, and an
examination of their sculptures and paintings has shown that they
represented the characteristics of their models with wonderful truth and
accuracy. For ethnological purposes their portraits of foreign races are
of considerable importance. Now the prisoners of Shishak have the
features, not of the Jew, but of the Amorite. The prisoners who served as
models to the Egyptian sculptors at Karnak must therefore have been of
Amorite descent. 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. The Jews, in fact, were but the
conquering and dominant caste, and with the extinction of their
nationality came also in Judah the extinction of their racial type. The
few who remained were one by one absorbed into the older population of the
country.
Shishak died soon after his Jewish campaigns. None of his successors seem
to have possessed his military capacity and energy. One of them, however,
Osorkon II., appears to have made an expedition against Palestine. Among
the monuments disinterred at Bubastis by Dr. Naville for the Egyptian
Exploration Fund are the inscribed blocks of stone which formed the walls
of the second hall of the temple. This hall was restored by Osorkon, who
called it the “Festival Hall” of Amon, which was dedicated on the day of
Khoiak, in the twenty-second year of the king’s reign. On one of the
blocks the Pharaoh declares that “all countries, the Upper and Lower
Retennu, are hidden under his feet.” The Upper Retennu denoted Palestine,
the Lower Retennu Northern Syria, and though the boast was doubtless a
vainglorious one, it must have had some foundation in truth.
In the Second Book of Chronicles (xiv. 9-15) we are told that when Asa was
on the Jewish throne, “there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian
with an host of a thousand thousand and three hundred chariots.” The
similarity between the names Zerah and Osorkon has long been noticed, and
the reign of Osorkon II. would coincide with that of Asa. Dr. Naville,
therefore, is probably right in believing that some connection exists
between the campaign of Zerah and the boast of Osorkon. It is true that
the Chronicler calls Zerah an Ethiopian, and describes his army as an
Ethiopian host; but this seems due to the fact that the next kings of
Egypt who interfered in the affairs of Palestine, So and Tirhakah, were of
Ethiopian descent. In the time of Asa, at any rate, when the twenty-second
dynasty was ruling over Egypt, no Ethiopian army could have entered Judah
without the permission of the Egyptian monarch. However, Dr. Naville draws
attention to the fact that Osorkon seems to have had some special tie with
Ethiopia. His great festival at Bubastis was attended by natives of
Ethiopia, the Anti came with their gifts from “the land of the negroes,”
and are depicted like the priests on the walls of the hall.
But troublous times were in store for Egypt. The twenty-second dynasty
came to an end, and a period followed of confusion, civil war, and foreign
invasion. The kings of Ethiopia sailed down the Nile and swept the country
from Assuan to the sea. Petty princes reigned as independent sovereigns in
the various cities of Egypt, and waged war one against the other. Pi-ankhi
the Ethiopian was content with their momentary submission; he then retired
to his ancestral capital at Napata, midway between Dongola and Khartûm,
carrying with him the spoils of the Nile. Another Ethiopian, Shabaka or
Sabako, the son of Kashet, made a more permanent settlement in Egypt. He
put to death the nominal Pharaoh, Bak-n-ran-f or Bokkhoris, and founded
the twenty-fifth dynasty. Order was again restored, the petty princes
suppressed, and Egypt as well as Ethiopia obeyed a single head. The roads
were cleared of brigands, the temples and walls of the cities were
rebuilt, and trade could again pass freely up and down the Nile.
An Egyptian civilisation and an Egyptian religion had been established in
Ethiopia since the days of the eighteenth dynasty. For some centuries,
even after they had become independent of Egypt, the ruling classes
boasted of the purity of their Egyptian descent. But before the age of
Sabako the Egyptian element had been absorbed by the native population. We
have learned from a monument of the Assyrian king, Esar-haddon, lately
found at Sinjerli, in northern Syria, that Sabako and his successors had
all the physical characteristics of the negro. But no sign of this is
allowed to appear on the Egyptian monuments. With the contempt for the
black race which still distinguishes them, the Egyptians refused to
acknowledge that their Pharaohs could be of negro blood. In the sculptures
and paintings of the Nile, accordingly, the kings of the Ethiopian dynasty
are represented with all the features of the Egyptian race.
In spite, however, of all attempts to conceal the fact, we now know that
they were negroes in reality. But they brought with them a vigour and a
strength of will that had long been wanting among the rulers of Egypt. And
it was not long before their Asiatic neighbours found that a new and
energetic power had arisen on the banks of the Nile. Assyria was now
extending its empire throughout Western Asia, and claiming to control the
politics of Syria and Palestine. The Syrian princes looked to Egypt for
help. In B.C. 720, Assyria and Egypt met face to face for the first time.
Sib’e, the Tartan, or commander-in-chief, of the Egyptian armies, with
Hanno of Gaza and other Syrian allies, blocked the way of the Assyrian
invaders at Raphia, on the border of Palestine. The victory was won by the
Assyrian Sargon. Hanno was captured, and Sib’e fled to the Delta. But
Sargon turned northward again, and did not follow up his success. He was
content with receiving the tribute of Pharaoh (Pir’u) “king of Egypt,” of
Samsi, the queen of Arabia, and of Ithamar the Sabæan.
In Sib’e we must see the So or Seve of the Old Testament (2 Kings xvii.
4). He is there called “king of Egypt,” but he was rather one of the
subordinate princes of the Delta, who acted as the commander-in-chief of
“Pharaoh.” Pharaoh, it would seem, was still Bak-n-ran-f.
A few years later Sabako was established on the throne. He reigned at
least twelve years, and was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Tirhakah, the
Tarqû of the Assyrian texts. Under him, Egypt once more played a part in
Jewish history.
It was trust in “Pharaoh, king of Egypt,” that made Hezekiah revolt from
Assyria after Sargon’s death. The result was the invasion of his kingdom
by Sennacherib in B.C. 701. Tirhakah moved forward to help his ally. But
his march diverted the attention of the Assyrian monarch only for a while.
The armies of Sennacherib and Tirhakah met at Eltekeh, and Tirhakah the
Pharaoh of Egypt was forced to retire. Both claim a victory in their
inscriptions. Sennacherib tells us how “the kings of Egypt and the bowmen,
chariots, and horses of the king of northern Arabia, had collected their
innumerable forces and gone to the aid” of Hezekiah and his Philistine
allies, and how in sight of Eltekeh, “in reliance on Assur,” he had
“fought with them and utterly overthrown them.” “The charioteers and the
sons of the king of Egypt, together with the charioteers of the king of
northern Arabia,” he had “taken captive in the battle.” Tirhakah, on the
other hand, on a statue now in the Gizeh Museum, declares that he was the
conqueror of the Bedouin, the Hittites, the Arvadites, the Assyrians, and
the people of Aram-Naharaim. The battle, in fact, was a Kadmeian victory.
Tirhakah was so far defeated that he was forced to retreat to his own
dominions, while Sennacherib’s victory was not decisive enough to allow
him to pursue it. He contented himself with marching back into Judah,
burning and plundering its towns and villages, and carrying their
inhabitants into captivity. Then came the catastrophe which destroyed the
larger part of his army and obliged him to return ignominiously to his own
capital. The spoils and captives of Judah were the only fruits of his
campaign. His rebellious vassal went unpunished, and the strong fortress
of Jerusalem was saved from the Assyrian. Though Sennacherib made many
military expeditions during the remaining twenty years of his reign, he
never came again to the south of Palestine.
Egypt lay sheltered from invasion behind Jerusalem. But with the death of
Sennacherib there came a change. His son and successor, Esar-haddon, was a
good general and a man of great ability. Manasseh of Judah became his
vassal, and the way lay open to the Nile. With a large body of trained
veterans he descended upon Egypt (B.C. 674). The sheikh of the Bedouin
provided him with the camels which conveyed the water for the army across
the desert. Three campaigns were needed before Egypt, under its Ethiopian
ruler, could be subdued. But at last, in B.C. 670, Esar-haddon drove the
Egyptian forces before him in fifteen days (from the 3rd to the 18th of
Tammuz or June) all the way from the frontier to Memphis, thrice defeating
them with heavy loss, and wounding Tirhakah himself. Three days later
Memphis fell, and Tirhakah fled to Ethiopia, leaving Egypt to the
conqueror. It was after this success that the Assyrian monarch erected the
stêlê at Sinjerli, on which he is portrayed with Tirhakah of Egypt and
Baal of Tyre kneeling before him, each with a ring through his lips, to
which is attached a bridle held by the Assyrian king.
Egypt was reorganised under Assyrian rule, and measures taken to prevent
the return of the Ethiopians. It was divided into twenty satrapies, the
native princes being appointed to govern them for their Assyrian master.
At their head was placed Necho, the vassal king of Sais. Esar-haddon now
returned to Nineveh, and on the cliffs of the Nahr el-Kelb, near Beyrout,
he engraved a record of his conquest of Egypt and Thebes by the side of
the monument whereon, seven centuries previously, Ramses II. had boasted
of his victories over the nations of Asia.
At first the Egyptian princes were well pleased with their change of
masters. But in Thebes there was a strong party which sympathised with
Ethiopia rather than with Assyria. With their help, Tirhakah returned in
B.C. 668, sailed down the Nile, and took Memphis by storm. Esar-haddon
started at once to suppress the revolt. But on the way to Egypt he died on
the 10th of Marchesvan or October, and his son, Assur-bani-pal, followed
him on the throne.
The Ethiopian army was encountered near Kar-banit, in the Delta. A
complete victory was gained over it, and Tirhakah was compelled to fly,
first from Memphis, then from Thebes. The tributary kings whom he had
displaced were restored, and Assur-bani-pal left Egypt in the full belief
that it was tranquil. But hardly had he returned to Nineveh before a fresh
revolt broke out there. Tirhakah began to plot with the native satraps,
and even Necho of Sais was suspected of complicity. The commanders of the
Assyrian garrisons, accordingly, sent him and two other princes (from
Tanis and Goshen) loaded with chains to Assyria. But Assur-bani-pal,
either really convinced of Necho’s innocence or pretending to be so, not
only pardoned him but bestowed upon him a robe of honour, as well as a
sword of gold and a chariot and horses, and sent him back to Sais, giving
at the same time the government of Athribis, whose mounds lie close to
Benha, to his son, Psammetikhos. Meanwhile Tirhakah had again penetrated
to Thebes and Memphis, where he celebrated the festival in honour of the
appearance of a new Apis. But his power was no longer what it once had
been, and even before the return of Necho he found it prudent to retire to
Ethiopia. There he died a few months later.
The Thebaid, however, continued in a state of revolt against the Assyrian
authority. Another Ethiopian king, whom the Assyrians call Urd-Aman, had
succeeded Tirhakah, and was battling for the sovereignty of Egypt.
Urd-Aman is usually identified with the Pharaoh Rud-Amon, whose name has
been met with on two Egyptian monuments, but about whom nothing further is
known. Some scholars, however, read the name Tand-Aman, and identify it
with that of Tuatan-Amon or Tuant-Amon, whose royal cartouches are
engraved by the side of those of Tirhakah in the temple of Ptah-Osiris at
Karnak. An inscription found built into a wall at Luxor mentions his third
year, and a large stêlê erected by him at Napata was discovered among the
ruins of his capital in 1862, and is now in the Museum of Gizeh. On this
he states that in the first year of his reign he was excited by a dream to
invade the north. Thebes opened its gates to him, and after worshipping in
the temple of Amon at Karnak, he marched to Memphis, which he captured
after a slight resistance. Then he proceeded against the princes of the
Delta, who, however, shut themselves up in their cities or else submitted
to him.
One day Paqrur of Goshen appeared at Memphis to do him homage, much to the
surprise and delight of the Ethiopian king. As Paqrur was the prince of
Pi-Sopd or Goshen, who had been sent to Nineveh along with Necho, the date
of Tuatan-Amon is pretty clear. How he came to quit Egypt, however, he
does not vouchsafe to explain.
Whether Urd-Aman were Rud-Amon or Tuatan-Amon, he gave a good deal of
trouble to the Assyrians. Thebes was securely in his hands, and from
thence he marched upon Memphis. The Assyrian garrison and its allies were
defeated in front of the city, which was then blockaded and taken after a
long siege. Necho was captured and put to death, and Psammetikhos escaped
the same fate only by flight into Syria. But Assyrian revenge did not
tarry long. Assur-bani-pal determined to put an end to Egyptian revolt and
Ethiopian invasion once for all. A large army was despatched to the Nile,
which overthrew the forces of Rud-Amon in the Delta and pursued him as far
as Thebes. Thence he fled to Kipkip in Ethiopia, and a terrible punishment
was inflicted on the capital of southern Egypt. The whole of its
inhabitants were led away into slavery. Its temples—at once the centres of
disaffection and fortresses against attack—were half-demolished, its
monuments and palaces were destroyed, and all its treasures, sacred and
profane, were carried away. Among the spoil were two obelisks, more than
seventy tons in weight, which were removed to Nineveh as trophies of
victory. The injuries which Kambyses has been accused of inflicting on the
ancient monuments of Thebes were really the work of the Assyrians.
How great was the impression made upon the oriental world by the sack of
Thebes may be gathered from the reference to it by the prophet Nahum (iii.
8-10). Nineveh itself is threatened with the same overthrow. “Art thou
better than No of Amon, that was situate among the rivers, that had the
waters round about it, whose rampart was the sea, (the Nile), and her wall
was from the sea? Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was
infinite; Put and Lubim were thy helpers. Yet was she carried away, she
went into captivity: her young children also were dashed in pieces at the
top of all the streets: and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all
her great men were bound in chains.” As the destruction of Thebes took
place about B.C. 665, the date of Nahum’s prophecy cannot have been much
later.
In the Assyrian inscriptions Thebes is called Ni’, corresponding with the
No of the Old Testament. Both words represent the Egyptian Nu, “city,”
Thebes being pre-eminently “the city” of Upper Egypt. Its patron-deity was
Amon, to whom its great temple was dedicated, and hence it is that Nahum
calls it “No of Amon.” Divided as it was into two halves by the Nile, and
encircled on either side by canals, one of which—“the southern
water”—still runs past the southern front of the temple of Luxor, it could
truly be said that its “rampart was the sea.” To this day the Nile is
called “the sea” by the natives of Egypt.
The Ethiopians penetrated into Egypt no more. The twenty satrapies were
re-established; and Psammetikhos received his father’s principality,
though the precedence among the vassal-kings was given to Paqrur of
Goshen. For a time the country was at peace.
Fifteen years later, however, an event occurred which shook the Assyrian
empire to its foundations. A revolt broke out which spread throughout the
whole of it. The revolt was headed by Assur-bani-pal’s brother, the
Viceroy of Babylonia, and for some time the result wavered in the balance.
But the good generalship and disciplined forces of Assyria eventually
prevailed, and she emerged from the struggle, exhausted indeed, but
triumphant. The empire, however, was shrunken. Gyges of Lydia had thrown
off his allegiance, and had assisted Psammetikhos of Sais to make Egypt
independent. While the Assyrian armies were battling for existence in
Asia, Psammetikhos, with the Ionian and Karian mercenaries from Lydia, was
driving out the Assyrian garrisons and overcoming his brother satraps. One
by one they disappeared before him, and at last he had the satisfaction of
seeing Egypt a united and independent monarchy, under a monarch who
claimed to be of native race.
The blood of the founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty was, however, mixed.
He seems to have been, partly at least, of Libyan descent, and it is even
doubtful whether his name is pure Egyptian. 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.
It was during the reign of Psammetikhos I. (B.C. 664-610) that the great
invasion of nomad Scyths, referred to in the earlier chapters of Jeremiah,
swept over Western Asia. They sacked the towns of the Philistines and made
their way to the Egyptian frontier, but there they were bought off by
Psammetikhos. After their dispersion, the Egyptian Pharaoh turned his eyes
towards Palestine, with the intention of restoring the Asiatic empire of
Ramses II. The twenty-sixth dynasty was an age of antiquarian revival; not
content with restoring Egypt to peace and prosperity, its kings aimed also
at restoring the Egypt of the past. Egyptian art again puts on an antique
form, temples are repaired or erected in accordance with ancient models,
and literature reflects the general tendency. The revival only wanted
originality to make it successful; as it is, the art of the twenty-sixth
dynasty is careful and good, and under its rule Egypt enjoyed for the last
time a St. Luke’s summer of culture and renown.
The power of Assyria was passing away. The great rebellion, and the wars
in Elam which followed, had drained it of its resources. The Scythic
invasion destroyed what little strength was left. Before Psammetikhos died
Nineveh was already surrounded by its foes, and four years later it
perished utterly.
The provinces of the west became virtually independent. Josiah of Judah
still called himself a vassal of the Assyrian monarch, but he acted as if
the Assyrian monarchy did not exist. The Assyrian governor of Samaria was
deprived of his authority, and Jewish rule was obeyed throughout what had
been the territory of the Ten Tribes.
The weakness of Assyria was the opportunity of Egypt. The earlier years of
the reign of Psammetikhos were spent in reorganising his kingdom and army,
in suppressing all opposition to his government, and in rebuilding the
ruined cities and temples. Then he marched into Palestine and endeavoured
to secure once more for Egypt the cities of the Philistines. Ashdod was
taken after a prolonged siege, and an Egyptian garrison placed in it.
The successor of Psammetikhos was his son Necho, who carried out the
foreign policy of his father. The old canal which ran from the Red Sea at
Suez to the Nile near Zagazig, and which centuries of neglect had allowed
to be choked, was again partially cleared out, and “the tongue of the
Egyptian sea was cut off” (Isa. xi. 15). Ships were also sent from Suez
under Phœnician pilots to circumnavigate Africa. Three years did they
spend on the voyage, and after passing the Straits of Gibraltar, finally
arrived safely at the mouths of the Nile. There an incredulous people
heard that as they were sailing westward the sun was on their right hand.
But long before the return of his ships, Necho had placed himself at the
head of his army and entered on the invasion of Asia. The Syrians were
defeated at Migdol, and Gaza was occupied. The Egyptian army then
proceeded to march along the sea-coast by the ancient military road, which
struck inland at the Nahr el-Kelb. But the Jewish king, pleading his duty
to his Assyrian suzerain, attempted to block the way; the result was a
battle in the plain of Megiddo, where the Jewish forces were totally
routed, and Josiah himself carried from the field mortally wounded. Necho
now overran northern Syria as far as the Euphrates, and then returned
southward to punish the Jews. Jerusalem was captured by treachery, and
Jehoahaz, the new king, deposed after a reign of only three months. The
Pharaoh then made his brother Eliakim king in his stead, changing his name
to Jehoiakim. The city was fined a talent of gold and a hundred talents of
silver, and Necho sent his armour to the temple of Apollo near Miletus as
a thank-offering to the god of his Greek mercenaries.
The empire of Thothmes was restored, at all events in Asia. But it lasted
hardly more than three years. In B.C. 605 a decisive battle was fought at
Carchemish, on the Euphrates, now Jerablûs, between Necho and the
Babylonian prince Nebuchadrezzar, who commanded the army of his father
Nabopolassar. The Egyptians fled in confusion, and the Asiatic empire was
utterly lost. The Jewish king transferred his allegiance to the conqueror,
and for three years “became his servant.” Then he rebelled, probably in
consequence of a fresh attempt made by the Egyptians to recover their
power in Palestine. The attempt, however, failed, and a Babylonian army
was sent against Jerusalem. Jehoiakim was already dead, but his son
Jehoiachin, along with the leading citizens, the military class, and the
artisans—“ten thousand captives” in all—was carried into exile in
Babylonia (B.C. 599). His uncle Zedekiah was placed on the throne, and for
nearly nine years he remained faithful to his Babylonian master.
Then came temptation from the side of Egypt. Psammetikhos II., who had
succeeded his father Necho in B.C. 594, prepared to march into Palestine,
and contest the supremacy over Western Asia with the Babylonian monarch. A
Babylonian army was already besieging the revolted city of Jerusalem when
the forces of the Pharaoh appeared in sight. The Babylonians broke up
their camp and retired, and it seemed as if the rebellion of the Jewish
king had been successful (Jer. xxxvii. 5, 11; Ezek. xvii. 15).
But it was not for long. The Egyptians returned to “their own land,” and
the siege of Jerusalem was recommenced. At last, in B.C. 588, the city was
taken, its king and most of its inhabitants led into captivity, and its
temple and palace burned with fire. Judah was placed under a Babylonian
governor, and the authority of the Babylonians acknowledged as far as
Gaza.
Psammetikhos II. had died in the preceding year, and his son Uahabra, the
Apries of the Greeks, the Hophra of the Old Testament, occupied his place.
The army which had gone to the help of Zedekiah had doubtless been sent by
him. He had recaptured Gaza, and marched along the coast to Sidon, which
he captured, and Tyre, which was in rebellion against the Chaldæans, while
his fleet defeated the combined forces of the Cyprians and Phœnicians, and
held the sea. A hieroglyphic inscription, erected by a native of Gebal and
commemorative of the invasion, has recently been found near Sidon. But the
Egyptian conquests were again lost almost as quickly as they had been
made.
Palestine became a Babylonian province up to the frontiers of Egypt. Many
of the Jews who had been left in it fled to Egypt. Their numbers were
reinforced by a band of outlaws, of whom Johanan was the leader, who had
murdered the Babylonian governor and had dragged into Egypt with them the
prophet Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. Jeremiah in vain protested against
their conduct, and predicted that Hophra should be slain by his enemies,
and that Nebuchadrezzar should set up his throne on that very pavement “at
the entry of Pharaoh’s house in Tahpanhes” where the prophet was then
standing. Tahpanhes is almost certainly Tel ed-Defneh, the Daphnæ of Greek
geography, which stands in the mid-desert about twelve miles to the west
of Kantara on the Suez Canal, and where Professor Flinders Petrie made
excavations for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886. There he found the
remains of a great fortress and camp, which had been built by Psammetikhos
I. for his Greek mercenaries. The walls of the camp were forty feet in
thickness, and the ruins of the fortress still go by the name of the
“Castle of the Jew’s Daughter.” In front of it is a brick pavement, just
like that described by Jeremiah.
Daphnæ, in fact, was one of the chief fortresses of Egypt on the side of
Asia, and it was accordingly the chief station of the Greek mercenaries.
It commanded the entrance to the Delta, and was almost the first place in
Egypt that the traveller from Palestine who came by the modern caravan
road would approach. It was, therefore, the first settlement at which
Jewish fugitives who wished to avoid the Babylonian garrison at Gaza would
be likely to arrive. And it was also the first object of attack on the
part of an invader from the East. Its possession opened to him the way to
Memphis.
That Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded Egypt, as Jeremiah had predicted, we
now know from a fragment of his annals. In his thirty-seventh year (B.C.
567) he marched into Egypt, defeating the Pharaoh Amasis, and the soldiers
of “Phut of the Ionians,” “a distant land which is in the midst of the
sea.” The enemies, therefore, into whose hands Hophra was to fall were not
the Babylonians. They were, in fact, his own subjects.
He had pursued the Hellenising policy of his predecessors with greater
thoroughness than they had done, and had thus aroused the jealousy and
alarm of the native population. The Greek mercenaries alone had his
confidence, and the Egyptians accused him of betraying the native troops
whom he had sent to the help of the Libyans against the Greek colony of
Kyrênê. Amasis (or Ahmes), his brother-in-law, put himself at the head of
the rebels. A battle was fought near Sais between the Greek troops of
Hophra on the one side and the revolted Egyptians on the other, which
ended in the defeat of the Greeks and the capture of Hophra himself.
Amasis was proclaimed king (B.C. 570), and though the captive Pharaoh was
at first treated with respect, he was afterwards put to death.
The change of monarch made little difference to the Greeks in Egypt. They
were too valuable, both as soldiers and as traders, for the Pharaoh to
dispense with their services. The mercenaries were removed from Daphnæ to
Memphis, in the very heart of the kingdom, and fresh privileges were
granted to the merchants of Naukratis. The Pharaoh married a Greek wife,
and a demotic papyrus, now at Paris, even describes how he robbed the
temples of Memphis, On and Bubastis of their endowments and handed them
over to the Greek troops. “The Council” which sat under him ordered that
“the vessels, the fuel, the linen, and the dues” hitherto enjoyed by their
gods and their priests should be given instead to the foreigner. In this
act of sacrilege the Egyptians of a later day saw the cause of the
downfall of their country. The invasion of Nebuchadrezzar had passed over
it without producing much injury; indeed, it does not seem to have
extended beyond the eastern half of the Delta. But a new power, that of
Cyrus, was rising in the East. Amasis had foreseen the coming storm, and
had occupied Cyprus in advance. If Xenophon is to be believed, he had also
sent troops to the aid of Krœsus of Lydia. But all was of no avail. The
power of Cyrus steadily increased. The empires of Lydia and Babylonia went
down before it, and when his son Kambyses succeeded him in July, B.C. 529,
the new empire extended from the Mediterranean to India and from the
Caspian to the borders of Egypt. It was clear that the fertile banks of
the Nile would be the next object of attack.
Greek vanity asserted that the actual cause of the invasion was the Greek
mercenary Phanês. He had deserted to Kambyses, and explained to him how
Egypt could be entered. That Phanês was a name used by the Egyptian Greeks
we know from its occurrence on the fragment of a large vase discovered by
Professor Petrie at Naukratis. Here we read: “Phanês the son of Glaukos
dedicated me to Apollo of Naukratis.” But the invasion of Egypt by
Kambyses was the necessary consequence of the policy which had laid the
whole of the oriental world at his father’s feet.
Amasis died while the army of Kambyses was on its march (B.C. 526), and
his son Psammetikhos III. had to bear the brunt of the attack. A battle
was fought near Pelusium, and though the Greek and Karian auxiliaries did
their best, the invading forces gained the day. The Pharaoh fled to
Memphis, which was thereupon besieged by Kambyses. The siege was a short
one. The city of “the White Wall” was taken, Psammetikhos made a prisoner,
and his son, together with two thousand youths of the leading Egyptian
families, was put to death. For a while Psammetikhos himself was allowed
to live, but the fears of the conqueror soon caused him to be executed,
and with his death came the end of the twenty-sixth dynasty and the
independence of Egypt.
CHAPTER V. THE AGE OF THE PTOLEMIES.
Judah had profited by the revolution which had been so disastrous to the
monarchy of the Nile. The overthrow of the Babylonian empire and the rise
of Cyrus had brought deliverance from exile and the restoration of the
temple and its services. In the Jewish colony at Jerusalem, Cyrus and his
successors had, as it were, a bridle upon Egypt; gratitude to their
deliverer and freedom to enjoy the theocracy which had taken the place of
the Davidic monarchy made the Jewish people an outpost and garrison upon
whose loyalty the Persian king could rely.
The yoke of the Zoroastrian Darius and his descendants pressed heavily, on
the other hand, upon the priests and people of Egypt. Time after time they
attempted to revolt. Their first rebellion, under Khabbash, saved Greece
from the legions of Darius and postponed the day of Persian invasion to a
time when the incapable Xerxes sat upon the throne of his energetic
father. A second time they rose in insurrection in the reign of Artaxerxes
I., the successor of Xerxes. But under Artaxerxes II. came a more
formidable outbreak, which ended in the recovery of Egyptian independence
and the establishment of the last three dynasties of native kings.
For sixty-five years (from B.C. 414 to 349) 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. The army was
insubordinate, and between the Greek and Egyptian soldiers there was
jealousy and feud. Nektanebo II. (B.C. 367-49), the last of the Pharaohs,
had dethroned his own father, and though he had once driven the Persian
king Artaxerxes Ochus back from the coasts of Egypt, he failed to do so a
second time. The Greeks were left to defend themselves as best they could
at Pelusium, while Nektanebo retired to Memphis with 60,000 worthless
native troops. From thence he fled to Ethiopia with his treasures, leaving
his country in the hands of the Persian. Ochus wreaked his vengeance on
the Egyptian priests, destroying the temples, demanding a heavy ransom for
the sacred records he had robbed, setting up an ass—a symbol in Egyptian
eyes of all that was evil and unclean—as the patron-god of the conquered
land, and slaying the sacred bull Apis in sacrifice to the new divinity.
The murder of Ochus by his Egyptian eunuch Bagoas was the penalty he paid
for these outrages on the national faith.
Egypt never again was free. Its rulers have been of manifold races and
forms of faith, but they have never again been Egyptians. Persians, Greeks
and Romans, Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, Mameluk slaves and Turks, Frenchmen
and Englishmen, have all governed or misgoverned it, but throughout this
long page of its history there is no sign of native political life.
Religion or taxation has alone seemed able to stir the people into
movement or revolt. For aspirations after national freedom we look in
vain.
The Persian was not left long in the possession of his rebellious
province. Egypt opened her gates to Alexander of Macedon, as in later ages
she opened her gates to the Arab ’Amru. The Greeks had long been
associated in the Egyptian mind with opposition to the hated Persian, and
it was as a Greek that Alexander entered the country. Memphis and Thebes
welcomed him, and he did his best to prove to his subjects that he had
indeed come among them as one of their ancient kings. Hardly had he
reached Memphis before he went in state to the temple of Apis and offered
sacrifice to the sacred bull. Then, after founding Alexandria at the spot
where the native village of Rakoti stood, he made his way to the Oasis of
Ammon, the modern Siwah, among the sands of the distant desert, and there
was greeted by the high-priest of the temple as the son of the god. Like
the Pharaohs of old, the Macedonian conqueror became the son of Amon-Ra,
and in Egypt at least claimed divine honours.
Before leaving Egypt Alexander appointed the nomarchs who were to govern
it, and ordered that justice should be administered according to the
ancient law of the land. He also sent 7000 Samaritans into the Thebaid;
some of them were settled in the Fayyûm, and in the papyri discovered by
Professor Petrie at Hawâra mention is made of a village which they had
named Samaria. Appointing Kleomenês prefect of Egypt and collector of the
taxes, Alexander now hurried away to the Euphrates, there to overthrow the
shattered relics of the Persian Empire.
It was while he was at Ekbatana that his friend Hêphæstiôn died, and
Alexander wrote to Egypt to inquire of the oracle of Ammon what honours it
was lawful for him to pay to the dead man. In reply Hêphæstiôn was
pronounced to be a god, and a temple was accordingly erected to him at
Alexandria, and the new lighthouse on the island of Pharos was called
after his name.
When Alexander died suddenly and unexpectedly, the council of his generals
which assembled at Babylon declared his half-brother, Philip Arridæus, to
be his successor. But they reserved to themselves all the real power in
Alexander’s empire. Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, chose Egypt as the seat of
his government, which was accordingly handed over to him by Kleomenês on
his arrival there, a year after the accession of the new king. His first
act was to put Kleomenês to death.
Then came the long funeral procession bearing the corpse of Alexander from
Babylon to the tomb that was to be erected for him in his new city of
Alexandria. More than a year passed while it wound its way slowly from
city to city, till at last it arrived at Memphis. Here the body of the
great conqueror rested awhile until the gorgeous sepulchre was made ready
in which it was finally to repose.
It was plain that Ptolemy was aiming at independent power. Perdikkas, the
regent, accordingly attacked him, carrying in his train the young princes,
Philip Arridæus, and Alexander Ægos, the infant son of Alexander. But the
invading army was routed below Memphis, Perdikkas was slain, and the young
princes fell into the hands of the conqueror. From this time forward,
Ptolemy, though nominally a subject, acted as if he were a king.
Nikanôr was sent into Syria to annex it to Egypt. Jerusalem alone resisted
the invaders, but it was assaulted on the Sabbath when the defenders
withdrew from the walls, and all further opposition was at end. Palestine
and Cœle-Syria were again united with the kingdom on the Nile.
The union, however, did not last long. In B.C. 315 Philip Arridæus was
murdered, and Alexander was proclaimed successor to his empty dignity. The
year following, Antigonus, the rival of Ptolemy in Asia Minor, made ready
to invade Egypt. But Ptolemy had already conquered Kyrênê and Cyprus, and
was master of the sea. Syria and Palestine, however, submitted to
Antigonus, and though Ptolemy gained a decisive victory over his enemies
at Gaza, he did not think it prudent to pursue it. He contented himself,
therefore, with razing the fortifications of Acre and Jaffa, of Samaria
and Gaza.
In B.C. 312 the generals of Alexander, who still called themselves the
lieutenants of his son, came to a general agreement, each keeping that
portion of the empire which he had made his own. The agreement was almost
immediately followed by the murder of Alexander Ægos. Cleopatra, the
sister of the great Alexander, and his niece Thessalonika alone remained
of the royal family, and Cleopatra, on her way to Egypt to marry Ptolemy,
was assassinated by Antigonus (in B.C. 308), and Alexander’s niece soon
afterwards shared the same fate. The family of “the son of Ammon,” the
annihilator of the Persian Empire, was extinct.
Two years later, in B.C. 306, an end was put to the farce so long played
by the generals of Alexander, and each of them assumed the title of king.
Ptolemy took that of “king of Egypt.” To this the Greeks afterwards added
the name of Sôtêr, “Saviour,” when his supplies of corn had saved the
Rhodians from destruction during their heroic defence of their city
against the multitudinous war-ships of Antigonus.
Throughout his rule, Ptolemy never forgot the needs and interests of the
kingdom over which he ruled. Alexandria was completed, with its unrivalled
harbours, its stately public buildings, its broad quays and its spacious
streets. From first to last it remained the Greek capital of Egypt. It was
Greek in its origin, Greek in its architecture, Greek in its population;
Greek also in its character, its manners, and its faith. Cut off from the
rest of Egypt by the Mareotic Lake, and enjoying a European climate, it
was from its foundation what it is to-day, a city of Europe rather than of
Egypt. From it, as from an impregnable watch-tower, the Ptolemies directed
the fortunes of their kingdom: it was not only the key to Egypt, it was
also a bridle upon it. The wealth of the world passed through its streets
and harbours; the religions and philosophies of East and West met within
its halls. Ptolemy had founded in it a university, a prototype of Oxford
and Cambridge in modern England, of the Azhar in modern Cairo. In the
Museum, as it was called, a vast library was gathered together, and its
well-endowed chairs were filled with learned professors from all parts of
the Greek world, who wrote books and delivered lectures and dined together
at the royal charge.
But the Greeks were not the only inhabitants of the new city. The Jews
also settled there in large numbers on the eastern side of the town,
attracted by the offers of Ptolemy and the belief that the rising centre
of trade would be better worth inhabiting than the wasted fields of
Palestine. All the rights of Greek citizenship were granted to them, and
they were placed on a footing almost of equality with Ptolemy’s own
countrymen.
The native Egyptians were far worse treated. They had become “the hewers
of wood and carriers of water” for their new Greek masters. It was they
who furnished the government with its revenue, but in return they
possessed no rights, no privileges. When land was wanted for the veterans
of the Macedonian army, as, for example, in the Fayyûm, it was taken from
them without compensation. Taxes, ever heavier and heavier, were laid upon
them; and every attempt at remonstrance or murmuring was visited with
immediate punishment. The Egyptian had no rights unless he could be
registered a citizen of Alexandria, and this it was next to impossible for
him to be.
It is true that the Egyptians were told all this was done in order that
their own laws and customs might not be interfered with. While the Greeks
and Jews were governed by Greek law, the Egyptians were governed by the
old law of the land. But it was forgotten that the laws were administered
by Greeks, and that the higher officials were also Greeks, who, as against
an Egyptian, possessed arbitrary power. It was only amongst themselves, as
between Egyptian and Egyptian, that the natives of the country enjoyed any
benefit from the laws under which they lived; wherever the government and
the Greeks were concerned, they were like outcasts, who could be punished,
but not tried.
Nevertheless the country for many years remained tranquil. Unlike the
Persians, the Greeks respected the religion of the people. Ptolemy did his
utmost to conciliate the priesthood; their temples were restored and
decorated, their festivals were treated with honour; above all, their
endowments were untouched. And with the priesthood disposed to be friendly
towards him, Ptolemy had no reason to be afraid. The priests were the
national leaders; they it was who had stirred up the revolts against the
Persian, and the temples in which they served had been the fortresses and
rallying-points of the rebel armies. The Egyptians have always been an
intensely religious people; whatever may have been their form of creed,
whether pagan, Christian, or Moslem, they have clung to it with tenacity
and battled for it, sometimes with fanatical zeal. Religion will arouse
them when nothing else can do so; by the side of it even the love of gain
has but little influence.
Besides conciliating the priesthood, Ptolemy planted garrisons of Greeks
in several parts of the country. Bodies of veterans colonised the Fayyûm,
and Ptolemais, now Menshîyeh, in Upper Egypt, was a Greek city modelled in
all respects upon Alexandria. The public accounts were kept in Greek, and
though the clerks and tax-gatherers were usually natives who had received
a Greek education, many of them were Greeks by birth and even Jews.
“Ostraka,” or inscribed potsherds, have been found at Thebes, which show
that in the days of Ptolemy Physkôn, a Jew, Simon, the son of Eleazar,
farmed the taxes there for the temple of Amon. As he did not himself know
Greek, his receipts were written for him by one of his sons. After his
death he was succeeded in his office by his son Philoklês. The name is
noticeable, as it shows how rapidly the Jews of Egypt could become wholly
Greek. The religion of his forefathers was not likely to sit heavily on
the shoulders of the tax-gatherer of a heathen temple, and we need not
wonder at the Hellenisation of his family. Simon was a sample of many of
his brethren: in adopting Greek culture the Jews of Egypt began to forget
that they were Jews. It required the shock of persecution at Jerusalem,
and the Maccabean war of independence to recall them to a recollection of
their past history and a sense of the mission of their race.
With the rise of the Greek kingdom in Egypt, the canonical books of the
Old Testament come to an end. Jaddua, the last high-priest recorded in the
Book of Nehemiah (xii. 7, 22), met Alexander the Great at Mizpeh, and if
Josephus is to be trusted, obtained from him a recognition of the ancient
privileges of the Jews and their exemption from taxation every Sabbatical
year. The First Book of Chronicles (iii. 23) seems to bring the genealogy
of the descendants of Zorobabel down to an even later date. But where the
canonical books break off, the books of the Apocrypha begin. Jesus the son
of Sirach, in his prologue to the Book of Ecclesiasticus, tells us that he
had translated it in Egypt from Hebrew into Greek, when Euergetês, the
third Ptolemy, was king, and thirty-eight years after its compilation by
his grandfather Jesus. Like most of the apocryphal books, it thus had a
Palestinian origin, but its translation into Greek indicates the
intercourse that was going on between the Jews of Palestine and those of
Egypt, as well as the general adoption of the Greek language by the
Egyptian Jews.
The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek about the same period
is a yet more striking illustration of the same fact. The name of
“Septuagint,” which the translation still retains, perpetuates the legend,
derived from the false Aristæas, of its having been made all at one time
by seventy (or seventy-two) translators. But internal evidence shows that
such could not have been the case. The various books of the Canon were
translated at different times, and the translators exhibit very different
degrees of ability and acquaintance with the Hebrew language. The
Pentateuch was the first to be rendered into Greek; the other books
followed afterwards, and it would appear that the Book of Ecclesiastes
never found a place in the translation at all. The Greek translation of
the book which is now found in the Septuagint was probably made by Aquila.
It was under Ptolemy II., who justified his title of Philadelphus, or
“Brother-loving,” by the murder of his two brothers, that the work of
translation was begun. Ptolemy Sôtêr, his father, had resigned his crown
two years before his death, and the event proved that his confidence in
his son’s filial piety was not misplaced. The coronation of Philadelphus
at Alexandria was celebrated with one of the most gorgeous pageants the
world has ever seen, the details of which are preserved by Athenæus. Under
the new king the internal development of the monarchy went on apace. The
canal was opened which connected the Nile with the Red Sea, and at its
outlet near Suez a town was built called Arsinoê, after the king’s sister.
The ports of Berenikê and Philotera (now Qoseir) were constructed and
fortified on the coast of the Red Sea, and roads made to them from Koptos
and Syênê on the Nile. In this way the ivory and gems of the Sudân could
be brought to Egypt without passing through the hostile territories of the
Ethiopians in Upper Nubia. In the eastern desert itself the mines of
emerald and gold were worked until the royal revenue was increased to more
than three millions sterling a year.
Though Ptolemy Philadelphus was fond of show, he was not extravagant, and
his income was sufficient not only to maintain a large army and navy and
protect efficiently the frontier of his kingdom, but also to leave a large
reserve fund in the treasury. It was said to amount to as much as a
hundred millions sterling. It was no wonder, therefore, that Alexandria
became filled with sumptuous buildings. The Pharos or lighthouse was
finished by Sôstratos, as well as the tomb of Alexander, whose body was
moved from Memphis to the golden sarcophagus which had been prepared for
it. The library of the Museum was stocked with books until 400,000 rolls
of papyrus were collected together, and men of science and learning from
all parts of the world were attracted to it by the munificence of the
king. The principal librarianship, however, changed hands on the accession
of the new king. Demetrius Phalereus, the ex-tyrant of Athens, who had
been the first librarian, had offended Philadelphus by advising that the
crown should descend to his elder brother instead of to himself, and he
had accordingly to make way for Zênodotos of Ephesus, famous as a critic
of Homer.
Among the books which found a place in the great library of Alexandria was
doubtless the Greek translation of the Pentateuch. Philadelphus showed
remarkable favour to the Jews. The Jewish captives of his soldiers were
ransomed by him and given homes in various parts of Egypt. One hundred and
twenty thousand slaves were thus freed, the king paying for each 120
drachmas, or 30 shekels, the price of a slave according to the Mosaic Law.
It is quite possible that there may be some truth in the legend that the
Greek translation of the Old Testament was made at his desire. Whether or
not we believe that he sent two Greek Jews, Aristæus and Andræus, with
costly gifts to Eleazar the high-priest at Jerusalem, asking him to select
fit men for the purpose, he was probably not unwilling that a copy of the
sacred books of his Jewish subjects, in a form intelligible to the Greeks,
should be added to the library. We must not forget that it was he who
employed Manetho, the priest of Sebennytos, to write in Greek the history
of his country, which he compiled from the hieroglyphic monuments and
hieratic papyri of the native temples.
Ptolemy III., Euergetês, the eldest son of Philadelphus, succeeded his
father in B.C. 246. A war with Syria broke out at the beginning of his
reign, and the march of the Egyptian army as far as Seleucia, the capital
of the Syrian kingdom on the Euphrates, was one uninterrupted triumph. On
his return, Ptolemy laid his offerings on the altar at Jerusalem, and
thanked the God of the Jews for his success. The Jewish community might
well be pardoned for believing that in the conqueror of Syria they had a
new proselyte to their faith.
The Egyptians had equal reason to be satisfied with their king. Among the
spoils of his Syrian campaign were 2500 vases and statues of the Egyptian
deities which Kambyses had carried to Persia nearly three centuries
before. They were restored to the temples of Upper Egypt, from which they
had been taken, with stately ceremonies and amid the rejoicing of the
people, and Ptolemy was henceforth known among his subjects as Euergetês,
their “Benefactor.”
Euergetês, in fact, seems to have been the most Egyptian and least Greek
of all the Ptolemies. Alone among them he visited Thebes and paid homage
to the gods of Egypt. Their temples were rebuilt and crowded with
offerings, and the priesthood naturally regarded him as a king after their
own heart. He, too, like the Pharaohs of old, turned his attention to the
conquest of Ethiopia, which his predecessors had been content to
neglect.(9) It was under Euergetês, moreover, that the so-called Decree of
Canôpus was drawn up in hieroglyphics and demotic Egyptian as well as in
Greek. Its occasion was the death of Berenikê, the king’s daughter, to
whom the Egyptian priests determined to grant divine honours. It is the
first time that we find the old script and language of Egypt taking its
place by the side of that of the Macedonian conqueror, and it is
significant that the Greek transcript occupies the third place.
Judah had hitherto remained tranquil and at peace under the government of
the Ptolemies. The high-priests had taken the place of the kings, and
their authority was undisputed. At times, indeed, the coveted dignity was
the cause of
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/38843