mmummmmmmmimmimimmtimmm mmmmmmammimmmmmimmtmmmii HMBMMBfa^ mmmmmmtmstmmimmm mp^m^ mmmtmmmmmmumfmmitmmmmm >>maiMMiMi I \\t n mmmmmmmimmmmmmmmmm i Ul ' .--LJ- ' i > i* «l^feg*»g rff^gmm mMLLJ. i_- '~^t«HMai ! 1 1 'i •> 1 , J ^ «) 1 » •) 5 « NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1885 ■f 1- O II ^ tl " " LIST OF ILLUSTRATIOXS. Rameses Mei-Amoun. From the alabaster statue in the Mu- seum of the Louvre. {Frontispiece.) paqk The PjTamids aud the Sphinx 9 Peoples known to the Egyptians 17 The Temple of Denderah (restored) 27 The SmaUer Temple at Philse 39 The Temples of PhilaB (restored) 43 Hypostyhc Hall at Karnak 55 The Avenue of Rams 71 An Egyptian Princess 75 The Interior Court of Karnak 81 The Sphinx of Rameses XL 87 Royal Scribes 109 Egyptian Cavalry 113 Egyptian Infantiy 119 Bas-rehef of Sesostris 123 Asiatic Enemies of the Egyptians 131 Rameses in Battle 139 The City of Atesh Ii7 Pylons and Portico of a Grand Temple , 169 View of Thebes during an Inundation 173 Colossi of Amenoph III. , or Mammon 177 A Palace Temple of Thebes (bird's-eye view) 181 The Residence of an Egyptian of rank 185 The Rameseum. Hall of the Colossus 189 The Rameseum, Hall of the Carj^atides 193 436330 LIST OF ILLUSTBATIONS. / Slaves onder the Eighteenth Dynasty, making brick. ... .. 1 ♦? Captives building a Temple iOl A HypostyHc Hall '<03 Present Aspect of Ibrim 217 The Speos of Athor 221 The Speos of Phra 225 Interior of the Speos of Phra 229 Fayade of the Speos of Ipsamboul 233 A Mummy in its Bandages Q38 Case containing a Mummy 239 Interior Coffin 239 Exterior Coffin 240 Sarcophagus 241 Eoyal Cartouche of Rameses Mei-Amoun 245 Hieroglyphics of the Names of Egyptian Kings 251 i57 Asiatic Nomads. it ' 1 , -> ■) 5 1 m ■ CD :i3 r c <■ <■ J f c { EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 11 its outskirts, and the initiation of the savage races of the Mediterranean valley into the peaceful mys- teries of agriculture and industry. In fine, it is easy to make out how the empire must have per- ished, and its colossal model have disappeared from the Earth, on the day when humanity ceased to be split up into a few hostile gi'oups, separated as much by space as by animosity ; and when the vital energy of social communities, the exclusive privilege, at first, of castes and classes restricted in number, began to be distributed among all the members of the social body. IT. The lofty plateau of equatorial Africa that ex- t'^nds beyond the fifteenth degree of north latitude ir Abyssinia and the twelfth in the Wadai, seems to re^-ede, between those two extreme points, as far southward as some distance beyond the Equator, whence it sinks towards the North, in a vast con- cave depression, of which the Nile occupies the low- est part. Issuing from the only source worthy of it, a sort of fresh water sea covering the highest levels of this 12 EGYPT o300 YEARS AGO. table-land, tlie great African river that, to use the expression of Herodotus, has created Egypt ^ descends by a series of cataracts into the plains of the Baris, the Djirs and the Donkas, which are dotted with lakes and streamlets, and then into the country where the Shillooks have taken the place of the oldAutomoli or refugees."^ The water sheds on ita left, pour into its tide during this journey a grep^t number of tributaries which are still unnamed in history. On the other hand, the Abyssirian mcun- tain n^ass sends to it, on "ts riplit ban!-, sop^e pow - r^rful af luents of which two at least, the Abawi aui ( the Tii-ccaze we:''e knov tc ^he earl^e^t geogn^uhej'b under the n mes Astapus and Ast^boras A characteristic tra-'t of t^iis river, ?.nd one that at first sight distinguishes it on the map of the globe, is the rectilinear direction of its ba ^in. The 80th meridian eastward of Paris, one of the three that traverse the great sheet of water know as Lake Nyanza, crosses one of the mouths of the Delta at the distance of a thousand leagues fi'om there, and during the interval the Nile, that seems to entwine * Herodotus gives this name to the Egyptians who aban- doned their country, under the reign of Psammeticus, in con- sequence of the intrusion of foreigners into pubhc office, and of Greek and Ionian condottiej'i into the ranks of the ariuj. EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 13 itself around it like the sacred tmmis around the antique cadiiceus, intersects it eight times at least with its windings, without, in any instance, receding more than forty leagues fi'om it in its farthest di- vergence. But in other respects, it alone among the great rivers of the world is not swollen by any affluent in the last thu'd of its course, which it pursues in sol- idary grandeur fcr the distance of four hundi'ed leaerues, ^Detween cxro deserts whose sands, cut ofi from the rair^s of the tropics, greedily absorb its vaters without jidlding it, ia retvrn, ^.he "^ribute o^ /)]ie feeblest ri^Tllut or tor.xnt. The isolation of this portion 3f tie basin in which i? dwelt constituted the strcng point of Egyptian society during the periou of its development. With fovr exceptions the mig^^'ations of tribes and races that then wandered to the four quarters of the earth, swept past, either above or below it. Herein lay the secret of the form that it assumed ; of the pro longed existence that was accorded it, and, let us hasten to add, of its weakness when the hour o; \vsi downfall had arrived. 14 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. V. All wlio have devoted any time to observation of the territory and history of Egypt, from Herodotus to Champollion, were under the impression that the Nile, as it has brought soil and fertility to Egypt, had hkewise brought it men and civihzation, and that the latter descended with it from the south to the north. A contrary opinion prevails, at present, among the learned in Egyptian matters. Many of them, those especiaUy who are somewhat under the influ- ence of German philosophy, affirm that the earliest settlers and earliest civilization com.nenced their work in the basin of the Nile, on the north, and that they ascended, instead of descending, the river. This difference of opinion is more apparent than real, since it has reference, fundamentally, only to the line followed by the migrations between the point of departure and the point of arrival, and in both hypotheses, the primitive cradle of the Egj^- tians and of 'their instructors must be sought for in Asia. Among the mummies which the Egyptian cata- combs and places of burial daily yield to our exam- EQITT 3300 YEATIS AGO. . 15 ination, modern anatomists think that they are able to distinguish three separate classes : the first '•com- prising the ancestors of the Copts properly so- styled, the form of whose crania recaUs the shape of the heads of the statuary and the sphinxes of Ihebe3;'the second bears some analogy to the Hindoo type, and the ihiid seems to be akin to the Nubian tribes, and the same savants connect it, as well as the Copts, with the Berber race. All who still cherish a disciple's remembrance of the eminent men who were the preceptors, so to speak, of those who to-day are the masters of liis- torical science, — of the Yolneys, the Heerens and the Ecksteins — ^ill, very justly, be astonished when they miss from among the tribes set down as the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, tlie Cush- ites or Negroes who have left their indelible stamp upon the religions notions of the people. For our part, since we have but httle faith in the expression luiiiian races, but a great deal in the modifica- tions of the family of man effected by the combined action of physical and moral surroundings ; by the influence of climate ; of the rules of health ob- served, and the institutions maintained, and by the emanations of soil and sun, we shall confine our- selves to another source of information. We shall, upon this much debated subject, question the tombs 16 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. of tne Pharaohs oxcaYat<}d in the Libyan chain to the westward of Thebes, drixing the lifetime of the princes whose last resting-places they became. The perfection of the adornment and the finish of the workmanship on each of th 3m are in propor- tion to the duration of the reign of the gnest whom they were to receive. But upon the walls of all of lihem where time had admitted the finishing stroke, dating from the nineteenth dynasty,* the mysteri- ous artist has carved and painted the images of the principal fractions of the human race known in hia *.'mc. lond-^icisA, c .3 and aU, by Hg'.t'C. ^ho pastoral {_,od of the nations, they are generally arranged in four groups corresponding with the four divisions of the world then known. The group farthest away 'I'om the god consists of savages of lofty stature, with "gilt or sandy hair, blue eyes, and straight or slightly , •ounded features. Tattooed and covered with the spoils of the aurochs and the bear, just as those late '.omers in old Europe, the Gauls and the Cimbri, ap- •>eared to the afirighted Greeks and Romans, in after ages, did the ancient Pelasgi appear fifteen centuries b of ore the Christian Era, to the erudite and culti- ' 'lie nmeteenth only. Tie geographical knowledge whicli these paintings pre-suppose does not appear to have existed any earlier. Tlus is a good point tv a: tablish. J 1 1 1 '> 11^ ", ' S' ) ■> te! 1^ S3 SzS o •^ p •tJ « o 73 rt) 03 t^ > D 01 O ^ •^ 53 trf- c o ' tr*- V a m 7^ *^ ^ O •a trt- SS t— '• 01 ^ oq tJ i-» 40 P C3 o •-5 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. . 19 vated Egyptians. The latter called tliem Tamhus, In the group that precedes them, are strikingly observable all the characteristics of the negro type in its most degraded varieties, and to these legend gives the name of Nahazis. In advance of them, again, are the representa- tives of Asia. Their yellow and tawny complex- ions ; then* aquihne or beaked noses ; their black bv3ards, sharp and pointed on some, ample and cmiy on othors ; their costumes of varied hue and fashion, i^ iV'cate members of the Aramaean branches : ,^j;?.]'s, IJebrews and Assyrians. On some walls, ^^6^es £.nd lonians figure among these sons of ^^'hem. All of them are comprised in the general denomination of Aamus. Lastly, standing close to the heathen divinity, and, as it were, under his special protection, are men of dark red skins and tall slender figure, with gentle and regular counte- nances, clear cut eyes, straight noses and open facial angle, wearing their hair in plaits, and dressed in white garments. The name of Rut-n-llom — the germ, or the race of man — with which they are specially honored, sufficiently point out the dwellers on the banks of the sacred river,— in other words, the Egyptians. The typical characteristics here associated with them, identical on all the monuments and verified 20 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. upou thousands of mummies of different epochs, are not found among the Copts, their mongrel descend- ants. Amid the confused mixture of all the nations that have succeeded each other in Egypt, the Copts have retained the idiom, better than the blood, of the old race.'*' The latter, whose presence may be traced at nu- merous points on the Afi'ican continent, is met with again, in all its original purity, in two nations who dwell in the basin of the Nile, but at a wide distance from each other, — the Abyssinians of the upper plains, and the Barabras of lower "f'Trb.^*, sheltered as they have been, the latter by j cvar^^j, the former by the natural strength of theu* soil, from the invasions of conquerors, and from the current of the migrations which, in the lapse of ages, has passed between them and isolated them, leaving them divided and far apart, yet kindred boughs of a parent trunk that has ceased to exist. * Oliampollioii's Letters on Egypt and Nubia. Larrey'a Memoirs, in tie Description of Egypt. Caillaud's Journey to Meroe and the "White Nile. Tr^meaux's Journey to Nubia, etc. EQYFT 3300 YEARS AGO. _ 21 VI. Should tlie logic of induction lead us, more than once, in the course of this recital, to admit extracts fi'om Manetho among the material upon which his- torical conclusions are based, it must not, for that reason, be inferred that we are inclined to accord to the remaining works of that old annahst, and espe- cially to his Hsts of kings and dynasties, analogous authority. It is not for us to inquire whether that Eg^-ptian priest, entrusted with the task of collecting in the Greek language all the national traditions stored away among the sacerdotal archives of his country, was or was not equal to his mission. Of the three volumes that composed his work, a few fragments, drowned in the compilations of later periods, and Usts of kings revised, corrected and abridged by the monastic zeal of the early Christians, being all, un- fortunately, that have come down to us, it would be unjust to hold the author responsible for all tbe contradictions of dates, facts and figures as well as the double appUcations that these different frag- ments contain. But, when we consider the complete discordance that exists between these documents of common 22 EGYPT 3300 YExiRS AGO. origin and those whence Herodotus had drawn his facts two centuries earher, and wei^^h the confiictins views whereby they have strayed from the ancient source that should have supphed them, and whicli, surviving in our day under the name of the Old Chronicles, gives only four hundi-ed and forty-three years to the fifteen earliest dynasties to which Man- etho assigns forty or fifty centuries, we must agree with one of the most judicious investigations of an- tiquity, that it is improbable that an Egyptian priest compiling with all the prejudices of his caste in a foreign tongue, and in behalf of a king whom he regarded as of barbarian origin, the traditions of an expiring nationality scattered on monuments of di- verse and often rival purport, should be specially endowed with that spirit of criticism in w^hose de- fault history relapses into legend, and which was almost entirely wanting in the ancients."^ At the close of this work will be found a faithful synopsis of Manetho's lists, such as they emanated from the hands of JuUus Africanus, Eusebius and Synceilus : such, too, as Champollion and his suc- cessors thought they could make them by correct- ing the figures according to the monumental inscrip- tions. We have also reserved the right to range to- gether a certain number of facts, the synchronism * Volney's Eesearclies in ancient HLstuiy. EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 23 of whicli is well-nigh certain, and may serve to estab- lish some rallying points upon the floating canvas of Egyptian chronology, and prepare for it a frame- work beyond which it cannot very easily escape. YII. It is not consistent with the plan of our book to extend this chronological study any farther. Such as it is, it must suffice the reader for a basis where- on to form his own opinion of the matter, and to choose between the system that would push back into the night of ages the development of the Egyp» tian nationahty, and the one that, relying upon the study of social facts, and upon the nature of man, holds that the more the torch of history gains in clearness, the more concise should chronology be- come and ancient times approach our own. The eternal aspkation of the human mind toward a fehcity which the present denies it, and which it could not ask of the future, so long as it was un- aware of its own progressive faculties, was undoubt- edly the source of the mania that impelled ah com- munities to antedate their origin and throw it back into a past that was all the more regretted that its 24 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. depths were tlie more obscure. In those days, na- tious, as iu more recent times families, gauged their nobihtj not bj deeds but by the duration of their existence. Hence, for historians jealous as to the origin of their country, arose the necessity of mul- tiply ing generations and centuries, and of ranging in series, one after the other, successions of dynasties and parallel epochs, along with contemporaneous men and facts. Hence, too, for Manetho, in partic- ular, the necessity of conforming his annals to the fables credited by the puerile vanity of the priestly order, and of spreading out the real traditions of his country in a chaos without proportion, name or limit. Serious history, then, cannot carry these tradi- tions farther back than the period where they cease to be controUed by positive synchronic data. The hi'st point of all is the appearance of Argus upon the stage of the world. From astronomical data calculated first by Bailly and Colebrooke, after- wards adopted by Lahsen and Wilsjn, and finally put beyond all doubt by Laplace, this event, which has fiu'nished roots to the genealogical tree of an- cient Egypt, may go back thii'ty centuries before our era, but no farther. This opinion, we know, will be taxed as heretical and even blasphemous by those who approach the EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 25 realm of history not in order to extract therefi'om fruitfal lessons and hopes for the future, but that they may, in the presence of dusty remains and ex- travagant legends, give themselves up to the ec- static admiration of an old idolatry as aimless as it was artificial and out of date. To have Memphis built by Menes, 5800 years before oiii- era, upon the mied-up bed of the Kile diverted from its course; to believe piously in the books of anatomy written by Athoth, the son and successor of the first-named dynastic founder ; to unreservedly ad- mit the authenticity of the ancestral images carried before the kings at religious ceremonies,* and the fihation of the three hundred and forty-hve Pi- Ro- mish mentioned by Herodotus ; to rear the Pyra- mids of Gizeh in the time of the brothers Sapphi * At Rome, also, in many public and private ceremonies, there were exhibited along with the images of ancestors those of the gods to which the Roman patricians pretended to trace their origia. Bat have modern historians ever come to the conclusion, from the presence of the images of Mars and Venus at the funeral rites of Julius or Martins, that those fetiches of the primitive clans of Latium ever had a real personal existence ? Assuredly not. Yet this is what Egyptian investigators do in our day, in regard to Menes and many mythical personages of ancient Egypt. t This word is equivalent to "the man superior to all others;" " a brave and virtuous person ;" "an excellent man." Herodotus. Euterpe, ch. 143. 26 EGYPT 3300 TEAES AGO. or Clmffia, of tlie fourth dynasty, forty or fifty cen- turies before Christ ; and to put back the origin of the grand hydraulic and architectural monuments of Fayoum fifteen hundred years anterior to Thoth- mes III, to Seti I, to Rameses Mei-Amoun ; to cause the conquest of Asia, two thousand five hun- dred years before the Saviour, by an Osymandyaa and a Secortasen, personages of whom the heroes of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties would be merely feeble imitators, — all this was, for a long time in France, and is still in Germany, a source of pleasure even to grave adepts in science, that it would be perilous to disturb by calm discussion. Therefore, we shall not attempt the task, confident as we are, that, ere long, there will become of those mytliical legends, what recently became of the series of centuries that our fathers so generously accorded to the temples of Esneh and Denderah — centuries which we had to reduce from sixty-four and from thirty-e'ght to seventeen or eighteen at the utmost.* * We know that this prafcended antiquity was the basis given by Dapuy to his system in his " Origin of ReUgioua Worship." See Apx)endix II. EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. ' 29 Yin. Nevertheless, we cannot close this dissertation, wliicli has been too far prolonged, already, for tlie plan of our book, without reminding those who "do not see what delight there is in shutting themselves up for four thousand years with nations in their in- fancy and tyrants in decay "* the avowal wrung by Herodotus from the very priesthood of Memphis : " That in the time of Menes, the first mortal King of Egypt, the entire country below ^he Thebaic norae tvas nothing but a marsh.'' But, in regard to the philological identity of the name Menes with that of Manu, given in the Sanscrit tongue, to the spir- its proceeding out of Brahma and especially entrust- ed by him with the charge of giving laws to the Earth, this avowal leaves nothing to the name in question and to the legends therewith connected but the consistency of a myth symbolizing the ener- getic force of nature in the earliest times, the same being subsequently imported fi'om the banks of the Indus to those of the Nile, at an unknown period bv a method of transmission identical with that which has l)orne the name of Jemshid (Yima * Chateaubriand. Introduction to his Journey to Ame- rica. so EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. Tchaeto), step by step, from the valleys of the Jax- artes and the Tarim, to the high plains of Media and Persia. In fine, we must ascertain for our readers the result of the researches that modern geology has been making with regard to the beds of clay successively deposited by the periodical inundations of the Egyptian river, and according to whic-h we must not date farther back than some thirty centu- ries before Christ the appearance of the first human monuments on the primitive soil of Thebes.* When a trench is dug or any excavation made in the valley of the Nile, there is, invariably, found a layer of vegetable earth from 20 to 2 J: feet in depth, the result of the river's annual deposit. This layer rests du'ectly upon a bed of sea sand. Yery minute calculations led the engineers of the great French expedition to Egypt to estimate at 126 millimetres, or about .4131 of a foot, per century, the elevation of this alluvial soil. At a later date, Mr. Lebas, the engineer upon whom devolved the task of convoy- iug the obelisk of Luxor to Paris, and the Enghsh savant Wilkinson, came to conclusions almost iden- tical, on the same subject, by methods of research different in character but equally exact m detail. Eight metres, 26 J feet, the greatest thickness, divided * Description of Egypt. Girard's Memoire on Drainage. EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. , 31 by 126 millimetres, or .4134 of a foot, gives us no more than 6350 years of days equal in length to those of our time. Egyptian history, as Manetho and the epigraphists understand it, is not restrained within these narrow Hmits. What, then, are we to do, unless we bring down to a date much later than Menes and the kings who built the Pyramids, the period when the Egyptians neither employed nor knew any years of longer term than four months. "The proof of this," admits one of the most ardent champions of the high antiquity of Egypt, " is that, later, when the year consisted of twelve months, three seasons were designated, each comprising four months, which were indicated hieroglyphicalJy by the word ter, and by a sign that may mean a sea-- son or a year^ indifferently y^ The lower course of the old Egyptian Nile is, therefore, geologically speaking, one of the most recently formed of the ancient continent, and, if geology be not a vain word, three thousand, aye, four thousand years anterior to Kameses, — five thousand years at most, if the heaping up of the lower deposits are to be, hkewise, taken into ac- count, — the soil of Egypt was still oscillating between the billows of the sea, and the rays of the sun. t * Dr. H. de Brngsch, History of Egypt from the earliest period of its existence (Leipzig, 1859, p. 26.) t See Appendix III. 32 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. Hence, the city of This or Thinis, from which the chief of the first Egyptian dynasty was said to have come, was not founded until long after- ward. IX. Nine or ten centuries later, that is to say after a longer lapse of time than was allotted to any nation of classic antiquity for its birth, development and death, the population of the valley of the Nile is dimly seen attempting a form of civilization of which historians make known to us only the de- chne. Subdivided into several groups whereof Beheni in Nubia, Thebes, Heracleopolis, and Memphis, some- times independent, sometimes tributary cities, but always rivals of each other, were the chief centres, the different populations referred to had for a com- mon bond : I. Their social organization, founded on the sys- tem of castes, the result of successive immigrations and conquests. II. Their reUgous creed, arising like their castes £i-om the superposition of different races upon the EQYrT 8300 YEARS AGO. Q'. same soil; a synthetic derivation from tlie mon- strous superstitions of the Cushites, of Semitic Sabalsm and Aryan naturalism, it presented, in the individual manifestations of divine power, traces of its triple origin ; but, multiplying those manifesta- tions according to the place and the interest of the moment, and upon each rung of the ladder that con- nects the phenomena of Earth with the invisible world, it could but terminate for the multitude in the grossest fetichism, and, for thinking men, athwart the mystery of the initiations, in those mystical metaphysics of which the Alexandrian school has transmitted only vague echoes to us. III. Their language, issuing from the same com- mingled sources, and retaining traces of its origin, yet differing importantly from nome to nome, from metrophs to metropolis, and particularly, fi'om the Thebais to the Delta, but for which, however, the priests had, in the long run, discovered in the num- berless array of their fetiches, animate or inanimate, tangible symbols, a graphic representation and a consecrated alphabet whereof every temple had the key. ly. A method of burial singular, but imperative- ly required by a long and cruel experience of the periodical inundations of the river, and of the poi- sonous effluviae arisinj^r from the contact of the wa- 34 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. ters witli tlie organic remains hidden beneath the soil. Y. Their sedentary life ; industrial and agricul- tural habits, derived, perforce, hke social manners and customs, from the imperious exigencies of their dwelling place and the odd shape of its narrow and elongated territorial surface ; at the same time, too, from their jealous attachment to the soil, their hatred and contempt for the stranger, and especially^ for the wandering tribes of the frontiers, an impure race whose insolent rapacity and greedy herds de- filed the earth and impaired its fertihty. What was there wanting to tribes who inhab- ited the banks of the Nile, at this period of their existence, to form a nation ? — One of those catastro- phes which bring communities closer together and combine them, as they do individuals — a partner- ship of perils, struggles, sufferings, reverses and tri- umphs gone through, side by side. Providence brought this about X. In due time, came rushing headlong across Western Asia, the first migration of nations where- EGITT 3300 YEAES AGO. - 35 of liistorj has retained the remembrance. Swollen bj all the nomadic tribes that it had gathered to it on the way, it fell suddenly upon the valley of the Nile. Whence came this human avalanche ? Josephus seems to indicate Chaldea ; Yolney speaks of Yemen. Judging by the force of its impetus and the length of time it took for the disappearance of its straggling remnants, by the name accursed that it left in the memory of Egypt, and above all, by the avenging hate that, in later times, repeatedly impeUed the Egyptian armies beyond the river Tigris and the Armenian Taurus, we think that it is in Central Asia, the ever-seething cauldron and workshop whence the commissioned races and the scourges of Divine wrath emanate, that we must look for the starting point of the Hycsos. Written history contains but a few words to sus- tain our opinion, yet they are formal and charac- teristic. " Before there were any Medes and As- syrians," says Justinus, in Book II., chapter iii., the Scythians, i. e., a wandering race coming fi'om the north, invaded Asia and held it in subjection for fifteen hundred years." The prophets of Thebes and of Memphis might have exclaimed, as those of Judea had occasion to 36 EcyrT 3o00 yeaes ago. do in later years, in the presence of an irruption ol similar hordes. "Behold a people cometh from the north; a mighty nation hath arisen from the loins of the Earth ! They carry the bow and the buckler : they break and destroy without pity ! — The noise of their coming is like the roaring of the sea. *' They come up as a cloud ; their chariots fly as the whirlwind. Woe unto us ! " I looked upon the Earthand it was a desert ; I beheld the mountains, and lo they trembled, and all the hills, and they dashed together. I beheld and lo ! there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled; ^ * ^ all the cities were broken down. * * * The whole land shall oe desolate.''* ^ ^ "It is a mighty nation, an ancient nation, a na- tion whose language thou knowest not, neither nn- derstandest what they say. * "^ * Their quiver is an open sepulchre. * * * And they shall eat \ip thine harvest and thy bread which thy sons and thy daughters should eat." * Jeremiah, eh. iv. v. and viii. EGITT 3300 YEAES AGO. - 37 XI. Here, the avowal of Manetho should be received •with credence ; since sapping the foundation of his system of national antiquity, better than any other argument, it must have sorely wounded his pride. " In the ancient times," he says, " during the reign of one of our kings named Timaos, the anger of God was aroused against us, I know not why ; and there came from the dh^ection of the east a multitude of men of ignoble race who, precipitating themselves by surprise upon our country, possessed themselves of it without a struggle and ivith the great- est ease. They slew part of the chiefs and cast the rest into chains. They burnt our cities and threw down the temples of the gods. Their barbarity toward the Egyptians were such that all who had not perished by the sword were reduced with their women and children to the hardest servitude. " They then took one from among themselves named Salatis, for a king, and he made his seat at Memphis and subjected all the provinces, superior and inferior alike, to tribute, by occupying them with military garrisons. *' The latter he estabhshed principally in the di- rection of the east, with a view to closing the gates of his conquest against the future masters of Asia. 38 EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. Having discovered in tlie Saitic nome or district to tlie eastward of the Bubastic branch of the Nile, a convenient spot called Avaris (Wara), he fortified it, and placed within its confines and in its neigh- borhood, two hundred and forty thousand warriors. Every year, at harvest time, he quited Memphis to come to that place, to superintend the harvests, to pay the salaries and wages, to exercise the mul- titude in warlike evolutions, and thus inspire the vanquished and foreigners with a salutary fear. Dying after a reign of nineteen years, he had for a successor Beon, who was replaced by Apachnas, to whom succeeded Apophis, then Janas, then Assis, in all, six kings in 259 years and three months." During this whole space of time, they never ceased to wage a war of extermination on the Egyptian race, and they were called the Hycsos or Shepherd Kings, for hac in the sacred tongue means kingy and SOS in the vulgar idiom a shepherd. * A curious document which has come down to us from those remote times yields the support of irre- futable testimony to Manetho's recital. There may be read on a hieratic papyrus in the British Museum the following inscription : " It happened that the land of Egypt fell into the * Extract of ManetLo in Flavins Joseplius, contra Aiqnonem, |\&/^HIiKllli]ll EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 41 hands of strangers (Aad-tiis) and then tliere were no native Pharaohs left in the whole country. At that time their descendant, Ra-Sekenen, was nothing bnt a liac^ or chief, of Upper Egypt. The Aad4us Aeld the strong city of the sun^ and their king, liis majesty Apapias, resided at Ila-War.-f- The whole country was tributary to him, and brought him all its good productions after the example of the lower country (Lower Egypt). " And his majesty Ra- Apapias chose the god Siitech as his Lord, and would not be the worship- per of any other god in the entire region, and he built a temple to him in good imperishable stone :":|: Li the presence of text so specific and formal as this, what becomes of the forty preceding centuries of administrative and territorial unity ? What re- mains of all that systematic scaffolding ? — unless it be the undeniable proof that the Egypt of those days succumbed so easily, only through the ab- sence of unitary institutions and traditions, — the inanity of her past existence as a nation. * This desigoation may be applied to Thebes, as well as to Heliopolis. t This word, which is entirely Aryan in origin, would suffice to indicate the primitive country of the Hycsos. TTar, in the Zend language, means the original enclosure built by Jeinshiu. — Wara or Tl''rtr, in Pelhvi, or old Persian, mean- ing borough^ fortified enclosure. \ See Appendix IV. 42 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. Surprised amid the pre-occupations inherent to the long infancy in which her servile educa- tion kept her under the joke of reHgious and rojal formalism ; parcelled out by the rival preten- sions of lier various tribes, her cities and her two controlling castes ; more accustomed to luxurious pageants, to rcjigious chantings and processioi.s swe 5 ^ ^ ' ' ■, V , ^ ' , ' ' > %■• : ', ^ ' '> •.' -> EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. -" 45 XII. A DEEP ravine with steep decKvities ; a river in it studded with a labyrinth of small islands and sharp projections of dark granite constantly embrowned by the dash and the foam of the waves, marks the passage of this mountain chain across the Nile, and constitutes the phenomenon of the cataracts of Syene, so strangely exaggerated by classic antiquity, A little higher up than these rapids rises the Island of Phil^e where Egyptian mythology placed the tomb of Ashi, and where, in fact, seemed to termi- nate, with Egypt itself, the furrow of fertility which the river opens from that point to the sea. Upon both banks of the Nile, enormous masses of brown freestone and granite, of sombre and cal- cined hue, confused and upturned . at their base, rise, lilie the chosen scene where Nephtis and Ty- phon, the gods of the desert and of chaos, had tri- umphed, and shutting in the horizon of the myste- rious isle on all sides, contrast, in the most startling manner, with the white pylons and the regular col- onnades that cover its surface. From this point to the Island of Say in Middle Nubia, this heap of rocks stamped with the seal of desolation, ascends the valley of the Nile, and en- closes it with its abrupt acclivities, in such manner as 4:6 EGYPT 3300 YEAFtS AGO. to leave it only tlie aspect of a mountain torrent which at certain points is but a stone's throw across. A steep path painfully winds along its rugged slopes, and below, at their foot, are seen some narrow furrows of barley and dourah, with oc- casional clumps of date trees indicating a thin strip of cultivable land, which, a hundred times intercept- ed by jutting ridges of rock rarely attains more than 355 feet in breadth, and supports hardly one hundred thousand inhabitants, upon a surface of more than one hundred and fifty leagues in longi- tudinal extent. XIIL Yet, this poor country, this region of stones^ as the Ajrabs call it, in their energetic idiom, — the Batn or Dar-el-haz/ia?\ — was the salvation of rich and fertile Egypt, in the days of Ilycsos rule. It gave refuge behind its granite frontier to all the vanquished who had been fortunate enough to escape the sword or the yoke of the invaders. It offered them, in the jagged recesses of its rocks, temples for their gods, palaces for their princes, and rallying places for their warriors. AU drank in from its rude hos- EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 47 pitality the energy tliat tliey lacked, and littlo by Kt- tle, it changed to thoughts of vengeance and the iiopa of return, the re'irets thev had bestowed on their lost country. The \ cry insufficiency of the Nubian soil to support theu' number, augmented as io \ViL3 each day by fresh fugitives, strengthened their i evo- lution. In order to subsist, thev were forced to venture upon marauding expeditions iuto the coun- try that they had not been able to defend. They had to creep stealthily tGv,^ard it, through the wil- derness, and, exposed to constant peril, to snatch away by dint of arms, a portion of the fruits and harvests that it lavished on the straDg<=.y. Tbi:3 Bedouin existence periorce accustomed the mmcaiy caste to danger, and they were reciuiied b}; all who had a heart or an arm. at the service of their desti- tution or their resentment. Partial successes de- veloped courage and confidence ; alhes cam.e to the Egyptians, undoubtedly, from the depths of Ethio- pia, and, very probably, from the coasts of Inoia ; their expeditions, as they multiplied, became m.oio regular in form and assumed a more general ch&.r- 5.cier ; theu' warfare, from being clandestine and fitful became open and continual, until, finedy, it took permanent foothold in all the passes th?,t descend from the south into Egypt, re cover mg ground, step by step, from the Hycsos. Holy iS EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. work ! ill wliieli many generations were consiurta^ and 7/hich was transmitted from father to son^ fcf more than two hundred years. The chieftains who, by reason of their descent from the ancient kings, or through services '/or- dered to the common cause, were summoned to di- 1 ect this great struggle, shared all its vicissitudes. At first mere chiefs of bands roving among the rocks and over the deserts, then sovereigns of Kubia and the Thebais, victory and national con- sent made them, successively, niactcis of the Keptancmis and of the lower course of the groat rirer. There are many names, now the subject of dispute between authorities skilled in Lgyp^r.s,:o lore who refer them back to still earlier times, which we thmk belong to the period and range that we r.re just describing. At length, when Ahmes, tho founder of the eighteenth dynasty, uniting all tho native forces of the Nile valley, entered Memphis in triumph, dj'ove all the strangers beyond the river to their entrenched camp at Wara, and afterwavdi3 expelled them even from that ; and when Ame::.Gph, his son, completed their explusion from the tarji- tory of Kemi by fresh victories on the roads ioLid- ing to Asia, these princes may have thought of lo- constructing only the past, but, in reality, they Moi* up a totally unknown order of things and ideas. EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 49 Upon tlie ruins of tlie old principalities of Thebes, Mempliis and Fayoum, trampled out bj the feet of the Hjcsos, worn away and jumbled together by two centuries and a half of battles, they laid what *fas the real foundation of Egyptian nationahty, the true groundwork of a new empire whose strong and stable unity was long to remain without a counterpart in the future, as it was without one in the past. XI7. Such were, for Egypt, the final consequences of her first struggle with the men of the north. His- tory, which faithfully credits nations with the tears and the blood that similar crises cost them, and which does not always have the opportunity, as it has in this instance, to correctly estimate their prohfic results, must record these with eagerness. It is to this period of general revival, that we must also refer a fact, the date of which the an- cients, faihng to discover its origin in the historical ages of Egypt, have pushed back into the night of time, so as to do honor to Menes, a veritable sphhix to whom they committed the keeping of al] 6C EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. the problems that they deemed impenetrable. We allude to the reform which substituted the warrior for the priestly caste, at the head of the hierarchy, and which withdrew the kings from the shadow of the temples and the tutelage of the clerical order, to centralize all power in them, and to make them, for a long series of generations, the representatives of all the energies of society. In the system of the old legendary writers this reform can be explained only by some violent revul- sion, or by a usurpation of rights revolting against rights acquired. In our opinion, it proceeded from the grand onward sweep of human affairs ; it was ordained by the inflexible logic of events. The lat- ter, in creatmg new duties, naturally displaced the rights of various classes, and, naturally alsp, be- stowed the greatest share of privilege upon those who undertook the greatest share of res]3onsibility. Such were the men who, in the presence of the vic- torious stranger, covered with their bosoms and their swords the last asylums of their families and their gods, and repurchased a country for them at the price of their blood. Such men were preferred to those who, seeking refuge in the depths of their sanctuaries, had offered nothing to the common cause but sterile appeals and vain speculations ou the enigma of the world. EQITT 3300 YEARS AGO. 51 XY. The vital sap so superabundant in all nations in a state of social renovation, was with the Eg}^ptians when they had become, in their turn, the conquer- ors of the Hycsos, in proportion to the time and the sacrifices that victory had cost them. It developed, afterward, for centuries, from gener- ation to generation, revealing itseK, on all sides in striking displays ; — at home by gigantic achieve- ments of art or of public utihty ; outside, by inces- sant effort to expand in the most opposite directions the boundaries of the Empire, until the latter, at length, overflowed upon the world in civilizing col- onies and in warhke expeditions which by ideas or by the sword, by trade or conquest, fertilized the soil where other races were to spring up and grow great in their turn. If we are to beheve the testimony deduced from the monuments, most of the sovereigns who, at that time, reigned in Egypt, had to contend not only against the barbarians of the north and of the south ; to repel fresh attacks of the Hycsos, who could not make up their minds to abandon forever the grand prize that their fathers had won, — and to Liui them back into the heart of Asia; but they 52 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO* Jiad, also, to restore the majesty of the altar and the throne by re-erecting the temples and palaces destroyed by time and invasion, and to re-open by agricnlture and by canals that should distribute the fertihzing properties of the Nile, sources of Egypt's territorial wealth. " In no country," wrote the last and the greatest of Egypt's conquerors, on this subject, " in no coun- try has the administration so much influence over public prosperity. If the administration be good, the canals are well dug, well kept, the rules for irriga- tion are properly executed, the flooding is more complete. If the administration be bad, corrupt or weak, the principles of the system by which the country is watered are violated by seditions fac- tions or by the interests of particular persons or locahties ; the canals are choked with mud : the djkes are poorly kept, and the entii'e nation suffers. Other governments have no control over the snow or the rain that falls in this province or in that, but in Egypt, it has a direct influence over the extent and character of the Nile inundations, which take the place of the showers and di'ifts that fall else- where." * Numerous attestations deduced from publi * Napoleon. Memoirs Dictated at St. Helena : CamimiQQ in Egypt. EGYi'T 3300 YEABS AGO. _" 53 monuments, and even fi'om the tombs of priyat<3 persons, agree in bearing witness that the sons and grandsons of Ahmes did not fall short of their mis- sion as warriors and administrators. Among them, three Amenophs and four Thoth- mes held swaj in Nubia and Sjria. Thothmes III., the most celebrated of all, extended the frontlets of the em^m-e as far as the borders of the Tigris to the eastern hmits of Mesopotamia. It is to this period of success and development that Egypt owed an acquisition more valuable for her, and more durable, too, than the annexation of territories distant from her natural frontiers. This was the possession of tlte liorse and its healthful domestication on the borders of tlie Nile.'^ Strange as it may appear in ^iew of the extreme antiquity ascribed to Egyptian civilization, it cannot be de- nied that the noblest conquest that man ever made re- mained unknoAvn in Egypt until the seventeenth centur}^ preceding our era ; and this fact alone suffices to anniliilate any system of history tending to assign to Egypt any activity beyond the borders of the valley of the Nile earher than the eighteentli dynasty. " The lists of the contiibutions exacted by * Dr. H. Brugscli. History of Egypt p. 25. 54 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. Thotlimes III.," sajs the Yicomte de Rouge, in his Memoir ou the Campaigns of Sesostris, " at the close of fourteen expeditions dh*ected chiefly against tho Assyrians and the Phoenicians, reveal to us Nineveh and Babylon, Asshur and Sbinar bringing in then- tribute as vassals to Egypt. They are ac- companied by other nations more powerful at that time in Asia than they, but whose names have shone less conspicuously m succeeding ages. Dur- ing time of peace, the Pharaohs exercised their su- premacy regu].ariy in those countries. Leaving all authority in the hands of the national chiefs, they contented thei""iS'Jves with levying an annual tribute. They had, nevertheless, seized the best domains oi the vanquished princes, and had appropriated the revenues either to the use of different temples, or to heh' personal treasury, fortresses commanded the chief approaches to Asia ; governors at the head of strong garrisons watched the conquered provinces ; and when a royal reign lasted for some length of time, the king himseK was seen coming to Asia, either peaceably to receive tribute, or angrily to chastise reb Is by one of those terrible forays which, in the East, seem to be the very essence of war. " The concluding re"gns of the eighteenth dynasty «Vore agitated by u^i'.TVpations and rehgious dissen- y'''\'-'l '■. 1 ' , 1 , •> ^*?sr;N;_,;;^;.^ Eynostvlic Ball o^" Kariiak 'the Or-tra] J next, 9.nd immediately after them, the ro3^ai nacs fwvrrcvjided by attendants, by fanbearers and young children of the sacerdotal caste carrying the sceptre, the arms and the other insignia of the monarol:, be- fore v/hom the first of the princes of the blocd aud the son of the high priest burned incense ic goldGii concers. The Queen Nofre-Ari, the youthfiJ comparuxon of Mei-Amoun when he too was young, robed like him in rich and almost transparent tissues, of wLioh India even then possessed the secret, and like Llm displaying about her black waging masses of Iiair, and in the many ornaments of her ne-.-k, her aims ti.nd her nalied feet all that was most precious among the pearls and corals of the Srythrean seas and ihe em- eralds of the Troglodytes, acjcurLi^.Tated duiiiig the la;pso of centuries iji the treasury of the Pharaohs, foUi^wed her spouse in an elcgfint palanquin, tie elastic hammock of which, constructed of nve ^'.ix and gold, seemed suspended to stalks of rose-colored and blue lotus. Above it, a broad dais woven of the rainbov/-hued spoils of the most brilliant birds of the Tropics, threw forth coruscating, ever-chang- ing shades^ and tints. Behind the Queen came on, in two pare.llel Ihies -, ' -> 1 1 1 1 ■> 1 > An Egyptian Princess in her palanquin (accoi ding lo Wilkinson). EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 77 tlic princes and princesses of the blood, tlie vassal kings, and the dignitaries of the priesthood and the army. Detachments of the latter, regularly drawn up in line by platoons under their respective officers and standards, terminated the procession which even the long avenue of sphinxes and rams,* leading from the banks of the river to the main en- trance of the temple, could not v/holly contain. V. In front of the sacred edifice of which the granite depths resounded with solemn and mysterious murmurs, the mihtary music ceased, and the royal pageant halted. The brazen gates, placed between two large ipj- lons, gave passage to a long succession of priestly choirs advanciDg to the presence of Mei-Amoun , these were the local ecclesiastics of all the great temples in the Empke, and all the pecuhar creeds of different places which time, conquest and the pohcy of legislators had made part of the system subordinate to Theban divinity. They brought the ' — — « ^ — - — —^ — ^—^— — . * Colossal stone statues of rams were used like the sphinxes to adorn the avenues of the temples. 78 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. beueclictioDS of their gods to the new son whom Amnion on that day adopted ; nay more, they brought the gods themselves. Baris or barks sus- tained on the shoulders of groups of eighteen or twenty -four priests, according to the importance of the divine personage represented on the prow or the poop of each one of them, contained small naos or tabernacles carefully veiled with a thick tissue of silyer and gold. There, hidden from the sight of every profane eje, were supposed to be stationed those renowned gods descended from the Yedic Aria upon the land of Kemi at successive and un- known epochs, viz : Ph-t-ah or Agny, meaning fire; Ph-Ra f Jom ; t Sevek ; % Asm ; § and those oth- er local conceptions, half monster and haK myth, which the pontiit' teachers of Ethiopia had engraft- ed upon the coarse fetiches of the Cushites, the original inhabitants of the valley of the Nile, and which were all associated in divine families or households analogous to the great initial triad of Thebes. As each hari filed along in its place in the proces- * An equivalent of Rf>, Ra, Ri, La, El, the Sun. f Om, Aom, Homa, the god of the Cup X Siva. ^ iWira. These were the Indian deities and titles with which the analogy of the Egyptian gods and goddess- es is thus indicated. KQITT 3300 YEAES AGO. - 79 sion, in front of Mei-Amoun the priests who carried it mingled praises of the King in their hymns, at- tributing to him all the virtues of Avliich their par- ticular deity was, more especiaUy, the type, the in- spiration or the symbol : some extoUed his sense of justice and his magnanimity ; others his hatred of falsehood and his love for the good ; these sang laudations of his wisdom and his prudence and their control over his passions, and those his strength and courage in overcomhig his enemies."* YI. The tabernacles of the gods were foDowed by siatuettes of the royal ancestors and predecessors of Mei-x4.mount also carried and interpreted by priests. Then, in the midst of another sacerdotal group, the white bull, the hving emblem of Ammon- Ra, covered with flowers and enveloped in a cloud of incense, appeared on the threshold of the tem- ple, as though to invite the new Ai'oeri to cross it. Then, descending from his elevated naos, Mei- Amoun on foot proceeded through the interior * See Diodorus, Book T., chapter 70. t See Apj)endix VL 80 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. porticoes aud tlie high colonnades of the hyposty- lic halls toward the sanctuary where, upon an altar of porphyry, sat the grand Theban triad. The priestly choirs, the sacred haris, the images of the ancestors, the royal family and the chiefs of the CEris only went in thither Avitli him. On his arrival, the high priest presiding over the pageant, caused the pontiffs officiating under him to mtone the chant consecrated to the Divine hght revealing itself to mortals. Standing erect at the altar, he there received the King, who, ascending to a place beside him, aided him in completing the sacrifice ordained for the occasion ; poured out consecrated hbations before Amnion ; burned the prescribed incense, amid a showier of flowers, and prostrated himself while pronouncing these words, at once so haughty and so simple : "I come to my father Ammon at the end of the procession of gods which he forever admits to his presence." During this time, these same gods and their ter- restrial retinue wheeled solemnly around the altar, mingling with the homage that they laid at the feet of the King of Heaven, as they passed, the wishes Avliich they expressed for the welfare of the new King of the Earth. The strange import of these antique Htanies may be conjectured from the lit iil!illll iiiyiiiij;iLii iiiillll EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. -' 83 following fragments which have been preserved for us bj the mural mscriptions : The Goddes3 Maut. i/ike grand-motJier and companion of Ammon.) " 1 come to render homage to the sovereign of the gcds, Ammon-Ra, the governing and controlling head of the land of Kemi, in order that he may grant long years to his son — Eling Kameses — who loves him." The God Khons. (Son of Maut and Ammon.) " We approach thee, to serve thy Majesty, Oh, sovereign lord, Ammon-Ra ! grant a pure and safe- ly estabUshed hfe to thy son who loves thee, — Ra- meses, the lord of the Earth." The Queen Nofre-Aiii. " And I, the royal spouse, the all-powerful mis- tress of the world, I bring my homage, also, to Am- mon-Ra, Kmg of gods and men. My heart rejoices in thy loving kindness ; I leap with delight under the weight of thy favors. Oh thou who dost es- tablish the seat of thy power in the dwelling of thy son, the lord of the world, Rameses, accord to him a firmly estabhshed and pure hfe. May his years be counted by periods of panegyrics." 84 fiOYPT 3300 YEARS AGO VIL To this series of prayers and intercessions, Am- luoR-Ra replies bj the mouth of his high-priest speaking to Mei-Amoun : " My well-beloved so/i, receive from me a pure life and long days to pass upon the throne of Kemi. Thou shalt joyously con- trol the world : Thoth has written down beside thy name all the royal attributes of the celestial Aroeri. The South and the North, the East and the West, shall be brought under thy yoke ; all the good gates shall be opened to thee. I give the evil races to thee to trample beneath thy sandals. The force of thy arm shall triumph in all parts of the world, and the terror of thy name shall stamp itself deeply on the heaps of the barbarians. I give to thee., oh ! my son, the scythe of battle to restrain the foreign nations, and to sever the heads of the im- pure. Take the whip and the sceptre to rule the land of Kemi. By my orders, the lady of the celestial palace has prepared for thee, the diadem of the sun. May this helmet remain upon thy fore- head, where I place it, forever !....*' At these words, Rameses ha^dng seized the crown upon the altar to place it on his head, the higJb EGYPT 3300 rEARS AGO. '" 85 priest stretcliod forth Lis pastoral staff toward the four quarters of the globe, and while the assistant pontiffs set at hUertj four living geese which, kept ill reserve until that moment, represented the genii of the four cardinal points of the compass, he ex- claimed : "Amset, ITapi Dawu-Mutef and Keba-snuf, Go ye toward The South, the North, the West, the East, And tell the gods of those regions That Ilorus, the son of Isis and of Asiri, lias put the Pshent upon his forehead, That King Rameses has put on the Pshent!'* nis head encircled with this mystic tiara, Mei- Amouu had, then, to cut with his own hands a stalk of wheat which had grown within one of the enclos- ures of the temple, and to place it upon the altar of Ammon. This offering and the reading aloud by the high-priest of certain sealed rules relative to the duties and conduct of kiii'jjs terminated the rehgious ceremony. Barneses was then escort- ed with the white bull and the images of the ances- tral Kings, back to the exterior limits of the temple, and, amid a cloud of incense and flowers, regained the naos that was awaiting him in front of the pylons ; then, preceded and followed with accla- mations, oaths of fidelity and imiversal expressions 8G EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. of interest and regard, lie advanced sIoavIj io hia palace, between two rows of sphinxes whose granito heads, that day adorned with ornaments and a roy- al or divine head-(kess which determined the symbol- ical expression of each of them, seemed to become animated with the breath of human enthusiasm and rise up to salute the new sovereign as he passed by. Such were the grand official pageants of Egypt fourteen centuries before Jesus Christ. The Egyptian monarchs celebrated, during their entire reign, the anniversary of their coronation, by a ceremony of the same kind, less imposing no doubt than the first, but invested, by the events of the year, with more or less interest and distinction. YIII. Were the question to be asked, " What was the position of the people in these festivals?" and if that expression meant the plebeian throng of artisans, mechanics, laborers and soldiers, who to- day make up the Uving force of a nation, we should have to reply that the people did not exist in the Egypt of the Rameses, and that the day of their a])pearance and rise had not yet dawned upon any human community. The 8\)luux ol Raiueses II. (according to the Spliiiix at th© Louvre) EGYIT 33 00 YEAHS AGO. 89 Below these two classes, one of wliicli was the ed- ucating and the other the conquering caste m the val- ley of the Nile, there were crowds of artisans, oJf workers-by-hand who, under the direction of chiefs belonging to the rehgious castes, cut and built ma- sonry ; melted and worked with the metals ; spun flax and hyssus ; in fine, toiled at the trades assigned to them, from the cradle, by law or by descent. There were fa vipers who tilled the lands given to them by cntj J^ng, the priests or the warriors who were the sole owners of the soil of the empire. Upon the borders of the deserts, around the oases and the broad levels of the Delta, hved herdsmen who transmitted, from father to son, the business of raising and guarding the flocks and lierds of the royal ecclesiastical or military domains. But these shepherds, these laborers, these artisans, excluded by law fi'om pubhc affairs ; depiived, also, of the right to bear arms and of inlying various ti-ades at once ; Hable to be condemLed, for each offence, to imprisonment, fines or the bastinado, that great re- source of the stationary East, could not be looked upon as citizens, by modern eyes. Indeed, they do not appear to have differed much, upon the land of Kemi, from the Siidras of India to whom the sovereign Master of things has assigned but ono i)0 EGITT 3300 YEAJIS AGO. office, viz., that of serving the upper dosses wiUioui depreciating tJieir merits.^ Below them, again, were tlie slaves who had been purchased in the markets or captured in war. IX. This condition of things, which is not deniod hsr the boldest admirers of the past history of Egjjr^., aiid is attested by the imanimous reports transmit- ted to us twenty centuries or more ago, by the sagacious observers of antiquity, who went fi-om all the centres of civilization in those days, to the borders of the Nile to study a civihzation older than their own — this state of things, we say, was discredited by one of our contemporaries as re- markable for the universality of his learning as for the vivacity of his scientific decisions. Arguing from the text of of some funereal inscriptions, in relation to the civil or private hfe of the ancient dwellers on the borders of the Nile, Mr. J. J. Am- pere has felt authorized to declare that there never were castes among them.f * Manava Shastra. Book First. t lu reference to castes in Egypt, see Revue des Deux Mo7ides, 15 Sept.. 184}x EGYPT 3300 YEABS AOU. 91 TVitliout disputiiig tlie validity of the documents adduced by that savant ; without inquiring whether they did not belong to periods of perturbation in Egyptian history, to times of trouble and strife, like those which preceded the eighteenth and followed tiie nineteenth dynasty; and especially to ages of dechne, hke those in which the last Hameses passed away, we shall confine oui'selves to ascer- taining, with Mr. Ampere himseK, that if, at certain epochs of Egyptian history, the functions of judges, engineers, architects, chiefs of nomes and districts, seem to have been exercised indifferently by priests, or by v/arriors, and if by chance there was so lit- tle demarcation between these two aristocratic classes, the same person could, sometimes, accu- mulate sacerdotal, mihtary and civil offices, t]\e line of separation between them and the inferior classes always remained so broad that nothing could obhterate it — not even death, for the honors paid to ancestors in the tombs, the admis- sion of theu' names into the fimereal inscriptions do not appear to have ever ceased to be the exclusive privilege of members of the priesthood and the army. It would be easy to prove that of the two terms of this proposition, the last affirms much more de- cidedly than the former one, the existence of 92 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AQO. castes. However that may be, we shall leave to any one who has studied in good faith, the nature of man and the affihation of his social conceptions, the task of deciding whether deductions drawn from hieroglyphics, or from a doubbful interpreta- tion and uncertain dates, are sufficient to refute the formal assertions of Herodotus, Plato, Strabo and Diodorus, who affirmed nothing concerning the in- stitutions of Egypt without having seen them with their own eyes and touched them with theu' own hands. For our part, oven in the absence of such testimo- ny, the contemplation of the valley of the Nile, which has been for 3000 years impotent in the pro- duction of a people, the sight of the degraded race that now occupies the homes of Thothmes III., of 8et.i and of Mei-Amoun, would have sufficed to con- vince us that this long hereditary lethargy, this stupor that has fallen there upon the growth of that progress of which Providence has planted the seed in the bosom of every region and every man, can be attributed to nothing but the violence of a rigid system of castes, too profoundly rooted into tho land by conquest, and too long carried to extremes by the tyranny of estabhshed institutions. EQYrr 3300 YEAiia aqo. - 93 X. This point of historical criticism put aside, and we have touched npon it for no other purpose than to sliow how far one may go astray, in allowing oneself to be guided by epigraphy alone, we have to admit that the social ideal of our time could not have been that of ancient days. Civilization could not sustain itseK, at the outset, and go on with its development excepting under the shelter of a rigorous system. There must be a coercive princi- ple, material as well as moral, to compel wandering tribes, whether rude shepherds or savage hunters, to become a nation. The institution of castes promptly attained this end, in Egypt and India ; but those who promoted it could not foresee how far their system, carried out to its ultimate results, would compro- mise the future. To the man of those days mucli less than to him who lives in our own time, was it given to uplift his gaze far enough toward the ze- nith to catch ghmpes of the light reflected there from the dawn that still lingers below the horizen. TJo made up for this by creating according to the extent of his visual range and his requhementS; a t}"pe of absolute monarchy in which the despot could be, up to a certain pomt, less the tyrant than the father of his subjects ; wherein each class and 94. EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. each profession had its allotted sphere ; ^vherein a rehgious dedication to the task, extending its influ- ence from father to son, age after age, contined each individual within a circle of cares and duties amid which he was to hve and die ; wherein, fin a 11 r, at the cost of beholding all human dignities concen- trated upon a few heads, and the fi'ee will of cacli one sacrificed to the rigid mechanism of the law, the arts of peace, agricultural abundance, and com- mercial wealth seemed to difiuse themselves over the whole social body, at the hands of the sovereign like the blessings that descend from Divinity itself."^ Some of the reigns of the eighteenth and nine- teeith Egyptian dynasties, and, particularly, that of Eameses 11. , seem to have attained the Umits of this ideal type. * See Heeien " Ou the Commerce and Policy of the An- cieuts." VoL L XnE CAMPAIGNS OF RAMESES THE GREAT. Situation, Wealth and Population of Egypt, on the Accession oi Rameses. — The plausible Motives for his Expeditious.- -Two Razzias at an Interval of Thirty-three Centuries. — Departure of Rameses for Asia. — His Army. — Testimony of Tacitus, Herodo- tus, Strabo and the Monuments. — A Bulletin of Victory, and a Poet Laureate of the Fourteenth Century before our Era. -The Battle of Atesk. — The retui-n of Rameses. "When Ramoses ascended tlie tlirone, more tlian two centuries had elapsed since the expulsion of the Hycsos. The almost unintemipted succession of a decade of memorable reigns had raised the in- ternal prosperity of the empire, as well as its influ- ence outside, to the highest pitch. The advan- tages resulting naturally from a long period of security ; an administration equal to the needs oi the epoch ; the multipHcation and good manage- ment of the canals, those peaceful conquerors of aiable land won by them fi'om the desert, were 98 EYGrx 3300 years ago. daily angmenting the chances of existence al- ready so easy on a fertile soil and beneath a smil- ing sky. And, while all these causes combined were making the agricultural and industrial classes of Eg}^pt the most laborious and the most compact population then existing, on the other hand, the mihtary castes, trained to warfare fi'om generation to generation by a series of successful distant expe- ditions, presented in its real effective force, and in that aUeged in the exaggerated figui*es handed down to us by the T\Titers of Greece and Rome,* the most martial, the best armed and the most for- midable mass of combatants knowTi to those an- cient times. Such elements of greatness, taken together with the youth of Mei-Amoun and his natural ardor, ex- cited, as it was, in the highest degree by his first triumphs in war, and by the example of his father, render it needless for us to search, with the legend- ary historians, in the oracles of the gods or the in- terpretation of dreams, the motives of his ambition and his conquests. * We cannot admit the 700,000 armed men spoken of in the recital of the Thebau i)riests to Germa.uicus (See the Annals of Tacitus) any more readily than the picked force of 640,000 reported by Diodorus. Either of these accounts would make the numbers of the entire caste amount to from two to three mil- lions of individuals, and that is excessive. See Ax^pendix VII. EGYFT 3300 YEAES AGO. - 99 Moreover, at that time, great disorders were agi- tating the East, and the noise of their distant tn- miilts could not but re-echo as far as the bordsra of the Nile. In the great irruptions that Seti I. had guided toward Central Asia, he had rep^atedlj come into colhsion with the confederation of thf Khetas,in whose title seem to lie concealed both tha^. of the old Hjcsos and the more modern name of the Scythians. From the gorges of the Taurus and the Lebanon mountains, where they had estabhshed their citadels and the centre of their power, these ancient wandering races presided over the great movements of the Oriental populations which the reUgious or so- cial convulsions of Upper Asia were incessantly de- taching fi'om the antique Ai'yan throne, and contm- ually recruited their numbers with fresh swarms. There was reason to apprehend that, ere long, all these torrents of men would follow the descending channel worn for them by former migrations, and- Lko them, pour down and inundate Egypt. To await their attacks was dangerous. It was better to hasten to meet them and to hurl them back to- Avard the sources whence they came, or, at all events, to break the force of the stream, and scatter its ramifications over the earth. Thus, no doubt, thought Mei-Amoun, and from the modern point of view, w(3 cannot but agree with him. 100 EOYrr 3300 years ago. TiccorJing to DioJorus, wliom, we think, we can take for our guide in this matter, Mei-Amoun pre- pared liimself for his great enterprise bj such acts as were most Hkelj to give his popuhiritj deep root in the minds of his subjects. In order to feel as- sured of the fidehty of those whom he was to leave behind him on the soil of his country, and to make certain of the indomitable perseverance of the com- panions in arms selected to follow him, he strove to link them to his destiny by the ties of interest and of gratitude. Affable and cordial with all, he dis- played a hberahty equal to his unhmited power. lie overwhelmed some with gifts ; to others he dis- tributed lands, while to still others, again, he remit- ted the fines and penalties they had incurred, and gave liberty to all prisoners of State, and all who had been incarcerated for debt, of whom the mul- titude then overstocked the jails.* The population and area of the Empire increas- ing from reign to reign, and necessitating a new territorial division, he fixed the number of names or provincial governments t at thirty-six, and placed at the head of each, to preside over the local ad- * See Diodonis, Book I. t M. Broiigscli, who very naturally, will have it that this administrative division of Egypt dates back to a period EGYPT 3300 YEA.RS AGO. ^ 101 ministration and the collection of taxes, men whose reputation or hereditary attachment to his dynasty recommended them the most to his confidence. One of the first results of this scheme having been an exact census of the military caste, lie was en- abled to raise from its midst an army composed of men who were the most robust and the most capa- ble of supporting the long fatigues and perilous chances of distant or unknown climes. He gave them for leaders the playmates of his childhood and the comrades who had shared the exploits' of his early youth. All of them, hke himself, full of ardor and ambition and inured to warhke exercises, were bound to each other by fraternal ties of which the common bond was an absolute devotion to Mei-Amoun, who, at the expense of the treasures amassed by his ancestors, and the regions annexed to the domains of the crown by previous con- quests, had provided for their pecuniary welfare sufficiently to leave them free from any other anxi- eties than those of war.* much anterior to Rameses, raises the number of nomes to forty-four, equally divided between Upper and Lower Egypt. He confesses, however, that concerning many nomes of thi=i latter part of the Egyptian territory, he still felt some lin- gering uncertainty, the solution of which demands fresh re- searches and discoveries. * Diodorus Book I, ch. LIV. 102 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. IL After liaviug thus regulated tlie organizatioi.' of the interior, and of the army, Mei-Amoun had still to provide for the security of the frontiers during the whole period of his projected absence, on his distant expeditions. On the western side, his possession of the oases, maintained by fortified posts, and the immensity of the desert, dispelled the idea of all serious danger. On the north, the carefully secured and guarded locks and barriers that closed the seven mouths of the Nile, sufficed to prevent the rovers of the Mediterranean from penetrating into Egypt, and the natives from leaving it. The Isth- mus of Suez, the point of both departure and ar- rival for aU the Asiatic routes, and partly covered by the Bitter Lakes which, at the epoch in question, every high tide still put in communication with the neighboring gulf, was moreover sheltered from all attack by the numerous military establishments that were to serve as a base for the warhke operations toward the Ea^t that Rameses was planning. There remained the districts on the south, ever exposed to the descents of the savage hordes belonging to the had race oi Ciish, and the Sea- Weed Lake^ the way to which the monsoons of the Indian Ocean had taught to the Pelasgians fi'om the banks of thu EGYPT 3000 YEARS AGO. 103 Indus and tlie Nerbiidda. Always in quest of ad- venture and pillage, as their brethren of the ^geeac Sea and of the open Ocean were to be, after an interval of many centuries, they frequently came thither to gather booty, sometimes as traders but often er as pirates. To remedy this double inconvenience, two things soemed necessary to Mei-Amoun ; — the subjuga- tion of Upper Ethiopia and the establishment of a mihtary marine which, riding supreme on the wa- ters of the Arabian Gulf, should, in maintaining the security of the two shores, guarantee the com- munications that trade and the working of the cop- per mines on the peninsula of Tor had kept open between them for several centuiies. These two en- terprises were interlinked, because the soil of Egypt and of Lower Nubia lacking timber fit for naval construction, it was necessary to seek that mate- rial upon the broad plateaux watered by the tribu- taries of the great river above Meroe. Consequently, he penetrated those regions and traversed them in every direction, at the head of a continually victorious army, exacting tribute in gold, ivory, ebony, and building-timber from all the Ethiopian tribes extending from the Nile to the Red Sea, who, until then, had escaped the Egypti/in yoke. 104 EQYrT 3300 YEARS AGO. Then, when the shipyards estabhshed in the ports subsequently named Aduhs, Berenice and Leucos * had given him the hrst long vessels constructed by Egyptian hands,! he embarked upon the waters of the Arabian Gulf, and subdued its islands, and its shores as far as its southern extremity. The port of Mossel^'cus, situated not far from Cape Guarda- fiii, and six hundred leagues from Thebes was, accr.rd- ing to Pliny and Strabo, the extreme point reached by Rameses in tliat direction. if The mementoes of these events, precursors as they were of others on a grander scale, may stiU bo deciphered on the ruins that cover Mount Barkal to the south of Nubia, as also among the broken re- mains of the Eameseum or great temple of Thebes, on the right bank. In one of the bas rehef pictures of the speos of Ipsamboul, even the triumphal entry of Rameses into his capital, on his return from the regions of the south, has been made out. Helmet on head, encased in a coat of mail, and erect in a superb chariot drawn by four magnifi- cently caparisoned horses, the Egyptian hero, amid the acclamations of his soldiers, is driving before * Herodotus, Book 11. t Diodoras, Book I. cli. Iv. X Strubo, Book LVI. Pliny Book VL EOYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. ^ 105 him a thicng of nogro and Leuco-Etbiopean cap- tives with wliicli lie is going to do homage to the Tlieban triad. What meaning must we assign to this terrible expression ? Egyptian scholars refuse to see any- thing in it but the right which war gave to the mas- ter over his slave, to the victor over the vanquished, mthout admitthig that this right was ever extended so far as to cover human sacrifice. But those who do not, without some restrictions, ascribe very puro or very exalted light to the Egyptian priesthood ; those who remember what pitiless hatred to the foreigner Egypt bequeathed to aU the races that inherited either her blood or her doctrines, and what unworthy trophies the warriors of the Nile sought out with frantic eagerness on the battle-field ; all, in fine, who aclmowledge the fifteenth, sixteenth and twenty-second verses of the first book of Ex- odus to be historical documents, will, no doubt, think with us that, in the period we describe, the prisoner of war had but feeble guarantees against bloody oUation, and the treatment meted out to the condemned, in the philanthropy of the priests of Egypt, the generosity of her warriors and the gentleness or the 'clemency of her kings."^ * A carved pillar of the reign of Amenoph II. , lately found in the temple of Amada in Nubia, unfortunately brings ILL One of the bas-reliefs of Beit-el- Wally shoves us Mei-Amoun seated in a brilliant naos and causing a long procession, the immediate result of his victories in Ethiopia, to file before him. There are groups of prisoners, among whom figures an Amenoph, the chief ruler of that part of the land of Cush which the inscriptions designate as bad ; tables and side- boards covered with goid-dust and golden rings ; Jogs of ebony wood, elephant tusks, ostrich feathers and leopard skins — all those articles of luxury and rarity, in fine, which the nations of the north and the east have never ceased, since the time in ques- terrible confirmation to the hints we have expressed. Its precise language is this : *' After having vanquished his ene- mies, and enlarged the frontiers of Egypt, his Holiness Amenoph II.) came back from the country of the Upper lluteni (Upper Assyria) and filled the heart of his father, Ammon-Ra, with joy ; for he had, with his own war-club, massacred seven kings captured in the city of Tashis and led in chains on board of his vessel. Six of these kings, af- ter having had their hands cut off, were hung opposite to the pylons of Thebes. "As for the other enemy, he was conveyed by water to Nubia, and hung to the wall of the city of Napata, to dis- play to the evil races of Chish tlie victories won by his majesty over all the nations of the world, and the manner in which he chastises them." EGYTT 3300 YE Alls AGO. ^ 107 tion, to bear awaj from Africa, that mother oj gold, of slaves and of raonsters who .e deplorably prohhc yield four thousand years of pillage have not been able to exhaust. The naaies of some' of the tribes subjugated in this expedition have their analogous equivalents on the modern map of Abyssinia and Sennaar ; un- fortunately, this similarity of names is not the only one that may be traced between those whom Mei- Amoun conquered, and their descendants living in our own day. It is well known that the present chiefs of the Eastern Soudan country annually organize murder- ing and robbing expeditions — ghrazias or razzias as they term them — against the inhabitants of the higher levels of the central table-land of Afi'ica. Then, too, the narratives that modern traveUers give of these acts of plunder sound like a faithful transla- tion of llie legends explaining one of the bas-rehefs of Beit-el-Wally destined to transmit to posterity the remembrance of a raid du-ected by Rameses against the Nahazis, the ancestors of the negroes of the present day. According to the hieroglyphic recital legible there, " The barbarians, utterly routed, are flying in consternation before the Egyptian hero, who is pursuing them in a chariot, at furious speed, and 108 EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. readies them with his arrows even in the shelter of their forests. Men, women, children and grey- beards, terrified at the sight of the carnage, are vainly endeavoring to escape extermination, and to find a refuge in retreats ihat they share with the wild beasts."* In connection with this picture, read another description sketched but yesterday, nearly on the same spot, and in which the descendants of tJie same hostile races figure : '• The xVbyssinian army had furiously pursued the wretched tribe of Soddo-Gallas, and their horsemen had soon overtaken a crowd of old men, women and children unable to escape. The sight of these unfortunate people, far from awaking in them that sentiment of compassion so natural to us when we behold helpless feebleness, only served to excite their brutal instinct for bloodshed. Some of them sjame back with their bleeding trophies paraded hi ^he most indecent manner, and vaunted their ex- ploits in obscene recitals ; others brouglit with them the wives and daughters of the helpless wretches whom they had massacred or mutilated. It was but one long wail of grief and despair. * Cliamiiollioii's Letters written from Egypt and Nubia.— Cherubini's Nubia. Firmin Didot EGYrX 3300 YEAES AGO. 111. Wlien the army pressed forward in the directiou of a thicket where the Gallas, it was supposed, had taken refuge, I withdrew, so as not to witness the slaugliter of the poor creatures who, to escape the jUvelins hurled at them, were clambering up into the trees. There thej were shot like sparrows, and thither, also, came the king, who would not have missed a humming-bird, at blank range, to briug down a miserable fugitive from the covert of the branches where he had tried to hide himself.""* Between these two narratives thirtj-three centu- ries had elapsed, sweeping away the Pharaohs and their empire, along with the nations that re- placed them on the stage of the world and the gods th.it dethroned their gods. All the races who owned submission to Horus, the divine shepherd of men, have, turn by turn, seized and borne the sceptre of civilization and renewed the face of the- Earth. The Nahazis form the sole exception. Cast outside of the track of the great migrations ; fastened to a harsh and enervating soil, under a sky of brass, they remained motionless, in their barbar- ism, their ignorance, and their native weakness and terror ; having no other relations with the remain- ing members of the great family than such as the * Clias. Lefevre's Jouruey to Abyssiuia, voL ii., pp. 2^5, 246, 112 EGYPT 3300 YEAIiS AGO. wild animals of their forests liold with the hunter, they have for five thousand years paid to them tri- bute of flesh and blood, and seen the bones of their childi'en scattered to all the four quarters of the globe, along the roads that lead to every slave mart. Gloomy fate ! unjustifiable in every age, but especially so in ours, when civilization, grown up and triumphant, no longer needs, as it did in the time of the Rameses, to secure its cradle against the assaults of barbarism, and has ceased to be, for any nation, a privileged deposit, the jealous safe- keeping of which implies, as the first of social du- ties, hatred, war and oppression for the stranger. IV. The preceding facts must have fully occupied the first two years of the reign of Mei-Amoun, and it was probably only toward the beginning of the third that, having provided for all that the accomplish- ment of his vast designs demanded, and having confided the government of Egypt to the Queen, assisted by a council of regency, he set in move- ment for the conquest of Asia the masses which he had accumulated with that intent on the borders of the Isthmus. < '•Ill 'iim\mr-,:,in,:iui...'HumainrM'}m\WMJ:mmw EGITT 3300 YEAHS AGO. 115 If the mouuinents Lave not placed it in our pow- er to correct the assertions of the ancients with re- gard to the numerical strength of that army, tLej at least leave us in the way to compensate for the silence that they have maintained with regard to the material of which it was composed. . The cavalry of our modern armies was represent- ed in it, as it continued to be for a long time after- ward by squadrons of war-chariots manned by the tlower of the CEris.^ The rest of the mihtary caste furnished the hopUtes or troops of the line on foot, who, protected by a cuirass and shielded b^ a buckler, used the lance, the sword and the battle- axe in combat, and manoeu"STed, according to pre- scribed rules, eight or ten men deep. Then, there was the light infantry, whose duty it was to recon- noitre and clear the roads, to skirmish in the ad- vanced guard, and to cover, with its cloud of archers and slingers, the wings of the army and the inter- vals between the chariots. It probably recruited among the auxiliary tribes on the frontiers, and fi'om the Ethopian allies its numerous soldicis * The numbGr of these chariot teams, each consistine: cf two horses at least, indicates clearly the importance and the degree of development which the business of raising and training that noble race of animals had assumed in the few generations that had elapsed since theii' introduction on the borders of the Nile. IIG EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. who, anna J wifcli all the projectile weapons known at thai period, held also in reserve for hand to hand struggles that terrible battle scythe or sickle, the murderous use of which has been perpetuated to this day in Africa, among the Abyssinians and the GaUas, and in Asia, among the Ghoorkas of the Himalayas and of the Western Ghauts. All these troops performed their evolutions to the sound of the trumpet and the di'um, under the banners of their respective chiefs ; but above all these special and subordmate symbols, there rose at the extremity of a tall and strong stall*, the en- sign of the Empire, all glittering with the splendor of pure and massive gold. It consisted of a ram's head sarmoaated with the solar disk, the double symbol of Ammon-Ka leading his worshippers against the hostile races. Borne along on a mag- nificent chariot, which had to be kept close to that of the sovereign, under all circumstances, this ven- erated emblem, indicated to the gaze of all, — on the march, and in actual battle, — the centre of the army and the presence of its leader, — and when in caiBp, the position of the royal pavihon. V. From the borders of the Nile to those of the Ti- gris, Rameses could follow routes u^^on which near- ly all his predecessors, dating fi'om Thothmes I., had left some land-nidrks. Since the opulent Pentapo- lis of the Jordan had sunk in the bituminous gulf of the Dead Sea, the most compact centres of per- manent population, existing between Egypt and upper Asia, were the maritime estabhshments which the Ciisliites of Canaan, driven from the shores of the Erythrean gulfs by convulsions of the soil, had founded upon the Syrian coast ; the fortified cities which the Khetas had built between the Orontes and the Euphi'ates, and, lastly. Babel in the land of Sliinar, where a celebrated temple of the Sun and a great navigable river, attracted caravans and flo- tillas of pilgrims and traders from all directions. To tlie eastward of the Nabarain country — JN^aha- raina-Kah on the Ipsamboul inscriptions, mean- ing Mesopotamia, — rise the mountainous regions, that, at a later period, were to form the nu- cleus of the emphes of Semhamis and Cyrus. Here, for Rameses, the realm of the unknown began, and an entii-e new world opened before him, in which he, undoubtedly, had no other guide than the 118 EGITT 3300 YE.UIS AGO. instinctive Iritred against the men of tlio North- east that animated his armj, and the fngitivo cur- rents of the tribes and races with which he camo into collision as he passed on. Nevertheless, one may mfer from the narrationa on this subject Avhich the ancients have left to us, separating them from the exaggerations credited by Diodorus, that the march of the Egyptian con- queror, at first directed eastward, touched, perhaps, on the Hindoo Koosh and Bactrian country, and then diverging toward the north, turned back again by a long elliptical curve and debouched upon the European siiores of the Propontis. Thus, liameses 11. after having left the imprint of his feet upon the rocks of Cape Guardafui, could, after an interval of some years, cause images of himself to be graven on the mythical terraces of the Indian Parnassus, and appear in the semblance of a fearfid and un- known god to the savages inhabiting the shores of the Thracian Bosphorus. We must run down along the Hsts of chronology more than ten centu- ries in order to again find in the son of Philip so indefatigable a promoter of the mixture of races, and the diffusion of ideas. When Germanicus, one of the latest heroes of antique society in its decline, for whom Rome wept bitterly and whom Tacitus extolled, repaued to the EQITT 3300 fEAP.S AGO. 12] East wliore a premature death awaited liim, he vis* ited the vast remains of Thebes in sober medita- tion, and, having asked one of the priests then pre- sent, a hving rehc in the midst of so many ruins, the meaning of the sacred characters that covered the edifices still standing, the latter replied while ho interpreted the inscriptions, that the King Ba- rneses, at the head of an armj of 700,000 men, had subjugated Libya and Ethiopia, the country of the Medes and Persians, Bactria and Scythia ; that he had brought under the yoke of his empire, the countries inhabited by the SjTians and the Arme- nians, Cappadocia, which is near to them, and all hither Asia from the Sea of Bithynia to that of Ly- cia."^. . . YL Herodotus, who preceded Germanicus by more than 450 years on the borders of the Nile, and Ta- citus by at least five centuries in history, hkewise reports, in accordance with the statement of the priests, that Sesostris (Kameses II.), after the sub- * See the Annals of Tacitus, Book IL, cliap. Ix. 122 EGYrT 3300 years ago. jugation of Eciiiopia, marched with a numerous army to the couquest of Asia, and subdued all the nations he encountered on the way, taking care, aftei each victory, to erect landmarks upon which inscriptions narrated the details of the combat, the name of his comitry and his own Tiius traversing the continent, he passed from Asia into Europe, and subdued the Thracians and Scyth- ians ; " but I do not think," adds the historian, " that he penetrated any farther in that direction, for, although we find among the last named nations the trophies that he set up, none are discovered be- yond their confines." " Retracing his steps, he halted on the banks of the Phasis ; but I do not make out clcarl}^ whether it was voluntarily that he left a part of his army there to colonize the country ; or whether detach- ments of his soldiers, fatigued and exhausted by their long marches, settled there in spite of him " However that may be, it appears positive that the Oolchians are of Egyptian origin. I suspected this fact ; others had mentioned it to me, and I wished to make certain of it for myself. I can affirm tliat the tv/o nations have retained remembrances of each other, which are much more vivil, however, among the Colchians than among the Egyptiaiis, ) 5 ' 1 ^ I ■< Bass-Relief of Sesostiis near Sardis, from a photograph. i J EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 125 • . . These nations both have a black skin and woolly hair . . . practise circumcision ; live in the same manner ; cultivate and work flax in the same style ; in fine, speak the same language.'' Herodotus adds that most of the monuments which Sesostris had caused to be set up in commemora- tion of his victories had already ceased to exist, in Lis day ; but that he had, with his own eyes, seen as many as three, — which have been found in our time, at the places pointed out ; one in Syrian Palestine and the other two in Ionia, on the roads from Ephesus to Phoc^a and from Smyrna to Sardis. " Each one of these, carved in relief on a wall of rock, represents a warrior five cubits in height, holding a.javelin in his right hand, and in his left a bow. The rest of his equipment is equally Egyptian and Ethiopian. On his breast, he bears an inscription in sacred characters, to this purport : " It is I who have conquered this country by tJie strength of riiy army* Strabo, whose birth in Asia Minor and long journeys in the East gave him the opportunity to verify or correct with his oavq eyesight the asser- tions of ilie father of history, declares that the routes followed by Kameses-Sesostris had been dc^tr * Herodotus. Book H., chaps. 102, 103, 104, 105. 126 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. ted with commemorative columns, inscriptions, baa- reliefs and temples."^ The great historical pages of Ipsamboiil, Lnxor and Karnak confirm in most of their details, witli- out invalidating any, the preceding attestations of the two great historians of Greece and Rome, anm the bulk of his army. But I must first give notice that we are not as yet able to exactly determine the locality of the oc- currence. The tribes of Mesopotamia figure with those of Syria in the confederation commanded by the Prince of Kheta ; the city of Atesh, near which 134 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. the fight took place, was the strongest post in the control of those tribes ; the Egyptian armies moved via the north of Syria to reach the country in ques- tion, and the city was washed by a river called the Aran t a. This name naturally recalls that of the Orontes, the only river of importance in Syria ; yet this is all that we can say, at present, with regard to the position of a place that underwent several sieges, beheld bloody battles fought under its walls, and seems to have been the culminating point of the earliest struggles made, in those primitive times, for the mastery of the world." *' Such are the facts that stand forth from the story of the campaign as it is found carved at Ib- samboul and in the Ilameseum. " In the fifth year of his reign, on the ninth day of the eleventh month, (Epiphi,) Eameses was in Asia with his army, marching against the insurgent tribes commanded by the prmce of Xheta. The king was advancing to the southward of the city, but he lacked information concerning the p^s>ition of the hostile army, when some Bedouins came in to offer theii' services, and told him that the prince of Kheta, intimidated by the Egyptian advance, had retired toward the south, in the direction of the Khirab countiy. But these rovers were emissaries of the foe, specially entnisted with the task of mis- leading the Egyptians by their false reports. The EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 135 coufedorates had really massed tlieir forces secretly to the northward of Atesb. Rameses, thus de- ceived, moved to the northwestward of that city, and drew near to the enemy. At this juncture, his scouts brought in to him two other Kheta spies, who, after being severely bastinadoed, confessed that they had been sent to examine the position of the Egyp- tian army, and that all the confederate forces were concentrated behind the city of Atesh watching the movements of the Pharaoh for an oj^portunity to attack him at advantage. " E-ameses calls his generals together ; repri- mands them sternly for their lack of vigilance, and informs them that the Prince of the Khetas, use- lessly pursued toward the south, by the Egyptian army, is there under the walls of Atesh ready to precipitate himself upon them. The generals ac- knowledge their delinquency, and that of the leaders of the scouts, who had obtained no information concerning the enemy's movements. An officer is then despatched in hot haste, to the main body of the army which is pursuing its march to the south- ward, thus uncovering the position of the king more and more. " While this council of war is being held, the Prmce of Kheta causes his troops to advance rap- idly to the southward of Atesh, and long before the 136 EGYTT 3300 YEi\JlS AGO. Egyptian army has time to retrace its steps, tlie lit- tle band of followers and attendants wlio accom- pany the king is dispersed, and Rameses finds him seK surrounded by the hostile chariots."* It is into the midst of this critical phase of lUo action that what remains of the poem of Penta-iir transports us. The papyrus, worn and rent in man} places, as it is, exhibits many a gap ; and we confess, with all humility, that we have endeavored to supply some of its deficiencies by the lielj) of the notes that ChampoUion has left, in reference to the same subject.! YIII. EXTRACTS FROM THE SALLIER TATYRUS. The prince of Kheta came with his archers and his horsemen well armed ; every chariot bore three men. They had gathered together the swiftest warriors of those base Khetas, carefuUy armed .... and had placed themselves in ambush to * See the Vicomte Em. de Rouge's Memoir on the Cam- paigns of Sesostris, Revue Conlemporaine, AugTist, 1856. f Tiie reader will recognize these fragments by the mark which we have placed before and after them. EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 137 the northwest of the city of Atesh. They attacked the soldiers of the king when the sun, god of the two horizons, was at the middle of his course : the latter were on the march, and were not expecting an attack. The archers and the horsemen of his Majesty fell back before the enemy, who was master of Atesh on the left bank of the Aranta Then his Majesty, strong and sound in constitution, rising like the god Month, put on the panoply of battle : arrayed in his weapoa.s he was hke unto Baal in his hour. The mighty coursers of his Majesty (strerujth in Tlicbak was their name) came forth from the grand stables of the Sun, the lord of justice, Kameses Mei Amoun.^ The king, rushmg forth in his chariot, plunged into the ranks of the despicable Kheta : he was alone, no other near him. This onset his Majesty made in sight of his whole retinue. He found him- self surrounded on all sides by two thousand five hundi*ed swift chariots, manned by the bravest war- riors of the pitiful Kheta and his numerous allies : Aradus^ Ifasu^ Patasa^ Kashkash^ CElon^ Gazwor tan^ Khu'iibj Alclay\ Atesh and Raka. Each of * The Lonvre Museum (Historical Hall, case G) possesses a goldou ring of singular shape, representing, on its collet, two tiny horses in relief. It may be that in them we behold a souvenir of the two steeds of Rameses II., who consecrated them to the Sun on his first return from Egypt. 138 EGYTT 3300 YEAES AGO. tLeii^ chariots bore tliree men .... and the king had witli him neither his princes, nor his gen- erals, nor the captains of the archers or of the chariots. And this is what his Majesty of the sound and strong hfe said : " What, then, is the intent of my father Am- mon? Is it a father who would deny his son? Or have I trusted to my own thoughts ? Have I not walked according to thy word ? Has not thy mouth guided my goings forth, and thy counsels have they not directed me ?" . . . " Have I not dedicated to thee magnificent festi- vals in great number, and have I not filled thy house with my booty ? There is building to thee a dweUing for myriads of years. . . . The whole world is gathering together to dedicate its offerings to thee. I have enriched thy domain ; I have sac- rificed to thee thirty thousand oxen, with all the scent-bearing herbs and choicest perfumes. , . • I have built for thee upon the sand, temples of blocks of stone; and bringing obelisks from Elo- phantina, I have reared eternal shafts in thy honor. For thee, the great ships toss upon the deep ; they bear to thee the tribute of the nations. Who will say that hke things have been done at any other time ? Ignominy to him who resists thy designs ; fcKcity V. ' ^ . , , -1 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 1:1:1 to Lim who understands thee, oh, Ammon ! I in- voke thee, oh, mj father ! I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and I am alone, before thee ; no one is with me. Mj archers and my liorsemen deserted me when I called aloud to them : not one among them hearkened to me when I cried to them for help. But I "prefer Ammon to thou- sands of archers, to millions of horsemen and to myriads of young men arrayed in phalanx. The wiles of men are as naught ; Ammon will prevail ovei them. Oh Sun ! have I not obeyed the order of thy hps, and thy counsels have they not guided me ? Have I not given glory to thee, to the ends of the Earth ?" Those words resounded in Hermonthis ; Phra comes to him who calls upon him ; he stretches forth his liand to him. Bejoice and be glad ... he flies to thee, he flies to thee . . . Eameses Mei- Amoun ! He says to thee, " Behold, I am near thee ; I am thy father, the Sun ; my hand is with thee, and I am more, for thee, than millions of men ar- rayed together. It is I who am the lord of troops and armies, lo^ing courage ; I have found thy heart firm in valor, and my heart exults thereat." When my master of the horse saw that I re- mained surrounded by so many chariots, he fal- tered, and his heart gave way for fear ; a mighty 142 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. terror seized on all his limbs. He said, tlien, to liis Majesty : " Mj good master, generous King, sole protector of Egypt in the day of battle, we are tar- rying alone in the midst of the foe ; halt in thy course and let us save the breath of our lives. What can we do, oh, Eameses Meiamoun 1 my good master ?" And thus did his Majesty reply to his master of the horse : " Have courage ! strengthen thy heart, oli my comrade ! I will plunge into theu' midst hke the hawk from on high darting down upon his foe; hurled to the ground and slain, they shall roU in the dust. What does thy heart then think of these Aanius f Ammon .... would not be a god, did he not make glorious my countenance in the pres- ence of their countless legions." The king pierced his way into the army of these vile Khetas ; six times did he enter into their midst. . . . . " I pursued them like Baal, in the hour of his might, and 1 slew them so that none could escape. "I threw myself upon them, like unto the god Month ; in a moment's space, my hand mowed them down. I slaughtered among them : I killed in their midst, and I was alone to shout aloud, there was no second word, not one of them hfted EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 113 up liis voice. SutekL, tlie great warrior-Baai, was in all liis members. . . . Each one of all mj ene- mies felt his hand without strength against mine ; they could no longer hold the bow or the spear. The king, rallying around him the generals and the horsemen of his retinue, said to them : " Your comrades have not satisfied my heart ; is there one among them who has deserved well of my couutry ? If your lord had not arisen in his might, all of ye had been lost. Each day .... I transmit to the sons the honors of their fathers, and when some misfortune falls upon Egypt, ye abandon your duty I administer justice every day, hearkening to every complaint that comes to me. And ye ! what have ye accomplished oh, my war- riors? Ye have remained in your tents and in your fortified camps, and ye gave no counsel to my army. I recommended to each of ye at his post, to take note of the day and the hour of the battle, and behold, one and all, ye have done ill ; not one of you arose to aid me with his hand I govern Egy|:>t like my father, the Sun, and there was not found one to take heed . . . and to fore- warn the land of Egypt. While, on this fortunate day, sacrifices are oifered up in Thebais, in the city of Ammon, great is the fault committed by my soldiers and mj^ horsemen. It is greater than can 114 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. be told, for if I have made manifest mj valor neither the archers nor the horsemen came with me. The whole world has made way to the efforts of my ar n ; and I was alone, and no other one was with me. That is what, of truth, I have done in the sight of my army." When the archers and the horsemen came in, one after the other, from their camps toward the evening hour, they found the whole region in which they were marching covered with dead bodies bathed in their blood — all good warriors of I\heta, valorous champions of their prince. When day- light illuminated the land of Atesh, the foot could not find place, so numerous were the dead. Then, the army went up to glorify the names of the king : " Good and mighty man of war, with the heart that cannot be shaken, thou dost the work of thine archers and of thy mounted men ! Son of the god Toum, fashioned from his own substance, thou hast wiped out the land of Kheta with thy victorious falchion! It is thou, oh good warrior! who art the lord of ar xiies. There is no king like to thee who does battle for his soldiers on the day of conflict. It is thou, oh king of the great lieart ! who art the foremost in the strife ; it is thou who art the greatest of the brave, before thine army, and in the presence of the whole world risen up agaius* EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. liS thes. It is thou who dost reign over Egypt and chastise the barbarian races The loins of the land ol Kheta are thine forever." IX. " However, on the next day, so soon as it was daylight on the Earth, Eameses caused the battle to be joined afi-esh, and rushed into the combat hke a bull that dashes among the geese The warriors, in their turn, Avent into the fight hke the hawk darting upon his prey And the king hurled flames into the faces of his foes, like the Sun, when he appears in the morning, darting his fires on the wicked The great lion that walked beside his coursers, fought with him ; rage filled aU his members, and whoever ap- proached him was overthrown. The king seized upon them or slew them, so that not one could es- cape. Hewn to pieces in front of his horses, their dead bodies, extended on the ground, formed but a single heap of bleeding remains."^ One cu-cumstance which has fi-equcntly repeated itself in scenes of warfare, rendered the disaster * See the Vicomte de Rouge at the passage cited. 14G EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. til at befell tlie army of the confederates still more decisive. With a river close behind them, they seem to have had for their line of retreat nothing but the bridge leading to the city which they had wished to defend. Toward it the main struggle concentrated ; Mei-Amoun, guided by his terrible military instinct, doing his utmost to force his way as far as that bridge, and Khetasar, his antagonist, fighting desperately to cover its approaches. [ There, the forests of spears, the clouds of ar- rows, the shields and the chariots crossed and re- crossed each other, and met in the deadly shock of battle with such re-echoing uproar that the Earth trembled to its depths, as though Apophis, the great serpent, had broken away from the chains with which the gods have fastened him to the foundations of the world."^ There vahantly fought, and not ingloriously fell, around the chief commander of the Khetas, his most faithful warriors, such as Grabatiisa his squire, and Khiraj)sar, his hbrarian or rhapsodist /f * Xu the Egyptian mythology, Apophis, the serpent, is the great enemy of the Sun ; in several hypogees he is rep- rcGcnted as struggling against the gods of the Amenti, "who B'.-/;c,eed in capturing and chaining him. See Champolliou'a Letiersfrom i^gypt. t Writer of Books, says the test. 1 ■> •> EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 149 and his most tried lieutenants, such as Rabsuna, cliief of the arcliers, and Tarekennas, general of the cavalry. But, when Rameses the II. had hewn a broad and bloody passage for himself to the banks of the river over the bodies of these champions of Asia, mangled and yet palpitating beneath the wheels of his chariot, the defeat of the confederated army, now cleft in twain and without any common rally- ing-point, degenerated into a fi'ightful rout, in which death in every form struck down the fugitives. Thou- sands of men fell under the sword, some to rise no more and others to sui'vive themselves, mutilated as they were for life, by the terrible hooked chariot- scythe. And if the river spared a few wlio, follow- ing Masraim, tlie brotlier of tlieir king, succeeded in swiinming across, it swallowed up a far greater number and, especially noted among them, "the chieftain of the land of Tonira, and the prince of the bad I'ace of the Khirabs, who was separated from his warriors wliile flying before king in the di- rection of the ivatery From the foot of the walls to w^hich he had been pushed back step by step, all the time fighting, Khetasar, beholding the tremendous disaster that his gallantry liad been unable to avert, resolutely took the only course that presented itself to him to 150 EGITT 3300 YEAIiS AGO. save his capital from the consequences of an assault that had now become unavoidable.] He turned with his hands extended toward the smihng sun He sent forth to invoke the great name of his Majesty : " It is thou who art the Sun, the god of the two horizons ! It is thou who art SouttA'/i^ the gi-eat conqueror, the son of heaven ; Baal is in all thy members. Terror is in the land of Kheta, in such wise that thy feet are on her reins forever." Announcement was made that a messenger had presented himself bearing a writing addi^essed to the great names of Majesty. . . , May this wri- ting satisfy the heart of the god Sun, the mighty Bull, loving justice ; the supreme King who him- self directs his soldiers ; the sword of terror ; the rampart of his army on the day of battle : the King of Upper and of Lower Egypt, with the m ighty courage and the boundless ardor ; the Sun, lord of justice, the chosen one of the god Phra, the son of the Sun Eameses Mei-Amoun."^ The slave says, addressing his Majesty : " ^ly good master, son of the Sun, since Ammon has ta- ken thee from out his loins and has given thee all the countries united together, that Egypt and the * This series of titles constitutes the ofQcial protocol oi King Rameses IL EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 151 people of Ivlieta may be slaves beneath tliy feet ; riira has granted to thee, dommion over them. Thou canst slaughter thy slaves ; they are in thy power ; not one of them will contend against thee. Thou earnest yesterday, and thou hast slain an in- finite number of them ; thou comest to-day, — do not continue the slaughter. . . . "We are prostrate on the ground, ready to obey thy orders : oh va- liant king ! honor to the race of -warriors ! grant to us the breath of Hfe." .... Then his Majesty caused the chief leaders of the army to come, and gathered them together that taey might hear the message of the great Prince of Kheta .... so as to write an answer. They said to his Majesty : " He hath done well, he throws his heart before the supreme king, his lord ; he makes no conditions. . . . He does hom- age to thee to appease thy wrath." [The king hearkened to their word and gave the vanquished his assurance of pardon and clemency ; then, addressing himself to the (Eris assembled in a throng around him, he added : *' Give yourselves up to rejoicing, oh my com- rades ; let it ascend to heaven ! " We have triumphed over the strangers by our might ; we have fallen upon them hke hons and we have pursued them hke hawks. We have crossed 152 EGYTT 3300 YEAEB AGO. tlieir rivers, burned tlieir fortified places, anniliilated tlieir guilty souls. The terror of my name has ho- vered over them and their hearts have been filled with it. " Ilejoice, then, oh my warriors ! " I am for the land of Kemi what the God Month has been. I have done battle with all the parts of the earth. Ammon-Pta has been at my right and at my left (in the battles ;) his mind has inspired my own and has prepared the downfall of my en- emies. Ammon-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world low beneath my feet, and I am on the throne forever."] Thereupon, Eameses, directing his march south- ward, returned peaceably to Egypt with his princes and his army, leaving all the nation terrified at his exploits, and the princes prostrating themselves before him, doing homage to his countenance. "His Majesty arrived in the city of Eameses Mei-Amoun,^ the gnat image of Fhra, and rested between his royal double pylons with a serene ex- istence, like the Sun in his double abode in the heavens." * Erected Lj the Asiatic captives and the Hebrews be- tween the present sites of Heliopolis and Suez on the fresh water canal which once ran, and, after an interval of 3000 years, is again to run from the Nile to tlie Eed Sea. EGYPT 3300 YEAliS AGO. l^'S X. When, some time after that period, Eameses led back ids army to bis country, laden witli the spoils of the East, and di'agging numberless captives in its traiu ; when, having passed through the cities of the Delta and the Heptanomis, more as a divin- ity than as a simple mortal, he came to the great temple of Thebes, to make in the presence of ail Egypt, the emphatic recital of winch we have just given the substance ; and then, in enumerating, in grand outhnes, the palpable results of his con- quests ; the roving tribes of the North hurled back and restrained within then* native steppes, by the sword or by the faith of treaties ; the hontieis of the Empire pushed beyond the Taiu'us and the Tigris and covered by mhitary colonies which, from the Euxine to the Ocean, guaranteed the hdehty of nations that were vassals or in tutelage, — he termi- nated, at last, with " the tributes imposed, their weight in gold and silver ; the number of weapons and horses ; the quantities of ivory and of incense for the temples ; the gi'ain and other products which each subjugated country was to furnish, and the aggregate of which equalled all the imposts that the arms of the Parthians or Boman power 154 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. have raised since tlien !"* — Assuredly, it was a fine day in the life of that man and of his people, what- ever may have been the price that one and the other had paid for it I No doubt that in the thinned ranks of the victors many a vacant place summoned the tears of majiy a family, for fathers, sons and husbands who had remained on the roads they had traversed. If we are to beheve testimony quite unanimous,t Rame- ses himself, as he first re-appeared upon his natal soil, but narrowly escaped the plottings of a broth- er armed against his life, and had to inflict condign punishment upon his own flesh and blood. But the broodings of domestic misfortune and private sorrow were lost in the intoxication of triumph and the glory shared by all ; for it is the peculiar qual- ity of great events to draw closer the bonds of fel- lowship that imite communities, in rejoicing as in grief, and to cause generations to sympathize with one another athwart the lapse of time. More than three thousand years have gone since these events, and yet we, who know how much each of its tardy steps of progress cost humanity ; we who have it in our power to connect with the labors of Rameses and of his companions their ultimate * Tacitus : Annals, Book II. cL. 60 and 61. f Herodotus, Diodorus, Manetho. EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 155 resultSj wbicli in their time no one could even con- jecture beforehand, — with their complete victories over the ro\Tng tribes, the whole future of the west- ern world based upon agriculture and the rearing of permanent cities ; — with their gigantic journej- ings, the enlargement of general views with regard to the world, and the drawing nearer together of a part of the long dispersed fiagments of human tradition ; — well, we confess aloud that, far from being tempted to smile at the ingenuous emphasis with which those men of the antique time express themselves and their infatuated dehght in the in- dulgence of their own pride, we cannot remain coldly unsympathetic with the invocation of the day that we have mentioned, however deeply hid- den it may be in the strata of history ; and we feel irresistibly drawn to applaud the words of the high priest of Thebes responding to Mei-Amoun in the name of his God ; ['' May thy return be joyous I " Thou hast pursued, and dispersed the barbari- ans ; thou hast broken their bows and triumphed over their leaders. The world has seen thee, at my command, pierce the heart of the accursed na- tions, and make fi'ee the breath of those who fol- lowed thee under my sacred ensigns; and the 156 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. world has stood still before thee! . . . Mj mouth doth praise thee !"] " Thus," says the bard Penta-iir, in conclusion, " Thus Barneses, child of the Son, and friend of Amnion, seated himself upon his throne, like the Sun, forever, all the nations of the Earth having been subdued by him." At this point historical truth is found to disagree with the lyrical enthusiasm of the poet, for, although the achievement of Rameses, the battle of Atesh and the occupation of that city terminated the campaign, they did not put an end to the war. Numerous monuments offer us the pictures of many other expeditions by Kameses, and long addi- tional Hsts of tribes brought under subjection by his arms. In his campaign of the year XL, he re- turned to attack and capture by storm several for- tresses in the land of Canaan, and among them, Ascalon, which had again fallen into the hands of the rebels. It is in this locality (Askaluna) a frontier town, and not at Pelusium, that we should be tempted to place the scene of the treason of which Herodotus has left us the legendary recital. In fine, it is only in the twenty-first year of his reign that Hameses, amid the pageantries of a pan- egyric celebrated at Thebes in honor of Ammon, sees a solemn embassy come in from the Prince of EOYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 157 tlie Khetas, soliciting a definitive treaty of peace from the Pharaoh. Khetasar then acknowledged himself the vassal and tributary of Barneses, and bound himself to furnish an auxiharj contingent whenever required. This treaty, put under the pro- tection of the national gods of each contracting party, was carved upon a memorial pillar, and exhibited to the gaze of all, in the temple of Am- mon. Keciprocal matrimonial alliances cemented it, and Rameses admitted the eldest daughter of Khetasar to his harem with the rank of one hirf wives. " This peace bore lasting and proUfic fi'uit for Egypt, where, for a very long time, engraved in- scriptions recalled the fact that the tribes of Khe- ta and of the borders of the Nile, a thing unheard of until then,* had but one heart to serve Rameses Mji-Amoun." * See the Vicomtc Em. de Rough's previously cited Me- ir.oir. THE MONUMENTS OF RAMESES THE GREAT. The Testimony of Herodotus, of Diodorus, and of the Bible. — Memphis and Thebes. — the Great Days of Royalty. — An Arte- sian Well in the time of Rameses. — The Land of Cush. — The Spears of Ipsamboul, — The old Age of Rameses. — Skeletoiia of Oxen and Skeletons of Kings. — Darius and the Statuo cf Rameses. L Although some allowance must be made for the official hyperboles of tlie great bard Penta-ur^ tJw friend of the master of the world , it remains a con- firmed fact in history that the world had never un- til then beheld power so vast as that possessed by Rameses on his triumphal return from his great expedition, and that for many generations afterward it Avas not to witness such another. None of Mei-Amoun's successors attained the distant boundaries that he had set to his dominion, and none of them impressed upon the soil of Egypt 162 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. itself such deeply marked or such multipHed traces of their passage. In reference to this subject, Diodorus relates that " on returning from his conquests, Sesostris re-en- tored the regions subject to his swaj with unaccus- tomed pomp, bringing in his train a numberless throng of captives, along with immense booty of priceless value, a share of which he pressed upon all the temples of Egypt. That country was also in- debted to him for the importation of many useful inventions. " Having given up war, he furloughed his army, compensating its services the while, with donations of land ; but his passion for renown allowing him no rest, he devoted himself to numerous and magnifi- cent undertaldngs, intended at once to glorify liis own name, and to defend, embelhsh and fertilize the soil of his country. First, he caused to be built in each city a temple in honor of the patron deity of the place. In many a locality he had causeways and embankments constructed to shield the dwell- ings from the annual inundation ; and, in many others, he dug canals, one of which was intended to open communication between Memphis and the Red Sea. . ..." In order to check the incursions of the predatory Arabs, he moreover enclosed the Isth- EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 103 mus from Pelnsinm to On (or Ileliopolis) with a wall of one thousand five hundred stadii in extent. In the temple of the god worshipped at Thebes, ha consecrated a vessel of cedar wood two hnndi'ed and eighty cubits long, and plated it with gold on the outfcide and with silver Avithin. He had two obehsks of very hard stone erected in front of the same temple, and thereon caused to be engraved the exact tabular statistics of his armies, his reve- nues, the nations that he had vanquished and the tribute that he had derived from them. Within the precincts of the temple of Hephaestus,^ at Memphis, he placed his own statue and that of his wife, each thirty cubits in height and hewn fi'om one solid block. The most difficult of all these works were executed by the captives whom he had brought from foreign regions, and he took care that the lapidary inscriptions should remind the reader that no Egyptian had a hand in ihem,''\ II. These details, borrowed from many sources, no doubt, by the historian of Stagp-a, agree with those * The Greek form of the Egyptian Phtah. f Diodoriis, Book I., chap. Ivi. and Ikii. 161 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. that Herodotus collected four centuries earlier fi'om the lips of the priests at Memphis, Thebes and HeHopohs, tJiose of the latter city being considered tJie best informed of cdl in tlie history of their country.^ Of the numerous monuments of Rameses II. some, such as the Isthmus wall, and the fortihed cities which he had built bj the tribes of Beni- Heber upon that frontier, have been swept awaj bj the breath of thirty-three centuries, or, like the terraces which formed the artificial soil of the an- cient cities along the Nile, have been covered by the miry deposits which the inundations annually heap up ; others, hke the canal uniting the Seaweed Lake, since then rediscovered in the days of our fathers,! by the very man who was for them what Rameses had been for his contemporaries, have left vestiges which science interrogates, sometimes wdth profit and always with interest ; still others, 3'et standing upon the desolate banks of the river that mirrored their pristine splendor, make the modern * Herodotii.s, Eiiterpe, c. III. f On the 30tli of December, 1793, the generiil in-chief of the Aj'my of the East, passing from Cairo to Suez, several times crossed the vestiges of the old canal with his escort of learned men. — Napoleon, in his Memoirs dictated at St. Helena. — Description of Egypt.— J. M. Lepere, in his Me- moirs on the comnmnication of the Indian OceaJi witli the Mediterranean. EGYPT 3300 YE.UIS AGO. 1G5 solitudes participate in tlie majesty of the ancient days ; and finally others again, borne awaj to the museums and public places of tlie great Western capitals, are pc^rpetual sources of study and medita- tion for thinking minds. It was above all in the two great capitals of his empire, in Memphis and in Thebes, that the monu- mental splendor of Rameses stinick the observers of antiquity. III. The first of these cities, much more exposed than its rival, to the inroads of time and the invader, ahke by its geographical situation and the material of which it was built, sleeps to-day, completely bu- ried beneath the slime of the inundations and the sands of the desert. A few vague undulations of the soil alone disturbing this double shroud, have served to indicate the site of monuments the ruins of which were still, six hundred years ago, according to the statement of one of the most judicious sons of Islam, a subject of admu'ation and astonishment for the observer. *' Notwithstanding the immense extent of Mem- iG6 EGYPT 3300 YEAliS AGO. pliis and its high antiquity," writes the Axab Ab- dallatif in the 13th centuiy of our Era, " notwith- standing the vicissitudes of the various govern- ments to whose yoke it has submitted ; whatever the attempts that different peoples have made to annihilate it, to cause even its faintest vestiges to disappear and wipe out the slightest traces of its existence by transporting to other points the stones and other materials of which it was con- structed ; by devastating its edifices and mutilating the statues that adorned them ; in fine, despite ail that the ages have superadded to so many causes of destruction, its ruitfs still present to those who contemplate them a combination of wonders that confounds the intelligence and which the most elo- quent tongue or pen might vainly attempt to de- scribe. — The more one considers it the more one feels the admiration that it inspu*es augment ; and every succeeding glance that one casts at its ruiiia is a new source of enchantment."* Memphis was especially proud of the grand tem- ple of its eponymic divinity Phtah,t whom the rela- tions of Kameses with Upper Asia, whence the wor- * Abdallatif translated into French by M. de Sacy. f Ph-i ah=^ahi, agny. The most ancient divinity of Vedic days. The northern origin of lire- worship seems to us in- disputable. EGITT 3300 YEAES AGO. 107 ship of this god had descended, had taught him to honor with especial devotion. Around this temple, where all the gods of the eighteenth dynasty seem to have been concentrated, Mei-Amoun had caused to be reared, in majestic colonnades, immense blocks of white calcareous stone in order to extract which from the quarrries of Mokattan and transport them to the other side of the Nile, thousands of captives had exliausted themselves for weary years. Moreover, in testimony of his gratitude and his piety, he had caused the monoHthic statues of his wife, his children and himseK, to be placed before the pylons of the sanctuary, in the attitude of religious contemplation. Well ! in these palaces or temples, divinities and worshi23pers are plunged in the same sleep and at this day abandon to the winds of the desert the same dust ; and a fallen column cast to a distance from its pedestal, including which it mTist formerly have measured nearl}' forty-five feet in height, still surmounts with all the thickness of its mutilated fragments the general level of the plain — last reUc of the palmy days of Memphis ! By his warlike insignia, by the deUcacy of his featm*es, by the name of Rameses engraved upon the ornaments on his breast and on the buckle of his belt, it is impossible to mistake in him the im- ago of the conqueror, the same one of whom Dio- 168 EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. dorus and Herodotus wrote, and wliom Abdallatii admired. One liiinclred and fifty leagues of navigation, ascending the windings of the Nile, over the richest soil and the most densely inhabited territory on record in all time, along a double line of towns and cities led from the city of Phtah to that of Ammon. In latitude 25° 34', the Nile, which, after entering Egypt, directs its course between the north and the northwest, suddenly doubles on itself and runs for many scores of miles toward the east-nortlieast, as though it would break its way through toward the nearest sea. In this space, the valley of the river, scooped out in a wide oval like an immense amphitheatre between its two parallel chains, pre- sents one of those sites which seem predestined by nature to receive great communities of men. This is the point at which the lines of traffic from Africa and Arabia, of the more direct routes of the Soudan by the Oases, and of the Habesh by the Nubian tablelands, converge ; it is the debouch- ing centre of the wadys that lead to the Red Soa, and which formerly guided the way to the mines oi* gold, copper and emeralds in the land of the Trog- EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. Ill lodytes : it was tliere that " No-Aynmcni was seated hetivcen the canals^ having for ramparts the loaters of waters.'' " There this instructress of the nations rested in her strength upon Ethiopia as also upon Egypt, and had the sons of Libya and those of Phut the boundless for hor champions."* There her scattered members He to-daj. V. When, coming up from the North, the travellei has reached the projecting angle of the Libyan range which crosses the Theban plain upon that side, he suddenly beholds unrolled before him one of the grandest spectacles that man can gaze upon here below. A mingled surface of earth and sand nearly as spacious as the modern area of Paris, traversed by a river the width of which at its period of lowest ebb is thrice that of the Seine at St. Cloud, and rolls along its broad undulations beneath a blazing sky, its stream studded with the shafts of columns, blocks of granite and broken scraps of walls whose * The prophet Nahum, ch. iii. , verses 8 and 9. 172 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. fallen fragments have formed hillocks there, muti- lated colossi, sphinxes and gigantic rams nearly all headless now — emblems of the Kings and gods of ancient times ! Four enormous massive groups, standing with broad spaces between them, sentinelled upon this field of ruins and holding, as though in a fasces, all these rudimentary or ornamental types of Egyp- tian architecture, seem to have been, at different epochs, the centres of the antique metropohs. Ac- coreUng to the names of the wretched modern hamlets which seek shelter in their shadow, Gour- nah and Mediuet Abou are the towns to the west of the river, going fi-om the north, and Karnak and Luxor are those to the eastward. The first of these groups contains the commemorative monu- ments erected to Rameses I. by Seti and to the lat- ter by his glorious son ; the second, which exhibits traces that go back to Thothmes III., was rebuilt on a gigantic plan by Hameses-Sickpun {haq-an) and was the residence of the Pharaohs of the twen- tieth djmasty. The principal edifices of Lui:or founded by Ho- rns {Horemheb) were finished ])y Mci-Amoun to whom, for instance, are due tlie two grajul pylons that look out upon the ISile, as also the two obel- isks mentioned by Diodorus, the smallest of which ', ,;•' .('^ •:K2 f:ii|i|!|:i,:: EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 175 now adorns the principal open square in Paris. In fine, the structures of Karnak, which contained among them the first temple of the Egyptian Em- pire, the revered sanctuary of Animon-Ra, date from the time of tlie kings who expelled the Hyc- sos. They have retained the stamp of their most reno^vned successors, and, above all, the majestic mark of Seti and of Mei-i^moun. To these general elements of the plan of Thebes must be added the indescribable levellings of nameless temples and palaces ; the canals filled up ; the granite quays undermined by the Nile, or crumbling into the sand, and the three avenues of sphinxes terminating in the pylons of Karnak, and one of which is no less than half a league in length. Then, if the reader will picture to himself the soil of a long series of artificial terraces between Gour- nah and Medinet-Abou, — between the river and the mountain, — which, in our days, are flooded by each overflow, where thousands of broken shafts of colonnades, splinters of capitals and fi^agments of monoliths, and, finally, the two colossi once so cele- brated under the name of Memnon, mark the site of the temple palace of Amenoph III., and of that Bameseum which seems to have ueen the favorite abode of Mei-Amoun. If, moreover, on the western side, one adds to this sad picture, as a fi'amework 17G EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. worthy of it, the precipitous walls of the LibjaD chain, pierced like the sides of an immense vessel with gtalleries on galleries where sleep the genera- tions who succeeded each other in No-Ammon for two thousand years, one will, even then, have but a very imperfect idea of the mighty remains of that city, as they are seen fi'om the top of the slope where the sight of them drew long continued plau- dits of surprise and admiration fi'om the French Ai'my of the East. *' Thebes," says one who was present in that ar- ray, in the monumental foho in which they have recorded their impressions, " Thebes, the foremost city of the world in the time of Homer, is still, at the present day, the most surprising. One feels as thcjugh he were in a dream while contemplating thf) immensity of its ruins, the vastness and majes- ty of its ed-fices, and the numberless remains of its ancient magnificence."* In order to move, to this degree, men whom un- paiallelod struggles, the loved study of antiquity, and the recent conquest of Italy had saturated with * Ilosiere's Description of Egypt — Ancieut Thebes. 1-1 1 ^ '•> ^'' -, -> 1 ■> ■> 1 ^ ^ fl ) / 1 ', ^ €. ' .■> djilb.'lllkiillbiil!ll>>l|i>iyi!lliiJltlllillMii!ii|i ' ■) 5 LALV Bird's Eye View of a Temple- Palace at Thebes (resioreci accoramg to tlk; moiiuraents). EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. 183 this absolute iguorance of the virtual conditions of a future far beyond tlie ken of tliat period, jirose the very sanction of the social inequahties which existed with that of all the forms with which the sombre logic of the human mind invested them in the material as well as in the moral order. The dweUings of men were, then, subjected to the same law that proclaimed the monarch son of tlte godsj and made the priesthood their inspired inter- preters. Around consecrated edifices built of im- perisliable materials, cemented with the blood and sw.oEit of whole generations of slaves, were grouped, in accordance with this law and at intervals of greater or less space marked out by cultivated fields, the luxurious yet neither very grand nor very lasting structures of the principal function- aries of the empii'e, — the brick-built workshops and stores of the merchant, — the cabin of the fellah made of clay and reeds, and the mud hovel where the sable captive- - sometimes the copper-colored or wliite one, as well, crouching on the dungheaps of the animals entrusted to his care, di'essed the bloedinc: cuts which the stick of his master had in- flicted upon his naked body and then sought in Sleep a vision of his native land and nis weeping family. Naga and Meroe, Babylon and Nineveh, the 134 . EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. primitive cities in the basin of the Oxus, the Indus and the Ganges ; at a later period, the cities of the Etruscans, in the West; much later still, those which the Toltecs and Aymaras built upon the table- lands of the ^Vndes, and the emigrants from India in the forests of Hindostan ; all the metro- pohtan marks, in fine, which men erected during their passage from tlje second to the thu'd social epoch, were const^'uctod upon this principle. Yin. In the time of Diodorus, the historical sense of this grand Egyptian period had already been lost to the Greeks, if, indeed, the latter had ever pos- sessed it. The historian of Stagira has left us a description of a monument in the metropolis of the Pharaohs, which had remained an indeciphera- ble enigma until the day when Champollion proved the identity of that monument with the Rameseum on the left banslv of the Thebes. " At the distance of ten stadii from the first tombs, where, according to tradition, the Queens of Thebes are buried, there stood," says DiodoruF- " the tomb of Osymandyas. At its entrance rose a i3jl on in marbled stone • its breadth was two pie- ,> ' ^' 5" 05? o cs 3 ?r 'cT o o o c e-t- O H I—* 5' f— '• cs '^-.A-^J^^ ^^^i EGYrT 3300 YEARS AGO. 187 hriB and its lieiglit fortj-five cubits. After Laving oassed it, one entered a square peristyle, each side of which measured four plethrse. It was not sus- tained by columns, but by animals carved in solid blocks of stone sixteen cubits in height, and carved in the ancient style. The entire ceihng, consisting of a single stone, was studded with golden stars up- on a field of azui'e. At the end of this peristyle there was a second entrance and a pylon like the former one, but adorned with variegated carvings of perfect workmanship. Beside this second portico were three statues, each chiselled from a single block of the hard and tinted stone of Syene. One, repre- senting a personage in a sitting posture, was the largest of all the statues in Egypt. The two others, placed near his knees, one on the right and the other on the left, were those of the mother and the daughter, and did not approach the first in size. This piece was not only remarkable for its dimen- sions, but it was worthy of admu-ation in regard to its artistic execution and the nature of the stone, which, notwithstanding its vastness, did not reveaJ a single crack or blemish. Upon it could be read the following inscription : I am Osymandyas, King of the Kings ; if any should tuish to know luho I am and luhtre I repose, let him suiyass one of my tcorks. There was, also, another monohthic status* re^pre- 188 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. senting tlio mother of this king separotelj. It was twenij cubits in height, with three diadems on its head to indicate that the personage commem- orated had been the daughter, wife and mother of kings. After the second pylon was discovered an- other peristyle more remarkable than the first. It was adorned with different sculptures, figuratively illustrating the war that this kmg had maintained against the revolted Bactrians. He had marched against them at the head of four hundred thousand foot and twenty thousand horsemen, after having divided his army into four bodies, commanded by the princes, his sons. " Upon the first wall of this peristyle Osymaudyas was represented besieging a fortress surrounded by a river, exposing himself to the blows of his ene- mies, and accompanied by a terrible lion which served him as an auxiliary in his combats. Among those who explain these carvings, some say that it was a real lion, tamed, fed by the king's own hand, and taught to accompany him while attacking and pursuing his enemies. Others maintain that this kinff, who was distinsfuished above all the rest for his valor and his strength, intr . ed to sound his own praises by symbolizing his qualities in the fig- ure of a lion. . . . Finallv, at the extremitv of the monument, there was, in the midst of a series oi ' > ' EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 191 apartments, the second library designated by, the inscription : The office of the so id.'' Yolnej had declared, as earlj as the beginning of the present century, with the intuition of genius, that all these details too clearly pointed to Sesos- tris to admit of any one seeing in the name given by the Greek historian anj thing but the epithetic title of that monarch. Twenty years later, Cham- pollion, applying the description of Diodorus to the ruins of the Ramescum, put together from its fragments, shattered as they ma,y be, the pretended tomb of the Osymandyas. Excepting in dimen- sions, exaggerated as ever by classic antiquity, he rediscovered every particular : the double pylons ; the court of the colossus ; the enormous fi'agments of the latter, which formerly must have measiu'ed thir- teen yards in height ; the hall of tlie caryatides ; the galleries, the colonnades giving access to the inte- rior apartments, p^nd even the hbrary with its ultra- marine blue vault studded with golden stars, and decorated with an astronomical picture. Moreover, he w^as enabled to detect in the mural paintings, a majestic concordance with the poem of Penta-ur, and to decipher in several legends dedicated to the great deity Ammon-Ea, these characteristic words 192 EGYrx 3300 years ago. " tlie Labitation of Eameses Mei-Amoui. in the Oph of Thebes."* IX. To the distant expeditions of her wai riors, to her •^omiiunications, more or less compulsory, with the odiei groups of the human race, Egypt was indebt- ed fo.' not only an accumulation of power and wealtJi, but for a more active impetus given her to- ward the arts, trade and industry. M. de Eouge, whose authority we cannot too frequently invoke in this place, has shown that a great intellectual de- velopment, a sort of hterary cycle, had been, as it wer3, the natural consequence of the glory of the arms and the extension of the power of Egypt over the world. Neither the poem nor the personahty of Penta-i^r i.: an isolated phenomenon of this epoch. Papy/i exlmmed from the tombs con- tain numerous ai:d remarkable fragments of that * The restored skeich-^& publishod by the great Egyptian Commission puts it in our power to offer our readers differ- ent views of this mor.uiriv'^nt, the finest, perhaps, of which Thebes was so proud at the period of her greatness, and one of the most dilapidated that her enclosure of ruins now con- 11 llii'i;'! I [■ I EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 195 literature wLicli was in a flourishing condition at the "court of the Pharaohs more than fifteen hun- dred years before our era. They have even pre- served for us the names of the Egyptian authors who hved in the vicinity of Rameses, or of his immedi- ate successors, and whose theological, philosophical historical, romantic or poetical compositions prop- agated and multiplied by the bureaux of calligra- phy, or, in other words, copying offices, of the pe- riod, were not without their echoes among their contemporaries, nor without influence upon the general current of the human mind. This rising movement of intelhgence upon the borders of the Kile seems to correspond in time with those achievements of a similar nature that, on the banks of the Indus and the ujiper Ganges, distinguished the heroic a^jje of the Arvaii tribes that used the Sanscrit tongue. From that time forth, anterior Asia also undoubtedly had her writers and her art- ists. But Egyptian domination ruled in this region during too long a lapse of centuries not to leave the imprint of the conquerors deeply stamped upon its matmers, institutions, and reUgious notions. Thus, tlie stylo of the most ancient cuneiform inscriptions difiers but httle from that of the carved hiero- glyphics and the papyri of the Egj^Dtians. Still more, a stele found among the ruins of a Theban 19G EG ITT 3300 YE.VES AGO. temple, a A'critable ex voto of those remote t'mes, 6x].ubits to us a sovereign from bevoncl the Tigris, the father-m-law and vassal of a Pharaoh of the twentieth dynasty sending a solemn embassy to his son-in-law to obtain the temporary cession or the loan of an Egyptian idol of great repute in order that it might exorcise one of his daughters who was possessed of an evil spirit. " Four centuries of intercourse in peace and ^t^c had multiplied the intimate relations between the Egyptians and the Asiatic nation. The former made journeys to Mesopotamia : these were officers sent by the prince to govern the provmces, to su- perintend the stations estabhshed and command the garrisons posted in the fortified places. The Asiatic came to Egypt, far as it was, either to con- sult the Egyptian physicians whose learning was already famous, — the wizards, probably, who con- tended with Moses, — or to carry on trade. The metal cups found in the ruins of Assyria are cov- ered with Egyptian emblems, and the Kings of Tyre wore a diadem patterned after the psclient of the Pharaohs. " We also discover the influence of the literary forms usual in Egypt among a people whose first steps excite a hvely interest everywhere. The Bible shows us, at tliis epoch, the sons of Jacob, of 1 ) > > 1 1 < d d o 1— ' £1. d P TO SO ?r 5" cr? ■-! o \\ y'M\\.}kmm\\\^kh EOYrr 3300 years ago. 199 whom Divine protection liad made a new nation, exliausting their strength in constructing in the Delta a city to which the holy book gives the name of Barneses. " Frequently mentioned in our pap3Ti, the place there bears the name of Kameses Mei-Amoun, and the scroll-boxes (even a statue) of the gi'eat con- queror have been f<.)und among its ruins. Rame- ses II,, then, was the persecutor of the Israehte family whose increasing number became a subject of alarm for his policy. This king could not ban- ish the remembrance that, upon several occasions, the wandering tribes of Asia, filling up lower Egypt by their incursions, had driven out the Pharaohs. " It war Ihen that Moses, having been rescued by the daughter of the sovereign, was reared in the palace and instructed in all the lore of Egypt. The concordance of the periods of time, and the minutire of the narrative do not leave room to attri- bute these wants to any other Pharaoh. Hame- ses is the only one who by his reign of sixty-eight years presents a sufficient lapse of time for the long withdrawal of Moses to the deserts of Arabia. The book of Exodns informs us, in fact, that the king whose anger Mosos had aroused died after a very long time, and that then only did the prophet venture to return to Egypt 200 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. " Moses, therefore, was reared in a country which had earned art and industry to a very high pitch, and at a moment when its hterature shone with more than usual brilhance. It is easy to recognize in the Egyptian texts, the pecuHar turn of verses and the parallehsm of the ideas or of the expres- sions which form the special character of Hebrew poesy. The earliest sacred writers even have di- rectly borrowed fi'om the priestly annalists certain expressions whose energy and beauty have long been admired, and it is no mean glory for the poet Penta-our and for the other men of letters assem- bled at the court of Rameses Mei-Amoun to have had a considerable share in the literary education of the Hebrew legislator."* X. Before going farther we should point out the fact that the cruel policy practised by Rameses toward the Hebrews, was not exclusively his own. It had been that of all his predecessors. A very curious painting found at Thebes, upon the waUs of a burial chapel attributed to Thothmes III., shows Viscount E. dc Rouge in tlie paper already cited. 1 •> > ■> 1 SuYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 203 US prisoners of war emplojed in kneading clay, moulding bricks and building the walls of a temple to Ammon under the surveillance of Egyptian superintendents or overseers armed with h<^,avy staves. The inscription informs us that these prisoners at hard labor ^ " are captives taken by His Holiness to work upon the temple of his father Ammon." When copied by the engraver's art, does not this scene look hke an illustration of the fol- owing passage in Exodus : ch. i. y. xiii. and xiv. " And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor :" " And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all man- ner of service in the field : all their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigor." History can bring to the support of the Biblical text still more formal testimony than the preceding. There are legible upon the back of a hieratic papy- rus which, unfortunately, has been very much mu- tilated, but which may be referred to the nineteenth dynasty, these characteristic lines : " That for twelve years, these men, entrusted with the making of bricks, be kept and closely watched in the work- shops, so as to see that they deliver exactly the number of bricks that they are ordered to make, without 7'est or cessation r (A papyrus of the Anas- tasi Collection No. 3, page S> 201 ECJyPT 3300 YEAES AGO. TLis working-up of tlio captive anJ the slave pushed to its farthest hmits, i.e. mutilation and death, ^'as the law q/' nations of a historic age, which did not cease even witli the most civilized countries until after the advent and triumph of Christianity : that law of nations, of which, long after the time of Hameses, the Assyrian monarchs, the Dorian Re- publics of Greece and the Roman patriciate, were to make many another ferocious application, and wlucli, even while we write, stiU entangles, with its long-surviving roots, the eastern half of modern Europe, and all the countries yet under the yoke ol the late-comers of wandeiing barbarism. XL At Thebes, as in all the great cities of the valley of the Kile, the sacred edifices enclosed within their limits between the pronaos and the'feauctuary of the gods, a spacious hall which, owing to the numerous columns supporting its massive ceiling of carved and tinted granite, received the title of hypihstyle from the Greeks. The one that Seti I. caused to be built in the temple of Karnak is celebrated among 11 111 J r!5^^^^^ JGYFI 3 300 TEAKS AGO. 207 tliem all for its dimensions — one hundred yards by fiity — and its hundred and thirty-four columns still standing, a dozen of which sustain the central part of the ceiling, at the height of seventy feet from the soil, upon capitals of twenty yards in circumference. The dimensions of these halls, even in the absence of other indications, would bear witness to the pur- pose for which they were destined. In the shadow of these groves of columns, where apertures curious- ly cut in the upper part of the cornice or windows hewn through the solid granite aUowed only a sub- dued heat to penetrate, and just enough light to illuminate the reliefs and the tintings of the great mural scenes, the monarch, seated on a magnificent throne, between the mementoes of his ancestors and the images of his gods, presided at the meet- ings of the priesthood and high dignitaries of the empire ; gave audience to the ambassadors of for- eign nations and to deputations from vassal nomes and provinces ; adjudged, as a tribimal of last ap- peal, the disputes of cities or of individuals ; listened to the complaints of his subjects or the outcry oi their need ; in. fine, held the great days of the roycd sway. The scribes, a very busily employed race of functionaries, whose learned body replenished its ranks from the colleges of the priesthood, took 208 EGITT 3o00 YEARS AGO. down, on tlie spot, tlie minutes of these sessions ol absolute power. Subsequently, Avhen tlie impor- tance of the subject demanded it, the series of all the orders and of all the administratiye measures thereunto aj^pertaining was recapitulated on a monumental stele, destined to remind the popula- tion therein interested of the vigilance and solici- tude of the prince. And, in sooth, these stones of testimony which have survived until our own time, are not the least instructive of the monuments tluit will put modern science in a condition to reconstruct the genuine history of the Egyptian period, of which, more faithfully than the others, perhaps, they represent the real aspect, the charac- teristic traits and the inner private life. It is with this view that we do not feel as though we could omit from this study on Kameses and his time, a few passages from a document of this de- scription dating from the commencement of the reign of that prince. We borrow them from the interpretations jointly agreed upon by the Enghsh orientalist Birch, and our learned compatriot M. Lenormand. EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. 209 XII. . . . . " When lie had subdued the laud of Ethio- pia, troddeu the Libjaus beneath his sandals, and rooted his sceptre among them ; after terror had overwhelmed Wentnowr and the Akars, the living and life-bestowing god, the representative of Seth and Ammon, the king sun, the guardian of truth approved by Phrah, the director and defender of the land o^ Kemi, the child of the gods, the beloved one of Ammon, Rameses, the eternal life-giver, de- scended at Memphis to accomplish toward the di- vine triad of that city ceremonies of thanksgiving. " On the twenty-fourth day of the month paoni, in the third year of his reign, as he was seated on his throne of the purest gold, and, with his head adorned with two ostrich plumes emblematic of justice, was causing the names of the regions fi*om which gold was obtained to be registered in his presence, and was giving orders that the roads leading to them and unprovided with water should be supplied with fountains, there was mentioned, among others, the country of Okau where gold abounded, but the route to which was utterly des- titute of springs. His Majesty was informed of the distress of the workmen employed in the extraction and prej^aratory washing of the precious metal, •JlO EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. many of whom had perished of thu-st on the way with the asses they drove thither. In fine, the con- dition of things was such that it could not continue without leading to the abandonment of the rich placers in question. " At this moment, the officer of the palace whose business it was to lead visitors to the foot of the throne, breaking silence, announced to llameses that the leading personages of the Okau country were present and humbly awaiting the favor of an audience : *' Behold them, oh king, with their arms uplifted toward thy throne and drawing nigh with reverence to look upon thy sacred features, in order that they may unfold to thee the deplorable condition of their country, and beseech thy hmitless power to remedy it." And permission to speak having been accorded to the chiefs of Okau, they said : " Thy power has no bounds ; it is hke the power of Maiidu and of Ammon, whose depositary thou art, here below : if thou wert to give orders to the night, the light would instantly appear. We come then, in all haste, to implore thy Majesty to do something in behalf of these gold mines, since thou art he who dost shine, at present, on the throne of the world. Thou wilt not reject our prayers, thou EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 211 wlio hast but to say to tlie mountain spring to, leap fortli, in order to behold the abyss of the waters of the heavens fly open at the sound of thy voice ; for fchou art the sun made fleshy all of whose orders are obeyed, all of whose words are made good, oh thou, our lord and our master !...." Thus spake the chiefs of Okau ; then a great dignitary, the second in the empire, the viceroy of Ethiopia, came forward to sustain their request wdth the weight of his opinion. " It is but too true," said the royal son of Cush. In their country the grass has been burned since the reign of the gods, and all the Pharaohs, thy pre- decessors, desired that a well should be dug on the borders of the road that leads thither, but their wish was in vain. At the command of Seti, of glo- rious memory, search Avas made to the depth of one hundred and twenty cubits for the sheet of w^ater intended to refresh the soil : it did not reach the surface. But thou, if thou saidst to Hapi-Mou, thy father and the father of the gods : Cause the icater to cover tlieface of the desert ! it would be as it is with ail thy words, all thy orders which are fulfilled in thy very presence. If they are instantly obeyed is it not because thou art dear to the gods of thy ancestors above all the rnonarchs that ha^e reigned since the sun?" ... 212 EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. To the royal son of Cusli, and to the chiefs of the country of Okan, Eameses replied : " Your request is just ; as you have declared, there has been no well dug near this road since the reign of the gods ; and, it is my ivill that a well shall be made there to yield water without ceasing, as though it sprang from the exhaustless bosom of the Nile. The gods who heap their favors upon me, and who have flooded my heart with joy, will help me in this circumstance. Under their protecting auspices, I proclaim, then, the order to pierce a hv- ing well at one of the intermediate stations of the road that leads from the Nile to Okau. Let this order, copied by the scribes on duty, be reproduced and published by the aid of the chief of the tran- scribing bureau, in my double dwelling of lights and let a copy of the order be sent to the royal son of my land of Cusli, who continues charged with its execution." And the prince of Nubia, superintendent of the land of C\i6'A, having got together the necessary work- men recommenced the task that had been begun during the reign of Seti, and caused it to be pushed with so great activity, that nothing like it had been done since there luere kings in Egypt. The caving in of the soil, and the infiltration of sand into the tube of the well, were checked successfully by lin- EGYPT 3400 YEARS AGO. 213 iDgs of reods wovju in mats or interlaced in fas- cines* and with siicli excellent residt that the vicv<« roy was enabled to send word to Mei-Amoun that the water was spouting four cubits above the soil, but that to raise it to twelve, as his Majesty had ordered with his own lips, it was stih indispens- able that a skilled workman should be sent. . . . Shortly afterward the sovereign word of Barneses had its full effect : " Tne king of the waters has hearkened to the king of the earth, the well has been fortunately terminated, and abundant waters leap fi'om its mouth and pass on to a distance to fertilize the surface of the desert and quench the tJiirst of the parched traveller." By a last decree, Kameses, the fi'iend of Ammon, expressed the wish that this work of public utility should bear his name, and that a stele commemorative of these acts should be placed within the enclosure of the tem- ple raised to Thoth Trismegistus, (celestial superin- tendent of Nubia for the supreme gods,) on the right bank of the Nile, opposite to the city of Pselkis. And it was there, at the mouth of the icady which leads from the river to the modern cantonal district of Olaki, that it has been found again in our time. * We give this interpretation on our own responsibility; it seems to be indicated by M. Lenorniand. As for ^Ir. Birch, the text seems to him to allude to aquatic birds play- ing among the reeds. 214 ]l^JFT 3300 YEARS AGO. XIII. The apjjeUation of tbo land of Ciish, v/hicL in the presence of the encroachm^ints of the yellow or red branches of the human main stem, had receded from the southern plains of Asia as far as tlio upper basin of the Nile, still ran down in the days of Mei-Amoun fi'om the unknown heights of Afiica as far as the cataracts of Syene, thus covering all the territory that the Greeks have since called Ethiopia, and the moderns Sennaar and Nubia. The importance of these provinces in the monarchy of Eameses was such that the title of their viceroy or superintendent seems to have been, under sev- eral dynasties, one of the first that was conferred uj)on the heu* presumptive of the empire, at his bu'th, and a long partnership in common, of inter- ests and of glory, had so bound them to Egypt that Champollion did not fail to discover that tho Pharaohs, full of confidence in the natives of Ethi- opia, gave up to them all the administrative po- sitions even to the command of the troops of the country. The learned Egyptian scholar has cited and deciphered in support of his assertion a gieat number of inscriptions still existing between the first and second cataract."^ * Champolliou the younger: Letters Wriite^i from E(^ypt and Xubia. EGYPT 3300 YEAHS AQO. 215 Mei-Amoun, whose appanage this country ap- pears to have been during the hfetime of his father Seti, seems also, judging by the monuments with which he endowed it, to have retained a pecuhar i^ Section for it, dui'ing the whole course of his long life. In fact, from Philae as far as Mount Barkal, more than two hundi-ed leagues from Thebes and four hundred fiom the Mediterranean, there are few ruins, steles or subterranean temples that do not retain some rehc, the scrolls or even the fea- tures of the great Bameses. It is to the graphic arts, to pure archaeology, that the labor of retracing the stages of this long advance specially •appertain ; but it is not departing fi'om the hmited cu'cle of this sketch even, wherein the effort is to become inspii'ed with the philosophy of history, to cite those of the locaUties the exami- nation of which may prove profitable in pursuing the study of ancient manners and institutions. XIV. At Essebouah, stood a temple palace the avenue to which was formed by a doubls row of Hons em- blematic of courage ever en the alert. It termi- nated in two magnificent pylons supported by eight 216 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. gigantic statues of Barneses. A bas-relief repre- senting the fourteen daughters of that monarch makes one think that the monument dates from an advanced epoch of his reign and of his Hfe. More- over, it seems to have been thrown down in wan- tonness at some period of ferocious reaction or bai- barian invasion, and the eight colossi overturned in the sand, remind us involuntarily of the Titans struck by tJie bolts of Jove."^ In the speos or subterranean temple cut in the rocks at Derr by order of the conqueror, his image is seen seated at the farther end of the sanctuary between those of the three great ancestors of the Egyptian pantheon : Phtah, Ammon and Phra ; and the legends on the walls show the same Ram- eses taking part as a divinity in the religious hom- age which he offers as a mortal, a priest and a god, all in one. At Ibrim, which, under the name of Primia, was the landmark of the Roman empire at the time of its greatest extension toward the south, another speos was excavated in honor of Pharaoh and un- der the invocation of Toth and of Sate, the local divinities, through the pious care of a royal son of Cvsh. the same, no doubt, who is mentioned on * Ampere : CorresponLkuce from Eyi/pl cmd Nubia, L«:t- ter IX. EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 219 the side relative to the well of Okaii. Oq the carved and painted walls of the subterranean tem- ple " this same personage is represented rendering bis respectful homage to B.amoses, at the head of all the functionaries of his government." ChampoUion has called attention to the fact that the mere presence of the wife of the Ethiopian prince who figured in this ceremony at the side of her husband and in advance of all the other func- tionaries marks an essential difference between the civihzation of Egypt and that of tJie rest of tJie East.* If the erudite French hierogrammatist had substi- tuted the words the modern Oriental loorld for the expression above given, he would have kept closer to the exact truth. What we know of India at the epoch of the second Rama allows us to dispense with insisting on this point. Between the exquisite sentiment that revealed to the antique poot Yalmiki the fresh and j^ure creation of Sita, and that which impcllod Eameses to rear dii'ectly beside the most commemorative edifice of liis life a sort of votive chapel to the Egyptian Yenus for the use of the IIofre-Ariy tlie royal spouse whom lie loved ^f is there * ChampoUion : Letters written from, Egypt and Nubicu t This inscription is the one on the grand front. ** To mako \i\. for it, in the dedication carved upon the architrave, in the interior of the temple, at the end of the ordinary 220 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. not something like a bond of simnltaneousness va time or of common origin ? It will be understood that we refer to the speos of Athor at Ipsamboul, tlw grotto of purity and c^ love, the details of which are full of interest and artistic charm, and where, from the gigantic front excavated in. the rock to the ornaments on the pil- lars that support the vault of the three halls scooped out in its flanks, and even to the minutest adornments of its chiselled and frescoed walls, every- thing reveals, as it were, a tender and reverential association of thought between Rameses and ths fair companion of his youth ; everything bears the impress of a feehng of harmony and conjugal equality.* When, in the time of our fathers,! the celebrated traveller Burckhardt discoA^ered the facade of this monument, and measured its carvatides of thirty-six feet in height, he believed that he had come upon legend of llameses, is read this line, which di«closcs the tea- derness of the Queen for Rameses : His royal spouse wJio loves him^ Kofre-Ari, the great moiher, has constructed this rest- ing place in the grotto of purity. Ampere, at the place cited. * Ampere in tlie place cited. The queen is charming, says the traveler, and one never grows weary of meeting every. where with her likeness, which Pharaoh never grows tired of rejDroducing. t In 1817. See the Voyages de Burckhardt. French translation. Vol. I. EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 223 tlio grandest thing that Egyptian art bad created. What then was his a,3tonishnient when, on turning an angle of this rocky cliti, he found himseK con- fronting four colossal figures of double dimensions, cut out in a second mountain, raising their fronts bound with the psJient, and their huge shoulders, high above the avalanche of sand which the wind of Libya continually rolls down from the top of the stony wall of which they form a part. There the^ seemed to be waiting, amid the silence of the desert the approach of some representative of modern civ- ihzation who should extricate them fi'om the ob- livion in which renown had let them sleep for thii'ty- three centuries. XY. Since Biu-ckhardt's adventure, many oiher vis- itors have reached the spot, and the great temple of Ipsamboul hab become the goal of the numerous tourists which Europe daily sends to the banks of the Nile. In the four stone giants, which have none like them in the world excepting the two colossi of Bamian that, from an unknown date in the past, have recalled to tlie inhabitants of the Paro- : ar^ifcus tlie nair .less features of a ki7i(/ and queen of 22J: EGYrT 3300 years ago « the Soutli,* have been recognized, even previous to any aid througl\ tlie interpretation of tlie scroll cases, tlie pure and delicate graciousness and the majestic placidity that characterize all the portraits of Rameses Mei-Ainoun. The portico of the peoSy when cleared of the sand of ages whicli had ob- structed it, yielded to the study and the admiration of the explorers a whole historical museum of which Eameses is the hero. Sixteen halls carved out in the flanks of the mountain by the chisels of the old Egyptian sculptors, are dedicated only to reproduce his deeds and to glorify his memory. Upon their walls he battles and triumphs as a warrior, sits en- throned and wields the sceptre as a king, and ofiiciates as a pontiff. His statues, erect, with their arms crossed upon their breasts, supply the place of pillars to prop up the mountain ; then, he sits in the sanctuary between Ammon, the supreme divinity, and Phrali, the Sun made a deity. How long did the members of this strange tria 1 assemble the same worshippers, receive the same incense? For two thousand years past, Ammon utters no more oracles, the Sun has ceased to be the eternal source of life even for the black Nubian, and the echoes of the Nile have forgotten even the name of Eameses. However, to this hour, when * Alex. BuiJLes ; Journeu to Samarcand, The Speos of Phra at lp;sauiboul (fagade restored). EGYFT 3300 YEARS AGO. 227 the star of day, emerging from the horizon of Arabia, darts its mornuig ray atliwart the narrow portico of the great speos of Ipsamboul, and sur- rounds the mutilated brows of the three antique idols with a fleeting halo, it still seems to the most indifferent passer-by, the coldest and most skeptical son of mocking Europe, as though some religious mystery were occurring in the recesses of the rock."* What, then, must have been the effect upon the imagination in those periods of implicit behef or credulous ignorance, of this daily phenomenon, skillfully managed by the priesthood of the speos, when immediately opposite to the latter, a con- siderable centre of population, culture and com- merce covered the Eastern bank of the river now so desolate? It appears that at the time of the social upheaving directed by Moses, wliich, not long after Mei-Amoun's day, compelled the Pharaohs and their court, as in the days of the Hycsos, to seek an asylum in Nubia, that hospitable country could not offer them a retreat better calculated than this to fortify their resolution afresh. In what * Ampere, place already cited. See in the works of Fon- tenelle what he states, on the authority of E-uffin, in reference to an opening made by the priests in the temple of Serapis, through which, at a certain moment, a ray of the sun fell upc»n the hps of the god. 228 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. Bcliool could tlie orphaned and banislied heir of the sceptre of Ilameses, the young Haq-an who, after- ward, was Hameses III.,* wishing to become inspired with the soul of his great-grandfather so as to resume and consolidate his work, have drawn loftier lessons than those which exhaled for him fi'om the subterranean tem2)les of Ipsamboul ? XVI. The ages and barbarism have so well respected the bas-relief pictures of the great temple, and their colors are still so fresh, that, according to the in- genuous expression of the Arabs, one would think that the workmen employed had hardly had time to wash their hands since they were completed. t All these marvels of Egyptian art at the height of its splendor offer material for study the more precious that the most of it evidently dates back to an epoch in the life of Ilameses, concerning which the historians of antiquity knew as little as they did of the monuments that are now engaging our attention. * Manetho, in Josephus contra Appu>ncm. — It is evident that the Cethos of this iraii;inent is indeed Ramesea III., son of Seti II., son of Aieneplitah, son of Raineses the Great. T Ampere, place cited. EQYrT 3300 YEAHS AGO. 231 According to the legendary opinion followed by Herodotus, Diodorns and Joseplius, Rameses 11. from the tenth year of his reign had closed his career of battle and conquest, and the friendly fates had imposed no other care upon him than to enjoy in peace the fruit of his youthful exploits. The walls of Ipsamboul, on the contrary, along with the inscriptions that we have been enabled to put to- gether among the ruins of the two Rameseums of Thebes, the most dilaj)idated of all the great king's monuments, and, also, one of the bas-rehefs of Beit-el- Vv^ally, show him to us in his riper years, surrounded by numerous sons, and in their company fighting the same enemies against whom he had directed the expeditions of his youth, viz., the black tribes of the South and the white or yellow hordes of the North. The picture of the grand hall of Ipsamboul, in- scribed by Champolhon under No. 1, offers, in this respect, along with that which the same learned antiquarian copied from the half crumbled pylon of the western Rameseum, such analogies of detail, that it is impossible to avoid considering the one a reproduction of the other. In both of them, Ram- eses, accompanied by three of his sons, already men grown and mounted like himself in war chariots, is pursuing, at headlong speed, a hostile army whose 232 Et never be lost sight of, in any inquiry relative to those distant times. It is absurd to say : this is of Indian and that of Egyptian origin, for the influences that shaped them have followed the tide of migration. Thus, even while admitting the influence of the Aiian and 250 APrENDEL Semitic creeds upon tlie forms of Egyptian worship, we can- not avoid recognizing in certain portions of the Vedas a character common to the rehgiou of Egypt. The caas« of these coincidences must be sought in the primitive extension of the race of Oush and of Shem in the regions lying in the immediate vicinity of the Aryan tribes. (Baron EckEteia, Researches concerning Frirrir itivv Humanity.) n. THE TEMPLE OF DENDERAH, (p. 29.) The great celebrity conferred on this monument since the French expedition of 1798, is associated with an archaeologi- cal error respecting the date of a planisphere carved on the ceiling of the temple, and with the fantastic speculations of Dupuis and his school on this pretended relic of antiquity. Nevertheless, the ruins of Teniyris, of whioh the wretched village of Denderah retains the name with its Arabic modifi- cation, have in themselves a real interest, principally owing to the state of preservation in which the temple is found. But, if this temple be one of the best preserved in Egypt, it is also one of the most recent. Commenced under the last Ptolemies it was not completed until some time in Nero's reign. The most ancient names that figure on the hiero- glyphic inscriptions are those of Cleopatra and of her son Ptolemy Ca?sarion ; the latest is that of Nero. A Greek inscription legible upon the upper part of the portico, on the overhanging of the cornice, is in the name of Tiberius and dated in the 21st year of his sovereignty. The emperors Caligula and Claudius also contributed to the embellishments of the edifice. Near the hieroglypiiio inscription in which are read the names of Cleopatra and of the son she bore to Caesar, on the external part of the rear APPENDIX. 251 wall of the temple, tliere is carved a portrait of tliat famous Queen ; it does but little credit to the chisel of the artist. The whole sculptural work, moreover, betrays a period of decadence in the art. The hieroglyphics, like the orna- ments, are of inferior execution, as we tind them on many other monuments of the same periods. But architecture maintained itself better in the midst of this wasting away of art. Here, for instance, the general effect, notwithstanding the bad taste and the heaviness of detail, lacks neither gran- deur nor majesty, and the temple, even in its present condi- tion, stUl produces a vivid impression on the traveller. The portico or pronaos, a work of Tiberius, is supported by 24 columns in four rows of six columns each. An inter- columnary wall, breast high, extending between the pillars, Closes the lower part of the first row. The ceihng, which is in complete preservation, is ornamented with the celebrated zodiac which has been the subject of so many dissertations and hypotheses. To the portico succeed three halls of un- equal size, the first adorned with columns, and the two others with adjoining side rooms. On the ceiling of one oi these chambers was secured a planisphere which is now in Paris. The naos or sanctuary which terminates this range of halls is isolated by a circular passage from the six rooms that surroimd it. The total length of the temple is 81 and its width 34 yards. That of the portico, which overshoots the body of the temple in such manner as to give the whole structure the form of a T, is 43 yards in length by 98 of interior height. The temple was prt^ceded by its dromos, extending a length of 110 paces to an isolated pylon which bears the names of Domitian and of Trajan. This temple was dedicated to the goddess Hathor, from whom the city, to all aj)j)earance, had taken its name ( Than— athor — the habitation of Hathor.) In the inscriptions dis- tributed in various parts of the temple, the goddess bears, among other titles, that of the Queen of Tenathyr, a word from which, in the fullness of time, was derived Tentj/ris, In its turn the latter degenerated to Denderah. 252 ArrENDix. M. de Rouge, in one of his lectures at the college of France, in the course of 1865, communicated to his audience a letter from M. Mariette, announcing the discovery that the latter had just made, beneath the temple of Denderah, of a subterranean chapel, the construction of which the inde- fatigable explorer thought that he could trace back to Cheops, (Chujfu.) the founder of the Great Pjrramid. Whatever may be the credit to assign or the reservations to be made in reference to this opinion, one thing is certain, . to" wit, that the discovery, in itself, does not in any degree affect the relatively modern dates of the upper temple and of its zodiac. The utmost it could do would be to give fresh credit to the hypothesis (rather quickly abandoned by the savants of our day) according to which the first rehgioua ironuments of Egypt were subterranean temples. in. THE ANCIENT BED OF THE NTLE, (p. 33.) To the westward of the Delta, parahel to its line of incli- nation and thirty-five miles distant, runs a valley that opens on the Mediterranean Sea not far from Arabs Cape. The name Bahr-hela-ma given by the wandering tribes to this valley signifies the i^lv&r loithout water ; it stretches far away to- ward the south and sends off' many side valleys to the Nile below Gizeh, (the Bahr-el-Farigh,) and toward Fayoum. It is one of the singular features of the physical configura- tion of Northeastern Africa. A simple crest or ridge sep- arates it from the Wadi-Natroun or the valley of tlie lakes of Natron, which no doubt was only one of its branches at tlie period when the waters rolled full and high between its banks fully 15,000 yards apart. The Bahr-bela-Ma is clog- ged with sand. Neither vegetation nor springs can be seen ; APPENDIX. 253 but, on the other hand there are such great quantities of petrified trunks of trees as are met witli between the ^fokat- tan and the Red Sea. Some of these trunks, completely transformed to stone, are as much as eight or ten yards in length. Impressions of fossil fish have also been noticed on the stone, and it has been ascertained that the pebbles picked up there belong to the primitive mountains of Up- per Egypt and the high Ethiopian Plains. These petrifac- tions are to be found, also, in the Bahr-el-Farigh. Ascending southward across the Fayoum, the small oasis, the interior oasis and that of Khargeh, one may follow the traces of the Bahr-bela-ma to the bosom of the Nubian des- erts as far as those wadys which, traversed by the roads leading to Darfur between the 20th and the 22nd degrees of latitude, seem to weld themselves to the most salient angles of the present bed of the Nile to the northward of Dongola. The Bahr-bela-ma is, then, but the old channel followed by the waters of the Ethiopian plateaux ere the convulsions of the crust of the earth had opened an outlet for them toward the primitive gulf which became Egypt, thanks to the local depressions of the surface. IV. THE SHEPnERD KING APAPSAS AND THE GOD SOUTIEE. "We read in Strabo that " at Ileliopolis and Memphis there were edifices of a barbarian order of architecture, with sev- eral rows of columns, but with neither ornaments noi de- signs." Was not the temple reared to Soutekh, the only God, by tiie Semitic iconoclast Apapias, one of these edifices ? Is it any other than the monument without ornament, without sculpture, without a single letter, discovered by M. Mariette twenty yards from the great Sphinx of Gizeh, and in which a well filled up with the statues of the gods and the kings of 254 ArrEKDix. the fourth dynasty, bears witness to the hatred of the foun- der for the idols and fetiches of the preceding generations r V. THE NAMES OF RAMESES O. [Note by M. Roug6.] If the testimony of Tacitus placed the present reading of the name of Rameses beyond dispute it did not assist us in comprehending how the Greeks had come to write a name so different from it. The condition in which the royal Usts taken from Manetho have reached us still increase the em- barrassment. In the nineteenth dynasty no other name had been found on these lists than the genuine Egyptian one of Rameses Mei-Amoun. The Greek chronologists who have transmitted these lists to us felt that they could not omit in> troducing the Sesostris of Herodotus, somewhere. A list of the Egyptian kings on which Sesostris had not been named would have seemed to them something as monstrous as a liistory of Greece from which the name of Alexander had l)een excluded. Hence these compilers of quotations found in Manetho, at the twelfth dynasty, a king whose name SesorUisen presented some analogy to that of Sesostris. More- over, lie was a conqueror. His monuments, which still exist to this day, show that he had advanced the frontiers of Egypt on the Nubian side, and that his memory was still held in pufficicnt honor to cause fresh temples to be reared to his memory many centuries after his death. Undoubtedly there were in the first extracts from Manetho some words of praise following this royal name, as there were after several others ; and this circumstance, joined to the similarity of names, in- duced the chronologists to place the Sesostris of the Greeks just there. The writing that accompanies it is, moreover, t^jo clear in its specifications to be accepted as the genuine text of Manetho. APPENDIX. 255 It is Dot tlie Sesostris of Herodotus that we meet with, then, at the twelfth dynasty ; it was, indeed, a king who was victorious on the frontiers, but whose armies had never pen- etrated into Asia, and this false application of the legend of Sesostris may have been caused by the complete absence of that famous name from the real lists of Manetho. Since the British Museum published its fine collection of papyri, all Egyptian scholars have remarked in the historical texts of the nineteenth dynasty a singular royal monogram which Em. O reads Sesu, V ' ' ^ ^^ ^ . The same name is also found at Thebes on a mural inscription. It seemed impossible to find any particular place for this king Sesu^ and the analogy of the name with Sesostris was so tempting, that it no doubt occurred to the mind of more than one archaeologist ; but the question was to find some decisive information so as to correctly place the king designated by the device. I be- lieve that I have been so fortunate as to come across the proof desired, in the Egyptian collection in the imperial musuem at Vienna. That museum possesses a small solid pyramid of calcareous stone; its four sides are covered with finely executed carv- ings. I have described, in the catalogue of the Louvre, the ordinary decoration of this small monument. It is, so to speak, turned. so as to face eastwardly, and is always made up of invocations to the sun in his various positions. The Vienna pyramid does not fall short of this programme, and these repeated invocations have supplied opportunities io frequently mention the name of the person dedicating it. That personage was called, like the great king, Barneses Mei-Amotin, \ ||| j f \\ MJ • Excepting the border sur- rounding the royal name, the signs are exactly the same. Now, twice upon the pyramid, the same Egyptian is named 256 APPENDIX. Bimi^ly Ses, I I written without the voweL A third time hia PPM najneiswriiten Ses Mei-Amoun \ I \^JyL in such manner as to make us perfectly understand that Ses is a popular abbre- viation of Barneses. This royal name, in its most complete form, that which was particularly in use under Rameees I., mM reads thus : V ' > ^ -^ A Eamesesu. From this form are derived several abbreviations. On the historical papyri we find the scrolls Sesu^ @S5] Sesesv, and V ' -^ A Ra-Sesesu, all used irdiffer- ently to designate Eameses H. I have even found there the variation Sesu-Mei- Amoun, identical with that which is read once on the pyramid at Vienna, where ihesnYname Mei-Amoun accompanies the abbreviation of the proper name. It is certain, then, that there did exist i pop- ular abbreviation Sesu, so currently used to designate the great Rameses, that it could be employed indiffereLtly to write the title of one of his namesakes. The form used in the papyri Sesesv is very exactly what Diodorus haiL tran- scribed into Sesoosis. It is not that I regard the form Sesos- iris as less correct ; it may be derived from the scroll Ba-Se- sesu. The Egyptians had known a number of kings whose names ended in the word ra, or sun (pronounced ri by iota- cism, according to all the Greek transcripts, in the termina- tions). Although the sign for the sun © was traced at the sommencement of the scroll as an honorary distinction, the APPENDIX. 257 grammatical construction frequently brought it to the end of the naiae. It is thus that the name of king Menkeres, writ- ten invariably v X Be-men-ke, became in the pronuncia, tion aam |_i and it is in this way that I found it written Men he re and it is in this way that I found it written for the proper name of a Saitic functionary. It seems to me very probable that, in consequence of this custom, the abbreviation ffTYl became transformed in the mouth of the people to Sesesu-ri and that it was in this shape that they peated, in the presence of Herodotus, the name that produced the Greek from Sesostris. [ Extract from the Athceneum frangais, 1S56.] VL THE IMAGES OF ANCESTORS, (p. 79.) The small statues of the ancestors and predecessors of Kam- eser J I., which the musal paintings represent as figuring at tti» panegyi'ic of his coronation, are only thirteen in number. They are, besides those of his father Seti and his grandfather Ilameses I., those of nine lawful kings of the 18th dynastv. Aahmcs, Amenoph L, Thothmes L, Thothmes IT., Amenoph II., Thothmes IV., Amenoph III., and Horemheb. These historical sovereigns are preceded by a Mentu Hotep VL, of the 11th dynasty, who has left no trace of hia personality on the monuments, and of the legendaiy Mena — two pers onages only, and problematical at that, to represent 21)8 ATPEXDIX. the long seiies of ages attributed to the history of Egypt beyond the time of the Hycsos ! .... Is it not as though, iu a gallery of portraits of the Bourbon race, no place had been found prior to the time of Henry IV., for any but the like- nesses of Robert the Strong and Francis the son of Hec- tor ? This leads us naturally to some reflections on the taljles or lists of the Egyptian Kings recently discovered and pub- lished. THE TABLES OF ABYDOS AND OF MEMTIIIS. In the month of September, 1863, M. Mariette, who had just made some excavations iu the gi'eat burial district of Sakkara near Memphis with great success, published in the Archeological Review (Revue Archeologique) n monumental table containing, in their order, the names of the fifty-three Pharaohs. Seti I,, of the 19th dynasty, himself, comprised in the same table, is represented as making the offerings pre- scribed by the funereal lites, to his deilied predecessors. Although the Egyptian scribes to whom was confided tlie task of recalling their names, have inverted the order of the kings of the 12th dynasty, whether through inattention or iu pursuance of some purpose as yet unfathomed, in such man- ner as to ascend instead of descending the scale of time ; and although this table contains among the kings of the first dynasties, some names until then unknown, still, such as it is, it was at the time of its publication, in the month of September 1803, the most important document of its kind that had seen the light since the discovery of the famous tablet of Ab^xlos in the possession of the British Museum. But it was not long ere the glory of this discovery was eclipsed by another, still more important, found by the in- defatigable French explorer. M. Mariette was very recently lucky enough to find a considerable portion of a temple, buried in the soil and dedicated to Asiris, in the heart of the holy city of Abydos, th< same from which the table in the British Museum came. UiJon one of the walls of this ArrENDix. 259 temple he discovered \ representation of the offerings made by Seti L, and by nn ion, (who, afterwards, was Barneses the Great,) to their deceased ancestors, no less than seventy- six in number, from the hr.st dyuasty ruler, Meues, down to Sethi himself. This discovery, which a German doctor, a savant by trade and a robber by calling, who clung to the iteps of M. Mariette, has tried to take away from our coun- tiyman, is undoubtedly of great value, but has perhaps been rated too high in a historical point of view. A slight obser- vation will suffice to prove as much. The first jjart of the old table of Abydos liaving been destroyed, it is not known whether this table did or did not commence with Menes. The Sakkara tablet does not contain this name, which, how- ever, is found upon the new hst of Abydos. These three lists are of nearly the same epoch ; the first, dating from Rameses the Great, contains 49 kings ; the second and the third are of the reign of Seti, and yet do not present the same number of names. The temple of Memphis has fifty two ; that of Abydos seventy-five — all predecessors of the same Seti. Hence it must be inferred that the Egyptian priests who prepared them^ had the privilege of selecting the kings whose names they wished, to retain a choice the motives of which must frequently have varied, since the two tables of the same city of Abydos, composed at two periods quite close together, diller in the names as well as in the number of them. But it will be confessed that the choice made by the his- torian of certain kings commendable for their virtues oi odious for their vices is reasonable only when one knows the motiv'=!S that determined this adoption or exclusion, and all becomes mystery to one who has not possession of the key to the labyrinth. On the other hand, isolated monuments and the list of the royal chamber at Karnak have revealed to us the existence in Upper Egypt of dynasties of Nantefs and Sevekhoteps, preceding the 12th dyuasty ; and, although localized, perhaps, in Upper Egypt, they were powerfiJ, but the names of all their people are omitted on the threa tables of which we are treating. 260 APPLNDIX. A careful comnaraiive examinatlou of these different doo uraents casts a ray of light, however, upon the dark places. By its help, we perceive that there was a j)eriod when the priests nad not the privilege of choosing among the names of the kings ; there was, indeed, a period in the history of Egypt in relation to which the different tables agree with each other as they, likewise, agree with the lists of the his- torian Manetho. This epoch was the oommencement of the famous 12th dynasty of the Sesorlasens and of the Amene7n- has. In ascending from Barneses II. to Amenemha I. every- thing is clear, everything follows in the same order on the different documents ; but, in taking the last named king for the point of departure, all becomes doubt and confusion ex- cepting at the epoch, comparatively free from clouds and mists, of the Pharaohs who built the great pyramids. Hence we may conclude that the learned copyists and scribes of the colleges at Thebes and Memphis composed, in the fourteenth century preceding the Christian Era, a history of Egypt in which the whole period anterior to the 12th dy- nasty is but a tissue of fables, legends and traditions toned down to the historic form, — something like the history of England written in the ninth and tenth centuries by monks and translated into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The papyrus at Turin is a collection of this nature, with its mythical kings, its divine dynasties and its legendary con- querors and law-givers. The history of Manetho is probably but an abridgment or an amplihcation of these traditions, and, thus, these compilations of the fourteenth century bo- fore our era bring no sujjport to the history of Manetho in all that concerns the epochs anterior to the commencement of the 12th dynasty. And, in fact, it is with this period that Manetho himself opens the second book of his history and emerges from the confused eras of the unfamiliar dy- nasties and nameless kings in order to enter ujDon the his- torically and monumentally well ascertiiined series of kings belonging to the 12th dynasty. The conclusion of all this reasoning is self ui^parent. The APr3::>^DJX 261 histoiy of the Egyptian Kings of the united monarcliies of Thebes and Memphis begiDS with the 12th dynasty '; with its accession the tide of Egyptian history brightens ; the priests retain without difficulty a remembrance of the kings that had governed the whole country, whereas previously they had seen before them a crowd of local sovereigns, of mere chiefs of cities and of petty kings independent of each other — a confused throng from which they chose whom they pleased according to the different degrees of renown that each of these petty princes had been able to acquire in the different great centres of the theocratic power. Some of these Pharaohs, the most celebrated for instance of those who reared the Pyramids, and the old King Papi, are in- scribed, alone and the same time, upon the hsts of Upper and Lower Egypt. But the inscription of the name of Menes, the legendary founder of the empire, upon the The- ban list of A.bydos, and his exclusion from the Mempliian list of Sakkara, confirm the opinion that we owe what we have of Egyptian history in form to the labors of the The- ban writers belonging to the palmy time of Egyptian litera- ture, the age of the Pharaohs of the dynasty of liamoses. vn. THE Al^MY OF RAMESES U — THE MHJTAP.T CASTE, (]3. 98.) The figures given by Diodorus (Book L, ch. 54) for the ai'my of Sesoosis (Bameses) are 600,000 foot-soldiers, 24,000 horsemen and 27,000 chariots. The only specimen of horse- manship that has been discovered on all the monuments ex- plored in old Egypt, from Memphis to the Cataracts, is a veritable caricature, viz., a terrified fugitive twisting and Btrnggling on the back of a runaway horse. Diodorus says elsewhere (Book L, ch. 31,) that, in his time, the j)opulation of Egypt ran up to 3,000,000 of souls, and that it had been 262 ArrEivDix. millions under the Ptolemies. This last estimate, witnout being impossible, seems very small when compared with the cultivable surface of the country, even puttincf the latter at its highest estimate. The actual number of 2,900,000 al- ready sujpasses the average population of France m respect to the exteiit of its territory. It is true that in the time of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, the cultivable surface of 3i,gypt may have been double what it is now, and this would give us, all proportions carefully observed, a total of 6,000,000 souls. In his " Memoirs Dictated at Saint Helena,'* the formf'r general of the army of the East pretends that under good Hiirainistration, when irrigating canals extended from the valiev of the Nile to the Oasis of Libya, this num- ber may have risen to 10 millions. But did a foundation for this hypothesis ever really exist ? However tnat umy have been, here is what Herodotus has told us of the military caste in Egypt : Euterpe CLXIV. . . . The warriors receive from their countrymen the names of Calasiiies and Hermotybies. They live in the names hereinafter enumerated, and ah Egypt is divided into nomes. CLXV. Those of the Hermotybies are : Busiris, Sais, Chemnis, Papremis, the island of Prosopitis and the half of Natho ; the Hermotybies have their domains u^dou these nomes : their number is one hundred and sixty thousand men when they are complete. Not one of them has ever learned any of the mechanical arts, but they devote them- selves to the military profession. CLXVI. The nomes of the Calasiries were Thebes, Bu- bastis, Aphris, Thau is, Mendes, Sebennys, Athribis, Phar- betis, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anysis, Mycephoris ; the last L.amed nome occupies an island opposite Biibastis ; the Calasiries have their domains on these nomes. Their num- ber is two hundred and fifty thousand when they are in their full muster They are not permitted to cultivate any mechanical art, but they practice the arts of war and hand them down from father to son. CLXYII. I cannot decide with certainty whether the APPENDIX. 263 Greeks have received these usages from the Egyptians, since I perceive that the Thracians, the Scythians, the Per- Bians, the Lydians, and nearly all the barbarians place such of their citizens as have learned the mechanical arts, and their descendants after them, in the lowermost rank in their estimation, and considered those the noblest of men who free themselves from manual labor, and especially those who report to warlike service. Such were the ideas of all the Greeks, especially of the Lacedtemonians ; the Corinthiana were they who "least despised the artisan. CLXVm. The following privileges wo.re assigned to the soldiers, and they were the only Egyptians, excepting the priests, to whom anything of the kind was ever granted- Each of them possesses twelve roods of excellent land ex- empt from taxation. The Egyptian rood is equivalent to a square lot measuring a hundred cubits on each side, the cubit being identical with that of Samos. Such are their privileges. They also enjoy by turns, and never twice the same, these other advantages : every year a thousand Cala- Biries and as many Hermotybies form the king's guard ; to these, besides their land, are given every day five mini of baked bread, two mini of beef and four cups of wine. THE EC BUS, (p. 12C.) We are not unaware that Dr. Brugsch, and with him many other Egyptian scholars, make this people out to have beeu a tribe in the north of Afi-ica. For them, Jiobu,^ meant Libus or Libyans. But notwithstanding the scientific authority of these learned men, we do not think that Libyan shepherds ever wore the double garment and the long tunic wiiich the mural paintings attribute to the Robus, along with their clear complexion, their blue eyes and light beard. Neither do we admit that any kind of a confederation of no« 264 APPENDIX. madic tribes to the westward of the Nile ever was importan'i enough to have abandoned from 12,000 to 13,000 corpses to the Egyptian soldiers on one iSeld of battle to be mutilated, as the inscriptions at Medinet-Abou pretend in reference to the Robus. For all these reasons, it remains quite evident to us, as it was for Ohampollion and for Wilkinson, that it will not do to rank the fiobns among the Eastern peoples, and that they occupied in Asia a country very remote from Egypt, and en- joyed a climate much more temperate than that of the bor- ders of the Nile. IX. MAI7NEBS AND CUSTOMS OP THE EGYPTIANS. [Extracts from Herodotus.] XXXV. . . The Egyptians live beneath a sky peculiar to themselves ; their country is watered by a river different from all other rivers : and then they have estabhshed laws and customs which are. for the most part, the opposite of those of the rest of human beings. With them the women go to market and trade ; the men stay at home and weave. Everywhere else the weavers pass the woof above, the Egyptians pass it below. The men carry burthens on their heads, the women carry them on their shoulders. No woman has the office of priesthood for gods of either sex ; the men only can be priests. The young men are never con- strained to sui:)port their parents, if such be not their own wish ; but the girls are compelled to do so even against their will. XXXYI. Elsewhere the priests of the gods wear long hair : in Egypt they shave ; among other men, the cus- tom is to cut the hair when mourning commences for any near relative; the Egyptians, to show respect for the dead, Jet ArrENDix. 285 the hair and the board which previously they shaved off, grow on their heads and under their chins. Other men Hve se^mrate from their animals ; the Egyptians live pell mell with them. Elsewhere, wheat and barley are staples of food, but the Egyptians consider it a disgrace to live upon that diet ; they use duuiah. They knead dough witb theii feet and clay with tho,i hands, and they lift manure with both hands. . . . Every man wears two garments ; the woman has only one. Other people fasten the rings and the cables of their sails inside ; the Egyptians fasten them outside. The Greeks write and count from left to right ; the Egyi^tians go from right to left, and, in doing so, claim that they go to the right, and the Greeks to the left. They have two idnds of letters— the sacred and the vulgate char« acters.* XXXVn. As they are observers of ceremonies more than other men they practise the following customs : they drink from a brazen cujJ which they cleanse every day ; and this not some only but all of them do. They wear linen garments, and are very careful to have them always fresh and clean. They deem it better to be neat than to be handsome. Every three days, the priests shave their whole bodi-es, so that no vermin may defile them while they are serving the gods. They wear nothing but linen garments and shoes of papyrus bark, and they are not permitted to use others. They wat.'h themselves with fresh water twice each day and twice each night. They accomplish other rites innumerable one might say, but they enjoy uncommon advantages. They neither wear out nor spend what belongs to them ; sacred viands ai-o cooked for them ; every day plenty of beef and geese are sent to them ; gxape wine is distributed to them ; but, at the same time, they cannot eat fish. No beans are planted throughout all Egypt, and if any come up they are not eaten, either raw or cook'^d. The priests cannot bear the sight of • The hieroglypliics and demotic characters. 2j6 ArrENDix. tliem, smco they look upon the vegetable as impure. Each god is served not by one priest only, but by several, one of whom is the high priest, and when he dies his son sacceeds nim. XL VII. The Egyptians regard the hog as an impure ani- mal. Consequently, should one of them, in passing near a pig, be touched by him, he is made to go down into the river without undressing, and they bathe him in his cloth- ing ; on the other hand, the Egyptian swineherds only, among all the population, cannot enter any temple in the country. No one gives them his daughters in marriage and no one marries their daughters, nor can they intermarry ex- cepting among themselves. The Egyptians do not think it proper to sacrifice a ])ig to any other deities than the Moon and Bacchiis ;* to them only they sacrifice that animal, at the same moment, during the full Moon, and eat the flesh of the victim. The manner of making this sacrifice of swine is as follows : when the victim has been slaughtered, they fasten together the extremity of the tail, the spleen and the kid- neys. These are then wrapped in ail the fat found in the stomach, and are burned u^Don the altar. The remainder of the flesh is eaten during the same day at the close of the sacrifice : no one would taste it on any other day. XLVIII. At the evening repast, on the day previous to the festival of Bacchas, (Asiri,) every man, in front of his own door, having slaughtered a young pig gives it to the swine- herd who had sold it to him, to take away. "The Egyptians celebrate the rest of the festival as the Greeks do, in all but the music and the singing. . . . L. Nearly all the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt. My researches prove to me that we get them from the barbarian countries, and I think that they come especially from Egypt. Excepting Neptune and the Dioscun , •^* whom I have a^heady spoken ; excepting J\i~z, \ was;a, TUcmis, the Graces aud the Nereids, ine names of all the •«■ isis and Asiri. ATPENDIX 2C7 other gods Lave always existed among llio Egyptians. I Here repeat what they themselves declared to me; The divinities of whom they say they do not know the names seem to me to have been named by the Pelasgi, excepting Neptune (Poseidon). The Libyans were they who revea ed this last divinity to us : no one pronounced his name pre- viously, and they have always honored him as a god. The Egyptians do not worship heroes. LI. The Greeks have learned from the Egyptians the customs which I have aheady mentioned and others that I shall speak of hereafter. LIL Primitively, the Pelasgi, when praying, made offer- ings of all kinds to their gods, as I was told at Dodona, but they gave neither name nor surname to any one of them ; for they had never heard any given to them. They called them gods for the sole reason that, after having put the universe in order, they maintained ail its laws. Then, much time having elapsed, they learned from Egypt the names of gods other than Bacchus, and, a long time afterward, this last name too. They consulted the oracle of Dodona in re- lation to these names, that being the one which the Greeks consider the most ancient, and which, at that time, was the only one. When the Pelasgi had asked whether they should accept names coming from the barbarians, the oracle replied *' Take them !'' Thereuf)on, they sacrificed to the gods under these names, of which they made use from that time forth, and, finally, the Greeks received the same from them. LIII. Whence came each of the gods ? Have they always existed ? What is the form of them ? Nothing of all this •was known, properly speaking, until a very recent period. For I think that Hesiod and Homer only four hundred years anterior to me, not more. Well, it was they who made up the Greek theogonv ; who gave names to the gods ; who distributed honors and attributes among them ; who de- scribed their forms, and it appears to me that the poets said to have preceded those two men were born after them. luYin. The oracle of Thebes in Egj'pt and that of Dodona 268 APPENDIX. yield their responses in nearly the same manner. The art of prophesying from an inspection of the victims camo also from Egypt. Tlie Egyptians were the first of all men to establish solemn processions, holidays and offerings, and it is from them that the Greeks learned these ceremonies. This, for me, is proof of the fact : in Egypt it is plain that they axe very ancient, and, in Greece that they have been but recently established. lilX. The Egyptians do not restrict themselves every year to one solemn festival only ; those great assemblages are frequent. The first of these and the one which is the most zealously attended, is held at Bubastis in honor of Diana : the second at Busiris in honor of Isis, since in this city stands the largest temi)le of Isis. The city itself is built in the midst of the Delta,- and Isis, in the language of the Greeks, is Ceres. The tlm-d gathering is at Sais in honor of Minerva : the fourth at Heliopolis, in honor of the Sun ; the fifth at Buto, in honor of Latona ; the sixth at Papremis, in honor of Mar-i. LX. And this is the way in wliich they repair to the City of Bubastis, for both men and women go thither, in great multitudes, from all parts, each family in its boat. Some of the women liave castanets and sound them : for their part during the whole trip some of the men jolay the flute and the remainder of both sexes clap their hands and sing. "When, as they sail along, they approach one of the cities that dot the way, they moor the boat and do what I am going to relate. Among the women some continue their singing or rattle their castanets, while others with loud cries jeer at tl)9 women of the city, and others again dance. ... At each town on the river banks, they do in hke manner. On taeir arrival at Bubastis, the passengers begin to celebrate the festival and offer sacrifices ; and in this solemnity they con- Bume more grape wine than during all the rest of the year. Without counting the children, more tlian seven hundred thousand men and women, according to the statements of the inhabitants, assemble there. Such are the things that take Dlace at Bubastis. ATPEXDIX. 269 LXI .... After the sacrifices, the men and v,'omen, thronging together in a numberless multitude, ply each other with blows. For what god they strike it would be an impiety in me to tell. The Carians established in Egypt do that and more still ; they cut each other's foreheads with knives ; by that they show that they are strangers and not Egyptians. LXII. When the latter are assembled to make sacrifices in the city of Sais, during a certain night, they all light, in in the open air around their houses, a great number of lamps filled with salt and oil, the wick floating on the sur- face. The wick burns all night, and this celebration is called the ** festival of the lamps." Such Egyptians as have not come to the assemblage equally celebrate the night of the sacri- fice ; all light their lamps as well, so that it is not the city of Sais alone that is illuminated, but all Egypt. For what rea- son has this night its share of illuminations and honors ? That is told in a sacred legend. LXIIL At Heliopolis, at Buto, the celebrants restrict themselves to the immolation of victims. At Papremis, the same sacrifices are ofiered up and the same ceremonies are observed as in the other cities ; Moreover, when the sun begins to wane, some of the priests are busied aroimd the statue ; others in much greater number, armed with staves, take tlieir stations at the entrance of the temple ; the people, that is to say many thousand persons, fulfilling their vows and similarly armed, are assembled on the opposite side. Now, on the previous evening, the statue, enclosed in a small chapel of painted wood, had been carried from the temple to another station ; the priests that had been placed around the statue go to work and draw a four-wheeled chariot to convey the wooden chapel and the statue that it contains back to the large temple ; but those who are in the portico refuse to admit them. The crowd of devotees, rushiug to the rescue of the god, strike them ; they defend 270 ArrENDix. themselves ; a violent conflict with sticks and staves ensues, and many a head is broken ; however, the Egyptians declare that no one has ever been killed. .... LXV. Bat the Egyptians observe with extreme attention all the prescribed forms ol religion, and particularly those that I am about to describe. Although coterminous with Libya, their country is not infested with wild beasts. The animals that they know are all reputed sacred, ihose that do and those that do not live with men, alike. Were I to tell why they hold them sacred, I should, in my narrative, penetrate to things divine of which I am seeking to avoid saying a word, for if I have chanced to touch upon them, I have not done so without being forced to it by necessity. There exists, on the subject of animals, a custom which I am about to set forth ; keepers of the two sexes are ap- pointed to feed each kind separately ; the son succeeds the father in this honorific office. The inhabitants of the towns fulfill their vows through the medium of these keepers ; when they have made a vow to the diviiuty to which one of these animals belongs, they shave either the whole head, or half of it, or the third part of the head of their sons ; they then put in the scales of a balance, on one side the hair, and on the other its weight in silver ; and, whatever that weight may be, they give it to the keeper of the animal. The latter in return cuts up some fish in pieces and throws them to his animals for fodder : such is the food offered to them. Should any person kill one of these animals wilfully, he is put to death ; should he kill unintentionally, he is punished with a fine fixed by the priests. Any one killing an ibis or a sparrow-hawk voluntarily or involuntarily would infallibly be immolated. LXVI. Whatever may be the number of the animals fed along with the men, it would be still more considerable if, in the cat species, for instance, the males did not destroy a great many of the young by savage instinct, or if frequent fires did not kill a vast number of these creatures. When such accidents occur, profound grief takes possession of the ArrENDix. 271 Egyptians. When, in any dwelling, a cat dies naturally, the inhabitants shave off their eyebrows ouly ; but if it be a dog that dies they shave their bodies and their heads. LXVIL D.3ad cats are taken to consecrated buildings; then, after having been ( mbalmed, they are buried at Bubastis. Dogs are buried, each one in its own town, ia consecrated ciiambers, and ichneumons the same. The shrew-m ce and the sparrowhawks are taken to Buto, the ibis to Hermopolis. Bears, which are very rarely inet with, and wolves (Jackals rather) whose size does not exceed that of foxes, are interred on the spot where they are found lying dead. LXVm. The crocodile daring the four coldest months eats nothing ; although a quadruped, it lives both on land and water ; it lays its eggs on land and hatches them there. It passes the greater part of the day on the banks and the whole night in the river because the water is warmer than the open air and the dew. Of all the perishable creatures that we know this one reaches the largest from the smallest bulk ; its eggs are no bigger than those of a goose ; the young one is born only the length of the egg and grows to seventeen cubits, — sometimes more. It has eyes like a pig, large teeth, and jutting scales all along the dorsal colunm. It is the only animal that has no tongue. Its lower jaw is immovable, and it closes the upper jaw upon it, in this too being peculiar among all living creatures. It has strong claws, and on its back scales which cannot be cut. Bli tid in the water, on land its sight is piercing ; and, as it passes the most of the time in the river, its mouth is full of insects that suck its blood. Animals and birds flee from it, but the trochylus lives in amity with it because that bird renders it good service. In fact when the crocodile comes out of the water and reaches dry land, its first need is to inhale the breath of the zephyr ; it emerges, therefore, with its jaws wide open ; then, the trochylus has access to them and can reheve it of the insects which it swallows. The crocodile receives this rehef with joy, and never harms the trochylus. 272 ArrENDix. LXIX. To some Egyptians, the crocodile is sacred ; to oth- ers it is not : the latter treat it as an enemy. Ai'oiind Thebe.s and Lake Moeris, the inhabitani's consider it sacred. Each one of them rears a crocodile, which is tamed by training , and they hang pendants and buckles of ciystal and gold in its ears ; they encircle its fore-paws with bracelets and give it choice viands from the sacrifices. In fine, while it is alive they tend it the best they can ; when it is dead they em- balm it and bury it in consecrated ground. On the contrary, the inhabitants of the territory of Eleijhantine eat croco- diles, not regarding them as sacred in any wise. The Egyp- tian name of this animal is not a^ocodile^ but champse. The lonians have called it crocodile, finding it resemble in shape the lizards [krokodeilos) which breed in stone walls. LXXVII. The Egyptians who inhabit the cultivated part of the country, taking pleasure in adorning their remembrance^ are the most refined of all the men whom I approached and studied. Tlieir legimen is as follows : very careful in the preservation of their health they purge themselves with emet- ics and clysters every month for three days in succession, since they think that all the diseases of man come from his food and drink. Aside from these precautions the Egyptians ai*e, next to the Libyans, the healthiest of mortals, in my ojiin- ion owing to the steadiness of their seasons ; in fact, sickness comes upon us, in consequence of the changes of all things, especially of the seasons. They feed on bread made from dourrah ; they drink a wine made from barley, in those dis- tricts where there are no vines. They eat fish, some of it dried in the sun, other kinds cured in drying-houses, close by the sea. Among birds, they prefer quails and ducks, and besides theso, some small birds di led raw. All other birds and fish that they have in their country, apart from those which they consider sacred, form part of their food, roasted or boiled, LXVni. At the banquets of the weallhy, when the eating is over, a man brings in a coffin, the wooden effigy of a dead body perfectly imitated by the sculptor and the painter, and ATrENDIX. 273 one or two cubits iu length. This the man shows to .each of the guests, aud, as he does so, he says : " Look upon thib" ; tlien drink and be merry, for such as thou seest it wilt thou be, after thy death." IjXXX. With the Lacedemoniaru* only do the Egyptians agree iu this other custom : young men when they meet their eJders, yield the path and pass aside to make way for them ; at their approach they rise from their seats. But in what follows, they do not resemble any Hellenic nation. Instead of saluting with the voice on the street, they do so bv lettinof their hand fall to the knee. LXXXI. They dress in hnen tunics with fringes around their legs ; they call these fringes calis>ris, and over the tunics they wear mantles of white wool. However, thoy do not entei the temples with the woolen garment on ; nor are these left on corpses to be buried with them that would be an act of impiety. In this respect, they chime in with the Orphic, or, as they are likewise called, the Bacchic traditions, which are equally observed by the Egyptians and by the Pythagoreans, since among the latter it is an impious act to bury in woolen tissues any one who htis been initiated m the my.^teries. A religious motive is ascriTjed to this custom. liXXXIV. In Egypt, the practice of medicine is divided into specialities, each physician devoting himself to one branch of disease, aud not to several. Phys.cians swarm everywhere, some for the eyes, others for the head, others for the teeth, others for the stomach, and still others for in- ternal disorders. LXXXV. Their acts of mourning and their funeral cer- emonies are after this fashion : when they lose a relative whom they greatly esteemed, all the women of the family, after having bedaubed their heads and faces with mire, leave the dead body in the house aud wander hither and thither through the town, beating their uncovered breasts and naked bosoms, in company with all those who hold relaUona of frieudiihiiJ with them. On the other hand, the men with 274 APPENDIX. uncovered breasts beat themselves in the same manner ; this done, they bear the body away to embalm it. LXXXVI. . There are persons entrusted with this business. It forms their profession. When the corpse has been ])rought to them, the embalmers show the friends of the de- ceased wooden models of corpses, imitated in painting, and they point out those that they consider the most worthy of attention, the name* of which I do not deem it proper to give in this place ; they then exhibit the second, which costs less, and finally the third, which is the cheapest of all. After this, they ask how they are desired to operate upon the corpse, and so soon as they agTee upon the style and the terms the relatives depart. The operators thus left to themselves proceed in the following manner to embalm in the best style. First, with a bent iron, they extract the brain through the nostrils, at least the greater part of it, and afterward the rest by the application of dissolvent injections. Then, with a sharpened Ethiopian stone, they cut open the sides of the corpse, take out all the intestines from the abdomen, wash the latter with palm wine, besprinkle it with powdered per- fumes, and at last sew it up, after having filled it with bruised myrrh of pure quahty, cinnamon and other perfumes, from among which incense alone is excluded. These opera- tions completed, they dry the body in carbonate of soda and leave it plunged in that for seventy days, but no longer ; they are not permitted to do so. At the expiration of these sev- enty days, they wash the corpse and wrap it up completely in bandages of the finest hnen saturated with gum, of which the Egyptians make great use instead of glue. The relatives then again take possession of the corpse, enclose it in a wooden case shaped like a human body, and place it standing against the wall in the burial chamber. This is the costliest style of embalming, LXXXVII. For those who prefer the middle method of smbalming, and desire to avoid heavy expense, the embalmers * Asiri. APPENDIX. 275 pitxseed in the following manner ; by means of syringes tUey inject cedar oil into the abdomen of the dead without opening it or removing the entrails, and they take care to retain the liquid in such manner that none of it may escape. They next jjlunge the body into carbonate of soda and leave it there for the time specified, and then cause the cedar oil which they first introduced, to issue from its cavities. The latter has strength enough to carry with it the intestines and the viscera, for it liquefies them all. Externally, the soda has dried up the flesh, and nothing remains of the dead man but hits skin and his bones : these operations concluded, they deliver the body and their task is over. LXXXVIU. The third style of embalming, for the ac- commodation of the poor, is this : the embalmers make an in- jection of horse-radish into the intestines, and dry the body in carbonate of soda for seventy days ; then they deliver it. XC. Whoever is found dead after having been seized by a crocodile, or swept away by the river, be he Egyptian or stjanger, and whatever the town where his body was picked up, is entitled to consecrated burial at the hands of the inhabi- tants. They perform the funeral rites in the costliest man- ner and deposit the body in then- burial chambers. Neither its friends nor its neighbors are permitted to touch it, but the priests of the Nile take charge of it and bury it as a more than human body. — Herodotus^ Book JI. The foregoing facts were gleaned by the historian of Hali- caruassus in the midst of Egyptian society when it had grown old and was in full decay : they may be completed by other information deduced from the paintings on the walls so abundant on the monuments which that same social or- ganization reared in the days of its youth and development. In this respect, what is there more curious or more striking from the point of view afforded by the private and civic life of the primitive Egyptians than the sepulchral grottoes of 276 APrENDix. Beni Hassan, excavated on the right bank of the Nile, nut far from the ancient Artemidos ? Below we give, accoidiug to CbampoUion, an enumeration of tlie subjects represented on the walls of these hjpogees. I. Agriculture. — Designs representing ploughing done by oxen or by human labor ; sowing, the treading of the ground bj rams, and not by pigs as Herodotus says ; five kinds oi carts ; digging and the harvest of grain and flax ; the sheaving of these different kinds of plants ; the stacking, the threshing and pounding, the measuring and the housing of the same in barns ; two designs of different kinds of large barns ; flax carried by asses ; a host of o'.her agTicultural txnls, and among them the gathering of the lotus ; the cul- tivation of the vine, the vintage, its transportation, the seed- ing, the winejjress of two kinds, one by manual power, the other by machinery ; the bottling of the wine, or putting up in jars, and its conveyance to the cellar ; the manufacture of shrub, etc., garden culture, the gathering of fruit, the cul- tivation of the onion, irrigation, etc. ; ah, like the following pictures, with explanatory hieroglyphic legends ; and, more- over, the superintendent of the country house and his clerks. II. Trades and Manufactures. — A collection of paintings, mostly in colors, so as to the better determine the nature of the articles, and representing the carver in stone and the carver in wood, the painter of statues, the painter of archi- tectural objects ; furniture and cabinet work, the painter with his pallet executing a picture ; scribes and clerks busied with writings of all kinds ; workmen at the quarries carry- ing blocks of stone ; the potter's trade with all its operations ; workmen kneading clay with their feet, others with their hands ; the placing of the clay on the conical wheel and the wheel on the turning lathe, the potter making the belly and the neck of the vase, etc. : the first baking in the kiln, the second drying in the oven ; makers of canes, oars and pad- dles ; cabinet makers ; joiners ; carpenters ; wood-sawyers ; curriers ; the leather and morocco dyers ; the shoemaker ; spinning ; the weaving of cloths of different manufuctui'e ; ATFENDIX. 277 the glassblower and all his oi^erations ; the goldsmith, the jeweller ; the blacksmith. ITT, Tke Military Caste. — The education of the militai-y caste and all its gymnastic exercises, represented in mere than 200 pictures, in which are reproduced all the positions and attitudes that two skillful antagonists can assume, attack- ing, defending, receding, advancing, standing up, j^rostrate et J. ; people may see from these whether Egyptian art con- tented itself with mere profile designs, legs joined and arms tightly pressed against the haunches. I copied all this curious series of naked warriors struggling together ; and, besides, some sixty figures representing sol- diers of every arm and of every rank ; sham fights ; a siege ; the tortoise and the battering ram ; mihtary punishments ; a field of battle and the prexjarations for a militaiy meal ; finally, the manufacture of spears, javehns, bows, arrows, war clubs, l)attle-axes, etc. IV. Singing, Music and Dancing. — A picture representing a vocal and instrumental concert ; a singer whom a musician accompanies on the harp, is seconded by two choirs, one of four men, the other of five women, and the latter beat the time of the measure with their hands : it is a whole opera ; harp players of both sexes ; players of the German fiute, of the flageolet, of a species of conch shell, etc. ; dancers ex- ecuting different figures with the names of the steps they are dancing ; in fine, a very curious collection of designs repre- senting dancing women (or ahnes of ancient Egypt) dancing, singing, playing tennis and performing divers feats cf gtreugth and skill. V. A considerable number of designs representing the education of animals; cowherds with oxen of all kinds, cows, calves ; milking ; butter and cheese making ; goatherds ; keepers of asses ; shepherds and their sheep ; scenes relating to the veterinary art ; finally, the bam yai'd, comjDrising the management of a great variety of geese and ducks, and of a species of swan that had been domesticated in ancient Egypt. 278 ATPENDIX. Vn. Designs relative to games, exercises, and a7nusemenis.. Among these may be noticed a sort of " hot cockles," "sledge-hammer," jackstraws, the game of pegs driven into the ground, etc. ; different games of strength ; the chase of wild beasts, a picture representing a grand hunt on the desert, and in which from 15 to 20 kinds of quadrupeds are depicted ; scenes representing the return from the chase ; the game carried in dead or brought alive ; many pictures rep- resenting the pursuit of birds with the net ; one of these paintings is of very large dimensions and is filled out with all the colors, and the movement of the original. Finally, drawings on a large scale, of the different kinds of traps to take birds, are given : these instruments of the chase are painted, separately, in some hypogees. Then, there are many pictures that relate to fishing ; line angling ; the line and fishing rod ; fishing with the trident or bident ; with the net ; the preparation of fish, etc. VIII. Domestic Justice. — Under this head, I have arranged some fifteen designs of bas-reliefs representing offences committed by servants ; the arrest of the culprit : the cha,rge against him ; his defence ; his conviction by the superintendents of the household ; his condemnation and jjunishment, which is restricted to the bastinado, the minutes of which, along witli all the particulars, have to be deposited with the body of the trial in the hands of the master of the house by his superintendent. IX. The House and Housekeeping. — I have brought together in this series, which is very numerous already, everything that relates to private or interior home life. These very curious designs represent, 1st, different Egyp- tian liouses, more or less sumptuous ; 2nd, vases of dif- ferent forms, utensils and furniture, all colored, because the colors invariably indicate the material ; 3d, a splendid palanquin ; 4th, a kind of small room with folding doors borne along on a sledge and serving as vehicles for the great personages of Egyjpt in ancient times ; 5th, monkeys, cats and APPENDIX. 279 dogs wliich formed part of the household, as well as dwarfs and other human deformities who served to clear the spleen of the Egyptian lords 1500 years B. C. just as they did for the old style barons in Europe 1500 years after the birth of the Saviour ; 6th, the officers of a great establishment, su- perintendents, clerks, etc. ; 7th, servants carrying in suppUes of all kinds for the table ; the maids likewise bringing various eatables ; 8th, the mode of slaughtering beef and cutting it up for home use ; 9th, a series of designs representing cooks preparing dishes of diiferent kinds ; 10th and last, servants bringing the dishes ah prepared to the master's table. XII. Navigriiion. — An assortment of designs representing the construction of vessels and barks of different kinds, and the games of the sailors, altogether analogous to the contests of strength and skill that take place on the Seine on great holidays. — Champolliori' s Letters from Egypt and Nubia. In a crypt of the strange necropohs that has furnished these details, the mortal remains of a governor of the nome of Sail had been sealed up for all eternity. The deceased in- forms us, by the history of his life written on the walls of his eternal abode, what were the duties and conduct of an impor- tant functionary of the mihtary caste, at that remote period. ... As a general, he had accompanied the king (an User- tesen of the 15th dynasty) into the land of Cush, and had penetrated to the extremities of the earth. Subsequently, at the head of a troop of 400 men, he had brought back from the mines on the Peninsula of Sinai a convoy of gold to the city of Keft (Coptos.) As nomarch (or governor of a nom^ he had earned the praises of his sovereign and the gratitude of his constituency. " I," he says, " was a master full of goodness and amiabil- ity ; a governor who loved his country. For years I exer- cised my power in the nome of Sah. All the works for the royal houiie were executed through my care. Thanks wera 280 APPENDIX. extended tc me on the part of the royal house for the tri- bute brought in by me in horned cattle. 1 carried the iiv li of all my toil to the royal liouse. Nothing was stolen from me in all my workshoj^s. I labored and the whole nome was in activity. Never was a little child distressed by me ; liever was a widow maltreated by me ; never have I troubled a Usherman on the waters or a shepherd in the pasture fields. Never was there a pentarch (foreman of five) whose men I turned aside from their work. Never was there a scarcity in my time, never a starving mouth under my administra- tion, even if these were famine years. For, see, I had tilled all the fields of the nome of Sah clear to its frontiers on the north and on the south. I made its inhabitants live upon its products, and thus there were no starving people in it. I gave equally to the widow and to the married woman, nor did I set the great before the httle in the distributions that I made. And, see, the Nile was in great inundation ; the owners of the fields and of the orchards were full of hope for a fertile yeai", and I did not cut the branches of the canal, etc. etc." The last part of this curious inscription in which the nom- arch, referring to a famme that took place during the years of his administration, makes a panegyric in his own behaK, for having warded off the miseries of the dearth by his be- nevolent impartiality toward every one, has struck some ob- servers as a pendant to the history of Joseph in Eg^^pt and his seven famous years of famine in that country. A mural scene on the same tomb recalls still more vividlj the Biblical legend. It represents the arrival in Egypt of a famUy of the Semitic race of the Aa7n or Ammonites. Forced by causes unknown, by a famine, perhaps, they have, like the sons of Jacob, abandoned their country ; they present themselv. s, thirty-seven persons in number — men, women and childi'en — before Chuumhotep, the governor of the nome of Sah, to solicit help or aai asylum at his hands. A temple scribe called JVe/erhotep is offering to the nomarch a sheet of papyrus covered with an inscription beai'ing at r-llillil APPENDIX. 2S3 the top the date of the year six of Usertescn IL, and the number of the strangers. The chief or sJieik of tlic little tribe, named Ahu-sa, first respectfully approaches the person of Ghnumhotep and otfers him a young wild-goat as a present. Behind him are his companions armed with spears, clubs and bows ; their women clad, in richly colored tunics, and their children carried, in wicker paniers slung over the backs of donkeys. The musician and minstrel of the cltiu closes the march j^layiug on a sort of lyre. Ai'e not these the pioneers, or, if the term be preferable, the forlorn hope of the vanguard of those nomadic hordes which were, at a later period, to inundate the valley of the Nile? X. The details collected by Herodotus with regard ta the civil and private life of the Egyptians are of nine ceni-uries later date than the epoch of Rameses Mei-Amoun. Those which the grottoes of Beni-Hassan yield us relate to genera- tions long preceding that conqueror. Nevertheless, the lapse of time does not api3ear to have introduced any notice- able dissimilarities between them. We think that we can fill them out with ideas upon the connection of temples with temples and the diplomatic relations of sovereigns with sov- ereigns at a period of history when the sceptre of Egypt was still held by the Pharaohs of the name and blood of Ilameses. These items of information are yielded us by a stele found at Thebes among the ruins of a temple of KJions, a divinity who apijears to have been the object of a special kind of worship, and to have enjoyed a renown that was propagated as far as the centre of Asia. THE STEIiE OF THE TEMPLE OF KHONS. .... His Majesty Rameses XII. having gone to Naha- rina (Mesopotamia) to coUect the annual tribute of that 284: APPENDIX. region , the princes and chiefs of each province came to prostrate themselves before him, and the natives of inferior rank, stooping beneath burthens of gold, of lapis lazuli, of copper and of precious woods, drew near to lay them at his feet. The King of Bouchten (Echntana according to Dr. lirugsch) came, in his turn, to do homage to His Majesty and to solicit peace. He had with him his eldest daughter, a young and handsome woman, who at cmce captivated the lieart of Rameses more than did anything else. His Majesty gave her the title of Ureal Queen, the name of Ra-Neferu, and conducted her to Egypt, where she was received with solemn pomp. In the fifteenth year of his reign, when His Majesty was celebrating at Thebes — that capital and mistress of the na- iions — the grand panegyric of his father Ammon, the sun, lie distributor of thrones, behold the arrival of a messenger /earing rich presents from the King of Bouchten for the queen, was announced to his Majesty. On being admitted to the presence of Rameses XIL, the envoy saluted His Majesty in these words : " Glory to thee, oh sun of nine peoples ; grant to us the breath of life 1" Then prostratmg himself, he added : " The king my mas- ter sends me to Thy Hohness because of Benten-rest, the young sister of the Queen Ba-Neferu. A secret malady consumes her ; will Thy Holiness deign to send to her one of those men who know all things, such as there are around thee ?" Then the King said : "Let there be assembled before me *^he college of sacred philosophers and the doctors skilled in ^.ysteries. So soon as they had all hostened to stand in array in His Majesty's presence, he said to them : " I have summoned ycu to hear and to obey. Point out to me the one of all of you whom you look upon as the firmest of heart, the quickest in understanding antl the most skillful of hand." The recorder of sacred writings, Toth-em-hebi, stepped forth from the ranks and bowed before His Majesty. He ArrENDix. 285 ira mediately received orders to repair to the country of Boiicbten with the royal messeDger. But when this master of wisdom and science had arrived at Bouchten, and was placed in the presence of the spirit that beset the Princess Benten-rest, he found himself itiS inferior and dared not engage in contest with it. The King of Bouchten thereupon sent another messenger to Phai"aoh, saying : ** Sovereign lord ! oh my master ! deign to command that a god may be brought to the country of Bouchten to combat this evil spirit." His Hohness was then still at Thebes, celebrating, in the twenty-sixth year of his reign, the i^anegyric of Ammon. He thereupon went to the temple of the Theban god E hons-Nef erhotep, and thus appealed to him : " O my be- neficent Lord 1 I come to thee on behalf of the daughter of the King of Bouchten. If thou wouldst command Khonsou, the giver of counsel who subdues rebels, to go to the coun- try of Bouchten, endowng him with some of thy divine power, I will cause that god to be borne thither to save the daughter of the king my father-in-law." Khons-Neferhotep, the patron of Thebes, acquiesced in His Majesty's wishes, and, four times over, imparted a por- tion of his divine virtue to the god Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher, who, enclosed in a brilhant naos, and placed upon a grand bari, proceeded upon a broad car toward the country of Bouchten, escorted by many horsemen riding on the right and on the left of him. When, at the end of a year and five months, the god Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher arrived in the country of Bouchten, the king, accompanied by his chieftains and his soldiers, came forth to meet him, and, prostrating himself before the sacred bari, cried aloud with his forehead in the dust: "Hail to thee, who comest to us by order of the King Kameses !" When the god had reached the place where the Princess Benten-rest was, the spirit that beset her humiliated itself before Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher, and said to him : " Welcome to thee, mighty god, conqueror of those who rebel ! The strong city of Bouchten is thy domain ; its inhabitants bow 286 APPENDIX. down before thee, aud for myself, I am thy slave ; I shall ba no hindrance to the piu'pose of thy journey, but shall return to the place whence I came. Only command the King of Bouchten to make a sacrifice in my honor." Then Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher of Thebes said graciously to his prophet : "Let the King of Bouchten make a sacrifice honorable to this spirit." While the god Khonsou and the spirit were thus conver- sing, the King of Bouchten, filled with a holy fear, was trembling in the midst of his soldiers. He celebrated a great festival in honor of Khonsou and of the spirit, made rich ofierings to them, and his daughter Benten-rest was in stantly cured, and the spirit withdrew whither he saw fit. Then the King of Bouchten was seized with extreme de- hght, as also were all his subjects. Then he said : ** This god ought to remain in the country of Bouchten. I will not let him go back to Egypt. " Thus Khonsou-Pa-ar-se- cher was kept three years and nine months in Bouchten ; out at the end of that time, behold the King of Bouchten, ly^ing in his bed, saw this god leaving his naos in the form of a golden sparrow-hawk, and extending his wings to fly to- ward Egypt. And the king, when he awoke, was seized with an inward sickness. He then said to the priest of Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher : " Let him leave us quickly and return to Egypt : cause his car to be made ready I" When the King of Bouchten caused this god to depart for Egypt, he gave him numerous and costly presents, and sol- diers and horses in great quantity. And when the god Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher had reached the temple of Khons- Neferhotep, he ofiered him the presents which the King of Bouchten had given him in the form of all sorts of good things, and kept nothing for himself. Khonsou-Pa-ar-secher of Thebes thus returned to his temple in peace in the yeai 33, on the nineteenth day of the month of Mechir, of tha King Barneses XTT., reigning eternally Uke the sun. APrENDIX. 287 O < <1 o I — I o o o o o o GO ;^ HH CO P2H o "3 2 63 -a tE ^ C =1-1 I O) en a P 53 :3 « o 0) . -»j -^ fQ •« -<-' _, ® a; O -u ^J ^ -3 a -*-» c3 •S O cS ri M a, ., .a pi -/ -*j «►? o •r-t -M ^ o 43 ;-> 00 JD m 4) OJ rrt "S a ® p - a S fl aj », 4) ^ o SO X ■-" _ o -J a a; :S 3'S ;a . ■^ a •- sj o a t- o ra tn OS go |§? '-' ar= o 00 © _ *■ .a 9 2 a D '-' -^ IN a sii 01 00 Is o ° ■^ a ° "5 " 3 o ^ a a"^ :i ?S Ha ;- --I = O ■^ a s^ a o cs a a s-- J- ■ H c3,:8 OH * '. 00 00 CO ® ® t- . a^ «3 o o a cs ^ l| S U a a. c ._§ g H ^ 3 _ ja r- ^ a L, •"^i _ o ° « . 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UJ 0) ft 0/ ,3 ft 3 43 a QQ ^ ^- • •» f % APPENDIX. 289 o < a m xn n o < xn O n o OS d -t a- o £ og „. a"' ob S!^ ro « « ;3 s .2 ^ * J OS ® r; ?3 t, pi"3 a) s -' - T! :-. o 3 -^ x; o > C to a,S .,.o o2 ? o s ^ -^'S ~ ^ Q <=-^cT^c>?2a5S.^ ■^ - "^ ^-2 -s ^ £ o 3 c 9 to o a) « — " a a 2'Sr'So2£;:-a* a-l SS a^ "^ a a :S O - a 2 3 a =* c."S a a 5? .S S o o ? » X 3-^-5 -^-gSs'^Sv.a^ i 2 a « « a) * a^ ^'^r^ aj o (O e3 ^ = c ^- 2 a a' CS 'S -5 .2 "i t ^ .M 2 o. es ""S a a a — ^ .o a .a □ a ;t 2, -a « aSSau^.'ii^ 5.9 a '^aSSl^'I'Si-^'^ cs-ir 9. fl 00 C5 o CI izi g o o H 5 03 t a> o S • e3 OS C3 •3 « "* CD 93 o-a S 9 •5 -s aj "^ PhPQxH on cS lO s! =5 e ci -" © « — oc e: eS tB S 00 OS r; J -2 a- « 5 = i^ a aD;z;aBoMSHO QQ d « •*-» C . jj cS . pC t- ai •' * - ^ ^ ■ « ^ . 0-2 u u C5 c-a-ES-i^-i: 0) a a o a a o S « 2 l3 j3 2 '^ 5 .X a o 5 2 ^ 5 » s 290 APPENDIX. A O M H CO n o CO M o a> •s a CO c3 a >» I 5 S o AS ^ 2? ■? ? 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