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 Eameses Meiamoun, irum the Alabaster Statue in the 
 Museum of the Louvre. 
 
WONDERS OF ART AND ARCHEOLOGY 
 
 Rameses the Great 
 
 OR 
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO 
 
 Translated from the French of F. De Lanoye 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 
 
 -> 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<l 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE CA^IPAIGNS OF KAMESES THE GREAT. 
 
 PAGV 
 
 Ibe Basin of the Nile and its First Colonists. — Races of Men 
 known in Egypt Fifteen Centuries before the Birth of Christ. 
 — Pre-Historic Chronology of the Egyptian Empire. — 
 Menes, the First Founder of a Dynasty. — Discordance 
 between Epigraphy and Geology. — The Ii-niption of the 
 Hycsos.— National liivalries and Wars. —The Eighteenth 
 Dynasty 1 
 
 E.AJIESES n. 
 
 Rameses n. — Mei-Amoun the Great, otherwise known as 
 Sesostris. — The Names of Rameses ; his Childhood ; his 
 Youth ; his Coronation. — A Consecration Thirtj'-ihree 
 Centuries Ago. — Social Rank in Egypt, and the People, 
 at that Period of its History 63 
 
 THE CAMPAIGNS OF RAl^IESES THE GREAT. 
 
 Situation, Wealth and Population of Egypt, on the Accession 
 of Rameses. — The plausible Motives for his Expeditions. — 
 Two Razzias at an Interval of Thirty-three Centuries. — De- 
 parture of Rameses for Asia. — His Ai-my. — Testimony of 
 Tacitus, Herodotus, Strabo and the Monuments. — A Bulla? 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 tin of Violory, and a Poet Laureate of the Fourteenth Cen- 
 tury before our Era. — The Battle of Atesh. — The return of 
 liameBes. 97 
 
 THE MONUMENTS OF KAMESES THE GREAT. 
 
 The Testimony of Herodotus, ofDiodorus, and of the Bible. — 
 Memphis and Thebes. — the Great Days of Royalty. — An 
 Artesian "Well in the time of Rameses. — The Land of 
 Gush. — The Spears of Ipsamboul. — The old Age of Ram- 
 eses. — Skeletons of Oxen and Skeletons of Kings. — Darius 
 and the Statue of Ramesea - i.61 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 L The Cushites 249 
 
 IL The Temple of Denderah 25C 
 
 IIL The Ancient Bed of the Nile 252 
 
 IV. The Shepherd King Apapias and the God Sutekli 253 
 
 V. The Names of Rameses IL 254 
 
 VI. The Images of Ancestors 257 
 
 VIL The Army of Rameses IL— the Military Caste 261 
 
 VUL The Robus 263 
 
 IX. Manners and Customs of the Egyptians 264 
 
 X. The Stele of the Temple of Khons 281 
 
 XL Chronological Canon, or Table of the Dyn^ties and 
 
 Kings of Eg\-pt. . 287 
 

 EGYPT BEFORE THE TIME OF 
 
 RAMESES. 
 
 The Basin of the Nile and its First Colonists. — Races of Men 
 known in Egypt Fifteen Centuries before the Birth of Christ.— 
 Pre-Hifitoric Chronology of the Egyptian Empire. — Menes, the 
 First Founder of a Dynasty. — Discordance between Epigraphy 
 ami Greology. — The Irruption of the Hycsos. — National Rivalries 
 and Wars. — The Eighteenth Dynasty. 
 
 •TEN the traveller from Europe directs his 
 course toward the southeast auglo of the Medi- 
 teiTanean, he must not expect to see the African 
 country reveal itself to his gaze in those majestic 
 aspects to which the Alpine landscapes of Liguria, 
 the Tyrrhenian Islands, Italy or Greece may have 
 accustomed him. Upon that part of the African 
 coast which directly confronts Asia Minor, there 
 is nothing of the kind ; a reddish mist, due, 
 no doubt, to the rarefaction of the atmosphere, 
 heated by the combined action of the sand and 
 
^ EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 tlio sun, is the first indication of the vicinity of 
 land that appears on the horizon : the second is 
 presented by the sight of a few palm-tree tops 
 reilected liigh in the air by tlie refraction of the 
 vapory mass. At length, almost at the moment 
 when you are about to touch it, the low, sandy 
 beach that sustains them is seen, like a thin, red- 
 dish line, a feeble boundary between the deep 
 green of the sea and the pale blue of the heavens. 
 Beyond that line, marshes whose extent has 
 earned them the title of lakes, and moving sands, are 
 forever renewing with the fertihty of the soil, and 
 the cultivation bestov/ed upon it, the anti(jue strug- 
 gle between the two brothers Typhon and Asiri.* 
 Then, behind that second zone, a wide plain, 
 almost level with the water and intersected by 
 numerous canals, extends toward the south, grad- 
 ually narrowing as it goes, up to the point where 
 these canals and the river which feeds them diverge 
 in a triangle toward the sea. This river is the Nile : 
 this plain is its Delta, a tract periodically submerged 
 for three months at a time, bv the waters that have 
 formed it, — -" a carpeting of verdure, of flowers and 
 
 * This we think is the more exact spelling of the classic 
 Osiris. Asiri = Asiira, one of the oldest titles employed 
 by man to designate God. See E. Biirnouf's Commentary 
 on the Yaena : and Jean Reynaud's study on Zoroaster. 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. - 6 
 
 of rich harvests from November until March,— a 
 cracked and burning soil, laden with a bhxck, im- 
 palpable dust during the remainder of the year," — 
 says Amrou in a letter to the Caliph Omar. 
 
 At the apex of the Delta, the horizon ascends and 
 gradually contracts from the southeast toward 
 the west. At that point, the crests of the hills 
 which, all the way from the ridges of Upper Africa, 
 shut in the narrow vaUey of the Nile between their 
 parallel chains and shelter it from the continually 
 threatening invasions of the deserts that it crosses, 
 subside and are at length lost beneath the sand. 
 At the foot of the Mokattan, the last broad 
 slope of the Arabian chain, stretches the modern 
 city of Cairo. Nearly opposite, on the left bank 
 of the river, a saUent angle of the Libyan chain 
 serves as a pedestal to the eternal pyramids whose 
 gigantic shadows the setting sun flings far over the 
 groves of palm trees that now cover the space where 
 Memphis stood. 
 
 " Placed at the entrance of the valley of the Nile," 
 says Chateaubriand in Les Marfyrs, " they look Hke 
 the mourning portals of Egypt, or rather like some 
 triumphal monument reared to Death to commemo- 
 rate his victories. Pharaoh is there with all his 
 people, and their sepulchres are around him !" 
 
6 F.QYPT 3300 TEARS AGO. 
 
 II. 
 
 Six degrees of latitude separate this point from 
 the one where almost immediately under the 
 tropic circle, the Nile, traversing the granitic rocks 
 of Syone and of Philae, penetrates the Egyptian 
 territory. Beyond, toAvard the South, extends Nubia. 
 In this space of more than four hundred and fifty 
 miles in length, by a breadth of nearly twenty, the 
 brilliant glow of the sky, the freshness of the waters, 
 the fertility of the plain and the aridity of its borders ; 
 the extreme pettiness of all the traces that modern 
 man has left of his presence, and the colossal seal 
 of the antique generations, — contrasts of every kind, 
 in a word, — seem to be accumulated, to strike the 
 beholder with prolonged astonishment. 
 
 Here the geologist may recognize, as he does in 
 the Delta, a conquest won by the dry land over the 
 sea, — a gulf fiUed up, since the last great astronom- 
 ical revolution of our globe, by deposits of clay 
 that the lapse of ages had heaped there after it had 
 been washed down, each spring, from the abrupt 
 slopes of Abyssinia and from those other moun- 
 tains, unknown until yesterday, but suspected, for 
 two thousand years, to be in existence, which, away 
 beyond the Equator, conceal the long-sought -for 
 sources of the Nila 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. - 7 
 
 Here, too, the antiquary and the poet may con- 
 template the most gigantic efforts of plastic art 
 that any race has left behind it : temples, palaces, 
 tombs, obelisks and colossal figures half ruined and 
 buried beneath the sand; crypts cut out in the 
 solid rock ; catacombs ; cities of the dead perpetuat- 
 ing in the very entrails of the desert mountains, 
 those ruins which were the cities of the living ! — 
 a long avenue of fragments and remains dating 
 back to an epoch whereof history lacked the an- 
 nals more than twenty centuries ago, but which the 
 correlation of the monuments, the religious notions 
 and the institutions of an entire people with the 
 surroundings in the midst of which it grew, seem 
 to characterize so peculiarly that no other epoch 
 could comprehend or explain its fundamental mean- 
 ing and creative idea, much less successfully attempt 
 to take them fur a model. 
 
 III. 
 
 It was reserved for the generation that is dying 
 out to penetrate, and not in vain, the depths of 
 these enigmatical ruins ; to disentomb from them 
 the past, and to restore to it the real aspect that 
 
8 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 once it wore, along with a part of its lost chronol- 
 ogy- 
 
 Thanks to the acquisitions of modern science, 
 
 for whose progress the genius and the blood of 
 France have helped to clear the way ; thanks to 
 the unhoped-for deciphering of those monumental 
 inscriptions through which the Egyptians of forty 
 centuries asfo seem still to converse with tlie men of 
 our own time, the historian can at length present 
 to them upon their sepulchres testimony more cer- 
 tain and reliable than classic antiquity, in the days 
 
 of its decline, could offer in their behalf. 
 
 Although the idea of again securing the thread, 
 
 a hundred times broken, of Eg3'ptian tradition, 
 
 must be once for all abandoned, we have it in our 
 
 power to reconstruct the mo^t brilliant part of it 
 
 almost to perfection. The period that it covers 
 
 flourished in times which nations the most jealous of 
 
 their antiquity do not, in their autlientic records, 
 
 pretend to have attained. 
 
 Henceforth, enabled to appreciate the weight of 
 
 Egypt in the balance of the world, historical criti- 
 cism is called upon, also, to judge of tlie manner in 
 
 which she has fulfilled the functions that seemed to 
 have been assigned to her by Providence, viz., the 
 protection of nascent civilization against the native 
 barbarism of the wandering tribes that hung around 
 
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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. 
 
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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<jph g I'dst from temple to temple elong hor 
 s;icr'^d ih tor, thai) inured to warlike cyercisjes and the 
 din of l)attlc ; bcttur skilled ir hardlirg the lioo 
 that fortiJi^GS the soil ar»d the chisel that carves 
 decoraiions in granite for the hours of j eace, than 
 in brandishing the bow and shield which would 
 have &aved her in the hour of peril, Egypt fell com- 
 plottji} prune before the Hycsos and disappeared 
 for a time beneath the billows of invasion. 
 
 The latter, sweeping all before it with barbarian 
 fury, frenzied as it was by the fanaticism of an 
 image-breaking creed, halted only at the limits 
 vhicL nature herself had set to its easy conquest. 
 Thosu limits were the rocky mountain ranges 
 that a little below the Tropic, and parallel to it, ox- 
 tended from the Libyan desert to the shores of the 
 Ked Sea. 
 
■ , 5 > 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<h\'e i*iStored 
 accciaing lo tne Jigyptian Commission) 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. -" 57 
 
 slons. Favored by these disorders, Asia shook off 
 the yoke of the Pharaohs, aud Seti I., the Sethos of 
 historians, found the revolt pushed on as far as the 
 gates of Lower Egypt, so that he had to begin over 
 again the conquest of Syria. The factories that 
 signahzed the first years of his reign appear to have 
 re-estabhshed the Egyptian supremacy over tho 
 Asiatic provinces, for some length of time. 
 
 The grand hypostyhc hall of Karnak, and the 
 magnificent tomb discovered by Belzoni, are majes- 
 tic monuments, that sufficently attest the tranquilhty 
 of the country, the wealth of the monarch, and the 
 high perfection of the arts under the reign of Se- 
 thos 
 
 But the glory of these names and of these deeds 
 is founded, for posterity, upon the still more daz- 
 zling splendor of the second period of that grand 
 Egyptian cycle which, until our day, was entirely 
 comprised in the legend of Sesostris, but which 
 is henceforth eclipsed by the reign, the name, 
 the monuments of Hameses the Great. 
 
E AMESES II. 
 
 Rameses n. — Mei-Amoun the Great, otherwise known as Sesos- 
 trifl. — The Names of Eameses ; his Childhood ; his Ycuth ; his 
 Coronation. —A Consecration Thirty-three Centuries Ago. — So- 
 cial Kank in Egypt, and the People, at that Period of its His- 
 tory. 
 
 I. 
 
 The name of the man whose place we are seeking 
 
 tc fix, ai:id v/hcse s.ctivG part in history we would 
 make plain to out readers recalls tlie exaltation of 
 
 human personal position to the highest limits of 
 pride and power, and the most excessive concentra- 
 ticn, m one individual, of all the vit?! forces of a 
 peoplo that historical annals record. Yet, the 
 name and the ir..ciivid:;iai referred to^ had remained 
 enveloped in doubt a,nd uncertainty until our day. 
 In vain have the chisel and the pencil perpetuat- 
 ed both upon the finest monuments in the valley of 
 the Nils. la vein in the basreliefs that adorn 
 
62 EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 the sanctuaries of tlie temples and the halls of the 
 palaces, whereof the great Barneses was the found- 
 er, has the hyperbole of flattery been pushed so far 
 as to cause the hkeness of the supreme Egyptian 
 deity, Ammon-Ka, to appear among those of the 
 monarch. Ammon bestows the empire of the 
 world, both sea and land, upon him, " his well-be~ 
 loved child, the guardian sun of justice, Rameses 
 II." Along with the image of this heathen god, is 
 seen that of Sethos, the god of war, " who promises 
 him a secure and upright hfe upon the throne of 
 the sun, forever." With these are also found the 
 portraits of Maut (primeval and prolific Night), and 
 of Isis and Anuke, who dandle Ammon on their 
 knees, refresh this singular banthng with their 
 milk, and endow him, by wtue of this divine nour- 
 ishment, with " a future prolonged for endless 
 periods of panegyrics."* .... Strange con- 
 fusion and extinction of all things here below ! 
 through causes of which the present condition of 
 society permits us to get only a ghmpse,t the name 
 and personality of Rameses Mei-Amoun became 
 
 * Panegyrics were the grand state occasions when the 
 farae of the princes and the glory of the gods of Egj-pt 
 were publicly extolled and celebrated with processions, 
 cliantings and festivities. 
 
 t See Appendix V. 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 63 
 
 mixed Rp, gradually, with those of his father and of 
 two of his descendants. Greece, that grand voice 
 which fills the trumpet of fame, knew nothing of 
 him excepting the mytliical remembrances that 
 emerged from this confusion, and which Manetho, 
 the only annahst of his native country, could not or 
 would not clear away. The written history of an- 
 tiquity contains but one exact mention of him, and 
 this it owes to Tacitus ; and it has required all tlie 
 progress of modern science applied to the researches 
 of the past to enable some of our contemporaries to 
 exhume the real name of the Egyptian hero, and 
 the true part that belongs to him in the furrow 
 which the old land has worn through the years of 
 antiquity. This they accomplished at last, when 
 thirty centuries had rolled away, by disputing with 
 the sands of the desert, the monumental legends of 
 Nubia and the Thebais. 
 
 Yet, after all, it matters but httle to the history 
 of humanity whether Kameses II. was a member 
 of the eighteenth dynasty, as Champollion thought, 
 or vnth his grandfather Eameses I., his father Seti 
 I., and Menephta and Seti II., his son and grand- 
 son, made up the nineteenth dynasty, as some 
 of the successors of the above-named writer hold. — 
 What interests us, at our great distance in time 
 from Rameses. is to form some idea of the poHticaJ 
 
64: EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 and social condition of the world wlien lie was sum- 
 moned to agitate it with the sceptre and the sword: 
 and also to comprehend the elemants that had pre- 
 pared the state of things of which he was, as it 
 were, the consequence, and also those the germs of 
 which he left behind him. We have already, in our 
 former book, endeavored to sot forth the first ; and 
 in the following pages we shall strive to complete 
 our review by extending it to the second. 
 
 n. 
 
 Son of Seti I. and of the Queen Twea — the 
 second wife of that prince — Ramescs Mei-Amoun 
 must have been born durmg the quarter of a cen- 
 tury that preceded the year 1400 before onr Ei'a. 
 The long duration attributed to his reign, and the 
 place that Moses held after him in chronoogy, do 
 not admit of the date of this event falling any later. 
 It was, says Diodorus, the occasion of an act macjni-' 
 fi(ent and truly royal. The recital that the Greek 
 historian has transmitted to us on this subject is 
 tinged with the marvellous, as his readers may re- 
 member, the dream in which a god announces to Pha- 
 raoh that the empire of the Earth is i)romised to the 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. ' 65 
 
 cliild just born ; tlie means conceived by the liappy 
 fatlier to prepare his son for this high destin^^ ; all 
 the yonng Egyptians born on the same day with 
 the httle prince, gratuitously furnished with nurses 
 and teachers, subsequently brought together around 
 him and with him subjected to a complete educa- 
 tion and discipline, made common to them all, so 
 that he might, one day, find in the companions and 
 the studies of his childhood, instruments devoted 
 to him and worthy of his designs as a man and his 
 glory as a King. Then, Arabia and Libya con- 
 quered; their deserts traversed and their Avild 
 beasts subdued, formed, "so to speak, the climax of 
 this masculine education, and, as it were, the first 
 essay in the field made by the prince and his young 
 brethren in . arms* 
 
 If, in the monuments discovered, nothing has 
 been found to confirm the legendary part of this 
 narrative, at the same time nothing has been found 
 to invalidate it. History sees no objection there to 
 her admitting that Seti was the fortunate adversary 
 of the Asiatic nations, and that, in one of his tri- 
 umphs, he was enabled to display the images and 
 captives taken from forty-eight of them whom he 
 had subdued, the prisoners saluting him and ap- 
 plauding him as tlie son cf the Sun, the Lord of dia- 
 dems, iJw favorite of FhtaJij the good Deity, sovereiyn 
 
66 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 of two ivorlds and eternal as the Sun itself J" That such 
 a man as this should have dreamed still greater 
 things for his son, and that he should have surround- 
 ed the boy's education with all sorts of precau- 
 tions and all the incitements that could favor his 
 designs, when, at that age of humanity, he had 
 power exalted to the height of divine control at his 
 disposal, is not, by any means, incredible. 
 
 Still more : the monuments show us Barneses as- 
 sociated with the crown from his earliest infancy, 
 and receiving the homage of the Egyptians while 
 in his cradle. " You were yet in the egg," his sub- 
 jects say to him, " and you had the honors of a 
 prince. IVJuh still a very little cliildj luearing plaited 
 
 hair, no monument was made without you At 
 
 the age of ten, you commanded armies^ This is 
 an inscription of the year III. In fact, there are 
 portraits of Kameses in a child's di'ess ; the double 
 crown is on his head, and he still carries his finger 
 at his mouth, the symbol adopted to designate in- 
 fancy.* 
 
 * At the Miisenm of the Louvre in Paris may be seen in 
 case C, in the Historic Hall, on the first floor, two has 
 rehefs representing Eameses II. In one of them the prince 
 is aheady a youth : he is standing near a hon, with a bow in 
 his hand ; but he still wears the i^lait of hair, the distin- 
 guishing emblem that was laid aside on attaining manhood. 
 In the other fragment, Barneses IT., still a mere infant, ia 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEAHS AGO. . 0? 
 
 III. 
 
 The monumenl:s, while thej are silent with regard 
 to the termination of Seti's reign, and his death, 
 have transmitted to us details concerning the con- 
 secration ceremonial of the Pharaohs of his dynasty, 
 which enable us, without maldng any great archaic 
 efforts, to retrace the scene of his son's coronation. 
 At the moment when the existing generation is 
 dy^ng out around us, while it looks on with coldness 
 and moclvjry at the last essays of monarchy now 
 dilapidated by time and deprived of credit by the 
 progress of ideas, it may not prove uninteresting, 
 perhaps, to see what it was at the outset in the ages 
 of monarchic fervor and popularity. Nothing, it 
 seems to us, enables one to appreciate the distance 
 traversed so perfectly, as to reascend the stream 
 of time, m fancy, to the period when society was in 
 its youth, and the masses of men, well or ill con- 
 ducted during their passage through hfe, rolled 
 along inert, fi'om the cradle to the tomb, in blind 
 
 nevertheless King, as the urce us, viper or nazha, -which sur- 
 mouuts his crest, and the titles carved around him, bear wit- 
 ness. He wears the long dangUng tress, and carries his fin- 
 ger at his mouth, as a token of childhood. 
 
68 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 adoration of their guides ; when human thought, 
 shut up in the depths of the temples, had no other 
 perception of the chvine ideal than in objects 
 of surprise and terror — the brutalities of mat- 
 ter in nature, and in humanity, the tyranny of 
 Kings. When, after the 72 days of mourning pre- 
 scribed by the funereal regulations, the corpse of Seti 
 had been deposited in the magnificent tomb which 
 he had prepared for himself in the holy mountain of 
 tlie West,^ beside the last resting places of the other 
 ierrestrial gods, his predecessors ; and when, by vir- 
 tue of other consecrated rites, the moment for the 
 establishment of his son Mei-Amoun upon the 
 throne had been decided and proclaimed, Thebes, 
 the city of Ammon, saw flowing in to her all the 
 
 * This tomb is that discovered and described by Belzoni. 
 The Museum of the Louvre has a suj)erb fragmeut of it, in 
 No. 7 of the bas reliefs. 
 
 Most of the tombs of the valley of Biban-el-Moluk have 
 remained unfinished, because, upon the death of the sov- 
 ereigns who caused them to be excavated, the work ceased 
 and the corpse was deposited and sealed in its resting-place 
 in the condition in which the sepulchre happened to be at 
 that moment. 
 
 There was no exception to this rule for any but Seti, 
 Kameses Hikpun, and his son Rameses IV. The tomb 
 of the great Mei-Amoun, destroyed, undoubtedly, by the 
 Persians, has never been pointed out. — See Lenormand. 
 Musee des Antiq. egypt, p. 20. 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. .- 69 
 
 functionaries of the two fii'st classes who by right 
 or through duty had a marked place in the pane- 
 gyrics, or great public ceremonies. 
 
 The entrenched camps wdth which, in emulation 
 of the ancient Hycsos camp of Wara, the Pha- 
 raohs of the eighteenth dynasty had covered their 
 capital on both banks of the Nile, received, with- 
 in their spacious enclosures, the deputations of the 
 army sent from all the cantonments that maintained 
 on the uttermost frontiers the integrity of the em- 
 pire or the submission of the newly subjugated 
 tribes. The rich dwellings which the great vassals 
 had to keep up around the palace of their sovereign 
 became peopled with CEris, intendants of the 
 Egyptian nomes, or governors of conquered territo- 
 ries. These broufiht with them, mini^linsc in their 
 showy retinues, and laden with rich tribute, the 
 chiefs of distant countries of the south who had 
 been reduced to subordinate rank or positively 
 conquered and made vassals. Many of the latter 
 also were fi'om the western region of the oases, or 
 the shores of the Red Sea, and the Asiatic con- 
 fines. In a word, the mysterious dwellings 
 of the great Theban triad ; the innermost re- 
 treats of the sacerdotal colleges were thrown open 
 to give hospitality to the eponymic divinities of all 
 the local religions of the valley of the Nile, v/hich. 
 
70 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 borne in pomp along tlie river by their propliets, 
 their pontiifs and theii' choristers, came to intc cede 
 respectfully with Ammon-Ra, their lord and /c 'er, 
 in favor of the mortal who was to become the gu' d- 
 ian Sun of justice among men. 
 
 lY. 
 
 On the appointed day, so soon as the sun rising 
 above the horizon of the Arabic chain, hi^-d gilded 
 the oppocite summits of the Libyan mountains^ 
 sanctifiCO by the presence of the royal necropolis or 
 city of the dead, and floods of sparkling light began 
 to ripple along the masses of sandstone and mar- 
 ble, red porr»]:;yT:y and black or rose-colored granite 
 which, reared in gigantic tempter ; hewi! in ihe vast 
 pylons; carved m cbclickc ; c"Uipki/ed in sphinxes 
 and colossi, seemed, at Thebes more than in the 
 rest of Egypt, hke the material envelope of the 
 empire's mysterious soul, a tremendous clamor of 
 human voices and instruments of music, rising from 
 the bosom of the city, saluted the appearance of 
 the Pelasgic god and gave the signal for the com- 
 mencement of the day's ceremonies. Ah who were 
 to take part in the latter hastened to range them- 
 
, 1 ^ -, ' -, 5 J , I 
 
EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. . 73 
 
 selves along tlie approaclies to the palace wliei'e 
 Mei-Amoun had passed, in seclusion, the period of 
 his mourning. Under the main portico stood a 
 magnificent ';^aos "'^ upon su])i:orts of eoeny cjirved 
 in symbohcal caiyatides. It contained a th::one of 
 ivory, the base of which represented in gilded reliet 
 the sphinx, the emblem of v:is:oTa uiitcd ^d^Ai 
 strength, and the lion, the sjLibol oi courage. 
 Of this throne the colored ptatn.o 3 cf Tmei, sLo god- 
 dess of justice, and of Hor-Moei, the sin-god 
 of truth, with outstretched arms and e:^pandcd 
 wings, formed the background and sustair.ed t'le 
 dais. The king, his forehead encircled with a ?lri- 
 ple band surmounted with a golden iiroeus S'^jt w.uli 
 jewels, having seated himself in this kind of co.so or 
 shrine, twelve Oeris or warrior chieftains, tlio first 
 iji the empire in dignity and birth, uplifted him en 
 their shoulders. Other great personages ther. took 
 hold, each one of some particular part of the sup- 
 ports and steps leading to the throne, 'ar.d pU 
 moved off together, preceded by an imme-i'^e 
 crowd, to the temple of Ammon. 
 
 The march was opened by a band of vocal ai^d 
 mstmrnsntal music in which figured the ruduT^ea- 
 fcary tyioes oi the flutes, trumpets and drums stii( m 
 
 * A csir or ch?.ir of state. 
 
74: EGYPT 3300 TM33 AGO. 
 
 rse. Thft members of the kir.g's hoiisehcld ??.i\d 
 ttie £i:r.ctior.aries of his home establisLmcnt c-:i£.^i> 
 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, an<l 
 of the erudite geographer of Amasia ; onlj that one 
 must not expect to find in these monumental in- 
 scriptions the ethnical data of the nations and em- 
 pires enumerated in the text of those writers. The 
 ethnography of the days of Rameses transmitted 
 but very few names to those of the Hellenic and 
 Roman epochs. If appellations like Luki and 
 Naharain may be easily translated in them by 
 " Lycians " and " Mesopotamia," the wandering 
 tribes of Arabia figure there only as the children 
 <^ the red soil : the Rotenians hold the place after- 
 "Vard occupied by the Assyrians ; Sengar is the 
 lame of the country of Babel, and in the regions 
 *vhere the empires of Media and Persia were to 
 be reared, the Remeni, tlie Moshaushs and tlie 
 Robus f range themselves along from north to 
 "iouth, between the Caspian Sea and the Ocean. 
 Then, farther on, beyond that zone, in the vanguard 
 
 * Strabo. Book XVII. 
 t See Appendix VIII. 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 127 
 
 of tlie East, tlie offensive designation of tlic 'plague 
 ofKheta marks out upon an immense space not lim- 
 ited toward the north, the numberless and warhke 
 nomadic hordes which, since the days of the Hyc- 
 sos, had suppUed the most implacable enemies 
 known to the warriors of the borders of the JS^ile. 
 
 It is not without some emotion that the historian 
 records these names, effaced so many centuries ago 
 from the memory of mankind ; but especially is it 
 not without profound interest that, amid these for- 
 gotten generations, which however took part, ac- 
 cording t(5 their gifts and opportunities, in the hu- 
 manitary task of their period, he is enabled to 
 ascertain the presence of the ancestors of a people 
 who, after ha\T.ng long held the sceptre of antique civ- 
 ilization, have arisen before our eyes fi^om the tomb 
 in which the ages had buried them, to claim a 
 place among the modern nations. It mil be un- 
 derstood that we are here referring to the louni, evi- 
 dently identical with the Javans of the Hebrew 
 books, and the Yavanas of the Hindoos, Avhose 
 tribes, scattered and floating about over Western 
 Asia after their expulsion from Ariawarta, their 
 original country, undoubtedly owed to then- inva- 
 sion by Barneses Mei-Amoun, to their struggles 
 with that conqueror and their flight before his vic- 
 torious armies, their concentration in the region 
 
128 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 surrounding tlie Mgesm Sea, and thereby, too, the 
 germ of their long subsequent history. 
 
 This double fact of an ancient antagonism in the 
 heart of Asia, between the forefathers of the Greeks 
 and the warriors of the Nile, and of the alhance of 
 the former with the ancestors of the Medes and 
 Persians, would no doubt have awakened singular 
 incredulity among the contemporanes of Themisto- 
 cles or Plato. Nevertheless, it has been repeatedly 
 affirmed by ChampoUion, who, in the inscriptions at 
 Karnak and in the Rameseum existing side by side, 
 with the names of barbarous nations, in northern 
 costumes, with shaven heads or their hair raised in 
 a single lock or wisp Hke that of the " Eed Skins " 
 of America or the Mongols of Asia, declares that 
 he read the title of these louni whose blue eyes and 
 golden hair * Homer was to celebrate some ages 
 later. 
 
 * This version of the illustrious Egyptian scholar is sus- 
 tained by Messrs, Birch and Lepsius, who think that they have 
 again come across the same name of a nation which they 
 spell Ya-bu-ria in the inscriptions attributed by them to the 
 12th and 13th dynasties. 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 129 
 
 YIT. 
 
 Foe Cbampollion, the Klietas were Scjtliians ; 
 but M. de Kongo, followed by all the Egyptian 
 scholars of the present day, considers them no other 
 than tlie Chets or Hittites of the Bible, whose ]X)wer- 
 ful confederation comprised, in the time of Rameses, 
 a portion of Mesopotamia and the whole north of 
 Syria on the two slopes of the Lebanon. 
 
 Whoever coincides with the ideas that we have 
 advanced in the precedmg pages, in reference to 
 
 the Scythians of Justinus and T. Pompeius, will 
 consider the difference of opinion existing, on this 
 point, between the founder of Egyptian research 
 and his worthiest successor, as reducing itseK to 
 a mere ethnical question, the same thing being 
 transcribed in two different idioms. 
 
 A formidable revolt of the Asiatic tribes sum- 
 moned Rameses into the midst of their encamp- 
 ments in the fifth year of his reign. In following 
 the steps of the conqueror thither, we have uner- 
 ring guides. The historical pictures dedicated to 
 this campaign adorn a great number of monuments ; 
 they moreover comprised the first bulletin of vic- 
 tory that history has picked up. Besides, M. de- 
 Rouge has analyzed or translated them, here and 
 
130 EGITT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 thero, witli liis usual penetration, in a S2:)ecial paper 
 from wiiicli we borrow the following passages : 
 
 " While studying the battles represented in these 
 mural j^ain tings, says the learned and conscientious 
 philologist, my attention was attracted hj a singu- 
 lar episode in which the personal valor of the King 
 seems to have extricated him fi'om great peril: 
 hence, too, it is repeated, as though by emulation, in 
 the paintings of all the temples. Twice given in 
 the Kameseum, it is also found at Luxor, at Ipsam- 
 boul and at Beit-el-Wally. In addition to tho 
 bulletin of the campaign reproduced by these bas- 
 reliefs, a manuscript which Champollion has made 
 famous in science, the papyrus of Sallier, now be- 
 longing to the British Museum, has preserved for 
 us the greater part of a poem composed at the very 
 period of the battle by a writer of the court of Ra- 
 meses named Penta-ur, ChampoUion appears to 
 have copied only a few hues of this manuscript 
 nevertheless, his great knowledge of the Egyptian 
 texts, revealed to him, as by instinct, the extremely 
 interesting character of this document. He recog- 
 nized in it the characteristics of a historical poem, 
 and gathered fi'om it, at the outset, the names of 
 the hostile tribes in league with the Prince of 
 Kheta. But, neither Champollion nor his succes- 
 sors had discerned the real theme of this epic frag- 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEAES AQO. 133 
 
 mont, to wit : tlie great peril to which Eameses was 
 exposed, when separated fi'om his army and at- 
 tacked, with his feeble escort, by a picked force 
 consisting of twenty-five hundred chariots. This 
 is the characteristic trait that enabled me to recog- 
 nize the same incident carved on aU the temples. 
 The poem of Pen-ta-ur was esteemed by his con- 
 temporaries, for it had the distinguished honor to 
 be carved upon one of the walls of Karnak, which 
 it completely covered. It is too much defaced, at 
 the present day, to serve for the com^ letion of the 
 manuscript ; but the number of the columns form- 
 erly filled with hieroglyphics leads us to conjecture 
 tha at least the first thkd part of the poem is 
 lacking. 
 
 The historian may fiU this deficiency, to some ex- 
 tent, by the aid of the official bulletins of the cam- 
 paiga, which the pictures of Ipsamboul and the 
 Earn vis 3um have preserved almost intact ; they will 
 explara io us by what stratagem the hostile leader 
 had suc^-«^xreded in cutting off the Pharaoh and his 
 retinue h ^>m 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. 
 
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 djilb.'lllkiillbiil!ll>>l|i>iyi!lliiJltlllillMii!ii|i<ltlli^^ 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 179 
 
 the perception of the grand and beautiful, what 
 must not Thebes have been when hfe animated 
 that vast body and harmonized all its parts in one 
 imposing whole ? 
 
 What must not Thebes have been at the period 
 w^hen, sharing in the plenitude of glory and power 
 attained by its chiefs, this city beheld triumphant 
 predatory expeditions and caravans of traders 
 streaming in from all points of the horizon, and 
 pouring the wealth of nations into her lap ? in the 
 time when the black native of eastern Soudan and 
 the representative of the vanquished hordes of 
 western Asia ; the Hymiarite come from the land 
 of incense and the tattooed Pelasgian from the bor- 
 ders of the Hellespont ; the opulent merchant of 
 the Phoenician coasts ; the pearl-fisher of the Eryth- 
 rean seas ; tlie Eotenu son of Asshnr with the 
 long trailing robe, and the humble Ben-Eber of 
 the plains of Goshen, met annually at the foot of 
 Mei-Amoun's throne to lay the tribute of theii* 
 clans and country there ? What must not Thebes 
 have been when her temple-palaces, built and em- 
 belhshed by twelve generations of kings, rivallec* 
 each other in splendor and display; had for enclo- 
 sures fi'esh thickets of palms and mimosas ; be- 
 decked themselves with parterres skilfuUy designed, 
 and nhiTored in the blue waters of spacious basins 
 
180 EGYTT 3300 ^"EARS AGO. 
 
 of marble or porphyry, tlie pure and severely simple 
 lines of their architecture ; Avhen, amid iioods of 
 light under the rays of an unrivalled sun, there 
 sparkled to the gaze the vividly colored bas-ieh'efs 
 of the granite pylons, the inscriptions on rose-tinted 
 obelisks, the giant heads of sphinxes and colossi, 
 and when each Egyptian could contemplate in the 
 one the grand pages of his country's past history 
 and in the other revere the well known features of 
 his ancestors and of the gods and heroes of liis 
 race ? No voice, to-day, could tell it all, no pencil 
 accurately retrace it, and even thought, plunging 
 through the heaped-up dust of ages, could but catch 
 a glimpse of its vague and feeble image. 
 
 \U, 
 
 Moreover, in order not to be drawn into grave 
 error in the appreciation of that image, one must 
 divest himself of all preconceived ideas based upon 
 the plan of any modern capital. We must not for- 
 get that the dead level which now gauges society, 
 depresses their sahent heights and elevates their 
 lower strata, was neither foreseen nor even dreamed 
 of in the days of Theban grandeur ; and that fi'om 
 
■> ' ■) 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- 
 
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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 
 
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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 E<?;YPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 heavy garaaents coyered with mantles, hair gather^cl 
 up in a single lock in the miJLlle of the cranium, 
 and pallid complexion, would indicate their origin 
 to be from beyond the Oxus, even did the legends 
 f)f these historic pages fail to give them the name 
 of Klietas. At Thebes, as at Ipsamboul, these ob- 
 stinate antagonists of Rameses are seen seeking 
 refuge in a fortified place, the walls of which four 
 Egyptian princes, other sons of the conqueror, have 
 just assailed. We know not whether the name of 
 the besieged town has been discovered at Ipsamboul, 
 only the last half of it having been preserved among 
 the ruins of the Tlieban monument. But that termi- 
 nation is quite significant, for it reads : apur^ ond 
 this Sanscrit ending alone indicates some locahtj 
 far to the Eastward. 
 
 XYII. 
 
 It has not been allotted, so far as we know, to 
 men who have been summoned to make themselves 
 felt in the world on the eve of great upheavals in 
 the social strata or in the human mind, to find re- 
 pose anywhere but in the tomb. Everything, 
 therefore, induces us to believe that, contrary to tho 
 assertions of tha ancients, Rameses must havo 
 
EG ITT 3300 YEABS AGO. 235 
 
 passed the long yeaie- cf liis le'gn evniggling, sword 
 in liand, to maintain outsidG. the eminent influence 
 of liis name and tlie completeness of liis conquests. 
 More than once, no doiibt, he was obhged, as 
 Ciiarlemagne was, in long after ages, to hasten, in 
 his grey hairs, fi'om his Southern frontiers, still 
 threatened, as they were, by the savage barbarism 
 of the Nahazis, to those of the North which were 
 still agitated by the movements of the Aryan com- 
 munities pushing the Semites and the Pelasgians 
 before them on all the routes of the West. More 
 fortunate than the son of Pepin, was he spared the 
 sight of the tempests that were to sweep away the 
 dynasty that had been the labor of his life? And 
 if his iron constitution secured liim the honor so 
 coveted by the Pharaohs, of twice celebrating the 
 trentenary panegyric of his coronation, could he in 
 this enjoyment of his old age carry his sceptre and 
 his harp as high as the level of his pride ? No one 
 can tell. History and the monuments are silent on 
 this score. The first accords to him a reign of 
 from sixty-six to sixty-eight years, but dating from 
 the sixty-second, the monuments preserve a mourn- 
 ful siler.ce in reference to this great name.* 
 
 ^ — . ■ — — 
 
 * The latest date foiiud at JpsLmlcnl °.s of the 38th year. 
 The rocks of Silsihs mention the 40th and the 44th ; the 
 walls of the Serapeum the 55tli. Finally, a stele in the Flor- 
 ence Museum is dated in the 62d. 
 
236 EGYPT 3300 YEAFiS AGO. 
 
 Like tlie patriarchs his contemporaries, Ramesea 
 saw a numerous family born and reared around 
 him. The monumental inscriptions have acquaint- 
 ed us with the names of twenty-three princes, his 
 sons, and thirteen of his daughters, of whom five 
 CA'O dignified with the title of queens. One, with a 
 name anything but full of euphony for our ears — 
 Baunt-Ant — seems to have been the female Ben- 
 jamin of his declining years. 
 
 But he also Uved to see most of his children die 
 one by one, around him, including all of his sons 
 who had taken part in the struggles, the combats, 
 and the triumphs of his riper age. He survived by 
 thirteen years the man who, among all the rest, he 
 and his subjects regarded as the most worthy to 
 succeed him, viz., the prince Sha-em-J(jm, and, at 
 last, he had to leave his sceptre in feeble hands. 
 Then, as the good king Priam was made to feel in 
 later years, he had to admit that a lengthy lineage 
 is not always a guarantee of good fortune and sta- 
 bility ; that old age is rarely a blessing, and that 
 those whom the gods love, die young.* 
 
 The prince Sha-em-Jom, so popular among his 
 contemporaries, and of whom Egypt, during the 
 troubled reign of his brother Menephtah doubly 
 felt the loss, has left tokens of remembrance on a 
 
 * Homer's Iliad, cli. 24:, aud Meiiauder's Fragments, 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 237 
 
 great number of monuments, particularly at Mem- 
 phis, of which he was governor or viceroy. The 
 lapidary inscriptions show him to us presiding in 
 this character from the thirtieth year of his father's 
 reign over the grand panegyrics which were cele- 
 brated every four years in honor of the god Phtah. 
 
 The French savant M. Mariette, to whom we are 
 indebted for an interpretation of these inscriptions, 
 has found a great number of others dedicated to 
 the same prince, in the recesses of the Serapeum of 
 Memphis, that strange necropolis peopled with 
 statues of Apis or sacred bulls wliose epitaphs have 
 enabled that indefatigable reader of inscriptions to 
 regulate, by genuine figures, the hypothetical dates 
 of a quite important portion of Egyptian chrono- 
 logy, and to bring the undeniable testimony of these 
 humble four-footed creatures to bear in proving or 
 disproving the existence of royal dynasties and 
 monarchs claiming to be the children of gods. 
 
 According to all appearances, Sha-em-Jom was 
 buried in the Serapeum, where, after the lapse of 
 thirty-tliree centuries, M. Mariette thinks that he 
 has discovered his mummified remains. We can 
 do no better than to transcribe in this place the 
 Q.Stct language of the report on the subject which 
 ii-at celebrated expert has addressee, to his Euro- 
 pean brethren; 
 
238 
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 " Three of the fT3 ipis thafc died during t]x 
 reigu of Rameses li. "?^ere buried in chambers No. 
 2, 3 and 4 of the j=n;.-i<l subterranean excavations, 
 Tlie other two had been deposited in one hollow 
 chamber, the wall of which bears the date of thti 
 year 55 of the great king. One died when the 
 prince Menephtah, who at a later period was to 
 succeed his father flameses IT., had taken the place 
 of Slia-em-dom in the government of Memphis, 
 and from the pofyrloTL of the inummy, I do not think 
 
 A mummy in its b&,nddges. 
 
 that it is to this Apis th^t the daio written on the 
 wall refers. Consequently, the other died in the 
 year 55, and this observation is interesting if, as 
 may be the case, the mummy of which I have re- 
 covered the remains, instead of being that of Apis 
 was that of prince Sha-em-Jom himself. This 
 new point would be worth extended explanation. 
 Let the reader imagine a mummy in the liumau 
 
EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 23y 
 
 form destroyed in all its lower parts from the 
 breast downward. A thick mask of gold now at 
 
 Case containiDg a mummy. 
 
 iDterior coffin to contain the case. 
 
 the Louvre covered its face. Ai'ound the neck 
 were two chains, also of gold, to one of which were 
 suspended three amulets. As for tne interior, it 
 
210 
 
 EGYPr 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 presented noiMng out a mass of cdorlferono hlturnen 
 mmijled with shapeless hones, in the midst of ivldcli were 
 buried tioo or three pieces of Jewelry ivith golden clasps 
 containing sm%U plates of glass. Finally, near this 
 singular monument, I picked up a large beetle in 
 grejdsh steatite, a little pillar of green feldspar and 
 a score of small funereal statues of the human form. 
 
 Exterior coffin. 
 
 Such was our Apis, and sorae estimate of the em- 
 barrassment this discovery occasioned us may bs 
 had when it is furthermore known that while all the 
 monuments found above the mummy indicate tho 
 title and name of Slia-em-Jom only, all those on 
 the contrary that were discovered in the neignbo 
 
EaYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 241 
 
 hood mention the name and usual qualifications of 
 Osorapis. Is this an Apis ? or i^ it the mummj of 
 Sha-em-Jom, who, dying in the 55th year of his 
 father's reign, rpade ?t a point to be buried in the 
 finest of the tombs tliat adorned the cemetery of 
 the city of which he was the governor, therein fol- 
 
 Sarcopliagus. * 
 
 lowing the example of the other grandees of Egypt, 
 who had themselves buried at Abydos near tho 
 tomb of Osiris ?" 
 
 To sum up, was this funereal windfall, this de- 
 cayed magmaf the remains of the belov^ed son of 
 liameses, of the selected heir of his vast empire, or 
 
 *■ These sarcophagi iu poi-phjry, iu basalt or in alabaster, 
 formed the fourth and last outside covering of mummies oi 
 high rank. 
 
242 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 Simply tliose of a bull fattened in a sacerdotal stall ? 
 Is there not in the doubt itself, a keen satire on 
 renown and death, as bitter as any that liistory 
 lias ever gathered in the tomb ? 
 
 We have elsewhere remarked the relations that 
 exist between the duration of the "veigxw o^ the 
 Pharaohs and the splendor of their ;-.ombs. That 
 of Rameses should, consequently, have surpassed 
 all the rest in magnificence. It was the third to 
 the right in the valley of tombs. At the present 
 day nothing remains of it but a mass of shapeless 
 ruins. All the funereal abodes of the holy mountain of 
 the West having been violated and overturned by 
 the Persians at the time of the invasion of Cam- 
 byses, those barbarian conquerors wreaked their 
 revenge particularly on the tomb of the man in 
 whom was incarnated the Egyptian nationality in 
 its struggles against the men of the North, justly re- 
 garded by these barbarians as their ancestors. 
 However, long before this period of warlike ven- 
 geance, the priestly reaction which had put an end 
 to the dynasty of Rameses and his successors ; 
 which had identified the patron deity of this mar- 
 tial family withTyphon, the genius of evil: which 
 had pursued the images of Sethos even to where 
 thtjy were found on the scroll-box of the gTeat king, 
 
EGYPT 3300 YE.VES AGO. 243 
 
 — bad tliis reaction really respected his memorj 
 and his coffin I 
 
 TVnATEVEU may have been the causes of the 
 revolution that wrested from the descendants of 
 Kameses the sceptre of Egypt and transferred it to 
 the family of the priest Peer, it cannot be con- 
 sidered as a reassertion of human dignity, outraged 
 by the unbounded ^haughtiness of the Pharaohs of 
 the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth dynasties. 
 A mere shifting from one set of hands to another 
 of privileges and vices, it momentarily profited the 
 priestly order only to the detriment of the vital 
 forces of the nation whose decline and downfall it 
 hastened. A people can never with impunity ^^o 
 taught to contemn what once they worshipped. 
 Under the anathema which fell upon her mihtary 
 spu'it and warlike energy, Egypt sank back upon 
 herself like her granite sphinxes crouching near 
 the entrance of her temples. Thenceforth, concen- 
 trating in the adoration of natural phenomena, an 
 acti^dty which had no other outlet, she strove to 
 connect with the subtleties of nascent iiietaphysi 
 
244 EGYTT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 cal science, the rude conceptions of her original 
 mythology, and made everything else subservient 
 to this vain toil ; men and things, principles and 
 facts, art, industr^^ and intelligence alike. With hei 
 everything passed into the condition of a symbol, 
 and every symbol became stone, until, petrified her- 
 seK Uke the objects of her idolatry, she did not no- 
 tice the billows of the human race that were flood- 
 ing up around her. 
 
 Even then, upon that soil struck with a paralysis 
 which lingers there still, one ^rand memory aione 
 survived and covered this corpse of a nation with 
 the name of Barneses as with a protecting aegis. 
 One day Darius, entering Memphis as its master, 
 penetrated to the temple of Phtah and gave orders 
 that his own statue should be placed in front of 
 those of the native kings, and even of the colossal 
 figure of Rameses Mei-Amoun. But, upon hearing 
 this order of the victorious monarch, the prophet 
 of the temple opposed it in these terms : " Thou 
 hast not done, oh king, all that Rameses did, since 
 the latter not only subdued as many nations as 
 thou, but he also conquered the Scytliians whom 
 thy Persians could not overcome. It is not just, 
 therefore, that thine image should be placed above 
 that of Rameses, since thou hast not surpassed him 
 by thy deeds." 
 
EGYTT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 245 
 
 At the words of tliis aged priest, inspired with 
 a patriotic remembrance as though bj the breath 
 of his god, Darius, the undisputed sovereign of 
 twenty satrapies whose chiefs had kings for vassals, 
 bowled his head in silence and abandoned his 
 haughty design. 
 
 Royal cartouche of 
 Barneses Mei-Amoun. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 THE cusniTEs, (page 15.) 
 
 , . . The Coptic idiom, a remnant of the old Egyptian 
 tongue, is inconte stably one of the most curious although 
 one of the most r.aagre fragments of the languages of an- 
 tiquity. An original kinship with the Semitic idioms has 
 been discovered for it ; since the Semitic dialects have pen- 
 etrated the old Cushiie foundation of human tongues 
 
 Although the Coptic is the antipodes of the Sanscrit, 
 a thousand reasons seem to conspire to make us look in the 
 ba^.n of the Indus for the seat of primitive civilization 
 transjjorted to the valley of the Nile at an epoch preceding 
 the time when Southern Asia was wrested from the Cushitea 
 by the Aryan and Semitic races. If we find in the popular 
 forms of worship of India the contrast between which and 
 the religious notions of the Vedas is so marked, a strong 
 resemblance to the creeds of Egypt, is there any reason to 
 feel surprised when we discover some words in Coptic 
 that have an equivalent in the Sanscrit ? There is one 
 thing that mur>t 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 
 
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 289 
 
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A NEW AND REVISED ISSUE OF 
 
 THE ILLUSTRATED 
 
 Library of Wonders. 
 
 THE WONDERS OF MAN AND NATURE, 
 
 In Eight Volumes. 
 
 THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE, 
 
 In Eight Volumes. 
 
 THE WONDERS OF ART AND ARCH.€OLOGY, 
 
 In Eight Volumes. 
 
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 EACH VOLUME i2mo, COMPLETE IN ITSELF. 
 
 Sold Separately at $I.OO per Volume. 
 
 Messrs. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SON^ have now begun 
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 the success of which has been most extraordinary and lasting. 
 THE WONDER LIBRARY biings within popular comprehension 
 the various operations and procedures in Science and the Arts, 
 the phenomena and laws of nature, curious and striking facts 
 
ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY OF WONDERS. 
 
 in natural history, remarkable exploits, archaeological discoveries, 
 and a historical account ot the progress of the fine arts. 
 
 The volumes are written by a number of French scientists 
 and specialists of the highest rank, and translated and adapted 
 for English readers by competent hands. 
 
 The subjects treated are of universal interest, and they are 
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 The illustrations are so numerous that they present every 
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 popularity. 
 
Illustrated Library OF Wonders. 
 
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 Wonders of the Human Body. 
 Bodily Strength and Skill. 
 The Sublime in Nature. 
 Mountain Adventures. 
 
 Adventures on the Great IIuNTiNCf Grounds. 
 Wonderful Escapes. 
 
 The Intelligence of Animals. 
 Thunder and Lightning. 
 
 THE WONDERS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 Wonders of Electricity. 
 Wonders of Heat. 
 The Sun. 
 
 Wonders of the Moon. 
 Wonders of Optics. 
 
 Wonders of Acoustics. 
 
 Wonders of the Heavens. 
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 THE WONDERS OF ART AND ARCH/EOLOGY. 
 
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 Wonders of Italian Art. 
 
 Wonders of Architecture. 
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 Wonders of Engraving. 
 
 Wonders of Glass Making. 
 
 Pompeii and the Pompeiians. 
 Egypt 3300 Years Ago. 
 
Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 To be published in SEPTEMBER: 
 
 Intelligence of Animals, with Illustrative Anecdotes. From the 
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 Wonders of Heat. By Achille Cazin. With 93 Illustrations, and 
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 Egypt 3,300 Years Ago ; or, Rameses the Great. By F. DeLanoye. 
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 Mountain Adventures. Compiled from the Note-Books of Distin- 
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 12mo. 
 
 Wonders of the Heavens. By Camille Flammarion. Translated 
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 The Wonders of Sculpture. From the French of Louis Viardot. 
 With a Chapter on American Sculpture. With 62 illustrations. 
 12mo. 
 
 A volume in each of the three series will be 
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 in this new edition. 
 
 PRICE, PER VOLUME, $1.00. 
 
 %*JFor sale hy all hooksellrrs, or will he sent, iiost-jxtid, on recei2)t 
 of price, hij 
 
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