LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 SAM DIEGO 
 
 JUUUUWUIMAIUUU1JU1^^
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO.
 
 Barneses Meiamc.un, from the Alabaster Statue in the 
 of the Louvre.
 
 EAMESES THE GREAT; 
 
 OB, 
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 rKANSLATKD FKOM THE FRENCH 
 
 or 
 F. DE LANOYE. 
 
 W1TB THIRTY-NINB WOOD OUTS Bf LANOSLOT, 8ZLLIJBB AND BAYARD. 
 
 NEW YOKK : 
 CHAELES SCBIBNER AND COMPANY. 
 
 1870
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER AND COMPANY, 
 
 In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the United States, for tho 
 Southern District of New York. 
 
 ALVORD, PRINTER.
 
 TO THE VICOMTE E. DE BOUGE\ 
 This historical study, inspired by his labors and indebted to 
 
 them for its best pages, 
 IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, 
 
 if not as the work of an expert pupil, for the author dare not 
 assume that title, at least as a feeble testimonial of the pro- 
 found gratitude which the illustrious master of Egyptian lore 
 has the right to claim of every one engaged in seeking out the 
 origin of human society, and new foundations on which to es- 
 tablish history. 
 
 F. DE LAKOTB. 
 
 PABIS, December 1, 1865.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE CAMPAIGNS OF RAMESES THE GREAT. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 The 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 Irruption of the 
 Hycsos. National Rivalries and Wars. The Eighteenth 
 Dynasty 1 
 
 RAMESES IL 
 
 Rameses II. Mei-Amoun the Great, otherwise known as 
 Sesostris. The Names of Rameses ; his Childhood ; his 
 Youth ; his Coronation. A Consecration Thirty-three 
 Centuries Ago. Social Rank in Egypt, and the People, 
 at that Period of its History 61 
 
 THE CAMPAIGNS OF RAMESES 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 Army. Testimony of 
 Tacitus, Herodotus, Strabo and the Monuments. A Bulle-
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 MB 
 
 tin of Victory, and a Poet Laureate of the Fourteenth Cen- 
 tury before our Era. The Battle of Atesh. The return of 
 Rameses 97 
 
 THE MONUMENTS OF E AMESES THE GREAT. 
 
 The Testimony of Herodotus, of Diodorus, 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 Rameses 161 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 L The Cushites 249 
 
 IL The Temple of Denderah 250 
 
 IIL The Ancient Bed of the Nile 252 
 
 IV. The Shepherd King Apapias and the God Sutekh 253 
 
 V. The Names of Rameses II 254 
 
 VL The linages of Ancestors 257 
 
 VIL The Army of Rameses IL the Military Caste 261 
 
 VHL 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 Dynasties and 
 
 Kings of Egypt 287
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Barneses Mei-Amoun. From the alabaster statue in the Mu- 
 seum of the Louvre. (Frontispiece.) PAGB 
 
 The Pyramids and the Sphinx. . 9 
 
 Peoples known to the Egyptians 17 
 
 The Temple of Denderah (restored) 27 
 
 The Smaller Temple at Philae 39 
 
 The Temples of Philse (restored) 43 
 
 Hypostylic Hall at Karnak 55 
 
 The Avenue of Rams 71 
 
 An Egyptian Princess 75 
 
 The Interior Court of Karnak 81 
 
 The Sphinx of Eameses IL 87 
 
 Eoyal Scribes 109 
 
 Egyptian Cavalry 113 
 
 Egyptian Infantry 119 
 
 Bas-relief of Sesostris 123 
 
 Asiatic Enemies of the Egyptians 131 
 
 Barneses in Battle 139 
 
 The City of Atesh 147 
 
 Pylons and Portico of a Grand Temple , 169 
 
 View of Thebes during an Inundation 173 
 
 Colossi of Amenoph III., or Memmon 177 
 
 A Palace Temple of Thebes (bird's-eye view) 181 
 
 The Eesidence of an Egyptian of rank 185 
 
 The Kameseum. Hall of the Colossus 189 
 
 The Eameseum. Hall of the Caryatides 193
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 Slaves under the Eighteenth Dynasty, making brick 197 
 
 Captives building a Temple 201 
 
 A Hypostylic Hall 203 
 
 Present Aspect of Ibrim 217 
 
 The Speos of Athor 221 
 
 The Speos of Phra 225 
 
 Interior of the Speos of Phra 229 
 
 FaQade of the Speos of Ipsamboul 233 
 
 A Mummy in its Bandages 238 
 
 Case containing a Mummy 239 
 
 Interior Coffin 239 
 
 Exterior Coffin 240 
 
 Sarcophagus 241 
 
 Royal Cartouche of Barneses Mei-Amoun 245 
 
 Hieroglyphics of the Names of Egyptian Kings 255-257 
 
 Asiatic Nomads. . , .281
 
 EGYPT BEFORE THE 
 TIME OF RAMESES.
 
 EGYPT BEFORE THE TIME OF 
 RAMESES. 
 
 The Basin of the Nile and its First Colonists. Kaces 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 Irruption of the Hycsos. National Rivalries 
 and Wars. The Eighteenth Dynasty. 
 
 WHEN the traveller from Europe directs his 
 course toward the southeast angle of the Medi- 
 terranean, 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
 
 4 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 the 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 
 reflected high in the air by the 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 fertility of the soil, and 
 the cultivation bestowed upon it, the antique 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, by 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 = Asnra, one of the oldest titles employed 
 by man to designate God. See E. Burnouf's Commentary 
 on the Yaena ; and JeanReynaud's study on Zoroaster.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 5 
 
 of rich harvests from November until March, a 
 cracked and burning soil, laden with a black, 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 valley 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 salient 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 Martyrs, " they look like 
 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 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 
 
 H. 
 
 Six degrees of latitude separate this point from 
 the one where almost immediately under the 
 tropic circle, the Nile, traversing the granitic rocks 
 of Syene and of Philse, penetrates the Egyptian 
 territory. Beyond, toward 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 filled 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-soug it-foi 
 sources of the Nile.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS A<JO. ' 
 
 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 for a model. 
 
 in. 
 
 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 A.GO. 
 
 once it wore, along with a part of its lost chrono- 
 logy- 
 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 ago seem still to converse with the 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 Egyptian tradition, 
 must be once for all abandoned, we have it in our 
 power to reconstruct the most 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 authentic 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 the 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
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES 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 groups, 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. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE lofty plateau of equatorial Africa that ex- 
 tends beyond the fifteenth degree of north latitude 
 in Abyssinia and the twelfth in the Wadai, seems to 
 recede, 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 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 table-land, the 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 
 old Automoli or refugees.* The water sheds on its 
 left, pour into its tide during this journey a great 
 number of tributaries which are still unnamed in 
 history. On the other hand, the Abyssinian moun- 
 tain mass sends to it, on its right bank, some pow- 
 erful affluents of which two at least, the Abawi and 
 the Taccaze, were know to the earliest geographers 
 under the names Astapus and Astaboras. 
 
 A characteristic trait of this river, and one that 
 at first sight distinguishes it on the map of the 
 globe, is the rectilinear direction of its basin. The 
 30th 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 from 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 public office, 
 and of Greek and Ionian condottieri into the ranks of the 
 army.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 13 
 
 itself around it like the sacred urwus around the 
 antique cadwxus, intersects it eight times at least 
 with its windings, without, in any instance, receding 
 more than forty leagues from 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 third of its course, which it pursues in sol- 
 itary grandeur for the distance of four hundred 
 leagues, between two deserts whose sands, cut off 
 from the rains of the tropics, greedily absorb its 
 waters without yielding it, in return, the tribute of 
 the feeblest rivulet or torrent. 
 
 The isolation of this portion of the basin in which 
 it dwelt constituted the strong point of Egyptian 
 society during the period of its development. With 
 few exceptions the migrations 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 of its 
 downfall had arrived.
 
 14 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 V. 
 
 ALL who 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 likewise brought it men and civilization, 
 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 especially who are somawhat under the influ- 
 ence of German philosophy, affirm that the earliest 
 settlers and earliest civilization commencad 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 
 bath hypotheses, the primitive cradle of the Egyp- 
 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-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 15 
 
 ination, modern anatomists think that they are able 
 to distinguish three separate classes : the first com- 
 prising the ancestors of the Copts properl) so- 
 styled, the form of whose crania recalls the shape 
 of the heads of the statuary and the sphinxes of 
 Thebes ; the second bears some analogy to the 
 Hindoo type, and the third 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 his- 
 torical science, of the Yolneys, the Heerens and 
 the Ecksteins will, very justly, be astonished 
 when they miss from among the tribes set down as 
 the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians, the Cush- 
 ites or Negroes who have left their indelible stamp 
 upon the religions notions of the people. For our 
 part, since we have but little faith in the expression 
 human 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 the Pharaohs excavated in the Libyan chain to 
 the westward of Thebes, during 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 them are in propor- 
 tion to the duration of the reign of the guest whom 
 they were to receive. But upon the walls of all of 
 them 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 his 
 time. 
 
 Conducted, one and all, by Horus, the pastoral 
 god of the nations, they are generally arranged in 
 four groups corresponding with the four divisions 
 of the world then known. The group farthest away 
 from the god consists of savages of lofty stature, with 
 light or sandy hair, blue eyes, and straight or slightly 
 rounded features. Tattooed and covered with the 
 spoils of the auroclis and the bear, just as those late 
 comers in old Europe, the Gauls and the Cimbri, ap- 
 peared to the affrighted Greeks and Romans, in after 
 ages, did the ancient Pelasgi appear fifteen centuries 
 before the Christian Era, to the erudite and culti- 
 
 * The nineteenth only. The geographical knowledge 
 which these paintings pre-suppose does not appear to have 
 existed any earlier. This is a good point to establish.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 19 
 
 vated Egyptians. The latter called them 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 ; their aquiline or beaked noses ; their black 
 beards, sharp and pointed on some, ample and 
 curly on others ; their costumes of varied hue and 
 fashion, indicate members of the Aramaean branches : 
 Arabs, Hebrews and Assyrians. On some walls, 
 Medes and lonians figure among these sons of 
 Shem. 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-Bom 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 YEABS AGO. 
 
 upon 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 African 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 Nubia, 
 sheltered as they have been, the latter by poverty, 
 the former by the natural strength of their 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. 
 
 * Champollion's Letters on Egypt and Nubia. Larrey's 
 Memoirs, in the Description of Egypt. Oaillaud's Journey 
 to Meroe and the White Nile. Tremeaux's Journey to 
 Nubia, etc.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 21 
 
 VI. 
 
 SHOULD the logic of induction lead us, more than 
 once, in the course of this recital, to admit extracts 
 from 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 annalist, and espe- 
 cially to his lists of kings and dynasties, analogous 
 authority. 
 
 It is not for us to inquire whether that Egyptian 
 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 
 lists 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 the 
 contradictions of dates, facts and figures as well as 
 the double applications that these different frag- 
 ments contain. 
 
 But, when we consider the complete discordance 
 that exists between these documents of common
 
 22 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 origin and those whence Herodotus had drawn his 
 facts two centuries earlier, and weigh the conflicting 
 views whereby they have strayed from the ancient 
 source that should have supplied them, and which, 
 surviving in our day under the name of the Old 
 Chronicles, gives only four hundred 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 whose 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 Julius Africanus, Eusebius and 
 Syncellus : 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 Researches in ancient History.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 23 
 
 of which 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. 
 
 VII. 
 
 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 nationality, 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 aspiration of the human mind toward 
 a felicity 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 all 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 the more obscure. In those days, na- 
 tions, as in more recent times families, gauged their 
 nobility not by deeds but by the duration of their 
 existence. Hence, for historians jealous as to the 
 origin of their country, arose the necessity of mul- 
 tiplying 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 
 fabler 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 controlled by positive synchronic data. The 
 first 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 Wilson, and finally 
 put beyond all doubt by Laplace, this event, which 
 has furnished roots to the genealogical tree of an- 
 cient Egypt, may go back thirty 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 YEAKS AGO. 25 
 
 realm of history not in order to extract therefrom 
 fruitful 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 our era, upon 
 the filled- up bed of the Nile 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 
 filiation of the three hundred and forty-five Pi-Ro- 
 mish mentioned by Herodotus ; to rear the Pyra- 
 mids of Gizeh in the time of the brothers Supphi 
 
 * 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 origin. 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 Martius, 
 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 Menea 
 and many mythical personages of ancient Egypt. 
 
 f 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 YEARS AGO. 
 
 or Clmffu, of the 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 Ilameses Mei-Amoun ; to 
 cause the conquest of Asia, two thousand five hun- 
 dred years before the Saviour, by an Osymandyas 
 and a Sesortasen, 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 
 mythical 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-eight to seventeen or eighteen at the utmost.* 
 
 * We know that this pretended antiquity was the basis 
 given by Dupuy to his system in his " Origin of Religious 
 Worship." See Appendix IL
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 29 
 
 vin. 
 
 NEVERTHELESS, we cannot close this dissertation, 
 which has been too far prolonged, already, for the 
 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 the Thebaic nome 
 was 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 from the banks of the 
 Indus to those of the Nile, at an unknown period 
 by a method of transmission identical with that 
 which has borne the name of Jemshid (Yima 
 
 * Chateaubriand. Introduction to hia Journey to Ame- 
 rica.
 
 30 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 Tehaeto), step by step, from the valleys of the Jax- 
 artes and the Tarim, to the high plains of Media and 
 Persia. In tine, 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 which 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 24 feet in depth, 
 the result of the river's annual deposit. This layer 
 rests directly upon a bed of sea sand. Very minute 
 calculations led the engineers of the great French 
 expedition to Egypt to estimate at 126 millimetres, 
 or about .4134: 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 convey- 
 ing the obelisk of Luxor to Paris, and the English 
 savant Wilkinson, came to conclusions almost iden- 
 tical, on the same subject, by methods of research 
 different in character but equally exact in detail. 
 Eight metres, 26 j feet, the greatest thickness, divided 
 
 * Description of Egypt. Girard's Nemoire on Drainage.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS 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 limits. 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 hieroglyphically 
 by the word ter, and by a sign tliat may mean a sea- 
 son or a year, indifferently."* 
 
 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 Rameses, five 
 thousand years at most, if the heaping up of the 
 lower deposits are to be, likewise, 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 Brugsch. 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- 
 cline. 
 
 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 religous creed, arising like their castes 
 from the superposition of different races upon the
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 33 
 
 same soil; a synthetic derivation from the mon- 
 strous superstitions of the Cushites, of Semitic 
 Sabaism 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 
 metroplis to metropolis, and particularly, from 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. 
 
 IV. 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 effluvia arising from the contact of the wa-
 
 34 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 ters with the organic remains hidden beneath the 
 soil. 
 
 V. Their sedentary life ; industrial and agricul- 
 tural habits, derived, perforce, like 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- 
 nied the earth and impaired its fertility. 
 
 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. 
 
 In due time, came rushing headlong across 
 Western Asia, the first migration of nations where-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 35 
 
 of history has retained the remembrance. Swollen 
 by all the nomadic tribes that it had gathered to 
 it on the way, it feU 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 
 impelled 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 from 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 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 do in later years, in the presence of an irruption oi 
 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 uii- 
 derstandest what they say. * * * Their quiver is an 
 open sepulchre. * * * And they shall eat up thine 
 harvest and thy bread which thy sons and thy 
 daughters should eat." 
 
 * Jeremiah, ch. iv. v. and viii.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 37 
 
 XL 
 
 HEKE, 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 direction 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 with 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 established 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 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 Having discovered in the Saitic nome or district to 
 the 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 hoc in the sacred tongue means king, 
 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 Manetho in Flavins Josephus, contra Appionem.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 41 
 
 hands of strangers (Aad-tus) and then there were 
 no native Pharaohs left in the whole country. At 
 that time their descendant, Ra-Sekenen, was nothing 
 but a hac, or chief, of Upper Egypt. The Aad-tus 
 held the strong city of the sun * and their king, his 
 majesty Apapias, resided at Ha-~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 
 Sutech 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 :": 
 
 In 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 designation may be applied to Thebes, as well as 
 to Heliopolis. 
 
 t Tliis word, which is entirely Aryan in origin, would suffice 
 to indicate the primitive country of the Hycsos. War, in 
 the Zend language, means the original enclosure built by 
 Jemshid. Wara or War, in Pelhvi, or old Persian, mean- 
 ing borough, fortified enclosure. 
 
 I 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 yoke of religious and 
 royal formalism ; parcelled out by the rival preten- 
 sions of her various tribes, her cities and her two 
 controlling castes ; more accustomed to luxurious 
 pageants, to religious chantings and processions 
 sweeping past from temple to temple along her 
 sacred river, than inured to warlike exercises and the 
 din of battle; better skilled in handling the hoe 
 that fertilizes the soil and the chisel that carves 
 decorations in granite for the hours of peace, than 
 in brandishing the bow and shield which would 
 have saved her in the hour of peril, Egypt fell com- 
 pletely prone 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 
 which nature herself had set to its easy conquest. 
 Those limits were the rocky mountain ranges 
 that a little below the Tropic, and parallel to it, ex- 
 tended from the Libyan desert to the shores of the 
 Red Sea.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 XII. 
 
 A DEEP ravine with steep declivities ; 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 Philse where Egyptian mythology placed the 
 tomb of Asiri, 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, like 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
 
 46 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 to leave it only the 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. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 YET, this poor country, this region of stones, as the 
 Arabs call it, in their energetic idiom, the Batn or 
 Dar-el-kazhar, 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. AH drank in from its rudo hos-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 47 
 
 pitality the energy that they lacked, and little by lit- 
 tle, it changed to thoughts of vengeance and the hope 
 of return, the regrets they had bestowed on their 
 lost country. The very insufficiency of the Nubian 
 soil to support their number, augmented as it was 
 each day by fresh fugitives, strengthened their reso- 
 lution. In order to subsist, they were forced to 
 venture upon marauding expeditions into the coun- 
 try that they had not been able to defend. They 
 had to creep stealthily toward 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 stranger. This 
 Bedouin existence perforce accustomed the military 
 caste to danger, and they were recruited by 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 ; allies came to the 
 Egyptians, undoubtedly, from the depths of Ethio- 
 pia, and, very probably, from the coasts of India ; 
 their expeditions, as they multiplied, became more 
 regular in form and assumed a more general char- 
 acter; their warfare, from being clandestine and 
 fitful became open and continual, until, finally, 
 it took permanent foothold in all the passes that 
 descend from the south into Egypt, recovering 
 ground, step by step, from the Hycsos. Holy
 
 48 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 work ! in which many generations were consumed 
 and which was transmitted from father to son, for 
 more than two hundred years. 
 
 The chieftains who, by reason of their descent 
 from the ancient kings, or through services ren- 
 dered to the common cause, were summoned to di- 
 rect this great struggle, shared all its vicissitudes. 
 At first mere chiefs of bands roving among the 
 rocks and over the deserts, then sovereigns of 
 Nubia and the Thebais, victory and national con- 
 sent made them, successively, masters of the 
 Heptanomis and of the lower course of the great 
 river. There are many names, now the subject of 
 dispute between authorities skilled in Egyptian 
 lore who refer them back to still earlier times, which 
 we think belong to the period and range that we 
 are just describing. At length, when Ahmes, the 
 founder of the eighteenth dynasty, uniting all the 
 native forces of the Nile valley, entered Memphis 
 in triumph, drove all the strangers beyond the river 
 to their entrenched camp at Wara, and afterwards 
 expelled them even from that ; and when Amenoph, 
 his son, completed their explusion from the terri- 
 tory of Kemi by fresh victories on the roads lead- 
 ing to Asia, these princes may have thought of re- 
 constructing only the past, but, in reality, they set 
 up a totally unknown order of things and ideas.
 
 EGYPT 3300 TEAKS AGO. 49 
 
 Upon the ruins of the old principalities of Thebes, 
 Memphis and Fayoum, trampled out by the feet of 
 the Hycsos, worn away and jumbled together by 
 two centuries and a half of battles, they laid what 
 was the real foundation of Egyptian nationality, 
 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. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 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 
 prolific 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, failing 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 
 sphinx to whom they committed the keeping of all
 
 50 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 creating new duties, naturally displaced the 
 rights of various classes, and, naturally also, be- 
 stowed the greatest share of privilege upon those 
 who undertook the greatest share of responsibility. 
 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 on 
 the enigma of the world.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 51 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE vital sap so superabundant in all nations in 
 a state of social renovation, was with the Egyptians 
 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 itself, on all sides in 
 striking displays; at home by gigantic achieve- 
 ments of art or of public utility ; 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 warlike 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 believe 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 
 hurl them back into the heart of Asia ; but they
 
 52 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 had, 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 
 agriculture and by canals that should distribute 
 the fertilizing 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 
 localities ; the canals are choked with mud : the 
 dykes are poorly kept, and the entire 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 drifts that fall else- 
 where." * 
 
 Numerous attestations deduced from public 
 
 * Napoleon. Memoirs Dictated at St. Helena : Campaigii 
 in Egypt.
 
 EGYPT 3300 TEARS AGO. 53 
 
 monuments, and even from the tombs of private 
 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 sway in Nubia and Syria. Thothmes III., 
 the most celebrated of all, extended the frontiers of 
 the empire as far as the borders of the Tigris to the 
 eastern limits 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 Hie, Iwrse and its healthful 
 domestication on the borders of the Nile.* Strange 
 as it may appear in view of the extreme antiquity 
 ascribed to Egyptian civilization, it cannot be de- 
 nied that the noUest conquest that man ever made re- 
 mained unknown in Egypt until the seventeenth 
 century preceding our era ; and this fact alone 
 suffices to annihilate any system of history tending 
 to assign to Egypt any activity beyond the borders 
 of the valley of the Nile earlier than the eighteenth 
 dynasty. 
 
 "The lists of the contributions exacted by 
 
 * Dr. H. Brugscli. History of Egypt p. 25.
 
 54 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 Thothmes III.," says the Vicomte de Bouge, in his 
 Memoir on the Campaigns of Sesostris, " at the 
 close of fourteen expeditions directed chiefly against 
 the Assyrians and the Phoenicians, reveal to us 
 Nineveh and Babylon, Asshur and Shiuar bringing 
 in their tribute as vassals to Egypt. They are ac- 
 companied by other nations more powerful at that 
 tune in Asia than they, but whose names have 
 shone less conspicuously in succeeding ages. Dur- 
 ing time of peace, the Pharaohs exercised their su- 
 premacy regularly in those countries. Leaving all 
 authority in the hands of the national chiefs, they 
 contented themselves with levying an annual tribute. 
 They had, nevertheless, seized the best domains of 
 the vanquished princes, and had appropriated the 
 revenues either to the use of different temples, or to 
 their 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 himself was seen coming to 
 Asia, either peaceably to receive tribute, or angrily 
 to chastise rebels 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 
 wore agitated by usurpations and religious dissen-
 
 fiyoostyiic nail of Earmk 'the Central $)ve restored 
 according to ttic Egyptian Commission).
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 57 
 
 sious. Favored by these disorders, Asia shook off 
 the yoke of the Pharaohs, aiid 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 victories that 
 signalized the first years of his reign appear to have 
 re-established the Egyptian supremacy over the 
 Asiatic provinces, for some length of time. 
 
 The grand hypos tylic hall of Karnak, and the 
 magnificent tomb discovered by Belzoni, are majes- 
 tic monuments, that sufficently attest the tranquillity 
 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 Kameses the Great.
 
 RAMESES II., 
 
 OR, 
 
 MEI-AMOUN THE GREAT.
 
 RAMESES II. 
 
 Rameses II. Mei-Aruoun the Great, otherwise known as Sesos- 
 tris. The Names of Rarneses ; his Childhood ; his Youth ; his 
 Coronation. A Consecration Thirty-three Centuries Ago. So- 
 cial Rank in Egypt, and the People, at that Period of its His- 
 tory. 
 
 THE name of the man whose place we are seeking 
 to fix, and whose active part in history we would 
 make plain to our readers recalls the exaltation of 
 human personal position to the highest limits of 
 pride and power, and the most excessive concentra- 
 tion, in one individual, of all the vital forces of a 
 people that historical annals record. Yet, the 
 name and the individual referred to, had remained 
 enveloped in doubt and uncertainty until our day. 
 
 In vain have the chisel and the pencil perpetuat- 
 ed both upon the finest monuments in the valley of 
 the Nile. In vain in the basreliefs that adorn
 
 62 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 the sanctuaries of the 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 likeness of the supreme Egyptian 
 deity, Ammon-Ba, 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, Barneses 
 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 life 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 bantling with their 
 milk, and endow him, by virtue 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 glimpse,t the name 
 and personality of Barneses Mei-Amoun became 
 
 * Panegyrics were the grand state occasions when the 
 fame of the princes and the glory of the gods of Egypt 
 were publicly extolled and celebrated with processions, 
 chan tings and festivities. 
 
 t See Appendix V.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 63 
 
 mixed up, 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 mythical remembrances that 
 emerged from this confusion, and which Manetho, 
 the only annalist 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 the 
 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 little to the history 
 of humanity whether Barneses II. was a member 
 of the eighteenth dynasty, as Champollion thought, 
 or with his grandfather Rameses 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 Barneses, is to form some idea of the political
 
 64 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 and social condition of the world when he was sum- 
 moned to agitate it with the sceptre and the sword : 
 and also to comprehend the elements 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 set forth the first ; and 
 in the following pages we shall strive to complete 
 oui % review by extending it to the second. 
 
 n. 
 
 SON of Seti I. and of the Queen Twea the 
 second wife of that prince Barneses Mei-Amoun 
 must have been born during the quarter of a cen^ 
 tury that preceded the year 1400 before our Era. 
 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 magni- 
 ficent 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 promised to tho
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 65 
 
 child just born ; the means conceived by the happy 
 father to prepare his son for this high destiny ; all 
 the young Egyptians born on the same day with 
 the little 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 wild 
 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 tune 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 ike son of the Sun, the Lard of dia- 
 dems, the favorite of Phtah, the good Deity, sovereign
 
 66 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 of two worlds and eternal as the Sun itself!" 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. WJiile still a very little child, wearing 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 Barneses in a child's dress ; 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 Museum of the Louvre in Paris may be seen in 
 case C, in the Historic Hall, on the first floor, two baa 
 reliefs representing Rameses IL In one of them the prince 
 is already a youth : he is standing near a lion, with a bow in 
 his hand ; but he still wears the plait of hair, the distin- 
 guishing emblem that was laid aside on attaining manhood. 
 In the other fragment, Barneses IL, still a mere infant, is
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. G7 
 
 m. 
 
 THE monuments, while they 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 making any great archaic 
 efforts, to retrace the scene of his son's coronation. 
 At the moment when the existing generation is 
 dying out around us, while it looks on with coldness 
 and mockery 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, in fancy, to the period when society was in 
 its youth, and the masses of men, well or ill con- 
 ducted during their passage through life, rolled 
 along inert, from the cradle to the tomb, in blind 
 
 nevertheless King, as the urceus, viper or nazha, which sur- 
 mounts his crest, and the titles carved around him, bear wit- 
 ness. He wears the long dangling tress, and carries his fiii- 
 ger at liis mouth, as a token of childhood.
 
 68 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 adoration of their guides ; when human thought, 
 shut up in the depths of the temples, had no other 
 perception of the divine 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 tJie holy mountain of 
 the West* beside the last resting places of the other 
 terrestrial 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 superb fragment 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, 
 Barneses Hikpun, and his son Barneses IV. The tomb 
 of the great Mei-Amoun, destroyed, undoubtedly, by -the 
 Persians, has never been pointed out. See Lenorumnd, 
 Muste des Anliq. egypt. , p. 20.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 69 
 
 functionaries of the two first classes who by right 
 or through duty had a marked place in the pane- 
 gyrics, or great public ceremonies. 
 
 The entrenched camps with 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 (Eris, intendants of the 
 Egyptian nomes, or governors of conquered territo- 
 ries. These brought with them, mingling 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 from 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, which,
 
 70 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 borne in pomp along the river by their prophets, 
 their pontiffs and their choristers, came to intercede 
 respectfully with Ammon-Ra, their lord and fatJter, 
 in favor of the mortal who was to become Hue, guard- 
 ian Sun of justice among men. 
 
 IV. 
 
 ON the appointed day, so soon as the sun rising 
 above the horizon of the Arabic chain, had gilded 
 the opposite summits of the Libyan mountains, 
 sanctified 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 porphyry and black or rose-colored granite 
 which, reared in gigantic temples ; hewn in the vast 
 pylons ; carved in obelisks ; sculptured in sphinxes 
 and colossi, seemed, at Thebes more than in the 
 rest of Egypt, like 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. All who were 
 to take part in the latter hastened to range them-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 73 
 
 selves along the approaches to the palace where 
 Mei-Amoun had passed, in seclusion, the period of 
 his mourning. Under the main portico stood a 
 magnificent naos * upon supports of eoony carved 
 in symbolical caryatides. It contained a throne of 
 ivory, the base of which represented in gilded relief 
 the sphinx, the emblem of wisdom united with 
 strength, and the lion, the symbol of courage. 
 Of this throne the colored statues of Tmei, the god- 
 dess of justice, and of Hor-Moei, the sun-god 
 of truth, with outstretched arms and expanded 
 wings, formed the background and sustained the 
 dais. The king, his forehead encircled with a sim- 
 ple band surmounted with a golden urceus set with 
 jewels, having seated himself in this kind of case or 
 shrine, twelve Oeris or warrior chieftains, the first 
 in the empire in dignity and birth, uplift'ed him on 
 their shoulders. Other great personages then took 
 hold, each one of some particular part of the sup- 
 ports and steps leading to the throne, and all 
 moved off together, preceded by an immense 
 crowd, to the temple of Ammon. 
 
 The march was opened by a band of vocal and 
 instrumental music in which figured the rudimen- 
 tary types of the flutes, trumpets and drums still in 
 
 * A car or chair of state.
 
 74: EGYPT 3300 TEAES AGO. 
 
 use. The members of the king's household and 
 the functionaries of his home establishment came 
 next, and immediately after them, the royal naos 
 surrounded by attendants, by fanbearers and young 
 children of the sacerdotal caste carrying the sceptre, 
 the arms and the other insignia of the monarch, be- 
 fore whom the first of the princes of the blood and 
 the son of the high priest burned incense in golden 
 censers. 
 
 The Queen Nofre-Ari, the youthful companion of 
 Mei-Ainoun when he too was young, robed like 
 him in rich and almost transparent tissues, of which 
 India even then possessed the secret, and like him 
 displaying about her black waving masses of hair, 
 and in the many ornaments of her neck, her arms and 
 her naked feet all that was most precious among the 
 pearls and corals of the Erythrean seas and the em- 
 eralds of the Troglodytes, accumulated during the 
 lapse of centuries in the treasury of the Pharaohs, 
 followed her spouse in an elegant palanquin, the 
 elastic hammock of which, constructed of fine flax 
 and gold, seemed suspended to stalks of rose-colored 
 and blue lotus. Above it, a broad dais woven of 
 the rainbow-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 parallel lines,
 
 An Egyptian Princess in her palanquin (according to Wilkinson).
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 77 
 
 the princes and princesses of the blood, the 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 wholly contain. 
 
 IN front of the sacred edifice of which the granite 
 depths resounded with solemn and mysterious 
 murmurs, the military music ceased, and the royal 
 pageant halted. 
 
 The brazen gates, placed between two large py- 
 lons, gave passage to a long succession of priestly 
 choirs advancing to the presence of Mei-Amoun ; 
 these were the local ecclesiastics of all the great 
 temples in the Empire, and all the peculiar creeds 
 of different places which time, conquest and the 
 policy 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 YEABS AGO. 
 
 benedictions of their gods to the new son whom 
 Ammon 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 silver and gold. There, hidden from the sight 
 of every profane eye, were supposed to be stationed 
 those renowned gods descended from the Vedic 
 Aria upon the land of Kemi at successive and un- 
 known epochs, viz : Ph-t-ah or Agny, meaning fire; 
 Ph-Ra ;* Jom ; t Sevek ; $ Asiri ; and those oth- 
 er local conceptions, half monster and half myth, 
 which the pontiff 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 bari filed along in its place in the proces- 
 
 * An equivalent of Re, Ra, Ri, La, El, the Sun. 
 
 f Om, Aom, Homa, the god of the Cup. 
 
 I Siva, g Asura. These were the Indian deities and titles 
 with which the analogy of the Egyptian gods uiid goddess- 
 es is thus indicated.
 
 tfGYPT 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 which their par- 
 ticular deity was, more especially, the type, the in- 
 spiration or the symbol : some extolled 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 overcoming his enemies.* 
 
 VL 
 
 THE tabernacles of the gods were followed by 
 statuettes of the royal ancestors and predecessors 
 of Mei-Amounf also carried and interpreted by 
 priests. Then, in the midst of another sacerdotal 
 group, the white bull, the living emblem of Ammon- 
 Ba, covered with flowers and enveloped in a cloud 
 of incense, appeared on the threshold of the tem- 
 ple, as though to invite the new Aroeri to cross it. 
 
 Then, descending from his elevated naos, Mei- 
 Amoun on foot proceeded through the interior 
 
 * See Diodorus, Book L, chapter 70. 
 t See Appendix VL
 
 80 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 porticoes and the 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 baris, the images of the 
 ancestors, the royal family and the chiefs of the 
 (Eris only went in thither with him. 
 
 On his arrival, the high priest presiding over the 
 pageant, caused the pontiffs officiating under him 
 to intone the chant consecrated to the Divine light 
 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 libations before Ammon ; burned the 
 prescribed incense, amid a shower 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 
 which they expressed for the welfare of the new 
 King of the Earth. The strange import of these 
 antique litanies may be conjectured from the
 
 llliilillil
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 83 
 
 following fragments which, have been preserved for 
 us by the mural inscriptions : 
 
 THE GODDESS MAUT. 
 (The grand-motJier and companion of Ammon.) 
 
 " I come to render homage to the sovereign of the 
 gods, Ammon-Ra, the governing and controlling 
 head of the land of Kemi, in order that he may 
 grant long years to his son King Barneses who 
 loves him." 
 
 THE GOD KHONS. 
 (Son of Maut and Amman.) 
 
 " We approach thee, to serve thy Majesty, Oh, 
 sovereign lord, Ammon-Ra ! grant a pure and safe- 
 ly established life to thy son who loves thee, Ra- 
 meses, the lord of the Earth." 
 
 THE QUEEN NOFKE-ARI. 
 
 " And I, the royal spouse, the all-powerful mis- 
 tress of the world, I bring my homage, also, to Am- 
 mon-Ra, King 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 established and pure life. May his 
 years be counted by periods of panegyrics."
 
 Si KGYPT 3300 YE AHS AGO. 
 
 VII. 
 
 To tins series of prayers and intercessions, Am- 
 mon-Ra replies by the mouth of his high-priest 
 speaking to Mei-Amoun : " My well-beloved son, 
 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, 
 shah 1 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, Barneses having seized the crown 
 upon the altar to place it on his head, the high
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 85 
 
 priest stretched forth his pastoral staff toward the 
 four quarters of the globe, and while the assistant 
 pontiffs set at liberty four living geese which, kept 
 in reserve until that moment, represented the genii 
 of the four cardinal points of the compass, he ex- 
 claimed : 
 
 "Amset, Hapi Dawu-Mutef and Keba-snuf, 
 
 Go ye toward 
 The South, the North, the "West, the East, 
 
 And tell the gods of those regions 
 
 That Horus, the son of Isis and of Asiri, 
 
 Has put the Pshent upon his forehead, 
 
 That King Rameses has put on the Pshent!" 
 
 His head encircled with this mystic tiara, Mei- 
 Amoun 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 kings terminated 
 the religious 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 universal expressions
 
 88 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 of interest and regard, he advanced slowly to liis 
 palace, between two rows of sphinxes whose granite 
 heads, that day adorned with ornaments and a roy- 
 al or divine head-dress 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. 
 
 Yin. 
 
 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 living 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 
 appearance and rise had not yet dawned upon any 
 human community.
 
 The Sphinx of Rameses II. (according to the Sphinx at the Louvre).
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 89 
 
 Below these two classes, one of which was the ed- 
 ucating and the other the conquering caste in the val- 
 ley of the Nile, there were crowds of artisans, of 
 workers-by-hand who, under the direction of chiefs 
 belonging to the religious castes, cut and built ma- 
 sonry ; melted and worked with the metals ; spun flax 
 and byssus ; in fine, toiled at the trades assigned to 
 them, from the cradle, by law or by descent. There 
 were farmers who tilled the lands given to them by 
 the King, 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, lived herdsmen who 
 transmitted, from father to son, the business of 
 raising and guarding the flocks and herds of the 
 royal ecclesiastical or military domains. But these 
 shepherds, these laborers, these artisans, excluded 
 by law from public affairs ; deprived, also, of the 
 right to bear arms and of plying various trades at 
 once ; liable to be condemned, for each offence, to 
 imprisonment, flues 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 Sudras of India to whom the 
 sovereign Master of things has assigned but one
 
 90 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 office, viz., that of serving tJie upper classes witlioui 
 depredating tlieir merits.* 
 
 Below them, again, were the slaves who had 
 been purchased in the markets or captured in war. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THIS condition of things, which is not denied by 
 the boldest admirers of the past history of Egypt, 
 and is attested by the unanimous reports transmit- 
 ted to us twenty centuries or more ago, by the 
 sagacious observers of antiquity, who went from all 
 the centres of civilization in those days, to the 
 borders of the Nile to study a civilization 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 th e text of of some funereal inscriptions, in 
 relation to the civil or private life 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.t 
 
 * Manava Shastra. Book First. 
 
 t In reference to castes in Egypt, see Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, 15 Sept., 184=8.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 91 
 
 Without disputing the 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 
 the nineteenth dynasty; and especially to ages of 
 decline, like those in which the last Kameses 
 passed away, we shall confine ourselves to ascer- 
 taining, with Mr. Ampere himself, 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 warriors, and if by chance there was so lit- 
 tle demarcation between these two aristocratic 
 classes, the same person could, sometimes, accu- 
 mulate sacerdotal, military and civil offices, the 
 line of separation between them and the inferior 
 classes always remained so broad that nothing 
 could obliterate it not even death. For the 
 honors paid to ancestors in the tombs, the admis- 
 sion of their names into the funereal 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 AGO. 
 
 castes. However that may be, we shall leave to 
 any one who has studied in good faith, the nature 
 of man and the affiliation of his social conceptions, 
 the task of deciding whether deductions drawn 
 from hieroglyphics, or from a doubtful 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 their own 
 hands. 
 
 For our part, even 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 
 Seti and of Mei-Amouu, 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 the 
 land by conquest, and too long carried to extremes 
 by the tyranny of established institutions.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 93 
 
 X. 
 
 THIS point of historical criticism put aside, and 
 we have touched npon it for no other purpose than 
 to show 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 itself, 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 much 
 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 glimpes of the light reflected there 
 from the dawn that still lingers below the horizen. 
 He made up for this by creating according to the 
 extent of his visual range and his requirements, 
 a type of absolute monarchy in which the despot 
 could be, up to a certain point, less the tyrant than 
 the father of his subjects ; wherein each class and
 
 94 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 each profession had its allotted sphere ; wherein a 
 religious dedication to the task, extending its influ- 
 ence from father to son, age after age, confined 
 each individual within a circle of cares and duties 
 amid which he was to live and die ; wherein, finally , 
 at the cost of beholding all human dignities concen- 
 trated upon a few heads, and the free will of each 
 one sacrificed to the rigid mechanism of the law, 
 the arts of peace, agricultural abundance, and com- 
 mercial wealth seemed to diffuse themselves over 
 the whole social body, at the hands of the sovereign 
 lite the blessings that descend from Divinity itself.* 
 Some of the reigns of the eighteenth and nine- 
 teenth Egyptian dynasties, and, particularly, that 
 of Barneses II., seem to have attained the limits of 
 this ideal type. 
 
 * See Heeren " On tlie Commerce and Policy of the An- 
 cients." Vol. I.
 
 THE CAMPAIGNS OF RAMESES 
 THE GREAT. 
 
 Situation, Wealth and Population of Egypt, on the Accession of 
 Barneses. The plausible Motives for his Expeditions.- -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 Atesh. The return of Rameses. 
 
 WHEN Rameses ascended the throne, more than 
 two centuri-es had elapsed since the expulsion of 
 the Hjcsos. The almost uninterrupted 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 of 
 the epoch ; the multiplication and good manage- 
 ment of . the canals, those peaceful conquerors of 
 arable land won by them from the desert, were
 
 98 EYGPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 daily augmenting 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 Egypt the most laborious and the most compact 
 population then existing, on the other hand, the 
 military castes, trained to warfare from generation 
 to generation by a series of successful distant expe- 
 ditions, presented in its real effective force, and in 
 that alleged in the exaggerated figures handed 
 down to us by the writers of Greece and Rome,* 
 the most martial, the best armed and the most for- 
 midable mass of combatants known 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, 
 ren ler 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 Theban priests to Germanicus (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 Appendix VII.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 99 
 
 Moreover, at that time, great disorders were agi- 
 tating the East, and the noise of their distant tu- 
 mults could not but re-echo as far as the borders 
 of the Nile. In the great irruptions that Seti I. had 
 guided toward Central Asia, he had repeatedly 
 come into collision with the confederation of the 
 Khetas, in whose title seem to He concealedjboth that 
 of the old Hycsos and the more modern name of the 
 Scythians. From the gorges of the Taurus and the 
 Lebanon mountains, where they had established then- 
 citadels and the centre of their power, these ancient 
 wandering races presided over the great movements 
 of the Oriental populations which the religious or so- 
 cial convulsions of Upper Asia were incessantly de- 
 taching from the antique Aryan throne, and contin- 
 ually recruited their numbers with fresh swarms. 
 
 There was reason to apprehend that, ere long, all 
 these torrents of men would foUow the descending 
 channel worn for them by former migrations, and, 
 like 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- 
 ward 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, we cannot but agree with him.
 
 100 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 According to Diodorus, whom, we think, we can 
 take for our guide in this matter, Mei-Amoun pre- 
 pared himself for his great enterprise by such acts 
 as were most likely to give his popularity deep root 
 in the minds of his subjects. In order to feel as- 
 sured of the fidelity 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 liberality equal to his unlimited power. 
 He 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 nom.es or 
 provincial governments! at thirty-six, and placed 
 at the head of each, to preside over the local ad- 
 
 * See Diodorus, Book I. 
 
 f M. Brougsch, who very naturally, will have it that this 
 administrative division of Egypt dates back to a period
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS 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, he 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, like himself, full of 
 ardor and ambition and inured to warlike 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 this 
 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, cli. LIV.
 
 102 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 H. 
 
 AFTEB having thus regulated the organization 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 all 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 warlike operations 
 toward the East that Barneses was planning. There 
 remained the districts on the south, ever exposed to 
 the descents of the savage hordes belonging to 
 the bad race of Gush, and the Sea- Weed Lake, the 
 way to which the monsoons of the Indian Ocean 
 had taught to the Pelasgians from the banks of the
 
 EGYPT 3000 TEARS AGO. 103 
 
 Indus and the Nerbudda. Always in quest of ad- 
 venture and pillage, as their brethren of the ^Egeean 
 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 oftener as pirates. 
 
 To remedy this double inconvenience, two things 
 seemed necessary to Mei-Amoun ; the subjuga- 
 tion of Upper Ethiopia and the establishment of a 
 military 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 centuries. 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 Bed 
 Sea, who, until then, had escaped the Egypti/in yoke.
 
 104 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 Then, when the shipyards established in the ports 
 subsequently named Adulis, Berenice and Leucos * 
 had given him the first long vessels constructed by 
 Egyptian hands, t 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 Mosselycus, situated not far from Cape Guarda- 
 fui, and six hundred leagues from Thebes was, accord- 
 ing to Pliny and Strabo, the extreme point reached 
 by Barneses in that direction.:}: 
 
 The mementoes of these events, precursors as 
 they were of others on a grander scale, may still bo 
 deciphered on the ruins that cover Mount Barkal 
 to the south of Nubia, as also among the broken re- 
 mains of the Bameseum or great temple of Thebes, 
 on the right bank. In one of the bas relief pictures 
 of the speos of Ipsamboul, even the triumphal 
 entry of Barneses 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 II. 
 
 t DioJorus, Book I, ch. Iv. 
 
 J Strabo, Book LVI. Pliuy Book VL
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 105 
 
 him a throng of negro and Leuco-Ethiopean cap- 
 tives with which he is going to do homage to the 
 Theban 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, 
 without admitting that this right was ever extended 
 so far as to cover human sacrifice. But those who 
 do not, without some restrictions, ascribe very pure 
 or very exalted light to the Egyptian priesthood ; 
 those who remember what pitiless hatred to the 
 foreigner Egypt bequeathed to ah 1 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 acknowledge 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 oblation, 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 IL , lately found 
 in the temple of Amada in Nubia, unfortunately brings
 
 in. 
 
 ONE of the bas-reliefs of Beit-el- Wally shows 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 Gush which 
 the inscriptions designate as bad ; tables and side- 
 boards covered with gold-dust and golden rings ; 
 logs 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 
 Ruteni (Upper Assyria) and filled the heart of his father, 
 Aui:iion-Ra, with joy ; for he had, with his own war-club, 
 massacred seven kings captured in the city of Tasliis 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 raws of Cvsh the victories won by his 
 majesty over all the nations of the world, and the manner in 
 \vhich he chastises them."
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 107 
 
 tion, to oear away from Africa, that mother of gold, 
 of slaves and of monsters who se deplorably prolific 
 yield four thousand years of pillage have not been 
 able to exhaust. 
 
 The names of some of the tribes subjugated in 
 this expedition have tlieir 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 Africa. 
 Then, too, the narratives that modern travellers give 
 of these acts of plunder sound like a faithful transla- 
 tion of the legends explaining one of the bas-reliefs 
 of Beit-el-Wally destined to transmit to posterity 
 the remembrance of a raid directed by Barneses 
 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 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 reaches 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 that 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 the 
 same hostile races figure : 
 
 " The Abyssinian 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 
 came back with their bleeding trophies paraded in 
 the most indecent manner, and vaunted their ex- 
 ploits in obscene recitals; others brought 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. 
 
 * Cliampollion's Letters written from Egypt and Nubia. 
 Cherubini's Nubia. Firmin Didot.
 
 EGYPT 3300 TEAKS AGO. Ill 
 
 When the army pressed forward in the direction of 
 a thicket where the Gallas, it was supposed, had 
 taken refuge, I withdrew, so as not to witness the 
 slaughter of the poor creatures who, to escape the 
 j&velins hurled at them, were clambering up into 
 the trees. There they were shot like sparrows, and 
 thither, also, came the king, who would not have 
 missed a humming-bird, at blank range, to bring 
 down a miserable fugitive from the covert of the 
 branches where he had tried to hide himself."* 
 
 Between these two narratives thirty-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 
 that 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 Journey to Abyssinia, vol. ii., pp. 245, 246.
 
 112 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 wild animals of their forests hold with the hunter, 
 they have for five thousand years paid to them tri- 
 bute of flesh and blood, and seen the bones of their 
 children 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 Barneses, 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.

 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 115 
 
 If the monuments have not placed it in our pow- 
 er to correct the assertions of the ancients with re- 
 gard to the numerical strength of that army, they 
 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 flower of the CEris.* The rest of the military 
 caste furnished the hoplites or troops of the line on 
 foot, who, protected by a cuirass and shielded by 
 a buckler, used the lance, the sword and the battle- 
 axe in combat, and manoeuvred, 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 
 from the Ethopian allies its numerous soldiers 
 
 * The number of these chariot teams, each consisting of 
 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 their introduction on the 
 borders of the Nile.
 
 116 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 who, armed with all the projectile weapons known 
 at that 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 
 Gallas, 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 drum, under the 
 banners oi their respective chiefs ; but above all 
 these special and subordinate symbols, there rose 
 at the extremity of a tall and strong staff, the en- 
 sign of the Empire, aD glittering with the splendor 
 of pure and massive gold. It consisted of a ram's 
 head surmounted with the solar disk, the double 
 symbol of Ammon-Ea 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 
 camp, the position of the royal pavilion.
 
 V. 
 
 FBOM the borders of the Nile to those of the Ti- 
 gris, Barneses could follow routes upon which near- 
 ly all his predecessors, dating from Thothmes I., had 
 left some land-marks. 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 establishments which 
 the Cushites 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 Euphrates, and, lastly, Babel in the land of 
 Shinar, 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 the eastward of the Naharain country Naha- 
 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 empires of Semiramis and Cyrus. 
 Here, for Barneses, the realm of the unknown began, 
 and an entire new world opened before him, in 
 which he, undoubtedly, had no other guide than the
 
 118 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 instinctive hatred against the men of the North- 
 east that animated his army, and the fugitive cur- 
 rents of the tribes and races with which he camo 
 into collision as he passed on. 
 
 Nevertheless, one may infer from the narrations 
 on this subject which 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 JBactrian country, and then 
 diverging toward the north, turned back again by 
 a long elliptical curve and debouched upon the 
 European shores of the Propontis. Thus, Barneses 
 II. 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 fearful and un- 
 known god to the savages inhabiting the shores 
 of the Thracian Bosphorus. We must run down 
 along the lists 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, repaired to the
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 121 
 
 East where a premature death awaited him, he vis- 
 ited the vast remains of Thebes in sober medita- 
 tion, and, having asked one of the priests then pre- 
 sent, a living relic in the midst of so many ruins, 
 the meaning of the sacred characters that covered 
 the edifices still standing, the latter replied while 
 he interpreted the inscriptions, that the King Ba- 
 rneses, at the head of an army 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 Syrians and the Arme- 
 nians, Cappadocia, which is near to them, and all 
 hither Asia from the Sea of Bithynia to that of Ly- 
 cia.*. , 
 
 VI. 
 
 HERODOTUS, who preceded Gerrnanicus by more 
 than 450 years on the borders of the Nile, and Ta- 
 citus by at least five centuries in history, likewise 
 reports, in accordance with the statement of the 
 priests, that Sesostris (Barneses II.), after the sub- 
 
 
 * See the Annals ot Tacitus, Book II., cliap. lx.
 
 122 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 jugation of Ethiopia, marched with a numerous 
 army to the conquest of Asia, and subdued all the 
 nations he encountered on the way, taking care, 
 after each victory, to erect landmarks upon which 
 inscriptions narrated the details of the combat, 
 
 the name of his country and his own 
 
 Thus 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 clearly 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 Colchians 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 
 that the two nations have retained remembrances 
 of each other, which are much more vivid, however, 
 among the Colchians than among the Egyptians.
 
 Bass-Relief of Sesostris near Sardis, from a photograph.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES 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 
 his 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 Phocaea and from Smyrna to 
 Sardis. "Each one of these, carved in relief on a Avail 
 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 the strength 
 of my arm"* 
 
 Strabo, whose birth in Asia Minor and long 
 journeys in the East gave him the opportunity to 
 verify or correct with his own eyesight the asser- 
 tions of the father of history, declares that the 
 routes followed by Eameses-Sesostris had been dofr- 
 
 * Herodotus, Book IL, chaps. 102, 103, 104, 105.
 
 126 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 ted with commemorative columns, inscriptions, bas- 
 reliefs and temples.* 
 
 The great historical pages of Ipsamboul, Luxor 
 and Karnak confirm in most of their details, with- 
 out invalidating any, the preceding attestations of 
 the two great historians of Greece and Home, and 
 of the erudite geographer of Amasia ; only 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 Barneses 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 
 of the red soil : the Rotenians hold the place after- 
 ward occupied by the Assyrians ; Sengar is the 
 name of the country of Babel, and in the regions 
 where the empires of Media and Persia were to 
 be reared, the Remeni, the Moshaushs and the 
 Robus f range themselves along from north to 
 south, 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 YEAES AGO. 127 
 
 of the East, the offensive designation of the plague 
 ofli/ieta marks out upon an immense space not lim- 
 ited toward the north, the numberless and warlike 
 nomadic hordes which, since the days of the Hyc- 
 sos, had supplied the most implacable enemies 
 known to the warriors of the borders of the Nile. 
 
 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 to their gifts and opportunities, in the hu- 
 naanitary task of their period, he is enabled to 
 ascertain the presence of the ancestors of a people 
 who, after having long held the sceptre of antique civ- 
 ilization, have arisen before our eyes from the tomb 
 iu which the ages had buried them, to claim a 
 place among the modern nations. It will 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, whose 
 tribes, scattered and floating about over Western 
 Asia after their expulsion from Ariawarta, their 
 original country, undoubtedly owed to their 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 the .ZEgean 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 alliance of 
 the former with the ancestors of the Medes and 
 Persians, would no doubt have awakened singular 
 incredulity among the contemporaries of Themisto- 
 cles or Plato. Nevertheless, it has been repeatedly 
 affirmed by Champollion, who, in the inscriptions at 
 Kamak 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 like that of the " Ked 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 andLepsius, who think that they have 
 again come across the same name of a nation which they 
 spell Ya-bu-na in the inscriptions attributed -by them to the 
 12th and 13th dynasties.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 129 
 
 VII. 
 
 FOE Champollion, the Khetas were Scythians ; 
 but M. de Rouge, followed by all the Egyptian 
 scholars of the present day, considers them 110 other 
 than the Chets or Hittites of the Bible, whose power- 
 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 preceding pages, in reference to 
 the Scythians of Justimis 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 itself 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 ; 
 
 
 
 rthey 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 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 there, with his usual penetration, in a special paper 
 from which we borrow the following passages : 
 
 " While studying the battles represented in these 
 mural paintings, says the learned and conscientious 
 philologist, my attention was attracted by a singu- 
 lar episode in which the personal valor of the King 
 seems to have extricated him from great peril: 
 hence, too, it is repeated, as though by emulation, in 
 the paintings of all the temples. Twice given in 
 the Bameseum, it is also found at Luxor, at Ipsam- 
 boul and at Beit-el-Wally. In addition to the 
 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 Ba- 
 rneses named Penta-ur. Champollion appears to 
 have copied only a few lines 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 from it, at the outset, the names of 
 the hostile tribes in league with the Prince of 
 Kheta. But, neither Champollion nor his succes- 
 ^rs had discerned the real theme of this epic frag-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 133 
 
 ment, to wit : the great peril to which Kameses was 
 exposed, when separated from 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 all 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 completion of the 
 manuscript ; but the number of the columns form- 
 erly filled with hieroglyphics leads us to conjecture 
 tha at least the first third part of the poem is 
 lacking. 
 
 The historian may fill this deficiency, to some ex- 
 tent, by the aid of the official bulletins of the cam- 
 paign, which the pictures of Ipsamboul and the 
 Ilameseum have preserved almost intact ; they will 
 explain to us by what stratagem the hostile leader 
 had succeeded in cutting off the Pharaoh and his 
 retinue from 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 YEARS 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 Aranta. 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,) Rameses was in 
 Asia with his army, marching against the insurgent 
 tribes commanded by the prince of Kheta. The 
 king was advancing to the southward of the city, 
 but he lacked information concerning the position 
 of the hostile army, when some Bedouins came in ' 
 to offer their 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 country. But these rovers were emissaries 
 of the foe, specially entrusted with the task of mis- 
 leading the Egyptians by their false reports. The
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 135 
 
 confederates had really massed their forces secretly 
 to the northward of Atesh. Barneses, 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 aU the confederate forces were 
 concentrated behind the city of Atesh watching 
 the movements of the Pharaoh for an opportunity 
 to attack him at advantage. 
 
 " Barneses caUs 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 
 Prince of Kheta causes his troops to advance rap- 
 idly to the southward of Atesh, and long before the 

 
 136 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 Egyptian army has time to retrace its steps, the lit- 
 tle band of followers and attendants who accom- 
 pany the king is dispersed, and Barneses finds him 
 self surrounded by the hostile chariots.' 1 * 
 
 It is into the midst of this critical phase of the 
 action that what remains of the poem of Penta-ur 
 transports us. The papyrus, worn and rent in 
 many places, as it is, exhibits many a gap ; and we 
 confess, with ah 1 humility, that we have endeavored 
 to supply some of its deficiencies by the help of the 
 notes that Champollion has left, in reference to the 
 same subject. f 
 
 VIII. 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM THE SALLIER PAPYRUS. 
 
 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, carefully armed 
 .... and had placed themselves in ambush to 
 
 * See the Vicomte Em. de Kongo's Memoir on the Cam- 
 paigns of Sesostris, Revue Contemporaine, August, 185G. 
 f The reader will recognize these fragments by the murk 
 which we have placed before and after them.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS 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 weapons he was like unto 
 Baal in his hour. The mighty coursers of his 
 Majesty (strength in Thebais was their name) came 
 forth from the grand stables of the Sun, the lord of 
 justice, Barneses Mei Amoun.* 
 
 The king, rushing 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 
 hundred swift chariots, manned by the bravest war- 
 riors of the pitiful Kheta and his numerous allies : 
 AraduSj Masu, Patasa, Kaslikash, (Elon, Gazwa- 
 tan, Khirdb, Aktar, Atesh and Rdka. Each of 
 
 * The Louvre Museum (Historical Hall, case G) possesses 
 a golden 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 Barneses II., who consecrated 
 them to the Sun on his first return from Egypt.
 
 138 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 
 
 their chariots bore three men .... and the 
 king had with 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 life 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 
 dwelling 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 Ele- 
 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 like things have been done at any other time ? 
 Ignominy to him who resists thy designs ; felicity
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 141 
 
 to him who understands thee, oh, Ammon ! I in- 
 voke thee, oh, my lather ! I am in the midst of a 
 throng of unknown tribes, and I am alone, before 
 thee; no one is with me. My archers and my 
 horsemen 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 Amrnon 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 over 
 them. Oh Sun ! have I not obeyed the order of thy 
 lips, and thy counsels have they not guided me ? 
 Have I not given glory to thee, to the ends of the 
 Earth ?" 
 
 These words resounded in Hermonthis; Phra 
 comes to him who calls upon him ; he stretches 
 forth his hand to him. Rejoice and be glad ... he 
 flies to thee, he flies to thee . . . Barneses 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, loving 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, then, to his 
 Majesty : " My 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, Barneses Meiamoun ! my 
 good master ?" 
 
 And thus did his Majesty reply to his master of 
 the horse : 
 
 " Have courage ! strengthen thy heart, oh my 
 comrade ! I will plunge into their midst like the 
 hawk from on high darting down upon his foe ; 
 hurled to the ground and slain, they shall roll in 
 the dust. What does thy heart then think of these 
 Aamus 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 I 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 lifted
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 143 
 
 up his voice. Sutekh, the -great warrior-Baal, was 
 in all his members. . . . Each one of all my 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 country ? 
 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 Egypt 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 offered up in Thebais, in the 
 city of Ammon, great is the fault committed by my 
 soldiers and my horsemen. It is greater than can
 
 144 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 be told, for if I have made manifest my valor, 
 neither the archers nor the horsemen came with 
 me. The whole world has made way to the efforts 
 of my arm ; 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 Kheta, 
 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 tby victorious 
 falchion! It is thou, oh good warrior! who art the 
 lord of ar nies. 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 heart ! 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 against
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 145 
 
 thee. It is thou who dost reign over Egypt and 
 
 chastise the barbarian races The loins of 
 
 the land of Kheta are thine forever." 
 
 IX. 
 
 " HOWEVER, on the next day, so soon as it was 
 daylight on the Earth, Barneses caused the battle 
 to be joined afresh, and rushed into the combat like 
 
 a bull that dashes among the geese The 
 
 warriors, in their turn, went into the fight like 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 all 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 circumstance which has frequently repeated 
 itself in scenes of warfare, rendered the disaster 
 
 * See the Vicomte de Rouge at the passage cited.
 
 146 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 that befell the 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 mam 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 valiantly fought, and not ingloriously fell, 
 around the chief commander of the Khetas, his 
 most faithful warriors, such as Grabatusa his 
 squire, and Khirapsar, his librarian or rhapsodist ;t 
 
 * In the Egyptian mythology, Apophis, the serpent, is 
 the great enemy of the Sun ; in several hypogees he is rep- 
 resented as struggling against the gods of the Amenti, who 
 succeed in capturing and chaining him. See Champollion's 
 Letters from Eyypt. 
 
 t Write)' of Books, says the text.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 149 
 
 and his most tried lieutenants, such as Rabsuna, 
 chief of the archers, and Tarekennas, general of 
 the cavalry. But, when Kameses 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 frightful 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 survive themselves, mutilated 
 as they were for life, by the terrible hooked chariot- 
 scythe. And if the river spared a few who, follow- 
 ing Masraim, the brother of their king, succeeded in 
 swimming 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 race of the Khirabs, who was separated 
 from his warriors while flying before Icing in the di- 
 rection of the icater" 
 
 From the foot of the walls to which he had been 
 pushed back step by step, all the time fighting, 
 Kketasar, beholding the tremendous disaster that 
 his gallantry had been unable to avert, resolutely 
 took the only course that presented itself to him to
 
 150 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 save his capital from the consequences of an assault 
 that had now become unavoidable.] 
 
 He turned with his hands extended toward the 
 smiling sun 
 
 He sent forth to invoke the great name of hid 
 Majesty : " It is thou who art the Sun, the god of 
 the two horizons ! It is thou who art Soutukh^kke 
 great 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 addressed 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 
 mighty courage and the boundless ardor; the Sun, 
 lord of justice, the chosen one of the god Phra, the 
 son of the Sun Rameses Mei-Amoun.* 
 
 The slave says, addressing his Majesty : " My 
 good master, son of the Sun, since Amnion 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 official protocol of 
 King Barneses II.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 151 
 
 people of Kheta may be slaves beneath thy feet ; 
 Phra has granted to thee, dominion 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 life." .... 
 
 Then his Majesty caused the chief leaders of 
 the army to come, and gathered them together that 
 they 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 GEris assembled in 
 a throng around him, he added : 
 
 " Give yourselves up to rejoicing, oh my com- 
 *ides ; let it ascend to heaven ! 
 
 " We have triumphed over the strangers by our 
 might ; we have fallen upon them like lions and we 
 have pursued them like hawks. We have crossed
 
 152 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 their rivers, burned their fortified places, annihilated 
 their guilty souls. The terror of my name has ho- 
 vered over them and their hearts have been filled 
 with it. 
 
 " Rejoice, 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. Aminoii-Ra 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-Ba, 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 great image of Plira, and rested 
 between his royal double pylons with a serene ex- 
 istence, like the Sun in his double abode in the 
 heavens." 
 
 * Erected by 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 the Bed Sea.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS AGO. 153 
 
 X. 
 
 WHEN, some time after that period, Barneses led 
 back his army to his country, laden with the spoils 
 of the East, and dragging numberless captives in 
 its train ; when, having passed through the cities 
 of the Delta and the Heptanoinis, more as a divin- 
 ity than as a simple mortal, he came to the great 
 temple of Thebes, to make in the presence of all 
 Egypt, the emphatic recital of winch we have just 
 given the substance ; and then, in enumerating, in 
 grand outlines, the palpable results of his con- 
 quests ; the roving tribes of the North hurled back 
 and restrained within their native steppes, by the 
 sword or by the faith of treaties ; the frontieis of 
 the Empire pushed beyond the Taurus and the 
 Tigris and covered by military colonies which, from 
 the Euxine to the Ocean, guaranteed the fidelity of 
 nations that were vassals or hi 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 grain and other products 
 which each subjugated country was to furnish, and 
 the aggregate of which equalled all the imposts 
 that tht? arms of the Parthians or Roman power 

 
 154 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 have raised since then !"* 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 ! 
 
 No doubt that in the thinned ranks of the victors 
 many a vacant place summoned the tears of many 
 a family, for fathers, sons and husbands who had 
 remained on the roads they had traversed. If we 
 are to believe testimony quite unaniinous,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 unite 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 Barneses and of his companions their ultimate 
 
 * Tacitus : Annals, Book II. cL. 60 and 61. 
 t Herodotus, Diodorus, Manetho.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 155 
 
 results, which in their time no one could even con- 
 jecture beforehand, with their complete victories 
 over the roving tribes, the whole future of the west- 
 ern world based upon agriculture and the rearing 
 of permanent cities ; with their gigantic journey- 
 ings, the enlargement of general views with regard 
 to the world, and the drawing nearer together of 
 a part of the long dispersed fragments of human 
 tradition ; well, we confess aloud that, far from 
 being tempted to smile at the ingenuous emphasis 
 with which these men of the antique time express 
 themselves and their infatuated delight 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 ! 
 
 "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 free the breath of those who fol- 
 lowed thee under my sacred ensigns; and the 

 
 15G EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 world has stood still before thee! . . . My mouth 
 doth praise thee !"] 
 
 " Thus," says the bard Penta-ur, in conclusion, 
 " Thus Rameses, child of the Sun, and friend of 
 Ammon, 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 Barneses, 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 Rameses, and long addi- 
 tional lists 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 Rameses, amid the pageantries of a pan- 
 egyric celebrated at Thebes in honor of Amnion, 
 sees a solemn embassy come in from the Prince of
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 157 
 
 the 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 auxiliary 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. Reciprocal matrimonial alliances cemented 
 it, and Barneses admitted the eldest daughter of 
 Khetasar to his harem with the rank of one his 
 wives. 
 
 " This peace bore lasting and prolific fruit 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 Barneses 
 Mei-Amoun." 
 
 * See the Vicomtc Em. de Rouge's previously cited Me- 
 moir
 
 THE MONUMENTS OF 
 RAMESES II. 

 
 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 Barneses. The Land of Gush. The 
 Spears of Ipsamboul. The old Age of Barneses. Skeletons 
 of Oxen and Skeletons of Kings. Darius and the Statue of 
 Barneses. 
 
 ALTHOUGH some allowance must be made for the 
 official hyperboles of the great bard Penta-ur, the 
 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 was not to witness such another. 
 
 None of Mei-Arnoun'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 YEARS AGO. 
 
 itself such deeply marked or such multiplied traces 
 of their passage. 
 
 In reference to this subject, Diodorus relates that 
 " on returning from his conquests, Sesostris re-en- 
 tered the regions subject to his sway 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 undertakings, intended at once to glorify his 
 own name, and to defend, embellish 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 YEABS AGO. 163 
 
 mus from Pelnsium to On (or Heliopolis) with a 
 wall of one thousand five hundred stadii in extent. 
 In the temple of the god worshipped at Thebes, he 
 consecrated a vessel of cedar wood two hnndred 
 and eighty cubits long, and plated it with gold on 
 the outside and with silver within. He had two 
 obelisks 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 from 
 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 
 
 H. 
 
 THESE details, borrowed from many sources, no 
 doubt, by the historian of Stagyra, agree with those 
 
 * The Greek form of the Egyptian Phtah. 
 f Diodorus, Book I., chap. Ivi. and Ivii.
 
 164 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 that Herodotus collected four centuries earlier from 
 the lips of the priests at Memphis, Thebes and 
 Heliopolis, tJiose of tJie latter city being considered tlie 
 best informed of all in tJie history of tlieir country.* 
 
 Of the numerous monuments of Barneses II. 
 some, such as the Isthmus wall, and the fortified 
 cities which he had built by the tribes of Beni- 
 Heber upon that frontier, have been swept away 
 by 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, like the canal uniting the Seaweed 
 Lake, since then rediscovered in the days of our 
 fathers,t by the very man who was for them what 
 Barneses had been for his contemporaries, have 
 left vestiges which science interrogates, sometimes 
 with profit and always with interest ; still others, yet 
 standing upon the desolate banks of the river that 
 mirrored their pristine splendor, make the modern 
 
 * Herodotus, Euterpe, c. III. 
 
 f Ou the 30th of December, 1798, the general-in-chief of 
 the Army 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- 
 moire on the communication of the Indian Ocean with the 
 Mediterranean.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 165 
 
 solitudes participate in the majesty of the ancient 
 days ; and finally others again, borne away to the 
 museums and public places of the great Western 
 capitals, are perpetual 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 Barneses struck the observers 
 of antiquity. 
 
 m. 
 
 THE first of these cities, much more exposed 
 than its rival, to the inroads of time and the invader, 
 alike 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 admiration and astonishment 
 for the observer. 
 
 "Notwithstanding the immense extent of Mem-
 
 166 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 phis and its high antiquity," writes the Arab'Ab- 
 dallatif in the 13th century 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 all 
 that the ages have superadded to so many causes 
 of destruction, its ruins 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 inspires augment ; and 
 every succeeding glance that one casts at its ruins 
 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 Barneses with Upper Asia, whence the wor- 
 
 * Abdallatif translated into French by M. de Sacy. 
 
 f Ph-l-ahahi, agny. The most ancient divinity of Vedio 
 days. The northern origin of fire-worship seems to us in- 
 disputable.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 167 
 
 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 exhausted themselves for weary years. 
 
 Moreover, in testimony of his gratitude and his 
 piety, he had caused the monolithic statues of his 
 wife, his children and himself, to be placed before the 
 pylons of the sanctuary, in the attitude of religious 
 contemplation. Well ! in these palaces or temples, 
 divinities and worshippers 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 
 must formerly have measured nearly forty-five feet 
 in height, still surmounts with all the thickness of 
 its mutilated fragments the general level of the 
 plain last relic of the pahny days of Memphis ! 
 
 By his warlike insignia, by the delicacy of his 
 features, by the name of Barneses engraved upon 
 the ornaments on his breast and on the buckle of 
 his belt, it is impossible to mistake in him the im- 
 age of the conqueror, the same one of whom Dio-
 
 168 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 dorus and Herodotus wrote, and whom Abdallatif 
 admired. 
 
 IV. 
 
 ONE hundred 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-northeast, 
 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 Sea, 
 and which formerly guided the way to the mines of 
 gold, copper and emeralds in the land of the Trog-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 171 
 
 lodytes : it was there that " No- Amman was seated 
 between 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 lie to-day. 
 
 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 YEARS 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 metropolis. Ac- 
 cording to the names of the wretched modern 
 hamlets which seek shelter in their shadow, Gour- 
 nah and Medinet Abou are the towns to the west 
 of the river, going from the north, and Karnak and 
 Luxor are those to the eastward. The first of 
 these groups contains the commemorative monu- 
 ments erected to Barneses 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 Rameses-Hickpun (haq-an) 
 and was the residence of the Pharaohs of the twen- 
 tieth dynasty. 
 
 The principal edifices of Luxor founded by Ho- 
 rus (HoremJieb) were finished by Mei-Amoun to 
 whom, for instance, are due the two grand pylons 
 that look out upon the Nile, as also the two obel- 
 isks mentioned by Diodorus, the smallest of which
 
 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 Ammon-Ea, date 
 from the time of the kings who expelled the Hyc- 
 sos. They have retained the stamp of their most 
 renowned successors, and, above all, the majestic 
 mark of Seti and of Mei-Amoun. 
 
 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 fragments 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 
 Kameseum which seems to have been the favorite 
 abode of "Mei-Amoun. If, moreover, on the western 
 side, one adds to this sad picture, as a framework
 
 176 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 worthy of it, the precipitous walls of the Libyan 
 chain, pierced like the sides of an immense vessel 
 with galleries on galleries where sleep the genera- 
 tions who succeeded each other in No-Amnion 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 from the top of the slope 
 where the sight of them drew long continued plau- 
 dits of surprise and admiration from the French 
 Army of the East. 
 
 VI. 
 
 " THEBES," says one who was present in that ar- 
 ray, in the monumental folio 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 
 though he were in a dream while contemplating 
 the immensity of its ruins, the vastness and majes- 
 ty of its edifices, and the numberless remains of its 
 ancient magnificence."* 
 
 In order to move, to this degree, men whom un- 
 paralleled struggles, the loved study of antiquity, 
 and the recent conquest of Italy had saturated with 
 
 * Rosicre's Description of Egypt. Ancient Thebes.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 179 
 
 the perception of the grand and beautiful, what 
 must not Thebes have been when life animated 
 that vast body and harmonized all its parts in one 
 imposing whole ? 
 
 What must not Thebes have been at the period 
 when, 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 Erytli- 
 rean seas ; the 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 their 
 clans and country there ? What must not Thebes 
 have been when her temple-palaces, built and em- 
 bellished by twelve generations of kings, rivalled 
 each other in splendor and display ; had for enclo- 
 sures fresh thickets of palms and mimosas; be- 
 decked themselves with parterres skilfully designed, 
 and mirrored in the blue waters of spacious basins
 
 180 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 of marble or porphyry, the pure and severely simple 
 lines of their architecture ; when, amid floods of 
 light under the rays of an unrivalled sun, there 
 sparkled to the gaze the vividly colored bas-reliefs 
 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 his 
 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. 
 
 VII. 
 
 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 salient heights and elevates their 
 lower strata, was neither foreseen nor even dreamed 
 of in the days of Theban grandeur ; and that from
 
 Bird's Eye View of a Temple-Palace at Thebes (restored according 
 to the monuments).
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 183 
 
 this absolute ignorance of the virtual conditions of 
 a future far beyond the ken of that period, arose 
 the very sanction of the social inequalities 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 dwellings of men were, then, subjected to the 
 same law that proclaimed the monarch son of tla 
 gods, and made the priesthood their inspired inter- 
 preters. Around consecrated edifices built of im- 
 perishable materials, cemented with the blood and 
 sweat 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 empire, 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 white one, as well, crouching on the dungheaps 
 of the animals entrusted to his care, dressed the 
 bleeding 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 his weeping 
 family. 
 
 Naga and Meroe, Babylon and Nineveh, the
 
 184 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 Andes, and the emigrants from 
 India in the forests of Hindostan ; all the metro- 
 politan marks, in fine, which men erected during 
 their passage from the second to the third social 
 epoch, were constructed upon this principle. 
 
 VHI. 
 
 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 bank 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 Diodorus, 
 " the tomb of Osymandyas. At its entrance rose 
 a pyl on in marbled stone ; its breadth was two pic-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 187 
 
 thrae and its height forty-five cubits. After having 
 passed it, one entered a square peristyle, each side 
 of which measured four plethrae. 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 ceiling, consisting 
 of a single stone, was studded with golden stars up- 
 on a field of azure. 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 admiration hi regard to 
 its artistic execution and the nature of the stone, 
 which, notwithstanding its vastness, did not reveal 
 a single crack or blemish. Upon it could be read 
 the following inscription : / am Osymandyas, King 
 of the Kings ; if any should wish to know who I am 
 and ivhere I repose, let him surpass one of my works. 
 There was, also, another monolithic statue repre-
 
 188 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 seuting the mother of this king separately. It 
 was twenty cubits in height, with three diadems or. 
 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 king 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 
 diviclcd his army into four bodies, commanded by 
 the princes, his sons. 
 
 " Upon the first wall of this peristyle Osymandyas 
 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. Amouy 
 those who explain these carvings, some say that it 
 was a real lion, tamed, fed by the king's own hand, 
 and taugut to accompany him while attacking and 
 pursuing his enemies. Others maintain that this 
 king, who was distinguished above all the rest for 
 his valor and his strength, intended to sound his 
 own praises by symbolizing his qualities in the fig- 
 ure of a lion. . . . Finally, at the extremity of the 
 monument, there was, in the midst of a series of
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAR AGO. 191 
 
 apartments, the second library designated by the 
 inscription : The office of the, soul" 
 
 Volney had declared, as early 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 anything but the epithetic 
 title of that monarch. Twenty years later, Chani- 
 pollion, applying the description of Diodorus to 
 the ruins of the Bameseum, put together from its 
 fragments, shattered as they may 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 fragments of 
 the latter, which formerly must have measured thir- 
 teen yards in height ; the hall of the caryatides ; the 
 galleries, the colonnades giving access to the inte- 
 rior apartments, and even the library with its ultra- 
 marine blue vault studded with golden stars, and 
 decorated with an astronomical picture. Moreover, 
 he was 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 EGYFI- 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 " the habitation of Kameses Mei-Amoun in the Oph 
 of Thebes."* 
 
 IX. 
 
 To the distant expeditions of her warriors, to her 
 communications, more or less compulsory, with the 
 other groups of the human race, Egypt was indebt- 
 ed for not only an accumulation of power and 
 wealth, but for a more active impetus given her to- 
 ward the arts, trade and industry. M. de Rouge, 
 whose authority we cannot too frequently invoke in" 
 this place, has shown that a great intellectual de- 
 velopment, a sort of literary cycle, had been, as it 
 were, 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 personality 
 of Penta-ur is an isolated phenomenon of this 
 epoch. Papyri exhumed from the tombs con- 
 tain numerous and remarkable fragments of that 
 
 * The restored sketches published by the great Egyptian 
 Commission puts it in our power to offer our readers differ- 
 ent views of this monument, 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-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 195 
 
 literature which 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 
 lived in the vicinity of Barneses, 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 intelligence upon the borders of the 
 Nile seems to correspond in time with those 
 achievements of a similar nature that, on the banks 
 of the Indus and the upper Ganges, distinguished 
 the heroic age of the Aryan 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 
 manners, institutions, and religious notions. Thus, 
 the style of the most ancient cuneiform inscriptions 
 difters but little from that of the carved hiero- 
 glyphics and the papyri of the Egyptians. Still 
 more, a stele foiind among the ruins of a Thebau
 
 196 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 temple, a veritable ex voto of those remote times, 
 exhibits to us a sovereign from beyond the Tigris, 
 the father-in-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 war 
 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 provinces, to su- 
 perintend the stations established 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 pscJient of the 
 Pharaohs. 
 
 " We also discover the influence of the literary 
 forms usual in Egypt among a people whose first 
 steps excite a lively interest everywhere. The 
 Bible shows us, at this epoch, the sous of Jacob, of
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 199 
 
 whom Divine protection had made a new nation, 
 exhausting their strength in constructing in the 
 Delta a city to which the holy book gives the name 
 of Barneses. 
 
 " Frequently mentioned in our papyri, the place 
 there bears the name of Barneses Mei-Amoun, and 
 the scroll-boxes (even a statue) of the great con- 
 queror have been found among its ruins. Barne- 
 ses II., then, was the persecutor of the Israelite 
 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 was then 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 
 minutiae of the narrative do not leave room to attri- 
 bute these wants to any other Pharaoh. Barne- 
 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 Exodus informs us, in fact, that the 
 king whose anger Moses had aroused died qfter 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 carried art and industry to a very high pitch, 
 and at a moment when its literature shone with 
 more than usual brilliance. It is easy to recognize 
 in the Egyptian texts, the peculiar turn of verses 
 and the parallelism 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 from 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 Barneses 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 Barneses 
 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 walls of 
 a burial chapel attributed to Thothmes III., shows 
 
 * Viscount E. de Rouge in the paper already cited.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 203 
 
 us prisoners of war employed in kneading clay, 
 moulding bricks and building the walls of a temple 
 to Ammon under the surveillance of Egyptian 
 superintendents or overseers armed with heavy 
 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 like an illustration of the fol- 
 owing passage in Exodus : ch. i. v. 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 tha-t they are ordered to make, 
 ivithout rest or cessation /" (A papyrus of the Anas- 
 tasi Collection No. 3, page 3.)
 
 204 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 This working-up of the captive and the slave 
 pushed to its farthest limits, i.e. mutilation and 
 death, was the law of nations of a historic age, which 
 did not cease even with the most civilized countries 
 until after tha advent and triumph of Christianity : 
 that law of nations, of which, long after the time of 
 Rameses, the Assyrian monarchs, the Dorian Re- 
 publics of Greece and the Roman patriciate, were 
 to make many another ferocious application, and 
 which, even while we write, still entangles, with its 
 long-surviving roots, the eastern half of modern 
 Europe, and all the countries yet under the yoke of 
 the late-comers of wandering barbarism. 
 
 XI. 
 
 AT Thebes, as in all the great cities of the valley 
 of the Nile, the sacred edifices enclosed within their 
 limits between the pronaos and the sanctuary 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 hypostyle from 
 the Greeks. The one that Seti I. caused to be 
 built in the temple of Karnak is celebrated among
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 207 
 
 them all for its dimensions one hundred yards by 
 fifty 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 allowed 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 tribunal of last ap- 
 peal, the disputes of cities or of individuals ; listened 
 to the complaints of his subjects or the outcry of 
 their need ; in. fine, held the great days of the royal 
 sway. 
 
 The scribes, a very busily employed race of 
 functionaries, whose learned body replenished its 
 ranks from the colleges of the priesthood, took
 
 208 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 down, on the spot, the minutes of these sessions of 
 absolute power. Subsequently, when the impor- 
 tance of the subject demanded it, the series of all 
 the orders and of all the administrative measures 
 thereunto appertaining 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 
 that 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 Rameses 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 English 
 orientalist Birch, and our learned compatriot 
 M. Lenormand.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 20 'J 
 
 XII. 
 
 . . . . " When he had subdued the land of Ethio- 
 pia, trodden the Libyans beneath his sandals, and 
 rooted his sceptre among them ; after terror had 
 overwhelmed Wentnovvr 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 of Kemi, the child of the gods, the beloved 
 one of Ammon, Barneses, 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 from 
 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 preparatory washing of the precious metal,
 
 210 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 many of whom had perished of thirst 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 Barneses 
 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 limitless 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 like the power 
 of Mandu 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
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 211 
 
 who hast but to say to the mountain spring to leap 
 forth, in order to behold the abyss of the waters of 
 the heavens fly open at the sound of thy voice ; for 
 thou art the sun made flesh, 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 
 with the weight of his opinion. 
 
 " It is but too true," said the royal son of Gush. 
 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 was made to the depth of one 
 hundred and twenty cubits for the sheet of water 
 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 
 water to cover the face of the desert ! it would be as 
 it is with all 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 monarchs that have 
 reigned since the sun ?" . . .
 
 212 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 To the royal son of Gush, and to the chiefs of 
 the country of Okau, Barneses 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 will 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 liv- 
 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 light, 
 and let a copy of the order be sent to the royal son 
 of my land of Gush, who continues charged with 
 its execution." 
 
 And the prince of Nubia, superintendent of the land 
 of Cush, 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 were kings in Egypt. The caving 
 in of the soil, and the infiltration of sand into the 
 tube of the well, were checked successfully by liu-
 
 EGYPT 3400 YEARS AGO. 21-'} 
 
 Ings of reeds woven in mats or interlaced in fas- 
 cines* and with such excellent result that the vice- 
 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 still indispens- 
 able that a skilled workman should be sent. . . . 
 Shortly afterward the sovereign word of Barneses 
 had its full effect : " The king of the waters has 
 hearkened to the king of the earth, the well has 
 been fortunately terminated, and abundant waters 
 leap from its mouth and pass on to a distance to 
 fertilize the surface of the desert and quench the 
 thirst of the parched traveller." By a last decree, 
 Barneses, the friend of Ammon, expressed the wish 
 that this work of public utility should bear his 
 name, and that a stde 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 
 wady . 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. Lenorinand. As for Mr. 
 Birch, the text seems to him to allude to aquatic birds ply- 
 'u .tinong +lia reeds.
 
 214 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE appellation of the land of Gush, which in 
 the presence of the encroachments of the yellow or 
 red branches of the human main stem, had receded 
 from the southern plains of Asia as far as the 
 upper basin of the Nile, still ran down in the days 
 of Mei-Ainoun from the unknown heights of Africa 
 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 Barneses 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 
 upon the heir presumptive of the empire, at his 
 birth, 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 the 
 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 great 
 number of inscriptions still existing between the 
 first and second cataract.* 
 
 * Champollion the younger: Letters Written from Ec/ypt 
 and Nubia.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 215 
 
 Mei-Amoun, whose appanage this country ap- 
 pears to have been during the lifetime of his father 
 Seti, seems also, judging by the monuments with 
 which he endowed it, to have retained a peculiar 
 affection for it, during the whole course of his long,: 
 life. 
 
 In fact, from Philae as far as Mount Barkal, 
 more than two hundred leagues from Thebes and 
 four hundred from the Mediterranean, there are 
 few ruins, sides or subterranean temples that do 
 not retain some relic, the scrolls or even the fea- 
 tures of the great Barneses. 
 
 It is to the graphic arts, to pure archaeology, 
 that the labor of retracing the stages of this long 
 advance speciaUy appertain ; but it is not departing 
 from the limited circle of this sketch even, wherein 
 the effort is to become inspired with the philosophy 
 of history, to cite those of the localities 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 double row of lions em- 
 blematic of courage ever on the alert. It termi- 
 nated in two magnificent pylons supported by eight
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 gigantic statues of Rameses. 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 life. More- 
 over, it seems to have been thrown down in Avan- 
 tonness at some period of ferocious reaction or bar- 
 barian invasion, and the eight colossi overturned 
 in the sand, remind us involuntarily of the Titans 
 struck by the 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, Ainmon and Phra ; 
 and the legends on the walls show the same Barn- 
 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 Primis, 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 : Correspondence from Eyy^ <md Nubin, Let- 
 ter IX.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AOO. 219 
 
 the side relative to the well of Okau. On the 
 carved and painted walls of the subterranean tem- 
 ple " this same personage is represented rendering 
 his respectful homage to Barneses, at the head of 
 all the functionaries of his government." 
 
 Champollion 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 
 civilization of Egypt and that of the rent of the East.* 
 If the erudite French hierogrammatist had substi- 
 tuted the words tlie modern Oriental world 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 Bama allows us to dispense 
 with insisting on this point. Between the exquisite 
 sentiment that revealed to the antique poet Valmiki 
 the fresh and pure creation of Sita, and that which 
 impelled Barneses to rear directly beside the most 
 commemorative edifice of his life a sort of votive 
 chapel to the Egyptian Venus for the use of the 
 Nofre-Ari, tlie roycd spouse wJiom he loved,\ is there 
 
 * Champollion : Letters written from Egypt and Nubia. 
 
 f This inscription is the one on the grand front "To 
 make u^ 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 simultaneousness in 
 time or of common origin ? 
 
 It will be understood that we refer to the speos 
 of Athor at Ipsamboul, tJie grotto of purity and of 
 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 th3 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 B/ameses and the 
 fair companion of his youth; everything bears the 
 impress of a feeling of harmony and conjugal 
 equality.* 
 
 When, in the time of our fathers, t the celebrated 
 traveller Burckhardt discovered the fa r ;ade of this 
 monument, and measured its caryatides of thirty-six 
 feet in height, he believed that he had come upon 
 
 legend of Rameses, is read this line, which discloses the tea- 
 derness of the Queen for Raruases : His royal spouse wh) 
 loves him, Nofre-A ri, the great mother, has constructed this rest- 
 ing place in the grotto of purity. Ampere, at the place cited. 
 
 * Ampere in the 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 
 reproducing. 
 
 t In 1817. See the Voyages de Burckhardt. French 
 translation. Vol. I.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 223 
 
 the grandest thing that Egyptian art had created. 
 What then was his astonishment when, on turning 
 an angle of this rocky cliff, he found himself con- 
 fronting four colossal figures of double dimensions, 
 cut out in a second mountain, raising their fronts 
 bound with the pshent, 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- 
 ilization who should extricate them from the ob- 
 livion in which renown had let them sleep for thirty- 
 three centuries. 
 
 XV. 
 
 SINCE Burckhardt's adventure, many other vis- 
 itors have reached the spot, and the great temple 
 of Ipsamboul ha*, 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 the inhabitants of the Paro- 
 pamisus the nameless features of atn?andtMMi of
 
 224: EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO 
 
 the South,* have been recognized, even previous to 
 any aid through the interpretation of the scroll 
 cases, the pure and delicate graciousness and the 
 majestic placidity that characterize all the portraits 
 of Barneses Mei-Amoun. The portico of the speos, 
 when cleared of the sand of ages which had ob- 
 structed it, yielded to the study and the admiration 
 of the explorers a whole historical museum of which 
 Barneses 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 
 officiates 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 Phrah, the Sun made a deity. 
 
 How long did the members of this strange triad 
 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 Barneses. However, to this hour, when 
 
 * Alex. Burnos : Journey to Samarcand.
 
 peos of Pkra at Ipsaiuuoul (fm/udc restoretl).
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 227 
 
 the star of day, emerging from the horizon of 
 Arabia, darts its morning ray athwart 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 belief 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, which, not long 
 after Mei-Amoun's day, compeDed 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 Rnffin, 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 
 upon the lips of the god.
 
 228 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 school could the orphaned and banished heir of the 
 sceptre of Barneses, the young Haq-an who, after- 
 ward, was Barneses 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 
 from the subterranean temples 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.! 
 
 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 Barneses, concerning which 
 the historians of antiquity knew as little as they 
 did of the monuments that are now engaging our 
 attention. 
 
 * Manetho, in Joseplius contra Appionem. It is evident 
 tliat the Cetlios of this fragment is indeed Rnmeses III. 
 son of Seti II., son of Menq>htali, son of Rnmeses the 
 Great. 
 
 t Ampere, place cited.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 231 
 
 According to the legendary opinion followed by 
 Herodotus, Diodortis and Josephus, Barneses II. 
 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 Bameseums of 
 Thebes, the most dilapidated of all the great king's 
 monuments, and, also, one of the bas-reliefs of 
 Beit-el- Wally, 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 ChampoUion under No. 1, offers, in this 
 respect, along with that which the same learned 
 antiquarian copied from the half crumbled pylon of 
 the western Bameseum, such analogies of detail, 
 that it is impossible to avoid considering the one a 
 reproduction of the other. In both of them, Barn- 
 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
 
 2J2 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 heavy garments covered with mantles, hair gathered 
 up in a single lock in the middle of the cranium, 
 and pallid complexion, would indicate their origin 
 to ba from beyond the Oxus, even did the legends 
 of these historic pages fail to give them the name 
 of Khetcis. At Thebes, as at Ipsamboul, these ob- 
 stinate antagonists of Barneses 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 Theban monument. But that termi- 
 nation is quite significant, for it reads : apur^ and 
 this Sanscrit ending alone indicates some locality 
 far to the Eastward. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Ir 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 the 
 assertions of the ancients, Barneses must have
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 235 
 
 passed the long years of his reign struggling, sword 
 in hand, to maintain outside, the eminent influence 
 of his name and the completeness of hi^ conquests. 
 More than once, no doubt, he was obliged, as 
 Charlemagne was, in long after ages, to hasten, in 
 his grey hairs, from 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 Samites 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 him 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 silence in reference to this great name.* 
 
 * The latest date foaud at Ipsainboul is of the 38th year. 
 The rocks of Silsilis mention the 40th and the 44th ; the 
 walls of the Serapeutn the 55th. Finally, a stele in the Flor- 
 ence Museum is dated in the t>2d.
 
 236 EGYPT 3300 YEAES AGO. 
 
 Like the patriarchs his contemporaries, Rameses 
 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 
 are 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 lived 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-Jom, and, at 
 last, he had to leave his sceptre in feeble hands. 
 Then, as the good king Priam was mad3 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 
 
 7 
 
 * Homer's Iliad, ch. 24. and Meuander's Fragmmib.
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEABS 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 whose 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-three centuries, M. Mariette thinks that he 
 has discovered his mummified remains. We can 
 do no better than to transcribe in this place the 
 exact language of the report on the subject which 
 that celebrated expert has addressed to his Euro- 
 pean brethren :
 
 238 
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 " Three of the five Apis that died during tlie 
 reign of Barneses II. were buried in chambers No. 
 2, 3 and 4 of the small subterranean excavations. 
 The other two had been deposited in one hollow 
 chamber, the wall of which bears the date of the 
 year 55 of the great king. One died when the 
 prince Meuephtah, who at a later period was to 
 succeed his father Rameses II., had taken the place 
 of Sha-em-Jom in the government of Memphis, 
 and from the position of the mummy, I do not think 
 
 A mummy in its bandages. 
 
 that it is to this Apis that the date 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 human
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 239 
 
 form destroyed in all its lower parts from the 
 breast downward. A thick mask of gold now at 
 
 Case containing a mummy. 
 
 Interior coffin to contain the case. 
 
 the Louvre covered its face. Around the neck 
 were two chains, also of gold, to one of which wove 
 suspended three amulets. As for the interior, it
 
 240 
 
 EGYPF 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 presented nothing but a mass of odoriferous bitumen 
 mingled with shapeless bones, in the midst of which were 
 buried two or three pieces of jewelry with golden clasps 
 containing small plates of glass. Finally, near this 
 singular monument, I picked up a large beetle in 
 greyish 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 some estimate of the em- 
 barrassment this discovery occasioned us may be 
 had when it is furthermore known that while all the 
 monuments found above the mummy indicate the 
 title and name of Sha-em-Jom only, all those on 
 the contrary that were discovered in the neighbor-
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEAKS AGO. 
 
 241 
 
 hood mention the name and usual qualifications of 
 Osorapis. Is this an Apis? or is it the mummy of 
 Sha-em-Join, who, dying in the 55th year of his 
 father's reign, made it a point to be buried in the 
 finest of the tombs that adorned the cemetery of 
 the city of which he was the governor, therein fol- 
 
 Sarcophagus.* 
 
 lowing the example of the other grandees of Egypt, 
 who had themselves buried at Abydos near the 
 tomb of Osiris ?" 
 
 To sum up, was this funereal windfall, this de- 
 cayed magma, the remains of the beloved son of 
 Barneses, of the selected heir of his vast empire, or 
 
 * These sarcophagi ill porphyry, in basalt or in alabaster, 
 formed the fourth and last outside covering of mummies of 
 high rank.
 
 242 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 simply those 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 history 
 has ever gathered in the tomb ? 
 
 We have elsewhere remarked the relations that 
 'exist between the duration of the reigns of the 
 Pharaohs and the splendor of their tombs. That 
 of Barneses 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 Barneses 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 
 they were found on the scroll-box of the great king,
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 243 
 
 had this reaction really respected his memory 
 and his coffin ! 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 WHATEVER may have been the causes of the 
 revolution that wrested from the descendants of 
 Rameses the sceptre of Egypt and transferred it to 
 the family of the priest Peor, 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 be 
 taught to contemn what once they worshipped. 
 Under the anathema which fell upon her military 
 spirit 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 
 activity which had no other outlet, she strove to 
 connect with the subtleties of nascent inetaphysi-
 
 244 EGYPT 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, industry and intelligence alike. With her 
 everything passed into the condition of a symbol, 
 and every symbol became stone, until, petrified her- 
 self like 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 grand memory alor.e 
 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 Barneses 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, ah 1 that Barneses did, since 
 the latter not only subdued as many nations as 
 thou, but he also conquered the Scythians whom 
 thy Persians could not overcome. It is not just, 
 therefore, that thine image should be placed above 
 that of Barneses, since thou hast not surpassed him 
 by thy deeds."
 
 EGYPT 3300 YEARS AGO. 
 
 245 
 
 At the words of this aged priest, inspired with 
 a patriotic remembrance as though bj fhe breath 
 of his god, Darius, the undisputed sovereign of 
 twenty satrapies whose chiefs had kings for vassals, 
 bowed his head in silence and abandoned his 
 haughty design. 
 
 lioyal cartonche of 
 Kaineses Mei-Amouo.
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 THE CUSHTTES, (page 15.) 
 
 .... THE Coptic idiom, a remnant of the old Egyptian 
 tongue, is incontestably one of the most curious although 
 one of the most meagre fragments of the languages of an- 
 tiquity. An original kinship with the Somitic idioms htm 
 been discovered for it ; since the Semitic dialects have pen- 
 etrated the old Cushite 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 
 basin of the Indus for the seat of primitive civilization 
 transported to the valley of the Nile at an epoch preceding 
 the time when Southern Asia was wrested from the Cushites 
 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 must 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 shai>ed 
 them have followed the tide of migration. 
 
 Thus, even while admitting (he influence of the Ariau and
 
 250 APPENDIX. 
 
 Semitic creeds upon the forms of Egyptian worship, we can- 
 not avoid recognizing in certain portions of the Vedas 
 a character common to the religion of Egypt. The cause 
 of these coincidences must be sought in the primitive 
 extension of the race of Gush and of Shem in the 
 regions lying in the immediate vicinity of the Aryan 
 tribes. (Baron Eckstein, Researches wrjcerning Prim- 
 itive Humanity.) 
 
 n. 
 
 THE TEMFLE OF DENDEKAH, (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 th'J 
 ceiling of the temple, and with the fantastic speculations ot' 
 Dupuis and his school on this pretended relic of antiquity. 
 Nevertheless, the ruins of Tentyris, of which the wretchel 
 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 Cfpsarion ; 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 :uid Claudius also contributed to 
 the embellishments of the edifice. Near the hieroglyphic 
 inscription in which arc read the names of Cleopatra and of 
 the sou she bore to Caesar, on the external part of the rear
 
 APPENDIX. 251 
 
 wall of the temple, there is carved a portrait of that 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 tne orna- 
 ments, are of inferior execution, as we find them on many 
 other monuments of the same periods. But arckitaature 
 maintained itself better in. the midst of this wasting away of 
 art. Here, for instance, the general effect, notwithstanding 
 t he bad taste and the heaviness of detail, lacks neither gran- 
 deur nor majesty, and the temple, even in its present condi- 
 tion, still 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 ceiling, which is 
 in'coniplete preservation, is ornamented with the celebrated 
 zodiac which has been the subject of so many dissertations 
 and hypotheses. To the portico succeed thive halls of un- 
 equal size, the first adorned with columns, and the two 
 others with adjoining side rooms. On the ceiling of one of 
 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 
 surround 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 iu 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 preceded by its dromos, extending 
 a length of J.10 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 appearance, had taken its name (Than- 
 athorthe habitation of Hathor.) In the inscriptions dis- 
 tributed in various parts of the temple, the goddess bears, 
 among other titles, that of the Qaeeu of Tennthyr, a word 
 from which, in the fullness of time, was derived Teutyris. 
 In its turn the latter degenerated to
 
 2;>2 APPENDIX. 
 
 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, (Chuffu.) the founder of the Great Pyramid. 
 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 religious 
 monuments of Egypt were subterranean temples. 
 
 in. 
 
 THE ANCIENT BED OF THE NILE, (p. 33.) 
 
 To the westward of the Delta, parallel 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-bela-ma given by the wandering tribes to this valley 
 signifies the river without 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 the lakes of 
 Natron, which no doubt was only one of its brandies at the 
 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 with between the Mokat- 
 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- 
 ertb 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 Dougola. 
 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 SHE1 HERD KINO APAPSAS AND THE GOD SOTJTEKH. 
 
 WE read in Strabo that " at Heliopolis and Memphis there 
 were edifices of a barbarian order of architecture, with sev- 
 eral rows of columns, but with neither ornaments nor de- 
 signs." Was not the temple reared to Soutekh, the only God, 
 by the 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. Marietta 
 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 APPENDIX. 
 
 the fourth dynasty, bears witness to the hatred of the foun- 
 der for the idols and fetiches of the preceding generations ? 
 
 V. 
 
 THE NAMES OP KAMESES II. 
 [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 lists 
 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 
 history of Greece from which the name of Alexander had 
 been excluded. Hence these compilers of quotations found 
 in Manetho, at the twelfth dynasty, a king whose name 
 Sesortasen presented some analogy to that of Sesoslris. More- 
 over, he 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 
 sufficient 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, 
 too clear in its specifications to be accepted as the genuine 
 text of Manetho.
 
 APPENDIX. 255 
 
 It is not the 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 
 trhat famous name from the real lists of Manetho. Since 
 the British Museum published its flue collection of papyri, 
 all Egyptian scholars have remarked in the historical texts 
 of the nineteenth dynasty a singular royal monogram which 
 
 reads Sesu, \~ ' ' ' -** Jl . 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 musm-m 
 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 to 
 frequently mention the name of the person dedicating it. 
 That personage was called, like the great king, Rameses 
 
 Mei-Amoun, | f |] j f (\U 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. 
 
 simply Ses, I I written without the vowel. A third time his 
 
 name is written SesMei-Ai wun \ I \\Ml in such manner as 
 to make us perfectly understand that Ses is a popular abbre- 
 viation of Rameses. This royal name, in its most complete 
 form, that which was particularly in use under Rameses L, 
 
 SES 
 
 reads thus :V I T Ramesesu. From this form 
 
 are derived several abbreviations. On the historical papyri 
 
 we find the scrolls 
 
 d 
 
 ., 
 
 Sesesu, and V ' ' ' -A J| R a -Sesesu, all used indiffer- 
 ently to designate Barneses II. I have even found there the 
 
 variation V I I JlT 1 ' 1 ~~J( Sem-Mei- Amoun, identical 
 with that which is read once on the pyramid at Vienna, where 
 the surname Met- Amoun accompanies the abbreviation of the 
 proper name. It is certain, then, that there did exist a pop- 
 ular abbreviation Kesu, so currently used to designate the 
 great Rameses, that it could be employed indifferently to 
 write the title of one of his namesakes. The form used in 
 the papyri Sesesn is very exactly what Diodorus has tran- 
 scribed into Sesoosis. It is not that I regard the form Sesos- 
 tris as less correct ; it may be derived from the scroll Ra-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 
 commencement of the scroll as an honorary distinction, tho
 
 APPENDIX. 257 
 
 grammatical construction frequently brought it to the end of 
 the name. It is thus that the name of king Menkeres, writ- 
 
 ten invariably 
 
 LI 
 
 He-men-Ice, became in the pronuncia. 
 tion fumm LJ Q and it is in this way that I found it written 
 
 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 
 
 (TUTU 
 
 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 Atheene-uinfratifais, 1856.] 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE IMAGES OF ANCESTOES, (p. 79.) 
 
 THE small statues of the ancestors and predecessors of Barn- 
 eses II., which the musal paintings represent as figuring at 
 the panegyric of his coronation, are only thirteen in number. 
 They are, besides those of his father Seti and his grandfather 
 Eameses I., those of nine lawful kings of the 18th 
 dynasty. Aahmes, Amenophl., Thothmes I., ThothmesIL, 
 Amenoph II., Thothmes IV., Amenoph III., and Horemheb. 
 These historical sovereigns are preceded by a Mentu 
 Hotep VI., of the llth dynasty, who has left no trace of his 
 personality on the monuments, and of the legendary Mena 
 two pers onages only, and problematical at that, to represent
 
 2/>8 APPENDIX. 
 
 the long series of ages attributed to the history of Egypt 
 beyond the time of the Hycsos ! .... Is it not as though, in 
 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 Eobert the Strong and Francis the son of Hec- 
 tor ? 
 
 This leads us naturally to some reflections on the tables or 
 lists of the Egyptian Kings recently discovered and pub- 
 lished. 
 
 THE TABLES OF ABYDOS AND OF MEMPHIS. 
 
 In the month of September, 1863, M. Mariette, who had 
 just made some excavations in the great burial district of 
 Sakkara near Memphis with great success, published in the 
 Archceological Review (Revue Archeologique) a 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 rites, to his deified predecessors. 
 Although the Egyptian scribes to whom was confided the 
 task of recalling their names, have inverted the order of the 
 kings of the 12th dynasty, whether through inattention or in 
 pursuance of some purpose as yet nnfathomed, 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, stiU, such 
 as it is, it was at the time of its publication, in the month of 
 September 1863, the most important document of its kind 
 that had seen the light since the discovery of the famous 
 tablet of Abytlos 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 
 th- holy fity of Abydos, the same from which the table in 
 the British Museum came. Upon one of the walls of thia
 
 APPENDIX. 259 
 
 temple lie discovered i representation of the offerings made 
 by Seti I., and by ji; ton, (who, afterwards, was Barneses 
 the Great,) to their deceased ancestors, no less than seventy- 
 six in number, from the first dynasty ruler, Menes, down to 
 Sethi himself. This discovery, which a German doctor, a 
 savant by trade and a robber by calling, who clung to the 
 steps of M. Mariette, has tried to take away from our coun- 
 tryman, 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 part of the 
 old table of Abydos having 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 list of Abydos. These three 
 lists are of nearly the same epoch ; the first, dating from 
 Barneses 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 ah 1 predecessors of the 
 same Seti. Hence it must be inferred that the Egyptian 
 priests who prepared them, had the privilege of selecting 
 the kings whoso 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, differ 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 or 
 odious for their vices is reasonable only when one knows the 
 motives 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 dynasty ; and, although 
 localized, perhaps, in Upper Egypt, they were powerful, 
 but the names of all their people are omitted on the three 
 tables of which we are treating.
 
 260 APPENDIX. 
 
 A careful comparative examination of these different doc- 
 uments casts a ray of light, however, upon the dark places. 
 By its help, we perceive that there was a period when the 
 priests had 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 commencement of the 
 famous 12th dynasty of the Sesortasens and of the Amenem- 
 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 amplification of these traditions, 
 and, thus, these compilations of the fourteenth century be- 
 fore our era bring no support 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 upon the his- 
 torically and monumentally well ascertained series of kings 
 belonging to the 12th dynasty. 
 
 The conclusion of all this reasoning is self-apparent. The
 
 APPENDIX. 261 
 
 history of the Egyptian Kings of the united monarchies of 
 Thebes and Memphis begins 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 lists of Upper 
 and Lower Egypt. But the inscription of the name of 
 Meues, the legendary founder of the empire, upon the The- 
 ban list of Abydos, and his exclusion from the Meinphian 
 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 Barneses. 
 
 vn. 
 
 THE AKMY OF KAMESES H THE MILITARY CASTE, (p. 98.) 
 
 THE figures given by Diodorus (Book I., ch. 54) for the 
 army of Sesoosis (Rameses) 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 
 struggling on the back of a runaway horse. Diodorus says 
 elsewhere (Book I., ch. 31,) that, in his time, the population 
 of Egypt ran up to 3,000,000 of souls, and that it had been
 
 262 APPENDIX. 
 
 millions under the Ptolemies. This last estimate, without 
 being impossible, seems very small when compared with the 
 cultivable surface of the country, even putting the latter at 
 its highest estimate. The actual number of 2,900,000 al- 
 ready surpasses the average population of France in respect 
 to the extent of its territory. It is true that in the time of 
 the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, the cultivable surface of 
 Egypt 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 former general of the army of the East pretends that 
 under good administration, when irrigating canals extended 
 from the valley 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 that may 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 Calasiries and Herrnotybies. They 
 live in the nomes hereinafter enumerated, and all 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 upon 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, Thauis, Mendes, Sebennys, Athribis, Phar- 
 betis, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anysis, Mycephoris ; the last 
 named nome occupies an island opposite Bubastis ; 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- 
 sians, 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 
 resort to warlike service. Such were the ideas of all the 
 Greeks, especially of the Lacedaemonians ; the Corinthians 
 were they who least despised the artisan. 
 
 CLXVm. The following privileges were assigned to the 
 soldiers, and they were the only Egyptians, excepting the 
 priests, to whom anything of the kind was ever gi'auted. 
 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 Gala- 
 si ries 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. 
 
 vin. 
 
 THE ROBUS, (p. 126.) 
 
 WE are not unaware that Dr. Brugsch, and with him many 
 other Egyptian scholars, make this people out to have been 
 a tribe in the north of Africa. For them, Itobus meant 
 Libus or Libyans. But notwithstanding the scientific 
 authority of these learned men, we do not think that Libyiui 
 shepherds ever wore the double garment and the long tunic 
 which the mural paintings attribute to the liobns, along 
 with their clear complexion, their blue eyes and light beard. 
 Neither do we admit that auy kind of a confederation of no-
 
 264 APPENDIX. 
 
 madic tribes to the westward of the Nile ever was important 
 enough to have abandoned from 12,000 to 13,000 corpses to 
 the Egyptian soldiers on one field 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 Champollion and for Wilkinson, that it will not do to 
 rank the Rohus 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. 
 
 MANNERS 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 established 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 support their parents, if such be not their own 
 wish ; but the girls are compelled to do so even against their 
 will. 
 
 XXXVI. 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 
 ui-ur ivlutive; the Egyptians, to show respect for the dead, let
 
 APPENDIX. 265 
 
 the hair and the beard which previously they shaved off, 
 grow on their heads and under their chins. Other men live 
 separate from their animals ; the Egyptians live pell rnell 
 with them. Elsewhere, wheat and barley are staples of 
 food, but the Egyptians consider it a disgrace to live upon 
 that diet ; they use duurah. They knead dough with their 
 feet and clay with their 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 Egyptians 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 kinds of letters the sacred and the vulgate char- 
 acters.* 
 
 XXXVII. As they are observers of ceremonies more than 
 other men they practise the following customs : they drink 
 from a brazen cup 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 v 
 They deem it better to be neat than to be handsome. Every 
 three days, the priests shave their whole bodies, 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 wash 
 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 are 
 cooked for them ; every day plenty of beef and geese are 
 sent to them ; grape 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 cooked. The priests cannot bear the sight of 
 
 * The hieroglyphics and demotic characters.
 
 2G6 APPENDIX. 
 
 them, since 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 succeeds 
 him. 
 
 XLVIL The Egyptians regard the hog as an impure ani- 
 mal. Consequently, should one of thorn, 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 daughte. s, nor can they intermarry ex- 
 cepting among themselves. The Egyptians do not think it 
 proper to sacrifice a pig to any other .deities than the Moon 
 and Bacchus ;* 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 boon slaughtered, they fasten 
 together the extremity of the tail, the spleen and the kid- 
 neys. These are then wrapped in all the fat found in the 
 stomach, and are burned upon 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. 
 
 XL VIII. At the evening repast, on the day previous to 
 the festival of Bacchus, (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 Dioscuri, 
 of whom I have already spoken ; excepting Juno, Vesta, 
 Themis, the Graces and the Nereids, the names of all tin 
 
 * Luis aud Asiri.
 
 APPENDIX, 267 
 
 other gods have always existed among the 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 revealed 
 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 already mentioned and others that I 
 shall speak of hereafter. 
 
 LII. 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 all 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 wliich 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 
 t " Take them !" Thereupon, 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 theogony ; 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. 
 
 LVIIL The oracle of Thebes in Egypt and that of Dodoua
 
 268 APPENDIX. 
 
 yield their responses in nearly the same manner. The art 
 of prophesying from an inspection of the victims came also 
 from .Egypt. The Egyptians were the first of all men to 
 establish solemn processions, holidays and oli'eiings, 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 are very ancient, and, in Greece that, they have been bnt 
 recently established. 
 
 LIX. 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 temple of Isis. The city itself is built in the 
 midst of the Delta, and Isis, in the language of the Greeks, 
 is Ceres. The third 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 Mars. 
 
 LX. And this is the way in which 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 have castanets and sound them : for their part 
 during the whole trip some of the men play 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 the 
 women of the city, and others again dance. ... At each 
 town on the river banks, they do in like manner. On their 
 arrival at Bubastis, the passengers begin to celebrate the 
 festival and offer sacrifices ; and in this solemnity they con- 
 sume more grape wine than during all the rest of the year. 
 Without counting the children, more than seven hundred 
 thousand men and women, according to the statements of 
 the inhabitants, assemble there. Such are the things that 
 take place at Bubastis.
 
 APPENDIX. 269 
 
 LXI .... After the sacrifices, the men and women, 
 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. 
 
 LXIII. At Heliopolis, at Buto, the celebrants restrict 
 themselves to the immolation of victims. At Papremis, the 
 same sacrifices are offered 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 around the 
 statue ; others in much greater number, armed with staves, 
 take their 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 tho 
 portico refuse to admit them. The crowd of devotees, 
 rushing to the rescue of the god, strike them : they defend
 
 270 APPENDIX. 
 
 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 of 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, chose 
 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 divinity 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 va-st number of these creatures. When 
 such accidents occur, profound grief takes possession of the
 
 APPENDIX. 271 , 
 
 Egyptians. When, in any dwelling, a cat, dies naturally, the 
 inhabitants shave off their eyebrows only ; but if it be a dog 
 that dies they shave their bodies and their heads. 
 
 LXVII. Dead cats are taken to consecrated buildings ; 
 then, after having been embalmed, they are buried at 
 Bubastis. Dogs are bulled, each one in its own town, in 
 consecrated chambers, and ichneumons the same. The 
 shrew-mice and the sparrowhawks are taken to Buto, the 
 ibis to Hermopolis. Bears, which are very rarely met with, 
 and wolves (jackals rather) whose size does not exceed that 
 of foxes, are interred on the spot where they are found lying 
 dead. 
 
 LXVIII. The crocodile during 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 column. 
 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. Blind 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 
 relieve it of the insects which it swallows. The crocodile 
 receives this relief with joy, and never harms the trochylus.
 
 272 APPENDIX. 
 
 LXIX. To some Egyptians, the crocodile is sacred ; to oth- 
 ers it is not : the latter treat it as an enemy. Around Thebes 
 and Lake Moaris, the inhabitauis consider it sacred. Each 
 one of them rears a crocodile, which is tamed by training ; 
 and they hang pendants and buckles of crystal 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 Elephantine eat croco- 
 diles, not regarding them as sacred in uuy wise. The Egyp- 
 1 ian name of this animal is not crocodile, but champse. The 
 louians 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 
 o"the country, taking pleasure in adorning their remembrance, 
 are the most refined of all the men whom I approached and 
 studied. Their legirnen 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 
 are, next to the Libyans, the healthiest of mortals, in niy opin- 
 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 these, some small birds dried 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, 
 
 LXVIII. At the banquets of the wealthy, 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, nnd
 
 APPENDIX. 273 
 
 one or two cubits in length. This ths man shows to each of 
 the guests, and, as he does so, he says : " Look upon this ; 
 then drink and be merry, for such as thou seest it wilt thou 
 be, after thy death." 
 
 LXXX. With the Lacedemonians only do the Egyptians 
 agree in this other custom : young men when they meet 
 their elders, 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 dc so 
 by letting their hand fall to the knee. 
 
 LXXXI. They dress in linen tunics with fringes around 
 their legs ; they call these fringes calis>ris, and over the 
 tunics they wear mantles of white wool. However, they 
 do not eutei 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 has been initiated in the 
 mysteries. A religious motive is ascribed to this custom. 
 
 LXXXIV. In Egypt, the practice of medicine is divided 
 iuto specialities, each physician devoting himself to one 
 branch of disease, and not to several. Physicians 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 and wander hither and thither 
 through the town, beating their uncovered breasts and 
 naked bosoms, in company with all those who hold relations 
 yf friendship 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 
 brought to them, the euibalmers 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 agree 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 quality, 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 linen 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 
 embalming, and desire to avoid heavy expense, the embalmera 
 
 * Asm.
 
 APPENDIX. 275 
 
 proceed in the following manner ; by means of syringes 
 they 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 plunge 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 his skin and his bones : these operations concluded, they 
 deliver the body and their task is over. 
 
 LXXXVHI. 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 
 stranger, 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 their 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 II. 
 
 The foregoing facts w^re gleaned by the historian of Hali- 
 carnassus 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 APPENDIX. 
 
 Beni Hassan, excavated on the right bank of the Nile, nut 
 far from the ancient Artemidos ? Below we give, according 
 to Charnpollion, an enumeration of the subjects represented 
 on the walls of these hypogees. 
 
 I. Agriculture. Designs representing ploughing done by 
 oxen or by human labor ; sowing, the treading of the ground 
 by ranis, and not by pigs as Herodotus says ; five kinds of 
 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 other agricultural 
 toils, and among them the gathering of the lotus ; the cul- 
 tivation of the vine, the vintage, its transportation, the seed- 
 ing, the winepress 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. ; all, 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 pud- 
 dles ; cabinet makers ; joiners ; carpenters ; wood-sawyers ; 
 curriers ; the leather and morocco dyers ; the shoemaker ; 
 spinning ; the weaving of cloths of different manufacture ;
 
 APPENDIX. 277 
 
 the glassblower and all his operations ; the goldsmith, the 
 jeweller ; the blacksmith. 
 
 1IL The Military Caste. The education of the military 
 caste and all its gymnastic exercises, represented in more 
 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, prostrate 
 etc. ; 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 ; military punishments ; 
 a field of battle and the preparations for a military meal ; 
 finally, the manufacture of spears, javelins, bows, arrows, 
 war clubs, battle-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 l^ands : 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 of 
 strength 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 barn yard, comprising the 
 management of a great variety of geese and ducks, and of a 
 species of swan that had been domesticated in ancient
 
 278 APPENDIX. 
 
 VH. Designs relative to games, exercises, and amusements. 
 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 tilled 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 
 charge against him ; his defence ; his conviction by the 
 superintendents of the household ; his condemnation and 
 punishment, which is restricted to the bastinado, the minutes 
 of which, along with 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 houses, 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 Egypt in ancient times ; 5th, monkeys, cats and
 
 APPENDIX. 279 
 
 dogs which 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 supplies 
 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 different kinds ; 10th and last, servants 
 bringing the dishes all prepared to the master's table. 
 
 XII. Navigation. 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. Champollion's Letters from Egypt and Nubia. 
 
 In a crypt of the strange necropolis that has furnished 
 these details, the mortal remains of a governor of the nome 
 of Sah 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 military 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 nome) 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 house were executed through my care. Thanks were
 
 280 APPENDIX. 
 
 extended to me on the part of the royal house for the tri- 
 bute brought in by me in horned cattle. I carried the fruit 
 of all my toil to the royal house. Nothing was stolen from 
 me in all my workshops. I labored and the whole nome 
 was in activity. Never was a little child distressed by me ; 
 never was a widow maltreated by me ; never have I troubled 
 a fisherman 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 little 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 year, 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 famine that took place during the years 
 of his administration, makes a panegyric in his own behalf, 
 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 Egypt and 
 his seven famous years of famine in that country. 
 
 A mural scene on the same tomb recalls still more vividly 
 the Biblical legend. It represents the arrival in Egypt of a 
 family of the Semitic race of the Aam or Ammonites. 
 Forced by causes unknown, by a famine, perhaps, they have, 
 like the sons of Jacob, abandoned their country ; they 
 present themselves, thirty-seven persons in number men, 
 women and children before Olmumhotep, the governor of 
 the nome of Sah, to solicit help or an asylum at his hands. 
 A temple scribe called Neferhotep is offering to the nomarch 
 a sheet of papyrus covered with an inscription bearing at
 
 APPENDIX. 283 
 
 the top the date of the year six of Usertesen II., and the 
 number of the strangers. The chief or sheik of the little 
 tribe, named Abu-sa, first respectfully approaches the person 
 of Chnumhotep and offers 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 clan 
 closes the march playing on a sort of lyre. 
 
 Are 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? 
 
 THE details collected by Herodotus with regard to the 
 civil and private life of the Egyptians are of nine centuries 
 later date than the epoch of Barneses 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 appear 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 
 Barneses. 
 
 These items of information are yielded us by a stele found 
 at Thebes among the ruins of a temple of Khons, a divinity 
 who appears 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. 
 
 r H K. STELE OP TMJ TEMPLE OF KHONS. 
 
 .... His Majesty Barneses XTT. having gone to Naha- 
 rina (Mesopotamia) to collect 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 (Ecbatana according to Dr. 
 Brugsch) 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 once captivated the 
 heart of Rameses more than did anything else. His Majesty 
 gave her the title of Great 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- 
 tions the grand panegyric of his father Amrnon, the sun, 
 the distributor of thrones, behold the arrival of a messenger 
 bearing rich presents from the King of Bouchten for the 
 queen, was announced to his Majesty. 
 
 On being admitted to the presence of Rameses XII., the 
 envoy saluted His Majesty in these words : " Glory to 
 thee, oh sun of nine peoples ; grant to us the breath of life !" 
 Then prostrating himself, he added : " The king my mas- 
 ter sends me to Thy Holiness because of Benten-rest, the 
 young sister of the Queen Ra-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 
 the college of sacred philosophers and the doctors skilled in 
 mysteries. 
 
 So soon as they had all hastened to stand in array in His 
 Majesty's presence, he said to them : " I have summoned 
 you 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 and the most skillful of hand." 
 
 The recorder of sacred writings, Toth-em-hebi, stepped 
 forth from the ranks and bowed before His Majesty. He
 
 APPENDIX. 285 
 
 immediately received orders to repair to the country of 
 Bouchten with the royal messenger. 
 
 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 its 
 inferior and dared not engage in contest with it. 
 
 The King of Bouchten thereupon sent another messenger 
 to Pharaoh, 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 Holiness was then still at Thebes, celebrating, in the 
 twenty-sixth year of his reign, the panegyric of Ammon. 
 He thereupon went to the temple of the Theban god 
 Khons-Neferhotep, and thus appealed to him : " O my be- 
 neficent Lord ! 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 brilliant 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 Barneses !" 
 
 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, and for myself, I am thy slave ; I shall be 
 no hindrance to the purpose 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 Khoiisou-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 
 offerings 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- 
 light, as also were all bis 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 ; 
 but at the end of that time, behold the King of Bouchten, 
 lying 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 
 Khousou-Pa-ar-secher : " Let him leave us quickly and 
 return to Egypt : cause his car to be made ready 1" 
 
 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 offered 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 year 
 33, on the nineteenth day of the month of Mechir, of the 
 King Barneses XIL, reigning eternally like the sun.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
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 I
 
 Scrtbner & Co., 
 
 654 Broadway, New York, 
 
 HAVB JUST COMMENCED THE PUBLICATION OF 
 
 IHusfrafpi) Eufirerg of Mon&prs. 
 
 This Library is based upon a similar series of works now in course of issue 
 in France, the popularity of which may be inferred from the fa& that 
 
 OVER ONE MILLION COPIES 
 
 have been sold. The volumes to be comprised in the series are all written 
 in a popular style, and, where scientific subjects are treated of, with care- 
 ful accuracy, and with the purpose of embodying the latest discoveries and 
 inventions, and the results of the most recent developments in every de- 
 partment of investigation. Familiar explanations are given of the most 
 striking phenomena in nature, and of the various operations and processes 
 in science and the arts. Occasionally notable passages in history and re- 
 markable adventures are described. The different volumes are profusely 
 illustrated with engravings, designed by the most skilful artists, and execu- 
 ted in the most careful manner, and every possible care will be taken to 
 render them complete and reliable expositions of the subjects upon which 
 they respectively treat For THE FAMILY LIBRARY, for t use as 
 PRIZES in SCHOOLS, as an inexhaustible fund of ANECDOTE and 
 ILLUSTRATION for TEACHERS, and as works of instruction and 
 amusement for readers of all ages, the volumes comprising THE ILLUS 
 TRATED LIBRARY OF WONDERS will be found unexcelled. 
 The following volumes of the series have been published :
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 Optical 
 
 HTHE WONDERS OF OPTICS. By F. MARION. 
 
 *- Illrstrated with over seventy engravings on wood, many of 
 them full-page, and a colored frontispiece. One volume, I2mo. 
 Price $15 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 13. 
 
 In the Wonders of Optics, the phenomena of Vision, including the struc- 
 ture of the eye, optical illusions, the illusions caused by light itself, and the 
 influence of the imagination, are explained. These explanations are not at 
 all abstract or scientific. Numerous striking facts and events, many of which 
 were once attributed to supernatural causes, are narrated, and from them the 
 laws in accordance with which they were developed are derived. The closing 
 section of the book is devoted to Natural Magic, and the properties of Mir- 
 rors, the Stereoscope, the Spectroscope, &c., &c., are fully described, together 
 with the methods by which "Chinese Shadows," Spectres, and numerous 
 other illusions arc produced. The book is one which furnishes an almost 
 illimitable fund of amusement and instruction, and it is illustrated with no 
 less than 73 finely executed engravings, many of them full-page. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " The work has the merit of conveying much useful scientific information in a popular 
 manner." Phila. North American. 
 
 "Thoroughly admirable, and as an introduction to this science for the general reader, 
 leaves hardly anything to be desired." N. Y. Evening Post. 
 
 " Treats in a charming, but scientific and exhaustive manner, the wonderful subject of 
 optics." Cleveland Leader. 
 
 " All the marvels of light and of optical illusions are made dear." A^. Y. Observer . 
 
 t)ttntotr antr HigDtning* 
 
 T^HUNDER AND LIGHTNING. By W. DE FON- 
 
 ^ YIELLE. Illustrated with 39 Engravings on wood, nearly 
 all full-page. One volume, I2tno $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 14. 
 
 Thunder and Lightning, as its title indicates, deals with the most star- 
 tling phenomena of nature. The writings of the author, M. De Fonvielle, 
 have attracted very general attention in France, as well on account of the 
 happy manner in which he calls his readers' attention to certain facts hereto- 
 fore treated in scientific works only, as because of the statement of other)-
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonder*. 
 
 often observed and spoken of, over which he appears to throw quite a new 
 light. The different kinds of lightning forked, globular, and sheet light- 
 ning are described ; numerous instances of the effects produced by this won- 
 derful agency are very graphically narrated ; and thirty-nine engravings, nearly 
 all full-page, illustrate the text most effectively. The volume is certain to 
 excite popular interest, and to call the attention of persons unaccustomed to 
 observe to some of the wonderful phenomena which surround us in this 
 world. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " In the book before us the dryness of detail is avoided. The author has given us all 
 the scientific information necessary, and yet so happily united interest with instruction that 
 no person who has the smallest particle of curiosity to investigate the subject treated of can 
 fail to be interested in it." N. Y. Herald. 
 
 " Any boy or girl who wants to read strange stories and see curious pictures of the do- 
 ings of ele&ricitv. had better get these books." Our Young Folks. 
 
 " A. volume which cannot fail to attract attention and awaken interest in persons who 
 have not been accustomed to give the subject any thought." Daily Register (New 
 Haven}. 
 
 '"THE WONDERS OF HEAT. By ACHILLE CAZIN. 
 
 *- With 90 illustrations, many of them full-page, and a colored 
 frontispiece. One volume, I2mo $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page \ tj. 
 
 In the Wonders of Heat the principal phenomena are presented as viewed 
 from the standpoint afforded by recent discoveries. Burning-glasses, and the 
 remarkable effects produced by them, are described; the relations between 
 heat and electricity, between heat and cold, and the comparative effects of 
 each, are discussed ; and incidentally, interesting accounts are given of the 
 mode of formation of glaciers, of Montgolfier's balloon, of Davy's safety- 
 lamp, of the methods of glass-blowing, and of numerous other facts in nature 
 and processes in art dependent upon the influence of heat. Like the other 
 volumes of the Library of Wonders, this is illustrated wherever the text 
 gives an opportunity for explanation by this method. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " From the first to the very last page the interest is all-absorbing." Albany Evening 
 Times. 
 
 " The book deserves, as it will doubtless attain, a wide circulation." Pittsburg Chrort 
 icle.
 
 4 Illustrated Library of Wonders. _ 
 
 "This book is instructive and clear." Independent. 
 
 " It describes and explains the wonders of heat in a manner to be clearly understood by 
 non-icientinc readers." Fhila. Inquirer. 
 
 animal KntrUf0etue, 
 
 E INTELLIGENCE OF ANIMALS, WITH 
 ILLUSTRATIVE ANECDOTES. From the French of ERNEST 
 MENAULT. With 54 illustrations. One volume, i2mo . $i 50 
 
 Far specimen illustration see page 1 6. 
 
 In this very interesting volume there are grouped together a great num- 
 ber of fa<5ls and anecdotes collected from original sources, and from the 
 writings of the most eminent naturalists of all countries, designed to illus- 
 trate the manifestations of intelligence in the animal creation. Very many 
 novel and curious fa<5ts regarding the habits of Reptiles, Birds, and Beasts 
 are narrated in the most charming style, and hi a way which is sure to 
 excite the desire of every reader for wider knowledge of one of the most 
 fascinating subjects in the whole range of natural history. The grace and 
 skill displayed in the illustrations, which are very numerous, make the vol- 
 ume singularly attractive. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " May be recommended as very entertaining." London Athenaeum. 
 " The stories are of real value to those who take any interest in the curious habits of 
 animals." Rochester Democrat. 
 
 3,300 YEARS AGO; OR, RAMESES THE 
 GREAT. By F. DE LANOYE. With 40 illustrations. One 
 volume, I2mo ......... $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see pa.gt I7 
 
 This volume is devoted to the wonders of Ancient Egypt during the time 
 of the Pharaohs and under Sesostris, the period of its greatest splendor and 
 magnificence. Her monuments, her palaces, her pyramids, and her works 
 of art are not only accurately described in the text, but reproduced in a 
 series of very attractive illustrations as they have been restored by French 
 explorers, aided by students of Egyptology. While the volume has the 
 attraction of being devoted to a subjeft which possesses all the charms of 
 novelty to the great number of readers, it has the substantial merit of dis- 
 cussing, with intelligence and careful accuracy, one of the greatest epochs 
 in the world's history.
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " I think this a good book for the purpose for which it is designed. It is brief on each 
 head, lively and graphic, without any theatrical artifices ; is not the work of a novice, but 
 of a real scholar in Egyptology, and, as far as can be ascertained now, is history." 
 JAMES C. MOFFA T, Professor in Princeton Theological Seminary. 
 
 "The volume is full of wonders." Hartford Cournnt. 
 
 " Evidently prepared with great care." Chicago Evening Journal. 
 
 " Not merely the curious in antiquarian matters will find this volume attractive, but the 
 general reader will be pleased, entertained, and informed by it." Portland Argus. 
 
 " The work possesses the freshness and charm of romance, and cannot fail to repay all 
 who glance over its pages." Philadelphia City Item. 
 
 ADVENTURES ON THE GREAT HUNTING 
 GROUNDS OF THE WORLD. By VICTOR MEUNIER. 
 Illustrated with 22 woodcuts. One volume I2mo . . $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 1 8. 
 
 Besides numerous thrilling adventures judiciously selected, this work con- 
 tains much valuable and exceedingly interesting information regarding the 
 different animals, adventures with which are narrated, together with accu- 
 rate descriptions of the different countries, making the volume not only 
 interesting, but instructive in a remarkable degree. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 "This is a very attractive volume in this excellent series." Cleveland Herald. 
 "Cannot fail to prove entertaining to the juvenile reader." Albion. 
 " The adventures are gathered from the histories of famous travellers and explorers, and 
 have the merit of truth as well as interest." IV. Y. Observer. , 
 
 " Just the book for boys during the coming Winter evenings." Boston Daily Journal. 
 
 Domjmt. 
 
 WONDERS OF POMPEII. By MARC MONNIER, 
 With 22 illustrations. One volume i2mo . . $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 19. 
 
 There are here summed up, in a very lively and graphic style, the results 
 of the discoveries made at Pompeii since the commencement of the exten- 
 sive excavations there. The illustrations represent the houses, the domes- 
 tic utensils, the statues, and the various works of art, as investigation gives 
 every reason to believe that they existed at the time of the eruption.
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " It is undoubtedly one of the best works on Pompeii that have been published, and has 
 this advantage over all others in that it records the results of excavations to the latest 
 date." N. Y. Herald. 
 
 "A vsry pleasant and inslr::live book." Bait. Meth. Prat. 
 
 " It gives a very clear and accurate account of the buried city." Portland Transcript. 
 
 Stitiiime in Nature* 
 
 THE SUBLIME IN NATURE, FROM DESCRIP- 
 TIONS OF CELEBRATED TRAVELLERS AND 
 WRITERS. By FERDINAND LANOYE. Illustrated with 48 wood- 
 cuts. One volume I2mo $i 50 
 
 for specimen illustration see page 2O. 
 
 The Air and Atmospheric Phenomena, the Ocean, Mountains, Volcanic 
 Phenomena, Rivers, Falls and Cataracts, Grottoes and Caverns, and the 
 Phenomena of Vegetation, are described in this volume, and in the most 
 charming manner possible, because the descriptions given have been selected 
 from the writings of the most distinguished authors and travellers. The 
 illustrations, several of which are from the pencil of GUSTAVE DoRfi, re- 
 produce scenes in this country, as well as in foreign lands. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " As a hand-book of reference to the natural wonders of the world this work has no 
 luperior." Philadelphia Inquirer. 
 
 " The illustrations are particularly graphic, and in some cases furnish much better ideas 
 of the phenomena they indicate than anything short of an actual experience, or a pano- 
 ramic view of them would do." A^. Y. Sunday Times. 
 
 Kty Stm, 
 
 THE SUN. By AMEDEE GUILLEMIN. From the French 
 by T. L. PHIPSON, Ph.D. With 58 illustrations. One 
 volume I2mo $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see pagt 21. 
 
 M. GUILLEMIN'S well-known work upon The Heavens has secured him 
 a wide reputation as one of the first of living astronomical writers and ob- 
 servers. In this compact treatise he discourses familiarly but most accu- 
 rately and entertainingly of the Sun as the source of light, of heat, and of 
 chemical action ; of its influence upon living 1 eings ; of its place in the 
 Planetary World ; of its place in the Sidereal We rid ; of its physical and
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 chemical constitution ; of the maintenance of Solar Radiation, and, in con- 
 clusion, the question whether the Sun is inhabited, is examined. The work 
 embraces the results of the most recent investigations, and is valuable for 
 its fulness and accuracy as well as for the very popular way in which the 
 subject is presented. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 " The matter of the volume is highly interesting, as well as scientifically complete ; the 
 style is clear and simple, and the illustrations excellent." N. Y. Daily Tribune. 
 
 " For the first time, the fullest and latest information about the Sun has been comprised 
 in a single volume." Philadelphia Press. 
 
 "The work is intensely interesting. It is written in a style which must commend itself 
 to the general reader, and imparts a vast fund of information in language free from astrono 
 mical or other scientific technicalities." Albany Evening "Journal. 
 
 "The latest discoveries of science are set forth in a popular and attractive style." Port' 
 land Transcript. 
 
 " Conveys, in a graphic form, the present amount of knowledge in regard to the luminous 
 centre of our solar system." Boston Congregationalist. 
 
 WONDERS OF GLASS-MAKING ; ITS DESCRIPTION 
 AND HISTORY FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE 
 PRESENT. By A. SAUZAY. With 63 illustrations on wood. One 
 volume I2mo $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 22. 
 
 The title of this work very accurately indicates its character. It is writ- 
 ten in an exceedingly lively and graphic style, and the useful and ornamen- 
 tal applications of glass are fully described. The illustrations represent, 
 among other things, the mirror of Marie de Medici and various articles 
 manufactured from glass which have, from their unique character, or the 
 associations connected with them, acquired historical interest 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 
 "All the information which the general reader needs on the subject will be found heie 
 in a very intelligible and attractive form." N. Y. Evening Post. 
 
 " Tells about every branch of this curious manufacture, tracing its progress from the re- 
 motest ages, and omitting not one point upon which information can be desired." Boston 
 Post. 
 
 "A very useful and interesting book." N. Y. Cititen.
 
 8 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 " An extremely pleasant and useful little book." N. Y. Sunday Times. 
 " The book will well repay perusal." ff. Y. Globe. 
 
 A most interesting volume." Portland Argus. 
 " Graphically told." N. Y. Albion. 
 
 " Young people and old will derive equal benefit and pleasure from its perusal." 
 ff. Y. Ch. Intelligence. 
 
 Ktaltan art* 
 
 WONDERS OF ITALIAN ART. By Louis VIARDOT. 
 With 28 illustrations. One volume I2mo . $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 23. 
 
 As a compact, readable, and instructive manual upon a subject the ex- 
 position of which has heretofore been confined to ambitious and expensive 
 treatises, this volume has no equal. In style it is clear and attractive ; its 
 critical estimates are based upon thorough and extensive knowledge and 
 sound judgment, and the illustrations reproduce, as accurately as wood 
 engravings can do, the leading works of the famous Italian masters, while 
 anecdotes of these great artists and curious facts regarding their works 
 give popular interest to the volume. 
 
 Efte Tlnnuau l*otn>. 
 
 WONDERS OF THE HUMAN BODY. From the 
 French of A. LE PILEUR, Doctor of Medicine. Illustrated 
 by 45 Engravings by LEVEiLLis. One volume I2mo . $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 24. 
 
 While sufficiently minute in anatomical and physiological details to satisfy 
 those who desire to go deeper into such studies than many may deem 
 necessary, this work is nevertheless written so that it may form part of the 
 domestic library. Mothers and daughters may read it without being re- 
 pelled or shocked ; and the young will find their interest sustained by 
 incidental digressions to more attractive matters. Such are the pages re- 
 ferring to phrenology and to music, which accompany the anatomical 
 description of the skull and of the organs of voice ; and the chapter on 
 artistic expression which closes the book. Numerous simple but at- 
 tractive engravings elucidate the work.
 
 Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 WONDERS OF ARCHITECTURE. Translated from 
 the French of M. LEFJSVRE ; to which is added a chapter 
 on English Architecture by R. DONALD. With 50 illustrations. 
 One volume I2mo ........ $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 25. 
 
 The object of the Wonders of Architefture is to supply, in as accessible 
 and popular a form as the nature of the subject admits, a connected and 
 comprehensive sketch of the chief architectural achievements of ancient 
 and modern times. Commencing with the rudest dawnings of architectural 
 science as exemplified in the Celtic monuments, a carefully compiled and 
 authentic record is given of the most remarkable temples, palaces, columns, 
 towers, cathedrals, bridges, viaducts, churches, and buildings of every 
 description which the genius of man has constructed ; and as these are all 
 described in chronological order, according to the eras to which they belong, 
 they form a connected narrative of the development of architecture, in 
 which the history and progress of the art can be authentically traced. 
 Care has been taken to popularize the theme as much as possible, to make 
 the descriptions plain and vivid, to render the text free from mere techni 
 calities, and to convey a correct and truthful impression of the various 
 objects that are enumerated. 
 
 BOTTOM OF THE SEA. By L. SONREL. Translated 
 and edited by ELIHU RICH, translator of " Cazin's Heat," 
 &c., with 68 woodcuts. (Printed on Tinted Paper) One vol I2mo 
 
 $r 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 26. 
 
 Written in a popular and attractive style, this volume affords much use- 
 ful information about the sea, its depth, color, and temperature ; its action 
 in deep water and on the shores ; the exuberance of life in the depths of 
 the ocean, and the numberless phenomena, anecdotes, adventures, and 
 perils connected therewith. The illustrations are very numerous, and 
 specially graphic and attractive. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE. 
 
 This book is well illustrated throughout, and is admirably adapted to t.'tc^e wlio 
 require light scientific reading. Nature,
 
 to Illustrated Library of Wonders. 
 
 7i.f&i)ttjottsrs an* 
 
 LIGHTHOUSES AND LIGHTSHIPS. By W. H, D. 
 ADAMS. With sixty illustrations. One volume I2mo- 
 Printed on tinted paper ....... $i 50 
 
 The aim of this volume is to furnish in a popular and intelligible form a 
 description of the Lighthouse as it is and as it was, of the rude Roman 
 pharos, or old sea-tower, with its flickering fire of wood or coal, and the 
 modern Lighthouse, shapely and yet substantial, with its powerful illumina- 
 ting apparatus of lamps and lenses, shining ten, or twelve, or twenty miles 
 across the waters. The author gives a descriptive and historical account of 
 their mode of construction and organization, based on the best authorities, 
 and revised by competent critics. Sketches are furnished of the most re- 
 markable Lighthouses in the Old World, and a graphic narration is presented 
 of the mode of life of their keepers. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES. 
 "The book is full of interest." JV. Y. Commercial Advertiser. 
 
 "The whole subject is treated in a manner at once interesting and instructive." 
 Rochester Democrat. 
 "The illustrations are full, and excellently engraved." Phil. Morning Post. 
 
 WONDERS OF ACOUSTICS; or, THE PHE- 
 _L NOMEMA OF SOUND. By R. RADAU. With I io illustra- 
 tions. One volume 1 2mo. Printed on tinted paper . . $i 50 
 
 For specimen illustration see page 27. 
 
 No overweight of technicalities encumber the author's ample and exceed- 
 ingly instructive disquisition ; but by presenting the results of curious inves- 
 tigation, by anecdote, by all manner of striking illustration, and by the aid 
 of numerous pictures, he throws a popular interest about one of the most 
 suggestive and beautiful of the sciences. The book opens with an attractive 
 chapter on " Sound in Nature," in which the language of animals, nocturnal 
 life in the forests, and kindred subjects are discussed. Among the topics 
 treated of later in the work are such as "Effects of Sound, on Living 
 Beings," "Velocity of Sound," "The Notes," "The Voice, Music, and 
 Science." This volume forms a valuable addition to the series.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000713200 4