HISTORY OF EGYPT
CHALDEA, SYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND ASSYRIA
By G. MASPERO,
Honorable Doctor of Civil Laws, and Fellow of
Queen’s College,
Oxford; Member of the Institute and Professor at
the College of France
Edited by A. H. SAYCE,
Professor of Assyriology, Oxford
Translated by M. L. McCLURE,
Member of the Committee of the Egypt
Exploration Fund
CONTAINING OVER TWELVE HUNDRED COLORED PLATES AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Volume V.
LONDON
THE GROLIER SOCIETY
PUBLISHERS
THE EIGHTEENTH THEBAN DYNASTY—(continued)
THÛTMOSIS III.: THE ORGANISATION OF THE SYRIAN PROVINCES—AMENÔTHES
III.: THE WORSHIPPERS OF ATONÛ.
Thutmosis III.: the talcing of Qodshâ in the 42nd year of his reign—The
tribute of the south—The triumph-song of Amon.
The constitution of the Egyptian empire—The Grown vassals and
their relations with the Pharaoh—The king’s messengers—The
allied states—Royal presents and marriages; the status of foreigners
in the royal harem—Commerce with Asia, its resources and its risks;
protection granted to the national industries, and treaties of
extradition.
Amenôthes II, his campaigns in Syria and Nubia—Thûtmosis IV.; his
dream under the shadow of the Sphinx and his marriage—Amenôthes III.
and his peaceful reign—The great building works—The temples of
Nubia: Soleb and his sanctuary built by Amenôthes III, Gebel Barkal,
Elephantine—The beautifying of Thebes: the temple of Mat, the
temples of Amon at Luxor and at Karnak, the tomb of Amenôthes III, the
chapel and the colossi of Memnon.
The increasing importance of Anion and his priests: preference shown by
Amenôthes III. for the Heliopolitan gods, his marriage with Tii—The
influence of Tii over Amenôthes IV.: the decadence of Amon and of Thebes,
Atonû and Khûîtniatonû—Change of physiognomy in Khûniaton, his
character, his government, his relations with Asia: the tombs of Tel
el-Amarna and the art of the period—Tutanlchamon, At: the return of
the Pharaohs to Thebes and the close of the XVIIIth dynasty.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I—THE EIGHTEENTH THEBAN DYNASTY—(continued)
CHAPTER II—THE REACTION AGAINST EGYPT
CHAPTER III—THE CLOSE OF THE THEBAN
EMPIREList of Illustrations
006.jpg a Procession of Negroes
015.jpg a Syrian Town and Its Outskirts After
an Egyptian Army Had Passed Through It030.jpg the LotanÛ and The Goldsmiths’work
Constituting Their Tribute032b.jpg Painted Tablets in the Hall of Harps
034.jpg. The Bear and Elephant Brought As
Tribute in The Tomb of Rakhmiri040.jpg the Mummy of Thutmosis Iii.
041.jpg Head of the Mummy Of ThÛtmosis Iii.
044.jpg AmenÔthes Ii., from the Statue at
Turin046.jpg the Great Sphinx and The Chapel of
Thutmosis Iv.047.jpg the Simoom. Sphinx and Pyramids at
Gizeh050.jpg the Stele of The Sphinx Of Gizer
052b.jpg Amenothes Iii. Colossal Head in the
British Museum053.jpg Amenothes Iii. From the Tomb of
Khamhait058.jpg a Gang of Syrian Prisoners Making
Brick for The Temple of Amon059.jpg One of the Rams Of AmenÔthes Iii
062.jpg One of the Lions Of Gebel-barkal
065.jpg the Temple at Elephantine, As It Was
in 1799066.jpg the Great Court of The Temple Of
Luxor During The Inundation067.jpg Part of the Avenue Of Rams, Between
The Temples Of Amon and MaÛt069.jpg the Pylons of ThÛtmosis Iii. And
HarmhabÎ At Kaknak070.jpg Sacred Lake Akd the Southern Part of
The Temple Of Karnak.073.jpg the Two Colossi of Memnon in The
Plain Of Thebes076.jpg a Party of Tourists at the Foot Of
The Vocal Statue of Memnok087.jpg the Decorated Pavement of The Palace
095.jpg the Mask of KihÛniatonÛ
096.jpg AmenÔthes Iv., from the Statuette in
The Louvre.098.jpg KhÛniatonÛ and his Wife Rewarding One
of The Great Officers of the Court100.jpg the Door of a Tomb at Tel El-amarna
103.jpg Interior of a Tomb at Tel El-amarna
104.jpg Profile of Head Of Mummy (thebes
Tombs.)106.jpg Two of the Daughters Of KhÛhi AtonÛ
111.jpg Sarcophagus of the Pharaoh AÎ
123.jpg the First Pylon of HarmhabÎ at
Karnak127.jpg Amenothes IV. From a Fragment Used
Again By Harmhabi129.jpg the Vaulted Passage of The Rock-tomb
at Gebel Silsileh131.jpg the Triumph Of HarmhabÎ in The
Sanctuary of Gebel Silsileh135.jpg Three Heads of Hittite Soldiers
140.jpg a Hittite Chariot With Its Three
Occupants166.jpg Representation of Seti I.
Vanquishing the Libyans And Asiatics on the Walls, Karnak168.jpg a Fortified Station on the Route
Between The Nile And the Red Sea.169.jpg the Temple of Seti I. At Redesieh
170.jpg Fragment of the Map Of The
Gold-mines171.jpg the Three Standing Columns of The
Temple Of Sesebi173 an Avenue of One Of the Aisles Of The
Hypostyle Hall At Karnak174.jpg the Gratings of The Central
Colonnade in The Hypostyle Hall at Karnak176.jpg One of the Colonnades Of The
Hypostyle Hall In The Temple of Seti I. At Abydos176b.jpg the Facade of The Temple Of Seti
184.jpg One of the Pillars Of The Tomb Of
Seti I.187.jpg Ramses II. Puts the Negroes to
Flight193.jpg the Shardana Guard of Ramses II.
195.jpg Two Hittite Spies Beaten by the
Egyptian Soldiers196.jpg the Egyptian Camp and The Council of
War on The Morning of the Battle Of QodshÛ198.jpg the Garrison of QodshÛ Issuing Forth
to Help The Prince of KhÂti.214.jpg KhÂtusaru, Prince of KhÂti, and his
Daughter218.jpg Phoenician Boats Landing at Thebes
221.jpg the Projecting Columns of The Speos
Of Gerf-hosseÎn221.jpg the Caryatides of Gerf-hosseÎn
224.jpg the Two Colossi of Abu Simbel to The
South Of The Doorway225.jpg the Interior of The Speos Of Abu
Simbel228.jpg the Face of The Rock at Abu Simgel
229.jpg Ramses Ii. Pierces a Libyan Chief
With his Lance230.jpg Ramses Ii. Strikes a Group of
Prisoners231.jpg the Façade of The Little Speos Of
Hauthor at Abu Simbel232.jpg Columns of Temple at Luxor
233.jpg the Chapel of Thutmosis III. And One
Of The Pylons of Ramses Ii. At Luxor235.jpg the Colonnade of Seti I. And The
Three Colossal Statues of Ramses II. At Luxor237.jpg the Remains of The Colossal Statue
Of Ramses Ii. At the Ramesseum240.jpg the Ruins of The Memnonium Of Ramses
Ii. At Abydos242.jpg the Colossal Statue of Ramses II. At
Mitrahineh245.jpg the Chapel of The Apis Of AmekÔthes
III.247.jpg Stele of the Nahr El-kelb
248.jpg the Bas-belief of Ninfi
249.jpg the Coffin and Mummy of Ramses II
263.jpg the Chapels of Ramses II. And
Minephtah At Sisileh299.jpg One of the Libyan Chiefs Vanquished
by Ramses Iii.300.jpg the Waggons of The Pulasati and
Their Confederates307.jpg the Army Op Ramses III. On The
March, and The Lion-hunt308.jpg the Defeat of The Peoples Of The Sea
313.jpg the Captive Chiefs of Ramses Iii. At
Medinet-ihabu314.jpg Ramses III. Binds the Chiefs of The
Libyans318.jpg the Prince of The Khati
320.jpg Signs, Arms and Instruments
321.jpg the Colossal Osirian Figures in The
First Court At Medinet-habu322.jpg the First Pylon of The Temple
327.jpg the Mummy of Ramses III.
331.jpg a Ramses of the Xxth Dynasty
334.jpg Map: Thebes in the Xxth Dynasty
345.jpg Pectoral of Ramses II.
347.jpg the Ram-headed Sparrow-hawk in The
Louvre350.jpg Page Image With Furniture
CHAPTER I—THE EIGHTEENTH THEBAN DYNASTY—(continued)
Thutmosis III.: the organisation of the Syrian provinces—Amenothes
III.: the royal worshippers of Atonû.
In the year XXXIV. the Egyptians reappeared in Zahi. The people of
Anaugasa having revolted, two of their towns were taken, a third
surrendered, while the chiefs of the Lotanû hastened to meet their lord
with their usual tribute. Advantage was taken of the encampment being at
the foot of the Lebanon to procure wood for building purposes, such as
beams and planks, masts and yards for vessels, which were all shipped by
the Kefâtiu at Byblos for exportation to the Delta. This expedition was,
indeed, little more than a military march through the country. It would
appear that the Syrians soon accustomed themselves to the presence of the
Egyptians in their midst, and their obedience henceforward could be fairly
relied on. We are unable to ascertain what were the circumstances or the
intrigues which, in the year XXXV., led to a sudden outbreak among the
tribes settled on the Euphrates and the Orontes. The King of Mitanni
rallied round him the princes of Naharaim, and awaited the attack of the
Egyptians near Aruna. Thûtmosis displayed great personal courage, and the
victory was at once decisive. We find mention of only ten prisoners, one
hundred and eighty mares, and sixty chariots in the lists of the spoil.
Anaugasa again revolted, and was subdued afresh in the year XXXVIII.; the
Shaûsû rebelled in the year XXXIX., and the Lotanû or some of the tribes
connected with them two years later. The campaign of the year XLII. proved
more serious. Troubles had arisen in the neighbourhood of Arvad.
Thûtmosis, instead of following the usual caravan route, marched along the
coast-road by way of Phoenicia. He destroyed Arka in the Lebanon and the
surrounding strongholds, which were the haunts of robbers who lurked in
the mountains; then turning to the northeast, he took Tunipa and extorted
the usual tribute from the inhabitants of Naharaim. On the other hand, the
Prince of Qodshû, trusting to the strength of his walled city, refused to
do homage to the Pharaoh, and a deadly struggle took place under the
ramparts, in which each side availed themselves of all the artifices which
the strategic warfare of the times allowed. On a day when the assailants
and besieged were about to come to close quarters, the Amorites let loose
a mare among the chariotry of Thûtmosis. The Egyptian horses threatened to
become unmanageable, and had begun to break through the ranks, when
Amenemhabî, an officer of the guard, leaped to the ground, and, running up
to the creature, disembowelled it with a thrust of his sword; this done,
he cut off its tail and presented it to the king. The besieged were
eventually obliged to shut themselves within their newly built walls,
hoping by this means to tire out the patience of their assailants; but a
picked body of men, led by the same brave Amenemhabî who had killed the
mare, succeeded in making a breach and forcing an entrance into the town.
Even the numerous successful campaigns we have mentioned, form but a part,
though indeed an important part, of the wars undertaken by Thûtmosis to
“fix his frontiers in the ends of the earth.” Scarcely a year elapsed
without the viceroy of Ethiopia having a conflict with one or other of the
tribes of the Upper Nile; little merit as he might gain in triumphing over
such foes, the spoil taken from them formed a considerable adjunct to the
treasure collected in Syria, while the tributes from the people of Kûsh
and the Uaûaîû were paid with as great regularity as the taxes levied on
the Egyptians themselves. It comprised gold both from the mines and from
the rivers, feathers, oxen with curiously trained horns, giraffes, lions,
leopards, and slaves of all ages. The distant regions explored by
Hâtshopsîtû continued to pay a tribute at intervals. A fleet went to
Pûanît to fetch large cargoes of incense, and from time to time some Ilîm
chief would feel himself honoured by having one of his daughters accepted
as an inmate of the harem of the great king. After the year XLII. we have
no further records of the reign, but there is no reason to suppose that
its closing years were less eventful or less prosperous than the earlier.
Thûtmosis III., when conscious of failing powers, may have delegated the
direction of his armies to his sons or to his generals, but it is also
quite possible that he kept the supreme command in his own hands to the
end of his days. Even when old age approached and threatened to abate his
vigour, he was upheld by the belief that his father Amon was ever at hand
to guide him with his counsel and assist him in battle. “I give to thee,
declared the god, the rebels that they may fall beneath thy sandals, that
thou mayest crush the rebellious, for I grant to thee by decree the earth
in its length and breadth. The tribes of the West and those of the East
are under the place of thy countenance, and when thou goest up into all
the strange lands with a joyous heart, there is none who will withstand
Thy Majesty, for I am thy guide when thou treadest them underfoot. Thou
hast crossed the water of the great curve of Naharaim* in thy strength and
in thy power, and I have commanded thee to let them hear thy roaring which
shall enter their dens, I have deprived their nostrils of the breath of
life, I have granted to thee that thy deeds shall sink into their hearts,
that my uraeus which is upon thy head may burn them, that it may bring
prisoners in long files from the peoples of Qodi, that it may consume with
its flame those who are in the marshes,** that it may cut off the heads of
the Asiatics without one of them being able to escape from its clutch. I
grant to thee that thy conquests may embrace all lands, that the urseus
which shines upon my forehead may be thy vassal, so that in all the
compass of the heaven there may not be one to rise against thee, but that
the people may come bearing their tribute on their backs and bending
before Thy Majesty according to my behest; I ordain that all aggressors
arising in thy time shall fail before thee, their heart burning within
them, their limbs trembling!”
“I.—I am come that I may grant unto thee to crush the great ones of
Zahi, I throw them under thy feet across their mountains,—I grant to
thee that they shall see Thy Majesty as a lord of shining splendour when
thou shinest before them in my likeness!
“II.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush those of the
country of Asia, to break the heads of the people of Lotanû,—I grant
thee that they may see Thy Majesty, clothed in thy panoply, when thou
seizest thy arms, in thy war-chariot.
“III.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush the land of
the East, and invade those who dwell in the provinces of Tonûtir,—I
grant that they may see Thy Majesty as the comet which rains down the heat
of its flame and sheds its dew.
“IV.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush the land of the
West, so that Kafîti and Cyprus shall be in fear of thee,—I grant
that they may see Thy Majesty like the young bull, stout of heart, armed
with horns which none may resist.
“V.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush those who are in
their marshes, so that the countries of Mitanni may tremble for fear of
thee,—I grant that they may see Thy Majesty like the crocodile, lord
of terrors, in the midst of the water, which none can approach.
“VI.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush those who are
in the isles, so that the people who live in the midst of the Very-Green
may be reached by thy roaring,—I grant that they may see Thy Majesty
like an avenger who stands on the back of his victim.
“VII.—I am come, to grant that thou mayest crush the Tihonu, so that
the isles of the Utanâtiû may be in the power of thy souls,—I grant
that they may see Thy Majesty like a spell-weaving lion, and that thou
mayest make corpses of them in the midst of their own valleys.*
“VIII.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush the ends of
the earth, so that the circle which surrounds the ocean may be grasped in
thy fist,—I grant that they may see Thy Majesty as the sparrow-hawk,
lord of the wing, who sees at a glance all that he desires.
“IX.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush the peoples who
are in their “duars,” so that thou mayest bring the Hirû-shâîtû into
captivity,—I grant that they may see Thy Majesty like the jackal of
the south, lord of swiftness, the runner who prowls through the two lands.
“X.—I am come, to grant thee that thou mayest crush the nomads, so
that the Nubians as far as the land of Pidît are in thy grasp,—I
grant that they may see Thy Majesty like unto thy two brothers Horus and
Sit, whose arms I have joined in order to establish thy power.”
The poem became celebrated. When Seti I., two centuries later, commanded
the Poet Laureates of his court to celebrate his victories in verse, the
latter, despairing of producing anything better, borrowed the finest
strophes from this hymn to Thûtmosis IIL, merely changing the name of the
hero. The composition, unlike so many other triumphal inscriptions, is not
a mere piece of official rhetoric, in which the poverty of the subject is
concealed by a multitude of common-places whether historical or
mythological. Egypt indeed ruled the world, either directly or through her
vassals, and from the mountains of Abyssinia to those of Cilicia her
armies held the nations in awe with the threat of the Pharaoh.
The conqueror, as a rule, did not retain any part of their territory. He
confined himself to the appropriation of the revenue of certain domains
for the benefit of his gods.* Amon of Karnak thus became possessor of
seven Syrian towns which he owed to the generosity of the victorious
Pharaohs.**
Certain cities, like Tunipa, even begged for statues of Thûtmosis for
which they built a temple and instituted a cultus. Amon and his
fellow-gods too were adored there, side by side with the sovereign the
inhabitants had chosen to represent them here below.* These rites were at
once a sign of servitude, and a proof of gratitude for services rendered,
or privileges which had been confirmed. The princes of neighbouring
regions repaired annually to these temples to renew their oaths of
allegiance, and to bring their tributes “before the face of the king.”
Taking everything into account, the condition of the Pharaoh’s subjects
might have been a pleasant one, had they been able to accept their lot
without any mental reservation. They retained their own laws, their
dynasties, and their frontiers, and paid a tax only in proportion to their
resources, while the hostages given were answerable for their obedience.
These hostages were as a rule taken by Thûtmosis from among the sons or
the brothers of the enemy’s chief. They were carried to Thebes, where a
suitable establishment was assigned to them,** the younger members
receiving an education which practically made them Egyptians.
As soon as a vacancy occurred in the succession either in Syria or in
Ethiopia, the Pharaoh would choose from among the members of the family
whom he held in reserve, that prince on whose loyalty he could best count,
and placed him upon the throne.* The method of procedure was not always
successful, since these princes, whom one would have supposed from their
training to have been the least likely to have asserted themselves against
the man to whom they owed their elevation, often gave more trouble than
others. The sense of the supreme power of Egypt, which had been inculcated
in them during their exile, seemed to be weakened after their return to
their native country, and to give place to a sense of their own
importance. Their hearts misgave them as the time approached for them to
send their own children as pledges to their suzerain, and also when called
upon to transfer a considerable part of their revenue to his treasury.
They found, moreover, among their own cities and kinsfolk, those who were
adverse to the foreign yoke, and secretly urged their countrymen to
revolt, or else competitors for the throne who took advantage of the
popular discontent to pose as champions of national independence, and it
was difficult for the vassal prince to counteract the intrigues of these
adversaries without openly declaring himself hostile to his foreign
master.**
A time quickly came when a vestige of fear alone constrained them to
conceal their wish for liberty; the most trivial incident then sufficed to
give them the necessary encouragement, and decided them to throw off the
mask, a repulse or the report of a repulse suffered by the Egyptians, the
news of a popular rising in some neighbouring state, the passing visit of
a Chaldæan emissary who left behind him the hope of support and perhaps of
subsidies from Babylon, and the unexpected arrival of a troop of
mercenaries whose services might be hired for the occasion.* A rising of
this sort usually brought about the most disastrous results. The native
prince or the town itself could keep back the tribute and own allegiance
to no one during the few months required to convince Pharaoh of their
defection and to allow him to prepare the necessary means of vengeance;
the advent of the Egyptians followed, and the work of repression was
systematically set in hand. They destroyed the harvests, whether green or
ready for the sickle, they cut down the palms and olive trees, they tore
up the vines, seized on the flocks, dismantled the strongholds, and took
the inhabitants prisoners.**
The rebellious prince had to deliver up his silver and gold, the contents
of his palace, even his children,* and when he had finally obtained peace
by means of endless sacrifices, he found himself a vassal as before, but
with an empty treasury, a wasted country, and a decimated people.
In spite of all this, some head-strong native princes never relinquished
the hope of freedom, and no sooner had they made good the breaches in
their walls as far as they were able, than they entered once more on this
unequal contest, though at the risk of bringing irreparable disaster on
their country. The majority of them, after one such struggle, resigned
themselves to the inevitable, and fulfilled their feudal obligations
regularly. They paid their fixed contribution, furnished rations and
stores to the army when passing through their territory, and informed the
ministers at Thebes of any intrigues among their neighbours.* Years
elapsed before they could so far forget the failure of their first attempt
to regain independence, as to venture to make a second, and expose
themselves to fresh reverses.
The administration of so vast an empire entailed but a small expenditure
on the Egyptians, and required the offices of merely a few
functionaries.** The garrisons which they kept up in foreign provinces
lived on the country, and were composed mainly of light troops, archers, a
certain proportion of heavy infantry, and a few minor detachments of
chariotry dispersed among the principal fortresses.***
The officers in command had orders to interfere as little as possible in
local affairs, and to leave the natives to dispute or even to fight among
themselves unhindered, so long as their quarrels did not threaten the
security of the Pharaoh.* It was never part of the policy of Egypt to
insist on her foreign subjects keeping an unbroken peace among themselves.
If, theoretically, she did not recognise the right of private warfare, she
at all events tolerated its practice. It mattered little to her whether
some particular province passed out of the possession of a certain Eibaddû
into that of a certain Azîru, or vice versa, so long as both
Eibaddû and Azîru remained her faithful slaves. She never sought to
repress their incessant quarrelling until such time as it threatened to
take the form of an insurrection against her own power. Then alone did she
throw off her neutrality; taking the side of one or other of the
dissentients, she would grant him, as a pledge of help, ten, twenty,
thirty, or even more archers.**
No doubt the discipline and personal courage of these veterans exercised a
certain influence on the turn of events, but they were after all a mere
handful of men, and their individual action in the combat would scarcely
ever have been sufficient to decide the result; the actual importance of
their support, in spite of their numerical inferiority, lay in the moral
weight they brought to the side on which they fought, since they
represented the whole army of the Pharaoh which lay behind them, and their
presence in a camp always ensured final success. The vanquished party had
the right of appeal to the sovereign, through whom he might obtain a
mitigation of the lot which his successful adversary had prepared for him;
it was to the interest of Egypt to keep the balance of power as evenly as
possible between the various states which looked to her, and when she
prevented one or other of the princes from completely crushing his rivals,
she was minimising the danger which might soon arise from the vassal whom
she had allowed to extend his territory at the expense of others.
These relations gave rise to a perpetual exchange of letters and petitions
between the court of Thebes and the northern and southern provinces, in
which all the petty kings of Africa and Asia, of whatever colour or race,
set forth, either openly or covertly, their ambitions and their fears,
imploring a favour or begging for a subsidy, revealing the real or
suspected intrigues of their fellow-chiefs, and while loudly proclaiming
their own loyalty, denouncing the perfidy and the secret projects of their
neighbours. As the Ethiopian peoples did not, apparently, possess an
alphabet of their own, half of the correspondence which concerned them was
carried on in Egyptian, and written on papyrus. In Syria, however, where
Babylonian civilization maintained itself in spite of its conquest by
Thûtmosis, cuneiform writing was still employed, and tablets of dried
clay.* It had, therefore, been found necessary to establish in the
Pharaoh’s palace a department for this service, in which the scribes
should be competent to decipher the Chaldæan character. Dictionaries and
easy mythological texts had been procured for their instruction, by means
of which they had learned the meaning of words and the construction of
sentences. Having once mastered the mechanism of the syllabary, they set
to work to translate the despatches, marking on the back of each the date
and the place from whence it came, and if necessary making a draft of the
reply.** In these the Pharaoh does not appear, as a rule, to have insisted
on the endless titles which we find so lavishly used in his inscriptions,
but the shortened protocol employed shows that the theory of his divinity
was as fully acknowledged by strangers as it was by his own subjects. They
greet him as their sun, the god before whom they prostrate themselves
seven times seven, while they are his slaves, his dogs, and the dust
beneath his feet.***
The runners to whom these documents were entrusted, and who delivered them
with their own hand, were not, as a rule, persons of any consideration;
but for missions of grave importance “the king’s messengers” were
employed, whose functions in time became extended to a remarkable degree.
Those who were restricted to a limited sphere of activity were called “the
king’s messengers for the regions of the south,” or “the king’s messengers
for the regions of the north,” according to their proficiency in the idiom
and customs of Africa or of Asia. Others were deemed capable of
undertaking missions wherever they might be required, and were, therefore,
designated by the bold title of “the king’s messengers for all lands.” In
this case extended powers were conferred upon them, and they were
permitted to cut short the disputes between two cities in some province
they had to inspect, to excuse from tribute, to receive presents and
hostages, and even princesses destined for the harem of the Pharaoh, and
also to grant the support of troops to such as could give adequate reason
for seeking it.* Their tasks were always of a delicate and not
infrequently of a perilous nature, and constantly exposed them to the
danger of being robbed by highwaymen or maltreated by some insubordinate
vassal, at times even running the risk of mutilation or assassination by
the way.**
They were obliged to brave the dangers of the forests of Lebanon and of
the Taurus, the solitudes of Mesopotamia, the marshes of Chaldoa, the
voyages to Pûanît and Asia Minor. Some took their way towards Assyria and
Babylon, while others embarked at Tyre or Sidon for the islands of the
Ægean Archipelago.* The endurance of all these officers, whether governors
or messengers, their courage, their tact, the ready wit they were obliged
to summon to help them out of the difficulties into which their calling
frequently brought them, all tended to enlist the public sympathy in their
favour.**
Many of them achieved a reputation, and were made the heroes of popular
romance. More than three centuries after it was still related how one of
them, by name Thûtîi, had reduced and humbled Jaffa, whose chief had
refused to come to terms. Thûtîi set about his task by feigning to throw
off his allegiance to Thûtmosis III., and withdrew from the Egyptian
service, having first stolen the great magic wand of his lord; he then
invited the rebellious chief into his camp, under pretence of showing him
this formidable talisman, and killed him after they had drunk together.
The cunning envoy then packed five hundred of his soldiers into jars, and
caused them to be carried on the backs of asses before the gates of the
town, where he made the herald of the murdered prince proclaim that the
Egyptians had been defeated, and that the pack train which accompanied him
contained the spoil, among which was Thûtîi himself. The officer in charge
of the city gate was deceived by this harangue, the asses were admitted
within the walls, where the soldiers quitted their jars, massacred the
garrison, and made themselves masters of the town. The tale is, in the
main, the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves.
The frontier was continually shifting, and Thûtmosis III., like Thûtmosis
I., vainly endeavoured to give it a fixed character by erecting stelas
along the banks of the Euphrates, at those points where he contended it
had run formerly. While Kharu and Phoenicia were completely in the hands
of the conqueror, his suzerainty became more uncertain as it extended
northwards in the direction of the Taurus. Beyond Qodshû, it could only be
maintained by means of constant supervision, and in Naharaim its duration
was coextensive with the sojourn of the conqueror in the locality during
his campaign, for it vanished of itself as soon as he had set out on his
return to Africa. It will be thus seen that, on the continent of Asia,
Egypt possessed a nucleus of territories, so far securely under her rule
that they might be actually reckoned as provinces; beyond this immediate
domain there was a zone of waning influence, whose area varied with each
reign, and even under one king depended largely on the activity which he
personally displayed.
This was always the case when the rulers of Egypt attempted to carry their
supremacy beyond the isthmus; whether under the Ptolemies or the native
kings, the distance to which her influence extended was always practically
the same, and the teaching of history enables us to note its limits on the
map with relative accuracy.*
The coast towns, which were in maritime communication with the ports of
the Delta, submitted to the Egyptian yoke more readily than those of the
interior. But this submission could not be reckoned on beyond Berytus, on
the banks of the Lykos, though occasionally it stretched a little further
north as far as Byblos and Arvad; even then it did not extend inland, and
the curve marking its limits traverses Coele-Syria from north-west to
south-east, terminating at Mount Hermon. Damascus, securely entrenched
behind Anti-Lebanon, almost always lay outside this limit. The rulers of
Egypt generally succeeded without much difficulty in keeping possession of
the countries lying to the south of this line; it demanded merely a slight
effort, and this could be furnished for several centuries without
encroaching seriously on the resources of the country, or endangering its
prosperity. When, however, some province ventured to break away from the
control of Egypt, the whole mechanism of the government was put into
operation to provide soldiers and the necessary means for an expedition.
Each stage of the advance beyond the frontier demanded a greater
expenditure of energy, which, with prolonged distances, would naturally
become exhausted. The expedition would scarcely have reached the Taurus or
the Euphrates, before the force of circumstances would bring about its
recall homewards, leaving but a slight bond of vassalage between the
recently subdued countries and the conqueror, which would speedily be cast
off or give place to relations dictated by interest or courtesy. Thûtmosis
III. had to submit to this sort of necessary law; a further extension of
territory had hardly been gained when his dominion began to shrink within
the frontiers that appeared to have been prescribed by nature for an
empire like that of Egypt. Kharû and Phoenicia proper paid him their
tithes with due regularity; the cities of the Amurru and of Zahi, of
Damascus, Qodshû, Hamath, and even of Tunipa, lying on the outskirts of
these two subject nations, formed an ill-defined borderland, kept in a
state of perpetual disturbance by the secret intrigues or open rebellions
of the native princes. The kings of Alasia, Naharaim, and Mitanni
preserved their independence in spite of repeated reverses, and they
treated with the conqueror on equal terms.*
The tone of their letters to the Pharaoh, the polite formulas with which
they addressed him, the special protocol which the Egyptian ministry had
drawn up for their reply, all differ widely from those which we see in the
despatches coming from commanders of garrisons or actual vassals. In the
former it is no longer a slave or a feudatory addressing his master and
awaiting his orders, but equals holding courteous communication with each
other, the brother of Alasia or of Mitanni with his brother of Egypt. They
inform him of their good health, and then, before entering on business,
they express their good wishes for himself, his wives, his sons, the lords
of his court, his brave soldiers, and for his horses. They were careful
never to forget that with a single word their correspondent could let
loose upon them a whirlwind of chariots and archers without number, but
the respect they felt for his formidable power never degenerated into a
fear which would humiliate them before him with their faces in the dust.
This interchange of diplomatic compliments was called for by a variety of
exigencies, such as incidents arising on the frontier, secret intrigues,
personal alliances, and questions of general politics. The kings of
Mesopotamia and of Northern Syria, even those of Assyria and Chaldæa, who
were preserved by distance from the dangers of a direct invasion, were in
constant fear of an unexpected war, and heartily desired the downfall of
Egypt; they endeavoured meanwhile to occupy the Pharaoh so fully at home
that he had no leisure to attack them. Even if they did not venture to
give open encouragement to the disposition in his subjects to revolt, they
at least experienced no scruple in hiring emissaries who secretly fanned
the flame of discontent. The Pharaoh, aroused to indignation by such
plotting, reminded them of their former oaths and treaties. The king in
question would thereupon deny everything, would speak of his tried
friendship, and recall the fact that he had refused to help a rebel
against his beloved brother.* These protestations of innocence were
usually accompanied by presents, and produced a twofold effect. They
soothed the anger of the offended party, and suggested not only a
courteous answer, but the sending of still more valuable gifts. Oriental
etiquette, even in those early times, demanded that the present of a less
rich or powerful friend should place the recipient under the obligation of
sending back a gift of still greater worth. Every one, therefore, whether
great or little, was obliged to regulate his liberality according to the
estimation in which he held himself, or to the opinion which others formed
of him, and a personage of such opulence as the King of Egypt was
constrained by the laws of common civility to display an almost boundless
generosity: was he not free to work the mines of the Divine Land or the
diggings of the Upper Nile; and as for gold, “was it not as the dust of
his country”?**
He would have desired nothing better than to exhibit such liberality, had
not the repeated calls on his purse at last constrained him to parsimony;
he would have been ruined, and Egypt with him, had he given all that was
expected of him. Except in a few extraordinary cases, the gifts sent never
realised the expectations of the recipients; for instance, when twenty or
thirty pounds of precious metal were looked for, the amount despatched
would be merely two or three. The indignation of these disappointed
beggars and their recriminations were then most amusing: “From the time
when my father and thine entered into friendly relations, they loaded each
other with presents, and never waited to be asked to exchange amenities;*
and now my brother sends me two minas of gold as a gift! Send me abundance
of gold, as much as thy father sent, and even, for so it must be, more
than thy father.” ** Pretexts were never wanting to give reasonable weight
to such demands: one correspondent had begun to build a temple or a palace
in one of his capitals,*** another was reserving his fairest daughter for
the Pharaoh, and he gave him to understand that anything he might receive
would help to complete the bride’s trousseau.****
The princesses thus sent from Babylon or Mitanni to the court of Thebes
enjoyed on their arrival a more honourable welcome, and were assigned a
more exalted rank than those who came from Kharû and Phoenicia. As a
matter of fact, they were not hostages given over to the conqueror to be
disposed of at will, but queens who were united in legal marriage to an
ally.* Once admitted to the Pharaoh’s court, they retained their full
rights as his wife, as well as their own fortune and mode of life. Some
would bring to their betrothed chests of jewels, utensils, and stuffs, the
enumeration of which would cover both sides of a large tablet; others
would arrive escorted by several hundred slaves or matrons as personal
attendants.** A few of them preserved their original name,*** many assumed
an Egyptian designation,**** and so far adapted themselves to the
costumes, manners, and language of their adopted country, that they
dropped all intercourse with their native land, and became regular
Egyptians.
When, after several years, an ambassador arrived with greetings from their
father or brother, he would be puzzled by the changed appearance of these
ladies, and would almost doubt their identity: indeed, those only who had
been about them in childhood were in such cases able to recognise them.*
These princesses all adopted the gods of their husbands,** though without
necessarily renouncing their own. From time to time their parents would
send them, with much pomp, a statue of one of their national divinities—Ishtar,
for example—which, accompanied by native priests, would remain for
some months at the court.***
The children of these queens ranked next in order to those whose mothers
belonged to the solar race, but nothing prevented them marrying their
brothers or sisters of pure descent, and being eventually raised to the
throne. The members of their families who remained in Asia were naturally
proud of these bonds of close affinity with the Pharaoh, and they rarely
missed an opportunity of reminding him in their letters that they stood to
him in the relationship of brother-in-law, or one of his fathers-in-law;
their vanity stood them in good stead, since it afforded them another
claim on the favours which they were perpetually asking of him.*
These foreign wives had often to interfere in some of the contentions
which were bound to arise between two States whose subjects were in
constant intercourse with one another. Invasions or provincial wars may
have affected or even temporarily suspended the passage to and from of
caravans between the countries of the Tigris and those of the Nile; but as
soon as peace was re-established, even though it were the insecure peace
of those distant ages, the desert traffic was again resumed and carried on
with renewed vigour. The Egyptian traders who penetrated into regions
beyond the Euphrates, carried with them, and almost unconsciously
disseminated along the whole extent of their route, the numberless
products of Egyptian industry, hitherto but little known outside their own
country, and rendered expensive owing to the difficulty of transmission or
the greed of the merchants. The Syrians now saw for the first time in
great quantities, objects which had been known to them hitherto merely
through the few rare specimens which made their way across the frontier:
arms, stuffs, metal implements, household utensils—in fine, all the
objects which ministered to daily needs or to luxury. These were now
offered to them at reasonable prices, either by the hawkers who
accompanied the army or by the soldiers themselves, always ready, as
soldiers are, to part with their possessions in order to procure a few
extra pleasures in the intervals of fighting.
On the other hand, whole convoys of spoil were despatched to Egypt after
every successful campaign, and their contents were distributed in varying
proportions among all classes of society, from the militiaman belonging to
some feudal contingent, who received, as a reward of his valour, some
half-dozen necklaces or bracelets, to the great lord of ancient family or
the Crown Prince, who carried off waggon-loads of booty in their train.
These distributions must have stimulated a passion for all Syrian goods,
and as the spoil was insufficient to satisfy the increasing demands of the
consumer, the waning commerce which had been carried on from early times
was once more revived and extended, till every route, whether by land or
water, between Thebes, Memphis, and the Asiatic cities, was thronged by
those engaged in its pursuit. It would take too long to enumerate the
various objects of merchandise brought in almost daily to the marts on the
Nile by Phoenician vessels or the owners of caravans. They comprised
slaves destined for the workshop or the harem,* Hittite bulls and
stallions, horses from Singar, oxen from Alasia, rare and curious animals
such as elephants from Nîi, and brown bears from the Lebanon,** smoked and
salted fish, live birds of many-coloured plumage, goldsmiths’work*** and
precious stones, of which lapis-lazuli was the chief.
Wood for building or for ornamental work—pine,cypress, yew, cedar,
and oak,* musical instruments,** helmets, leathern jerkins covered with
metal scales, weapons of bronze and iron,*** chariots,**** dyed and
embroidered stuffs,^ perfumes,^^ dried cakes, oil, wines of Kharû,
liqueurs from Alasia, Khâti, Singar, Naharaim, Amurru, and beer from
Qodi.^^^
On arriving at the frontier, whether by sea or by land, the majority of
these objects had to pay the custom dues which were rigorously collected
by the officers of the Pharaoh. This, no doubt, was a reprisal tariff,
since independent sovereigns, such as those of Mitanni, Assyria, and
Babylon, were accustomed to impose a similar duty on all the products of
Egypt. The latter, indeed, supplied more than she received, for many
articles which reached her in their raw condition were, by means of native
industry, worked up and exported as ornaments, vases, and highly decorated
weapons, which, in the course of international traffic, were dispersed to
all four corners of the earth. The merchants of Babylon and Assyria had
little to fear as long as they kept within the domains of their own
sovereign or in those of the Pharaoh; but no sooner did they venture
within the borders of those turbulent states which separated the two great
powers, than they were exposed to dangers at every turn. Safe-conducts
were of little use if they had not taken the additional precaution of
providing a strong escort and carefully guarding their caravan, for the
Shaûsû concealed in the depths of the Lebanon or the needy sheikhs of
Kharû could never resist the temptation to rob the passing traveller.*
The victims complained to their king, who felt no hesitation in passing on
their woes to the sovereign under whose rule the pillagers were supposed
to live. He demanded their punishment, but his request was not always
granted, owing to the difficulties of finding out and seizing the
offenders. An indemnity, however, could be obtained which would nearly
compensate the merchants for the loss sustained. In many cases justice had
but little to do with the negotiations, in which self-interest was the
chief motive; but repeated refusals would have discouraged traders, and by
lessening the facilities of transit, have diminished the revenue which the
state drew from its foreign commerce.
The question became a more delicate one when it concerned the rights of
subjects residing out of their native country. Foreigners, as a rule, were
well received in Egypt; the whole country was open to them; they could
marry, they could acquire houses and lands, they enjoyed permission to
follow their own religion unhindered, they were eligible for public
honours, and more than one of the officers of the crown whose tombs we see
at Thebes were themselves Syrians, or born of Syrian parents on the banks
of the Nile.*
Hence, those who settled in Egypt without any intention of returning to
their own country enjoyed all the advantages possessed by the natives,
whereas those who took up a merely temporary abode there were more limited
in their privileges. They were granted the permission to hold property in
the country, and also the right to buy and sell there, but they were not
allowed to transmit their possessions at will, and if by chance they died
on Egyptian soil, their goods lapsed as a forfeit to the crown. The heirs
remaining in the native country of the dead man, who were ruined by this
confiscation, sometimes petitioned the king to interfere in their favour
with a view of obtaining restitution. If the Pharaoh consented to waive
his right of forfeiture, and made over the confiscated objects or their
equivalent to the relatives of the deceased, it was solely by an act of
mercy, and as an example to foreign governments to treat Egyptians with a
like clemency should they chance to proffer a similar request.*
It is also not improbable that the sovereigns themselves had a personal
interest in more than one commercial undertaking, and that they were the
partners, or, at any rate, interested in the enterprises, of many of their
subjects, so that any loss sustained by one of the latter would eventually
fall upon themselves. They had, in fact, reserved to themselves the
privilege of carrying on several lucrative industries, and of disposing of
the products to foreign buyers, either to those who purchased them out and
out, or else through the medium of agents, to whom they intrusted certain
quantities of the goods for warehousing. The King of Babylon, taking
advantage of the fashion which prompted the Egyptians to acquire objects
of Chaldæan goldsmiths’ and cabinet-makers’ art, caused ingots of gold to
be sent to him by the Pharaoh, which he returned worked up into vases,
ornaments, household utensils, and plated chariots. He further fixed the
value of all such objects, and took a considerable commission for having
acted as intermediary in the transaction.* In Alasia, which was the land
of metals, the king appears to have held a monopoly of the bronze. Whether
he smelted it in the country, or received it from more distant regions
ready prepared, we cannot say, but he claimed and retained for himself the
payment for all that the Pharaoh deigned to order of him.**
From such instances we can well understand the jealous, watch which these
sovereigns exercised, lest any individual connected with corporations of
workmen should leave the kingdom and establish himself in another country
without special permission. Any emigrant who opened a workshop and
initiated his new compatriots in the technique or professional secrets of
his craft, was regarded by the authorities as the most dangerous of all
evil-doers. By thus introducing his trade into a rival state, he deprived
his own people of a good customer, and thus rendered himself liable to the
penalties inflicted on those who were guilty of treason. His savings were
confiscated, his house razed to the ground, and his whole family—parents,
wives, and children—treated as partakers in his crime. As for
himself, if justice succeeded in overtaking him, he was punished with
death, or at least with mutilation, such as the loss of eyes and ears, or
amputation of the feet. This severity did not prevent the frequent
occurrence of such cases, and it was found necessary to deal with them by
the insertion of a special extradition clause in treaties of peace and
other alliances. The two contracting parties decided against conceding the
right of habitation to skilled workmen who should take refuge with either
party on the territory of the other, and they agreed to seize such workmen
forthwith, and mutually restore them, but under the express condition that
neither they nor any of their belongings should incur any penalty for the
desertion of their country. It would be curious to know if all the
arrangements agreed to by the kings of those times were sanctioned, as in
the above instance, by properly drawn up agreements. Certain expressions
occur in their correspondence which seem to prove that this was the case,
and that the relations between them, of which we can catch traces,
resulted not merely from a state of things which, according to their
ideas, did not necessitate any diplomatic sanction, but from conventions
agreed to after some war, or entered on without any previous struggle,
when there was no question at issue between the two states.*
When once the Syrian conquest had been effected, Egypt gave permanency to
its results by means of a series of international decrees, which
officially established the constitution of her empire, and brought about
her concerted action with the Asiatic powers.
She already occupied an important position among them, when Thûtmosis III.
died, on the last day of Phamenoth, in the IVth year of his reign.* He was
buried, probably, at Deîr el-Baharî, in the family tomb wherein the most
illustrious members of his house had been laid to rest since the time of
Thûtmosis I. His mummy was not securely hidden away, for towards the close
of the XXth dynasty it was torn out of the coffin by robbers, who stripped
it and rifled it of the jewels with which it was covered, injuring it in
their haste to carry away the spoil. It was subsequently re-interred, and
has remained undisturbed until the present day; but before re-burial some
renovation of the wrappings was necessary, and as portions of the body had
become loose, the restorers, in order to give the mummy the necessary
firmness, compressed it between four oar-shaped slips of wood, painted
white, and placed, three inside the wrappings and one outside, under the
bands which confined the winding-sheet.
Happily the face, which had been plastered over with pitch at the time of
embalming, did not suffer at all from this rough treatment, and appeared
intact when the protecting mask was removed. Its appearance does not
answer to our ideal of the conqueror. His statues, though not representing
him as a type of manly beauty, yet give him refined, intelligent features,
but a comparison with the mummy shows that the artists have idealised
their model. The forehead is abnormally low, the eyes deeply sunk, the jaw
heavy, the lips thick, and the cheek-bones extremely prominent; the whole
recalling the physiognomy of Thûtmosis II., though with a greater show of
energy. Thûtmosis III. is a fellah of the old stock, squat, thickset,
vulgar in character and expression, but not lacking in firmness and
vigour.* Amenôthes II., who succeeded him, must have closely resembled
him, if we may trust his official portraits. He was the son of a princess
of the blood, Hâtshopsîtû II., daughter of the great Hâtshopsîtû,** and
consequently he came into his inheritance with stronger claims to it than
any other Pharaoh since the time of Amenôthes I. Possibly his father may
have associated him with himself on the throne as soon as the young prince
attained his majority;*** at any rate, his accession aroused no
appreciable opposition in the country, and if any difficulties were made,
they must have come from outside.
It is always a dangerous moment in the existence of a newly formed empire
when its founder having passed away, and the conquered people not having
yet become accustomed to a subject condition, they are called upon to
submit to a successor of whom they know little or nothing. It is always
problematical whether the new sovereign will display as great activity and
be as successful as the old one; whether he will be capable of turning to
good account the armies which his predecessor commanded with such skill,
and led so bravely against the enemy; whether, again, he will have
sufficient tact to estimate correctly the burden of taxation which each
province is capable of bearing, and to lighten it when there is a risk of
its becoming too heavy. If he does not show from the first that it is his
purpose to maintain his patrimony intact at all costs, or if his officers,
no longer controlled by a strong hand, betray any indecision in command,
his subjects will become unruly, and the change of monarch will soon
furnish a pretext for widespread rebellion. The beginning of the reign of
Amenôthes II. was marked by a revolt of the Libyans inhabiting the Theban
Oasis, but this rising was soon put down by that Amenemhabî who had so
distinguished himself under Thûtmosis.* Soon after, fresh troubles broke
out in different parts of Syria, in Galilee, in the country of the Amurru,
and among the peoples of Naharaim. The king’s prompt action, however,
prevented their resulting in a general war.** He marched in person against
the malcontents, reduced the town of Shamshiaduma, fell upon the Lamnaniu,
and attacked their chief, slaying him with his own hand, and carrying off
numbers of captives.
He crossed the Orontes on the 26th of Pachons, in the year II., and seeing
some mounted troops in the distance, rushed upon them and overthrew them;
they proved to be the advanced guard of the enemy’s force, which he
encountered shortly afterwards and routed, collecting in the pursuit
considerable booty. He finally reached Naharaim, where he experienced in
the main but a feeble resistance. Nîi surrendered without resistance on
the 10th of Epiphi, and its inhabitants, both men and women, with censers
in their hands, assembled on the walls and prostrated themselves before
the conqueror. At Akaîti, where the partisans of the Egyptian government
had suffered persecution from a considerable section of the natives, order
was at once reestablished as soon as the king’s approach was made known.
No doubt the rapidity of his marches and the vigour of his attacks, while
putting an end to the hostile attitude of the smaller vassal states, were
effectual in inducing the sovereigns of Alasia, of Mitanni,* and of the
Hittites to renew with Amenôthes the friendly relations which they had
established with his father.**
This one campaign, which lasted three or four months, secured a lasting
peace in the north, but in the south a disturbance again broke out among
the Barbarians of the Upper Nile. Amenôthes suppressed it, and, in order
to prevent a repetition of it, was guilty of an act of cruel severity
quite in accordance with the manners of the time. He had taken prisoner
seven chiefs in the country of Tikhisa, and had brought them, chained, in
triumph to Thebes, on the forecastle of his ship. He sacrificed six of
them himself before Amon, and exposed their heads and hands on the façade
of the temple of Karnak; the seventh was subjected to a similar fate at
Napata at the beginning of his third year, and thenceforth the sheîkhs of
Kush thought twice before defying the authority of the Pharaoh.*
Amenôthes’reign was a short one, lasting ten years at most, and the end of
it seems to have been darkened by the open or secret rivalries which the
question of the succession usually stirred up among the kings’ sons. The
king had daughters only by his marriage with one of his full sisters, who
like himself possessed all the rights of sovereignty; those of his sons
who did not die young were the children of princesses of inferior rank or
of concubines, and it was a subject of anxiety among these princes which
of them would be chosen to inherit the crown and be united in marriage
with the king’s heiresses, Khûît and Mûtemûaû.
One of his sons, named Thûtmosis, who resided at the “White Wall,” was in
the habit of betaking himself frequently to the Libyan desert to practise
with the javelin, or to pursue the hunt of lions and gazelles in his
chariot. On these occasions it was his pleasure to preserve the strictest
incognito, and he was accompanied by two discreet servants only. One day,
when chance had brought him into the neighbourhood of the Great Pyramid,
he lay down for his accustomed siesta in the shade cast by the Sphinx, the
miraculous image of Khopri the most powerful, the god to whom all men in
Memphis and the neighbouring towns raised adoring hands filled with
offerings. The gigantic statue was at that time more than half buried, and
its head alone was seen above the sand. As soon as the prince was asleep
it spoke gently to him, as a father to his son: “Behold me, gaze on me, O
my son Thûtmosis, for I, thy father Harmakhis-Khopri-Tûmû, grant thee
sovereignty over the two countries, in both the South and the North, and
thou shalt wear both the white and the red crown on the throne of Sibû,
the sovereign, possessing the earth in its length and breadth; the
flashing eye of the lord of all shall cause to rain on thee the
possessions of Egypt, vast tribute from all foreign countries, and a long
life for, many years as one chosen by the Sun, for my countenance is
thine, my heart is thine, no other than thyself is mine! Nor am I covered
by the sand of the mountain on which I rest, and have given thee this
prize that thou mayest do for me what my heart desires, for I know that
thou art my son, my defender; draw nigh, I am with thee, I am thy
well-beloved father.” The prince understood that the god promised him the
kingdom on condition of his swearing to clear the sand from the statue. He
was, in fact, chosen to be the husband of the queens, and immediately
after his accession he fulfilled his oath; he removed the sand, built a
chapel between the paws, and erected against the breast of the statue a
stele of red granite, on which he related his adventure. His reign was as
short as that of Amenôthes, and his campaigns both in Asia and Ethiopia
were unimportant.*
He had succeeded to an empire so firmly established from Naharaim to
Kari,* that, apparently, no rebellion could disturb its peace. One of the
two heiress-princesses, Kûît, the daughter, sister, and wife of a king,
had no living male offspring, but her companion Mûtemûaû had at least one
son, named Amenôthes. In his case, again, the noble birth of the mother
atoned for the defects of the paternal origin. Moreover, according to
tradition, Amon-Ka himself had intervened to renew the blood of his
descendants: he appeared in the person of Thûtmosis IV., and under this
guise became the father of the heir of the Pharaohs.**
Like Queen Ahmasis in the bas-reliefs of Deîr el-Baharî, Mûtemûaû is shown
on those of Luxor in the arms of her divine lover, and subsequently
greeted by him with the title of mother; in another bas-relief we see the
queen led to her couch by the goddesses who preside over the birth of
children; her son Amenôthes, on coming into the world with his double, is
placed in the hands of the two Niles, to receive the nourishment and the
education meet for the children of the gods. He profited fully by them,
for he remained in power forty years, and his reign was one of the most
prosperous ever witnessed by Egypt during the Theban dynasties.
Amenôthes III. had spent but little of his time in war. He had undertaken
the usual raids in the South against the negroes and the tribes of the
Upper Nile. In his fifth year, a general defection of the sheikhs obliged
him to invade the province of Abhaît, near Semneh, which he devastated at
the head of the troops collected by Mari-ifi mosû, the Prince of Kûsh; the
punishment was salutary, the booty considerable, and a lengthy peace was
re-established. The object of his rare expeditions into Naharaim was not
so much to add new provinces to his empire, as to prevent disturbances in
the old ones. The kings of Alasia, of the Khâti, of Mitanni, of Singar,*
of Assyria, and of Babylon did not dare to provoke so powerful a
neighbour.**
The remembrance of the victories of Thûtmosis III. was still fresh in
their memories, and, even had their hands been free, would have made them
cautious in dealing with his great-grandson; but they were incessantly
engaged in internecine quarrels, and had recourse to Pharaoh merely to
enlist his support, or at any rate make sure of his neutrality, and
prevent him from joining their adversaries.
Whatever might have been the nature of their private sentiments, they
professed to be anxious to maintain, for their mutual interests, the
relations with Egypt entered on half a century before, and as the surest
method of attaining their object was by a good marriage, they would each
seek an Egyptian wife for himself, or would offer Amenôthes a princess of
one of their own royal families. The Egyptian king was, however, firm in
refusing to bestow a princess of the solar blood even on the most powerful
of the foreign kings; his pride rebelled at the thought that she might one
day be consigned to a place among the inferior wives or concubines, but he
gladly accepted, and even sought for wives for himself, from among the
Syrian and Chaldæan princesses. Kallimmasin of Babylon gave Amenôthes
first his sister, and when age had deprived this princess of her beauty,
then his daughter Irtabi in marriage.*
Sutarna of Mitanni had in the same way given the Pharaoh his daughter
Gilukhîpa; indeed, most of the kings of that period had one or two
relations in the harem at Thebes. This connexion usually proved a support
to Asiatic sovereigns, such alliances being a safeguard against the
rivalries of their brothers or cousins. At times, however, they were the
means of exposing them to serious dangers. When Sutarna died he was
succeeded by his son Dushratta, but a numerous party put forward another
prince, named Artassumara, who was probably Gilukhîpa’s brother, on the
mother’s side;* a Hittite king of the name of Pirkhi espoused the cause of
the pretender, and a civil war broke out.
Dushratta was victorious, and caused his brother to be strangled, but was
not without anxiety as to the consequences which might follow this
execution should Gilukhîpa desire to avenge the victim, and to this end
stir up the anger of the suzerain against him. Dushratta, therefore, wrote
a humble epistle, showing that he had received provocation, and that he
had found it necessary to strike a decisive blow to save his own life; the
tablet was accompanied by various presents to the royal pair, comprising
horses, slaves, jewels, and perfumes. Gilukhîpa, however, bore Dushratta
no ill-will, and the latter’s anxieties were allayed. The so-called
expeditions of Amenôthes to the Syrian provinces must constantly have been
merely visits of inspection, during which amusements, and especially the
chase, occupied nearly as important a place as war and politics. Amenôthes
III. took to heart that pre-eminently royal duty of ridding the country of
wild beasts, and fulfilled it more conscientiously than any of his
predecessors. He had killed 112 lions during the first ten years of his
reign, and as it was an exploit of which he was remarkably proud, he
perpetuated the memory of it in a special inscription, which he caused to
be engraved on numbers of large scarabs of fine green enamel. Egypt
prospered under his peaceful government, and if the king made no great
efforts to extend her frontiers, he spared no pains to enrich the country
by developing industry and agriculture, and also endeavoured to perfect
the military organisation which had rendered the conquest of the East so
easy a matter.
A census, undertaken by his minister Amenôthes, the son of Hâpi, ensured a
more correct assessment of the taxes, and a regular scheme of recruiting
for the army.
Whole tribes of slaves were brought into the country by means of the
border raids which were always taking place, and their opportune arrival
helped to fill up the vacancies which repeated wars had caused among the
rural and urban population; such a strong impetus to agriculture was also
given by this importation, that when, towards the middle of the reign, the
minister Khâmhâîfc presented the tax-gathers at court, he was able to
boast that he had stored in the State granaries a larger quantity of corn
than had been gathered in for thirty years. The traffic carried on between
Asia and the Delta by means of both Egyptian and foreign ships was
controlled by customhouses erected at the mouths of the Nile, the coast
being protected by cruising vessels against the attacks of pirates. The
fortresses of the isthmus and of the Libyan border, having been restored
or rebuilt, constituted a check on the turbulence of the nomad tribes,
while garrisons posted at intervals at the entrance to the Wadys leading
to the desert restrained the plunderers scattered between the Nile and the
Red Sea, and between the chain of Oases and the unexplored regions of the
Sahara.* Egypt was at once the most powerful as well as the most
prosperous kingdom in the world, being able to command more labour and
more precious metals for the embellishment of her towns and the
construction of her monuments than any other.
Public works had been carried on briskly under Thûtmosis III. and his
successors. The taste for building, thwarted at first by the necessity of
financial reforms, and then by that of defraying the heavy expenses
incurred through the expulsion of the Hyksôs and the earlier foreign wars,
had free scope as soon as spoil from the Syrian victories began to pour in
year by year. While the treasure seized from the enemy provided the money,
the majority of the prisoners were used as workmen, so that temples,
palaces, and citadels began to rise as if by magic from one end of the
valley to the other.*
Nubia, divided into provinces, formed merely an extension of the ancient
feudal Egypt—at any rate as far as the neighbourhood of the Tacazzeh—though
the Egyptian religion had here assumed a peculiar character.
The conquest of Nubia having been almost entirely the work of the Theban
dynasties, the Theban triad, Amon, Maût, and Montû, and their immediate
followers were paramount in this region, while in the north, in witness of
the ancient Elephantinite colonisation, we find Khnûmû of the cataract
being worshipped, in connexion with Didûn, father of the indigenous
Nubians. The worship of Amon had been the means of introducing that of Eâ
and of Horus, and Osiris as lord of the dead, while Phtah, Sokhît, Atûmû,
and the Memphite and Heliopolitan gods were worshipped only in isolated
parts of the province. A being, however, of less exalted rank shared with
the lords of heaven the favour of the people. This was the Pharaoh, who as
the son of Amon was foreordained to receive divine honours, sometimes
figuring, as at Bohani, as the third member of a triad, at other times as
head of the Ennead. Ûsirtasen III. had had his chapels at Semneh and at
Kûmmeh, they were restored by Thûtmosis III., who claimed a share of the
worship offered in them, and whose son, Amenôthes II., also assumed the
symbols and functions of divinity.
Amenôthes I. was venerated in the province of Kari, and Amenôthes III.,
when founding the fortress Hâît-Khâmmâît* in the neighbourhood of a Nubian
village, on a spot now known as Soleb, built a temple there, of which he
himself was the protecting genius.**
The edifice was of considerable size, and the columns and walls remaining
reveal an art as perfect as that shown in the best monuments at Thebes. It
was approached by an avenue of ram-headed sphinxes, while colossal statues
of lions and hawks, the sacred animals of the district, adorned the
building. The sovereign condescended to preside in person at its
dedication on one of his journeys to the southern part of his empire, and
the mutilated pictures still visible on the façade show the order and
detail of the ceremony observed on this occasion. The king, with the crown
upon his head, stood before the centre gate, accompanied by the queen and
his minister Amenôthes, the son of Hâpi, who was better acquainted than
any other man of his time with the mysteries of the ritual.*
The king then struck the door twelve times with his mace of white stone,
and when the approach to the first hall was opened, he repeated the
operation at the threshold of the sanctuary previous to entering and
placing his statue there. He deposited it on the painted and gilded wooden
platform on which the gods were exhibited on feast-days, and enthroned
beside it the other images which were thenceforth to constitute the local
Ennead, after which he kindled the sacred fire before them. The queen,
with the priests and nobles, all bearing torches, then passed through the
halls, stopping from time to time to perform acts of purification, or to
recite formulas to dispel evil spirits and pernicious influences; finally,
a triumphal procession was formed, and the whole cortege returned
to the palace, where a banquet brought the day’s festivities to a close.*
It was Amenôthes III. himself, or rather one of his statues animated by
his double, who occupied the chief place in the new building. Indeed,
wherever we come across a temple in Nubia dedicated to a king, we find the
homage of the inhabitants always offered to the image of the founder,
which spoke to them in oracles. All the southern part of the country
beyond the second cataract is full of traces of Amenôthes, and the
evidence of the veneration shown to him would lead us to conclude that he
played an important part in the organisation of the country. Sedeinga
possessed a small temple under the patronage of his wife Tîi. The ruins of
a sanctuary which he dedicated to Anion, the Sun-god, have been discovered
at Gebel-Barkal; Amenôthes seems to have been the first to perceive the
advantages offered by the site, and to have endeavoured to transform the
barbarian village of Napata into a large Egyptian city. Some of the
monuments with which he adorned Soleb were transported, in later times, to
Gebel-Barkal, among them some rams and lions of rare beauty. They lie at
rest with their paws crossed, the head erect, and their expression
suggesting both power and repose.** As we descend the Nile, traces of the
work of this king are less frequent, and their place is taken by those of
his predecessors, as at Sai, at Semneh, at Wady Haifa, at Amada, at Ibrîm,
and at Dakkeh. Distant traces of Amenôthes again appear in the
neighbourhood of the first cataract, and in the island of Elephantine,
which he endeavoured to restore to its ancient splendour.
Two of the small buildings which he there dedicated to Khnûmû, the local
god, were still in existence at the beginning of the present century. That
least damaged, on the south side of the island, consisted of a single
chamber nearly forty feet in length. The sandstone walls, terminating in a
curved cornice, rested on a hollow substructure raised rather more than
six feet above the ground, and surrounded by a breast-high parapet. A
portico ran round the building, having seven square pillars on each of its
two sides, while at each end stood two columns having lotus-shaped
capitals; a flight of ten or twelve steps between two walls of the same
height as the basement, projected in front, and afforded access to the
cella. The two columns of the façade were further apart than those at the
opposite end of the building, and showed a glimpse of a richly decorated
door, while a second door opened under the peristyle at the further
extremity. The walls were covered with the half-brutish profile of the
good Khnûmû, and those of his two companions, Anûkît and Satît, the
spirits of stormy waters. The treatment of these figures was broad and
simple, the style free, light, and graceful, the colouring soft; and the
harmonious beauty of the whole is unsurpassed by anything at Thebes
itself. It was, in fact, a kind of oratory, built on a scale to suit the
capacities of a decaying town, but the design was so delicately conceived
in its miniature proportions that nothing more graceful can be imagined.*
Ancient Egypt and its feudal cities, Ombos, Edfû,* Nekhabît, Esneh,**
Medamôt,*** Coptos,**** Denderah, Abydos, Memphis,^ and Heliopolis,
profited largely by the generosity of the Pharaohs.
Since the close of the XIIth dynasty these cities had depended entirely on
their own resources, and their public buildings were either in ruins, or
quite inadequate to the needs of the population, but now gold from Syria
and Kûsh furnished them with the means of restoration. The Delta itself
shared in this architectural revival, but it had suffered too severely
under the struggle between the Theban kings and the Shepherds to recover
itself as quickly as the remainder of the country. All effort was
concentrated on those of its nomes which lay on the Eastern frontier, or
which were crossed by the Pharaohs in their journeys into Asia, such as
the Bubastite and Athribite nomes; the rest remained sunk in their ancient
torpor.*
* Mariette and E. de Rougé, attribute this torpor, at least as far as
Tanis is concerned, to the aversion felt by the Pharaohs of Egyptian blood
for the Hyksôs capital, and for the provinces where the invaders had
formerly established themselves in large numbers.
Beyond the Red Sea the mines were actively worked, and even the oases of
the Libyan desert took part in the national revival, and buildings rose in
their midst of a size proportionate to their slender revenues. Thebes
naturally came in for the largest share of the spoils of war. Although her
kings had become the rulers of the world, they had not, like the Pharaohs
of the XIIth and XIIIth dynasties, forsaken her for some more illustrious
city: here they had their ordinary residence as well as their seat of
government, hither they returned after each campaign to celebrate their
victory, and hither they sent the prisoners and the spoil which they had
reserved for their own royal use. In the course of one or two generations
Thebes had spread in every direction, and had enclosed within her circuit
the neighbouring villages of Ashîrû, the fief of Maiit, and Apît-rîsîfc,
the southern Thebes, which lay at the confluence of the Nile with one of
the largest of the canals which watered the plain. The monuments in these
two new quarters of the town were unworthy of the city of which they now
formed part, and Amenôthes III. consequently bestowed much pains on
improving them. He entirely rebuilt the sanctuary of Maût, enlarged the
sacred lake, and collected within one of the courts of the temple several
hundred statues in black granite of the Memphite divinity, the
lioness-headed Sokhît, whom he identified with his Theban goddess. The
statues were crowded together so closely that they were in actual contact
with each other in places, and must have presented something of the
appearance of a regiment drawn up in battle array. The succeeding Pharaohs
soon came to look upon this temple as a kind of storehouse, whence they
might provide themselves with ready-made figures to decorate their
buildings either at Thebes or in other royal cities. About a hundred of
them, however, still remain, most of them without feet, arms, or head;
some over-turned on the ground, others considerably out of the
perpendicular, from the earth having given way beneath them, and a small
number only still perfect and in situ.
At Luxor Amenôthes demolished the small temple with which the sovereigns
of the XIIth and XIIIth dynasties had been satisfied, and replaced it by a
structure which is still one of the finest yet remaining of the times of
the Pharaohs. The naos rose sheer above the waters of the Nile, indeed its
cornices projected over the river, and a staircase at the south side
allowed the priests and devotees to embark directly from the rear of the
building. The sanctuary was a single chamber, with an opening on its side,
but so completely shut out from the daylight by the long dark hall at
whose extremity it was placed as to be in perpetual obscurity. It was
flanked by narrow, dimly lightly chambers, and was approached through a
pronaos with four rows of columns, a vast court surrounded with porticoes
occupying the foreground. At the present time the thick walls which
enclosed the entire building are nearly level with the ground, half the
ceilings have crumbled away, air and light penetrate into every nook, and
during the inundation the water flowing into the courts, transformed them
until recently into lakes, whither the flocks and herds of the village
resorted in the heat of the day to bathe or quench their thirst. Pictures
of mysterious events never meant for the public gaze now display their
secrets in the light of the sun, and reveal to the eyes of the profane the
supernatural events which preceded the birth of the king. On the northern
side an avenue of sphinxes and crio-sphinxes led to the gates of old
Thebes. At present most of these creatures are buried under the ruins of
the modern town, or covered by the earth which overlies the ancient road;
but a few are still visible, broken and shapeless from barbarous usage,
and hardly retaining any traces of the inscriptions in which Amenôthes
claimed them boastingly as his work.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Beato.
Triumphal processions passing along this route from Luxor to Karnak would
at length reach the great court before the temple of Amon, or, by turning
a little to the right after passing the temple of Maût, would arrive in
front of the southern façade, near the two gilded obelisks whose splendour
once rejoiced the heart of the famous Hâtshopsîtû. Thûtmosis III. was also
determined on his part to spare no expense to make the temple of his god
of proportions suitable to the patron of so vast an empire. Not only did
he complete those portions which his predecessors had merely sketched out,
but on the south side towards Ashîrû he also built a long row of pylons,
now half ruined, on which he engraved, according to custom, the list of
nations and cities which he had subdued in Asia and Africa. To the east of
the temple he rebuilt some ancient structures, the largest of which served
as a halting-place for processions, and he enclosed the whole with a stone
rampart. The outline of the sacred lake, on which the mystic boats were
launched on the nights of festivals, was also made more symmetrical, and
its margin edged with masonry.
By these alterations the harmonious proportion between the main buildings
and the façade had been destroyed, and the exterior wall was now too wide
for the pylon at the entrance. Amenôthes III. remedied this defect by
erecting in front a fourth pylon, which was loftier, larger, and in all
respects more worthy to stand before the enlarged temple. Its walls were
partially covered with battle-scenes, which informed all beholders of the
glory of the conqueror.*
Progress had been no less marked on the left bank of the river. As long as
Thebes had been merely a small provincial town, its cemeteries had covered
but a moderate area, including the sandy plain and low mounds opposite
Karnak and the valley of Deîr el-Baharî beyond; but now that the city had
more than doubled its extent, the space required for the dead was
proportionately greater. The tombs of private persons began to spread
towards the south, and soon reached the slopes of the Assassîf, the hill
of Sheikh-Abd-el-Qurnah and the district of Qûrnet-Mûrraî—in fact,
all that part which the people of the country called the “Brow” of Thebes.
On the borders of the cultivated land a row of chapels and mastabas with
pyramidal roofs sheltered the remains of the princes and princesses of the
royal family. The Pharaohs themselves were buried either separately under
their respective brick pyramids or in groups in a temple, as was the case
with the first three Thûtmosis and Hâtshopsîtû at Deîr el-Baharî.
Amenôthes II. and Thûtmosis IV. could doubtless have found room in this
crowded necropolis,* although the space was becoming limited, but the
pride of the Pharaohs began to rebel against this promiscuous burial side
by side with their subjects. Amenôthes III. sought for a site, therefore,
where he would have ample room to display his magnificence, far from the
vulgar crowd, and found what he desired at the farther end of the valley
which opens out behind the village of Qurnah. Here, an hour’s journey from
the bank of the Nile, he cut for himself a magnificent rock-tomb with
galleries, halls, and deep pits, the walls being decorated with
representations of the Voyage of the Sun through the regions which he
traverses during the twelve hours of his nocturnal course.
A sarcophagus of red granite received his mummy, and Ushabti’s of
extraordinary dimensions and admirable workmanship mounted guard around
him, so as to release him from the corvée in the fields of Ialû. The
chapel usually attached to such tombs is not to be found in the
neighbourhood. As the road to the funeral valley was a difficult one, and
as it would be unreasonable to condemn an entire priesthood to live in
solitude, the king decided to separate the component parts which had
hitherto been united in every tomb since the Memphite period, and to place
the vault for the mummy and the passages leading to it some distance away
in the mountains, while the necessary buildings for the cultus of the
statue and the accommodation of the priests were transferred to the plain,
and were built at the southern extremity of the lands which were at that
time held by private persons. The divine character of Amenôthes, ascribed
to him on account of his solar origin and the co-operation of Amon-Râ at
his birth, was, owing to this separation of the funerary constituents,
brought into further prominence. When once the body which he had animated
while on earth was removed and hidden from sight, the people soon became
accustomed to think only of his Double enthroned in the recesses of the
sanctuary: seeing him receive there the same honours as the gods
themselves, they came naturally to regard him as a deity himself.
The arrangement of his temple differed in no way from those in which Amon,
Maût, and Montû were worshipped, while it surpassed in size and splendour
most of the sanctuaries dedicated to the patron gods of the chief towns of
the nomes. It contained, moreover, colossal statues, objects which are
never found associated with the heavenly gods. Several of these figures
have been broken to pieces, and only a few scattered fragments of them
remain, but two of them still maintain their positions on each side of the
entrance, with their faces towards the east. They are each formed of a
single block of red breccia from Syenê,* and are fifty-three feet high,
but the more northerly one was shattered in the earthquake which completed
the ruin of Thebes in the year 27 B.C. The upper part toppled over with
the shock, and was dashed to pieces on the floor of the court, while the
lower half remained in its place. Soon after the disaster it began to be
rumoured that sounds like those produced by the breaking of a harp-string
proceeded from the pedestal at sunrise, whereupon travellers flocked to
witness the miracle, and legend soon began to take possession of the giant
who spoke in this marvellous way. In vain did the Egyptians of the
neighbourhood declare that the statue represented the Pharaoh Amenôthes;
the Greeks refused to believe them, and forthwith recognised in the
colossus an image of Memnon the Ethiopian, son of Tithonus and Aurora,
slain by their own Achilles beneath the walls of Troy—maintaining
that the music heard every morning was the clear and harmonious voice of
the hero saluting his mother.
Towards the middle of the second century of our era, Hadrian undertook a
journey to Upper Egypt, and heard the wonderful song; sixty years later,
Septimus Severus restored the statue by the employment of courses of
stones, which were so arranged as to form a rough representation of a
human head and shoulders. His piety, however, was not rewarded as he
expected, for Memnon became silent, and his oracle fell into oblivion. The
temple no longer exists, and a few ridges alone mark the spot where it
rose; but the two colossi remain at their post, in the same condition in
which they were left by the Roman Cæsar: the features are quite
obliterated, and the legs and the supporting female figures on either side
are scored all over with Greek and Latin inscriptions expressing the
appreciation of ancient tourists. Although the statues tower high above
the fields of corn and bersîm which surround them, our first view
of them, owing to the scale of proportion observed in their construction,
so different from that to which we are accustomed, gives us the impression
that they are smaller than they really are, and it is only when we stand
close to one of them and notice the insignificant appearance of the crowd
of sightseers clustered on its pedestal that we realize the immensity of
the colossi.
The descendants of Ahmosis had by their energy won for Thebes not only the
supremacy over the peoples of Egypt and of the known world, but had also
secured for the Theban deities pre-eminence over all their rivals. The
booty collected both in Syria and Ethiopia went to enrich the god Amon as
much as it did the kings themselves; every victory brought him the tenth
part of the spoil gathered on the field of battle, of the tribute levied
on vassals, and of the prisoners taken as slaves. When Thûtmosis IIL,
after having reduced Megiddo, organised a systematic plundering of the
surrounding country, it was for the benefit of Amon-Eâ that he reaped the
fields and sent their harvest into Egypt; if during his journeys he
collected useful plants or rare animals, it was that he might dispose of
them in the groves or gardens of Amon as well as in his own, and he never
retained for his personal use the whole of what he won by arms, but always
reserved some portion for the sacred treasury.
His successors acted in a similar manner, and in the reigns of Amenôthes
II., Thût-mosis IV., and Amenôthes III., the patrimony of the Theban
priesthood continued to increase. The Pharaohs, perpetually called upon as
they were to recompense one or other of their servants, were never able to
retain for long their share of the spoils of war. Gold and silver, lands,
jewels, and slaves passed as quickly out of their hands as they had fallen
into them, and although then fortune was continually having additions made
to it in every fresh campaign, yet the increase was rarely in proportion
to the trouble expended. The god, on the contrary, received what he got
for all time, and gave back nothing in return: fresh accumulations of
precious metals were continually being added to his store, his meadows
were enriched by the addition of vineyards, and with his palm forests he
combined fish-ponds full of fish; he added farms and villages to those he
already possessed, and each reign saw the list of his possessions
increase. He had his own labourers, his own tradespeople, his own
fishermen, soldiers, and scribes, and, presiding over all these, a learned
hierarchy of divines, priests, and prophets, who administered everything.
This immense domain, which was a kind of State within the State, was ruled
over by a single high priest, chosen by the sovereign from among the
prophets. He was the irresponsible head of it, and his spiritual ambition
had increased step by step with the extension of his material resources.
As the human Pharaoh showed himself entitled to homage from the lords of
the earth, the priests came at length to the conclusion that Amon had a
right to the allegiance of the lords of heaven, and that he was the
Supreme Being, in respect of whom the others were of little or no account,
and as he was the only god who was everywhere victorious, he came at
length to be regarded by them as the only god in existence. It was
impossible that the kings could see this rapid development of sacerdotal
power without anxiety, and with all their devotion to the patron of their
city, solicitude for their own authority compelled them to seek elsewhere
for another divinity, whose influence might in some degree counterbalance
that of Amon. The only one who could vie with him at Thebes, either for
the antiquity of his worship or for the rank which he occupied in the
public esteem, was the Sun-lord of Heliopolis, head of the first Ennead.
Thûtmosis IV. owed his crown to him, and ‘displayed his gratitude in
clearing away the sand from the Sphinx, in which the spirit of Harmakhis
was considered to dwell; and Amenôthes III., although claiming to be the
son of Amon himself, inherited the disposition shown by Thûtmosis in
favour of the Heliopolitan religions, but instead of attaching himself to
the forms most venerated by theologians, he bestowed his affection on a
more popular deity—Atonû, the fiery disk. He may have been
influenced in his choice by private reasons. Like his predecessors, he had
taken, while still very young, wives from among his own family, but
neither these reasonable ties, nor his numerous diplomatic alliances with
foreign princesses, were enough for him. From the very beginning of his
reign he had loved a maiden who was not of the blood of the Pharaohs, Tîi,
the daughter of Iûîa and his wife Tûîa.*
* For the last thirty years Queen Tîi has been the subject of many
hypotheses and of much confusion. The scarabasi engraved under Amenôthes
III. say explicitly that she was the daughter of two personages, Iûîa and
Tûîa, but these names are not accompanied by any of the signs which are
characteristic of foreign names, and were considered Egyptian by
contemporaries. Hincks was the first who seems to have believed her to be
a Syrian; he compares her father’s name with that of Levi, and attributes
the religious revolution which followed to the influence of her foreign
education. This theory has continued to predominate; some prefer a Libyan
origin to the Asiatic one, and latterly there has been an attempt to
recognise in Tîi one of the princesses of Mitanni mentioned in the
correspondence of Tel el-Amarna. As long ago as 1877, I showed that Tîi
was an Egyptian of middle rank, probably of Heliopolitan origin.
Connexions of this kind had been frequently formed by his ancestors, but
the Egyptian women of inferior rank whom they had brought into their
harems had always remained in the background, and if the sons of these
concubines were ever fortunate enough to come to the throne, it was in
default of heirs of pure blood. Amenôthes III. married Tîi, gave her for
her dowry the town of Zâlû in Lower Egypt, and raised her to the position
of queen, in spite of her low extraction. She busied herself in the
affairs of State, took precedence of the princesses of the solar family,
and appeared at her husband’s side in public ceremonies, and was so
figured on the monuments. If, as there is reason to believe, she was born
near Heliopolis, it is easy to understand how her influence may have led
Amenôthes to pay special honour to a Heliopolitan divinity. He had built,
at an early period of his reign, a sanctuary to Atonû at Memphis, and in
the Xth year he constructed for him a chapel at Thebes itself,* to the
south of the last pylon of ïhûtmosis III., and endowed this deity with
property at the expense of Anion.
He had several sons;* but the one who succeeded him, and who, like him,
was named Amenôthes, was the most paradoxical of all the Egyptian
sovereigns of ancient times.**
He made up for the inferiority of his birth on account of the plebeian
origin of his mother Tîî,* by his marriage with Nofrîtîti, a princess of
the pure solar race.** Tîi, long accustomed to the management of affairs,
exerted her influence over him even more than she had done over her
husband. Without officially assuming the rank, she certainly for several
years possessed the power, of regent, and gave a definite Oriental impress
to her son’s religious policy. No outward changes were made at first;
Amenôthes, although showing his preference for Heliopolis by inscribing in
his protocol the title of prophet of Harmakhis, which he may, however,
have borne before his accession, maintained his residence at Thebes, as
his father had done before him, continued to sacrifice to the Theban
divinities, and to follow the ancient paths and the conventional
practices.***
He either built a temple to the Theban god, or enlarged the one which his
father had constructed at Karnak, and even opened new quarries at Syene
and Silsileh for providing granite and sandstone for the adornment of this
monument. His devotion to the invincible Disk, however, soon began to
assert itself, and rendered more and more irksome to him the religious
observances which he had constrained himself to follow. There was nothing
and no one to hinder him from giving free course to his inclinations, and
the nobles and priests were too well trained in obedience to venture to
censure anything he might do, even were it to result in putting the whole
population into motion, from Elephantine to the sea-coast, to prepare for
the intruded deity a dwelling which should eclipse in magnificence the
splendour of the great temple. A few of those around him had become
converted of their own accord to his favourite worship, but these formed a
very small minority. Thebes had belonged to Amon so long that the king
could never hope to bring it to regard Atonû as anything but a being of
inferior rank. Each city belonged to some god, to whom was attributed its
origin, its development, and its prosperity, and whom it could not forsake
without renouncing its very existence. If Thebes became separated from
Amon it would be Thebes no longer, and of this Amenôthes was so well aware
that he never attempted to induce it to renounce its patron. His residence
among surroundings which he detested at length became so intolerable, that
he resolved to leave the place and create a new capital elsewhere. The
choice of a new abode would have presented no difficulty to him had he
been able to make up his mind to relegate Atonû to the second rank of
divinities; Memphis, Heracleopolis, Siût, Khmûnû, and, in fact, all the
towns of the valley would have deemed themselves fortunate in securing the
inheritance of their rival, but not one of them would be false to its
convictions or accept the degradation of its own divine founder, whether
Phtah, Harshafîtû, Anubis, or Thot. A newly promoted god demanded a new
city; Amenôthes, therefore, made selection of a broad plain extending on
the right bank of the Nile, in the eastern part of the Hermopolitan nome,
to which he removed with all his court about the fourth or fifth year of
his reign.*
He found here several obscure villages without any historical or religious
traditions, and but thinly populated; Amenôthes chose one of them, the
Et-Tel of the present day, and built there a palace for himself and a
temple for his god. The temple, like that of Eâ at Heliopolis, was named
Haît-Banbonû, the Mansion of the Obelisk. It covered an immense
area, of which the sanctuary, however, occupied an inconsiderable part; it
was flanked by brick storehouses, and the whole was surrounded by a thick
wall. The remains show that the temple was built of white limestone, of
fine quality, but that it was almost devoid of ornament, for there was no
time to cover it with the usual decorations.*
The palace was built of brick; it was approached by a colossal gateway,
and contained vast halls, interspersed with small apartments for the
accommodation of the household, and storehouses for the necessary
provisions, besides gardens which had been hastily planted with rare
shrubs and sycamores. Fragments of furniture and of the roughest of the
utensils contained in the different chambers are still unearthed from
among the heaps of rubbish, and the cellars especially are full of
potsherds and cracked jars, on which we can still see written an
indication of the reign and the year when the wine they once contained was
made. Altars of massive masonry rose in the midst of the courts, on which
the king or one of his ministers heaped offerings and burnt incense
morning, noon, and evening, in honour of the three decisive moments in the
life of Atonû.*
A few painted and gilded columns supported the roofs of the principal
apartments in which the Pharaoh held his audiences, but elsewhere the
walls and pillars were coated with cream-coloured stucco or whitewash, on
which scenes of private life were depicted in colours. The pavement, like
the walls, was also decorated. In one of the halls which seems to have
belonged to the harem, there is still to be seen distinctly the picture of
a rectangular piece of water containing fish and lotus-flowers in full
bloom; the edge is adorned with water-plants and flowering shrubs, among
which birds fly and calves graze and gambol; on the right and left were
depicted rows of stands laden with fruit, while at each end of the room
were seen the grinning faces of a gang of negro and Syrian prisoners,
separated from each other by gigantic arches. The tone of colouring is
bright and cheerful, and the animals are treated with great freedom and
facility. The Pharaoh, had collected about him several of the best artists
then to be found at Thebes, placing them under the direction of Baûki, the
chief of the corporation of sculptors,* and probably others subsequently
joined these from provincial studios.
Work for them was not lacking, for houses had to be built for all the
courtiers and government officials who had been obliged to follow the
king, and in a few years a large town had sprung up, which was called
Khûîtatonû, or the “Horizon of the Disk.” It was built on a regular plan,
with straight streets and open spaces, and divided into two separate
quarters, interspersed with orchards and shady trellises. Workmen soon
began to flock to the new city—metal-founders, glass-founders,
weavers; in fine, all who followed any trade indispensable to the luxury
of a capital. The king appropriated a territory for it from the ancient
nome of the Hare, thus compelling the god Thot to contribute to the
fortune of Atonû; he fixed its limits by means of stelæ placed in the
mountains, from Gebel-Tûnah to Deshlûît on the west, and from Sheikh-Said
to El-Hauata on the eastern bank;* it was a new nome improvised for the
divine parvenu.
Atonû was one of the forms of the Sun, and perhaps the most material one
of all those devised by the Egyptians. He was defined as “the good god who
rejoices in truth, the lord of the solar course, the lord of the disk, the
lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the living disk which lights up the two
worlds, the living Harmakhis who rises on the horizon bearing his name of
Shû, which is disk, the eternal infuser of life.” His priests exercised
the same functions as those of Heliopolis, and his high priest was called
“Oîrimaû,” like the high priest of Râ in Aunû. This functionary was a
certain Marirl, upon whom the king showered his favours, and he was for
some time the chief authority in the State after the Pharaoh himself.
Atonû was represented sometimes by the ordinary figure of Horus,*
sometimes by the solar disk, but a disk whose rays were prolonged towards
the earth, like so many arms ready to lay hold with their little hands of
the offerings of the faithful, or to distribute to mortals the crux
ansata, the symbol of life. The other gods, except Amon, were sharers
with humanity in his benefits. Atonû proscribed him, and tolerated him
only at Thebes; he required, moreover, that the name of Amon should be
effaced wherever it occurred, but he respected Râ and Horus and Harmakhis—all,
in fact, but Amon: he was content with being regarded as their king, and
he strove rather to become their chief than their destroyer.**
His nature, moreover, had nothing in it of the mysterious or ambiguous; he
was the glorious torch which gave light to humanity, and which was seen
every day to flame in the heavens without ever losing its brilliance or
becoming weaker. When he hides himself “the world rests in darkness, like
those dead who lie in their rock-tombs, with their heads swathed, their
nostrils stuffed up, their eyes sightless, and whose whole property might
be stolen from them, even that which they have under their head, without
their knowing it; the lion issues from his lair, the serpent roams ready
to bite, it is as obscure as in a dark room, the earth is silent whilst he
who creates everything dwells in his horizon.” He has hardly arisen when
“Egypt becomes festal, one awakens, one rises on one’s feet; when thou
hast caused men to clothe themselves, they adore thee with outstretched
hands, and the whole earth attends to its work, the animals betake
themselves to their herbage, trees and green crops abound, birds fly to
their marshy thickets with wings outstretched in adoration of thy double,
the cattle skip, all the birds which were in their nests shake themselves
when thou risest for them; the boats come and go, for every way is open at
thy appearance, the fish of the river leap before thee as soon as thy rays
descend upon the ocean.” It is not without reason that all living things
thus rejoice at his advent; all of them owe their existence to him, for
“he creates the female germ, he gives virility to men, and furnishes life
to the infant in its mother’s womb; he calms and stills its weeping, he
nourishes it in the maternal womb, giving forth the breathings which
animate all that he creates, and when the infant escapes from the womb on
the day of its birth, thou openest his mouth for speech, and thou
satisfiest his necessities. When the chick is in the egg, a cackle in a
stone, thou givest to it air while within to keep it alive; when thou hast
caused it to be developed in the egg to the point of being able to break
it, it goes forth proclaiming its existence by its cackling, and walks on
its feet from the moment of its leaving the egg.” Atonû presides over the
universe and arranges within it the lot of human beings, both Egyptians
and foreigners. The celestial Nile springs up in Hades far away in the
north; he makes its current run down to earth, and spreads its waters over
the fields during the inundation in order to nourish his creatures. He
rules the seasons, winter and summer; he constructed the far-off sky in
order to display himself therein, and to look down upon his works below.
From the moment that he reveals himself there, “cities, towns, tribes,
routes, rivers—all eyes are lifted to him, for he is the disk of the
day upon the earth.” * The sanctuary in which he is invoked contains only
his divine shadow;** for he himself never leaves the firmament.
His worship assumes none of the severe and gloomy forms of the Theban
cults: songs resound therein, and hymns accompanied by the harp or flute;
bread, cakes, vegetables, fruits, and flowers are associated with his
rites, and only on very rare occasions one of those bloody sacrifices in
which the other gods delight. The king made himself supreme pontiff of
Atonu, and took precedence of the high priest. He himself celebrated the
rites at the altar of the god, and we see him there standing erect, his
hands outstretched, offering incense and invoking blessings from on high.*
Like the Caliph Hakim of a later age, he formed a school to propagate his
new doctrines, and preached them before his courtiers: if they wished to
please him, they had to accept his teaching, and show that they had
profited by it. The renunciation of the traditional religious observances
of the solar house involved also the rejection of such personal names as
implied an ardent devotion to the banished god; in place of Amenôthes, “he
to whom Amon is united,” the king assumed after a time the name of
Khûniatonû, “the Glory of the Disk,” and all the members of his family, as
well as his adherents at court, whose appellations involved the name of
the same god, soon followed his example. The proscription of Amon extended
to inscriptions, so that while his name or figure, wherever either could
be got at, was chiselled out, the vulture, the emblem of Mût, which
expressed the idea of mother, was also avoided.**
The king would have nothing about him to suggest to eye or ear the
remembrance of the gods or doctrines of Thebes. It would consequently have
been fatal to them and their pretensions to the primacy of Egypt if the
reign of the young king had continued as long as might naturally have been
expected. After having been for nearly two centuries almost the national
head of Africa, Amon was degraded by a single blow to the secondary rank
and languishing existence in which he had lived before the expulsion of
the Hyksôs. He had surrendered his sceptre as king of heaven and earth,
not to any of his rivals who in old times had enjoyed the highest rank,
but to an individual of a lower order, a sort of demigod, while he himself
had thus become merely a local deity, confined to the corner of the Said
in which he had had his origin. There was not even left to him the
peaceful possession of this restricted domain, for he was obliged to act
as host to the enemy who had deposed him: the temple of Atonû was erected
at the door of his own sanctuary, and without leaving their courts the
priests of Amon could hear at the hours of worship the chants intoned by
hundreds of heretics in the temple of the Disk. Amon’s priests saw,
moreover, the royal gifts flowing into other treasuries, and the gold of
Syria and Ethiopia no longer came into their hands. Should they stifle
their complaints, and bow to this insulting oppression, or should they
raise a protest against the action which had condemned them to obscurity
and a restricted existence? If they had given indications of resistance,
they would have been obliged to submit to prompt repression, but we see no
sign of this. The bulk of the people—clerical as well as lay—accepted
the deposition with complacency, and the nobles hastened to offer their
adherence to that which afterwards became the official confession of faith
of the Lord King.* The lord of Thebes itself, a certain Ramses, bowed his
head to the new cult, and the bas-reliefs of his tomb display to our eyes
the proofs of his apostasy: on the right-hand side Amon is the only
subject of his devotion, while on the left he declares himself an adherent
of Atonû. Religious formularies, divine appellations, the representations
of the costume, expression, and demeanour of the figures are at issue with
each other in the scenes on the two sides of the door, and if we were to
trust to appearances only, one would think that the two pictures belonged
to two separate reigns, and were concerned with two individuals strangers
to each other.**
The rupture between the past and the present was so complete, in fact,
that the sovereign was obliged to change, if not his face and expression,
at least the mode in which they were represented.
The name and personality of an Egyptian were so closely allied that
interference with one implied interference with the other. Khûniatonû
could not continue to be such as he was when Amenôthes, and, in fact,
their respective portraits differ from each other to that degree that
there is some doubt at moments as to their identity. Amenôthes is hardly
to be distinguished from his father: he has the same regular and somewhat
heavy features, the same idealised body and conventional shape as those
which we find in the orthodox Pharaohs. Khûniatonû affects a long and
narrow head, conical at the top, with a retreating forehead, a large
aquiline and pointed nose, a small mouth, an enormous chin projecting in
front, the whole being supported by a long, thin neck.
His shoulders are narrow, with little display of muscle, but his breasts
are so full, his abdomen so prominent, and his hips so large, that one
would think they belonged to a woman. Etiquette required the attendants
upon the king, and those who aspired to his favour, to be portrayed in the
bas-reliefs of temples or tombs in all points, both as regards face and
demeanour, like the king himself. Hence it is that the majority of his
contemporaries, after having borne the likeness of Amenôthes, came to
adopt, without a break, that of Khûniatonû. The scenes at Tel el-Amarna
contain, therefore, nothing but angular profiles, pointed skulls, ample
breasts, flowing figures, and swelling stomachs. The outline of these is
one that lends itself readily to caricature, and the artists have
exaggerated the various details with the intention, it may be, of
rendering the representations grotesque. There was nothing ridiculous,
however, in the king, their model, and several of his statues attribute to
him a languid, almost valetudinarian grace, which is by no means lacking
in dignity.
He was a good and affectionate man, and was passionately fond of his wife,
Nofrîtîti, associating her with himself in his sovereign acts. If he set
out to visit the temple, she followed him in a chariot; if he was about to
reward one of his faithful subjects, she stood beside him and helped to
distribute the golden necklaces. She joined him in his prayers to the
Solar Disk; she ministered to him in domestic life, when, having broken
away from the worries of his public duties, he sought relaxation in his
harem; and their union was so tender, that we find her on one occasion, at
least, seated in a coaxing attitude on her husband’s knees—a unique
instance of such affection among all the representations on the monuments
of Egypt.
They had six daughters, whom they brought up to live with them on terms of
the closest intimacy: they accompanied their father and mother everywhere,
and are exhibited as playing around the throne while their parents are
engaged in performing the duties of their office. The gentleness and
gaiety of the king were reflected in the life of his subjects: all the
scenes which they have left us consist entirely of processions,
cavalcades, banquets, and entertainments. Khûniatonû was prodigal in the
gifts of gold and the eulogies which he bestowed on Marirî, the chief
priest: the people dance around him while he is receiving from the king
the just recompense of his activity. When Hûîa, who came back from Syria
in the XIIth year of the king’s reign, brought solemnly before him the
tribute he had collected, the king, borne in his jolting palanquin on the
shoulders of his officers, proceeded to the temple to return thanks to his
god, to the accompaniment of chants and the waving of the great fans. When
the divine father Aï had married the governess of one of the king’s
daughters, the whole city gave itself up to enjoyment, and wine flowed
freely during the wedding feast. Notwithstanding the frequent festivals,
the king found time to watch jealously over the ordinary progress of
government and foreign affairs. The architects, too, were not allowed to
stand idle, and without taking into account the repairs of existing
buildings, had plenty to do in constructing edifices in honour of Atonû in
the principal towns of the Nile valley, at Memphis, Heliopolis,
Hermopolis, Hermonthis, and in the Fayûm. The provinces in Ethiopia
remained practically in the same condition as in the time of Amenôthes
III.;* Kûsh was pacified, notwithstanding the raids which the tribes of
the desert were accustomed to make from time to time, only to receive on
each occasion rigorous chastisement from the king’s viceroy.
The sudden degradation of Amon had not brought about any coldness between
the Pharaoh and his princely allies in Asia. The aged Amenôthes had,
towards the end of his reign, asked the hand of Dushratta’s daughter in
marriage, and the Mitannian king, highly flattered by the request, saw his
opportunity and took advantage of it in the interest of his treasury. He
discussed the amount of the dowry, demanded a considerable sum of gold,
and when the affair had been finally arranged to his satisfaction, he
despatched the princess to the banks of the Nile. On her arrival she found
her affianced husband was dead, or, at all events, dying. Amenôthes IV.,
however, stepped into his father’s place, and inherited his bride with his
crown.
The new king’s relations with other foreign princes were no less friendly;
the chief of the Khâti (Hittites) complimented him on his accession, the
King of Alasia wrote to him to express his earnest desire for a
continuance of peace between the two states. Burnaburiash of Babylon had,
it is true, hoped to obtain an Egyptian princess in marriage for his son,
and being disappointed, had endeavoured to pick a quarrel over the value
of the presents which had been sent him, together with the notice of the
accession of the new sovereign. But his kingdom lay too far away to make
his ill-will of much consequence, and his complaints passed unheeded. In
Coele-Syria and Phoenicia the situation remained unchanged. The vassal
cities were in a perpetual state of disturbance, though not more so than
in the past. Azîru, son of Abdashirti, chief of the country of the
Amorites, had always, even during the lifetime of Amenôthes III., been the
most turbulent of vassals. The smaller states of the Orontes and of the
coast about Arvad had been laid waste by his repeated incursions and
troubled by his intrigues. He had taken and pillaged twenty towns, among
which were Simyra, Sini, Irqata, and Qodshû, and he was already
threatening Byblos, Berytus, and Sidon. It was useless to complain of him,
for he always managed to exculpate himself to the royal messengers. Khaî,
Dûdû, Amenemaûpît had in turn all pronounced him innocent. Pharaoh
himself, after citing him to appear in Egypt to give an explanation of his
conduct, had allowed himself to be won over by his fair speaking, and had
dismissed him uncondemned. Other princes, who lacked his cleverness and
power, tried to imitate him, and from north to south the whole of Syria
could only be compared to some great arena, in which fighting was
continually carried on between one tribe or town and another—Tyre
against Sidon, Sidon against Byblos, Jerusalem against Lachish. All of
them appealed to Khûniatonû, and endeavoured to enlist him on their side.
Their despatches arrived by scores, and the perusal of them at the present
day would lead us to imagine that Egypt had all but lost her supremacy.
The Egyptian ministers, however, were entirely unmoved by them, and
continued to refuse material support to any of the numerous rivals, except
in a few rare cases, where a too prolonged indifference would have
provoked an open revolt in some part of the country.
Khûniatonû died young, about the XVIIIth year of his reign.* He was buried
in the depths of a ravine in the mountain-side to the east of the town,
and his tomb remained unknown till within the last few years. Although one
of his daughters who died before her father had been interred there, the
place seems to have been entirely unprepared for the reception of the
king’s body. The funeral chamber and the passages are scarcely even
rough-hewn, and the reception halls show a mere commencement of
decoration.** The other tombs of the locality are divided into two groups,
separated by the ravine reserved for the burying-place of the royal house.
The noble families possessed each their own tomb on the slopes of the
hillside; the common people were laid to rest in pits lower down, almost
on the level of the plain. The cutting and decoration of all these tombs
had been entrusted to a company of contractors, who had executed them
according to two or three stereotyped plans, without any variation, except
in size. Nearly all the walls are bare, or present but few inscriptions;
those tombs only are completed whose occupants died before the Pharaoh.
The façades of the tombs are cut in the rock, and contain, for the most
part, but one door, the jambs of which are covered on both sides by
several lines of hieroglyphs; and it is just possible to distinguish
traces of the adoration of the radiant Disk on the lintels, together with
the cartouches containing the names of the king and god. The chapel is a
large rectangular chamber, from one end of which opens the inclined
passage leading to the coffin. The roof is sometimes supported by columns,
having capitals decorated with designs of flowers or of geese hung from
the abacus by their feet with their heads turned upwards.
The religious teaching at Tel el-Amarna presents no difference in the main
from that which prevailed in other parts of Egypt.* The Double of Osiris
was supposed to reside in the tomb, or else to take wing to heaven and
embark with Atonû, as elsewhere he would embark with Eâ. The same funerary
furniture is needed for the deceased as in other local cults—ornaments
of vitreous paste, amulets, and Ushabtiu, or “Respondents,” to
labour for the dead man in the fields of Ialû. Those of Khûniatonû were,
like those of Amenôthes III., actual statuettes in granite of admirable
workmanship. The dead who reached the divine abode, retained the same rank
in life that they had possessed here below, and in order to ensure the
enjoyment of it, they related, or caused to be depicted in their tombs,
the events of their earthly career.
A citizen of Khûîtatonû would naturally represent the manners and customs
of his native town, and this would account for the local colouring of the
scenes in which we see him taking part.
They bear no resemblance to the traditional pictures of the buildings and
gardens of Thebes with which we are familiar; we have instead the palaces,
colonnades, and pylons of the rising city, its courts planted with
sycomores, its treasuries, and its storehouses. The sun’s disk hovers
above and darts its prehensile rays over every object; its hands present
the crux ansata to the nostrils of the various members of the
family, they touch caressingly the queen and her daughters, they handle
the offerings of bread and cakes, they extend even into the government
warehouses to pilfer or to bless. Throughout all these scenes Khûniatonû
and the ladies of his harem seem to be ubiquitous: here he visits one of
the officers, there he repairs to the temple for the dedication of its
sanctuary. His chariot, followed at a little distance by that of the
princesses, makes its way peaceably through the streets. The police of the
city and the soldiers of the guard, whether Egyptians or foreigners, run
before him and clear a path among the crowd, the high priest Marirî stands
at the gate to receive him, and the ceremony is brought to a close by a
distribution of gold necklaces or rings, while the populace dance with
delight before the sovereign. Meantime the slaves have cooked the repast,
the dancers and musicians within their chambers have rehearsed for the
evening’s festival, and the inmates of the house carry on animated
dialogues during their meal. The style and the technique of these
wall-paintings differ in no way from those in the necropolis of the
preceding period, and there can be no doubt that the artists who decorated
these monuments were trained in the schools of Thebes. Their drawing is
often very refined, and there is great freedom in their composition; the
perspective of some of the bas-reliefs almost comes up to our own, and the
movement of animated crowds is indicated with perfect accuracy. It is,
however, not safe to conclude from these examples that the artists who
executed them would have developed Egyptian art in a new direction, had
not subsequent events caused a reaction against the worship of Atonû and
his followers.
Although the tombs in which they worked differ from the generality of
Egyptian burying-places, their originality does not arise from any effort,
either conscious or otherwise, to break through the ordinary routine of
the art of the time; it is rather the result of the extraordinary
appearance of the sovereign whose features they were called on to portray,
and the novelty of several of the subjects which they had to treat. That
artist among them who first gave concrete form to the ideas circulated by
the priests of Atonû, and drew the model cartoons, evidently possessed a
master-hand, and was endowed with undeniable originality and power. No
other Egyptian draughtsman ever expressed a child’s grace as he did, and
the portraits which he sketched of the daughters of Khûniatonû playing
undressed at their mother’s side, are examples of a reserved and delicate
grace. But these models, when once composed and finished even to the
smallest details, were entrusted for execution to workmen of mediocre
powers, who were recruited not only from Thebes, but from the neighbouring
cities of Hermopolis and Siût. These estimable people, with a praiseworthy
patience, traced bit by bit the cartoons confided to them, omitting or
adding individuals or groups according to the extent of the wall-space
they had to cover, or to the number of relatives and servants whom the
proprietor of the tomb desired should share in his future happiness. The
style of these draughtsmen betrays the influence of the second-rate
schools in which they had learned their craft, and the clumsiness of their
work would often repel us, were it not that the interest of the episodes
portrayed redeems it in the eyes of the Egyptologist.
Khûniatonû left no son to succeed him; two of his sons-in-law successively
occupied the throne—Sâakerî, who had married his eldest daughter
Marîtatonû, and Tûtankhamon, the husband of Ankhnasaton. The first had
been associated in the sovereignty by his father-in-law;* he showed
himself a zealous partisan of the “Disk,” and he continued to reside in
the new capital during the few years of his sole reign.** The second
son-in-law was a son of Amenôthes III., probably by a concubine. He
returned to the religion of Amon, and his wife, abjuring the creed of her
father, changed her name from Ankhnasaton to that of Ankhnasamon. Her
husband abandoned Khûitatonû*** at the end of two or three years, and
after his departure the town fell into decadence as quickly as it had
arisen. The streets were unfrequented, the palaces and temples stood
empty, the tombs remained unfinished and unoccupied, and its patron god
returned to his former state, and was relegated to the third or fourth
rank in the Egyptian Pantheon.
The town struggled for a short time against its adverse fate, which was no
doubt retarded owing to the various industries founded in it by
Khûniatonû, the manufactories of enamel and coloured glass requiring the
presence of many workmen; but the latter emigrated ere long to Thebes or
the neighbouring city of Hermopolis, and the “Horizon of Atonû”
disappeared from the list of nomes, leaving of what might have been the
capital of the Egyptian empire, merely a mound of crumbling bricks with
two or three fellahîn villages scattered on the eastern bank of the Nile.*
Thebes, whose influence and population had meanwhile never lessened,
resumed her supremacy undisturbed. If, out of respect for the past,
Tûtankhamon continued the decoration of the temple of Atonû at Karnak, he
placed in every other locality the name and figure of Amon; a little
stucco spread over the parts which had been mutilated, enabled the
outlines to be restored to their original purity, and the alteration was
rendered invisible by a few coats of colour. Tûtankhamon was succeeded by
the divine father Aï, whom Khûniatonû had assigned as husband to one of
his relatives named Tîi, so called after the widow of Amenôthes III. Aï
laboured no less diligently than his predecessor to keep up the traditions
which had been temporarily interrupted. He had been a faithful worshipper
of the Disk, and had given orders for the construction of two funerary
chapels for himself in the mountain-side above Tel el-Amarna, the
paintings in which indicate a complete adherence to the faith of the
reigning king. But on becoming Pharaoh, he was proportionally zealous in
his submission to the gods of Thebes, and in order to mark more fully his
return to the ancient belief, he chose for his royal burying-place a site
close to that in which rested the body of Amenôthes III.*
His sarcophagus, a large oblong of carved rose granite, still lies open
and broken on the spot.
Figures of goddesses stand at the four angles and extend their winged arms
along its sides, as if to embrace the mummy of the sovereign. Tûtankhamon
and Aï were obeyed from one end of Egypt to the other, from Napata to the
shores of the Mediterranean. The peoples of Syria raised no disturbances
during their reigns, and paid their accustomed tribute regularly;* if
their rule was short, it was at least happy. It would appear, however,
that after their deaths, troubles arose in the state. The lists of Manetho
give two or three princes—Râthôtis, Khebres, and Akherres—whose
names are not found on the monuments.** It is possible that we ought not
to regard them as historical personages, but merely as heroes of popular
romance, of the same type as those introduced so freely into the history
of the preceding dynasties by the chroniclers of the Saite and Greek
periods. They were, perhaps, merely short-lived pretenders who were
overthrown one by the other before either had succeeded in establishing
himself on the seat of Horus. Be that as it may, the XVIIIth dynasty drew
to its close amid strife and quarreling, without our being able to
discover the cause of its overthrow, or the name of the last of its
sovereigns.***
Scarcely half a century had elapsed between the moment when the XVIII’s
dynasty reached the height of its power under Amenôthes III. and that of
its downfall. It is impossible to introduce with impunity changes of any
kind into the constitution or working of so complicated a machine as an
empire founded on conquest. When the parts of the mechanism have been once
put together and set in motion, and have become accustomed to work
harmoniously at a proper pace, interference with it must not be attempted
except to replace such parts as are broken or worn out, by others exactly
like them. To make alterations while the machine is in motion, or to
introduce new combinations, however ingenious, into any part of the
original plan, might produce an accident or a breakage of the gearing when
perhaps it would be least expected. When the devout Khûniatonû exchanged
one city and one god for another, he thought that he was merely
transposing equivalents, and that the safety of the commonwealth was not
concerned in the operation. Whether it was Amon or Atonu who presided over
the destinies of his people, or whether Thebes or Tel el-Amarna were the
centre of impulse, was, in his opinion, merely a question of internal
arrangement which could not affect the economy of the whole. But events
soon showed that he was mistaken in his calculations. It is probable that
if, on the expulsion of the Hyksôs, the earlier princes of the dynasty had
attempted an alteration in the national religion, or had moved the capital
to any other city they might select, the remainder of the kingdom would
not have been affected by the change. But after several centuries of
faithful adherence to Amon in his city of Thebes, the governing power
would find it no easy matter to accomplish such a resolution. During three
centuries the dynasty had become wedded to the city and to its patron
deity, and the locality had become so closely associated with the dynasty,
that any blow aimed at the god could not fail to destroy the dynasty with
it; indeed, had the experiment of Khûniatonû been prolonged beyond a few
years, it might have entailed the ruin of the whole country. All who came
into contact with Egypt, or were under her rule, whether Asiatics or
Africans, were quick to detect any change in her administration, and to
remark a falling away from the traditional systems of the times of
Thûtmosis III. and Amenothes II. The successors of the heretic king had
the sense to perceive at once the first symptoms of disorder, and to
refrain from persevering in his errors; but however quick they were to
undo his work, they could not foresee its serious consequences. His
immediate followers were powerless to maintain their dynasty, and their
posterity had to make way for a family who had not incurred the hatred of
Amon, or rather that of his priests. If those who followed them were able
by their tact and energy to set Egypt on her feet again, they were at the
same time unable to restore her former prosperity or her boundless
confidence in herself.
THE REACTION AGAINST EGYPT
THE XIth DYNASTY: HARMHABΗTHE HITTITE EMPIRE IN SYRIA AND IN
ASIA MINOR—SETI I. AND RAMSES II.—THE PEOPLE OF THE SEA:
MÎNEPHTAH AND THE ISRAELITE EXODUS.
The birth and antecedents of Harmhabî, his youth, his enthronement—The
final triumph of Amon and his priests—Harmhabî infuses order into
the government: his wars against the Ethiopians and Asiatics—The
Khâti, their civilization, religion; their political and military
constitution; the extension of their empire towards the north—The
countries and populations of Asia Minor; commercial routes between the
Euphrates and the Ægean Sea—The treaty concluded between Harmhabî
and Sapalulu.
Ramses I. and the uncertainties as to his origin—Seti I. and the
campaign against Syria in the 1st year of his reign; the re-establishment
of the Egyptian empire—Working of the gold-mines at Etaï—The
monuments constructed by Seti I. in Nubia, at Karnak, Luxor, and Abydos—The
valley of the kings and tomb of Seti I. at Thebes.
Ramses II., his infancy, his association in the Government, his début
in Ethiopia: he builds a residence in the Delta—His campaign against
the Khâti in the 5th year of his reign—The talcing of Qodshu, the
victory of Ramses II. and the truce established with Khâtusaru: the poem
of Pentaûîrît—His treaty with the Khâti in the 21st year of his
reign: the balance of power in Syria: the marriage of Ramses II. with a
Hittite princess—Public works: the Speos at Abu-Simbel; Luxor,
Karnak, the Eamesseum, the monuments in the Delta—The regency of
Khamoîsît and Mînephtah, the legend of Sesostris, the coffin and mummy of
Ramses II.
Minephtah—The kingdom of Libya, the people of the sea—The
first invasion of Libya: the Egyptian victory at Piriû; the triumph of
Minephtah—Seti II., Amenmeses, Siphtah-Minephtah—The foreign
captives in Egypt; the Exodus of the Hebrews and their march to Sinai—An
Egyptian romance of the Exodus: Amenophis, son of Pa-apis.
CHAPTER II—THE REACTION AGAINST EGYPT
The XIXth dynasty: Harmhabî—The Hittite empire in Syria and in
Asia Minor—Seti I. and Ramses II.—The people of the sea:
Minephtah and the Israelite Exodus.
While none of these ephemeral Pharaohs left behind them a, either
legitimate or illegitimate, son there was no lack of princesses, any of
which, having on her accession to the throne to choose a consort after her
own heart, might thus become the founder of a new dynasty. By such a
chance alliance Harmhabî, who was himself descended from Thûtmosis III.,
was raised to the kingly office.* His mother, Mûtnozmît, was of the royal
line, and one of the most beautiful statues in the Gîzeh Museum probably
represents her. The body is mutilated, but the head is charming in its
intelligent and animated expression, in its full eyes and somewhat large,
but finely modelled, mouth. The material of the statue is a finegrained
limestone, and its milky whiteness tends to soften the malign character of
her look and smile. It is possible that Mûtnozmît was the daughter of
Amenôthes III. by his marriage with one of his sisters: it was from her,
at any rate, and not from his great-grandfather, that Harmhabî derived his
indisputable claims to royalty.**
He was born, probably, in the last years of Amenôthes, when Tîi was the
exclusive favourite of the sovereign; but it was alleged later on, when
Harmhabî had emerged from obscurity, that Amon, destining him for the
throne, had condescended to become his father by Mûtnozmît—a
customary procedure with the god when his race on earth threatened to
become debased.* It was he who had rocked the newly born infant to sleep,
and, while Harsiesis was strengthening his limbs with protective amulets,
had spread over the child’s skin the freshness and brilliance which are
the peculiar privilege of the immortals. While still in the nursery, the
great and the insignificant alike prostrated themselves before Harmhabî,
making him liberal offerings. Every one recognised in him, even when still
a lad and incapable of reflection, the carriage and complexion of a god,
and Horus of Cynopolis was accustomed to follow his steps, knowing that
the time of his advancement was near. After having called the attention of
the Egyptians to Harmhabî, Amon was anxious, in fact, to hasten the coming
of the day when he might confer upon him supreme rank, and for this
purpose inclined the heart of the reigning Pharaoh towards him. Aï
proclaimed him his heir over the whole land.**
He never gave cause for any dissatisfaction when called to court, and when
he was asked questions by the monarch he replied always in fit terms, in
such words as were calculated to produce serenity, and thus gained for
himself a reputation as the incarnation of wisdom, all his plans and
intentions appearing to have been conceived by Thot the Ibis himself. For
many years he held a place of confidence with the sovereign. The nobles,
from the moment he appeared at the gate of the palace, bowed their backs
before him; the barbaric chiefs from the north or south stretched out
their arms as soon as they approached him, and gave him the adoration they
would bestow upon a god. His favourite residence was Memphis, his
preference for it arising from his having possibly been born there, or
from its having been assigned to him for his abode. Here he constructed
for himself a magnificent tomb, the bas-reliefs of which exhibit him as
already king, with the sceptre in his hand and the uraaus on his brow,
while the adjoining cartouche does not as yet contain his name.*
He was the mighty of the mighty, the great among the great, the general of
generals, the messenger who ran to convey orders to the people of Asia and
Ethiopia, the indispensable companion in council or on the field of
battle,* at the time when Horus of Cynopolis resolved to seat him upon his
eternal throne. Aï no longer occupied it. Horus took Harmhabî with him to
Thebes, escorted him thither amid expressions of general joy, and led him
to Amon in order that the god might bestow upon him the right to reign.
The reception took place in the temple of Luxor, which served as a kind of
private chapel for the descendants of Amenôthes. Amon rejoiced to see
Harmhabî, the heir of the two worlds; he took him with him to the royal
palace, introduced him into the apartments of his august daughter,
Mûtnozmît; then, after she had recognised her child and had pressed him to
her bosom, all the gods broke out into acclamations, and their cries
ascended up to heaven.**
“Behold, Amon arrives with his son before him, at the palace, in order to
put upon his head the diadem, and to prolong the length of his life! We
install him, therefore, in his office, we give to him the insignia of Eâ,
we pray Amon for him whom he has brought as our protector: may he as king
have the festivals of Eâ and the years of Horus; may he accomplish his
good pleasure in Thebes, in Heliopolis, in Memphis, and may he add to the
veneration with which these cities are invested.” And they immediately
decided that the new Pharaoh should be called Horus-sturdy-bull, mighty in
wise projects, lord of the Vulture and of the very marvellous Urseus in
Thebes, the conquering Horus who takes pleasure in the truth, and who
maintains the two lands, the lord of the south and north, Sozir Khopîrûrî
chosen of Eâ, the offspring of the Sun, Harmhabî Mîamûn, giver of life.
The cortege came afterwards to the palace, the king walking before
Amon: there the god embraced his son, placed the diadems upon his head,
delivered to him the rule of the whole world, over foreign populations as
well as those of Egypt, inasmuch as he possessed this power as the
sovereign of the universe.
This is the customary subject of the records of enthronement. Pharaoh is
the son of a god, chosen by his father, from among all those who might
have a claim to it, to occupy for a time the throne of Horus; and as he
became king only by a divine decree, he had publicly to express, at the
moment of his elevation, his debt of gratitude to, and his boundless
respect for, the deity, who had made him what he was. In this case,
however, the protocol embodied something more than the traditional
formality, and its hackneyed phrases borrowed a special meaning from the
circumstances of the moment. Amon, who had been insulted and proscribed by
Khûniatonû, had not fully recovered his prestige under the rule of the
immediate successors of his enemy.
They had restored to him his privileges and his worship, they had become
reconciled to him, and avowed themselves his faithful ones, but all this
was as much an act of political necessity as a matter of religion: they
still continued to tolerate, if not to favour, the rival doctrinal system,
and the temple of the hateful Disk still dishonoured by its vicinity the
sanctuary of Karnak. Harmhabî, on the other hand, was devoted to Amon, who
had moulded him in embryo, and had trained him from his birth to worship
none but him. Harmhabî’s triumph marked the end of the evil days, and
inaugurated a new era, in which Amon saw himself again master of Thebes
and of the world. Immediately after his enthronement Harmhabî rivalled the
first Amen-ôthes in his zeal for the interests of his divine father: he
overturned the obelisks of Atonû and the building before which they stood;
then, that no trace of them might remain, he worked up the stones into the
masonry of two pylons, which he set up upon the site, to the south of the
gates of Thûtmosis III. They remained concealed in the new fabric for
centuries, but in the year 27 B.C. a great earthquake brought them
abruptly to light. We find everywhere among the ruins, at the foot of the
dislocated gates, or at the bases of the headless colossal figures, heaps
of blocks detached from the structure, on which can be made out remnants
of prayers addressed to the Disk, scenes of worship, and cartouches of
Amenôfches IV., Aï, and Tûtankhamon. The work begun by Harmhabî at Thebes
was continued with unabated zeal through the length of the whole
river-valley. “He restored the sanctuaries from the marshes of Athû even
to Nubia; he repaired their sculptures so that they were better than
before, not to speak of the fine things he did in them, rejoicing the eyes
of Râ. That which he had found injured he put into its original condition,
erecting a hundred statues, carefully formed of valuable stone, for every
one which was lacking. He inspected the ruined towns of the gods in the
land, and made them such as they had been in the time of the first Ennead,
and he allotted to them estates and offerings for every day, as well as a
set of sacred vessels entirely of gold and silver; he settled priests in
them, bookmen, carefully chosen soldiers, and assigned to them fields,
cattle, all the necessary material to make prayers to Râ every morning.”
These measures were inspired by consideration for the ancient deities; but
he added to them others, which tended to secure the welfare of the people
and the stability of the government. Up to this time the officials and the
Egyptian soldiers had displayed a tendency to oppress the fellahîn,
without taking into consideration the injury to the treasury occasioned by
their rapacity. Constant supervision was the only means of restraining
them, for even the best-served Pharaohs, Thûtmosis, and Amenôthes III.
themselves, were obliged to have frequent recourse to the rigour of the
law to keep the scandalous depredations of the officials within bounds.*
The religious disputes of the preceding years, in enfeebling the authority
of the central power, had given a free hand to these oppressors. The
scribes and tax-collectors were accustomed to exact contributions for the
public service from the ships, whether laden or not, of those who were in
a small way of business, and once they had laid their hands upon them,
they did not readily let them go. The poor fellow falling into their
clutches lost his cargo, and he was at his wits’ end to know how to
deliver at the royal storehouses the various wares with which he
calculated to pay his taxes. No sooner had the Court arrived at some place
than the servants scoured the neighbourhood, confiscating the land
produce, and seizing upon slaves, under pretence that they were acting for
the king, while they had only their personal ends in view. Soldiers
appropriated all the hides of animals with the object, doubtless, of
making from them leather jackets and helmets, or of duplicating their
shields, with the result that when the treasury made its claim for
leather, none was to be found. It was hardly possible, moreover, to bring
the culprits to justice, for the chief men of the towns and villages, the
prophets, and all those who ought to have looked after the interests of
the taxpayer, took money from the criminals for protecting them from
justice, and compelled the innocent victims also to purchase their
protection. Harmhabî, who was continually looking for opportunities to put
down injustice and to punish deceit, at length decided to pro-mulgate a
very severe edict against the magistrates and the double-dealing
officials: any of them who was found to have neglected his duty was to
have his nose cut off, and was to be sent into perpetual exile to Zalu, on
the eastern frontier. His commands, faithfully carried out, soon produced
a salutary effect, and as he would on no account relax the severity of the
sentence, exactions were no longer heard of, to the advantage of the
revenue of the State. On the last day of each month the gates of his
palace were open to every one.
Any one on giving his name to the guard could enter the court of honour,
where he would find food in abundance to satisfy his hunger while he was
awaiting an audience. The king all the while was seated in the sight of
all at the tribune, whence he would throw among his faithful friends
necklaces and bracelets of gold: he inquired into complaints one after
another, heard every case, announced his judgments in brief words, and
dismissed his subjects, who went away proud and happy at having had their
affairs dealt with by the sovereign himself.*
The portraits of Harmhabî which have come down to us give us the
impression of a character at once energetic and agreeable. The most
beautiful of these is little more than a fragment broken off a black
granite statue. Its mournful expression is not pleasing to the spectator,
and at the first view alienates his sympathy. The face, which is still
youthful, breathes an air of melancholy, an expression which is somewhat
rare among the Pharaohs of the best period: the thin and straight nose is
well set on the face, the elongated eyes have somewhat heavy lids; the
large, fleshy lips, slightly contracted at the corners of the mouth, are
cut with a sharpness that gives them singular vigour, and the firm and
finely modelled chin loses little of its form from the false beard
depending from it. Every detail is treated with such freedom that one
would think the sculptor must have had some soft material to work upon,
rather than a rock almost hard enough to defy the chisel; the command over
it is so complete that the difficulty of the work is forgotten in the
perfection of the result. The dreamy expression of his face, however, did
not prevent Harmhabî from displaying beyond Egypt, as within it, singular
activity.
Although Egypt had never given up its claims to dominion over the whole
river-valley, as far as the plains of Sennar, yet since the time of
Amenôthes III. no sovereign had condescended, it would I appear, to
conduct in person the expeditions directed against the tribes of! the
Upper Nile. Harmhabî was anxious to revive the custom which imposed upon
the Pharaohs the obligation to make their first essay in arms in Ethiopia,
as Horus, son of Isis, had done of yore, and he seized the pretext of the
occurrence of certain raids there to lead a body of troops himself into
the heart of the negro country.
He had just ordered at this time the construction of the two southern
pylons at Karnak, and there was great activity in the quarries of
Silsileh. A commemorative chapel also was in course of excavation here in
the sandstone rock, and he had dedicated it to his father, Amon-Ba of
Thebes, coupling with him the local divinities, Hapî the Nile, and Sobkû
the patron of Ombos. The sanctuary is excavated somewhat deeply into the
hillside, and the dark rooms within it are decorated with the usual scenes
of worship, but the vaulted approach to them displays upon its western
wall the victory of the king. We see here a figure receiving from Amon the
assurance of a long and happy life, and another letting fly his arrows at
a host of fleeing enemies; Ethiopians raise their heads to him in
suppliant gesture; soldiers march past with their captives; above one of
the doors we see twelve military leaders marching and carrying the king
aloft upon their shoulders, while a group of priests and nobles salute
him, offering incense.*
At this period Egyptian ships were ploughing the Red Sea, and their
captains were renewing official relations with Pûanît. Somali chiefs were
paying visits to the palace, as in the time of Thûtmosis III. The wars of
Amon had, in fact, begun again. The god, having suffered neglect for half
a century, had a greater need than ever of gold and silver to fill his
coffers; he required masons for his buildings, slaves and cattle for his
farms, perfumed essences and incense for his daily rites. His resources
had gradually become exhausted, and his treasury would soon be empty if he
did not employ the usual means to replenish it. He incited Harmhabi to
proceed against the countries from which, in olden times he had enriched
himself—to the south in the first place, and then, having decreed
victory there, and having naturally taken for himself the greater part of
the spoils, he turned his attention to Asia.
In the latter campaign the Egyptian troops took once more the route
through Coele-Syria, and if the expedition experienced here more
difficulties than on the banks of the Upper Nile, it was, nevertheless,
brought to an equally triumphant conclusion. Those of their adversaries
who had offered an obstinate resistance were transported into other lands,
and the rebel cities were either razed to the ground or given to the
flames: the inhabitants having taken refuge in the mountains, where they
were in danger of perishing from hunger, made supplications for peace,
which was granted to them on the usual conditions of doing homage and
paying tribute.*
We do not exactly know how far he penetrated into the country; the list of
the towns and nations over which he boasts of having triumphed contains,
along with names unknown to us, some already famous or soon to become so—Arvad,
Pibukhu, the Khâti, and possibly Alasia. The Haui-Nibu themselves must
have felt the effects of the campaign, for several of their chiefs
associated, doubtless, with the Phoenicians, presented themselves before
the Pharaoh at Thebes. Egypt was maintaining, therefore, its ascendency,
or at least appearing to maintain it in those regions where the kings of
the XVIIIth dynasty had ruled after the campaigns of Thûtmosis I.,
Thûtmosis III., and Amenothes II. Its influence, nevertheless, was not so
undisputed as in former days; not that the Egyptian soldiers were less
valiant, but owing to the fact that another power had risen up alongside
them whose armies were strong enough to encounter them on the field of
battle and to obtain a victory over them.
Beyond Naharaim, in the deep recesses of the Amanus and Taurus, there had
lived, for no one knows how many centuries, the rude and warlike tribes of
the Khâti, related not so, much to the Semites of the Syrian plain as to
the populations of doubtful race and language who occupied the upper
basins of the Halys and Euphrates.* The Chaldæan conquest had barely
touched them; the Egyptian campaign had not more effect, and Thûtmosis
III. himself, after having crossed their frontiers and sacked several of
their towns, made no serious pretence to reckon them among his subjects.
Their chiefs were accustomed, like their neighbours, to use, for
correspondence with other countries, the cuneiform mode of writing; they
had among them, therefore, for this purpose, a host of scribes,
interpreters, and official registrars of events, such as we find to have
accompanied the sovereigns of Assyria and Babylon.** These chiefs were
accustomed to send from time to time a present to the Pharaoh, which the
latter was pleased to regard as a tribute,*** or they would offer,
perhaps, one of their daughters in marriage to the king at Thebes, and
after the marriage show themselves anxious to maintain good faith with
their son-in-law.
They had, moreover, commercial relations with Egypt, and furnished it with
cattle, chariots, and those splendid Cappadocian horses whose breed was
celebrated down to the Greek period.* They were already, indeed, people of
consideration; their territory was so extensive that the contemporaries of
Thutmosis III. called them the Greater Khâti; and the epithet “vile,”
which the chancellors of the Pharaohs added to their name, only shows by
its virulence the impression which they had produced upon the mind of
their adversaries.**
Their type of face distinguishes them clearly from the nations
conterminous with them on the south. The Egyptian draughtsmen represented
them as squat and short in stature, though vigorous, strong-limbed, and
with broad and full shoulders in youth, but as inclined frequently to
obesity in old age. The head is long and heavy, the forehead flattened,
the chin moderate in size, the nose prominent, the eyebrows and cheeks
projecting, the eyes small, oblique, and deep-set, the mouth fleshy, and
usually framed in by two deep wrinkles; the flesh colour is a yellowish or
reddish white, but clearer than that of the Phoenicians or the Amurru.
Their ordinary costume consisted, sometimes of a shirt with short sleeves,
sometimes of a sort of loin-cloth, more or less ample according to the
rank of the individual wearing it, and bound round the waist by a belt. To
these they added a scanty mantle, red or blue, fringed like that of the
Chaldæans, which they passed over the left shoulder and brought back under
the right, so as to leave the latter exposed. They wore shoes with thick
soles, turning up distinctly at the toes,* and they encased their hands in
gloves, reaching halfway up the arm.
They shaved off both moustache and beard, but gave free growth to their
hair, which they divided into two or three locks, and allowed to fall upon
their backs and breasts. The king’s head-dress, which was distinctive of
royalty, was a tall pointed hat, resembling to some extent the white crown
of the Pharaohs. The dress of the people, taken all together, was of
better and thicker material than that of the Syrians or Egyptians. The
mountains and elevated plateaus which they inhabited were subject to
extraordinary vicissitudes of heat and cold. If the summer burnt up
everything, the winter reigned here with an extreme rigour, and dragged on
for months: clothing and footgear had to be seen to, if the snow and the
icy winds of December were to be resisted. The character of their towns,
and the domestic life of their nobles and the common people, can only be
guessed at. Some, at least, of the peasants must have sheltered themselves
in villages half underground, similar to those which are still to be found
in this region. The town-folk and the nobles had adopted for the most part
the Chaldæan or Egyptian manners and customs in use among the Semites of
Syria. As to their religion, they reverenced a number of secondary deities
who had their abode in the tempest, in the clouds, the sea, the rivers,
the springs, the mountains, and the forests. Above this crowd there were
several sovereign divinities of the thunder or the air, sun-gods and
moon-gods, of which the chief was called Khâti, and was considered to be
the father of the nation. They ascribed to all their deities a warlike and
savage character. The Egyptians pictured some of them as a kind of Râ,*
others as representing Sit, or rather Sûtkhû, that patron of the Hyksôs
which was identified by them with Sit: every town had its tutelary heroes,
of whom they were accustomed to speak as if of its Sûtkhû—Sûtkhû of
Paliqa, Sûtkhû of Khissapa, Sûtkhû of Sarsu, Sûtkhû of Salpina. The
goddesses in their eyes also became Astartés, and this one fact suggests
that these deities were, like their Phoenician and Canaanite sisters, of a
double nature—in one aspect chaste, fierce, and warlike, and in
another lascivious and pacific. One god was called Mauru, another Targu,
others Qaui and Khepa.**
Tishubu, the Rammân of the Assyrians, was doubtless lord of the tempest
and of the atmosphere; Shausbe answered to Shala and to Ishtar the queen
of love;* but we are frequently in ignorance as to the Assyrian and Greek
inscriptions. Kheba, Khepa, Khîpa, is said to be a denomination of Rammân;
we find it in the names of the princesses Tadu-khîpa, Gilu-khîpa,
Puu-khîpa.
The majority of them, both male and female, were of gigantic stature, and
were arrayed in the vesture of earthly kings and queens: they brandished
their arms, displayed the insignia of their authority, such as a flower or
bunch of grapes, and while receiving the offerings of the people were
seated on a chair before an altar, or stood each on the animal
representing him—such as a lion, a stag, or wild goat. The temples
of their towns have disappeared, but they could never have been, it would
seem, either-large or magnificent: the favourite places of worship were
the tops of mountains, in the vicinity of springs, or the depths of
mysterious grottoes, where the deity revealed himself to his priests, and
received the faithful at the solemn festivals celebrated several times a
year.*
We know as little about their political organisation as about their
religion.* We may believe, however, that it was feudal in character, and
that every clan had its hereditary chief and its proper gods: the clans
collectively rendered obedience to a common king, whose effective
authority depended upon his character and age.**
The various contingents which the sovereign could collect together and
lead would, if he were an incapable general, be of little avail against
the well-officered and veteran troops of Egypt. Still they were not to be
despised, and contained the elements of an excellent army, superior both
in quality and quantity to any which Syria had ever been able to put into
the field. The infantry consisted of a limited number of archers or
slingers. They had usually neither shield nor cuirass, but merely, in the
way of protective armour, a padded head-dress, ornamented with a tuft. The
bulk of the army carried short lances and broad-bladed choppers, or more
generally, short thin-handled swords with flat two-edged blades, very
broad at the base and terminating in a point.
Their mode of attack was in close phalanxes, whose shock must have been
hard to bear, for the soldiers forming them were in part at least
recruited from among the strong and hardy mountaineers of the Taurus. The
chariotry comprised the nobles and the élite of the army, but it
was differently constituted from that of the Egyptians, and employed other
tactics.
The Hittite chariots were heavier, and the framework, instead of being a
mere skeleton, was pannelled on the sides, the contour at the top being
sometimes quite square, at other times rudely curved. It was bound
together in the front by two disks of metal, and strengthened by strips of
copper or bronze, which were sometimes plated with silver or gold. There
were no quiver-cases as in Egyptian chariots, for the Hittite charioteers
rarely resorted to the bow and arrow. The occupants of a chariot were
three in number—the driver; the shield-bearer, whose office it was
to protect his companions by means of a shield, sometimes of a round form,
with a segment taken out on each side, and sometimes square; and finally,
the warrior, with his sword and lance. The Hittite princes whom fortune
had brought into relations with Thûtmosîs III. and Amenôthes II. were not
able to avail themselves properly of the latent forces around them. It was
owing probably to the feebleness of their character or to the turbulence
of their barons that we must ascribe the poor part they played in the
revolutions of the Eastern world at this time. The establishment of a
strong military power on their southern frontier was certain, moreover, to
be anything but pleasing to them; if they preferred not to risk everything
by entering into a great struggle with the invaders, they could, without
compromising themselves too much, harass them with sudden attacks, and
intrigue in an underhand way against them to their own profit. Pharaoh’s
generals were accustomed to punish, one after the other, these bands of
invading tribes, and the sculptors duly recorded their names on a pylon at
Thebes among those of the conquered nations, but these disasters had
little effect in restraining the Hittites. They continued, in spite of
them, to march southward, and the letters from the Egyptian governors
record their progress year after year. They had a hand in all the plots
which were being hatched among the Syrians, and all the disaffected who
wished to be free from foreign oppression—such as Abdashirti and his
son Azîru—addressed themselves to them for help in the way of
chariots and men.*
Even inthe time of Amenôfches III. they had endeavoured to reap profit
from the discords of Mitanni, and had asserted their supremacy over it.
Dushratta, however, was able to defeat one of their chiefs. Repulsed on
this side, they fell back upon that part of Naharaim lying between the
Euphrates and Orontes, and made themselves masters of one town after
another in spite of the despairing appeals of the conquered to the Theban
king. From the accession of Khûniatonû, they set to work to annex the
countries of Nukhassi, Nîi, Tunipa, and Zinzauru: they looked with
covetous eyes upon Phoenicia, and were already menacing Coele-Syria. The
religious confusion in Egypt under Tûtankhamon and Aî left them a free
field for their ambitions, and when Harmhabî ventured to cross to the east
of the isthmus, he found them definitely installed in the region
stretching from the Mediterranean and the Lebanon to the Euphrates. Their
then reigning prince, Sapalulu, appeared to have been the founder of a new
dynasty: he united the forces of the country in a solid body, and was
within a little of making a single state out of all Northern Syria.*
* Sapalulu has the same name as that wo meet with later on in the country
of Patin, in the time of Salmanasar III., viz. Sapalulme. It is known to
us only from a treaty with the Khâti, which makes him coeval with Ramses
I.: it was with him probably that Harmhabî had to deal in his Syrian
campaigns. The limit of his empire towards the south is gathered in a
measure from what we know of the wars of Seti I. with the Khâti.
All Naharaim had submitted to him: Zahi, Alasia, and the Amurru had passed
under his government from that of the Pharaohs; Carchemish, Tunipa, Nîi,
Hamath, figured among his royal cities, and Qodshû was the defence of his
southern frontier. His progress towards the east was not less
considerable. Mitanni, Arzapi, and the principalities of the Euphrates as
far as the Balikh, possibly even to the Khabur,* paid him homage: beyond
this, Assyria and Chaldæa barred his way. Here, as on his other frontiers,
fortune brought him face to face with the most formidable powers of the
Asiatic world.
The latter prince was obliged to capture Qodshû, and to conquer the people
of the Lebanon. Had he sufficient forces at his disposal to triumph over
them, or only enough to hold his ground? Both hypotheses could have been
answered in the affirmative if each one of these great powers, confiding
in its own resources, had attacked him separately. The Amorites, the
people of Zahi, Alasia, and Naharaim, together with recruits from Hittite
tribes, would then have put him in a position to resist, and even to carry
off victory with a high hand in the final struggle. But an alliance
between Assyria or Babylon and Thebes was always possible. There had been
such things before, in the time of Thut-mosis IV. and in that of Amenôthes
III., but they were lukewarm agreements, and their effect was not much to
boast of, for the two parties to the covenant had then no common enemy to
deal with, and their mutual interests were not, therefore, bound up with
their united action. The circumstances were very different now. The rapid
growth of a nascent kingdom, the restless spirit of its people, its
trespasses on domains in which the older powers had been accustomed to
hold the upper hand,—did not all this tend to transform the
convention, more commercial than military, with which up to this time they
had been content, into an offensive and defensive treaty? If they decided
to act in concert, how could Sapalulu or his successors, seeing that he
was obliged to defend himself on two frontiers at the same moment, muster
sufficient resources to withstand the double assault? The Hittites, as we
know them more especially from the hieroglyphic inscriptions, might be
regarded as the lords only of Northern Syria, and their power be measured
merely by the extent of territory which they occupied to the south of the
Taurus and on the two banks of the Middle Euphrates. But this does not by
any means represent the real facts. This was but the half of their empire;
the rest extended to the westward and northward, beyond the mountains into
that region, known afterwards as Asia Minor, in which Egyptian tradition
had from ancient times confused some twenty nations under the common vague
epithet of Haûî-nîbû. Official language still employed it as a convenient
and comprehensive term, but the voyages of the Phoenicians and the travels
of the “Royal Messengers,” as well as, probably, the maritime commerce of
the merchants of the Delta, had taught the scribes for more than a century
and a half to make distinctions among these nations which they had
previously summed up in one. The Lufeu* were to be found there, as well as
the Danauna,** the Shardana,*** and others besides, who lay behind one
another on the coast. Of the second line of populations behind the region
of the coast tribes, we have up to the present no means of knowing
anything with certainty. Asia Minor, furthermore, is divided into two
regions, so distinctly separated by nature as well as by races that one
would be almost inclined to regard them as two countries foreign to each
other.
In its centre it consists of a well-defined undulating plain, having a
gentle slope towards the Black Sea, and of the shape of a kind of convex
trapezium, clearly bounded towards the north by the highlands of Pontus,
and on the south by the tortuous chain of the Taurus. A line of low hills
fringes the country on the west, from the Olympus of Mysia to the Taurus
of Pisidia. Towards the east it is bounded by broken chains of mountains
of unequal height, to which the name Anti-Taurus is not very appropriately
applied. An immense volcanic cone, Mount Argseus, looks down from a height
of some 13,000 feet over the wide isthmus which connects the country with
the lands of the Euphrates. This volcano is now extinct, but it still
preserved in old days something of its languishing energy, throwing out
flames at intervals above the sacred forests which clothed its slopes. The
rivers having their sources in the region just described, have not all
succeeded in piercing the obstacles which separate them from the sea, but
the Pyramus and the Sarus find their way into the Mediterranean and the
Iris, Halys and Sangarios into the Euxine. The others flow into the
lowlands, forming meres, marshes, and lakes of fluctuating extent. The
largest of these lakes, called Tatta, is salt, and its superficial extent
varies with the season. In brief, the plateau of this region is nothing
but an extension of the highlands of Central Asia, and has the same
vegetation, fauna, and climate, the same extremes of temperature, the same
aridity, and the same wretched and poverty-stricken character as the
latter. The maritime portions are of an entirely different aspect.
The western coast which stretches into the Ægean is furrowed by deep
valleys, opening out as they reach the sea, and the rivers—the
Caicus, the Hermos, the Cayster, and Meander—which flow through them
are effective makers of soil, bringing down with them, as they do, a
continual supply of alluvium, which, deposited at their mouths, causes the
land to encroach there upon the sea. The littoral is penetrated here and
there by deep creeks, and is fringed with beautiful islands—Lesbos,
Chios, Samos, Cos, Rhodes—of which the majority are near enough to
the continent to act as defences of the seaboard, and to guard the mouths
of the rivers, while they are far enough away to be secure from the
effects of any violent disturbances which might arise in the mainland. The
Cyclades, distributed in two lines, are scattered, as it were, at hazard
between Asia and Europe, like great blocks which have fallen around the
piers of a broken bridge. The passage from one to the other is an easy
matter, and owing to them, the sea rather serves to bring together the two
continents than to divide them. Two groups of heights, imperfectly
connected with the central plateau, tower above the Ægean slope—wooded
Ida on the north, veiled in cloud, rich in the flocks and herds upon its
sides, and in the metals within its bosom; and on the south, the volcanic
bastions of Lycia, where tradition was wont to place the fire-breathing
Chimaera. A rocky and irregularly broken coast stretches to the west of
Lycia, in a line almost parallel with the Taurus, through which, at
intervals, torrents leaping from the heights make their way into the sea.
At the extreme eastern point of the coast, almost at the angle where the
Cilician littoral meets that of Syria, the Pyramus and the Sarus have
brought down between them sufficient material to form an alluvial plain,
which the classical geographers designated by the name of the Level
Cilicia, to distinguish it from the rough region of the interior, Gilicia
Trachea.
The populations dwelling in this peninsula belong to very varied races. On
the south and south-west certain Semites had found an abode—the
mysterious inhabitants of Solyma, and especially the Phoenicians in their
scattered trading-stations. On the north-east, beside the Khâti,
distributed throughout the valleys of the Anti-Taurus, between the
Euphrates and Mount Argseus, there were tribes allied to the Khâti*—possibly
at this time the Tabal and the Mushkâ—and, on the shores of the
Black Sea, those workers in metal, which, following the Greeks, we may
call, for want of a better designation, the Chalybes.
We are at a loss to know the distribution of tribes in the centre and in
the north-west, but the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, we may rest assured,
never formed an ethnographical frontier. The continents on either side of
them appear at this point to form the banks of a river, or the two slopes
of a single valley, whose bottom lies buried beneath the waters. The
barbarians of the Balkans had forced their way across at several points.
Dardanians were to be encountered in the neighbourhood of Mount Ida, as
well as on the banks of the Axios, from early times, and the Kebrenes of
Macedonia had colonised a district of the Troad near Ilion, while the
great nation of the Mysians had issued, like them, from the European
populations of the Hebrus and the Strymon. The hero Dardanos, according to
legend, had at first founded, under the auspices of the Idasan Zeus, the
town of Dardania; and afterwards a portion of his progeny followed the
course of the Scamander, and entrenched themselves upon a precipitous
hill, from the top of which they could look far and wide over the plain
and sea. The most ancient Ilion, at first a village, abandoned on more
than one occasion in the course of centuries, was rebuilt and transformed,
earlier than the XVth century before Christ, into an important citadel,
the capital of a warlike and prosperous kingdom. The ruins on the spot
prove the existence of a primitive civilization analogous to that of the
islands of the Archipelago before the arrival of the Phoenician
navigators. We find that among both, at the outset, flint and bone, clay,
baked and unbaked, formed the only materials for their utensils and
furniture; metals were afterwards introduced, and we can trace their
progressive employment to the gradual exclusion of the older implements.
These ancient Trojans used copper, and we encounter only rarely a kind of
bronze, in which the proportion of tin was too slight to give the
requisite hardness to the alloy, and we find still fewer examples of iron
and lead. They were fairly adroit workers in silver, electrum, and
especially in gold. The amulets, cups, necklaces, and jewellery discovered
in their tombs or in the ruins of their houses, are sometimes of a not
ungraceful form. Their pottery was made by hand, and was not painted or
varnished, but they often gave to it a fine lustre by means of a
stone-polisher. Other peoples of uncertain origin, but who had attained a
civilization as advanced as that of the Trojans, were the Maeonians, the
Leleges, and the Carians who had their abode to the south of Troy and of
the Mysians. The Maeonians held sway in the fertile valleys of the Hermos,
Cayster, and Maaander. They were divided into several branches, such as
the Lydians, the Tyrseni, the Torrhebi, and the Shardana, but their most
ancient traditions looked back with pride to a flourishing state to which,
as they alleged, they had all belonged long ago on the slopes of Mount
Sipylos, between the valley of the Hermos and the Gulf of Smyrna. The
traditional capital of this kingdom was Magnesia, the most ancient of
cities, the residence of Tantalus, the father of Niobe and the Pelopidae.
The Leleges rise up before us from many points at the same time, but
always connected with the most ancient memories of Greece and Asia. The
majority of the strongholds on the Trojan coast belonged to them—such
as Antandros and Gargara—and Pedasos on the Satniois boasted of
having been one of their colonies, while several other towns of the same
name, but very distant from each other, enable us to form some idea of the
extent of their migrations.*
In the time of Strabo, ruined tombs and deserted sites of cities were
shown in Caria which the natives regarded as Lelegia—that is, abode
of the Leleges. The Carians were dominant in the southern angle of the
peninsula and in the Ægean Islands; and the Lycians lay next them on the
east, and were sometimes confounded with them. One of the most powerful
tribes of the Carians, the Tremilse, were in the eyes of the Greeks hardly
to be separated from the mountainous district which they knew as Lycia
proper; while other tribes extended as far as the Halys. A district of the
Troad, to the south of Mount Ida, was called Lycia, and there was a
Lycaonia on both sides of the Middle Taurus; while Attica had its Lycia,
and Crete its Lycians. These three nations—the Lycians, Carians, and
Leleges—were so entangled together from their origin, that no one
would venture now to trace the lines of demarcation between them, and we
are often obliged to apply to them collectively what can be appropriately
ascribed to only one.
How far the Hittite power extended in the first years of its expansion we
have now hardly the means of knowing. It would appear that it took within
its scope, on the south-west, the Cilician plain, and the undulating
region bordering on it—that of Qodi: the prince of the latter
district, if not his vassal, was at least the colleague of the King of the
Khâti, and he acted in concert with him in peace as well as in war.*
It embraced also the upper basin of the Pyramos and its affluents, as well
as the regions situated between the Euphrates and the Halys, but its
frontier in this direction was continually fluctuating, and our researches
fail to follow it. It is somewhat probable that it extended considerably
towards the west and north-west in the direction of the Ægean Sea. The
forests and escarpments of Lycaonia, and the desolate steppes of the
central plateau, have always presented a barrier difficult to surmount by
any invader from the east. If the Khâti at that period attacked it in
front, or by a flank movement, the assault must rather have been of the
nature of a hurried reconnaissance, or of a raid, than of a methodically
conducted campaign.*
They must have preferred to obtain possession of the valleys of the
Thermodon and the Iris, which were rich in mineral wealth, and from which
they could have secured an inexhaustible revenue. The extraction and
working of metals in this region had attracted thither from time
immemorial merchants from neighbouring and distant countries—at
first from the south to supply the needs of Syria, Chaldæa, and Egypt,
then from the west for the necessities of the countries on the Ægean. The
roads, which, starting from the archipelago on the one hand, or the
Euphrates on the other, met at this point, fell naturally into one, and
thus formed a continuous route, along which the caravans of commerce, as
well as warlike expeditions, might henceforward pass. Starting from the
cultivated regions of Mæonia, the road proceeded up the valley of the
Hermos from west to east; then, scaling the heights of the central plateau
and taking a direction more and more to the north-east, it reached the
fords of the Halys. Crossing this river twice—for the first time at
a point about two-thirds the length of its course, and for the second at a
short distance from its source—it made an abrupt turn towards the
Taurus, and joined, at Melitene, the routes leading to the Upper Tigris,
to Nisibis, to Singara, and to Old Assur, and connecting further down
beyond the mountainous region, under the walls of Carchemish, with the
roads which led to the Nile and to the river-side cities on the Persian
Gulf.*
There were other and shorter routes, if we think only of the number of
miles, from the Hermos in Pisidia or Lycaonia, across the central steppe
and through the Cilician Gates, to the meeting of the ways at Carchemish;
but they led through wretched regions, without industries, almost without
tillage, and inhospitable alike to man and beast, and they were ventured
on only by those who aimed at trafficking among the populations who lived
in their neighbourhood. The Khâti, from the time even when they were
enclosed among the fastnesses of the Taurus, had within their control the
most important section of the great land route which served to maintain
regular relations between the ancient kingdoms of the east and the rising
states of the Ægean, and whosoever would pass through their country had to
pay them toll. The conquest of Naharaim, in giving them control of a new
section, placed almost at their discretion the whole traffic between
Chaldæa and Egypt. From the time of Thûtmosis III. caravans employed in
this traffic accomplished the greater part of their journey in territories
depending upon Babylon, Assyria, or Memphis, and enjoyed thus a relative
security; the terror of the Pharaoh protected the travellers even when
they were no longer in his domains, and he saved them from the flagrant
exactions made upon them by princes who called themselves his brothers, or
were actually his vassals. But the time had now come when merchants had to
encounter, between Qodshu and the banks of the Khabur, a sovereign owing
no allegiance to any one, and who would tolerate no foreign interference
in his territory. From the outbreak of hostilities with the Khâti, Egypt
could communicate with the cities of the Lower Euphrates only by the Wadys
of the Arabian Desert, which were always dangerous and difficult for large
convoys; and its commercial relations with Chaldæa were practically
brought thus to a standstill, and, as a consequence, the manufactures
which fed this trade being reduced to a limited production, the fiscal
receipts arising from it experienced a sensible diminution. When peace was
restored, matters fell again into their old groove, with certain
reservations to the Khâti of some common privileges: Egypt, which had
formerly possessed these to her own advantage, now bore the burden of
them, and the indirect tribute which she paid in this manner to her rivals
furnished them with arms to fight her in case she should endeavour to free
herself from the imposition. All the semi-barbaric peoples of the
peninsula of Asia Minor were of an adventurous and warlike temperament.
They were always willing to set out on an expedition, under the leadership
of some chief of noble family or renowned for valour; sometimes by sea in
their light craft, which would bring them unexpectedly to the nearest
point of the Syrian coast, sometimes by land in companies of foot-soldiers
and charioteers. They were frequently fortunate enough to secure plenty of
booty, and return with it to their homes safe and sound; but as frequently
they would meet with reverses by falling into some ambuscade: in such a
case their conqueror would not put them to the sword or sell them as
slaves, but would promptly incorporate them into his army, thus making his
captives into his soldiers. The King of the Khâti was able to make use of
them without difficulty, for his empire was conterminous on the west and
north with some of their native lands, and he had often whole regiments of
them in his army—Mysians, Lycians, people of Augarît,* of Ilion,**
and of Pedasos.***
The revenue of the provinces taken from Egypt, and the products of his
tolls, furnished him with abundance of means for obtaining recruits from
among them.*
All these things contributed to make the power of the Khâti so
considerable, that Harmhabî, when he had once tested it, judged it prudent
not to join issues with them. He concluded with Sapalulu a treaty of peace
and friendship, which, leaving the two powers in possession respectively
of the territory each then occupied, gave legal sanction to the extension
of the sphere of the Khâti at the expense of Egypt.** Syria continued to
consist of two almost equal parts, stretching from Byblos to the sources
of the Jordan and Damascus: the northern portion, formerly tributary to
Egypt, became a Hittite possession; while the southern, consisting of
Phoenicia and Canaan,*** which the Pharaoh had held for a long time with a
more effective authority, and had more fully occupied, was retained for
Egypt.
This could have been but a provisional arrangement: if Thebes had not
altogether renounced the hope of repossessing some day the lost conquests
of Thûtmosis III., the Khâti, drawn by the same instinct which had urged
them to cross their frontiers towards the south, were not likely to be
content with less than the expulsion of the Egyptians from Syria, and the
absorption of the whole country into the Hittite dominion. Peace was
maintained during Harmhabî’s lifetime. We know nothing of Egyptian affairs
during the last years of his reign. His rule may have come to an end owing
to some court intrigue, or he may have had no male heir to follow him.*
Ramses, who succeeded him, did not belong to the royal line, or was only
remotely connected with it.**
He was already an old man when he ascended the throne, and we ought
perhaps to identify him with one or other of the Ramses who flourished
under the last Pharaohs of the XVIIIth dynasty, perhaps the one who
governed Thebes under Khûniatonû, or another, who began but never finished
his tomb in the hillside above Tel el-Amarna, in the burying-place of the
worshippers of the Disk.
He had held important offices under Harmhabî,* and had obtained in
marriage for his son Seti the hand of Tuîa, who, of all the royal family,
possessed the strongest rights to the crown.**
Ramses reigned only six or seven years, and associated Seti with himself
in the government from his second year. He undertook a short military
expedition into Ethiopia, and perhaps a raid into Syria; and we find
remains of his monuments in Nubia, at Bohani near Wady Haifa, and at
Thebes, in the temple of Amon.*
He displayed little activity, his advanced age preventing him from
entering on any serious undertaking: but his accession nevertheless marks
an important date in the history of Egypt. Although Harmhabî was distantly
connected with the line of the Ahmessides, it is difficult at the present
day to know what position to assign him in the Pharaonic lists: while some
regard him as the last of the XVIIIth dynasty, others prefer to place him
at the head of the XIXth. No such hesitation, however, exists with regard
to Ramses I., who was undoubtedly the founder of a new family. The old
familiar names of Thûtmosis and Amenôthes henceforward disappear from the
royal lists, and are replaced by others, such as Seti, Mînephtah, and,
especially, Ramses, which now figure in them for the first time. The
princes who bore these names showed themselves worthy successors of those
who had raised Egypt to the zenith of her power; like them they were
successful on the battle-field, and like them they devoted the best of the
spoil to building innumerable monuments. No sooner had Seti celebrated his
father’s obsequies, than he assembled his army and set out for war.
It would appear that Southern Syria was then in open revolt. “Word had
been brought to His Majesty: ‘The vile Shaûsû have plotted rebellion; the
chiefs of their tribes, assembled in one place on the confines of Kharû,
have been smitten with blindness and with the spirit of violence; every
one cutteth his neighbour’s throat.” * It was imperative to send succour to
the few tribes who remained faithful, to prevent them from succumbing to
the repeated attacks of the insurgents. Seti crossed the frontier at Zalu,
but instead of pursuing his way along the coast, he marched due east in
order to attack the Shaûsû in the very heart of the desert. The road ran
through wide wadys, tolerably well supplied with water, and the length of
the stages necessarily depended on the distances between the wells. This
route was one frequented in early times, and its security was ensured by a
number of fortresses and isolated towers built along it, such as “The
House of the Lion “—ta ait pa maû—near the pool of the
same name, the Migdol of the springs of Huzîna, the fortress of Uazît, the
Tower of the Brave, and the Migdol of Seti at the pools of Absakaba. The
Bedawîn, disconcerted by the rapidity of this movement, offered no serious
resistance. Their flocks were carried off, their trees cut down, their
harvests destroyed, and they surrendered their strongholds at discretion.
Pushing on from one halting-place to another, the conqueror soon reached
Babbîti, and finally Pakanâna.**
The latter town occupied a splendid position on the slope of a rocky hill,
close to a small lake, and defended the approaches to the vale of Hebron.
It surrendered at the first attack, and by its fall the Egyptians became
possessed of one of the richest provinces in the southern part of Kharû.
This result having been achieved, Seti took the caravan road to his left,
on the further side of Gaza, and pushed forward at full speed towards the
Hittite frontier.
It was probably unprotected by any troops, and the Hittite king was absent
in some other part of his empire. Seti pillaged the Amurru, seized Ianuâmu
and Qodshû by a sudden attack, marched in an oblique direction towards the
Mediterranean, forcing the inhabitants of the Lebanon to cut timber from
their mountains for the additions which he was premeditating in the temple
of the Theban Amon, and finally returned by the coast road, receiving, as
he passed through their territory, the homage of the Phoenicians. His
entry into Egypt was celebrated by solemn festivities. The nobles,
priests, and princes of both south and north hastened to meet him at the
bridge of Zalû, and welcomed, with their chants, both the king and the
troops of captives whom he was bringing back for the service of his father
Amon at Karnak. The delight of his subjects was but natural, since for
many years the Egyptians bad not witnessed such a triumph, and they no
doubt believed that the prosperous era of Thûtmosis III. was about to
return, and that the wealth of Naharaim would once more flow into Thebes
as of old. Their illusion was short-lived, for this initial victory was
followed by no other. Maurusaru, King of the Khâti, and subsequently his
son Mautallu, withstood the Pharaoh with such resolution that he was
forced to treat with them. A new alliance was concluded on the same
conditions as the old one, and the boundaries of the two kingdoms remained
the same as under Harmhabî, a proof that neither sovereign had gained any
advantage over his rival. Hence the campaign did not in any way restore
Egyptian supremacy, as had been hoped at the moment; it merely served to
strengthen her authority in those provinces which the Khâti had failed to
take from Egypt. The Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon had too many commercial
interests on the banks of the Nile to dream of breaking the slender tie
which held them to the Pharaoh, since independence, or submission to
another sovereign, might have ruined their trade. The Kharû and the
Bedawîn, vanquished wherever they had ventured to oppose the Pharaoh’s
troops, were less than ever capable of throwing off the Egyptian yoke.
Syria fell back into its former state. The local princes once more resumed
their intrigues and quarrels, varied at intervals by appeals to their
suzerain for justice or succour. The “Royal Messengers” appeared from time
to time with their escorts of archers and chariots to claim tribute, levy
taxes, to make peace between quarrelsome vassals, or, if the case required
it, to supersede some insubordinate chief by a governor of undoubted
loyalty; in fine, the entire administration of the empire was a
continuation of that of the preceding century. The peoples of Kûsh
meanwhile had remained quiet during the campaign in Syria, and on the
western frontier the Tihonû had suffered so severe a defeat that they were
not likely to recover from it for some time.* The bands of pirates,
Shardana and others, who infested the Delta, were hunted down, and the
prisoners taken from among them were incorporated into the royal guard.**
Seti, however, does not appear to have had a confirmed taste for war. He
showed energy when occasion required it, and he knew how to lead his
soldiers, as the expedition of his first year amply proved; but when the
necessity was over, he remained on the defensive, and made no further
attempt at conquest. By his own choice he was “the jackal who prowls about
the country to protect it,” rather than “the wizard lion marauding abroad
by hidden paths,” * and Egypt enjoyed a profound peace in consequence of
his ceaseless vigilance.
A peaceful policy of this kind did not, of course, produce the amount of
spoil and the endless relays of captives which had enabled his
predecessors to raise temples and live in great luxury without
overburdening their subjects with taxes. Seti was, therefore, the more
anxious to do all in his power to develop the internal wealth of the
country. The mining colonies of the Sinaitic Peninsula had never ceased
working since operations had been resumed there under Hâtshopsîtû and
Thûtmosis III., but the output had lessened during the troubles under the
heretic kings. Seti sent inspectors thither, and endeavoured to stimulate
the workmen to their former activity, but apparently with no great
success. We are not able to ascertain if he continued the revival of trade
with Pûanît inaugurated by Harmhabî; but at any rate he concentrated his
attention on the regions bordering the Red Sea and the gold-mines which
they contained. Those of Btbaï, which had been worked as early as the
XIIth dynasty, did not yield as much as they had done formerly; not that
they were exhausted, but owing to the lack of water in their neighbourhood
and along the routes leading to them, they were nearly deserted. It was
well known that they contained great wealth, but operations could not be
carried on, as the workmen were in danger of dying of thirst. Seti
despatched engineers to the spot to explore the surrounding wadys, to
clear the ancient cisterns or cut others, and to establish victualling
stations at regular intervals for the use of merchants supplying the gangs
of miners with commodities. These stations generally consisted of square
or rectangular enclosures, built of stones without mortar, and capable of
resisting a prolonged attack. The entrance was by a narrow doorway of
stone slabs, and in the interior were a few huts and one or two reservoirs
for catching rain or storing the water of neighbouring springs. Sometimes
a chapel was built close at hand, consecrated to the divinities of the
desert, or to their compeers, Mînû of Coptos, Horus, Maut, or Isis. One of
these, founded by Seti, still exists near the modern town of Redesieh, at
the entrance to one of the valleys which furrow this gold region.
It is built against, and partly excavated in, a wall of rock, the face of
which has been roughly squared, and it is entered through a four-columned
portico, giving access to two dark chambers, whose walls are covered with
scenes of adoration and a lengthy inscription. In this latter the
sovereign relates how, in the IXth year of his reign, he was moved to
inspect the roads of the desert; he completed the work in honour of
Amon-Râ, of Phtah of Memphis, and of Harmakhis, and he states that
travellers were at a loss to express their gratitude and thanks for what
he had done. “They repeated from mouth to mouth: ‘May Amon give him an
endless existence, and may he prolong for him the length of eternity! O ye
gods of fountains, attribute to him your life, for he has rendered back to
us accessible roads, and he has opened that which was closed to us.
Henceforth we can take our way in peace, and reach our destination alive;
now that the difficult paths are open and the road has become good, gold
can be brought back, as our lord and master has commanded.’” Plans were
drawn on papyrus of the configuration of the district, of the beds of
precious metal, and of the position of the stations.
One of these plans has come down to us, in which the districts are
coloured bright red, the mountains dull ochre, the roads dotted over with
footmarks to show the direction to be taken, while the superscriptions
give the local names, and inform us that the map represents the Bukhni
mountain and a fortress and stele of Seti. The whole thing is executed in
a rough and naive manner, with an almost childish minuteness which
provokes a smile; we should, however, not despise it, for it is the oldest
map in the world.
The gold extracted from these regions, together with that brought from
Ethiopia, and, better still, the regular payment of taxes and custom-house
duties, went to make up for the lack of foreign spoil all the more
opportunely, for, although the sovereign did not share the military
enthusiasm of Thûtmosis III., he had inherited from him the passion for
expensive temple-building.
He did not neglect Nubia in this respect, but repaired several of the
monuments at which the XVIIIth dynasty had worked—among others,
Kalabsheh, Dakkeh, and Amada, besides founding a temple at Sesebi, of
which three columns are still standing.*
The outline of these columns is not graceful, and the decoration of them
is very poor, for art degenerated rapidly in these distant provinces of
the empire, and only succeeded in maintaining its vigour and spirit in the
immediate neighbourhood of the Pharaoh, as at Abydos, Memphis, and above
all at Thebes. Seti’s predecessor Ramses, desirous of obliterating all
traces of the misfortunes lately brought about by the changes effected by
the heretic kings, had contemplated building at Karnak, in front of the
pylon of Amenôthes III., an enormous hall for the ceremonies connected
with the cult of Amon, where the immense numbers of priests and
worshippers at festival times could be accommodated without inconvenience.
It devolved on Seti to carry out what had been merely an ambitious dream
of his father’s.*
We long to know who was the architect possessed of such confidence in his
powers that he ventured to design, and was able to carry out, this almost
superhuman undertaking. His name would be held up to almost universal
admiration beside those of the greatest masters that we are familiar with,
for no one in Greece or Italy has left us any work which surpasses it, or
which with such simple means could produce a similar impression of
boldness and immensity. It is almost impossible to convey by words to
those who have not seen it, the impression which it makes on the
spectator. Failing description, the dimensions speak for themselves. The
hall measures one hundred and sixty-two feet in length, by three hundred
and twenty-five in breadth. A row of twelve columns, the largest ever
placed inside a building, runs up the centre, having capitals in the form
of inverted bells.
One hundred and twenty-two columns with lotiform capitals fill the aisles,
in rows of nine each. The roof of the central bay is seventy-four feet
above the ground, and the cornice of the two towers rises sixty-three feet
higher. The building was dimly lighted from the roof of the central
colonnade by means of stone gratings, through which the air and the sun’s
rays entered sparingly. The daylight, as it penetrated into the hall, was
rendered more and more obscure by the rows of columns; indeed, at the
further end a perpetual twilight must have reigned, pierced by narrow
shafts of light falling from the ventilation holes which were placed at
intervals in the roof.
The whole building now lies open to the sky, and the sunshine which floods
it, pitilessly reveals the mutilations which it has suffered in the course
of ages; but the general effect, though less mysterious, is none the less
overwhelming. It is the only monument in which the first coup d’oil
surpasses the expectations of the spectator instead of disappointing him.
The size is immense, and we realise its immensity the more fully as we
search our memory in vain to find anything with which to compare it. Seti
may have entertained the project of building a replica of this hall
in Southern Thebes. Amenôthes III. had left his temple at Luxor
unfinished. The sanctuary and its surrounding buildings were used for
purposes of worship, but the court of the customary pylon was wanting, and
merely a thin wall concealed the mysteries from the sight of the vulgar.
Seti resolved to extend the building in a northerly direction, without
interfering with the thin screen which had satisfied his predecessors.
Starting from the entrance in this wall, he planned an avenue of giant
columns rivalling those of Karnak, which he destined to become the central
colonnade of a hypostyle hall as vast as that of the sister temple. Either
money or time was lacking to carry out his intention. He died before the
aisles on either side were even begun. At Abydos, however, he was more
successful. We do not know the reason of Seti’s particular affection for
this town; it is possible that his family held some fief there, or it may
be that he desired to show the peculiar estimation in which he held its
local god, and intended, by the homage that he lavished on him, to cause
the fact to be forgotten that he bore the name of Sit the accursed.
The king selected a favourable site for his temple to the south of the
town, on the slope of a sandhill bordering the canal, and he marked out in
the hardened soil a ground plan of considerable originality. The building
was approached through two pylons, the remains of which are now hidden
under the houses of Aarabat el-Madfuneh.
A fairly large courtyard, bordered by two crumbling walls, lies between
the second pylon and the temple façade, which was composed of a portico
resting on square pillars. Passing between these, we reach two halls
supported by-columns of graceful outline, beyond which are eight chapels
arranged in a line, side by side, in front of two chambers built in to the
hillside, and destined for the reception of Osiris. The holy of holies in
ordinary temples is surrounded by chambers of lesser importance, but here
it is concealed behind them. The building-material mainly employed here
was the white limestone of Tûrah, but of a most beautiful quality, which
lent itself to the execution of bas-reliefs of great delicacy, perhaps the
finest in ancient Egypt. The artists who carved and painted them belonged
to the Theban school, and while their subjects betray a remarkable
similarity to those of the monuments dedicated by Amenôthes III., the
execution surpasses them in freedom and perfection of modelling; we can,
in fact, trace in them the influence of the artists who furnished the
drawings for the scenes at Tel el-Amarna. They have represented the gods
and goddesses with the same type of profile as that of the king—a
type of face of much purity and gentleness, with its aquiline nose, its
decided mouth, almond-shaped eyes, and melancholy smile. When the
decoration of the temple was completed, Seti regarded the building as too
small for its divine inmate, and accordingly added to it a new wing, which
he built along the whole length of the southern wall; but he was unable to
finish it completely. Several parts of it are lined with religious
representations, but in others the subjects have been merely sketched out
in black ink with corrections in red, while elsewhere the walls are bare,
except for a few inscriptions, scribbled over them after an interval of
twenty centuries by the monks who turned the temple chambers into a
convent. This new wing was connected with the second hypostyle hall of the
original building by a passage, on one of the walls of which is a list of
seventy-five royal names, representing the ancestors of the sovereign
traced back to Mini. The whole temple must be regarded as a vast funerary
chapel, and no one who has studied the religion of Egypt can entertain a
doubt as to its purpose. Abydos was the place where the dead assembled
before passing into the other world. It was here, at the mouth of the
“Cleft,” that they received the provisions and offerings of their
relatives and friends who remained on this earth. As the dead flocked
hither from all quarters of the world, they collected round the tomb of
Osiris, and there waited till the moment came to embark on the Boat of the
Sun. Seti did not wish his soul to associate with those of the common
crowd of his vassals, and prepared this temple for himself, as a separate
resting-place, close to the mouth of Hades. After having dwelt within it
for a short time subsequent to his funeral, his soul could repair thither
whenever it desired, certain of always finding within it the incense and
the nourishment of which it stood in need.
Thebes possessed this king’s actual tomb. The chapel was at Qurnah, a
little to the north of the group of pyramids in which the Pharaohs of the
XIth dynasty lay side by side with those of the XIIIth and XVIIth. Ramses
had begun to build it, and Seti continued the work, dedicating it to the
cult of his father and of himself. Its pylon has altogether disappeared,
but the façade with lotus-bud columns is nearly perfect, together with
several of the chambers in front of the sanctuary. The decoration is as
carefully carried out and the execution as delicate as that in the work at
Abydos; we are tempted to believe from one or two examples of it that the
same hands have worked at both buildings.
The rock-cut tomb is some distance away up in the mountain, but not in the
same ravine as that in which Amenôthes III., Aï, and probably Tûtankhamon
and Harmhabî, are buried.*
There then existed, behind the rock amphitheatre of Deîr el-Baharî, a kind
of enclosed basin, which could be reached from the plain only by dangerous
paths above the temple of Hâtshopsîtû. This basin is divided into two
parts, one of which runs in a south-easterly direction, while the other
trends to the south-west, and is subdivided into minor branches. To the
east rises a barren peak, the outline of which is not unlike that of the
step-pyramid of Saqqâra, reproduced on a colossal scale. No spot could be
more appropriate to serve as a cemetery for a family of kings. The
difficulty of reaching it and of conveying thither the heavy accessories
and of providing for the endless processions of the Pharaonic funerals,
prevented any attempt being made to cut tombs in it during the Ancient and
Middle Empires. About the beginning of the XIXth dynasty, however, some
engineers, in search of suitable burial sites, at length noticed that this
basin was only separated from the wady issuing to the north of Qurnah by a
rocky barrier barely five hundred cubits in width. This presented no
formidable obstacle to such skilful engineers as the Egyptians. They cut a
trench into the living rock some fifty or sixty cubits in depth, at the
bottom of which they tunnelled a narrow passage giving access to the
valley.*
It is not known whether this herculean work was accomplished during the
reign of Harnhabî or in that of Ramses I. The latter was the first of the
Pharaohs to honour the spot by his presence. His tomb is simple, almost
coarse in its workmanship, and comprises a gentle inclined passage, a
vault and a sarcophagus of rough stone. That of Seti, on the contrary, is
a veritable palace, extending to a distance of 325 feet into the
mountain-side. It is entered by a wide and lofty door, which opens on to a
staircase of twenty-seven steps, leading to an inclined corridor; other
staircases of shallow steps follow with their landings; then come
successively a hypostyle hall, and, at the extreme end, a vaulted chamber,
all of which are decorated with mysterious scenes and covered with
inscriptions. This is, however, but the first storey, containing the
antechambers of the dead, but not their living-rooms. A passage and steps,
concealed under a slab to the left of the hall, lead to the real vault,
which held the mummy and its funerary furniture. As we penetrate further
and further by the light of torches into this subterranean abode, we see
that the walls are covered with pictures and formulae, setting forth the
voyages of the soul through the twelve hours of the night, its trials, its
judgment, its reception by the departed, and its apotheosis—all
depicted on the rock with the same perfection as that which characterises
the bas-reliefs on the finest slabs of Tûrah stone at Qurnah and Abydos. A
gallery leading out of the last of these chambers extends a few feet
further and then stops abruptly; the engineers had contemplated the
excavation of a third storey to the tomb, when the death of their master
obliged them to suspend their task. The king’s sarcophagus consists of a
block of alabaster, hollowed out, polished, and carved with figures and
hieroglyphs, with all the minuteness which we associate with the cutting
of a gem.
It contained a wooden coffin, shaped to the human figure and painted
white, the features picked out in black, and enamel eyes inserted in a
mounting of bronze. The mummy is that of a thin elderly man, well
preserved; the face was covered by a mask made of linen smeared with
pitch, but when this was raised by means of a chisel, the fine kingly head
was exposed to view. It was a masterpiece of the art of the embalmer, and
the expression of the face was that of one who had only a few hours
previously breathed his last. Death had slightly drawn the nostrils and
contracted the lips, the pressure of the bandages had flattened the nose a
little, and the skin was darkened by the pitch; but a calm and gentle
smile still played over the mouth, and the half-opened eyelids allowed a
glimpse to be seen from under their lashes of an apparently moist and
glistening line,—the reflection from the white porcelain eyes let in
to the orbit at the time of burial.
Seti had had several children by his wife Tuîa, and the eldest had already
reached manhood when his father ascended the throne, for he had
accompanied him on his Syrian campaign. The young prince died, however,
soon after his return, and his right to the crown devolved on his younger
brother, who, like his grandfather, bore the name of Ramses. The prince
was still very young,* but Seti did not on that account delay enthroning
with great pomp this son who had a better right to the throne than
himself.
“From the time that I was in the egg,” Ramses writes later on, “the great
ones sniffed the earth before me; when I attained to the rank of eldest
son and heir upon the throne of Sibû, I dealt with affairs, I commanded as
chief the foot-soldiers and the chariots. My father having appeared before
the people, when I was but a very little boy in his arms, said to me: ‘I
shall have him crowned king, that I may see him in all his splendour while
I am still on this earth!’ The nobles of the court having drawn near to
place the pschent upon my head: ‘Place the diadem upon his forehead!’ said
he.” As Ramses increased in years, Seti delighted to confer upon him, one
after the other, the principal attributes of power; “while he was still
upon this earth, regulating everything in the land, defending its
frontiers, and watching over the welfare of its inhabitants, he cried:
‘Let him reign!’ because of the love he had for me.” Seti also chose for
him wives, beautiful “as are those of his palace,” and he gave him in
marriage his sisters Nofrîtari II. Mîmût and Isîtnofrît, who, like Ramses
himself, had claims to the throne. Ramses was allowed to attend the State
councils at the age of ten; he commanded armies, and he administered
justice under the direction of his father and his viziers. Seti, however,
although making use of his son’s youth and activity, did not in any sense
retire in his favour; if he permitted Ramses to adopt the insignia of
royalty—the cartouches, the pschent, the bulbous-shaped helmet, and
the various sceptres—he still remained to the day of his death the
principal State official, and he reckoned all the years of this dual
sovereignty as those of his sole reign.*
Ramses repulsed the incursions of the Tihonû, and put to the sword such of
their hordes as had ventured to invade Egyptian territory. He exercised
the functions of viceroy of Ethiopia, and had on several occasions to
chastise the pillaging negroes. We see him at Beît-Wally and at Abu Simbel
charging them in his chariot: in vain they flee in confusion before him;
their flight, however swift, cannot save them from captivity and
destruction.
He was engaged in Ethiopia when the death of Seti recalled him to Thebes.*
He at once returned to the capital, celebrated the king’s funeral
obsequies with suitable pomp, and after keeping the festival of Amon, set
out for the north in order to make his authority felt in that part of his
domains. He stopped on his way at Abydos to give the necessary orders for
completing the decoration of the principal chambers of the resting-place
built by his father, and chose a site some 320 feet to the north-west of
it for a similar Memnonium for himself. He granted cultivated fields and
meadows in the Thinite name for the maintenance of these two mausolea,
founded a college of priests and soothsayers in connexion with them, for
which he provided endowments, and also assigned them considerable fiefs in
all parts of the valley of the Nile. The Delta next occupied his
attention. The increasing importance of the Syrian provinces in the eyes
of Egypt, the growth of the Hittite monarchy, and the migrations of the
peoples of the Mediterranean, had obliged the last princes of the
preceding dynasty to reside more frequently at Memphis than Amenôthes I.
or Thûtmosis III. had done. Amenôthes III. had set to work to restore
certain cities which had been abandoned since the days of the Shepherds,
and Bubastis, Athribis, and perhaps Tanis, had, thanks to his efforts,
revived from their decayed condition. The Pharaohs, indeed, felt that at
Thebes they were too far removed from the battle-fields of Asia; distance
made it difficult for them to counteract the intrigues in which their
vassals in Kharû and the lords of Naharaim were perpetually implicated,
and a revolt which might have been easily anticipated or crushed had they
been advised of it within a few days, gained time to increase and extend
during the interval occupied by the couriers in travelling to and from the
capital. Ramses felt the importance of possessing a town close to the
Isthmus where he could reside in security, and he therefore built close to
Zalû, in a fertile and healthy locality, a stronghold to which he gave his
own name,* and of which the poets of the time have left us an enthusiastic
description. “It extends,” they say, “between Zahi and Egypt—and is
filled with provisions and victuals.—It resembles Hermonthis,—it
is strong like Memphis,—and the sun rises—and sets in it—so
that men quit their villages and establish themselves in its territory.”—“The
dwellers on the coasts bring conger eels and fish in homage,—they
pay it the tribute of their marshes.—The inhabitants don their
festal garments every day,—perfumed oil is on their heads and new
wigs;—they stand at their doors, their hands full of bunches of
flowers,—green branches from the village of Pihâthor,—garlands
of Pahûrû,—on the day when Pharaoh makes his entry.—Joy then
reigns and spreads, and nothing can stay it,—O Usirmarî-sotpûnirî,
thou who art Montû in the two lands,—Ramses-Mîamûn, the god.” The
town acted as an advance post, from whence the king could keep watch
against all intriguing adversaries,—whether on the banks of the
Orontes or the coast of the Mediterranean.
Nothing appeared for the moment to threaten the peace of the empire. The
Asiatic vassals had raised no disturbance on hearing of the king’s
accession, and Mautallu continued to observe the conditions of the treaty
which he had signed with Seti. Two military expeditions undertaken beyond
the isthmus in the IInd and IVth years of the new sovereign were
accomplished almost without fighting. He repressed by the way the
marauding Shaûsû, and on reaching the Nahr el-Kelb, which then formed the
northern frontier of his empire, he inscribed at the turn of the road, on
the rocks which overhang the mouth of the river, two triumphal stelæ in
which he related his successes.* Towards the end of his IVth year a
rebellion broke out among the Khâti, which caused a rupture of relations
between the two kingdoms and led to some irregular fighting. Khâtusaru, a
younger brother of Maurusaru, murdered the latter and made himself king in
his stead.** It is not certain whether the Egyptians took up arms against
him, or whether he judged it wise to oppose them in order to divert the
attention of his subjects from his crime.
At all events, he convoked his Syrian vassals and collected his
mercenaries; the whole of Naharaim, Khalupu, Carchemish, and Arvad sent
their quota, while bands of Dardanians, Mysians, Trojans, and Lycians,
together with the people of Pedasos and Girgasha,* furnished further
contingents, drawn from an area extending from the most distant coasts of
the Mediterranean to the mountains of Cilicia. Ramses, informed of the
enemy’s movement by his generals and the governors of places on the
frontier, resolved to anticipate the attack. He assembled an army almost
as incongruous in its component elements as that of his adversary: besides
Egyptians of unmixed race, divided into four corps bearing the names of
Amon, Phtah, Harmakhis and Sûtkhû, it contained Ethiopian auxiliaries,
Libyans, Mazaiu, and Shardana.**
When preparations were completed, the force crossed the canal at Zalû, on
the 9th of Payni in his Vth year, marched rapidly across Canaan till they
reached the valley of the Litâny, along which they took their way, and
then followed up that of the Orontes. They encamped for a few days at
Shabtuna, to the south-west of Qodshû,* in the midst of the Amorite
country, sending out scouts and endeavouring to discover the position of
the enemy, of whose movements they possessed but vague information.
Khâtusaru lay concealed in the wooded valleys of the Lebanon; he was kept
well posted by his spies, and only waited an opportunity to take the
field; as an occasion did not immediately present itself, he had recourse
to a ruse with which the generals of the time were familiar. Ramses, at
length uneasy at not falling in with the enemy, advanced to the south of
Shabtuna, where he endeavoured to obtain information from two Bedawîn.
“Our brethren,” said they, “who are the chiefs of the tribes united under
the vile Prince of Khâti, send us to give information to your Majesty: We
desire to serve the Pharaoh. We are deserting the vile Prince of the
Khâti; he is close to Khalupu (Aleppo), to the north of the city of
Tunipa, whither he has rapidly retired from fear of the Pharaoh.” This
story had every appearance of probability; and the distance—Khalupu
was at least forty leagues away—explained why the reconnoitring
parties of the Egyptians had not fallen in with any of the enemy. The
Pharaoh, with this information, could not decide whether to lay siege to
Qodshû and wait until the Hittites were forced to succour the town, or to
push on towards the Euphrates and there seek the engagement which his
adversary seemed anxious to avoid.
He chose the latter of the two alternatives. He sent forward the legions
of Anion, Phrâ, Phtah, and Sutkhu, which constituted the main body of his
troops, and prepared to follow them with his household chariotry. At the
very moment when this division was being effected, the Hittites, who had
been represented by the spies as being far distant, were secretly massing
their forces to the north-east of Qodshu, ready to make an attack upon the
Pharaoh’s flank as soon as he should set out on his march towards Khalupu.
The enemy had considerable forces at their disposal, and on the day of the
engagement they placed 18,000 to 20,000 picked soldiers in the field.*
Besides a well-disciplined infantry, they possessed 2500 to 3000 chariots,
containing, as was the Asiatic custom, three men in each.**
The Egyptian camp was not entirely broken up, when the scouts brought in
two spies whom they had seized—Asiatics in long blue robes arranged
diagonally over one shoulder, leaving the other bare. The king, who was
seated on his throne delivering his final commands, ordered them to be
beaten till the truth should be extracted from them. They at last
confessed that they had been despatched to watch the departure of the
Egyptians, and admitted that the enemy was concealed in ambush behind the
town. Ramses hastily called a council of war and laid the situation before
his generals, not without severely reprimanding them for the bad
organisation of the intelligence department. The officers excused
themselves as best they could, and threw the blame on the provincial
governors, who had not been able to discover what was going on. The king
cut short these useless recriminations, sent swift messengers to recall
the divisions which had started early that morning, and gave orders that
all those remaining in camp should hold themselves in readiness to attack.
The council were still deliberating when news was brought that the
Hittites were in sight.
Their first onslaught was so violent that they threw down one side of the
camp wall, and penetrated into the enclosure. Ramses charged them at the
head of his household troops. Eight times he engaged the chariotry which
threatened to surround him, and each time he broke their ranks. Once he
found himself alone with Manna, his shield-bearer, in the midst of a knot
of warriors who were bent on his destruction, and he escaped solely by his
coolness and bravery. The tame lion which accompanied him on his
expeditions did terrible work by his side, and felled many an Asiatic with
his teeth and claws.*
The soldiers, fired by the king’s example, stood their ground resolutely
during the long hours of the afternoon; at length, as night was drawing
on, the legions of Phrâ and Sûtkhû, who had hastily retraced their steps,
arrived on the scene of action. A large body of Khâfci, who were hemmed in
in that part of the camp which they had taken in the morning, were at once
killed or made prisoners, not a man of them escaping. Khâtusaru,
disconcerted by this sudden reinforcement of the enemy, beat a retreat,
and nightfall suspended the struggle. It was recommenced at dawn the
following morning with unabated fury, and terminated in the rout of the
confederates. Garbatusa, the shield-bearer of the Hittite prince, the
generals in command of his infantry and chariotry, and Khalupsaru, the
“writer of books,” fell during the action. The chariots, driven back to
the Orontes, rushed into the river in the hope of fording it, but in so
doing many lives were lost. Mazraîma, the Prince of Khâti’s brother,
reached the opposite bank in safety, but the Chief of Tonisa was drowned,
and the lord of Khalupu was dragged out of the water more dead than alive,
and had to be held head downwards to disgorge the water he had swallowed
before he could be restored to consciousness.
Khâtusaru himself was on the point of perishing, when the troops which had
been shut up in Qodshû, together with the inhabitants, made a general
sortie; the Egyptians were for a moment held in check, and the fugitives
meanwhile were able to enter the town. Either there was insufficient
provision for so many mouths, or the enemy had lost all heart from the
disaster; at any rate, further resistance appeared useless. The next
morning Khâtusaru sent to propose a truce or peace to the victorious
Pharaoh. The Egyptians had probably suffered at least as much as their
adversaries, and perhaps regarded the eventuality of a siege with no small
distaste; Ramses, therefore, accepted the offers made to him and prepared
to return to Egypt. The fame of his exploits had gone before him, and he
himself was not a little proud of the energy he had displayed on the day
of battle. His predecessors had always shown themselves to be skilful
generals and brave soldiers, but none of them had ever before borne, or
all but borne, single-handed the brunt of an attack. Ramses loaded his
shield-bearer Manna with rewards for having stood by him in the hour of
danger, and ordered abundant provender and sumptuous harness for the good
horses—“Strength-in-Thebaid” and “Nûrît the satisfied”—who had
drawn his chariot.*
He determined that the most characteristic episodes of the campaign—the
beating of the spies, the surprise of the camp, the king’s repeated
charges, the arrival of his veterans, the flight of the Syrians, and the
surrender of Qodshû—should be represented on the walls and pylons of
the temples. A poem in rhymed strophes in every case accompanies these
records of his glory, whether at Luxor, at the Eamesseum, at the Memnonium
of Abydos, or in the heart of Nubia at Abu Simbel. The author of the poem
must have been present during the campaign, or must have had the account
of it from the lips of his sovereign, for his work bears no traces of the
coldness of official reports, and a warlike strain runs through it from
one end to the other, so as still to invest it with life after a lapse of
more than thirty centuries.*
But little pains are bestowed on the introduction, and the poet does not
give free vent to his enthusiasm until the moment when he describes his
hero, left almost alone, charging the enemy in the sight of his followers.
The Pharaoh was surrounded by two thousand five hundred chariots, and his
retreat was cut off by the warriors of the “perverse” Khâti and of the
other nations who accompanied them—the peoples of Arvad, Mysia, and
Pedasos; each of their chariots contained three men, and the ranks were so
serried that they formed but one dense mass. “No other prince was with me,
no general officers, no one in command of the archers or chariots. My
foot-soldiers deserted me, my charioteers fled before the foe, and not one
of them stood firm beside me to fight against them.” Then said His
Majesty: “Who art thou, then, my father Amon? A father who forgets his
son? Or have I committed aught against thee? Have I not marched and halted
according to thy command? When he does not violate thy orders, the lord of
Egypt is indeed great, and he overthrows the barbarians in his path! What
are these Asiatics to thy heart? Amon will humiliate those who know not
the god. Have I not consecrated innumerable offerings to thee? Filling thy
holy dwelling-place with my prisoners, I build thee a temple for millions
of years, I lavish all my goods on thy storehouses, I offer thee the whole
world to enrich thy domains…. A miserable fate indeed awaits him who
sets himself against thy will, but happy is he who finds favour with thee
by deeds done for thee with a loving heart. I invoke thee, O my father
Amon! Here am I in the midst of people so numerous that it cannot be known
who are the nations joined together against me, and I am alone among them,
none other is with me. My many soldiers have forsaken me, none of my
charioteers looked towards me when I called them, not one of them heard my
voice when I cried to them. But I find that Amon is more to me than a
million soldiers, than a hundred thousand charioteers, than a myriad of
brothers or young sons, joined all together, for the number of men is as
nothing, Amon is greater than all of them. Each time I have accomplished
these things, Amon, by the counsel of thy mouth, as I do not transgress
thy orders, I rendered thee glory even to the ends of the earth.” So calm
an invocation in the thick of the battle would appear misplaced in the
mouth of an ordinary man, but Pharaoh was a god, and the son of a god, and
his actions and speeches cannot be measured by the same standard as that
of a common mortal. He was possessed by the religious spirit in the hour
of danger, and while his body continued to fight, his soul took wing to
the throne of Amon. He contemplates the lord of heaven face to face,
reminds him of the benefits which he had received from him, and summons
him to his aid with an imperiousness which betrays the sense of his own
divine origin. The expected help was not delayed. “While the voice
resounds in Hermonthis, Amon arises at my behest, he stretches out his
hand to me, and I cry out with joy when he hails me from behind: ‘Face to
face with thee, face to face with thee, Ramses Miamun, I am with thee! It
is I, thy father! My hand is with thee, and I am worth more to thee than
hundreds of thousands. I am the strong one who loves valour; I have beheld
in thee a courageous heart, and my heart is satisfied; my will is about to
be accomplished!’ I am like Montû; from the right I shoot with the dart,
from the left I seize the enemy. I am like Baal in his hour, before them;
I have encountered two thousand five hundred chariots, and as soon as I am
in their midst, they are overthrown before my mares. Not one of all these
people has found a hand wherewith to fight; their hearts sink within their
breasts, fear paralyses their limbs; they know not how to throw their
darts, they have no strength to hold their lances. I precipitate them into
the water like as the crocodile plunges therein; they are prostrate face
to the earth, one upon the other, and I slay in the midst of them, for I
have willed that not one should look behind him, nor that one should
return; he who falls rises not again.” This sudden descent of the god has,
even at the present day, an effect upon the reader, prepared though he is
by his education to consider it as a literary artifice; but on the
Egyptian, brought up to regard Amon with boundless reverence, its
influence was irresistible. The Prince of the Khâti, repulsed at the very
moment when he was certain of victory, “recoiled with terror. He sends
against the enemy the various chiefs, followed by their chariots and
skilled warriors,—the chiefs of Arvad, Lycia, and Ilion, the leaders
of the Lycians and Dardanians, the lords of Carchemish, of the
Girgashites, and of Khalupu; these allies of the Khâti, all together,
comprised three thousand chariots.” Their efforts, however, were in vain.
“I fell upon them like Montû, my hand devoured them in the space of a
moment, in the midst of them I hewed down and slew. They said one to
another: ‘This is no man who is amongst us; it is Sûtkhû the great
warrior, it is Baal incarnate! These are not human actions which he
accomplishes: alone, by himself, he repulses hundreds of thousands,
without leaders or men. Up, let us flee before him, let us seek to save
our lives, and let us breathe again!’” When at last, towards evening, the
army again rallies round the king, and finds the enemy completely
defeated, the men hang their heads with mingled shame and admiration as
the Pharaoh reproaches them: “What will the whole earth say when it is
known that you left me alone, and without any to succour me? that not a
prince, not a charioteer, not a captain of archers, was found to place his
hand in mine? I fought, I repulsed millions of people by myself alone.
‘Victory-in-Thebes’ and ‘Nûrît satisfied’ were my glorious horses; it was
they that I found under my hand when I was alone in the midst of the
quaking foe. I myself will cause them to take their food before me, each
day, when I shall be in my palace, for I was with them when I was in the
midst of the enemy, along with the Prince Manna my shield-bearer, and with
the officers of my house who accompanied me, and who are my witnesses for
the combat; these are those whom I was with. I have returned after a
victorious struggle, and I have smitten with my sword the assembled
multitudes.”
The ordeal was a terrible one for the Khâti; but when the first moment of
defeat was over, they again took courage and resumed the campaign. This
single effort had not exhausted their resources, and they rapidly filled
up the gaps which had been made in their ranks. The plains of Naharaim and
the mountains of Cilicia supplied them with fresh chariots and
foot-soldiers in the place of those they had lost, and bands of
mercenaries were furnished from the table-lands of Asia Minor, so that
when Ramses II. reappeared in Syria, he found himself confronted by a
completely fresh army. Khâtusaru, having profited by experience, did not
again attempt a general engagement, but contented himself with disputing
step by step the upper valleys of the Litany and Orontes. Meantime his
emissaries spread themselves over Phoenicia and Kharû, sowing the seeds of
rebellion, often only too successfully. In the king’s VIIIth year there
was a general rising in Galilee, and its towns—Galaput in the
hill-country of Bît-Aniti, Merorn, Shalama, Dapur, and Anamaîm*—had
to be reduced one after another.
Dapur was the hardest to carry. It crowned the top of a rocky eminence,
and was protected by a double wall, which followed the irregularities of
the hillside. It formed a rallying-point for a large force, which had to
be overcome in the open country before the investment of the town could be
attempted. The siege was at last brought to a conclusion, after a series
of skirmishes, and the town taken by scaling, four Egyptian princes having
been employed in conducting the attack. In the Pharaoh’s IXth year a
revolt broke out on the Egyptian frontier, in the Shephelah, and the king
placed himself at the head of his troops to crush it. Ascalon, in which
the peasantry and their families had found, as they hoped, a safe refuge,
opened its gates to the Pharaoh, and its fall brought about the submission
of several neighbouring places. This, it appears, was the first time since
the beginning of the conquests in Syria that the inhabitants of these
regions attempted to take up arms, and we may well ask what could have
induced them thus to renounce their ancient loyalty. Their defection
reduced Egypt for the moment almost to her natural frontiers. Peace had
scarcely been resumed when war again broke out with fresh violence in
Coele-Syria, and one year it reached even to Naharaim, and raged around
Tunipa as in the days of Thûtmosis III. “Pharaoh assembled his
foot-soldiers and chariots, and he commanded his foot-soldiers and his
chariots to attack the perverse Khâti who were in the neighbourhood of
Tunipa, and he put on his armour and mounted his chariot, and he waged
battle against the town of the perverse Khâti at the head of his
foot-soldiers and his chariots, covered with his armour;” the fortress,
however, did not yield till the second attack. Ramses carried his arms
still further afield, and with such results, that, to judge merely from
the triumphal lists engraved on the walls of the temple of Karnak, the
inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates, those in Carchemish, Mitanni,
Singar, Assyria, and Mannus found themselves once more at the mercy of the
Egyptian battalions. These victories, however brilliant, were not
decisive; if after any one of them the princes of Assyria and Singar may
have sent presents to the Pharaoh, the Hittites, on the other hand, did
not consider themselves beaten, and it was only after fifteen campaigns
that they were at length sufficiently subdued to propose a treaty. At
last, in the Egyptian king’s XXIst year, on the 21st of the month Tybi,
when the Pharaoh, then residing in his good town of Anakhîtû, was
returning from the temple where he had been offering prayers to his father
Amon-Eâ, to Harmakhis of Heliopolis, to Phtah, and to Sûtkhû the valiant
son of Nûît, Eamses, one of the “messengers” who filled the office of
lieutenant for the king in Asia, arrived at the palace and presented to
him Tartisubu, who was authorised to make peace with Egypt in the name of
Khâtusaru.* Tartisubu carried in his hand a tablet of silver, on which his
master had prescribed the conditions which appeared to him just and
equitable. A short preamble recalling the alliances made between the
ancestors of both parties, was followed by a declaration of friendship,
and a reciprocal obligation to avoid in future all grounds of hostility.
Not only was a perpetual truce declared between both peoples, but they
agreed to help each other at the first demand. “Should some enemy march
against the countries subject to the great King of Egypt, and should he
send to the great Prince of the Khâti, saying: ‘Come, bring me forces
against them,’ the great Prince of the Khâti shall do as he is asked by
the great King of Egypt, and the great Prince of the Khâti shall destroy
his enemies. And if the great Prince of the Khâti shall prefer not to come
himself, he shall send his archers and his chariots to the great King of
Egypt to destroy his enemies.” A similar clause ensured aid in return from
Ramses to Khâtusaru, “his brother,” while two articles couched in
identical terms made provision against the possibility of any town or
tribe dependent on either of the two sovereigns withdrawing its allegiance
and placing it in the hands of the other party. In this case the Egyptians
as well as the Hittites engaged not to receive, or at least not to accept,
such offers, but to refer them at once to the legitimate lord. The whole
treaty was placed under the guarantee of the gods both, of Egypt and of
the Khâti, whose names were given at length: “Whoever shall fail to
observe the stipulations, let the thousand gods of Khâti and the thousand
gods of Egypt strike his house, his land, and his servants. But he who
shall observe the stipulations engraved on the tablet of silver, whether
he belong to the Hittite people or whether he belong to the people of
Egypt, as he has not neglected them, may the thousand gods of Khâti and
the thousand gods of Egypt give him health, and grant that he may prosper,
himself, the people of his house, and also his land and his servants.” The
treaty itself ends by a description of the plaque of silver on which it
was engraved. It was, in fact, a facsimile in metal of one of those clay
tablets on which the Chaldæans inscribed their contracts. The preliminary
articles occupied the upper part in closely written lines of cuneiform
characters, while in the middle, in a space left free for the purpose, was
the impress of two seals, that of the Prince of the Khâti and of his wife
Pûûkhîpa. Khâtusaru was represented on them as standing upright in the
arms of Sûtkhû, while around the two figures ran the inscription, “Seal of
Sûtkhû, the sovereign of heaven.” Pûûkhîpa leaned on the breast of a god,
the patron of her native town of Aranna in Qaauadana, and the legend
stated that this was the seal of the Sun of the town of Àranna, the regent
of the earth. The text of the treaty was continued beneath, and probably
extended to the other side of the tablet. The original draft had
terminated after the description of the seals, but, to satisfy the
Pharaoh, certain additional articles were appended for the protection of
the commerce and industry of the two countries, for the prevention of the
emigration of artisans, and for ensuring that steps taken against them
should be more effectual and less cruel. Any criminal attempting to evade
the laws of his country, and taking refuge in that of the other party to
the agreement, was to be expelled without delay and consigned to the
officers of his lord; any fugitive not a criminal, any subject carried off
or detained by force, any able artisan quitting either territory to take
up permanent residence in the other, was to be conducted to the frontier,
but his act of folly was not to expose him to judicial condemnation. “He
who shall thus act, his fault shall not be brought up against him; his
house shall not be touched, nor his wife, nor his children; he shall not
have his throat cut, nor shall his eyes be touched, nor his mouth, nor his
feet; no criminal accusation shall be made against him.”
This treaty is the most ancient of all those of which the text has come
down to us; its principal conditions were—perfect equality and
reciprocity between the contracting sovereigns, an offensive and defensive
alliance, and the extradition of criminals and refugees. The original was
drawn up in Chaldæan script by the scribes of Khâtusaru, probably on the
model of former conventions between the Pharaohs and the Asiatic courts,
and to this the Egyptian ministers had added a few clauses relative to the
pardon of emigrants delivered up by one or other of the contracting
parties. When, therefore, Tartisubu arrived in the city of Eamses, the
acceptance of the treaty was merely a matter of form, and peace was
virtually concluded. It did not confer on the conqueror the advantages
which we might have expected from his successful campaigns: it enjoined,
on the contrary, the definite renunciation of those countries, Mitanni,
Naharaim, Alasia, and Amurru, over which Thûtmosis III. and his immediate
successors had formerly exercised an effective sovereignty. Sixteen years
of victories had left matters in the same state as they were after the
expedition of Harmhabî, and, like his predecessor, Ramses was able to
retain merely those Asiatic provinces which were within the immediate
influence of Egypt, such as the Phoenician coast proper, Kharû, Persea
beyond Jordan, the oases of the Arabian desert, and the peninsula of
Sinai.*
This apparently unsatisfactory result, after such supreme efforts, was,
however, upon closer examination, not so disappointing. For more than half
a century at least, since the Hittite kingdom had been developed and
established under the impulse given to it by Sapalulu, everything had been
in its favour. The campaign of Seti had opposed merely a passing obstacle
to its expansion, and had not succeeded in discouraging its ambitions, for
its rulers still nursed the hope of being able one day to conquer Syria as
far as the isthmus. The check received at Qodshû, the abortive attempts to
foment rebellion in Galilee and the Shephelah, the obstinate persistence
with which Ramses and his army returned year after year to the attack, the
presence of the enemy at Tunipa, on the banks of the Euphrates, and in the
provinces then forming the very centre of the Hittite kingdom—in
short, all the incidents of this long struggle—at length convinced
Khâtusaru that he was powerless to extend his rule in this direction at
the expense of Egypt. Moreover, we have no knowledge of the events which
occupied him on the other frontiers of his kingdom, where he may have been
engaged at the same time in a conflict with Assyria, or in repelling an
incursion of the tribes on the Black Sea. The treaty with Pharaoh, if made
in good faith and likely to be lasting, would protect the southern
extremities of his kingdom, and allow of his removing the main body of his
forces to the north and east in case of attack from either of these
quarters. The security which such an alliance would ensure made it,
therefore, worth his while to sue for peace, even if the Egyptians should
construe his overtures as an acknowledgment of exhausted supplies or of
inferiority of strength. Ramses doubtless took it as such, and openly
displayed on the walls at Karnak and in the Eamesseum a copy of the treaty
so flattering to his pride, but the indomitable resistance which he had
encountered had doubtless given rise to reflections resembling those of
Khâtusaru, and he had come to realise that it was his own interest not to
lightly forego the good will of the Khâti. Egypt had neighbours in Africa
who were troublesome though not dangerous: the Timihû, the Tihonu, the
Mashûasha, the negroes of Kûsh and of Pûanît, might be a continual source
of annoyance and disturbance, even though they were incapable of
disturbing her supremacy. The coast of the Delta, it is true, was exposed
to the piracy of northern nations, but up to that time this had been
merely a local trouble, easy to meet if not to obviate altogether. The
only real danger was on the Asiatic side, arising from empires of ancient
constitution like Chaldæa, or from hordes who, arriving at irregular
intervals from the north, and carrying all before them, threatened, after
the example of the Hyksôs, to enter the Delta. The Hittite kingdom acted
as a kind of buffer between the Nile valley and these nations, both
civilized and barbarous; it was a strongly armed force on the route of the
invaders, and would henceforth serve as a protecting barrier, through
which if the enemy were able to pass it would only be with his strength
broken or weakened by a previous encounter. The sovereigns loyally
observed the peace which they had sworn to each other, and in his XXXIVth
year the marriage of Ramses with the eldest daughter of Khâtusaru
strengthened their friendly relations.
Pharaoh was not a little proud of this union, and he has left us a naive
record of the manner in which it came about. The inscription is engraved
on the face of the rock at Abu Simbel in Nubia; and Ramses begins by
boasting, in a heroic strain, of his own energy and exploits, of the fear
with which his victories inspired the whole world, and of the anxiety of
the Syrian kinglets to fulfil his least wishes. The Prince of the Khâti
had sent him sumptuous presents at every opportunity, and, not knowing how
further to make himself agreeable to the Pharaoh, had finally addressed
the great lords of his court, and reminded them how their country had
formerly been ruined by war, how their master Sûtkhû had taken part
against them, and how they had been delivered from their ills by the
clemency of the Sun of Egypt. “Let us therefore take our goods, and
placing my eldest daughter at the head of them, let us repair to the
domains of the great god, so that the King Sesostris may recognise us.” He
accordingly did as he had proposed, and the embassy set out with gold and
silver, valuable horses, and an escort of soldiers, together with cattle
and provisions to supply them with food by the way. When they reached the
borders of Khâru, the governor wrote immediately to the Pharaoh as
follows: “Here is the Prince of the Khâti, who brings his eldest daughter
with a number of presents of every kind; and now this princess and the
chief of the country of the Khâti, after having crossed many mountains and
undertaken a difficult journey from distant parts, have arrived at the
frontiers of His Majesty. May we be instructed how we ought to act with
regard to them.” The king was then in residence at Ramses. When the news
reached him, he officially expressed his great joy at the event, since it
was a thing unheard of in the annals of the country that so powerful a
prince should go to such personal inconvenience in order to marry his
daughter to an ally. The Pharaoh, therefore, despatched his nobles and an
army to receive them, but he was careful to conceal the anxiety which he
felt all the while, and, according to custom, took counsel of his patron
god Sûtkhû: “Who are these people who come with a message at this time to
the country of Zahi?” The oracle, however, reassured him as to their
intentions, and he thereupon hastened to prepare for their proper
reception. The embassy made a triumphal entry into the city, the princess
at its head, escorted by the Egyptian troops told off for the purpose,
together with the foot-soldiers and charioteers of the Khâti, comprising
the flower of their army and militia. A solemn festival was held in their
honour, in which food and drink were served without stint, and was
concluded by the celebration of the marriage in the presence of the
Egyptian lords and of the princes of the whole earth.*
Ramses, unwilling to relegate a princess of such noble birth to the
companionship of his ordinary concubines, granted her the title of queen,
as if she were of solar blood, and with the cartouche gave her the new
name of Ûirimaûnofîrurî—“She who sees the beauties of the Sun.” She
figures henceforth in the ceremonies and on the monuments in the place
usually occupied by women of Egyptian race only, and these unusual honours
may have compensated, in the eyes of the young princess, for the
disproportion in age between herself and a veteran more than sixty years
old. The friendly relations between the two courts became so intimate that
the Pharaoh invited his father-in-law to visit him in his own country.
“The great Prince of Khâti informed the Prince of Qodi: ‘Prepare thyself
that we may go down into Egypt. The word of the king has gone forth, let
us obey Sesostris. He gives the breath of life to those who love him;
hence all the earth loves him, and Khâti forms but one with him.’” They
were received with pomp at Ramses-Anakhîtû, and perhaps at Thebes. It was
with a mixture of joy and astonishment that Egypt beheld her bitterest foe
become her most faithful ally, “and the men of Qimît having but one heart
with the chiefs of the Khâti, a thing which had not happened since the
ages of Pa.”
The half-century following the conclusion of this alliance was a period of
world-wide prosperity. Syria was once more able to breathe freely, her
commerce being under the combined protection of the two powers who shared
her territory. Not only caravans, but isolated travellers, were able to
pass through the country from north to south without incurring any risks
beyond those occasioned by an untrustworthy guide or a few highwaymen. It
became in time a common task in the schools of Thebes to describe the
typical Syrian tour of some soldier or functionary, and we still possess
one of these imaginative stories in which the scribe takes his hero from
Qodshû across the Lebanon to Byblos, Berytus, Tyre, and Sidon, “the fish”
of which latter place “are more numerous than the grains of sand;” he then
makes him cross Galilee and the forest of oaks to Jaffa, climb the
mountains of the Dead Sea, and following the maritime route by Raphia,
reach Pelusium. The Egyptian galleys thronged the Phoenician ports, while
those of Phoenicia visited Egypt. The latter drew so little water that
they had no difficulty in coming up the Nile, and the paintings in one of
the tombs represent them at the moment of their reaching Thebes. The hull
of these vessels was similar to that of the Nile boats, but the bow and
stern were terminated by structures which rose at right angles, and
respectively gave support to a sort of small platform. Upon this the pilot
maintained his position by one of those wondrous feats of equilibrium of
which the Orientals were masters.
An open rail ran round the sides of the vessel, so as to prevent goods
stowed upon the deck from falling into the sea when the vessel lurched.
Voyages to Pûanît were undertaken more frequently in quest of incense and
precious metals. The working of the mines of Akiti had been the source of
considerable outlay at the beginning of the reign. The measures taken by
Seti to render the approaches to them practicable at all seasons had not
produced the desired results; as far back as the IIIrd year of Ramses the
overseers of the south had been forced to acknowledge that the managers of
the convoys could no longer use any of the cisterns which had been hewn
and built at such great expense. “Half of them die of thirst, together
with their asses, for they have no means of carrying a sufficient number
of skins of water to last during the journey there and back.” The friends
and officers whose advice had been called in, did not doubt for a moment
that the king would be willing to complete the work which his father had
merely initiated. “If thou sayest to the water, ‘Come upon the mountain,’
the heavenly waters will spring out at the word of thy mouth, for thou art
Râ incarnate, Khopri visibly created, thou art the living image of thy
father Tûmû, the Heliopolitan.”—“If thou thyself sayest to thy
father the Nile, father of the gods,” added the Viceroy of Ethiopia,
“‘Raise the water up to the mountain,’ he will do all that thou hast said,
for so it has been with all thy projects which have been accomplished in
our presence, of which the like has never been heard, even in the songs of
the poets.” The cisterns and wells were thereupon put into such a
condition that the transport of gold was rendered easy for years to come.
The war with the Khâti had not suspended building and other works of
public utility; and now, owing to the establishment of peace, the
sovereign was able to devote himself entirely to them. He deepened the
canal at Zalû; he repaired the walls and the fortified places which
protected the frontier on the side of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and he built
or enlarged the strongholds along the Nile at those points most frequently
threatened by the incursions of nomad tribes. Ramses was the royal builder
par excellence, and we may say without fear of contradiction that,
from the second cataract to the mouths of the Nile, there is scarcely an
edifice on whose ruins we do not find his name. In Nubia, where the desert
approaches close to the Nile, he confined himself to cutting in the solid
rock the monuments which, for want of space, he could not build in the
open. The idea of the cave-temple must have occurred very early to the
Egyptians; they were accustomed to house their dead in the mountain-side,
why then should they not house their gods in the same manner? The oldest
forms of speos, those near to Beni-Hasan, at Deîr el-Baharî, at Bl-Kab,
and at Gebel Silsileh, however, do not date further back than the time of
the XVIIIth dynasty. All the forms of architectural plan observed in
isolated temples were utilised by Ramses and applied to rock-cut buildings
with more or less modification, according to the nature of the stratum in
which he had to work. Where space permitted, a part only of the temple was
cut in the rock, and the approaches to it were built in the open air with
blocks brought to the spot, so that the completed speos became only in
part a grotto—a hemi-speos of varied construction. It was in this
manner that the architects of Ramses arranged the court and pylon at
Beît-Wally, the hypostyle hall, rectangular court and pylon at
Gerf-Hosseîn, and the avenue of sphinxes at Wady es-Sebuah, where the
entrance to the avenue was guarded by two statues overlooking the river.
The pylon at Gerf-Hosseîn has been demolished, and merely a few traces of
the foundations appear here and there above the soil, but a portion of the
portico which surrounded the court is still standing, together with its
massive architraves and statues, which stand with their backs against the
pillars.
The sanctuary itself comprised an antechamber, supported by two columns
and flanked by two oblong recesses; this led into the Holy of Holies,
which was a narrow niche with a low ceiling, placed between two lateral
chapels. A hall, nearly square in shape, connected these mysterious
chambers with the propylæa, which were open to the sky and faced with
Osiride caryatides.
These appear to keep rigid and solemn watch over the approaches to the
tabernacle, and their faces, half hidden in the shadow, still present such
a stern appearance that the semi-barbaric Nubians of the neighbouring
villages believe them to be possessed by implacable genii. They are
supposed to move from their places during the hours of night, and the fire
which flashes from their eyes destroys or fascinates whoever is rash
enough to watch them.
Other kings before Ramses had constructed buildings in these spots, and
their memory would naturally become associated with his in the future; he
wished, therefore, to find a site where he would be without a rival, and
to this end he transformed the cliff at Abu Simbel into a monument of his
greatness. The rocks here project into the Nile and form a gigantic
conical promontory, the face of which was covered with triumphal stelæ, on
which the sailors or troops going up or down the river could spell out as
they passed the praises of the king and his exploits. A few feet of shore
on the northern side, covered with dry and knotty bushes, affords in
winter a landing-place for tourists. At the spot where the beach ends near
the point of the promontory, sit four colossi, with their feet nearly
touching the water, their backs leaning against a sloping wall of rock,
which takes the likeness of a pylon. A band of hieroglyphs runs above
their heads underneath the usual cornice, over which again is a row of
crouching cynocephali looking straight before them, their hands resting
upon their knees, and above this line of sacred images rises the steep and
naked rock. One of the colossi is broken, and the bust of the statue,
which must have been detached by some great shock, has fallen to the
ground; the others rise to the height of 63 feet, and appear to look
across the Nile as if watching the wadys leading to the gold-mines.
The pschent crown surmounts their foreheads, and the two ends of the
head-dress fall behind their ears; their features are of a noble type,
calm and serious; the nose slightly aquiline, the under lip projecting
above a square, but rather heavy, chin. Of such a type we may picture
Ramses, after the conclusion of the peace with the Khâti, in the full
vigour of his manhood and at the height of his power.
The doorway of the temple is in the centre of the façade, and rises nearly
to a level with the elbows of the colossi; above the lintel, and facing
the river, stands a figure of the god Râ, represented with a human body
and the head of a sparrow-hawk, while two images of the king in profile,
one on each side of the god, offer him a figure of Truth. The first hall,
130 feet long by 58 feet broad, takes the place of the court surrounded by
a colonnade which in other temples usually follows the pylon. Her eight
Osiride figures, standing against as many square pillars, appear to
support the weight of the superincumbent rock. Their profile catches the
light as it enters through the open doorway, and in the early morning,
when the rising sun casts a ruddy ray over their features, their faces
become marvellously life-like. We are almost tempted to think that a smile
plays over their lips as the first beams touch them. The remaining
chambers consist of a hypostyle hall nearly square in shape, the sanctuary
itself being between two smaller apartments, and of eight subterranean
chambers excavated at a lower level than the rest of the temple. The whole
measures 178 feet from the threshold to the far end of the Holy of Holies.
The walls are covered with bas-reliefs in which the Pharaoh has vividly
depicted the wars which he carried on in the four corners of his kingdom;
here we see raids against the negroes, there the war with the Khâti, and
further on an encounter with some Libyan tribe. Ramses, flushed by the
heat of victory, is seen attacking two Timihu chiefs: one has already
fallen to the ground and is being trodden underfoot; the other, after
vainly letting fly his arrows, is about to perish from a blow of the
conqueror.
His knees give way beneath him, his head falls heavily backwards, and the
features are contracted in his death-agony. Pharaoh with his left hand has
seized him by the arm, while with his right he points his lance against
his enemy’s breast, and is about to pierce him through the heart. As a
rule, this type of bas-relief is executed with a conventional grace which
leaves the spectator unmoved, and free to consider the scene merely from
its historical point of view, forgetful of the artist.
An examination of most of the other wall-decorations of the speos will
furnish several examples of this type: we see Ramses with a suitable
gesture brandishing his weapon above a group of prisoners, and the
composition furnishes us with a fair example of official sculpture,
correct, conventional, but devoid of interest. Here, on the contrary, the
drawing is so full of energy that it carries the imagination hack to the
time and scene of those far-off battles.
The indistinct light in which it is seen helps the illusion, and we almost
forget that it is a picture we are beholding, and not the action itself as
it took place some three thousand years ago. A small speos, situated at
some hundred feet further north, is decorated with standing colossi of
smaller size, four of which represent Ramses, and two of them his wife,
Isit Nofrîtari. This speos possesses neither peristyle nor crypt, and the
chapels are placed at the two extremities of the transverse passage,
instead of being in a parallel line with the sanctuary; on the other hand,
the hypostyle hall rests on six pillars with Hathor-headed capitals of
fine proportions.
A third excavated grotto of modest dimensions served as an accessory
chamber to the two others. An inexhaustible stream of yellow sand poured
over the great temple from the summit of the cliff, and partially covered
it every year. No sooner were the efforts to remove it relaxed, than it
spreads into the chambers, concealing the feet of the colossi, and slowly
creeping upwards to their knees, breasts, and necks; at the beginning of
this century they were entirely hidden. In spite of all that was done to
divert it, it ceaselessly reappeared, and in a few summers regained all
the ground which had been previously cleared. It would seem as if the
desert, powerless to destroy the work of the conqueror, was seeking
nevertheless to hide it from the admiration of posterity.*
Seti had worked indefatigably at Thebes, but the shortness of his reign
prevented him from completing the buildings he had begun there. There
existed everywhere, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on the left bank of the Nile,
the remains of his unfinished works; sanctuaries partially roofed in,
porticoes incomplete, columns raised to merely half their height, halls as
yet imperfect with blank walls, here and there covered with only the
outlines in red and black ink of their future bas-reliefs, and statues
hardly blocked out, or awaiting the final touch of the polisher.*
Ramses took up the work where his father had relinquished it. At Luxor
there was not enough space to give to the hypostyle hall the extension
which the original plans proposed, and the great colonnade has an
unfinished appearance.
The Nile, in one of its capricious floods, had carried away the land upon
which the architects had intended to erect the side aisles; and if they
wished to add to the existing structure a great court and a pylon, without
which no temple was considered complete, it was necessary to turn the axis
of the building towards the east.
In their operations the architects came upon a beautiful little edifice of
rose granite, which had been either erected or restored by Thûtmosis III.
at a time when the town was an independent municipality and was only
beginning to extend its suburban dwellings to meet those of Karnak. They
took care to make no change in this structure, but set to work to
incorporate it into their final plans. It still stands at the north-west
corner of the court, and the elegance of its somewhat slender little
columns contrasts happily with the heaviness of the structure to which it
is attached. A portion of its portico is hidden by the brickwork of the
mosque of Abu’l Haggag: the part brought to light in the course of the
excavations contains between each row of columns a colossal statue of
Ramses II. We are accustomed to hear on all sides of the degeneracy of the
sculptor’s art at this time, and of its having fallen into irreparable
neglect. Nothing can be further from the truth than this sweeping
statement. There are doubtless many statues and bas-reliefs of this epoch
which shock us by their crudity and ugliness, but these owed their origin
for the most part to provincial workshops which had been at all times of
mediocre repute, and where the artists did not receive orders enough to
enable them to correct by practice the defects of their education. We find
but few productions of the Theban school exhibiting bad technique, and if
we had only this one monument of Luxor from which to form our opinion of
its merits, it would be sufficient to prove that the sculptors of Ramses
II. were not a whit behind those of Harmham or Seti I. Adroitness in
cutting the granite or hard sandstone had in no wise been lost, and the
same may be said of the skill in bringing out the contour and life-like
action of the figure, and of the art of infusing into the features and
demeanour of the Pharaoh something of the superhuman majesty with which
the Egyptian people were accustomed to invest their monarchs. If the
statues of Ramses II. in the portico are not perfect models of sculpture,
they have many good points, and their bold treatment makes them
effectively decorative.
Eight other statues of Ramses are arranged along the base of the façade,
and two obelisks—one of which has been at Paris for half a century*—stood
on either side of the entrance.
The whole structure lacks unity, and there is nothing corresponding to it
in this respect anywhere else in Egypt. The northern half does not join on
to the southern, but seems to belong to quite a distinct structure, or the
two parts might be regarded as having once formed a single edifice which
had become divided by an accident, which the architect had endeavoured to
unite together again by a line of columns running between two walls. The
masonry of the hypostyle hall at Karnak was squared and dressed, but the
walls had been left undecorated, as was also the case with the majority of
the shafts of the columns and the surface of the architraves. Ramses
covered the whole with a series of sculptured and painted scenes which had
a rich ornamental effect; he then decorated the pylon, and inscribed on
the outer wall to the south the list of cities which he had captured. The
temple of Amon then assumed the aspect which it preserved henceforward for
centuries. The Ramessides and their successors occupied themselves in
filling it with furniture, and in taking steps for the repair of any
damage that might accrue to the hall or pillars; they had their cartouches
or inscriptions placed in vacant spaces, but they did not dare to modify
its arrangement. It was reserved for the Ethiopian and Greek Pharaohs, in
presence of the hypostyle and pylon of the XIXth dynasty, to conceive of
others on a still vaster scale.
Ramses, having completed the funerary chapel of Seti at Qurneh upon the
left bank of the river, then began to think of preparing the edifice
destined for the cult of his “double”—that Eamesseum whose majestic
ruins still stand at a short distance to the north of the giants of
Amenôthes. Did these colossal statues stimulate his spirit of emulation to
do something yet more marvellous? He erected here, at any rate, a still
more colossal figure. The earthquake which shattered Memnon brought it to
the ground, and fragments of it still strew the soil where they fell some
nineteen centuries ago. There are so many of them that the spectator would
think himself in the middle of a granite quarry.*
The portions forming the breast, arms, and thighs are in detached pieces,
but they are still recognisable where they lie close to each other. The
head has lost nothing of its characteristic expression, and its
proportions are so enormous, that a man could sleep crouched up in the
hollow of one of its ears as if on a sofa. Behind the court overlooked by
this colossal statue lay a second court, surrounded by a row of square
pillars, each having a figure of Osiris attached to it. The god is
represented as a mummy, the swathings throwing the body and limbs into
relief.
His hands are freed from the bandages and are crossed on the breast, and
hold respectively the flail and crook; the smiling face is surmounted by
an enormous head-dress. The sanctuary with the buildings attached to it
has perished, but enormous brick structures extend round the ruins,
forming an enclosure of storehouses. Here the priests of the “double” were
accustomed to dwell with their wives and slaves, and here they stored up
the products of their domains—meat, vegetables, corn, fowls dried or
preserved in fat, and wines procured from all the vineyards of Egypt.
These were merely the principal monuments put up by Ramses II. at Thebes
during the sixty-seven years of his rule. There would be no end to the
enumeration of his works if we were to mention all the other edifices
which he constructed in the necropolis or among the dwellings of the
living, all those which he restored, or those which he merely repaired or
inscribed with his cartouches. These are often cut over the name of the
original founder, and his usurpations of monuments are so numerous that he
might be justly accused of having striven to blot out the memory of his
predecessors, and of claiming for himself the entire work of the whole
line of Pharaohs. It would seem as if, in his opinion, the glory of Egypt
began with him, or at least with his father, and that no victorious
campaigns had been ever heard of before those which he conducted against
the Libyans and the Hittites.
The battle of Qodshû, with its attendant episodes—the flogging of
the spies, the assault upon the camp, the charge of the chariots, the
flight of the Syrians—is the favourite subject of his inscriptions;
and the poem of Pentaûîrît adds to the bas-reliefs a description worthy of
the acts represented. This epic reappears everywhere, in Nubia and in the
Said, at Abu Simbel, at Beît-Wally, at Derr, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on
the Eamesseum, and the same battle-scenes, with the same accompanying
texts, reappear in the Memnonium, whose half-ruined walls still crown the
necropolis of Abydos.
He had decided upon the erection of this latter monument at the very
beginning of his reign, and the artisans who had worked at the similar
structure of Seti I. were employed to cover its walls with admirable
bas-reliefs. Ramses also laid claim to have his own resting-place at “the
Cleft;” in this privilege he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom he
imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names, which
we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his building
also. Some ruins, lying beyond Abydos, are too formless to do more than
indicate the site of some of his structures. He enlarged the temple of
Harshafîtû and that of Osiris at Heracleopolis, and, to accomplish these
works the more promptly, his workmen had recourse for material to the
royal towns of the IVth and XIIth dynasties; the pyramids of Usirtasen II.
and Snofrûi at Medûm suffered accordingly the loss of the best part of
their covering. He finished the mausoleum at Memphis, and dedicated the
statue which Seti had merely blocked out; he then set to work to fill the
city with buildings of his own device—granite and sandstone chambers
to the east of the Sacred Lake,* monumental gateways to the south,** and
before one of them a fine colossal figure in granite.*** It lay not long
ago at the bottom of a hole among the palm trees, and was covered by the
inundation every year; it has now been so raised as to be safe from the
waters. Ramses could hardly infuse new life into all the provinces which
had been devastated years before by the Shepherd-kings; but
Heliopolis,**** Bubastes, Athribis, Patûmû, Mendis, Tell Moqdam, and all
the cities of the eastern corner of the Delta, constitute a museum of his
monuments, every object within them testifying to his activity.
He colonised these towns with his prisoners, rebuilt them, and set to work
to rouse them from the torpor into which they had fallen after their
capture by Ahmosis. He made a third capital of Tanis, which rivalled both
Memphis and Thebes.
Before this it had been little more than a deserted ruin: he cleared out
the débris, brought a population to the place; rebuilt the temple,
enlarging it by aisles which extended its area threefold; and here he
enthroned, along with the local divinities, a triad, in which Amonrâ and
Sûtkhû sat side by side with his own deified “double.” The ruined walls,
the overturned stelæ, the obelisks recumbent in the dust, and the statues
of his usurped predecessors, all bear his name. His colossal figure of
statuary sandstone, in a sitting attitude like that at the Eamesseum,
projected from the chief court, and seemed to look down upon the confused
ruin of his works.*
We do not know how many wives he had in his harem, but one of the lists of
his children which has come down to us enumerates, although mutilated at
the end, one hundred and eleven sons, while of his daughters we know of
fifty-five.*
The majority of these were the offspring of mere concubines or foreign
princesses, and possessed but a secondary rank in comparison with himself;
but by his union with his sisters Nofrîtari Marîtmût and Isîtnofrît, he
had at least half a dozen sons and daughters who might aspire to the
throne. Death robbed him of several of these before an opportunity was
open to them to succeed him, and among them Amenhikhopshûf, Amenhiunamif,
and Ramses, who had distinguished themselves in the campaign against the
Khâti; and some of his daughters—Bitanîti, Marîtamon, Nibîttaûi—by
becoming his wives lost their right to the throne. About the XXXth year of
his reign, when he was close upon sixty, he began to think of an
associate, and his choice rested on the eldest surviving son of his queen
Isîtnofrît, who was called Khâmoîsît. This prince was born before the
succession of his father, and had exhibited distinguished bravery under
the walls of Qodshu and at Ascalon. When he was still very young he had
been invested with the office of high priest of the Memphite Phtah, and
thus had secured to him the revenues of the possessions of the god, which
were the largest in all Egypt after those of the Theban Anion. He had a
great reputation for his knowledge of abstruse theological questions and
of the science of magic—a later age attributing to him the
composition of several books on magic giving directions for the invocation
of spirits belonging to this world and the world beyond. He became the
hero also of fantastic romances, in which it was related of him how, in
consequence of his having stolen from the mummy of an old wizard the books
of Thot, he became the victim of possession by a sort of lascivious and
sanguinary ghoul. Ramses relieved himself of the cares of state by handing
over to Khâmoîsîfc the government of the country, without, however,
conferring upon him the titles and insignia of royalty. The chief concern
of Khâmoîsît was to secure the scrupulous observance of the divine laws.
He celebrated at Silsilis the festivals of the inundation; he presided at
the commemoration of his father’s apotheosis, and at the funeral rites of
the Apis who died in the XXXth year of the king’s reign. Before his time
each sacred bull had its separate tomb in a quarter of the Memphite
Necropolis known to the Greeks as the Serapeion. The tomb was a small
cone-roofed building erected on a square base, and containing only one
chamber. Khâmoîsît substituted for this a rock-tomb similar to those used
by ordinary individuals. He had a tunnel cut in the solid rock to a depth
of about a hundred yards, and on either side of this a chamber was
prepared for each Apis on its death, the masons closing up the wall after
the installation of the mummy. His regency had lasted for nearly a quarter
of a century, when, the burden of government becoming too much for him, he
was succeeded in the LVth year of Ramses by his younger brother Mînephtah,
who was like himself a son of Isîtnofrît.* Mînephtah acted, during the
first twelve years of his rule, for his father, who, having now almost
attained the age of a hundred, passed peacefully away at Thebes in the
LXVIII year of his reign, full of days and sated with glory.** He became
the subject of legend almost before he had closed his eyes upon the world.
He had obtained brilliant successes during his life, and the scenes
describing them were depicted in scores of places. Popular fancy believed
everything which he had related of himself, and added to this all that it
knew of other kings, thus making him the Pharaoh of Pharaohs—the
embodiment of all preceding monarchs. Legend preferred to recall him by
the name Sesûsû, Sesûstûrî—a designation which had been applied to
him by his contemporaries, and he thus became better known to moderns as
Sesostris than by his proper name Ramses Mîamûn.*
According to tradition, he was at first sent to Ethiopia with a fleet of
four hundred ships, by which he succeeded in conquering the coasts of the
Red Sea as far as the Indus. In later times several stelæ in the cinnamon
country were ascribed to him. He is credited after this with having led
into the east a great army, with which he conquered Syria, Media, Persia,
Bactriana, and India as far as the ocean; and with having on his return
journey through the deserts of Scythia reached the Don [Tanais], where, on
the shore of the Masotic Sea, he left a number of his soldiers, whose
descendants afterwards peopled Colchis. It was even alleged that he had
ventured into Europe, but that the lack of provisions and the inclemency
of the climate had prevented him from advancing further than Thrace.
He returned to Egypt after an absence of nine years, and after having set
up on his homeward journey statues and stelæ everywhere in commemoration
of his victories. Herodotus asserts that he himself had seen several of
these monuments in his travels in Syria and Ionia. Some of these are of
genuine Egyptian manufacture, and are to be attributed to our Ramses; they
are to be found near Tyre, and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb, where
they mark the frontier to which his empire extended in this direction.
Others have but little resemblance to Egyptian monuments, and were really
the work of the Asiatic peoples among whom they were found. The two
figures referred to long ago by Herodotus, which have been discovered near
Ninfi between Sardis and Smyrna, are instances of the latter.
The shoes of the figures are turned up at the toe, and the head-dress has
more resemblance to the high hats of the people of Asia Minor than to the
double crown of Egypt, while the lower garment is striped horizontally in
place of vertically. The inscription, moreover, is in an Asiatic form of
writing, and has nothing Egyptian about it. Ramses II. in his youth was
the handsomest man of his time. He was tall and straight; his figure was
well moulded—the shoulders broad, the arms full and vigorous, the
legs muscular; the face was oval, with a firm and smiling mouth, a thin
aquiline nose, and large open eyes.
There may be seen below the cartouche the lines of the official report of
inspection written during the XXIst dynasty. Old age and death did not
succeed in marring the face sufficiently to disfigure it. The coffin
containing his body is not the same as that in which his children placed
him on the day of his obsequies; it is another substituted for it by one
of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance to
the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy is thin, much shrunken, and
light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one would
expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred; but the
figure is still tall and of perfect proportions.*
* Even after the coalescence of the vertebrae and the shrinkage produced
by mummification, the body of Ramses II. still measures over 5 feet 8
inches.
The head, which is bald on the top, is somewhat long, and small in
relation to the bulk of the body; there is but little hair on the
forehead, but at the back of the head it is thick, and in smooth stiff
locks, still preserving its white colour beneath the yellow balsams of his
last toilet. The forehead is low, the supra-orbital ridges accentuated,
the eyebrows thick, the eyes small and set close to the nose, the temples
hollow, the cheek-bones prominent; the ears, finely moulded, stand out
from the head, and are pierced, like those of a woman, for the usual
ornaments pendant from the lobe. A strong jaw and square chin, together,
with a large thick-lipped mouth, which reveals through the black paste
within it a few much-worn but sound teeth, make up the features of the
mummied king. His moustache and beard, which were closely shaven in his
lifetime, had grown somewhat in his last sickness or after his death; the
coarse and thick hairs in them, white like those of the head and eyebrows,
attain a length of two or three millimetres. The skin shows an ochreous
yellow colour under the black bituminous plaster. The mask of the mummy,
in fact, gives a fair idea of that of the living king; the somewhat
unintelligent expression, slightly brutish perhaps, but haughty and firm
of purpose, displays itself with an air of royal majesty beneath the
sombre materials used by the embalmer. The disappearance of the old hero
did not produce many changes in the position of affairs in Egypt:
Mînephtah from this time forth possessed as Pharaoh the power which he had
previously wielded as regent. He was now no longer young. Born somewhere
about the beginning of the reign of Ramses II., he was now sixty, possibly
seventy, years old; thus an old man succeeded another old man at a moment
when Egypt must have needed more than ever an active and vigorous ruler.
The danger to the country did not on this occasion rise from the side of
Asia, for the relations of the Pharaoh with his Kharu subjects continued
friendly, and, during a famine which desolated Syria,* he sent wheat to
his Hittite allies.
The nations, however, to the north and east, in Libya and in the
Mediterranean islands, had for some time past been in a restless
condition, which boded little good to the empires of the old world. The
Tirnihû, some of them tributaries from the XIIth, and others from the
first years of the XVIIIth dynasty, had always been troublesome, but never
really dangerous neighbours. From time to time it was necessary to send
light troops against them, who, sailing along the coast or following the
caravan routes, would enter their territory, force them from their
retreats, destroy their palm groves, carry off their cattle, and place
garrisons in the principal oases—even in Sîwah itself. For more than
a century, however, it would seem that more active and numerically
stronger populations had entered upon the stage. A current of invasion,
having its origin in the region of the Atlas, or possibly even in Europe,
was setting towards the Nile, forcing before it the scattered tribes of
the Sudan. Who were these invaders? Were they connected with the race
which had planted its dolmens over the plains of the Maghreb? Whatever the
answer to this question may be, we know that a certain number of Berber
tribes*—the Labû and Mashaûasha—who had occupied a middle
position between Egypt and the people behind them, and who had only
irregular communications with the Nile valley, were now pushed to the
front and forced to descend upon it.**
They were men tall of stature and large of limb, with fair skins, light
hair, and blue eyes; everything, in fact, indicating their northern
origin. They took pleasure in tattooing the skin, just as the Tuaregs and
Kabyles are now accustomed to do, and some, if not all, of them practised
circumcision, like a portion of the Egyptians and Semites. In the
arrangement of the hair, a curl fell upon the shoulder, while the
remainder was arranged in small frizzled locks. Their chiefs and braves
wore on their heads two flowering plumes. A loin-cloth, a wild-beast’s
skin thrown over the back, a mantle, or rather a covering of woollen or
dyed cloth, fringed and ornamented with many-coloured needlework, falling
from the left shoulder with no attachment in front, so as to leave the
body unimpeded in walking,—these constituted the ordinary costume of
the people. Their arms were similar to those of the Egyptians, consisting
of the lance, the mace, the iron or copper dagger, the boomerang, the bow
and arrow, and the sling.
They also employed horses and chariots. Their bravery made them a foe not
to be despised, in spite of their ignorance of tactics and their want of
discipline. When they were afterwards formed into regiments and conducted
by experienced generals, they became the best auxiliary troops which Egypt
could boast of. The Labû from this time forward were the most energetic of
the tribes, and their chiefs prided themselves upon possessing the
leadership over all the other clans in this region of the world.*
The Labû might very well have gained the mastery over the other
inhabitants of the desert at this period, who had become enfeebled by the
frequent defeats which they had sustained at the hands of the Egyptians.
At the moment when Mînephtah ascended the throne, their king, Mâraîû, son
of Didi, ruled over the immense territory lying between the Fayûm and the
two Syrtes: the Timihu, the Kahaka, and the Mashaûasha rendered him the
same obedience as his own people. A revolution had thus occurred in Africa
similar to that which had taken place a century previously in Naharaim,
when Sapalulu founded the Hittite empire. A great kingdom rose into being
where no state capable of disturbing Egyptian control had existed before.
The danger was serious. The Hittites, separated from the Nile by the whole
breadth of Kharu, could not directly threaten any of the Egyptian cities;
but the Libyans, lords of the desert, were in contact with the Delta, and
could in a few days fall upon any point in the valley they chose.
Mînephtah, therefore, hastened to resist the assault of the westerns, as
his father had formerly done that of the easterns, and, strange as it may
seem, he found among the troops of his new enemies some of the adversaries
with whom the Egyptians had fought under the walls of Qodshû sixty years
before. The Shardana, Lycians, and others, having left the coasts of the
Delta and the Phoenician seaports owing to the vigilant watch kept by the
Egyptians over their waters, had betaken themselves to the Libyan
littoral, where they met with a favourable reception. Whether they had
settled in some places, and formed there those colonies of which a Greek
tradition of a recent age speaks, we cannot say. They certainly followed
the occupation of mercenary soldiers, and many of them hired out their
services to the native princes, while others were enrolled among the
troops of the King of the Khâti or of the Pharaoh himself. Mâraîû brought
with him Achæans, Shardana, Tûrsha, Shagalasha,* and Lycians in
considerable numbers when he resolved to begin the strife.** This was not
one of those conventional little wars which aimed at nothing further than
the imposition of the payment of a tribute upon the conquered, or the
conquest of one of their provinces. Mâraîû had nothing less in view than
the transport of his whole people into the Nile valley, to settle
permanently there as the Hyksôs had done before him.
He set out on his march towards the end of the IVth year of the Pharaoh’s
reign, or the beginning of his Vth, surrounded by the elite of his troops,
“the first choice from among all the soldiers and all the heroes in each
land.” The announcement of their approach spread terror among the
Egyptians. The peace which they had enjoyed for fifty years had cooled
their warlike ardour, and the machinery of their military organisation had
become somewhat rusty. The standing army had almost melted away; the
regiments of archers and charioteers were no longer effective, and the
neglected fortresses were not strong enough to protect the frontier. As a
consequence, the oases of Farafrah and of the Natron lakes fell into the
hands of the enemy at the first attack, and the eastern provinces of the
Delta became the possession of the invader before any steps could be taken
for their defence. Memphis, which realised the imminent danger, broke out
into open murmurs against the negligent rulers who had given no heed to
the country’s ramparts, and had allowed the garrisons of its fortresses to
dwindle away. Fortunately Syria remained quiet. The Khâti, in return for
the aid afforded them by Mînephtah during the famine, observed a friendly
attitude, and the Pharaoh was thus enabled to withdraw the troops from his
Asiatic provinces. He could with perfect security take the necessary
measures for ensuring “Heliopolis, the city of Tûmû,” against surprise,
“for arming Memphis, the citadel of Phtah-Tonen, and for restoring all
things which were in disorder: he fortified Pibalîsît, in the
neighbourhood of the Shakana canal, on a branch of that of Heliopolis,”
and he rapidly concentrated his forces behind these quickly organised
lines.*
Mâraîû, however, continued to advance; in the early months of the summer
he had crossed the Canopic branch of the Nile, and was now about to encamp
not far from the town of Pirici. When the king heard of this “he became
furious against them as a lion that fascinates its victim; he called his
officers together and addressed them: ‘I am about to make you hear the
words of your master, and to teach you this: I am the sovereign shepherd
who feeds you; I pass my days in seeking out that which is useful for you:
I am your father; is there among you a father like me who makes his
children live? You are trembling like geese, you do not know what is good
to do: no one gives an answer to the enemy, and our desolated land is
abandoned to the incursions of all nations. The barbarians harass the
frontier, rebels violate it every day, every one robs it, enemies
devastate our seaports, they penetrate into the fields of Egypt; if there
is an arm of a river they halt there, they stay for days, for months; they
come as numerous as reptiles, and no one is able to sweep them back, these
wretches who love death and hate life, whose hearts meditate the
consummation of our ruin. Behold, they arrive with their chief; they pass
their time on the land which they attack in filling their stomachs every
day; this is the reason why they come to the land of Egypt, to seek their
sustenance, and their intention is to install themselves there; mine is to
catch them like fish upon their bellies. Their chief is a dog, a poor
devil, a madman; he shall never sit down again in his place.’” He then
announced that on the 14th of Epiphi he would himself conduct the troops
against the enemy.
These were brave words, but we may fancy the figure that this king of more
than sixty years of age would have presented in a chariot in the middle of
the fray, and his competence to lead an effective charge against the
enemy. On the other hand, his absence in such a critical position of
affairs would have endangered the morale of his soldiers and
possibly compromised the issue of the battle. A dream settled the whole
question.*
While Mînephtah was asleep one night, he saw a gigantic figure of Phtah
standing before him, and forbidding him to advance. “‘Stay,’ cried the god
to him, while handing him the curved khopesh: ‘put away discouragement
from thee!’ His Majesty said to him: ‘But what am I to do then?’ And Phtah
answered him: ‘Despatch thy infantry, and send before it numerous chariots
to the confines of the territory of Piriû.’”**
The Pharaoh obeyed the command, and did not stir from his position. Mâraîû
had, in the mean time, arranged his attack for the 1st of Epiphi, at the
rising of the sun: it did not take place, however, until the 3rd. “The
archers of His Majesty made havoc of the barbarians for six hours; they
were cut off by the edge of the sword.” When Mâraîû saw the carnage, “he
was afraid, his heart failed him; he betook himself to flight as fast as
his feet could bear him to save his life, so successfully that his bow and
arrows remained behind him in his precipitation, as well as everything
else he had upon him.” His treasure, his arms, his wife, together with the
cattle which he had brought with him for his use, became the prey of the
conqueror; “he tore out the feathers from his head-dress, and took flight
with such of those wretched Libyans as escaped the massacre, but the
officers who had the care of His Majesty’s team of horses followed in
their steps” and put most of them to the sword. Mâraîû succeeded, however,
in escaping in the darkness, and regained his own country without water or
provisions, and almost without escort. The conquering troops returned to
the camp laden with booty, and driving before them asses carrying, as
bloody tokens of victory, quantities of hands and phalli cut from the dead
bodies of the slain. The bodies of six generals and of 6359 Libyan
soldiers were found upon the field of battle, together with 222
Shagalasha, 724 Tursha, and some hundreds of Shardana and Achæans: several
thousands of prisoners passed in procession before the Pharaoh, and were
distributed among such of his soldiers as had distinguished themselves.
These numbers show the gravity of the danger from which Egypt had escaped:
the announcement of the victory filled the country with enthusiasm, all
the more sincere because of the reality of the panic which had preceded
it. The fellahîn, intoxicated with joy, addressed each other: “‘Come, and
let us go a long distance on the road, for there is now no fear in the
hearts of men.‘The fortified posts may at last be left; the citadels are
now open; messengers stand at the foot of the walls and wait in the shade
for the guard to awake after their siesta, to give them entrance. The
military police sleep on their accustomed rounds, and the people of the
marshes once more drive their herds to pasture without fear of raids, for
there are no longer marauders near at hand to cross the river; the cry of
the sentinels is heard no more in the night: ‘Halt, thou that comest, thou
that comest under a name which is not thine own—sheer off!’ and men
no longer exclaim on the following morning: ‘Such or such a thing has been
stolen;’ but the towns fall once more into their usual daily routine, and
he who works in the hope of the harvest, will nourish himself upon that
which he shall have reaped.” The return from Memphis to Thebes was a
triumphal march.
“He is very strong, Binrî Mînephtah,” sang the court poets, “very wise are
his projects—his words have as beneficial effect as those of Thot—everything
which he does is completed to the end.—When he is like a guide at
the head of his armies—his voice penetrates the fortress walls.—Very
friendly to those who bow their backs—before Mîamun—his
valiant soldiers spare him who humbles himself—before his courage
and before his strength;—they fall upon the Libyans—they
consume the Syrian;—the Shardana whom thou hast brought back by thy
sword—make prisoners of their own tribes.—Very happy thy
return to Thebes—victorious! Thy chariot is drawn by hand—the
conquered chiefs march backwards before thee—whilst thou leadest
them to thy venerable father—Amon, husband of his mother.” And the
poets amuse themselves with summoning Mâraîû to appear in Egypt, pursued
as he was by his own people and obliged to hide himself from them. “He is
nothing any longer but a beaten man, and has become a proverb among the
Labû, and his chiefs repeat to themselves: ‘Nothing of the kind has
occurred since the time of Râ.’ The old men say each one to his children:
‘Misfortune to the Labû! it is all over with them! No one can any longer
pass peacefully across the country; but the power of going out of our land
has been taken from us in a single day, and the Tihonu have been withered
up in a single year; Sûtkhû has ceased to be their chief, and he
devastates their “duars;” there is nothing left but to conceal one’s self,
and one feels nowhere secure except in a fortress.’” The news of the
victory was carried throughout Asia, and served to discourage the
tendencies to revolt which were beginning to make themselves manifest
there. “The chiefs gave there their salutations of peace, and none among
the nomads raised his head after the crushing defeat of the Libyans; Khâti
is at peace, Canaan is a prisoner as far as the disaffected are concerned,
the inhabitant of Ascalon is led away, Gezer is carried into captivity,
Ianuâmîm is brought to nothing, the Israîlû are destroyed and have no
longer seed, Kharu is like a widow of the land of Egypt.” *
Mînephtah ought to have followed up his opportunity to the end, but he had
no such intention, and his inaction gave Mâraîû time to breathe. Perhaps
the effort which he had made had exhausted his resources, perhaps old age
prevented him from prosecuting his success; he was content, in any case,
to station bodies of pickets on the frontier, and to fortify a few new
positions to the east of the Delta. The Libyan kingdom was now in the same
position as that in which the Hittite had been after the campaign of Seti
I.: its power had been checked for the moment, but it remained intact on
the Egyptian frontier, awaiting its opportunity.
Mînephtah lived for some time after this memorable year* and the number of
monuments which belong to this period show that he reigned in peace. We
can see that he carried out works in the same places as his father before
him; at Tanis as well as Thebes, in Nubia as well as in the Delta. He
worked the sandstone quarries for his building materials, and continued
the custom of celebrating the feasts of the inundation at Silsileh. One at
least of the stelae which he set up on the occasion of these feasts is
really a chapel, with its architraves and columns, and still, excites the
admiration of the traveller on account both of its form and of its
picturesque appearance.
The last years of his life were troubled by the intrigues of princes who
aspired to the throne, and by the ambition of the ministers to whom he was
obliged to delegate his authority.
One of the latter, a man of Semite origin, named Ben-Azana, of Zor-bisana,
who had assumed the appellation of his first patron, ramsesûpirnirî,
appears to have acted for him as regent. Mînephtah was succeeded,
apparently, by one of his sons, called Seti, after his great-grandfather.*
Seti II. had doubtless reached middle age at the time of his accession,
but his portraits represent him, nevertheless, with the face and figure of
a young man.** The expression in these is gentle, refined, haughty, and
somewhat melancholic. MU It is the type of Seti I. and Ramses II., but
enfeebled and, as it were, saddened. An inscription of his second year
attributes to him victories in Asia,*** but others of the same period
indicate the existence of disturbances similar to those which had troubled
the last years of his father.
These were occasioned by a certain Aiari, who was high priest of Phtah,
and who had usurped titles belonged ordinarily to the Pharaoh or his
eldest son, in the house of Sibû, “heir and hereditary prince of the two
lands.” Seti died, it would seem, without having had time to finish his
tomb. We do not know whether he left any legitimate children, but two
sovereigns succeeded him who were not directly connected with him, but
were probably the grandsons of the Amenmesis and the Siphtah, whom we meet
with among the children of Ramses. The first of these was also called
Amenmesis,* and he held sway for several years over the whole of Egypt,
and over its foreign possessions.
The second, who was named Siphtah-Mînephtah, ascended “the throne of his
father” thanks to the devotion of his minister Baî,* but in a greater
degree to his marriage with a certain princess called Tausirît. He
maintained himself in this position for at least six years, during which
he made an expedition into Ethiopia, and received in audience at Thebes
messengers from all foreign nations. He kept up so zealously the
appearance of universal dominion, that to judge from his inscriptions he
must have been the equal of the most powerful of his predecessors at
Thebes.
Egypt, nevertheless, was proceeding at a quick pace towards its downfall.
No sooner had this monarch disappeared than it began to break up.** There
were no doubt many claimants for the crown, but none of them succeeded in
disposing of the claims of his rivals, and anarchy reigned supreme from
one end of the Nile valley to the other. The land of Qîmît began to drift
away, and the people within it had no longer a sovereign, and this, too,
for many years, until other times came; for “the land of Qîmît was in the
hands of the princes ruling over the nomes, and they put each other to
death, both great and small.
Other times came afterwards, during years of nothingness, in which Arisu,
a Syrian,* was chief among them, and the whole country paid tribute before
him; every one plotted with his neighbour to steal the goods of others,
and it was the same with regard to the gods as with regard to men,
offerings were no longer made in the temples.”
This was in truth the revenge of the feudal system upon Pharaoh. The
barons, kept in check by Ahmosis and Amenôthes I., restricted by the
successors of these sovereigns to the position of simple officers of the
king, profited by the general laxity to recover as many as possible of
their ancient privileges. For half a century and more, fortune had given
them as masters only aged princes, not capable of maintaining continuous
vigilance and firmness. The invasions of the peoples of the sea, the
rivalry of the claimants to the throne, and the intrigues of ministers
had, one after the other, served to break the bonds which fettered them,
and in one generation they were able to regain that liberty of action of
which they had been deprived for centuries. To this state of things Egypt
had been drifting from the earliest times. Unity could be maintained only
by a continuous effort, and once this became relaxed, the ties which bound
the whole country together were soon broken. There was another danger
threatening the country beside that arising from the weakening of the
hands of the sovereign, and the turbulence of the barons. For some three
centuries the Theban Pharaohs were accustomed to bring into the country
after each victorious campaign many thousands of captives. The number of
foreigners around them had, therefore, increased in a striking manner. The
majority of these strangers either died without issue, or their posterity
became assimilated to the indigenous inhabitants. In many places, however,
they had accumulated in such proportions that they were able to retain
among themselves the remembrance of their origin, their religion, and
their customs, and with these the natural desire to leave the country of
their exile for their former fatherland. As long as a strict watch was
kept over them they remained peaceful subjects, but as soon as this
vigilance was relaxed rebellion was likely to break out, especially
amongst those who worked in the quarries. Traditions of the Greek period
contain certain romantic episodes in the history of these captives. Some
Babylonian prisoners brought back by Sesostris, these traditions tell us,
unable to endure any longer the fatiguing work to which they were
condemned, broke out into open revolt.
They made themselves masters of a position almost opposite Memphis, and
commanding the river, and held their ground there with such obstinacy that
it was found necessary to give up to them the province which they
occupied: they built here a town, which they afterwards called Babylon. A
similar legend attributes the building of the neighbouring village of
Troîû to captives from Troy.*
The scattered barbarian tribes of the Delta, whether Hebrews or the
remnant of the ïïyksôs, had endured there a miserable lot ever since the
accession of the Ramessides. The rebuilding of the cities which had been
destroyed there during the wars with the Hyksôs had restricted the extent
of territory on which they could pasture their herds. Ramses II. treated
them as slaves of the treasury,** and the Hebrews were not long under his
rule before they began to look back with regret on the time of the
monarchs “who knew Joseph.” **
The Egyptians set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their
burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.
But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And
they were “grieved because of the children of Israel.” * A secondary
version of the same narrative gives a more detailed account of their
condition: “They made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and
in brick, and in all manner of service in the field.” ** The unfortunate
slaves awaited only an opportunity to escape from the cruelty of their
persecutors.
The national traditions of the Hebrews inform us that the king, in
displeasure at seeing them increase so mightily notwithstanding his
repression, commanded the midwives to strangle henceforward their male
children at their birth. A woman of the house of Levi, after having
concealed her infant for three months, put him in an ark of bulrushes and
consigned him to the Nile, at a place where the daughter of Pharaoh was
accustomed to bathe. The princess on perceiving the child had compassion
on him, adopted him, called him Moses—saved from the waters—and
had him instructed in all the knowledge of the Egyptians. Moses had
already attained forty years of age, when he one day encountered an
Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, and slew him in his anger, shortly afterwards
fleeing into the land of Midian. Here he found an asylum, and Jethro the
priest gave him one of his daughters in marriage. After forty years of
exile, God, appearing to him in a burning bush, sent him to deliver His
people. The old Pharaoh was dead, but Moses and his brother Aaron betook
themselves to the court of the new Pharaoh, and demanded from him
permission for the Hebrews to sacrifice in the desert of Arabia. They
obtained it, as we know, only after the infliction of the ten plagues, and
after the firstborn of the Egyptians had been stricken.* The emigrants
started from Ramses; as they were pursued by a body of troops, the Sea
parted its waters to give them passage over the dry ground, and closing up
afterwards on the Egyptian hosts, overwhelmed them to a man. Thereupon
Moses and the children of Israel sang this song unto Jahveh, saying:
“Jahveh is my strength and song—and He has become my salvation.—This
is my God, and I will praise Him,—my father’s God, and I will exalt
Him.—The Lord is a man of war,—and Jahveh is His name.—Pharaoh’s
chariots and his hosts hath He cast into the sea, —and his chosen
captains are sunk in the sea of weeds.—The deeps cover them—they
went down into the depths like a stone…. The enemy said: ‘I will pursue,
I will overtake—I will divide the spoil—my lust shall be
satiated upon them—I will draw my sword—my hand shall destroy
them.’—Thou didst blow with Thy wind—the sea covered them—they
sank as lead in the mighty waters.” **
From this narrative we see that the Hebrews, or at least those of them who
dwelt in the Delta, made their escape from their oppressors, and took
refuge in the solitudes of Arabia. According to the opinion of accredited
historians, this Exodus took place in the reign of Mînephtah, and the
evidence of the triumphal inscription, lately discovered by Prof. Petrie,
seems to confirm this view, in relating that the people of Israîlû were
destroyed, and had no longer a seed. The context indicates pretty clearly
that these ill-treated Israîlû were then somewhere south of Syria,
possibly in the neighbourhood of Ascalon and Glezer. If it is the Biblical
Israelites who are here mentioned for the first time on an Egyptian
monument, one might suppose that they had just quitted the land of slavery
to begin their wanderings through the desert. Although the peoples of the
sea and the Libyans did not succeed in reaching their settlements in the
land of Goshen, the Israelites must have profited both by the disorder
into which the Egyptians were thrown by the invaders, and by the
consequent withdrawal to Memphis of the troops previously stationed on the
east of the Delta, to break away from their servitude and cross the
frontier. If, on the other hand, the Israîlû of Mînephtah are regarded as
a tribe still dwelling among the mountains of Canaan, while the greater
part of the race had emigrated to the banks of the Nile, there is no need
to seek long after Mînephtah for a date suiting the circumstances of the
Exodus. The years following the reign of Seti II. offer favourable
conditions for such a dangerous enterprise: the break-up of the monarchy,
the discords of the barons, the revolts among the captives, and the
supremacy of a Semite over the other chiefs, must have minimised the risk.
We can readily understand how, in the midst of national disorders, a tribe
of foreigners weary of its lot might escape from its settlements and
betake itself towards Asia without meeting with strenous opposition from
the Pharaoh, who would naturally be too much preoccupied with his own
pressing necessities to trouble himself much over the escape of a band of
serfs.
Having crossed the Red Sea, the Israelites pursued their course to the
north-east on the usual road leading into Syria, and then turning towards
the south, at length arrived at Sinai. It was a moment when the nations of
Asia were stirring. To proceed straight to Canaan by the beaten track
would have been to run the risk of encountering their moving hordes, or of
jostling against the Egyptian troops, who still garrisoned the strongholds
of the She-phelah. The fugitives had, therefore, to shun the great
military roads if they were to avoid coming into murderous conflict with
the barbarians, or running into the teeth of Pharaoh’s pursuing army. The
desert offered an appropriate asylum to people of nomadic inclinations
like themselves; they betook themselves to it as if by instinct, and spent
there a wandering life for several generations.*
The traditions collected in their sacred books described at length their
marches and their halting-places, the great sufferings they endured, and
the striking miracles which God performed on their behalf.*
Moses conducted them through all these experiences, continually troubled
by their murmurings and seditions, but always ready to help them out of
the difficulties into which they were led, on every occasion, by their
want of faith. He taught them, under God’s direction, how to correct the
bitterness of brackish waters by applying to them the wood of a certain
tree.* When they began to look back with regret to the “flesh-pots of
Egypt” and the abundance of food there, another signal miracle was
performed for them. “At even the quails came up and covered the camp, and
in the morning the dew lay round about the host; and when the dew that lay
was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small
round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the
children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, ‘What is it? ‘for
they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, ‘It is the bread
which the Lord hath given you to eat.’”**
“And the house of Israel called the name thereof ‘manna: ‘and it was like
coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with
honey.” * “And the children of Israel did eat the manna forty years, until
they came to a land inhabited; they did eat the manna until they came unto
the borders of the land of Canaan.” ** Further on, at Eephidim, the water
failed: Moses struck the rocks at Horeb, and a spring gushed out.*** The
Amalekites, in the meantime, began to oppose their passage; and one might
naturally doubt the power of a rabble of slaves, unaccustomed to war, to
break through such an obstacle. Joshua was made their general, “and Moses,
Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill: and it came to pass, when
Moses held up his hand, that Israel prevailed, and when he let down his
hand, Amalek prevailed. But Moses’ hands were heavy; and they took a
stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed
up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side,
and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua
discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.” ****
Three months after the departure of the Israelites from Egypt they
encamped at the foot of Sinai, and “the Lord called unto Moses out of the
mountain, saying, ‘Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the
children of Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I
bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now therefore, if
ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a
peculiar treasure unto Me from among all peoples: for all the earth is
Mine: and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.’
The people answered together and said, ‘All that the Lord hath spoken we
will do.’ And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Lo, I come unto thee in a thick
cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee, and may also
believe thee for ever.’” “On the third day, when it was morning, there
were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the
voice of a trumpet exceeding loud; and all the people that were in the
camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet
God; and they stood at the nether part of the mountain. And Mount Sinai
was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and
the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount
quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet waxed louder and louder,
Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice.” *
Then followed the giving of the supreme law, the conditions of the
covenant which the Lord Himself deigned to promulgate directly to His
people. It was engraved on two tables of stone, and contained, in ten
concise statements, the commandments which the Creator of the Universe
imposed upon the people of His choice.
“I. I am Jahveh, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt
have none other gods before Me.
II. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, etc.
III. Thou shalt not take the name of Jahveh thy God in vain.
IV. Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy.
V. Honour thy father and thy mother.
VI. Thou shalt do no murder.
VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
X. Thou shalt not covet.” *
“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice
of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they
trembled, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, ‘Speak thou with
us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.’”* God
gave His commandments to Moses in instalments as the circumstances
required them: on one occasion the rites of sacrifice, the details of the
sacerdotal vestments, the mode of consecrating the priests, the
composition of the oil and the incense for the altar; later on, the
observance of the three annual festivals, and the orders as to absolute
rest on the seventh day, as to the distinctions between clean and unclean
animals, as to drink, as to the purification of women, and lawful and
unlawful marriages.**
The people waited from week to week until Jahveh had completed the
revelation of His commands, and in their impatience broke the new law more
than once. On one occasion, when “Moses delayed to come out of the mount,”
they believed themselves abandoned by heaven, and obliged Aaron, the high
priest, to make for them a golden calf, before which they offered burnt
offerings. The sojourn of the people at the foot of Sinai lasted eleven
months. At the end of this period they set out once more on their slow
marches to the Promised Land, guided during the day by a cloud, and during
the night by a pillar of fire, which moved before them. This is a general
summary of what we find in the sacred writings.
The Israelites, when they set out from Egypt, were not yet a nation. They
were but a confused horde, flying with their herds from their pursuers;
with no resources, badly armed, and unfit to sustain the attack of regular
troops. After leaving Sinai, they wandered for some time among the
solitudes of Arabia Petraea in search of some uninhabited country where
they could fix their tents, and at length settled on the borders of
Idumaea, in the mountainous region surrounding Kadesh-Barnea.* Kadesh had
from ancient times a reputation for sanctity among the Bedawin of the
neighbourhood: it rejoiced in the possession of a wonderful well—the
Well of Judgment—to which visits were made for the purpose of
worship, and for obtaining the “judgment” of God. The country is a poor
one, arid and burnt up, but it contains wells which never fail, and wadys
suitable for the culture of wheat and for the rearing of cattle. The tribe
which became possessed of a region in which there was a perennial supply
of water was fortunate indeed, and a fragment of the psalmody of Israel at
the time of their sojourn here still echoes in a measure the transports of
joy which the people gave way to at the discovery of a new spring: “Spring
up, O well; sing ye unto it: the well which the princes digged, which the
nobles of the people delved with the sceptre and with their staves.” **
The wanderers took possession of this region after some successful brushes
with the enemy, and settled there, without being further troubled by their
neighbours or by their former masters. The Egyptians, indeed, absorbed in
their civil discords, or in wars with foreign nations, soon forgot their
escaped slaves, and never troubled themselves for centuries over what had
become of the poor wretches, until in the reign of the Ptolemies, when
they had learned from the Bible something of the people of God, they began
to seek in their own annals for traces of their sojourn in Egypt and of
their departure from the country. A new version of the Exodus was the
result, in which Hebrew tradition was clumsily blended with the materials
of a semi-historical romance, of which Amenôthes III. was the hero. His
minister and namesake, Amenôthes, son of Hâpû, left ineffaceable
impressions on the minds of the inhabitants of Thebes: he not only erected
the colossal figures in the Amenophium, but he constructed the chapel at
Deîr el-Medineh, which was afterwards restored in Ptolemaic times, and
where he continued to be worshipped as long as the Egyptian religion
lasted. Profound knowledge of the mysteries of magic were attributed to
him, as in later times to Prince Khâmoîsît, son of Ramses II. On this
subject he wrote certain works which maintained their reputation for more
than a thousand years after his death,* and all that was known about him
marked him out for the important part he came to play in those romantic
stories so popular among the Egyptians.
The Pharaoh in whose good graces he lived had a desire, we are informed,
to behold the gods, after the example of his ancestor Horus. The son of
Hâpû, or Pa-Apis, informed him that he could not succeed in his design
until he had expelled from the country all the lepers and unclean persons
who contaminated it. Acting on this information, he brought together all
those who suffered from physical defects, and confined them, to the number
of eighty thousand, in the quarries of Tûrah. There were priests among
them, and the gods became wrathful at the treatment to which their
servants were exposed; the soothsayer, therefore, fearing the divine
anger, predicted that certain people would shortly arise who, forming an
alliance with the Unclean, would, together with them, hold sway in Egypt
for thirteen years. He then committed suicide, but the king nevertheless
had compassion on the outcasts, and granted to them, for their exclusive
use, the town of Avaris, which had been deserted since the time of
Ahmosis. The outcasts formed themselves into a nation under the rule of a
Heliopolitan priest called Osarsyph, or Moses, who gave them laws,
mobilised them, and joined his forces with the descendants of the
Shepherds at Jerusalem. The Pharaoh Amenôphis, taken by surprise at this
revolt, and remembering the words of his minister Amenôthes, took flight
into Ethiopia. The shepherds, in league with the Unclean, burned the
towns, sacked the temples, and broke in pieces the statues of the gods:
they forced the Egyptian priests to slaughter even their sacred animals,
to cut them up and cook them for their foes, who ate them derisively in
their accustomed feasts. Amenôphis returned from Ethiopia, together with
his son Ramses, at the end of thirteen years, defeated the enemy, driving
them back into Syria, where the remainder of them became later on the
Jewish nation.*
This is but a romance, in which a very little history is mingled with a
great deal of fable: the scribes as well as the people were acquainted
with the fact that Egypt had been in danger of dissolution at the time
when the Hebrews left the banks of the Nile, but they were ignorant of the
details, of the precise date and of the name of the reigning Pharaoh. A
certain similarity in sound suggested to them the idea of assimilating the
prince whom the Chroniclers called Menepthes or Amenepthes with
Amen-ôthes, i.e. Amenophis III.; and they gave to the Pharaoh of the XIXth
dynasty the minister who had served under a king of the XVIIIth: they
metamorphosed at the same time the Hebrews into lepers allied with the
Shepherds. From this strange combination there resulted a narrative which
at once fell in with the tastes of the lovers of the marvellous, and was a
sufficient substitute for the truth which had long since been forgotten.
As in the case of the Egyptians of the Greek period, we can see only
through a fog what took place after the deaths of Mînephtah and Seti II.
We know only for certain that the chiefs of the nomes were in perpetual
strife with each other, and that a foreign power was dominant in the
country as in the time of Apôphis. The days of the empire would have
Harmhabî himself belonged to the XVIIIth dynasty, for he modelled the form
of his cartouches on those of the Ahmesside Pharaohs: the XIXth dynasty
began only, in all probability, with Ramses I., but the course of the
history has compelled me to separate Harmhabî from his predecessors. Not
knowing the length of the reigns, we cannot determine the total duration
of the dynasty: we shall not, however, be far wrong in assigning to it a
length of 130 years or thereabouts, i.e. from 1350 to somewhere near 1220
B.C. been numbered if a deliverer had not promptly made his appearance.
The direct line of Ramses II. was extinct, but his innumerable sons by
innumerable concubines had left a posterity out of which some at least
might have the requisite ability and zeal, if not to save the empire, at
least to lengthen its duration, and once more give to Thebes days of
glorious prosperity. Egypt had set out some five centuries before this for
the conquest of the world, and fortune had at first smiled upon her
enterprise. Thûtmosis I., Thûtmosis III., and the several Pharaohs bearing
the name of Amenôthes had marched with their armies from the upper waters
of the Nile to the banks of the Euphrates, and no power had been able to
withstand them. New nations, however, soon rose up to oppose her, and the
Hittites in Asia and the Libyans of the Sudan together curbed her
ambition. Neither the triumphs of Ramses II. nor the victory of Mînephtah
had been able to restore her prestige, or the lands of which her rivals
had robbed her beyond her ancient frontier. Now her own territory itself
was threatened, and her own well-being was in question; she was compelled
to consider, not how to rule other tribes, great or small, but how to keep
her own possessions intact and independent: in short, her very existence
was at stake.
THE CLOSE OF THE THEBAN EMPIRE
RAMSES III.—THE THEBAN CITY UNDER THE RAMESSIDES—MANNERS
AND CUSTOMS.
Nalthtâsît and Ramses III.: the decline of the military spirit in Egypt—The
reorganisation of the army and fleet by Ramses—The second Libyan
invasion—The Asiatic peoples, the Pulasati, the Zakleala, and the
Tyrseni: their incursions into Syria and their defeat—The campaign
of the year XL and the fall of the Libyan kingdom—Cruising on the
Red Sea—The buildings at Medinet-Habû—The conspiracy of
Pentaûîrît—The mummy of Ramses III.
The sons and immediate successors of Ramses III.—Thebes and the
Egyptian population: the transformation of the people and of the great
lords: the feudal system from being military becomes religious—The
wealth of precious metals, jewellery, furniture, costume—Literary
education, and the influence of the Semitic language on the Egyptian:
romantic stories, the historical novel, fables, caricatures and satires,
collections of maxims and moral dialogues, love-poems.
CHAPTER III—THE CLOSE OF THE THEBAN EMPIRE
Ramses III.—The Theban city under the Ramessides—Manners
and customs.
As in a former crisis, Egypt once more owed her salvation to a scion of
the old Theban race. A descendant of Seti I. or Ramses II., named
Nakhtûsît, rallied round him the forces of the southern nomes, and
succeeded, though not without difficulty, in dispossessing the Syrian
Arisû. “When he arose, he was like Sûtkhû, providing for all the
necessities of the country which, for feebleness, could not stand, killing
the rebels which were in the Delta, purifying the great throne of Egypt;
he was regent of the two lands in the place of Tûmû, setting himself to
reorganise that which had been overthrown, to such good purpose, that each
one recognised as brethren those who had been separated from him as by a
wall for so long a time, strengthening the temples by pious gifts, so that
the traditional rites could be celebrated at the divine cycles.” *
Many were the difficulties that he had to encounter before he could
restore to his country that peace and wealth which she had enjoyed under
the long reign of Sesostris. It seems probable that his advancing years
made him feel unequal to the task, or that he desired to guard against the
possibility of disturbances in the event of his sudden death; at all
events, he associated with himself on the throne his eldest son Ramses—not,
however, as a Pharaoh who had full rights to the crown, like the
coadjutors of the Amenemhâîts and Usirtasens, but as a prince invested
with extraordinary powers, after the example of the sons of the Pharaohs
Thûtmosis and Seti I. Ramses recalls with pride, towards the close of his
life, how his father “had promoted him to the dignity of heir-presumptive
to the throne of Sibû,” and how he had been acclaimed as “the supreme head
of Qimît for the administration of the whole earth united together.” * This
constituted the rise of a new dynasty on the ruins of the old—the
last, however, which was able to retain the supremacy of Egypt over the
Oriental world. We are unable to ascertain how long this double reign
lasted.
Nakhtûsît, fully occupied by enemies within the country, had no leisure
either to build or to restore any monuments;* on his death, as no tomb had
been prepared for him, his mummy was buried in that of the usurper Siphtah
and the Queen Tausirît.
He was soon forgotten, and but few traces of his services survived him;
his name was subsequently removed from the official list of the kings,
while others not so deserving as he—as, for instance,
Siphtah-Minephtah and Amenmesis—were honourably inscribed in it. The
memory of his son overshadowed his own, and the series of the legitimate
kings who formed the XXth dynasty did not include him. Ramses III. took
for his hero his namesake, Ramses the Great, and endeavoured to rival him
in everything. This spirit of imitation was at times the means of leading
him to commit somewhat puerile acts, as, for example, when he copied
certain triumphal inscriptions word for word, merely changing the dates
and the cartouches,* or when he assumed the prenomen of Usirmârî, and
distributed among his male children the names and dignities of the sons of
Sesostris. We see, moreover, at his court another high priest of Phtah at
Memphis bearing the name of Khâmoîsît, and Marîtûmû, another supreme
pontiff of Râ in Heliopolis. However, this ambition to resemble his
ancestor at once instigated him to noble deeds, and gave him the necessary
determination to accomplish them.
He began by restoring order in the administration of affairs; “he
established truth, crushed error, purified the temple from all crime,” and
made his authority felt not only in the length and breadth of the Nile
valley, but in what was still left of the Asiatic provinces. The
disturbances of the preceding years had weakened the prestige of Amon-Râ,
and the king’s supremacy would have been seriously endangered, had any one
arisen in Syria of sufficient energy to take advantage of the existing
state of affairs. But since the death of Khâtusaru, the power of the Khâti
had considerably declined, and they retained their position merely through
their former prestige; they were in as much need of peace, or even more
so, than the Egyptians, for the same discords which had harassed the
reigns of Seti II. and his successors had doubtless brought trouble to
their own sovereigns. They had made no serious efforts to extend their
dominion over any of those countries which had been the objects of the
cupidity of their forefathers, while the peoples of Kharu and Phoenicia,
thrown back on their own resources, had not ventured to take up arms
against the Pharaoh. The yoke lay lightly upon them, and in no way
hampered their internal liberty; they governed as they liked, they
exchanged one prince or chief for another, they waged petty wars as of
old, without, as a rule, exposing themselves to interference from the
Egyptian troops occupying the country, or from the “royal messengers.”
These vassal provinces had probably ceased to pay tribute, or had done so
irregularly, during the years of anarchy following the death of Siphtah,
but they had taken no concerted action, nor attempted any revolt, so that
when Ramses III. ascended the throne he was spared the trouble of
reconquering them. He had merely to claim allegiance to have it at once
rendered him—an allegiance which included the populations in the
neighbourhood of Qodshû and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb. The empire,
which had threatened to fall to pieces amid the civil wars, and which
would indeed have succumbed had they continued a few years longer, again
revived now that an energetic prince had been found to resume the
direction of affairs, and to weld together those elements which had been
on the point of disintegration.
One state alone appeared to regret the revival of the Imperial power; this
was the kingdom of Libya. It had continued to increase in size since the
days of Mînephtah, and its population had been swelled by the annexation
of several strange tribes inhabiting the vast area of the Sahara. One of
these, the Mashaûasha, acquired the ascendency among these desert races
owing to their numbers and valour, and together with the other tribes—the
Sabati, the Kaiakasha, the Shaîû, the Hasa, the Bikana, and the Qahaka*—formed
a confederacy, which now threatened Egypt on the west. This federation was
conducted by Didi, Mashaknû, and Mâraîû, all children of that Mâraîû who
had led the first Libyan invasion, and also by Zamarû and Zaûtmarû, two
princes of less important tribes.** Their combined forces had attacked
Egypt for the second time during the years of anarchy, and had gained
possession one after another of all the towns in the west of the Delta,
from the neighbourhood of Memphis to the town of Qarbîna: the Canopic
branch of the Nile now formed the limit of their dominion, and they often
crossed it to devastate the central provinces.***
Nakhtûsîti had been unable to drive them out, and Ramses had not ventured
on the task immediately after his accession. The military institutions of
the country had become totally disorganised after the death of Mînephtah,
and that part of the community responsible for furnishing the army with
recruits had been so weakened by the late troubles, that they were in a
worse condition than before the first Libyan invasion. The losses they had
suffered since Egypt began its foreign conquests had not been repaired by
the introduction of fresh elements, and the hope of spoil was now
insufficient to induce members of the upper classes to enter the army.
There was no difficulty in filling the ranks from the fellahîn, but the
middle class and the aristocracy, accustomed to ease and wealth, no longer
came forward in large numbers, and disdained the military profession. It
was the fashion in the schools to contrast the calling of a scribe with
that of a foot-soldier or a charioteer, and to make as merry over the
discomforts of a military occupation as it had formerly been the fashion
to extol its glory and profitableness. These scholastic exercises
represented the future officer dragged as a child to the barracks, “the
side-lock over his ear.—He is beaten and his sides are covered with
scars,—he is beaten and his two eyebrows are marked with wounds,—he
is beaten and his head is broken by a badly aimed blow; he is stretched on
the ground” for the slightest fault, “and blows fall on him as on a
papyrus,—and he is broken by the stick.” His education finished, he
is sent away to a distance, to Syria or Ethiopia, and fresh troubles
overtake him. “His victuals and his supply of water are about his neck
like the burden of an ass,—and his neck and throat suffer like those
of an ass,—so that the joints of his spine are broken.—He
drinks putrid water, keeping perpetual guard the while.” His fatigues soon
tell upon his health and vigour: “Should he reach the enemy,—he is
like a bird which trembles.—Should he return to Egypt,—he is
like a piece of old worm-eaten wood.—He is sick and must lie down,
he is carried on an ass,—while thieves steal his linen,—and
his slaves escape.” The charioteer is not spared either. He, doubtless,
has a moment of vain-glory and of flattered vanity when he receives,
according to regulations, a new chariot and two horses, with which he
drives at a gallop before his parents and his fellow-villagers; but once
having joined his regiment, he is perhaps worse off than the foot-soldier.
“He is thrown to the ground among thorns:—a scorpion wounds him in
the foot, and his heel is pierced by its sting.—When his kit is
examined,—his misery is at its height.” No sooner has the fact been
notified that his arms are in a bad condition, or that some article has
disappeared, than “he is stretched on the ground—and overpowered
with blows from a stick.” This decline of the warlike spirit in all
classes of society had entailed serious modifications in the organisation
of both army and navy. The native element no longer predominated in most
battalions and on the majority of vessels, as it had done under the
XVIIIth dynasty; it still furnished those formidable companies of archers—the
terror of both Africans and Asiatics—and also the most important
part, if not the whole, of the chariotry, but the main body of the
infantry was composed almost exclusively of mercenaries, particularly of
the Shardana and the Qahaka. Ramses began his reforms by rebuilding the
fleet, which, in a country like Egypt, was always an artificial creation,
liable to fall into decay, unless a strong and persistent effort were made
to keep it in an efficient condition. Shipbuilding had made considerable
progress in the last few centuries, perhaps from the impulse received
through Phoenicia, and the vessels turned out of the dockyards were far
superior to those constructed under Hâtshopsîtû. The general outlines of
the hull remained the same, but the stem and stern were finer, and not so
high out of the water; the bow ended, moreover, in a lion’s head of metal,
which rose above the cut-water. A wooden structure running between the
forecastle and quarter-deck protected the rowers during the fight, their
heads alone being exposed. The mast had only one curved yard, to which the
sail was fastened; this was run up from the deck by halyards when the
sailors wanted to make sail, and thus differed from the Egyptian
arrangement, where the sail was fastened to a fixed upper yard. At least
half of the crews consisted of Libyan prisoners, who were branded with a
hot iron like cattle, to prevent desertion; the remaining half was drawn
from the Syrian or Asiatic coast, or else were natives of Egypt. In order
to bring the army into better condition, Ramses revived the system of
classes, which empowered him to compel all Egyptians of unmixed race to
take personal service, while he hired mercenaries from Libya, Phoenicia,
Asia Minor, and wherever he could get them, and divided them into regular
regiments, according to their extraction and the arms that they bore. In
the field, the archers always headed the column, to meet the advance of
the foe with their arrows; they were followed by the Egyptian lancers—the
Shardana and the Tyrseni with their short spears and heavy bronze swords—while
a corps of veterans, armed with heavy maces, brought up the rear.* In an
engagement, these various troops formed three lines of infantry disposed
one behind the other—the light brigade in front to engage the
adversary, the swordsmen and lancers who were to come into close quarters
with the foe, and the mace-bearers in reserve, ready to advance on any
threatened point, or to await the critical moment when their intervention
would decide the victory: as in the times of Thûtmosis and Ramses II. the
chariotry covered the two wings.
It was well for Ramses that on ascending the throne he had devoted himself
to the task of recruiting the Egyptian army, and of personally and
carefully superintending the instruction and equipment of his men; for it
was thanks to these precautions that, when the confederated Libyans
attacked the country about the Vth year of his reign, he was enabled to
repulse them with complete success. “Didi, Mashaknû, Maraîû, together with
Zamarû and Zaûtmarû, had strongly urged them to attack Egypt and to carry
fire before them from one end of it to the other.”—“Their warriors
confided to each other in their counsels, and their hearts were full: ‘We
will be drunk!’ and their princes said within their breasts: ‘We will fill
our hearts with violence!’ But their plans were overthrown, thwarted,
broken against the heart of the god, and the prayer of their chief, which
their lips repeated, was not granted by the god.” They met the Egyptians
at a place called “Kamsisû-Khasfi-Timihû” (“Ramses repulses the Timihû”),
but their attack was broken by the latter, who were ably led and displayed
considerable valour. “They bleated like goats surprised by a bull who
stamps its foot, who pushes forward its horn and shakes the mountains,
charging whoever seeks to annoy it.” They fled afar, howling with fear,
and many of them, in endeavouring to escape their pursuers, perished in
the canals. “It is,” said they, “the breaking of our spines which
threatens us in the land of Egypt, and its lord destroys our souls for
ever and ever. Woe be upon them! for they have seen their dances changed
into carnage, Sokhît is behind them, fear weighs upon them. We march no
longer upon roads where we can walk, but we run across fields, all the
fields! And their soldiers did not even need to measure arms with us in
the struggle! Pharaoh alone was our destruction, a fire against us every
time that he willed it, and no sooner did we approach than the flame
curled round us, and no water could quench it on us.” The victory was a
brilliant one; the victors counted 12,535 of the enemy killed,* and many
more who surrendered at discretion. The latter were formed into a brigade,
and were distributed throughout the valley of the Nile in military
settlements. They submitted to their fate with that resignation which we
know to have been a characteristic of the vanquished at that date.
They regarded their defeat as a judgment from God against which there was
no appeal; when their fate had been once pronounced, nothing remained to
the condemned except to submit to it humbly, and to accommodate themselves
to the master to whom they were now bound by a decree from on high. The
prisoners of one day became on the next the devoted soldiers of the prince
against whom they had formerly fought resolutely, and they were employed
against their own tribes, their employers having no fear of their
deserting to the other side during the engagement. They were lodged in the
barracks at Thebes, or in the provinces under the feudal lords and
governors of the Pharaoh, and were encouraged to retain their savage
customs and warlike spirit. They intermarried either with the fellahîn or
with women of their own tribes, and were reinforced at intervals by fresh
prisoners or volunteers. Drafted principally into the Delta and the cities
of Middle Egypt, they thus ended by constituting a semi-foreign
population, destined by nature and training to the calling of arms, and
forming a sort of warrior caste, differing widely from the militia of
former times, and known for many generations by their national name of
Mashaûasha. As early as the XIIth dynasty, the Pharaohs had, in a similar
way, imported the Mazaîû from Nubia, and had used them as a military
police; Ramses III. now resolved to naturalise the Libyans for much the
same purpose. His victory did not bear the immediate fruits that we might
have expected from his own account of it; the memory of the exploits of
Ramses II. haunted him, and, stimulated by the example of his ancestor at
Qodshû, he doubtless desired to have the sole credit of the victory over
the Libyans. He certainly did overcome their kings, and arrested their
invasion; we may go so far as to allow that he wrested from them the
provinces which they had occupied on the left bank of the Canopic branch,
from Marea to the Natron Lakes, but he did not conquer them, and their
power still remained as formidable as ever. He had gained a respite at the
point of the sword, but he had not delivered Egypt from their future
attacks.
He might perhaps have been tempted to follow up his success and assume the
offensive, had not affairs in Asia at this juncture demanded the whole of
his attention. The movement of great masses of European tribes in a
southerly and easterly direction was beginning to be felt by the
inhabitants of the Balkans, who were forced to set out in a double stream
of emigration—one crossing the Bosphorus and the Propontis towards
the centre of Asia Minor, while the other made for what was later known as
Greece Proper, by way of the passes over Olympus and Pindus. The nations
who had hitherto inhabited these regions, now found themselves thrust
forward by the pressure of invading hordes, and were constrained to move
towards the south and east by every avenue which presented itself. It was
probably the irruption of the Phrygians into the high table-land which
gave rise to the general exodus of these various nations—the
Pulasati, the Zakkala, the Shagalasha, the Danauna, and the Uashasha—some
of whom had already made their way into Syria and taken part in campaigns
there, while others had as yet never measured strength with the Egyptians.
The main body of these migrating tribes chose the overland route, keeping
within easy distance of the coast, from Pamphylia as far as the confines
of Naharaim.
They were accompanied by their families, who must have been mercilessly
jolted in the ox-drawn square waggons with solid wheels in which they
travelled. The body of the vehicle was built either of roughly squared
planks, or else of something resembling wicker-work. The round axletree
was kept in its place by means of a rude pin, and four oxen were harnessed
abreast to the whole structure. The children wore no clothes, and had, for
the most part, their hair tied into a tuft on the top of their heads; the
women affected a closely fitting cap, and were wrapped in large blue or
red garments drawn close to the body.* The men’s attire varied according
to the tribe to which they belonged. The Pulasati undoubtedly held the
chief place; they were both soldiers and sailors, and we must recognise in
them the foremost of those tribes known to the Greeks of classical times
as the Oarians, who infested the coasts of Asia Minor as well as those of
Greece and the Ægean islands.**
Crete was at this time the seat of a maritime empire, whose chiefs were
perpetually cruising the seas and harassing the civilized states of the
Eastern Mediterranean. These sea-rovers had grown wealthy through piracy,
and contact with the merchants of Syria and Egypt had awakened in them a
taste for a certain luxury and refinement, of which we find no traces in
the remains of their civilization anterior to this period. Some of the
symbols in the inscriptions found on their monuments recall certain of the
Egyptian characters, while others present an original aspect and seem to
be of Ægean origin. We find in them, arranged in juxtaposition, signs
representing flowers, birds, fish, quadrupeds of various kinds, members of
the human body, and boats and household implements. From the little which
is known of this script we are inclined to derive it from a similar source
to that which has furnished those we meet with in several parts of Asia
Minor and Northern Syria. It would appear that in ancient times, somewhere
in the centre of the Peninsula—but under what influence or during
what period we know not—a syllabary was developed, of which
varieties were handed on from tribe to tribe, spreading on the one side to
the Hittites, Cilicians, and the peoples on the borders of Syria and
Egypt, and on the other to the Trojans, to the people of the Cyclades, and
into Crete and Greece. It is easy to distinguish the Pulasati by the felt
helmet which they wore fastened under the chin by two straps and
surmounted by a crest of feathers. The upper part of their bodies was
covered by bands of leather or some thick material, below which hung a
simple loin-cloth, while their feet were bare or shod with short sandals.
They carried each a round buckler with two handles, and the stout bronze
sword common to the northern races, suspended by a cross belt passing over
the left shoulder, and were further armed with two daggers and two
javelins. They hurled the latter from a short distance while attacking,
and then drawing their sword or daggers, fell upon the enemy; we find
among them a few chariots of the Hittite type, each manned by a driver and
two fighting men. The Tyrseni appear to have been the most numerous after
the Pulasati, next to whom came the Zakkala. The latter are thought to
have been a branch of the Siculo-Pelasgi whom Greek tradition represents
as scattered at this period among the Cyclades and along the coast of the
Hellespont;* they wore a casque surmounted with plumes like that of the
Pulasati. The Tyrseni may be distinguished by their feathered head-dress,
but the Shaga-lasha affected a long ample woollen cap falling on the neck
behind, an article of apparel which is still worn by the sailors of the
Archipelago; otherwise they were equipped in much the same manner as their
allies. The other members of the confederation, the Shardana, the Danauna,
and the Nashasha, each furnished an inconsiderable contingent, and, taken
all together, formed but a small item of the united force.**
Their fleet sailed along the coast and kept within sight of the force on
land. The squadrons depicted on the monuments are without doubt those of
the two peoples, the Pulasati and Zakkala. Their ships resembled in many
respects those of Egypt, except in the fact that they had no cut-water.
The bow and stern rose up straight like the neck of a goose or swan; two
structures for fighting purposes were erected above the dock, while a rail
running round the sides of the vessel protected the bodies of the rowers.
An upper yard curved in shape hung from the single mast, which terminated
in a top for the look-out during a battle. The upper yard was not made to
lower, and the top-men managed the sail in the same manner as the Egyptian
sailors. The resemblance between this fleet and that of Ramses is easily
explained. The dwellers on the Ægean, owing to the knowledge they had
acquired of the Phoenician galleys, which were accustomed to cruise
annually in their waters, became experts in shipbuilding.
They copied the lines of the Phoenician craft, imitated the rigging, and
learned to manoeuvre their vessels so well, both on ordinary occasions and
in a battle, that they could now oppose to the skilled eastern navigators
ships as well fitted out and commanded by captains as experienced as those
of Egypt or Asia.
There had been a general movement among all these peoples at the very time
when Ramses was repelling the attack of the Libyans; “the isles had
quivered, and had vomited forth their people at once.” *
They were subjected to one of those irresistible impulses such as had
driven the Shepherds into Egypt; or again, in later times, had carried
away the Cimmerians and the Scyths to the pillage of Asia Minor: “no
country could hold out against their arms, neither Khâti, nor Qodi, nor
Carchemish, nor Arvad, nor Alasia, without being brought to nothing.” The
ancient kingdoms of Sapalulu and Khâtusaru, already tottering, crumbled to
pieces under the shock, and were broken up into their primitive elements.
The barbarians, unable to carry the towns by assault, and too impatient to
resort to a lengthened siege, spread over the valley of the Orontes,
burning and devastating the country everywhere. Having reached the
frontiers of the empire, in the country of the Amorites, they came to a
halt, and constructing an entrenched camp, installed within it their women
and the booty they had acquired. Some of their predatory bands, having
ravaged the Bekâa, ended by attacking the subjects of the Pharaoh himself,
and their chiefs dreamed of an invasion of Egypt. Ramses, informed of
their design by the despatches of his officers and vassals, resolved to
prevent its accomplishment. He summoned his troops together, both
indigenous and mercenary, in his own person looked after their armament
and commissariat, and in the VIIIth year of his reign crossed the frontier
near Zalu. He advanced by forced marches to meet the enemy, whom he
encountered somewhere in Southern Syria, on the borders of the Shephelah,*
and after a stubbornly contested campaign obtained the victory. He carried
off from the field, in addition to the treasures of the confederate
tribes, some of the chariots which had been used for the transport of
their families. The survivors made their way hastily to the north-west, in
the direction of the sea, in order to receive the support of their navy,
but the king followed them step by step.
It is recorded that he occupied himself with lion-hunting en route
after the example of the victors of the XVIIIth dynasty, and that he
killed three of these animals in the long grass on one occasion on the
banks of some river. He rejoined his ships, probably at Jaffa, and made
straight for the enemy. The latter were encamped on the level shore, at
the head of a bay wide enough to offer to their ships a commodious space
for naval evolutions—possibly the mouth of the Belos, in the
neighbourhood of Magadîl. The king drove their foot-soldiers into the
water at the same moment that his admirals attacked the combined fleet of
the Pulasati and Zakkala.
Some of the Ægean galleys were capsized and sank when the Egyptian vessels
rammed them with their sharp stems, and the crews, in endeavouring to
escape to land by swimming, were picked off by the arrows of the archers
of the guard who were commanded by Ramses and his sons; they perished in
the waves, or only escaped through the compassion of the victors. “I had
fortified,” said the Pharaoh, “my frontier at Zahi; I had drawn up before
these people my generals, my provincial governors, the vassal princes, and
the best of my soldiers. The mouths of the river seemed to be a mighty
rampart of galleys, barques, and vessels of all kinds, equipped from the
bow to the stern with valiant armed men. The infantry, the flower of
Egypt, were as lions roaring on the mountains; the charioteers, selected
from among the most rapid warriors, had for their captains only officers
confident in themselves; the horses quivered in all their limbs, and were
burning to trample the nations underfoot. As for me, I was like the
warlike Montû: I stood up before them and they saw the vigour of my arms.
I, King Ramses, I was as a hero who is conscious of his valour, and who
stretches his hands over the people in the day of battle. Those who have
violated my frontier will never more garner harvests from this earth: the
period of their soul has been fixed for ever. My forces were drawn up
before them on the ‘Very Green,’ a devouring flame approached them at the
river mouth, annihilation embraced them on every side. Those who were on
the strand I laid low on the seashore, slaughtered like victims of the
butcher. I made their vessels to capsize, and their riches fell into the
sea.” Those who had not fallen in the fight were caught, as it were, in
the cast of a net. A rapid cruiser of the fleet carried the Egyptian
standard along the coast as far as the regions of the Orontes and Saros.
The land troops, on the other hand, following on the heels of the defeated
enemy, pushed through Coele-Syria, and in their first burst of zeal
succeeded in reaching the plains of the Euphrates. A century had elapsed
since a Pharaoh had planted his standard in this region, and the country
must have seemed as novel to the soldiers of Ramses III. as to those of
his predecessor Thûtmosis.
The Khâti were still its masters; and all enfeebled as they were by the
ravages of the invading barbarians, were nevertheless not slow in
preparing to resist their ancient enemies. The majority of the citadels
shut their gates in the face of Ramses, who, wishing to lose no time, did
not attempt to besiege them: he treated their territory with the usual
severity, devastating their open towns, destroying their harvests,
breaking down their fruit trees, and cutting away their forests. He was
able, moreover, without arresting his march, to carry by assault several
of their fortified towns, Alaza among the number, the destruction of which
is represented in the scenes of his victories. The spoils were
considerable, and came very opportunely to reward the soldiers or to
provide funds for the erection of monuments. The last battalion of troops,
however, had hardly recrossed the isthmus when Lotanû became again its own
master, and Egyptian rule was once more limited to its traditional
provinces of Kharû and Phoenicia. The King of the Khâti appears among the
prisoners whom the Pharaoh is represented as bringing to his father Amon;
Carchemish, Tunipa, Khalabu, Katna, Pabukhu, Arvad, Mitanni, Mannus, Asi,
and a score of other famous towns of this period appear in the list of the
subjugated nations, recalling the triumphs of Thûtmosis III. and Amenothes
II. Ramses did not allow himself to be deceived into thinking that his
success was final. He accepted the protestations of obedience which were
spontaneously offered him, but he undertook no further expedition of
importance either to restrain or to provoke his enemies: the restricted
rule which satisfied his exemplar Ramses II. ought, he thought, to be
sufficient for his own ambition.
Egypt breathed freely once more on the announcement of the victory;
henceforward she was “as a bed without anguish.” “Let each woman now go to
and fro according to her will,” cried the sovereign, in describing the
campaign, “her ornaments upon her, and directing her steps to any place
she likes!” And in order to provide still further guarantees of public
security, he converted his Asiatic captives, as he previously had his
African prisoners, into a bulwark against the barbarians, and a safeguard
of the frontier. The war must, doubtless, have decimated Southern Syria;
and he planted along its coast what remained of the defeated tribes—the
Philistines in the Shephelah, and the Zakkala on the borders of the great
oak forest stretching from Oarmel to Dor.*
Watch-towers were erected for the supervision of this region, and for
rallying-points in case of internal revolts or attacks from without. One
of these, the Migdol of Ramses III., was erected, not far from the scene
of the decisive battle, on the spot where the spoils had been divided.
This living barrier, so to speak, stood between the Nile valley and the
dangers which threatened it from Asia, and it was not long before its
value was put to the proof. The Libyans, who had been saved from
destruction by the diversion created in their favour on the eastern side
of the empire, having now recovered their courage, set about collecting
their hordes together for a fresh invasion. They returned to the attack in
the XIth year of Ramses, under the leadership of Kapur, a prince of the
Mashauasha.*
Their soul had said to them for the second time that “they would end their
lives in the nomes of Egypt, that they would till its valleys and its
plains as their own land.” The issue did not correspond with their
intentions. “Death fell upon them within Egypt, for they had hastened with
their feet to the furnace which consumes corruption, under the fire of the
valour of the king who rages like Baal from the heights of heaven. All his
limbs are invested with victorious strength; with his right hand he lays
hold of the multitudes, his left extends to those who are against him,
like a cloud of arrows directed upon them to destroy them, and his sword
cuts like that of Montû. Kapur, who had come to demand homage, blind with
fear, threw down his arms, and his troops did the same. He sent up to
heaven a suppliant cry, and his son [Mashashalu] arrested his foot and his
hand; for, behold, there rises beside him the god who knows what he has in
his heart: His Majesty falls upon their heads as a mountain of granite and
crushes them, the earth drinks up their blood as if it had been water…;
their army was slaughtered, slaughtered their soldiers,” near a fortress
situated on the borders of the desert called the “Castle of
Usirmarî-Miamon.” They were seized, “they were stricken, their arms bound,
like geese piled up in the bottom of a boat, under the feet of His
Majesty.” * The fugitives were pursued at the sword’s point from the Castle
of Usirmarî-Miamon to the Castle of the Sands, a distance of
over thirty miles.**
Two thousand and seventy-five Libyans were left upon the ground that day,
two thousand and fifty-two perished in other engagements, while two
thousand and thirty-two, both male and female, were made prisoners. These
were almost irreparable losses for a people of necessarily small numbers,
and if we add the number of those who had succumbed in the disaster of six
years before, we can readily realise how discouraged the invaders must
have been, and how little likely they were to try the fortune of war once
more. Their power dwindled and vanished almost as quickly as it had
arisen; the provisional cohesion given to their forces by a few ambitious
chiefs broke up after their repeated defeats, and the rudiments of an
empire which had struck terror into the Pharaohs, resolved itself into its
primitive elements, a number of tribes scattered over the desert. They
were driven back beyond the Libyan mountains; fortresses* guarded the
routes they had previously followed, and they were obliged henceforward to
renounce any hope of an invasion en masse, and to content
themselves with a few raiding expeditions into the fertile plain of the
Delta, where they had formerly found a transitory halting-place.
Counter-raids organised by the local troops or by the mercenaries who
garrisoned the principal towns in the neighbourhood of Memphis—Hermopolis
and Thinisl—inflicted punishment upon them when they became too
audacious. Their tribes, henceforward, as far as Egypt was concerned,
formed a kind of reserve from which the Pharaoh could raise soldiers every
year, and draw sufficient materials to bring his army up to fighting
strength when internal revolt or an invasion from without called for
military activity.
The campaign of the XIth year brought to an end the great military
expeditions of Ramses III. Henceforward he never took the lead in any more
serious military enterprise than that of repressing the Bedawin of Seîr
for acts of brigandage,* or the Ethiopians for some similar reason. He
confined his attention to the maintenance of commercial and industrial
relations with manufacturing countries, and with the markets of Asia and
Africa. He strengthened the garrisons of Sinai, and encouraged the working
of the ancient mines in that region. He sent a colony of quarry-men and of
smelters to the land of Atika, in order to work the veins of silver which
were alleged to exist there.**
He launched a fleet on the Red Sea, and sent it to the countries of
fragrant spices. “The captains of the sailors were there, together with
the chiefs of the corvée and accountants, to provide provision” for
the people of the Divine Lands “from the innumerable products of Egypt;
and these products were counted by myriads. Sailing through the great sea
of Qodi, they arrived at Pûântt without mishap, and there collected
cargoes for their galleys and ships, consisting of all the unknown marvels
of Tonûtir, as well as considerable quantities of the perfumes of Pûâtîn,
which they stowed on board by tens of thousands without number. The sons
of the princes of Tonûtir came themselves into Qîmit with their tributes.
They reached the region of Coptos safe and sound, and disembarked there in
peace with their riches.” It was somewhere about Sau and Tuau that the
merchants and royal officers landed, following the example of the
expeditions of the XIIth and XVIIIth dynasties. Here they organised
caravans of asses and slaves, which taking the shortest route across the
mountain—that of the valley of Rahanû—carried the precious
commodities to Coptos, whence they were transferred to boats and
distributed along the river. The erection of public buildings, which had
been interrupted since the time of Mînephtah, began again with renewed
activity. The captives in the recent victories furnished the requisite
labour, while the mines, the voyages to the Somali coast, and the tributes
of vassals provided the necessary money. Syria was not lost sight of in
this resumption of peaceful occupations. The overthrow of the Khâti
secured Egyptian rule in this region, and promised a long tranquillity
within its borders. One temple at least was erected in the country—that
of Pa-kanâna—where the princes of Kharu were to assemble to offer
worship to the Pharaoh, and to pay each one his quota of the general
tribute. The Pulasati were employed to protect the caravan routes, and a
vast reservoir was erected near Aîna to provide a store of water for the
irrigation of the neighbouring country. The Delta absorbed the greater
part of the royal subsidies; it had suffered so much from the Libyan
incursions, that the majority of the towns within it had fallen into a
condition as miserable as that in which they were at the time of the
expulsion of the Shepherds. Heliopolis, Bubastis, Thmuis, Amû, and Tanis
still preserved some remains of the buildings which had already been
erected in them by Ramses; he constructed also, at the place at present
called Tel el-Yahûdîyeh, a royal palace of limestone, granite, and
alabaster, of which the type is unique amongst all the structures hitherto
discovered. Its walls and columns were not ornamented with the usual
sculptures incised in stone, but the whole of the decorations—scenes
as well as inscriptions—consisted of plaques of enamelled
terra-cotta set in cement. The forms of men and animals and the lines of
hieroglyphs, standing out in slight relief from a glazed and warm-coloured
background, constitute an immense mosaic-work of many hues. The few
remains of the work show great purity of design and an extraordinary
delicacy of tone.
All the knowledge of the Egyptian painters, and all the technical skill of
their artificers in ceramic, must have been employed to compose such
harmoniously balanced decorations, with their free handling of line and
colour, and their thousands of rosettes, squares, stars, and buttons of
varicoloured pastes.*
The difficulties to overcome were so appalling, that when the marvellous
work was once accomplished, no subsequent attempt was made to construct a
second like it: all the remaining structures of Ramses III., whether at
Memphis, in the neighbourhood of Abydos, or at Karnak, were in the
conventional style of the Pharaohs. He determined, nevertheless, to give
to the exterior of the Memnonium, which he built near Medinet-Habu for the
worship of himself, the proportions and appearance of an Asiatic “Migdol,”
influenced probably by his remembrance of similar structures which he had
seen during his Syrian campaign. The chapel itself is of the ordinary
type, with its gigantic pylons, its courts surrounded by columns—each
supporting a colossal Osirian statue—its hypostyle hall, and its
mysterious cells for the deposit of spoils taken from the peoples of the
sea and the cities of Asia. His tomb was concealed at a distant spot in
the Biban-el-Moluk, and we see depicted on its walls the same scenes that
we find in the last resting-place of Seti I. or Ramses II., and in
addition to them, in a series of supplementary chambers, the arms of the
sovereign, his standards, his treasure, his kitchen, and the preparation
of offerings which were to be made to him. His sarcophagus, cut out of an
enormous block of granite, was brought for sale to Europe at the beginning
of this century, and Cambridge obtained possession of its cover, while the
Louvre secured the receptacle itself.
These were years of profound tranquillity. The Pharaoh intended that
absolute order should reign throughout his realm, and that justice should
be dispensed impartially within it.
There were to be no more exactions, no more crying iniquities: whoever was
discovered oppressing the people, no matter whether he were court official
or feudal lord—was instantly deprived of his functions, and replaced
by an administrator of tried integrity. Ramses boasts, moreover, in an
idyllic manner, of having planted trees everywhere, and of having built
arbours wherein the people might sit in the shade in the open air; while
women might go to and fro where they would in security, no one daring to
insult them on the way. The Shardanian and Libyan mercenaries were
restricted to the castles which they garrisoned, and were subjected to
such a severe discipline that no one had any cause of complaint against
these armed barbarians settled in the heart of Egypt. “I have,” continues
the king, “lifted up every miserable one out of his misfortune, I have
granted life to him, I have saved him from the mighty who were oppressing
him, and have secured rest for every one in his own town.” The details of
the description are exaggerated, but the general import of it is true.
Egypt had recovered the peace and prosperity of which it had been deprived
for at least half a century, that is, since the death of Mînephtah. The
king, however, was not in such a happy condition as his people, and court
intrigues embittered the later years of his life. One of his sons, whose
name is unknown to us, but who is designated in the official records by
the nickname of Pentaûîrît, formed a conspiracy against him. His mother,
Tîi, who was a woman of secondary rank, took it into her head to secure
the crown for him, to the detriment of the children of Queen Isît. An
extensive plot was hatched in which scribes, officers of the guard,
priests, and officials in high place, both natives and foreigners, were
involved. A resort to the supernatural was at first attempted, and the
superintendent of the Herds, a certain Panhûibaûnû, who was deeply versed
in magic, undertook to cast a spell upon the Pharaoh, if he could only
procure certain conjuring books of which he was not possessed. These were
found to be in the royal library. He managed to introduce himself under
cover of the night into the harem, where he manufactured certain waxen
figures, of which some were to excite the hate of his wives against their
husband, while others would cause him to waste away and finally perish. A
traitor betrayed several of the conspirators, who, being subjected to the
torture, informed upon others, and these at length brought the matter home
to Pentaûîrît and his immediate accomplices. All were brought before a
commission of twelve members, summoned expressly to try the case, and the
result was the condemnation and execution of six women and some forty men.
The extreme penalty of the Egyptian code was reserved for Pentaûîrît, and
for the most culpable,—“they died of themselves,” and the meaning of
this phrase is indicated, I believe, by the appearance of one of the
mummies disinterred at Deîr el-Baharî.* The coffin in which it was placed
was very plain, painted white and without inscription; the customary
removal of entrails had not been effected, but the body was covered with a
thick layer of natron, which was applied even to the skin itself and
secured by wrappings.
It makes one’s flesh creep to look at it: the hands and feet are tied by
strong bands, and are curled up as if under an intolerable pain; the
abdomen is drawn up, the stomach projects like a ball, the chest is
contracted, the head is thrown back, the face is contorted in a hideous
grimace, the retracted lips expose the teeth, and the mouth is open as if
to give utterance to a last despairing cry. The conviction is borne in
upon us that the man was invested while still alive with the wrappings of
the dead. Is this the mummy of Pentaûîrît, or of some other prince as
culpable as he was, and condemned to this frightful punishment? In order
to prevent the recurrence of such wicked plots, Pharaoh resolved to share
his throne with that one of his sons who had most right to it. In the
XXXIInd year of his reign he called together his military and civil
chiefs, the generals of the foreign mercenaries, the Shardana, the
priests, and the nobles of the court, and presented to them, according to
custom, his heir-designate, who was also called Ramses. He placed the
double crown upon his brow, and seated him beside himself upon the throne
of Horus. This was an occasion for the Pharaoh to bring to remembrance all
the great exploits he had performed during his reign—his triumphs
over the Libyans and over the peoples of the sea, and the riches he had
lavished upon the gods: at the end of the enumeration he exhorted those
who were present to observe the same fidelity towards the son which they
had observed towards the father, and to serve the new sovereign as
valiantly as they had served himself.
The joint reign lasted for only four years. Ramses III. was not much over
sixty years of age when he died. He was still vigorous and muscular, but
he had become stout and heavy. The fatty matter of the body having been
dissolved by the natron in the process of embalming, the skin distended
during life has gathered up into enormous loose folds, especially about
the nape of the neck, under the chin, on the hips, and at the
articulations of the limbs. The closely shaven head and cheeks present no
trace of hair or beard. The forehead, although neither broad nor high, is
better proportioned than that of Ramses II.; the supra-orbital ridges are
less accentuated than his, the cheek-bones not so prominent, the nose not
so arched, and the chin and jaw less massive. The eyes were perhaps
larger, but no opinion can be offered on this point, for the eyelids have
been cut away, and the cleared-out cavities have been filled with rags.
The ears do not stand out so far from the head as those of Ramses II., but
they have been pierced for ear-rings. The mouth, large by nature, has been
still further widened in the process of embalming, owing to the
awkwardness of the operator, who has cut into the cheeks at the side. The
thin lips allow the white and regular teeth to be seen; the first molar on
the right has been either broken in half, or has worn away more rapidly
than the rest. Ramses III. seems, on the whole, to have been a sort of
reduced copy, a little more delicate in make, of Ramses II.; his face
shows more subtlety of expression and intelligence, though less nobility
than that of the latter, while his figure is not so upright, his shoulders
not so broad, and his general muscular vigour less. What has been said of
his personality may be extended to his reign; it was evidently and
designedly an imitation of the reign of Ramses IL, but fell short of its
model owing to the insufficiency of his resources in men and money. If
Ramses III. did not succeed in becoming one of the most powerful of the
Theban Pharaohs, it was not for lack of energy or ability; the depressed
condition of Egypt at the time limited the success of his endeavours and
caused them to fall short of his intentions. The work accomplished by him
was not on this account less glorious. At his accession Egypt was in a
wretched state, invaded on the west, threatened by a flood of barbarians
on the east, without an army or a fleet, and with no resources in the
treasury. In fifteen years he had disposed of his inconvenient neighbours,
organised an army, constructed a fleet, re-established his authority
abroad, and settled the administration at home on so firm a basis, that
the country owed the peace which it enjoyed for several centuries to the
institutions and prestige which he had given it. His associate in the
government, Ramses IV., barely survived him. Then followed a series of rois
fainéants bearing the name of Ramses, but in an order not yet clearly
determined. It is generally assumed that Ramses V., brother of Ramses
III., succeeded Ramses IV. by supplanting his nephews—who, however,
appear to have soon re-established their claim to the throne, and to have
followed each other in rapid succession as Ramses VI., Ramses VIL, Ramses
VIII., and Maritûmû.* Others endeavour to make out that Ramses V. was the
son of Ramses IV., and that the prince called Ramses VI. never succeeded
to the throne at all. At any rate, his son, who is styled Ramses VIL, but
who is asserted by some to have been a son of Ramses III., is considered
to have succeeded Ramses V., and to have become the ancestor from whom the
later Ramessides traced their descent.**
The short reigns of these Pharaohs were marked by no events which would
cast lustre on their names; one might say that they had nothing else to do
than to enjoy peacefully the riches accumulated by their forefather.
Ramses IV. was anxious to profit by the commercial relations which had
been again established between Egypt and Puanît, and, in order to
facilitate the transit between Coptos and Kosseir, founded a station, and
a temple dedicated to Isis, in the mountain of Bakhni; by this route, we
learn, more than eight thousand men had passed under the auspices of the
high priest of Amon, Nakh-tû-ramses. This is the only undertaking of
public utility which we can attribute to any of these kings. As we see
them in their statues and portraits, they are heavy and squat and without
refinement, with protruding eyes, thick lips, flattened and commonplace
noses, round and expressionless faces. Their work was confined to the
engraving of their cartouches on the blank spaces of the temples at Karnak
and Medinet-Habu, and the addition of a few stones to the buildings at
Memphis, Abydos, and Heliopolis. Whatever energy and means they possessed
were expended on the construction of their magnificent tombs.
These may still be seen in the Biban el-Moluk, and no visitor can refrain
from admiring them for their magnitude and decoration. As to funerary
chapels, owing to the shortness of the reigns of these kings, there was
not time to construct them, and they therefore made up for this want by
appropriating the chapel of their father, which was at Medinet-Habu, and
it was here consequently that their worship was maintained. The last of
the sons of Ramses III. was succeeded by another and equally ephemeral
Ramses; after whom came Ramses X. and Ramses XI., who re-established the
tradition of more lasting reigns. There was now no need of expeditions
against Kharu or Libya, for these enfeebled countries no longer disputed,
from the force of custom, the authority of Egypt. From time to time an
embassy from these countries would arrive at Thebes, bringing presents,
which were pompously recorded as representing so much tribute.* If it is
true that a people which has no history is happy, then Egypt ought to be
reckoned as more fortunate under the feebler descendants of Ramses III.
than it had ever been under the most famous Pharaohs.
Thebes continued to be the favourite royal residence. Here in its temple
the kings were crowned, and in its palaces they passed the greater part of
their lives, and here in its valley of sepulchres they were laid to rest
when their reigns and lives were ended. The small city of the beginning of
the XVIIIth dynasty had long encroached upon the plain, and was now
transformed into an immense town, with magnificent monuments, and a motley
population, having absorbed in its extension the villages of Ashirû,* and
Madit, and even the southern Apît, which we now call Luxor. But their
walls could still be seen, rising up in the middle of modern
constructions, a memorial of the heroic ages, when the power of the Theban
princes was trembling in the balance, and when conflicts with the
neighbouring barons or with the legitimate king were on the point of
breaking out at every moment.**
The inhabitants of Apît retained their walls, which coincided almost
exactly with the boundary of Nsîttauî, the great sanctuary of Amon; Ashirû
sheltered behind its ramparts the temple of Mût, while Apît-rîsît
clustered around a building consecrated by Amenôthes III. to his divine
father, the lord of Thebes. Within the boundary walls of Thebes extended
whole suburbs, more or less densely populated and prosperous, through
which ran avenues of sphinxes connecting together the three chief boroughs
of which the sovereign city was composed. On every side might have been
seen the same collections of low grey huts, separated from each other by
some muddy pool where the cattle were wont to drink and the women to draw
water; long streets lined with high houses, irregularly shaped open
spaces, bazaars, gardens, courtyards, and shabby-looking palaces which,
while presenting a plain and unadorned exterior, contained within them the
refinements of luxury and the comforts of wealth. The population did not
exceed a hundred thousand souls,* reckoning a large proportion of
foreigners attracted hither by commerce or held as slaves.
The court of the Pharaoh drew to the city numerous provincials, who,
coming thither to seek their fortune, took up their abode there, planting
in the capital of Southern Egypt types from the north and the centre of
the country, as well as from Nubia and the Oases; such a continuous
infusion of foreign material into the ancient Theban stock gave rise to
families of a highly mixed character, in which all the various races of
Egypt were blended in the most capricious fashion. In every twenty
officers, and in the same number of ordinary officials, about half would
be either Syrians, or recently naturalised Nubians, or the descendants of
both, and among the citizens such names as Pakhari the Syrian, Palamnanî
the native of the Lebanon, Pinahsî the negro, Palasiaî the Alasian,
preserved the indications of foreign origin.* A similar mixture of races
was found in other cities, and Memphis, Bubastis, Tanis, and Siût must
have presented as striking an aspect in this respect as Thebes.** At
Memphis there were regular colonies of Phoenician, Canaanite, and Amorite
merchants sufficiently prosperous to have temples there to their national
gods, and influential enough to gain adherents to their religion from the
indigenous inhabitants. They worshipped Baal, Anîti. Baal-Zaphuna, and
Ashtoreth, side by side with Phtah, Nofîrtûmû, and Sokhit,*** and this
condition of things at Memphis was possibly paralleled elsewhere—as
at Tanis and Bubastis.
This blending of races was probably not so extensive in the country
districts, except in places where mercenaries were employed as garrisons;
but Sudanese or Hittite slaves, brought back by the soldiers of the ranks,
had introduced Ethiopian and Asiatic elements into many a family of the
fellahîn.*
We have only to examine in any of our museums the statues of the Memphite
and Theban periods respectively, to see the contrast between the
individuals represented in them as far as regards stature and appearance.
Some members of the courts of the Ramessides stand out as genuine Semites
notwithstanding the disguise of their Egyptian names; and in the times of
Kheops and Ûsirtasen they would have been regarded as barbarians. Many of
them exhibit on their faces a blending of the distinctive features of one
or other of the predominant Oriental races of the time. Additional
evidence of a mixture of races is forthcoming when we examine with an
unbiased mind the mummies of the period, and the complexity of the new
elements introduced among the people by the political movements of the
later centuries is thus strongly confirmed. The new-comers had all been
absorbed and assimilated by the country, but the generations which arose
from this continual cross-breeding, while representing externally the
Egyptians of older epochs, in manners, language, and religion, were at
bottom something different, and the difference became the more accentuated
as the foreign elements increased. The people were thus gradually divested
of the character which had distinguished them before the conquest of
Syria; the dispositions and defects imported from without counteracted to
such an extent their own native dispositions and defects that all marks of
individuality were effaced and nullified. The race tended to become more
and more what it long continued to be afterwards,—a lifeless and
inert mass, without individual energy—endowed, it is true, with
patience, endurance, cheerfulness of temperament, and good nature, but
with little power of self-government, and thus forced to submit to foreign
masters who made use of it and oppressed it without pity.
The upper classes had degenerated as much as the masses. The feudal nobles
who had expelled the Shepherds, and carried the frontiers of the empire to
the banks of the Euphrates, seemed to have expended their energies in the
effort, and to have almost ceased to exist. As long as Egypt was
restricted to the Nile valley, there was no such disproportion between the
power of the Pharaoh and that of his feudatories as to prevent the latter
from maintaining their privileges beside, and, when occasion arose, even
against the monarch. The conquest of Asia, while it compelled them either
to take up arms themselves or to send their troops to a distance,
accustomed them and their soldiers to a passive obedience. The maintenance
of a strict discipline in the army was the first condition of successful
campaigning at great distances from the mother country and in the midst of
hostile people, and the unquestioning respect which they had to pay to the
orders of their general prepared them for abject submission to the will of
their sovereign. To their bravery, moveover, they owed not only money and
slaves, but also necklaces and bracelets of honour, and distinctions and
offices in the Pharaonic administration. The king, in addition, neglected
no opportunity for securing their devotion to himself. He gave to them in
marriage his sisters, his daughters, his cousins, and any of the
princesses whom he was not compelled by law to make his own wives. He
selected from their harems nursing-mothers for his own sons, and this
choice established between him and them a foster relationship, which was
as binding among the Egyptians and other Oriental peoples as one of blood.
It was not even necessary for the establishment of this relation that the
foster-mother’s connexion with the Pharaoh’s son should be durable or even
effective: the woman had only to offer her breast to the child for a
moment, and this symbol was quite enough to make her his nurse—his
true monâît. This fictitious fosterage was carried so far, that it
was even made use of in the case of youths and persons of mature age. When
an Egyptian woman wished to adopt an adult, the law prescribed that she
should offer him the breast, and from that moment he became her son. A
similar ceremony was prescribed in the case of men who wished to assume
the quality of male nurse—monâî—or even, indeed, of
female nurse—monâît—like that of their wives; according
to which they were to place, it would seem, the end of one of their
fingers in the mouth of the child.* Once this affinity was established,
the fidelity of these feudal lords was established beyond question; and
their official duties to the sovereign were not considered as accomplished
when they had fulfilled their military obligations, for they continued to
serve him in the palace as they had served him on the field. Wherever the
necessities of the government called them—at Memphis, at Ramses, or
elsewhere—they assembled around the Pharaoh; like him they had their
palaces at Thebes, and when they died they were anxious to be buried there
beside him.**
Many of the old houses had become extinct, while others, owing to
marriages, were absorbed into the royal family; the fiefs conceded to the
relations or favourites of the Pharaoh continued to exist, indeed, as of
old, but the ancient distrustful and turbulent feudality had given place
to an aristocracy of courtiers, who lived oftener in attendance on the
monarch than on their own estates, and whose authority continued to
diminish to the profit of the absolute rule of the king. There would be
nothing astonishing in the “count” becoming nothing more than a governor,
hereditary or otherwise, in Thebes itself; he could hardly be anything
higher in the capital of the empire.* But the same restriction of
authority was evidenced in all the provinces: the recruiting of soldiers,
the receipt of taxes, most of the offices associated with the civil or
military administration, became more and more affairs of the State, and
passed from the hands of the feudal lord into those of the functionaries
of the Crown. The few barons who still lived on their estates, while they
were thus dispossessed of the greater part of their prerogatives, obtained
some compensation, on the other hand, on the side of religion. From early
times they had been by birth the heads of the local cults, and their
protocol had contained, together with those titles which justified their
possession of the temporalities of the nome, others which attributed to
them spiritual supremacy. The sacred character with which they were
invested became more and more prominent in proportion as their political
influence became curtailed, and we find scions of the old warlike families
or representatives of a new lineage at Thinis, at Akhmîm,** in the nome of
Baalû, at Hierâconpolis,*** at El-Kab,**** and in every place where we
have information from the monuments as to their position, bestowing more
concern upon their sacerdotal than on their other duties.
This transfiguration of the functions of the barons, which had been
completed under the XIXth and XXth dynasties, corresponded with a more
general movement by which the Pharaohs themselves were driven to
accentuate their official position as high priests, and to assign to their
sons sacerdotal functions in relation to the principal deities. This
rekindling of religious fervour would not, doubtless, have restrained
military zeal in case of war;* but if it did not tend to suppress entirely
individual bravery, it discouraged the taste for arms and for the bold
adventures which had characterised the old feudality.
The duties of sacrificing, of offering prayer, of celebrating the sacred
rites according to the prescribed forms, and rendering due homage to the
gods in the manner they demanded, were of such an exactingly scrupulous
and complex character that the Pharaohs and the lords of earlier times had
to assign them to men specially fitted for, and appointed to, the task;
now that they had assumed these absorbing functions themselves, they were
obliged to delegate to others an increasingly greater proportion of their
civil and military duties. Thus, while the king and his great vassals were
devoutly occupying themselves in matters of worship and theology, generals
by profession were relieving them of the care of commanding their armies;
and as these individuals were frequently the chiefs of Ethiopian, Asiatic,
and especially of Libyan bands, military authority, and, with it,
predominant influence in the State were quickly passing into the hands of
the barbarians. A sort of aristocracy of veterans, notably of Shardana or
Mashauasha, entirely devoted to arms, grew up and increased gradually side
by side with the ancient noble families, now by preference devoted to the
priesthood.*
The barons, whether of ancient or modern lineage, were possessed of
immense wealth, especially those of priestly families. The tribute and
spoil of Asia and Africa, when once it had reached Egypt, hardly ever left
it: they were distributed among the population in proportion to the
position occupied by the recipients in the social scale. The commanders of
the troops, the attendants on the king, the administrators of the palace
and temples, absorbed the greater part, but the distribution was carried
down to the private soldier and his relations in town or country, who
received some of the crumbs. When we remember for a moment the four
centuries and more during which Egypt had been reaping the fruits of her
foreign conquest, we cannot think without amazement of the quantities of
gold and other precious metals which must have been brought in divers
forms into the valley of the Nile.* Every fresh expedition made additions
to these riches, and one is at a loss to know whence in the intervals
between two defeats the conquered could procure so much wealth, and why
the sources were never exhausted nor became impoverished. This flow of
metals had an influence upon commercial transactions, for although trade
was still mainly carried on by barter, the mode of operation was becoming
changed appreciably. In exchanging commodities, frequent use was now made
of rings and ingots of a certain prescribed weight in tabonû; and
it became more and more the custom to pay for goods by a certain number of
tabonû of gold, silver, or copper, rather than by other
commodities: it was the practice even to note down in invoices or in the
official receipts, alongside the products or manufactured articles with
which payments were made, the value of the same in weighed metal.**
This custom, although not yet widely extended, placed at the disposal of
trade enormous masses of metal, which were preserved in the form of ingots
or bricks, except the portion which went to the manufacture of rings,
jewellery, or valuable vessels.*
The general prosperity encouraged a passion for goldsmith’s work, and the
use of bracelets, necklaces, and chains became common among classes of the
people who were not previously accustomed to wear them. There was
henceforward no scribe or merchant, however poor he might be, who had not
his seal made of gold or silver, or at any rate of copper gilt. The stone
was sometimes fixed, but frequently arranged so as to turn round on a
pivot; while among people of superior rank it had some emblem or device
upon it, such as a scorpion, a sparrow-hawk, a lion, or a cynocephalous
monkey. Chains occupied the same position among the ornaments of Egyptian
women as rings among men; they were indispensable decorations. Examples of
silver chains are known of some five feet in length, while others do not
exceed two to three inches. There are specimens in gold of all sizes,
single, double, and triple, with large or small links, some thick and
heavy, while others are as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian
lace. The poorest peasant woman, alike with the lady of the court, could
boast of the possession of a chain, and she must have been in dire poverty
who had not some other ornament in her jewel-case. The jewellery of Queen
Âhhotpû shows to what degree of excellence the work of the Egyptian
goldsmiths had attained at the time of the expulsion of the Nyksôs: they
had not only preserved the good traditions of the best workmen of the
XIIth dynasty, but they had perfected the technical details, and had
learned to combine form and colour with a greater skill. The pectorals of
Prince Khâmoîsît and the Lord Psaru,now in the Louvre, but which were
originally placed in the tomb of the Apis in the time of Ramses II., are
splendid examples.
The most common form of these represents in miniature the front of a
temple with a moulded or flat border, surmounted by a curved cornice. In
one of them, which was doubtless a present from the king himself, the
cartouche, containing the first name of the Pharaoh-Usirmari, appears just
below the frieze, and serves as a centre for the design within the frame.
The wings of the ram-headed sparrow-hawk, the emblem of Amonrâ, are so
displayed as to support it, while a large urseus and a vulture beneath
embracing both the sparrow-hawk and the cartouche with outspread wings
give the idea of divine protection. Two didû, each of them filling
one of the lower corners, symbolise duration. The framework of the design
is made up of divisions marked out in gold, and filled either with
coloured enamels or pieces of polished stone. The general effect is one of
elegance, refinement, and harmony, the three principal elements of the
design becoming enlarged from the top downwards in a deftly adjusted
gradation. The dead-gold of the cartouche in the upper centre is set off
below by the brightly variegated and slightly undulating band of colours
of the sparrow-hawk, while the urseus and vulture, associated together
with one pair of wings, envelope the upper portions in a half-circle of
enamels, of which the shades pass from red through green to a dull blue,
with a freedom of handling and a skill in the manipulation of colour which
do honour to the artist. It was not his fault if there is still an element
of stiffness in the appearance of the pectoral as a whole, for the form
which religious tradition had imposed upon the jewel was so rigid that no
artifice could completely get over this defect. It is a type which arose
out of the same mental concepts as had given birth to Egyptian
architecture and sculpture—monumental in character, and appearing
often as if designed for colossal rather than ordinary beings. The
dimensions, too overpowering for the decoration of normal men or women,
would find an appropriate place only on the breasts of gigantic statues:
the enormous size of the stone figures to which alone they are adapted
would relieve them, and show them in their proper proportions. The artists
of the second Theban empire tried all they could, however, to get rid of
the square framework in which the sacred bird is enclosed, and we find
examples among the pectorals in the Louvre of the sparrow-hawk only with
curved wings, or of the ram-headed hawk with the wings extended; but in
both of them there is displayed the same brilliancy, the same purity of
line, as in the square-shaped jewels, while the design, freed from the
trammels of the hampering enamelled frame, takes on a more graceful form,
and becomes more suitable for personal decoration.
The ram’s head in the second case excels in the beauty of its workmanship
anything to be found elsewhere in the museums of Europe or Egypt. It is of
the finest gold, but its value does not depend upon the precious material:
the ancient engraver knew how to model it with a bold and free hand, and
he has managed to invest it with as much dignity as if he had been carving
his subject in heroic size out of a block of granite or limestone. It is
not an example of pure industrial art, but of an art for which a
designation is lacking. Other examples, although more carefully executed
and of more costly materials, do not approach it in value: such, for
instance, are the earrings of Ramses XII. at Gîzeh, which are made up of
an ostentatious combination of disks, filigree-work, chains, beads, and
hanging figures of the urseus.
To get an idea of the character of the plate on the royal sideboards, we
must have recourse to the sculptures in the temples, or to the paintings
on the tombs: the engraved gold or silver centrepieces, dishes, bowls,
cups, and amphoras, if valued by weight only, were too precious to escape
the avarice of the impoverished generations which followed the era of
Theban prosperity. In the fabrication of these we can trace foreign
influences, but not to the extent of a predominance over native art: even
if the subject to be dealt with by the artist happened to be a Phoenician
god or an Asiatic prisoner, he was not content with slavishly copying his
model; he translated it and interpreted it, so as to give it an Egyptian
character.
The household furniture was in keeping with these precious objects. Beds
and armchairs in valuable woods, inlaid with ivory, carved, gilt, painted
in subdued and bright colours, upholstered with mattresses and cushions of
many-hued Asiatic stuffs, or of home-made materials, fashioned after
Chaldæan patterns, were in use among the well-to-do, while people of
moderate means had to be content with old-fashioned furniture of the
ancient regime.
The Theban dwelling-house was indeed more sumptuously furnished than the
earliest Memphite, but we find the same general arrangements in both,
which provided, in addition to quarters for the masters, a similar number
of rooms intended for the slaves, for granaries, storehouses, and stables.
While the outward decoration of life was subject to change, the inward
element remained unaltered. Costume was a more complex matter than in
former times: the dresses and lower garments were more gauffered, had more
embroidery and stripes; the wigs were larger and longer, and rose up in
capricious arrangements of curls and plaits.
The use of the chariot had now become a matter of daily custom, and the
number of domestics, already formidable, was increased by fresh additions
in the shape of coachmen, grooms, and saises, who ran before their
master to clear a way for the horses through the crowded streets of the
city.*
As material, existence became more complex, intellectual life partook of
the same movement, and, without deviating much from the lines prescribed
for it by the learned and the scribes of the Memphite age, literature had
become in the mean time larger, more complicated, more exacting, and more
difficult to grapple with and to master. It had its classical authors,
whose writings were committed to memory and taught in the schools. These
were truly masterpieces, for if some felt that they understood and enjoyed
them, others found them almost beyond their comprehension, and complained
bitterly of their obscurity. The later writers followed them pretty
closely, in taking pains, on the one hand to express fresh ideas in the
forms consecrated by approved and ancient usage, or when they failed to
find adequate vehicles to convey new thoughts, resorting in their lack of
imagination to the foreigner for the requisite expressions. The necessity
of knowing at least superficially, something of the dialect and writings
of Asia compelled the Egyptian scribes to study to some degree the
literature of Phonecia and of Chaldæa.
From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation,
medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and
especially Astartê played the chief part. They appropriated in this manner
a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to
interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it polite to call a
door no longer by the word ro, but the term tira, and to
accompany themselves no longer with the harp bordt, but with the
same instrument under its new name kinnôr, and to make the salâm
in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, aaû. They
were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their
affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country,
and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of
the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages
from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly. This
artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their
writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their
poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors,
but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence
of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of
literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in
their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one of
the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture
of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were
indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections
of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises,
letters, and legal documents.
It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of an
Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was written
would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more easily,
and been more sustained and better balanced.
The great odes to the deities which we find in the Theban papyri
are better fitted, perhaps, than the profane compositions of the period,
to give us an idea of the advance which Egyptian genius had made in the
width and richness of its modes of expression, while still maintaining
almost the same dead-level of idea which had characterised it from the
outset. Among these, one dedicated to Harmakhis, the sovereign sun, is no
longer restricted to a bare enumeration of the acts and virtues of the
“Disk,” but ventures to treat of his daily course and his final triumphs
in terms which might have been used in describing the victorious campaigns
or the apotheosis of a Pharaoh. It begins with his awakening, at the
moment when he has torn himself away from the embraces of night. Standing
upright in the cabin of the divine bark, “the fair boat of millions of
years,” with the coils of the serpent Mihni around him, he glides in
silence on the eternal current of the celestial waters, guided and
protected by those battalions of secondary deities with whose odd forms
the monuments have made us familiar. “Heaven is in delight, the earth is
in joy, gods and men are making festival, to render glory to
Phrâ-Harmakhis, when they see him arise in his bark, having overturned his
enemies in his own time!” They accompany him from hour to hour, they fight
the good fight with him against Apopi, they shout aloud as he inflicts
each fresh wound upon the monster: they do not even abandon him when the
west has swallowed him up in its darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind
us, in the definiteness of the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of
a portion of the poem of Pentaûîrît, or one of those inscriptions of
Ramses III. wherein he celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or
Libyans.
The Egyptians took a delight in listening to stories. They preferred tales
which dealt with the marvellous and excited their imagination, introducing
speaking animals, gods in disguise, ghosts and magic. One of them tells of
a king who was distressed because he had no heir, and had no sooner
obtained the favour he desired from the gods, than the Seven Hathors, the
mistresses of Fate, destroyed his happiness by predicting that the child
would meet with his death by a serpent, a dog, or a crocodile. Efforts
were made to provide against such a fatality by shutting him up in a
tower; but no sooner had he grown to man’s estate, than he procured
himself a dog, went off to wander through the world, and married the
daughter of the Prince of Naharaim. His fate meets him first under the
form of a serpent, which is killed by his wife; he is next assailed by a
crocodile, and the dog kills the crocodile, but as the oracles must be
fulfilled, the brute turns and despatches his master without further
consideration. Another story describes two brothers, Anûpû and Bitiû, who
live happily together on their farm till the wife of the elder falls in
love with the younger, and on his repulsing her advances, she accuses him
to her husband of having offered her violence. The virtue of the younger
brother would not have availed him much, had not his animals warned him of
danger, and had not Phrâ-Harmakhis surrounded him at the critical moment
with a stream teeming with crocodiles. He mutilates himself to prove his
innocence, and announces that henceforth he will lead a mysterious
existence far from mankind; he will retire to the Valley of the Acacia,
place his heart on the topmost flower of the tree, and no one will be able
with impunity to steal it from him. The gods, however, who frequent this
earth take pity on his loneliness, and create for him a wife of such
beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her
hair, which is carried by its waters down into Egypt. Pharaoh finds the
lock, and, intoxicated by its scent, commands his people to go in quest of
the owner. Having discovered the lady, Pharaoh marries her, and
ascertaining from her who she is, he sends men to cut down the Acacia, but
no sooner has the flower touched the earth, than Bitiû droops and dies.
The elder brother is made immediately acquainted with the fact by means of
various prodigies. The wine poured out to him becomes troubled, his beer
leaves a deposit. He seizes his shoes and staff and sets out to find the
heart.
After a search of seven years he discovers it, and reviving it in a vase
of water, he puts it into the mouth of the corpse, which at once returns
to life. Bitiû, from this moment, seeks only to be revenged. He changes
himself into the bull Apis, and, on being led to court, he reproaches the
queen with the crime she has committed against him. The queen causes his
throat to be cut; two drops of his blood fall in front of the gate of the
palace, and produce in the night two splendid “Persea” trees, which renew
the accusation in a loud voice. The queen has them cut down, but a chip
from one of them flies into her mouth, and ere long she gives birth to a
child who is none other than a reincarnation of Bitiû. When the child
succeeds to the Pharaoh, he assembles his council, reveals himself to
them, and punishes with death her who was first his wife and subsequently
his mother. The hero moves throughout the tale without exhibiting any
surprise at the strange incidents in which he takes part, and, as a matter
of fact, they did not seriously outrage the probabilities of contemporary
life. In every town sorcerers could be found who knew how to transform
themselves into animals or raise the dead to life: we have seen how the
accomplices of Pentaûîrît had recourse to spells in order to gain
admission to the royal palace when they desired to rid themselves of
Ramses III. The most extravagant romances differed from real life merely
in collecting within a dozen pages more miracles than were customarily
supposed to take place in the same number of years; it was merely the
multiplicity of events, and not the events themselves, that gave to the
narrative its romantic and improbable character. The rank of the heroes
alone raised the tale out of the region of ordinary life; they are always
the sons of kings, Syrian princes, or Pharaohs; sometimes we come across a
vague and undefined Pharaoh, who figures under the title of Pîrûîâûi or
Prûîti, but more often it is a well-known and illustrious Pharaoh who is
mentioned by name. It is related how, one day, Kheops, suffering from ennui
within his palace, assembled his sons in the hope of learning from them
something which he did not already know. They described to him one after
another the prodigies performed by celebrated magicians under Kanibri and
Snofrûi; and at length Mykerinos assured him that there was a certain
Didi, living then not far from Meîdum, who was capable of repeating all
the marvels done by former wizards. Most of the Egyptian sovereigns were,
in the same way, subjects of more or less wonderful legends—Sesostris,
Amenôthes III., Thûfcmosis III., Amenemhâît I., Khîti, Sahûrî, Usirkaf,
and Kakiû. These stories were put into literary shape by the learned,
recited by public story-tellers, and received by the people as authentic
history; they finally filtered into the writings of the chroniclers, who,
in introducing them into the annals, filled up with their extraordinary
details the lacunæ of authentic tradition. Sometimes the narrative assumed
a briefer form, and became an apologue. In one of them the members of the
body were supposed to have combined against the head, and disputed its
supremacy before a jury; the parties all pleaded their cause in turn, and
judgment was given in due form.*
Animals also had their place in this universal comedy. The passions or the
weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the
lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short
practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of
whose existence he little dreamed.
As La Fontaine found an illustrator in Granville, so, too, in Egypt the
draughtsman brought his reed to the aid of the fabulist, and by his
cleverly executed sketches gave greater point to the sarcasm of story than
mere words could have conveyed. Where the author had briefly mentioned
that the jackal and the cat had cunningly forced their services on the
animals whom they wished to devour at their leisure, the artist would
depict the jackal and the cat equipped as peasants, with wallets on their
backs, and sticks over their shoulders, marching behind a troup of
gazelles or a flock of fat geese: it was easy to foretell the fate of
their unfortunate charges. Elsewhere it is an ox who brings up before his
master a cat who has cheated him, and his proverbial stupidity would
incline us to think that he will end by being punished himself for the
misdeeds of which he had accused the other. Puss’s sly and artful
expression, the ass-headed and important-looking judge, with the wand and
costume of a high and mighty dignitary, give pungency to the story, and
recall the daily scenes at the judgment-seat of the lord of Thebes. In
another place we see a donkey, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey giving an
instrumental and vocal concert.
A lion and a gazelle play a game of chess. A cat of fashion, with a flower
in her hair, has a disagreement with a goose: they have come to blows, and
the excitable puss, who fears she will come off worst in the struggle,
falls backwards in a fright. The draughtsmen having once found vent for
their satire, stopped at nothing, and even royalty itself did not escape
their attacks. While the writers of the day made fun of the military
calling, both in prose and verse, the caricaturists parodied the combats
and triumphal scenes of the Ramses or Thutmosis of the day depicted on the
walls of the pylons. The Pharaoh of all the rats, perched upon a chariot
drawn by dogs, bravely charges an army of cats; standing in the heroic
attitude of a conqueror, he pierces them with his darts, while his horses
tread the fallen underfoot; his legions meanwhile in advance of him attack
a fort defended by tomcats, with the same ardour that the Egyptian
battalions would display in assaulting a Syrian stronghold.
This treatment of ethics did not prevent the Egyptian writers from giving
way to their natural inclinations, and composing large volumes on this
subject after the manner of Kaqîmni or Phtahhotpû. One of their books, in
which the aged Ani inscribes his Instructions to his son, Khonshotpû, is
compiled in the form of a dialogue, and contains the usual commonplaces
upon virtue, temperance, piety, the respect due to parents from children,
or to the great ones of this world from their inferiors. The language in
which it is written is ingenious, picturesque, and at times eloquent; the
work explains much that is obscure in Egyptian life, and upon which the
monuments have thrown no light. “Beware of the woman who goes out
surreptitiously in her town, do not follow her or any like her, do not
expose thyself to the experience of what it costs a man to face an Ocean
of which the bounds are unknown.* The wife whose husband is far from home
sends thee letters, and invites thee to come to her daily when she has no
witnesses; if she succeeds in entangling thee in her net, it is a crime
which is punishable by death as soon as it is known, even if no wicked act
has taken place, for men will commit every sort of crime when under this
temptation alone.”
“Be not quarrelsome in breweries, for fear that thou mayest be denounced
forthwith for words which have proceeded from thy mouth, and of having
spoken that of which thou art no longer conscious. Thou fallest, thy
members helpless, and no one holds out a hand to thee, but thy
boon-companions around thee say: ‘Away with the drunkard!’ Thou art wanted
for some business, and thou art found rolling on the ground like an
infant.” In speaking of what a man owes to his mother, Ani waxes eloquent:
“When she bore thee as all have to bear, she had in thee a heavy burden
without being able to call on thee to share it. When thou wert born, after
thy months were fulfilled, she placed herself under a yoke in earnest, her
breast was in thy mouth for three years; in spite of the increasing
dirtiness of thy habits, her heart felt no disgust, and she never said:
‘What is that I do here?’ When thou didst go to school to be instructed in
writing, she followed thee every day with bread and beer from thy house.
Now thou art a full-grown man, thou hast taken a wife, thou hast provided
thyself with a house; bear always in mind the pains of thy birth and the
care for thy education that thy mother lavished on thee, that her anger
may not rise up against thee, and that she lift not her hands to God, for
he will hear her complaint!” The whole of the book does not rise to this
level, but we find in it several maxims which appear to be popular
proverbs, as for instance: “He who hates idleness will come without being
called;” “A good walker comes to his journey’s end without needing to
hasten;” or, “The ox which goes at the head of the flock and leads the
others to pasture is but an animal like his fellows.” Towards the end, the
son Khonshotpû, weary of such a lengthy exhortation to wisdom, interrupts
his father roughly: “Do not everlastingly speak of thy merits, I have
heard enough of thy deeds;” whereupon Ani resignedly restrains himself
from further speech, and a final parable gives us the motive of his
resignation: “This is the likeness of the man who knows the strength of
his arm. The nursling who is in the arms of his mother cares only for
being suckled; but no sooner has he found his mouth than he cries: ‘Give
me bread!’”
It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love repeating
madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that the hard and
blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men and women loving
and beloved in their own day.
The feeling which they entertained one for another had none of the
reticence or delicacy of our love: they went straight to the point, and
the language in which, they expressed themselves is sometimes too coarse
for our taste. The manners and customs of daily life among the Egyptians
tended to blunt in them the feelings of modesty and refinement to which
our civilization has accustomed us. Their children went about without
clothes, or, at any rate, wore none until the age of puberty. Owing to the
climate, both men and women left the upper part of the body more or less
uncovered, or wore fabrics of a transparent nature. In the towns, the
servants who moved about their masters or his guests had merely a narrow
loin-cloth tied round their hips; while in the country, the peasants
dispensed with even this covering, and the women tucked up their garments
when at work so as to move more freely. The religious teaching and the
ceremonies connected with their worship drew the attention of the faithful
to the unveiled human form of their gods, and the hieroglyphs themselves
contained pictures which shock our sense of propriety. Hence it came about
that the young girl who was demanded in marriage had no idea, like the
maiden of to-day, of the vague delights of an ideal union. The physical
side was impressed upon her mind, and she was well aware of the full
meaning of her consent. Her lover, separated from her by her disapproving
parents, thus expresses the grief which overwhelms him: “I desire to lie
down in my chamber,—for I am sick on thy account,—and the
neighbours come to visit me.—Ah! if my sister but came with them,—she
would show the physicians what ailed me,—for she knows my sickness!”
Even while he thus complains, he sees her in his imagination, and his
spirit visits the places she frequents: “The villa of my sister,—(a
pool is before the house),—the door opens suddenly,—and my
sister passes out in wrath.—Ah! why am I not the porter,—that
she might give me her orders!—I should at least hear her voice, even
were she angry,—and I, like a little boy, full of fear before her!”
Meantime the young girl sighs in vain for “her brother, the beloved of her
heart,” and all that charmed her before has now ceased to please her. “I
went to prepare my snare, my cage and the covert for my trap—for all
the birds of Puânît alight upon Egypt, redolent with perfume;—he who
flies foremost of the flock is attracted by my worm, bringing odours from
Puânît,—its claws full of incense.—But my heart is with thee,
and desires that we should trap them together,—I with thee, alone,
and that thou shouldest be able to hear the sad cry of my perfumed bird,—there
near to me, close to me, I will make ready my trap,—O my beautiful
friend, thou who goest to the field of the well-beloved!” The latter,
however, is slow to appear, the day passes away, the evening comes on:
“The cry of the goose resounds—which is caught by the worm-bait,—but
thy love removes me far from the bird, and I am unable to deliver myself
from it; I will carry off my net, and what shall I say to my mother,—when
I shall have returned to her?—Every day I come back laden with
spoil,—but to-day I have not been able to set my trap,—for thy
love makes me its prisoner!” “The goose flies away, alights,—it has
greeted the barns with its cry;—the flock of birds increases on the
river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy love,—for my
heart is bound to thy heart—and I cannot tear myself away from thy
beauty.” Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she hardly minds it,
and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies of thinking of her
brother, and of passionately crying for him: “O my beautiful friend! I
yearn to be with thee as thy wife—and that thou shouldest go whither
thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,—for then I will repeat to
my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.—If my great
brother does not come to-night,—I am as those who lie in the tomb—for
thou, art thou not health and life,—he who transfers the joys of thy
health to my heart which seeks thee?” The hours pass away and he does not
come, and already “the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,—it says:
‘Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?’ Thou, thou art
the bird, thou callest me,—and I find my brother in his chamber,—and
my heart is rejoiced to see him!—I will never go away again, my hand
will remain in thy hand,—and when I wander forth, I will go with
thee into the most beautiful places,—happy in that he makes me the
foremost of women—and that he does not break my heart.” We should
like to quote the whole of it, but the text is mutilated, and we are
unable to fill in the blanks. It is, nevertheless, one of those products
of the Egyptian mind which it would have been easy for us to appreciate
from beginning to end, without effort and almost without explanation. The
passion in it finds expression in such sincere and simple language as to
render rhetorical ornament needless, and one can trace in it, therefore,
nothing of the artificial colouring which would limit it to a particular
place or time. It translates a universal sentiment into the common
language of humanity, and the hieroglyphic groups need only to be put into
the corresponding words of any modern tongue to bring home to the reader
their full force and intensity. We might compare it with those popular
songs which are now being collected in our provinces before the peasantry
have forgotten them altogether: the artlessness of some of the
expressions, the boldness of the imagery, the awkwardness and somewhat
abrupt character of some of the passages, communicate to both that wild
charm which we miss in the most perfect specimens of our modern
love-poets.
END OF VOL. V.