HISTORY OF EGYPT UNDER THE PHARAOHS

DEDICATED
TO
HIS HIGHNESS ISMAEL PASHA
KHEDIVE OF EGYPT
WITH MOST RESPECTFUL GRATITUDE
BY THE AUTHOR

The History of Egypt now offered to the English reader is distinguished in two respects from the long train of able and interesting works, which, in opening to the last and the present generations the life and story of the Old Egyptians, as by a new revelation, have at the same time thrown a clear and vivid light on many portions of Holy Scripture. The work is as unique in the competence of its Author as in the originality of its design.

After all that has been done since the time when Young and Champollion discovered the key to the vast treasures of contemporary records which till then were a sealed book, it still remained for some competent scholar to undertake the Herculean task of weaving the testimony of the Egyptian records into a consecutive history of the long line of Pharaonic Dynasties, derived solely from these ancient and authentic sources^ and free of all colouring and intermixture from the traditions given at second-hand by the classic writers, [viii] which find their proper place elsewhere. No second-hand knowledge of the monuments and papyri, however learned or extensive, can be a sufficient qualification for the full and accurate rendering of their testimony. Nothing can suffice, short of that kind of scholarly instinct which is the first of a life-long study and comprehensive knowledge of the whole subject matter, based on a personal examination of the original records. These are the qualifications acquired and matured in the mind of Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, during his long residence in Egypt and his travels through the length and breadth of the land, with the express object of studying the monuments; qualifications which are shared alone by his friend and colleague, M. Mariette-Bey.

A complete account of the origin and plan of the work is given in the Author's Preface, but it may not be superfluous to indicate some points of special novelty and interest, difficult as it is to select them from the whole mass of new and important matter. The Author's long and deep study of Egyptian antiquity in all its bearings has enabled him to draw a true picture of the character and life of the people, the persons and court of the great Pharaohs, the revolutions indicated by the various Dynasties, the hierarchy of the State, and the details of administration, down to the text of official despatches, the names and works of artist., and men of letters, and the relations of Egypt to the [ix] neighbouring nations at each critical epoch of her history. He has set in the clearest light many deeply interesting subjects, which have hitherto been only straggling out of obscurity. Such, for example, is the large element of Semitic population in the Delta, and its influence on the Egyptian life and language, in connection with the history of the Shepherd Kings and the relations of the Pharaohs of the Nineteenth Dynasty to their Hebrew bondsmen. The position and precise office of Joseph, the name, time, and works of the Pharaoh of the oppression, and the Exodus of the Israelites, now take a definite place in Egyptian history, and the localities named in Scripture are determined by evidence of surprising clearness. Such also is the case with the revolutions by which the proud hue of Ramses was supplanted by the haughty priests of Thebes, and these driven out, in their turn, by a real Assyrian conquest of Egypt, now first made known from contemporary inscriptions. The cuneiform inscriptions of Sennacherib^s grandson, and the hieroglyphic records of the Ethiopian conquerors at Mount Barkal, fill up the story of that interesting period, hinted at in the 'Dodecarchy' of Herodotus, when Lower Egypt, divided among a host of petty kings and satraps (whose very names are now recovered) was a shuttle-cock between Assyria and Ethiopia, till we learn the true meaning of its union under Psammetichus. These are but a few points of the history now first put together from the [x] monuments, down to the thanksgiving of a priest for his preservation in 'the battle of the Ionians' under Alexander, and 'the rout of the Asiatic,' Darius Codomannus.

The present translation of Dr. Brugsch's German original¹ comes before the English reader with some claims for his indulgence. Undertaken by the late Mr. Henry Danby Seymour as a labour of love, it was left incomplete at his lamented death, when nearly all the First Volume was printed, and the translation of the Second was carried to the end of Chapter XVI. The Editor has finished the translation, and corrected the press for the whole of the Second Volume. He has also carefully revised the First Volume; and, as two are proverbially better than one, he has naturally found some points in which correction or improvement appeared to him essential; and such necessary alterations will furnish an apology for a somewhat large list of 'Errata.' For the first four chapters, which had been translated from the French before the publication of Dr. Brugsch's new work, the Editor has substituted a fresh translation from the German. For valuable advice on points of difficulty, the Editor is indebted to his old and esteemed friend, Dr. Leonhard Schmitz.

[xi] In rendering into English Dr. Brugsch's German translations of the Egyptian texts, there has been a two-fold difficulty, chiefly from the obscurity of the originals, and partly also from the archaic German often used by Dr. Brugsch to imitate their style. But it is a special characteristic of Dr. Brugsch's translations, that he generally gives a more complete and grammatically consecutive sense than will be found in most other renderings of the Egyptian texts; his are more, in his own phrase, 'in fliessender Rede.' Not that he has taken liberties with the originals, to wrest them into sense or to force a meaning out of them; but he uses that intimate acquaintance with the Egyptian language, which becomes almost an instinct when, to use his own words, 'the translator is sure of his subject in its fullest compass.'² In this respect the Editor has endeavoured to follow the Author's style of work, making the English represent neither less nor ore than the German translations of the Egyptian originals. Nor, in using the further light furnished by other versions of the texts, have their renderings been substituted for those of Dr. Brugsch, except in one or two very rare cases, where explicit warning is given of the liberty taken with our Author's version. The [xii] Editor has had neither time nor opportunity to refer to all the English translations of the texts, which it might be interesting to compare with those of Dr. Brugsch; but he has in every case given references to those contained in the excellent and convenient collection entitled 'Records of the Past.'³

Dr. Brugsch's pamphlet of 'Additions and Corrections' was not received till after the First Volume was nearly all printed. From that point they have been incorporated with the text; and the rest are placed at the end of the First Volume.

Dr. Brugsch's 'Discourse on the Exodus of the Israelites and the Egyptian Monuments' is now appended to his 'History' not merely on account of the striking and original views propounded in it, and the powerful arguments by which they are sustained, but because it gathers into a focus certain statements made in various parts of the 'History' in such a manner as to form almost a necessary complement to the work.

It is now twenty years since I ventured on the attempt to lay before the friends and admirers of Egyptian antiquity, in the French language, a History of Egypt under the Pharaohs according to the evidence of the Monuments, in so far as they have been preserved from the earliest times down to our own age. The time seemed to me even then to have come, to turn to account, for the profit of historical enquiry, the written information of the monuments, now interpreted, in opposition to the fabulous and less trustworthy accounts of classical antiquity, and to lay open to professed historians the chief sources, at least, to which science is and will ever remain indebted for a knowledge of the oldest races of men upon the earth. The quick sale with which the whole edition of my modest work was favoured soon after its appearance, in spite of its faults, could not but prove to me that I had met a sensible want in this province of enquiry, by having laboured, to the best of my knowledge and ability, to satisfy the desire generally expressed for an [xiv] insight into the rich abundance and the ample contents of the extant monuments and their inscriptions.

During the time which has since elapsed, the whole compass of our knowledge of the monuments has been enlarged beyond anticipation by new excavations and discoveries, and by the advances made in decyphering the inscriptions through the labours of gifted students of the science. Meanwhile the most important remains of Egyptian antiquity have been won from the bosom of the earth, and the most searching investigations have almost completely overcome the last remaining difficulties, which lay as hindrances in the way of understanding the Holy Scriptures.

Under such altered circumstances I could easily understand the wish generally expressed to me on the part of friends and scholars, that I should undertake anew the task of bringing together in one complete picture the historical records of the Pharaonic times, by the help of the latest acquisitions in the scientific knowledge of the monuments; in order also to afford to those admirers of Egyptian antiquity, who are less conversant with these studies, the opportunity of forming their own judgment on the value and the significance of the stone records of the oldest human history. My well-founded hesitation—on the ground that a work so comprehensive, based above all on the explanation and understanding of the superabundant number of texts, would need long years for its com- [xv] pletion—was at last overcome by the urgent request of my publisher, who reminded me of old engagements, and pleaded the constant enquiries for copies of the work, which had been long since exhausted.

Such has been the origin—in the midst of the official labours imposed upon me, almost without intermission, by my duties in the service of that enlightened oriental prince, the present ruler of Egypt—of this first German edition of the History of Egypt under the Pharaohs. Within the space of five years, in Europe, Africa, and America, I have arranged the work on a new plan and carried it to completion, snatching by force every moment of that leisuree which the scholar enjoys in his quiet study, yet always inspired with enthusiasm for the time long since passed away, which seemed to me the more attractive the further it is removed from our present life.

In my treatment of the subject, I have given my fullest and almost exclusive attention to the testimony of the monuments; and herein, according to my own view, lies the whole centre of gravity of my work. Claiming neither the vocation nor the ability of a professed historian, I am fain to content myself with the modest and subordinate merit of being a conscientious interpreter of the words of a past age, after having exhausted all means for the right determination of the evidence drawn from the primitive records, which frequent journeys to Upper Egypt have given [xvi] me the opportunity of thoroughly examining on the very spot where each is extant. If, as I fear, my exhibition and embodiment of the peculiarly rich materials at my command is affected by the imperfection incident to the task of writing the history of Egypt under the Pharaohs from the beginning to the end, the reader may still find some compensation in acquiring the knowledge of a wealth of primeval records, whose tone and phraseology I have taken pains to render with the greatest possible fidelity. The language of the monuments is simple and unadorned; but there breathes through it the fresh and vigorous air of a high antiquity.

My esteemed colleagues in these studies will not fail to observe that certain views, which I have put forth in the most important portions of my work, are in the most decided opposition to the opinions held by eminent authorities in the province of ancient Egyptian research, and hitherto accepted as incontrovertible facts. For example, I regard the idea, which has hitherto found so much favour, of a Pelasgo-Italian confederacy of nations in the times of Minepthah I. and Ramses III., as a dangerous error, which has been unfortunately introduced into our science, and has already struck its parasitical roots into handbooks of the history of Greece and Italy. In like manner, I regard Ilium, and the Dardanians, Mysians, and Lycians, as powers unknown to the Egyptians of [xvii] the fourteenth century, and I have, on the contrary, placed the peoples whose names correspond to these in the highlands about the upper course of the Euphrates. In this province of research, if anywhere, the most careful circumspection is required. The proofs in support of my rectifications of these and similar assumptions and hypotheses I intend speedily to lay before my colleagues, in all their force and completeness, in a separate scientific treatise, which is already prepared for the press.

I commend to my fellow-students, as noteworthy and deserving of thorough examination, the fact which has never before been recognized or established, that the Egyptian monuments of the date of B.C. 1000 and onwards bear witness, for the first time, to a knowledge of the names of Assyrian kings in the Egyptian form of writing, and attest the presence of Assyrian satraps in the Nile valley. Panbshns (Parrash-nes, PaUash-nes, Pallash-nisu), Shashanq, Nimrod, Tiglath, Sargon, &c., are real Assyrian persons, who appear henceforward in the closest connection with the history of Egypt.

The numerous translations, which, as I have said, form the special foundation of this work, have been written with the monuments before me, and repeatedly compared with the original texts. In the cases in which I have had to cite former translations and copies, I have not omitted to mention the fact in the text itself [xviii] or in a note. A very few such—as, for example, the translation of the long inscription of Piankhi by the late master of our science, E. de Rouge—have been accessible to me only since the completion of my book; but I have found no occasion to regret my own differences from them in the interpretation and translation of the documents. So much the more do I regret, on the other hand, that the splendid edition of the Harris Papyrus, No. 1—by the publication of which Dr. Birch has again earned for himself and the Trustees of the British Museum the greatest credit for the enrichment of ancient Egyptian learning—only came into my hands, as a present alike costly and valuable for its contents, after this book was printed. For all future time this document, the most important parts of which had only been known to me in extracts, will form the most valuable contribution to the history of the third Ramses.

In conclusion, I esteem it a special obligation of gratitude not to pass over in silence the names of the deserving scholars who, whether by the publication of the monuments, or by the explanation and decyphering of the historical inscriptions, have conferred a lasting service on science, and have thereby contributed in no small measure to lighten the labour of my work. I would especially mention the names of Birch, Chabas, E. and J. de Rouge, Deveria, Dumichen, Ebers, Goodwin, Leemans, Le Page Renouf, Lepsius, Lieblein. [xix] Mariette, Maspero, Naville, Pierret, Pleyte. If, in discussing the historical researches or the translations of texts, for which the learned world is indebted to these scholars, I have expressed a different opinion about some details, I have assuredly not been influenced by the spirit of contradiction, but by the conviction that I may have come nearer the truth. I may here quote the Arabic proverb: 'Honour to the beginner, even though the follower does better.'

To the chronological part of this work I have, of the most deliberate purpose, given a very subordinate attention. In my opinion, everything still remains to be done in this province, so far as relates to the time preceding the twenty-sixth dynasty. On the assumption of Manetho's epitome of the lists of the ancient Egyptian kings as the foundation for determining the numbers, Lepsius has done all that is possible in his Chronology, and has completely exhausted the materials at his command, with astonishing acuteness and great knowledge of the original authorities. But the monuments are now beginning more and more to discredit the numbers of Manetho: compare, for example, his statement of 12+26=38 years for the reign of Thutmes III., with the 53 years 11 months and 1 day assigned to that king by the monuments. Unless we choose, without any warrant, to strain the indefinitely elastic lists of Manetho at our pleasure, there remains no other course than to wait till some fortunate discovery relieves us [xx] from this' dangerous experiment It appeared to me, therefore, more advisable to refrain from any attempt at exact chronological determinations, and, for the present, to prefer those general methods, about the principle of which I have spoken at the proper place.

I now commit my work to the public, not indeed with the assurance that I have reached the mark for which I strove, but yet in the calm hope of obtaining indulgent and unprejudiced readers, not so much for myself as for the sake of the words repeated from the very lips of the ancient Egyptians, who already, at the distance of forty centuries before our time, esteemed remembrance to be the real life of men.

The History of Egypt, the names and deeds of its kings and princes, the varied fortunes of the Egyptian race during a course of more than sixty centuries; such is the comprehensive subject of this work. Our purpose is to collect into one view what the monuments and books tell us of the history of this most remarkable land and people on the favoured banks of the Nile, beginning with the first native king Mena, and, if God permit, finishing with the present reigning prince of Egypt, the Khedive Ismael Pasha I.

In the first portion of our work, we shall endeavour to portray the historical development of -the Egyptians under the rule of the Pharaohs. King Mena will form the starting point of our narrative, and Alexander the Great, the liberator and saviour of Egypt from the yoke of the Persians, its closing epoch. This part of the work was first published (in French) twenty years ago, when we endeavoured to bring together into one great picture the results of the [xl] examination of the monuments by ourselves as well as others, over the wide field of old Egyptian history. The task, in truth, was not an easy one, and it was certainly beyond our power at a first attempt, especially in a foreign language, not merely to place before enquiring students long lists of kings' names with lifeless numbers attached to them, but, led by the guiding hand of the monuments, to reproduce, if only in a general sketch, yet with the greatest possible truth and likelihood, the life and activity of the old inhabitants of the Nile Valley in the earliest kingdom of the world. To render the task still more difficult, there was added the serious fact, that such monuments as were then known and had been examined by learned men, yielded only a narrow range of information. For |he earliest history of the Egyptians does not enjoy the advantage of having been handed down to posterity by the so-called classic writers of antiquity in its true outlines and in a connected series of events. On the contrary, the stories of the classic times, intricately confused and transformed into a caricature, have proved rather injurious than serviceable, because they have disseminated false views, and have spread a cloud of fables and tales over Egypt and her history, during a period of more than twenty centuries. Only of late have the monuments, once again brought to light and awakened to new life, torn aside the deceitful veil, revealed the truth, and furnished the evidence that in the times of classic antiquity the history of the ancient Egyptians was already an uncomprehended book, like that with the seven [xli] seals. Unhappily the revelation has come almost too late to. preserve the vast world of stone, which had been meanwhile destroyed with its countless historical inscriptions.

But yet, in spite of all that has perished, never to return, the last twenty years have^ brought to the light of day an extraordinary and almost unexpected wealth of new discoveries and revelations. A single walk through the rooms of the Egyptian Museum at Boulaq, the port of Cairo, brings us at each step to monuments of the most remote ages, not only of Egyptian history, but of the whole history of mankind. Thanks to the lively interest which the most enlightened prince of the eastern world has taken in these investigations, we here see an unbroken series of new witnesses of the old time, raised from the bosom of the earth into the light of day, to give us information about the long vanished past, whose starting point can no longer be reached by the remotest stages in the ordinary historical measurement of time.

The 'Tables of Kings' of Saqqarah and Abydus, both containing a selection of Egyptian monarchs from the first Pharaoh Mena onwards, give us the most authentic evidence, now no longer to be doubted, that the primitive ancestors of the Egyptian dynasties, the Pharaohs of Memphis, must be greeted as real historical personages, and that King Ramses II. (about 1350 B.C.), the Sesostris of the Greek fabulous history of the Egyptians, was preceded by at least seventy-six legitimate sovereigns: that is to say, in other words, there were so many [xlii] generations of men, who lived during a space of time which is greater than the sum total of the years that have elapsed from Ramses II. down to the present day. Such a comparison of the extent of time between two epochs historically memorable teaches us to form a more impressive estimate of the astounding age of Egyptian history than any positive numbers. It gives us some approximate idea of the value of the monuments, preserved through such a space of time, for understanding the development of humanity, whose indestructible boundary stones, at the extremest limit of the political horizon, will be marked for all ages by the pyramids of Memphis.

Ought it to cause surprise if the newly-lighted torch of knowledge does not shine deep enough into these remote ages of hoar antiquity? if in the dark corridors of primeval history the guiding clue of monumental discovery suddenly breaks off, or reaches its end when least expected—or if the attention of the writer dwells fondly upon strange names, and on the deeds of a time full of simple childlike ideas, for which the history of our own day, with its great world-stirring aims, has long since lost the standard of comparison? Though the pampered darling of our busy age may smile as scornfully as he will at the life and doings of the 'ancients' of the Nile Valley, yet by the reflecting man that venerable antiquity, with its genuine striving after the dignity of man, will be viewed in the clear light of the earliest twilight dawn of the civilization and ennobling of his race, and with a simply thankful mind he will devote his full attention to the [xliii] life and work of these forefathers of mankind, as it is portrayed by their own hands.

If, on the one hand, the monuments of this most ancient history have in our day received so remarkable an increase, that they serve to fill up in the most welcome manner many gaps in the first edition of the Egyptian history, to correct many errors, and not seldom to confirm or to contradict conjectures previously made, so meanwhile another advantage has been won for these enquiries, the importance of which for historical research may be pronounced immeasurable. The decypherment of the old Egyptian texts has, by the united labour of gifted men of science, particularly of late years, reached such great certainty, in consequence of a methodical treatment, that the contents of each inscription can be exactly determined, at least so far that gross errors are no longer possible. A sober and healthy criticism has begun to assert its full right in this province, as in others, by subjecting the course of its researches to the general laws of enquiry into that which is as yet unknown.

What conquests the growing knowledge of the old Egyptian language and writing has meanwhile won for historical research, is best shown by the numerous writings of deserving men of science, who have chosen the decyphering of the most important inscriptions of Egyptian antiquity as the object of their studies, the
results of which throw such a surprising light on the most important periods of ancient history. The works of real genius by the never-to-be-forgotten Viscount E. de Rouge, (a French scholar too soon lost to science by [xliv] death,) on the irruption of the Mediterranean people into Egypt in the times of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, and the invaluable contributions which M. Chabas, of Chalons, has made towards a knowledge of the same reigns, especially by his acute decyphering of the hieratic rolls of papyrus in the British Museum, form turning points of the highest importance in the whole province of Egyptian history, and deserve to be mentioned as real conquests of the first rank.

In the presence of these venerable remains of monuments, the witnesses of a past world full of riddles and wonders, and considering the important discoveries which the acuteness of the human mind has wrung from the inscriptions in the most recent times, ||we may perhaps be permitted to indulge the modest hope, that this new edition of the History of the ancient Egyptians may at least in some degree answer the requirements which the reader is entitled to ask for in the treatment of an interesting subject, the materials of which have already been prepared by the labours of scholarship. For the scholar retires from the stage, and leaves to the historian the delightful but difficult task of exhibiting in one view that whole, whose several parts have been treated separately by the varied resources of science, often without divining or anticipating their connection.

Although, in so long a space of time as sixty centuries, events and revolutions of great historical importance must of necessity have completely altered the political state of Egypt, yet, notwithstanding all, the old Egyptian race has undergone but little change; for it still preserves to this day those distinctive features of physiognomy, and those peculiarities of manners and customs, which have been handed down to us, by the united testimony of the monuments and the accounts of the ancient classical writers, as the hereditary characteristics of this people.

Historical researches concerning a race of mankind are inseparably connected with the important and momentous enquiry after their primeval home, the cradle of their historic childhood. Nor does the historian by himself possess the means for a satisfactory solution of this question. The auxiliary sciences of the natural history of the human race and of comparative philology must be taken into council, in order to guide us, even though it be but approximately, to the [2] origin of nations and the directions in which they have migrated. It is not our intention to occupy; ourselves with the details of those researches, on the ground of which the first-named science has laboured to determine the primeval home of the ancient Egyptian race. It may suffice to lay down as a first settled point—although the feet is questioned by the younger school—that this science believes itself to possess positive proofs, as the result of which the forefathers of the Egyptians cannot be reckoned among the African races, properly so called. The form of the skull—so at least the elder school teaches—as well as the proportions of the several parts of the body, as these have been determined from examining a great number of mummies, are held to indicate a connection with the Caucasian family of mankind. The Egyptians, together with some other nations, form, as it would seem, a third branch of that race, namely, the family called Cushite, which is distinguished by special characters from the Pelasgian and the Semitic families. Whatever relations of kindred may be found always to exist between these great races of mankind, thus much may be regarded as certain, that the cradle of the Egyptian people must be sought in the interior of the Asiatic quarter of the world. In the earliest ages of humanity, far beyond all historical remembrance, the Egyptians, for reasons unknown to us, left the soil of their primeval home, took their way towards the setting sun, and finally crossed that bridge of nations, the Isthmus of Suez, to find a new fatherland on the favoured banks of the holy Nile.

[3] Comparative philology, in its turn, gives powerful support to this hypothesis. The Egyptian language—which has been preserved on the monuments of the oldest time, as well as in the late-Christian manuscripts of the Copts, the successors of the people of the Pharaohs—shows in no way any trace of a derivation and descent from the African families of speech. On the contrary, the primitive roots and the essential elements of the Egyptian grammar point to such an intimate connection with the Indo-Germanic and Semitic languages, that it is almost impossible to mistake the close relations which formerly prevailed between the Egyptians and the races called Indo-Germanic and Semitic.

We will not pass over in silence a Greek account, remarkable because of its origin, according to which the primitive abode of the Egyptian people is to be sought in Ethiopia. According to an opinion strongly advocated by ancient writers, and even subscribed to by some modem historians, little conversant with the facts of the case, the honour of first founding Egyptian civilization should be awarded to a society of priests from the city of Meroe. Descending the course of the Nile—so runs the story—they are supposed to have settled on the territory of the later city of Thebes, and there to have founded the first state with a theocratic form of government. Although, on the ground of the ancient tradition, this view has been frequently repeated in the historical works of subsequent times, it is nevertheless stamped with the mark of error, as it dispenses with any actual proof. It is not to the Ethiopian priests that the Egyptian empire owes its origin, its [4] form of government, and the characteristic stages of its high civilization; but much rather was it the Egyptians that first ascended the river, to found in Ethiopia temples, cities, and fortified places, and to diffuse the blessings of a civilized state among the rude dark-coloured population. Whichever of the Greek historians concocted the marvellous fiction of the first Ethiopic settlement in Egypt was led into the mistake by a confusion with the influence which Ethiopia exercised on the fortunes of Egypt during a comparatively late period, and by carrying this back, without further consideration, into the prehistoric age.

Supposing, for a moment, that Egypt had owed her civil and social development to Ethiopia, nothing should be more probable than the presumption of our finding monuments of the highest antiquity in that primitive home of the Egyptians, while in going down the river we ought to light only upon monuments of a later age. Strange to say, the whole number of the buildings in stone, as yet known and examined, which were erected on both sides of the river at the bidding of the Egyptian and Ethiopian kings, furnish the incontrovertible proof, that the long series of temples, cities, sepulchres, and monuments in general, exhibit a distinct chronological order, of which the oldest starting-point is found in the Pyramids, at the apex of the Delta, south of the bifurcation of the great river. As, in proceeding southwards, we approach nearer and nearer to the rapids and cataracts of the Upper Nile, right into the heart of the later Ethiopian kingdom, the more does the stamp of antiquity vanish from the [5] whole body of extant monuments; the more evident is the decline of art, of taste, and of beauty. In short, the Ethiopian style of art—so far as the monuments still preserved allow us to form a judgment—is destitute of all independent character. The first view of the Ethiopian monuments at once carries the conviction, that we can recognise no special quality beyond the rudest conception and the most imperfect execution of a style of art originally Egyptian. The most clumsy imitation of Egyptian attainments in all that relates to science and the arts, appears as the acme of the intellectual progress and the artistic development of Ethiopia.

According to the accounts of the Greek and Roman writers who had occasion to visit Egypt and to have close intercourse with the people of the country, the Egyptians themselves held the belief, that they were the original inhabitants of the land. The fertile valley of the Nile, according to their opinion, formed the heart and centre of the whole world. To the West of it dwelt the groups of tribes, which bore the general name of Ribu or Libu, the ancestors of those Libyans who are so often mentioned in the historical works and geographical descriptions of the ancients. Inhabiting the north coasts of Africa, they extended their abodes eastward as far as the districts along the Canopic branch of the Nile, now called that of Rosetta or Rashid. From the evidence of the monuments, they belonged to a light-coloured race, with blue eyes and blond or red hair. According to the very remarkable researches of the French general Faidherbe, they may [6] have been the earliest representatives of that race (perhaps of Celts?) who migrated from the north of Europe to Africa, making their way through the three Mediterranean peninsulas, and gradually taking possession of the Libyan coasts. It is a noteworthy phenomenon that, as early as the remote times of the Fourth Dynasty of Egyptian sovereigns, some people belonging to this race (men, women, and children) wandered into Egypt to display their dexterity as dancers, combatants, and gymnasts, in the public games which delighted young and old; just as at the present day the Egyptians still amuse themselves with the buffooneries and skilful tricks of wandering Moghrabins. The Libyans, however, who appear on the walls of the sepulchres from the fourth to the Twelfth Dynasty, are distinguished from the reddish-brown Egyptians by their light-grey or light-brown complexion, suggesting the probability, that they may not have had a very close relationship to the white Libyans of later times.

The great mixture of tribes in many branches, who had their primeval homes in the wide regions and marshy districts of the Upper Nile, from the Egyptian frontier at the first cataract (close to the city of Syene), have on the monuments the common name of Nahasu. In the coloured representations they appear of a black or dark-brown complexion, with unmistakable Negro features, and with a thoroughly primitive and simple dress. There can be no doubt that we have to recognise in them the ancestors of the Negro race of the present day. In the most ancient times, their northern tribes dwelt in immediate proximity to the [7] Egyptian frontier; while the Kar or Kal, often mentioned by the ancient Eg3rptians about the seventeenth century B.C.—probably the ancestors of the modern Galla—formed the southernmost branch, then known, of the great groups of nations of inner Africa. These dark-coloured neighbours often molested the Egyptian subjects of the southern regions; and the kings had to resort to arms in order to drive back the untamed hordes, and to fix a barrier against their inroads by strong garrisons and well-built forts.

Turning our eyes to the East, across the narrow Isthmus of Suez, we meet on the ancient soil the people of that great nation, which the Egyptians designated by the name of Amu. Whether we prefer to explain this name by the help of the Semitic languages, in which it has the general significance of 'people,' or whether we resort to the Egyptian vocabulary, in which ame (more usually amen) has the meaning of 'herdsman,'—in either case, this one thing is certain, that the Egyptians of the Pharaonic age used the term in a somewhat contemptuous sense. These Amu were the Pagans, the Kaffirs, or 'infidels' of their time. In the coloured representations they are distinguished chiefly by their yellow or yellowish-brown complexion, while their dress has sometimes a great simplicity, but sometimes shows a taste for splendour and richness in the choiceness of the cut and the coloured designs woven into the fabric. In these Amu scientific research has long since perceived the representatives of the great Semitic family of nations, though, in our own opinion, the same name includes also many peoples and families, who [8] appear to have but a slight relationship with the pure Semitic race.

The most remarkable nations among the Amu, who appear in the course of Egyptian history as commanding respect by their character and their deeds, are the Kheta, the Khar (or Khal), and the Ruten (or Luten). But moreover it is to be especially remarked, as a fact established beyond dispute, that even in the most glorious times of the Egyptian monarchy the Amu were settled as permanent inhabitants in the neighbourhood of the present lake Menzaleh. A great number of towns and villages, canals and pools, in that region, formerly bore names unmistakably Semitic, as we shall hereafter prove in fuller detail.

The most conspicuous part of Egyptian history, so far as it has been made known by the monuments as yet discovered and by the inscriptions on them, consists—besides the changes of the Dynasties—of conflicts within and without, and of victorious campaigns which the Pharaohs undertook at the head of their warriors against the nations who were their nearest neighbours. In such expeditions the kings sought to open new roads to all parts of the then known world, in order to extend the power and the territories of the Egyptian empire to the utmost bounds of the earth known to them. In the most glorious times of Egyptian history, inscribed pillars of stone, set up on the great plains of Mesopotamia as well as in the almost inaccessible regions of Inner Africa, served as speaking witnesses to the fame of the Egyptian arms and to the exploits of the Theban kings of Upper Egypt. Although the [9] ravages of time, in the long course of the world's history, have made them disappear without leaving a trace behind, yet the memory of these exploits is clearly preserved in some monuments of victory.

Like the rest of mankind, the Egyptians at last found their spirits cramped in their own proper home, and their restlessness found ample satisfaction in the warlike expeditions which opened to them the wide world and led them to covet the possession of the rich and fruitful territories of Asia and Africa beyond their own borders. The agricultural became a conquering people, regardless of the curse which is as old as the history of the world. For their foreign possessions, hard to win, j but still harder to keep, became a thorn in their own flesh, which at length brought the great body politic of Egypt to a miserable end.

Egypt is designated in the old inscriptions, as well as in the books of the later Christian Egyptians, by a word which signifies 'the black land,' and which is read in the Egyptian language Kem or Kami. The ancients had early remarked that the cultivable land of Egypt was distinguished by its dark and almost black colour, and certainly this peculiar colour of their soil suggested to the old Egyptians the name of the black land. This name and its derivation receive a further corroboration from the fact, that the neighbouring region of the Arabian desert bore the name of Tesher, or 'the red land,' in contradistinction to the black land (the A'in of the monuments, the Æan in Pliny, an appellation of the nome afterwards called the Heroopolitan). On countless occasions the king is mentioned in the inscriptions as 'the lord of the black country and of the red country,' in order to show that his rule extended over cultivated and uncultivated Egypt in the wider sense of the word. We must take this opportunity of stating that the Egyptians designated themselves simply as the people of the black land, and that the inscriptions, so far as we know, have handed [11] down to us no other appellation as the distinctive name of the Egyptian people.

On the other hand, the monuments make us acquainted with a number of other names, which served to designate this same land of Egypt in a special manner. Among the oldest is unquestionably the name Tamera, which seems to have meant the country of the inundation, and was applied more particularly to Lower Egypt. Other inscriptions belonging to the later age designated Egypt by appellations conceived for the most part in a poetical spirit. Among the most frequent expressions of this class are the following : The land of the sycomore, the land of the olive, the land of the Holy Eye, the land of the sixth day of the moon (intercalary day). The explanation of these and other designations can only be sought in those writings of the ancient Egyptians which relate to the doctrine of divine things and to the legends of the gods and divine beings, for it is a well-known fact that the Egyptians, precisely in the same manner as the Hebrews, believed that they found in the name of a person or place reference to certain events or to remarkable circumstances, whence the mere similarity of sound often gave occasion for incredibly bold identifications. The derivation of words according to fixed laws, corresponding to the natural state of things, was quite unknown to the ancients, and it must often make the hair of a modem philologer stand on end, to see the forced and violent comparison of words indulged in by the ancients in their explanations of significant proper names.

[12] A real enigma is proposed to us in the derivation and meaning of the curious proper name, by which the foreign peoples of Asia, each in its own dialect, were accustomed to designate Egypt. The Hebrews gave the land the name of Mizraim; the Assyrians, Muzur; the Persians, Mudraya. We may feel assured that at the basis of all these designations there lies an original form which consisted of the three letters M-z-r, all explanations of which have as yet been unsuccessful. Although I intend hereafter to consider more particularly the derivation of this puzzling name, which is still preserved at the present day in the Arabic appellation Misr, I will here premise the remark, that this name was originally applied only to a certain definite part of Egypt, in the east of the Delta, which, according to the indications of the monuments, was covered and defended by many 'zor,' or fortresses, and was hence called in Egyptian Mazor (that is, fortified).

Ancient Egypt, most commonly mentioned in general as 'the double land,' consisted of two great divisions, which, after their situation, were called in contrast with each other the land of the South and the land of the North, as is attested by the inscriptions. The first corresponds to that part of Egypt which, following the Greek name, we now know as Upper Egypt, and which the Arabs of the present day call by the appellation of Said. The land of Upper Egypt began on the south at the ivory-island-city of Elephantine, which lay opposite to Syene (the modem trading town of Assouan) on the right bank of the river; and its northern boundary reached to the neighbourhood of the Meraphian district [13] on the left bank of the holy river. Northern Egypt comprehended the remaining part of the land, called the Low country, the land of Behereh of the Arabs, the Delta of the Greek writers. This division, which exists just as much in our own day as it did in the most ancient times, is neither accidental nor arbitrary; for it is founded not only on a local difference in the respective dialects of the inhabitants, but on the marked distinction of habits, manners, and customs, which divides the Egyptians in the North and the South from one another. Already in the thirteenth century before our era, this difference of speech is proved by documentary evidence. In a manuscript which goes back to that date the learned author takes occasion to contrast the speech of a man of Upper Egypt with the speech of one of Lower Egypt, for the purpose of characterising most strikingly the obscurity and unintelligibility of a literary work. (See Vol. II. p. 109).

This chief division of Egypt, which according to the sacred traditions of the Egyptian priests was referred back to the time of the god-kings, explains not only the name of 'double country,' especially in the constantly recurring title of the kings, as 'the lords of the double country,' but it enables us to see clearly the grounds of the opposition by which, according to the myth, the sovereignty of the South was specially committed to the god Set, that of the North to the god Hor, the son of Osiris. It was a perpetual custom of the Egyptians that, after the old traditional manner, every king, on the day of his solemn coronation—which was distinct from the day of his receiving the [14] kingdom in his father's lifetime or on the death of his predecessor—received as his chief insignia two crowns, of which the white upper one symbolised his sovereignty over the South, the red lower one, on the contrary, his dominion over the North, of the Egyptian kingdom.

The land of Egypt resembles a small narrow girdle, divided in the midst by a stream of water, and hemmed in on both sides by long chains of mountains. On the right side of the stream, to the East, the chain of hills called Arabian accompany the river for its whole length; on the opposite, the Western side, the low hills of the Libyan desert extend in the same direction with the river from South to North up to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The river itself was designated by the Greeks and Romans by the name of Neilos or Nilus. Although this word is still retained in the Arabic language as Nil, with the special meaning of 'inundation,' yet its origin is not to be sought in the old Egyptian language; but, as has been lately suggested with great probability, it is to be derived from the Semitic word Nahar or Nahal, which has the general signification of 'river.' From its bifurcation south of the ancient city of Memphis, the river divided itself into three great arms, which watered the Lower Egyptian flat lands which spread out in the shape of the Greek letter Δ (Delta), and with four smaller arms formed the seven famous mouths of the Nile.

The Egyptian districts, called by the Greeks Nomes, which in the upper land lay on both sides of the river, comprehended in the inner part of the Delta [15] larger circuits, which were surrounded like islands by the arms of the Nile and their canals. Beyond these island nomes other districts extended on the Arabian and Libyan sides of the Lower Egyptian region of the stream. They are called in the lists the Western and Eastern nomes; and they correspond to the modern provinces of Gharbieh and Sharkieh, names which have the same meaning. This special division of the upper and lower countries into the districts called Nomes is of the highest antiquity, since we already find on the monuments of the fourth dynasty some nomes mentioned by their names, as well as some towns with the nomes to which they belonged. Thirty centuries later the same nomes appear on the monuments of the Ptolemaic and Roman times, arranged in regular and very-detailed tables, which separate the upper and the lower country by a clear distinction. Upper Egypt contained 22 nomes. Lower Egypt 20, so that there was a total for all Egypt of 42 nomes, which the native language designated sometimes by the word Sep or Hesep, sometimes by the word Tash. According to the account given in a papyrus, the division into 36 districts rests on a particular view, which connected the terrestrial division into nomes with the 36 ruling houses of the heavens (in astrology). In the celestial Egypt, as in the terrestrial, the first nome—in this case that of the first ruler—was dedicated to the goddess of the star Sothis (Sirius).

Each district had its own capital, which was at the same time the seat of the captain for the time being, whose office and dignity passed by inheritance, ac- [16] cording to the old Egyptian laws, from the father to the eldest grandson on the mother's side. The capital formed likewise the central point of the particular divine worship of the district which belonged to it. The sacred lists of the nomes have handed down to us the names of the temple of the chief deity, of the priests and priestesses, of the holy trees, and also the names of the town-harbour of the holy canal, the cultivated land and the land which was only fruitful during the inundation, and much other information, in such completeness that we are in a position, from the indications contained in these lists, to form the most exact picture of each Egyptian nome in all its details, almost without any gaps. Finally, we must not omit to remark that the several districts were separated from each other by boundary stones, and that the Egyptian authorities took the greatest pains in attending to the measurement of all the lands, for the making of canals and the inspection of the dams.

Egyptian history, so far as the monuments preserved from eternal oblivion throw light on the matter, furnishes proof that each nome formed in a certain degree a government complete in itself. It happened very often, that the inhabitants of one district threatened an attack on the occupants of another on account of some dispute about divine or human questions. The hostile feelings of the opponents not unfrequently broke out into a hard struggle, and it required the whole armed power of the king to extinguish at its first outburst the flaming torch of war, kindled by domineering chiefs of nomes or ambitious priests.

[17] The disastrous results of such feuds sometimes affected even the whole dynasty. The reigning family had to descend from the throne and give up the country and crown to the victorious prince of a nome. Hence not unfrequently arose the changes of dynasty, and the different names of the capitals of nomes in the Book of Kings handed down to us from Manetho. There are, however, three districts, above all others, which in the course of Egyptian history maintained the brilliant reputation of being the seats of government for the land: in Lower Egypt the nomes of Memphis and Heliopolis (On), and in Upper Egypt that of Thebes.

The old inhabitants of Egypt, like their descendants of today who inhabit the 'black country,' obtained nourishment and increase from their favoured soil. The wealth and prosperity of the country and its inhabitants were founded on agriculture and the breeding of cattle. Tillage, favoured by the proverbial fertility of the soil, had its fixed seasons regulated by the annual inundations. The special care already bestowed in the remotest antiquity on that important part of agricultural industry, the breeding and tending of cattle, is set in the clearest light by the evidence of the monuments. The walls of the sepulchral chapels are covered with thousands of bas-reliefs and their explanatory inscriptions, which preserve for us the most abundant disclosures respecting the labours of the field and the rearing of cattle, as practised by the old Egyptians. In them, also, navigation plays an important part, as the sole means of transport for long [18] distances. In ancient times, as in our own day, commerce and travelling were carried on upon the Nile and its canals. On the chief festivals of the Egyptian year the Pharaohs themselves did not disdain to sail along the sacred river in the gorgeous royal ship, in order to perform mystic rites in special honour of agriculture. The priests regarded the plough as a most sacred implement, and their faith held that the highest happiness of man, after the completion of his pilgrimage here below, would consist in tilling the Elysian fields of the subterranean god Osiris, in feeding and tending his cattle, and navigating the breezy water of the other world in slender skiffs. The husbandman, the shepherd, and the boatman, were in fact the first founders of the gentle manners—the honoured authors of that most ancient, peaceful life—of the people who flourished in the blessed valley of the Nile.

We cannot close this chapter without still taking an enquiring look at the peculiar mental endowments of the ancient Egyptians, about which the information of the monuments will be of course our faithful guides. There are not wanting very learned and intelligent persons—not excepting some who have won an illustrious name in historical enquiries—who teach us to regard the Egyptians as a people reflective, serious, and reserved, very religious, occupied only with the other world, and caring nothing or very little about this lower life; just as if they had been the Trappists of antiquity. But could it have been possible—we ask with wonder and bewilderment—that the fertile and bounteous land, that the noble river [19] which waters its soil, that the pure and smiling heaven, that the beaming sun of Egypt, could have produced a people of living mummies and of sad philosophers, a people who only regarded this life as a burden to be thrown off as soon as possible? No! Travel through the land of the old Pharaohs; look at the pictures carved or painted on the walls of the sepulchral chapels; read the words cut in stone or written with black ink on the fragile papyrus; and you will soon be obliged to form another judgment on the Egyptian philosophers. No people could be gayer, more lively, of more childlike simplicity, than those old Egyptians, who loved life with all their heart, and found the deepest joy in their very existence. Far from longing for death, they addressed to the host of the holy gods the prayer to preserve and lengthen life, if possible, to the 'most perfect old age of 110 years.' They gave themselves up to the pleasures of a merry life. The song and dance and flowing cup, cheerful excursions to the meadows and the papyrus marshes—to hunt with bow and arrow or sling, or to fish with spear and hook—heightened the enjoyment of life, and were the recreations of the nobler classes after work was done. In connection with this merry disposition, humorous jests and lively sallies of wit, often passing the bounds of decorum, characterised the people from age to age. They were fond of biting jests and smart innuendos; and free social talk found its way even into the silent chambers of the tomb. But the propensity to pleasure was a dangerous trap for the youth of the old Egyptian schools, and the judicious teachers had much need to [20] keep a curb on the young people. If admonition utterly failed, the chastising stick came into play, for the sages of the country believed that 'The ears of a youth are on his back.'

The lowest classes of the people, 'the mob,' as the inscriptions call them, were occupied with husbandry, the breeding of cattle, navigation, fishing, and the different branches of the most simple industries. From a very early period stone was wrought according to the rules of an advanced skill; and metals, namely, gold, silver, copper, iron (at first meteoric iron), were melted and wrought into works of art or tools and implements; wood and leather were formed into a great variety of valuable objects; glass was cast; flax was spun and woven into stuffs; ropes were twisted; baskets and mats of rushes were plaited; and on the round potter's wheel great and small vessels were formed by clever artists from the rich day of the Nile, and baked in the fiery furnace. Sculptors and painters found profitable work among the rich patrons of art at the court of the Pharaohs; and a whole world of busy artizans worked for daily wages under the bright blue sky of Egypt.

But all these, the humble followers of the earliest human art industry, were held 'in bad odour,' and the lowest scribe in the service of a great man looked down with the greatest contempt on the toiling, labouring people. It was esteemed better to be a servant in the house of the Pharaoh, and to bustle about in the service of their masters in the halls of the noble families. Though themselves children of the people, the class of [21] servants found help and protection from their lords, and had a share in the honour of the court. Spoilt by the plenty, luxury, and extravagance of splendid life, they knew not the painful lot of the workman. Death itself did not grudge the servants a part with the owners of the gorgeous sepulchres. For in the chambers of the dead, the deep pits of which hid in the place of honour the embalmed bodies of the noble masters, room was reserved by the artist's hand for the memory of the faithful servant. But too obedient to the orders of their lords, the servants held in slight regard the 'stinking' masses of the people, and abhorred the society of the 'miserable' traders and workmen.

Returning from successful campaigns abroad to the banks of the holy river, the princes and captains of the warriors, in the course of time, brought a great number of prisoners into the country, as booty of war: king's children, nobles, and common people of foreign origin. Some as hostages, others as slaves, inhabited the towns of their Egyptian lords; those not noble being promoted to the rank of domestic servants, or condemned to work in the fields with the common herd of the people. Dark-coloured inhabitants of the southern regions of the Upper Nile and light-coloured Canaanites, armed with sticks, attended the great men on their journeys as guards of honour, or, in the service of the court, enforced respect in an office like that of the cawasses of our day.

The noble class of the Egyptian people had nothing in common with the vulgar 'mob;' for they derived [22] their origin, for the most part, from the royal house, the nearest branches of which, the king's children and grandchildren (Sutenrekh), were held in high honour and respect. To them were committed the highest offices of the court, to which they were attached by abundant rewards from the Pharaoh's ever open hand. The nobles held as their hereditary possessions villages and tracts of land, with the people thereto belonging, bands of servants, and numerous herds of cattle. To their memory, after their decease, were dedicated, those splendid tombs, the remains of which, on the raised plain of the Libyan desert or in the caverns of the Egyptian hills, are still searched with admiring wonder by later ages, down to our own day. Ambition and arrogant pride form a remarkable feature in the spirit of the old dwellers on the Nile. Workman competed with work- man, husbandman with husbandman, official with official, to outvie his fellow, and to appropriate the favour and praises of the noble lords. In the schools, where the poor scribe's child sat on the same bench beside the offspring of the rich, to be trained in discipline and wise learning, the masters knew how by timely words to goad on the lagging diligence of the ambitious scholars, by holding out to them the future reward which awaited youths skilled in knowledge and letters. Thus the slumbering spark of self-esteem was stirred to a flame in the youthful breast, and emulation was stimulated among the boys. The clever son of the poor man, too, might hope by his knowledge to climb the ladder of the higher offices, for neither his birth nor position in life raised any barrier, if only the youth's mental [23] power justified fair hopes for the future. In this sense, the restraints of caste did not exist, and neither descent nor family hampered the rising career of the clever. Many a monument consecrated to the memory of some nobleman gone to his long home, who during life had held high rank at the court of Pharaoh, is decorated with the simple but laudatory inscription, 'His ancestors were unknown people.'

It is a satisfaction to avow that the training and instruction of the young interested the Egyptians in the highest degree. For they fully recognised in this the sole means of elevating their national life, and of fulfilling the high civilizing mission which Providence seemed to have placed in their hands. But above all things they regarded justice, and virtue had the highest price in their eyes. The law which ordered them—'To pray to the gods, to honour the dead, to give bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked'—reveals to us one of the finest qualities of the old Egyptian character, pity towards the unfortunate. The forty-two commandments of the Egyptian religion, which are contained in the 125th chapter of the 'Book of the Dead,' are in no way inferior to the precepts of Christianity; and, in reading the old Egyptian inscriptions concerning morality and the fear of God, we are tempted to believe that the Jewish lawgiver Moses modelled his teachings on the patterns given by the old Egyptian sages.

In the course of this history we shall have frequent occasion to return to the noble qualities which distinguished the old Egyptian character. [24] But the medal has its reverse side. The forefathers of the Egyptians were not free from vices and failings, which we cannot pass over in silence without exposing ourselves to the reproach of flattery at the expense of truth. Hatred, envy, cunning, intrigue, combined with an overweening sentiment of pride, opposition, and perversity, added to avarice and cruelty—such is the long series of hereditary faults which history reveals to us among the Egyptians by unnumbered examples in the course of centuries. We must especially beware of cherishing the belief that the rule of the Pharaohs opened to the inhabitants of the land the gates of a terrestrial paradise. The people suffered and endured under the blows of their oppressors, and the stick settled the despatch of business between the peasant and the tax-gatherer. We need but glance at the gigantic masses of the Pyramids ; they tell more emphatically than living speech or written words of the tears and the pains, the sufferings and miseries, of a whole population, which was condemned to erect these everlasting monuments of Pharaonic vanity. Three thousand years were not able to efface the curse resting on their memory. When Herodotus, about the middle of the fifteenth-century before Christ, visited the field of the great pyramids of Gizeh, the Egyptians told him of the imprecations wrung from their unhappy forefathers, and they would not from abhorrence so much as utter the names of the kings who constructed the two highest pyramids, whom we now know to have been the Pharaohs Khufu and Khafra.

The scientific students of our day, who trace back the history of mankind to the times when the races of men still lived in the condition of savages, have arranged in order the three ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, in order to fill up by this regular series the void which exists in all the records of history. Although we will not dispute that history may regard everything as an object for its consideration, yet we must openly acknowledge the fact, that, up to this time at least, Egypt throws scorn upon these assumed periods. So far as the historical record on the surviving monuments of Egypt reaches back, their beginnings coincide with the first age of the stone period, which the learned men of our time have invented in order to bridge over the historical chasm with a tangible fact. The result is, to speak in other words, that the history of Egypt must be the most ancient in the world—Egypt must appear to us in the light of the first human civilization. There is, therefore, the more reason for us to follow the precious traces of this most ancient past, and to welcome the slightest relics of those times as venerable [26] memorials which the earliest civilized race of men has left us of their actions and their life.

The Egyptians, like the ancients in general, were assuredly as inquisitive as ourselves of knowledge about the prehistoric times; but with this difference, that for them primeval history was concerned very little with 'the people and much more with the fame of the kings.' Their enquiries were directed to the names and genealogies of the princes who ruled the land before the first legitimate king, Mena.

The ancients cared little for those profound researches which our modern age, prompted by a burning thirst for knowledge, is accustomed to set on foot in order to penetrate the darkness which envelops the origin of the nations. At the point where historical information ceased, where Clio laid down her pen, and all further search for the lost sources of the great stream of history was wasted labour, the myth began to claim its rights, imagination replaced facts, and invention scorned the test of criticism.

As the Egyptians could not discover in the records of their monuments the primeval history of their land before the Pharaoh Mena mounted the throne, their imagination supposed three ages which followed one another, till Mena placed the double crown upon his head. During the first age a dynasty of the gods reigned in the land; this was followed by the age of the demigods; and the dynasty of the mysterious Manes closed the prehistoric time. It seems very likely that these dynasties contain some remembrance of the [27] ages of gold and silver of the poetic fictions of the Greeks.

The theology of the Egyptian priests did not fail to furnish materials for filling up these three ages with heavenly persons and names. The calculations of the courses of the stars, based on the cycle of the risings of Sothis (the Dog-star), gave the numbers which were added as regnal years to the names of these prehistoric sovereigns. As the sacred guilds of the priests at Memphis, Thebes, and other cities of Egypt, were not of one opinion, but differed from one another in their various doctrines about the nature of the gods and their connection with earthly things, we need not be surprised if the list of the three prehistoric dynasties contained different names and numbers, according to their respective origin.

To give but one example, we subjoin the names of the divine kings of the First Age (leaving out the numbers of years assigned to them), first in the Theban order, and then according to the arrangement of the Memphian priests; adding to the names of the Egyptian deities the corresponding classical appellations.

1.	Amon-ra, 'the King of the Gods'	Jupiter
2.	Mont, his son	Mars
3.	Shu, son of Ra	Agathodaemon
4.	Seb, or Qeb, son of Shu	Saturn
5.	Osiris, son of Seb	Bacchus
6.	Horus, son of Osiris	Apollo

1.	Fatah, 'the Father of the Gods,' (the Architect of the World.)	Vulcan
2.	Ra, son of Fatah, (Fire—Existent Being-the Present)	Sol (the Snn)
3.	Shu, his son, (the Air)	Agathodaemon
4.	Seb, his son, (the Earth)	Saturn
5.	Osiris, his son, (Water—Being that has existed—the Past)	Bacchus
6.	Set, son of Seb, (the Annihilation of Being)	Typhon
7.	Horus, son of Osiris, (the Coming into Being, the Future)	Apollo

A student who is initiated into the teachings and views of the priests about the being and nature of the deities—so far as we can learn them from the monuments—will find in the names of these heavenly kings, and in their order of succession, the matter and opportunity for very remarkable conjectures.

Thus the god Patah of Memphis, whom the inscriptions honour with the title of 'father of the gods,' is the Architect, in the highest sense of the word. This is at once indicated by his name, for Patah, in the Egyptian language, signifies 'architect, former, constructor.' On the other hand, there are not wanting very significant inscriptions, which throw a clear light on the sacred attributes of this Architect of the Universe. The following words, which may be read on the walls of the temple of Denderah, call the god expressly 'the chief of the society of the gods, who created all Being. All things came into existence after he existed. He is the lord of truth and king of the gods.' On the walls of the Temple of Isis, at Philae, it is said of the same god, [29] that it is 'he who created all Being, who formed men and gods with his own hands.' Another inscription at the same place speaks of the being of Patah in the following terms: 'He is the father of beginnings, who created the egg of the sun and of the moon;' while a third text at Philae more briefly but not less clearly calls him 'the father of all the gods, the first existing.' These examples are sufficient to prove the supreme place of the divine architect at the head of the god-kings. He is God the Creator, who existed before the creation of the universe, his own exclusive work.

The god Ra, the Sun, his successor, according to the Meniphian doctrine, is invoked in several sacred hymns as 'the son of Patah.' According to the various doctrines in different parts of the country, this god bears the double names of Khnum-Ra, Amon-Ra, Sebek-Ra, Khem-Ra, Hor-Ra, etc., all of which are only different local denominations of the same divinity. Ra is the sun, and in this character the representative of Light and Fire in the series of the four elements of the world. In another deeply mystic sense he is the divine form of existence in the most comprehensive sense of the word; he is 'that which is to-day, the present.'

His son and successor, Shu, recalls by his name the idea of emptiness or dryness. As an element, this divinity is identical with the wind or Air. The divine Seb, who, in the great calendar-inscription of the temple of Esneh, is called 'son of Shu,' appears in the documents and monuments of priestly origin as the personified image of the earth, and in this character as [30] the natural representative of the third element, the Earth. Yet it is a striking fact that the etymological sense of the word Seb, which in old Egyptian denotes both 'star ' and 'time,' is in manifest opposition to the character attributed to him as the earth-god. That there is no error or self-deception here, is made clear to us from the comparison which passed over into classical antiquity between the Egyptian Seb and the Greek Kronos, the son of Uranus and Gaea, under whose reign the golden age flourished upon earth.

To his son Osiris—the divinity adored in all parts of the land, with the exception of three nomes, and in whose forty-two temples of the dead, or Serapeums (the most celebrated of which were those of Abydos and Busiris, great sacrifices were offered in memory of the dead—the Egyptian priests assigned the particular meaning of the fourth and last element, that of Water. According to a deeper conception, they believed that they recognised in the god Osiris the symbol of existence completed, for the god is 'that which was yesterday, the past.'

We will not here dwell upon the hostile divinity of his brother Set, to whom we intend hereafter to give full consideration. Next to him comes under our notice the god of light, Hor (Horus, Apollo), the son of Osiris and of his divine wife Isis. According to the doctrine of the Egyptian sages, the form of the beautiful Hor symbolises the return of a completed existence, 'the new life, that which will be to-morrow, the future;' in a word, the being born again in the eternal cycle of earthly phenomena. Such is Hor, the [31] primeval form and the type of every royal successor of the Pharaohs, just as Ra represented the reigning Pharaoh, and Osiris the deceased king. A long drawn out myth about Hor, whom Isis by her mysterious magical arts awakens to life from the dead Osiris in the form of a child, tells of the combat of the youth and his companions with Set, the brother and murderer of his father, of the final victory of the god of light over Set, the prince of darkness and of eternal conflict and annihilation, and of the exaltation of the young king Hor on the undivided throne of his father Osiris. According to the testimony of the monuments, the duty was imposed upon each earthly Pharaoh, as the successor of Hor—on receiving the royal dignity—to accomplish a certain number of festive ceremonies, which were distinctly prescribed by a law, and were regulated in detail by the holy legend of Hor's enthronisation.

Of the royal gods, of whom we have spoken above, frequent mention is made in the old Egyptian records of every period; and the feet is noteworthy, that they are referred to as kings, who actually reigned ages before, with the addition of their respective regnal years. Besides the name of their dynasty, they have a second name of honour, and, just like the Pharaohs, they bear respectively the authentic title under which the god Thut, the holy scribe of the gods, registered each of them in the Book of the Kings, at the command of the Sun-god, Ra. They have their individual history, which the holy scribes wrote down in the books of the temples; they married royal brides, and begat [32] a very numerous posterity. In reality, all these poetical fables have not the slightest historical foundation, nor do they throw any light on the epoch which preceded and introduced the rule of Mena; but yet they serve as trustworthy evidence of the historical sentiment possessed by the ancient Egyptians, and of their earnest desire to hand down in the mythical form to future generations the remembrance of the oldest prehistoric past. The monuments preserve for us little information about the two fabulous dynasties which followed those of the god-kings, and which, in the extracts preserved in Greek from the lost Book of Kings by the Egyptian Manetho, are designated as the dynasties of the Demi-gods and of the Manes. It is to be regretted that the fragments of the Turin papyrus (once containing the most complete list of the kings of Egypt in their chronological order) have preserved not the slightest intelligible information about those fabulous successors of the god-kings. A single shred allows us to make out with tolerable certainty the names of sacred animals, such as the Apis of Memphis and the Mnevis of Heliopolis, so that it would appear as if these also had contributed to the number of the prehistoric rulers of Egypt. Science has not yet solved the problem, whether the fabulous personages of the dynasties in question are the same who, in the Turin papyrus and in other primitive records of Egyptian antiquity, are included under the general name of Hor-shesu, that is 'successors of Horus.' The inscriptions very often make allusion to them when they wish to speak of time beyond all memory.

[29*] Without occupying ourselves further with these imaginary beings, we must, as has been remarked before, at all events grant the inference, that Egypt had really a life before the historic age, but that the monuments—apart from the fictitious stories of the myths—contain nothing about the condition of the land in those far distant primeval times. All that we are allowed to suppose on this subject is confined to the assumption, that Egypt's prehistoric age must of necessity correspond to the time of the first development of arts and handicrafts and of human science, as well as to the time of the division and establishment of the higher and lower strata of society.

If the reader's curiosity leads him to an enquiry concerning the epochs of time already fixed in the history of the Pharaohs, and to a critical examination of the chronological tables thus far composed by scholars, he must be strangely impressed by the conflict of most diverse views in the computations of the most modern
school. As to the era, for example, when the first Pharaoh, Mena, mounted the throne, the German Egyptologers have attempted to fix it at the following epochs:

		B.C.			B.C.
Boeckh	.........	5702	Lepsius	.........	3892
Lauth	.........	4157	Brugsch	........	4455
Unger	..........	5613	Bunsen	.........	3623

The difference between the two extreme points of the series is amazingly great, for its number of years amounts to no less than 2079! In order to comprehend it more fully, let us suppose, for the sake of comparison, that, some sixty centimes after our time, the learned world should launch out into a discussion about the date of the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, which began, as we at this day know [31*] exactly, at the year 30 B.C. Instead then of this correct date, our learned sages would differ so widely in their opinions, that one would propose the year 207 B.C. of our chronology as the highest date, another the year 1872 a.d. of the same chronology as the lowest, for the accession of Augustus. Nevertheless the error has its limits, and we will explain the proof of this. The calculations in question are based on the extracts already often mentioned from a work by the Egyptian priest Manetho on the history of Egypt. That learned man had then at his command the annals of his country's history, which were preserved in the temples, and from them, the best and most accurate sources, he derived the materials for his work, composed in the Greek language, on the history of the ancient Egyptian Dynasties. His book, which is now lost, contained a general review of the kings of the land, divided into Thirty Dynasties, arranged in the order of their names, with the lengths of their reigns, and the total duration of each Dynasty. Though this invaluable work was little known and certainly but little regarded by the historians of the old classical age, large extracts were made from it by some of the ecclesiastical writers. In process of time the copyists, either by error or designedly, corrupted the names and the numbers, and thus we only possess at the present day the ruins instead of the complete building. The truth of the original, and the authenticity of his sources, was first proved by the deciphering of the Egyptian writing. And thus the Manethonian list of the kings served, and still serves, as a guide for assigning to the royal names [32*] read on the monuments their place in the Dynasties, as, on the other hand, the monuments have enabled us with certainty to restore to their correct orthography many of the kings' names which have been corrupted in the Manethonian lists. The very thorough investigations, to which learned experts have subjected the succession of the Pharaohs and the chronological order of the dynasties, have shown the absolute necessity of supposing in the list of Manetho contemporary and collateral dynasties, and thus of diminishing considerably the total duration of the thirty Dynasties. Notwithstanding all these discoveries, the figures are in a deplorable state. From the nature of the calculation, based on the exact determination of the regnal years of the kings, every number which is rectified necessarily changes the results of the whole series of numbers. It is only from the beginning of the twenty-sixth dynasty that the chronology is founded on data which leave little to be desired as to their exactitude.

The great pedigree of twenty-five court architects, to which we have already directed the attention of the learned world in the first edition of our history, and the last scion of which, the architect Khnum-ab-ra, was alive in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Darius I., has given rise to the new method of fixing the dates of the Pharaohs anterior to the twenty-sixth dynasty, at least approximately, with the help of existing series of genealogies. The credit is due to a Swedish scholar, Mr. Lieblein, of having turned this new auxiliary to account, in his last work, as an aid to Egyptian chronology. The importance of this touch- [33] stone for all measurements of time in Egyptian history is incontestable; and it is strongly confirmed by the proofs adduced by Mr. Lieblein. Assuming, according to the well-known calculation of the father of history, Herodotus, the round number of a century for three consecutive human lives, we possess a means of determining approximately the periods of time which have elapsed, on the one hand, from King Mena to the end of the twelfth dynasty, and again from the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty to the end of the twenty-sixth. If the objection be raised, that the series of kings contained in the Table of Abydus (for it is of this that we are speaking) does not exhibit a direct succession from father to son, and that therefore the hypothesis of a continuous genealogical series must utterly fail, we observe in reply, that the table in question contains only a selection of legitimate kings, and that the Pharaohs who only reigned a short time, as well as all the usurpers, are passed over in silence; in other words, that the term of 100 years for three consecutive reigns is rather below than above the truth.

The new table of Abydus, discovered eleven years ago in a corridor of the temple of Seti I. at Harabat-el-Madfouneh, gives a succession of sixty-five kings from Mena, the founder of the line, down to the last reign of the twelfth dynasty. To these sovereigns therefore would be assigned a period of 65/3 x 100 = 2166 years, leaving the fractional remainder out of the account.

The kings from the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, down to the Pharaoh Ramses II. of the nine- [34] teenth dynasty, are twelve in number, according to the same table of Abydus. On the other hand, there were nineteen court-architects, from Nofer-mennu, grandson of the architect Boken-khonsu, who lived in the reign of Seti I., down to his remote descendant Aahmes-sa-nit, father of the above-named Khnum-ab-ra, in the time of Darius I. We obtain therefore, for the second period, 12 + 19 =31 generations, or 31/3 x 100 = 1033⅓ years. The eighteenth dynasty would thus have b^un its rule over Egypt 1033⅓ years before the year 525 B.C., that is, in the year 1558 b.c. If we compare this number with the computations of recent critics of Manetho's work, which place the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty in one of the following year—1625 (Bunsen), 1655 (Boeckh), 1684 (Lepsius)—the result is a difference of about a hundred years. But even this difference is only apparent, for it is eliminated by the undeniable fact, that the architect Boken-khonsu or Beken-khonsu, whose pedigree makes him appear as contemporary with one of the later Ramessids of the XXth dynasty (see Table IV.) must be regarded as a second of the same name, in fact as a descendant of his namesake, the architect of Ramses II., who is passed over in the Table.

If we were to believe the Table of Abydus alone, the princes of the twelfth dynasty would have had the Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty for their immediate successors, without any break or interregnum. This would be in accordance with the fact perceived by the acuteness of Mariette-Bey, that the old Egyptian proper names of the persons of the twelfth, and especially of [35] the eleventh dynasty, recur in the same forms on the monuments of the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty; and further, that at these two periods of Egyptian history the form and ornaments of the coffins are so alike as to be undistinguishable. Here we have a remarkable enigma, for the solution of which we do not yet possess the requisite data.

If we admit, according to the evidence of the Table of Abydus, the sudden transition from the twelfth to the eighteenth dynasty, the historical beginning of the Egyptian Empire would fall about the year 3724 B.C., namely 2166 years before 1558 B.C. But if, on the other hand, we assume in round numbers 500 years as the intermediate space of time which divides the end of the twelfth from the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, the result would be that Mena ascended the throne of Horus 500 years before the year 3724, that is, in 4244 B.C.

Some men of science believe that they have discovered another mode of arriving at the determination of important epochs of Egyptian history in certain accounts of astronomical observations, which they have for this purpose subjected to exact calculation. The opportunity has been given for complicated calculations of such a kind by the reign of a king named Menophres, under whom, according to a Greek account, a new Sothic cycle began; again, by the data contained in several royal sepulchres concerning the risings of the star Sothis (our Sinus) under the reigns of contemporary Ramessids; finally by some miscellaneous monuments relating to astronomy; but as to [36] the value or worthlessness of these supposed results scientific criticism has not yet spoken its last word. Instead of growing less, the difficulties in determining the chronological relations of Egyptian history are on the contrary multiplied from day to day; for new problems, the solution of which has still to be waited for, are continually presenting themselves in the province of investigations about chronology. To mention one example, the question is now very properly raised, whether the old inhabitants of the Nile valley used the same form of calendar at all ages of their historical existence; whether they knew the Sothic cycle of the year or any sidereal cycle derived from observation of the stars; whether in the tables still extant they recorded the rising and setting of certain stars and constellations merely with the view of finding their position for a certain epoch of the reign of this or that king: all questions of the highest importance, but which up to the present time have waited in vain for their solution.

Had the Turin papyrus been preserved to us in its entire state; had we possessed the complete list of the historical kings of the Egyptian empire, we should probably have been in a position to mould into a perfect shape even the most ancient part of Egyptian history, with the dates belonging to it. But, as the case stands at present, no mortal man possesses the means of removing the difficulties which are inseparable from the attempt to restore the original list of kings from the fragments of the Turin papyrus. For too many of the most necessary elements axe wanting to fill up the [37] lacunae; and who is able to augment and complete the number of the historical monuments, especially those of the most ancient dynasties, which have survived but too rarely in their last ruins, to give satisfactory answers to our questions?

It also appears certain that the long series of the kings, which the Turin papyrus once contained, was arranged by the author according to his own ideas and views. For he gives carefully, besides the names of the Pharaohs, the years, months, and days of their reigns, but he forgets to give also any account of the contemporary double reign of two kings, which have been proved beyond all doubt by the inscriptions, and which was a very usual custom in the succession of a son to his father.

The chronological table of the history of the Egyptian kingdom, which is given at the end of this work (Appendix), is founded on the principles above explained, as far as dates are concerned, and is only presented to the reader with the extremest caution. I would make the general remark, that the numbers of years assigned to the Dynasties and to the individual Pharaohs claim merely the value of an approximation, but nevertheless they do not on the average exceed their actual ages obtained from the monuments.

In the eighth nome of upper Egypt, West of the river in the direction of the Libyan mountains, there stood a small town called by the Egyptians Tini, a name which the Greeks converted, after their manner, into This or Thinis. It was the ancient metropolis of the eighth nome. Lying near to the great city of Abydus, Tini probably formed only a separate quarter of that celebrated city, as would appear from numerous notices in the old Egyptian records. The town of Tini had chosen for its tutelar deity the warlike god Anhur, whom the Greeks and Romans identified with their Mars, while at Abydus Osiris was worshipped with the most holy rites of the dead. Both cities have now vanished from the face of the earth; but their memory is preserved by the vast necropolis, and by the splendid buildings of several sanctuaries which the pious faith of the Egyptians raised on the outermost border of the desert, at the place which the present modern inhabitants of this country call by the Arabic name of Harabat-el-Madfouneh (Harabat the sunken).

Although we have next to nothing to relate of the history of the little town of Tini, which in the time of the [39] Roman dominion, was only known for its dyers of purple, it must have enjoyed a very great reputation among the ancient Egyptians. As late as the period of the nineteenth dynasty, the highest functionaries of the blood royal were distinguished by the title of 'princes of Tini,' a mark of honour such as only existed in the following titles, 'princes of Kush and princes of Hineb' (the moon town, Eileithyiapolis). The highest glory of this town was undoubtedly founded on the circumstance that the first king of the Egyptians, and his successors who composed the two first dynasties, according to the enumeration of Manetho, were descended from a family which sprung from this place. The name of this ancestor of all Egyptian kings—whom the classic authors call indifferently Min, Menis, Meines, Meinios,and Meneres—was in the native language Mena, an appellation which will be best translated in English by its original meaning, 'the constant.' All that we know of him is limited to some notices which we owe to classic authors. According to them this pharaoh was the first legislator of the Egyptians, but they accused him of having perverted the good manners of ancient times, and of having replaced sobriety and a simple manner of living by royal luxury and sumptuous splendour. They related with regard to this that a long time after him a king named Technactis, or Tephachthus, the father of the unfortunate king Bocchoris, having experienced, during an expedition against the revolted Arabs, the advantages of a modest repast and a bed of straw, was so much disgusted at the royal mode of life, that he henceforward adopted [40] the most simple frugality. He even ordered the sacerdotal caste to engrave upon a stone a decree containing curses pronounced against King Mena, and to place it in the temple of Amon at Thebes.

According to another tradition, Mena was the first to lay down rules for the worship of the gods and the service of the temples. It was he who founded the brilliant capital of the ancient empire, the town of Memphis, after having changed the course of the river to increase the ground which was to contain his new residence. By the construction of an enormous dyke, the Nile, which before the reign of this king ran dose to the Libyan chain, was carried more to the east; its ancient bed was filled up, and thus a site was formed for Memphis. This history has nothing very surprising or astonishing. In our own day it has been possible to fill up a branch of the Nile, and to unite the island of Jezireh, opposite the port of Boulak, to the ground on the other side, situated towards the west.

M. Linant-Bey, one of the most industrious improvers of modem Egypt, has declared his opinion, founded on an examination of the formation of the ground, that the great dyke of Cocheiche is probably that which King Mena caused to be constructed 6,000 years ago, to give to the Nile its eastern direction. At the present day this dyke serves to restrain all the waters of inundation which arrive in Egypt. By means of large sluices, constructed in the dyke, the waters are allowed to flow over Lower Egypt or into the Nile as they are required. It is thus that a complement of inundation is produced in the lower basins, or a rise of [41] height in the level of the river, which in the neighbourhood of Cairo sometimes rises as much as three feet. M. Linant-Bey would place the spot at which the Nile is diverted towards the east at two miles to the south of Memphis.

On this site which had been won from the river Mena constructed the new town, with its houses, its fortifications, and its temples. The Egyptians, like the ancients in general, commenced the foundation of their towns by the construction of a temple, which formed the centre of the town which was to be built. When new temples were erected they became the occasion for creating new quarters, which extended round the centre, with which they formed one town. The names given to these sanctuaries applied also to the colonies in their neighbourhood, and thus several different names are applied to a single town.

If we follow the data of the lists of the districts, we arrive at knowing many an obscure designation, and gain a clear understanding of the historical inscriptions which speak of Memphis. For the sake of example, we will mention all about the Memphitic district which the above-mentioned lists tell us.

The chief name of the town, as also of the district, viz. Anbu-hat, or the White Wall, was derived from the fortified part of it, the origin of which may be traced into the old empire. The town in general bore the title Men-nofer (the good place), more seldom Cha-nofer (the good appearance), or Macha-ta, 'the land of the scales.' The holy appellation of the oldest kingly residence was the most common of all, viz. Ha-ka-patah, [42] 'house of worship of Patah.' derived from the chief god of the district, the holy architect Patah. The whole district, in the middle of which the new town of Mena arose, bore the name of Sochet-Ra, that is, 'the field of the sun,' often confounded with the neighbouring appellation of Sha-ament, 'the country of the inundation of the West.' The god Patah was worshipped in the temple Za-Patah or Pi-Patah, 'temple of Patah.' The dead of the Memphitic district rested in 'the land of life,' Anch-ta, of the towns in the stony desert in sight of the town of Memphis. Osiris, the judge of the dead underground, had his special temple—his serapeum, as the Greeks called it—bearing the name Han-ub, 'house of gold.' The holy canal at the place of the harbour was called Chet, or Mu-khet, i.e. 'the waters of the voyage below.' It carried off the floods of the inundation to the low-lying lands behind 'the great circumference,' Shen-ur. We have already spoken of the god Patah; not seldom he bears the additional appellation Sokar or Sokari, the traces of which still seem to appear in the name of the modem village Sakkarah, in the vicinity of the old town of Memphis. The wife of the god, horn-headed, the goddess with the sun's disc, bore the name Sochet, and their son was Nofer-atum, later Im-hotep (in Greek Imuthes), the Esculapius of the Egyptian mythology. The monuments further inform us that a holy snake, under the name Zotef, was worshipped in the temple of the god, and that the acacia and the mulberry, and the persea, were counted among the holy trees in Memphis. The bark of the god bore the name 'ship of the lord of [43] eternity;' his high priest was called, in allusion to the highest title of the god, 'foreman.' while the priestess had the flattering appellation, 'the beautifully formed.' On the first day of the months Tybi and Mechir were the chief feasts in Memphis.

Mennofer is the most constantly occurring name of this city. The Greeks made of this Memphis, and the Copts Memphi, while in cuneiform the Egyptian name is rendered by Mimpi. The traces of the ancient name are very clearly preserved in the modem name of Tel-Monf, by which the Arabs of the present day designate a heap of ruins on the site of the royal town of the ancient Pharaohs.

All that remains of this celebrated city at the present time consists of heaps of fragments of columns and altars, and carvings which once belonged to the temples of Memphis—a far-stretching mass of mounds out of which shine in the clear sunlight the remains of the half-destroyed chambers and halls of ancient houses. Those travellers who visit the remains of Memphis in the hope of recognising some vestiges worthy of its fame, will be little satisfied with the sad prospect which meets the eye.

Only in imagination can we see the past greatness of Memphis, and only then can we appreciate a pilgrimage to the grave of this old royal seat, and a town where once the celebrated temple of Patah, the Egyptian Hephaistos, rose in all its proud splendour—now a palm grove and a wide plain cultivated by fellahs of the neighbouring Arab village of Mifr-Eahineh.⁸

[44] The temple of the divine creator of the world, the central point of the destroyed city, lay on the south side of the salt-encrusted plain which stretches between the 'Swine's-hill,' Kum-el-Khanzeer, on the east, and the little Arab village of El-Kassarieh on the western. It stretches out in a direction from north to south, and the grand statue of Ramses II., now buried in a giant's grave and already reached by the water of the inundation, shows beyond doubt the place where the splendid gate of the temple with its double towers raised its dark masses in the blue expanse of heaven.

The existence of the holy lake to the north of the great statue of Ramses is indicated by the inscription on a massive block, which in the middle of the plain lying on its back, turns upwards its engraved holy writing. In the immediate neighbourhood of the village of El-Rassarieh (strangely enough this name means 'wash-pot'), there show themselves in grim chaos the broken remains and columns of a temple of which the engraved inscriptions name Ramses II. as the founder and builder. This building lay from east to west. Ramses II. raised it of beautifully-polished blocks of granite and alabaster, to the honour of the divine Fatah.

It seems that in the Middle Ages the ruins of Memphis were still so well preserved that their materials and the manner in which they were worked excited the admiration of the Arab visitors to the place. We possess [45] a poetical description of the ruins and wonders of ancient Memphis in the writings of the Arabian physician Abd-ul-Latif, in the thirteenth century. He begins his description with the very excellent remarks which I quote from the admirable translation of the Baron Silvestre de Sacy: 'In spite of the immense extent of this city, and of the high antiquity to which it reaches back; in spite of all the varied forms of government under the yoke of which it has passed in the course of ages, and although successive nations have done all in their power to raze it to the ground, making its smallest vestiges disappear and obliterating even the least traces of it, while they transported elsewhere the stones and other materials of which it was constructed, destroyed its edifices and mutilated the statues which adorned them; in short, not to weary the reader with all the causes of destruction contributed by 4,000 years and more, its ruins still offer to the eyes of the spectator a collection of wonderful works which confound the intellect, and to describe which the most eloquent man would labour in vain. The longer we look upon the scene, the higher rises the admiration it inspires; and every new glance that we cast upon the ruins reveals a new charm. Scarcely have they awakened a distinct idea in the soul of the spectator, than a still more admirable idea suggests itself; and just as you believe you have gained complete knowledge of them, at that very moment the conviction forces itself on the mind, that what you think you know is still very far from the truth.' After this enthusiastic burst of admiration, the learned physician launches out into a description of the celebrated [46] green chamber hewn out of a single block of stone, which was nine cubits high, eight wide and six long, and was covered with figures of men and animals of extraordinary proportions.

The repeated excavations which have been undertaken in our day on the ancient soil of Memphis, in hope of striking upon monuments of historical value, have given results hardly worth naming. It seems that the immense masses of stone used in the building of the temples were transported to Cairo, to supply the materials needed for the mosques, palaces, and houses of the well-preserved city of the Khalifs.

Next to Thebes, the royal capital of Upper Egypt, Memphis is the city about which the speaking stones and the written rolls have the most to tell us. In our special work on the geography of ancient Egypt, we have cited from the monuments the number of temples and sanctuaries which once formed the glory of the city, from the house of the deity Patah to the abode dedicated to the foreign goddess Astarte. The high priests of Patah, like their fellows of Thebes, played an important part at different epochs of the history of Egypt. We find among their number princes of the blood royal. As an example we may name the prince Khamus, a favourite son of Ramses II., who died early, and who gave rich gifts of honour to the temples of the gods, and fulfilled the rules of the holy service. With the decline of the empire the high priests of Memphis also, like those of Thebes, lost their importance, when the two cities ceased to be the famous residences of the Pharaohs.

Along the far-stretching margin of the desert, from [47] Abu-Roash to Meidum (the ancient city of Mi-tum), lay in silent tranquillity the necropolis of Memphis with its wealth of tombs, overlooked by the stupendous buildings of the pyramids, which rose high above the monuments of the noblest among the noble families, who, even after life was done, reposed in deep pits at the feet of their lords and masters. The contemporaries of the third, fourth, and fifth dynasties are here buried; but their memory has been preserved by pictures and writings on the walls of the sacrificial chambers built over their tombs. From this source flows the stream of tradition which carries us back to the time and to the soil of the oldest kingdom in the land. If this countless number of tombs had been preserved to us, it would have been an easy task to reconstruct before our eyes, in uninterrupted succession, the genealogy of the kings and of the noble lines related to them. Fate, however, has not granted this; for their monuments, names^ and deeds, are buried and forgotten ; but even the few remaining heaps of ruins enable us to imagine the lost in all its greatness.

In that obscure age of antiquity, when the symmetrical building of the pyramids and the well-constructed rooms of the sepulchral chambers demanded a high intelligence and a skilful hand, the office of architect was the occupation of the noblest men at the king's court. Pharaoh's architects (the Mur-ket), who were often of the number of the king's sons and grandsons, were held in high honour, and the favour of their lord gave them his own daughters out of the women's house as wives.

For these reasons Pharaoh's architects seem worthy [48] of remembrance. The following names of royal architects have survived the destroying hand of time, and are still preserved:

Besides these may be named Pehen-ka, Ra-ur, Ai, Uah-mer, besides other names which may have escaped our researches among the ruins of that perished world.

A higher office, according to the testimony of the speaking stones, belonged to the nobleman who bore the dignity of 'prophet of the Pyramid of Pharaoh.' This officer's duty was to praise the memory of the deceased king, and to devote the god-like image of the sovereign to enduring remembrance. The honour of the office was mentioned in the prophet's own tomb, and was associated with the name of his deified king. Thanks to this ancient usage, the famous names of the ancient Pharaohs were known to us long before the discovery at Abydus of the table of the kings, but without the order of their succession.

The eloquent language of the stones, speaking to us from the tombs of the necropolis of Memphis, tells us much concerning the usages of Pharaoh and his court. The king himself is officially desig- [49] nated by the most complete title, 'king of Upper and Lower Egypt.' His high dignity is also concealed under other names, as, for instance, Perao—that is, 'of the great house,' well known as Pharaoh in the Bible. For his subjects the pharaoh was a god (nuter) and lord (neb) par excellence. At sight of him they were obliged to prostrate themselves, rubbing the ground with their noses; sometimes, by the gracious order of the king, they only touched the knee of the omnipotent. In speaking of him, they very often used the words 'his holiness.' They also designated him very respectfully by a grammatical construction, which in the translation is best rendered by the word 'he' (the king).

It is the pharaoh who gives his orders to be executed by his servants, testifying his satisfaction by nominations, presents, and other acts of grace. He distributes decorations (for example, the necklace of gold nub), and makes rich presents of lands and slaves and maidens. His daughters, the princesses, went out of the women's house and married the highest and noblest in the land, and young men of talent and promise were admitted to the society of the children of the king. The wife of the king, as also the remaining bevy of royal ladies, the daughters and granddaughters, were honoured by the titles of 'prophetesses of the goddesses Hathor or Neit,' and are found 'in the house of the royal women,' the pharaonic harem, placed under the superintendence of officers who enjoyed the confidence of the king. 'The house of the children of the king' was under the direction of a lord of the court, [50] on whom fell the responsibility of the health and education of the pharaonic family.

The royal court was composed of the nobility of the country, and of the servants of inferior rank. Not only the splendour of their origin gave the nobles dignity in the eyes of the people, but still more their wisdom, manners, and virtues. The persons belonging to the first class of the nobility generally bore the title Erpa, 'hereditary highness;' Ha, 'prince;' Set, 'the illustrious;' Semer-ua-t, 'the intimate friend.' The affairs of the court and of the administration of the country were conducted by 'the chiefs' or the secretaries, and by a numerous class of scribes.

The names of the officials were 'the overseer,' Mur; 'the enlightener,' Sehat; 'the great,' Ur, or 'the follower ' Emkhet, who were attached to the person of the king himself. A steward had charge of the king's household, another had charge of the wardrobe, another acted as hairdresser, took care of the nails of his holiness, and prepared his bath. One was over the singing and playing, and prepared the means for the pharaoh's pleasures and enjoyments. Other nobles were charged with the administration of the magazines of wheat, dates and fruits in general, of the cellar, of the chamber for oil, of the bakery, and the butchering, and the stables. The treasury filled with gold and silver, and the offices for expenses and receipts, had their special superintendents. The Court of Exchequer was not wanting. The private domains, the farms, the palaces, and even the lakes and canals of the king, were placed under the care of inspectors. By Pharaoh's order skilful persons [51] of the class of the nobles were appointed to the charge of the buildings and all kinds of work in stone. From the caverns of the rocks of Ta-roou (the Troja of the Greeks and Romans, the Tura of the present Arabs), in sight of Memphis, they brought the white limestone for building the royal pyramids and the tombs, and for artistic works, as sarcophagi and columns. They also betook themselves to the southern lands, at the opposite boundary of the country, to loosen the hard granite from the Bed mountain behind the town of Sooan (the Assooan of our day), and construct rafts for the more easy conveyance of the vast masses of stone to the lower country in the favourable time of the high water.

The dreaded company of the overseers were set over the wretched people, who were urged to hard work more by the punishment of the stick than words of warning.

The population inhabiting the towns, as well as the villages of the country, was governed by the prefects of the pharaoh. The judges watched over the strict obedience to the written law, and administered justice to the oppressed people, whose complaints the attorneys (Anwalte) of the king were bound to hear. A great variety of punishments were administered to an unjust accuser by the provost-marshal.

The armed force—which was composed of young foot soldiers armed with clubs, axes, bows and arrows—was placed under the command of experienced officers. A general-in-chief prepared the campaign, organised the masses, made the necessary preparations for military [52] expeditions, and gave the orders for battle. Of a more peaceful kind was the much-praised office of the hir-seshta, which literally means 'teacher of the secret,' for they possessed all hidden wisdom in these ancient times. Those learned in the secrets of the heavens looked upwards and explained the ever-changing courses of the brilliant stars. Others are called 'the hir-seshta of all the countries.' If we are not mistaken, by these are meant the geographers of Memphis. Some are found with the title 'the hir-seshta of the depth.' If we are not mistaken these were learned in all which the earth conceals in its depths, and were initiated in the special knowledge of the soil. Important must have been their judgment before they undertook sinking their deep wells. We also meet with 'the hir-seshta of the secret words,' literary men and composers of deeply thought out themes, and 'hir-seshta of the sacred language,' the learned grammarians of the pharaonic court. The monuments mention most frequently the 'hir-seshta of the pharaoh,' or 'of all the orders of the pharaoh.' These were the learned secretaries of the king. After them we also find the 'hir-seshta who examine the words,' no doubt literary men with an elevated style, composers of the first rank, without we prefer to consider them as judges charged with the enquiries in law-suits.

The numerous company of scribes were divided into many branches, according to their business and positions. At the court of the king or in the halls of the noblemen, obedient to the orders of their masters, they wrote with the light reed pen the manifold events of domestic [53] life on the smooth rolls, accurately recorded the income and expenditure of their master, and kept the books in good order. The way was open to any scribe of talent to arrive at the summit of the pharaonic bureaucracy. The lower class of servants and the workmen artists were divided into several ranks, who obeyed their chiefs and executed their orders. Thus the court and the public administration were perfectly organised ; each kept his place according to his dignity; the affairs followed their regular course, and the pharaoh was the prime mover of the machine of government. Blind obedience was the oil which caused the harmonious working of the machinery.

And all this world, buried for 6,000 years in the sands of the desert, under the ruins of its own gigantic works, opens the mysteries of its public and private life to a posterity which profoundly admires its moral greatness, its perfection of mind, its art and its administration. But where is the modern hir-seshta to lift the veil which still hides the origin of these men of. yore?

We will conclude this section with the king by which we commenced it—with the Pharaoh Mena. The ancients commemorate him so far as to attribute to him a campaign against the Libyan tribes. The end of this ancestor of the Egyptian dynasties was unfortunate. He was seized by a crocodile, and became the prey of the savage beast. Such is the story of the ancients. Was the Typhonic Set, the lord of the horrid water-monsters, embittered with envious hatred against the founder of the most ancient state.

The following is the table of the pharaohs who succeeded Mena. This list is due to the discoveries of the tables of Saqqarah and of Abydos, together with the fragments of the papyrus of Turin, which in its perfect state contained the same names, with the addition of the reign of each king. The names and the figures given in the Manethonian Canon complete our table. The Manethonian list of kings answering to those found on the monuments is given for the sake of comparison.

	The Monuments		Manetho
1.	Mena	1.	Menes	62 yrs
2.	Tota	2.	Athothis	57
3.	Atot	3.	Kenkenes	81
4.	Ata	4.	Uenepbes I	28
		5.	Uenepbes II	42
5.	Sapti	6.	Usaphaidoa	20
6.	Mirbapen (Mi-ba)	7.	Miebidos	26
7.	(name very difficult to read)	8.	Semempses	18
8.	Qebeh	9.	Bieneches	26

9.	Butau	1.	Boethos	88
10.	Kakau	2.	Kaiechos	89
11.	Bainnuter	3.	Binothris	47
12.	Utnaa	4.	Tlas	17
13.	Senta	5.	Sethenes	41
		6.	Chaires	17
14.	Noferka (-ra)	7.	Nephercheres	25
15.	Noferka-Sokari, 8 y. 3 m. 4 d.	8.	Seaochris	48
16.	Hutefa . . 8 m. 4 d.	9.	Cheneres	80

17.	Bubui orTaTai^y 2 m. 1 d	1.	Necherophes	28
18.	Nebka 19 y	2.	Tosorthros	29
19.	Toser-(aa)	3.	Tyreis	7
20.	(Toser)-tota	4.	Mesochris	17
21.	Setes	5.	Soophis	16
22.	Nebkara	6.	Tosertaais	19
23.	Noferkara
24.	Huni	7.	Aches	42
25.	Senoferu	8.	Sephouria	30
		9.	Kerpheres	26

The reliable lists of the stone monuments show that the Greek list must be of very old origin; but, on the other hand, it will be well observed in what a wretched state, owing to the hands of ignorant copyists, the work of the Egyptian priest Manetho has reached us.

Even a cursory examination of the names belonging to the above-mentioned kings suggests a curious remark, namely, that these names, with the exception of two or three which only appear towards the end, do not at all resemble the pharaonic names of succeeding epochs. They have something common, plebeian about them, if we may use such an expression, which contrasts singularly with the splendour and [56] grandeur contained in the appellations of the pharaohs who succeeded. Besides this the sign + of the God Ra, the sun, a most essential element in the composition of pharaonic names, only begins to show itself with the 22nd king of the monumental list.

For the most part these names conceal a sense which very clearly recalls the ideas of force and terror inherent in men who first gained dominion over the masses. Mena means 'the constant,' or 'the firm,' he who resists; Tota, 'he who beats;' Kakau, the 'bull of bulls.' also the 'most manly;' Senta, 'the terrible;' Huni, 'he who strikes,' &c. It is only later that the worship of the local gods enters into the composition of the proper names. Then the dynasts like to adopt appellations which recall the principal divinity of their house. The names of Amoh, Sebek, Thut, Anhour, and other divinities whom they specially venerated, appear in the cartouches of the kings; while Ra, the king of the universe and the father of gods and men, occupies a place of honour at the head of the cartouches of all the pharaohs.

The name of the 15th king of the list, Noferka-Sokari (perfect through Sokari), is the only one which is composed with the name of a god. As we have already shown, Sokari is a particular denomination of the god of Memphis. But then how is the fact to be explained that a king of Thinis, in Upper Egypt, preferred a title recalling the worship of the divine Sokari, of the capital of Lower Egypt? One thing is certain, that the so-called Thinites must have reigned at Memphis. The tradition is strong that Mena laid out the ground of the [57] future capital, and that the later descendants of his house kept court in Mennofer, not in Tini.

Unfortunately the information from the monuments about these most ancient rulers of the empire of Egypt begins only with the last pharaohs which were above mentioned in the long list taken from the stone tables of the kings. The Greek accounts give meagre food to those hungry for knowledge in doubtful traditions about the doings of the royal predecessors of the last pharaohs. It is, however, necessary here also to test the faith to be placed in the Manethonian sources, by the information of the monuments.

As in the book of books, Cain's grandson, and grandson's children, were the first men in which want and necessity aroused an inventive genius, leading them to build houses, to raise cattle, and serve as teachers in brass and iron work to later generations, so was it, according to the traditional knowledge of the priest Manetho, borrowed from the well-preserved treasures of the holy books, the peculiar business of the first kings of Egypt to teach the arts, to draw out rules, to lay down the first foundations of knowledge for the use and piety of all then living, and who were to come after; to clothe justice in the form of laws, and in every way to encourage invention, Mena's son and heir was called Athothis, in the Manethonian description (in this name are included three kings, Tota, Atot, and Ata, according to the stone table of Abydos). He built the king's tower in Memphis, arid wrote, wonderful to say, a work on anatomy, 'for he was a physician.' The information [58] of the monuments is silent about a physician of the name of Tota, Atot, or Ata; mention is only made of a roll of a very ancient book bought in Thebes by Mr. Ebers, which, when Teta sat on the throne, was prized as a means for making the hair grow. More important than this information, interesting at most to hair-dressers, is the fact that the writings of the pharaohs on medical subjects reach back as far as the first dynasty of the Thinites.

As an example we will allude to the great medical papyrus discovered in the necropolis of Memphis, which was added to the collection of the museum of Berlin, about fifty years ago. As we have elsewhere shown, this precious document contains a quantity of receipts for the cure of a certain number of maladies of the nature of leprosy, and many other diseases. In a simple, childish exposition of the construction and mechanism of the body, the writing explained the number and use of the numerous 'tribes.' This manuscript was composed in the reign of Ramses II., but there is a passage in it which throws back the origin of one part of the work to the fifth king of the table of Abydos. This is what the text says on this subject. 'This is the beginning of the collection of receipts for curing leprosy. It was discovered in a very ancient papyrus enclosed in a writing-case, under the feet (of a statue) of the god Anoobis, in the town of Sochem, at the time of the reign of his majesty the defunct king Sapti. After his death it was brought to the majesty of the defunct king Senta, on account of its wonderful value.

[59] 'And behold the book was placed again at the feet and well secured by the scribe of the temple and the great physician, the wise Noferhotep. And when this happened to the book at the going down of the sun, he consecrated a meat and drink and incense offering to Isis, the lady, to Hor of Athribis, and the god Khonsoo-Thut of Ainkhit.'

What further the priest Manetho was able to tell us of those old times out of his book of kings, appears in meagre extracts in later authors, who have shown their own poverty of intelligence by the miserably ignorant use they have made of this copious document of antiquity. We hear and are astounded at how much there was of importance in the book of the priest.

When King Uenephes (I. 4) ascended the throne the land of Egypt suffered from a great famine. In spite of the hunger and necessity it pleased the ruler to employ his people in the building of a pyramid on the site 'black bull,' Kakami.

The Greeks called this city of the dead of Memphis by the very little altered name of Kochome. Here the bodies of the holy Apis bulls reposed in the serapeum in the desert. The place is near the modem village of Saqqarah, but was situated on the steep heights of the desert, and it is probable that the building with steps, the so-called step pyramid of Saqqarah, whose hollow body concealed the bleached bones of bulls and inscriptions chiselled in the stone relating to the royal name of Apis, was a common grave of the holy bulls which in days gone by King Uenephes consecrated in pious faith to these animals.

[60] Under the reign of King Semempses (I. 8) a number of miracles were observed, and a violent plague gave the black death all around.

When Butau (Boethos II. 1) ascended the throne, the earth opened at Bubastus and swallowed up many people.

There is more of interest in the traditions which the same annalist cites of the time of Kaiechos (in Egyptian ka-kau, 'the bull of bulls'), the successor of the preceding king. Under his reign, he says, was established the worship of the sacred bulls of Hapi (Apis) in the town of Menofer (Memphis), and of Merur or Men, Mnevis, at On, Heliopolis. Pure men served the holy animals, whose departure from the light of the Sun was deeply lamented; their corpses, adorned with decorations and coverings, were exposed on high biers. Their name also enters into the composition of the proper names of many distinguished persons.

With regard to the laws of the empire we must pay particular attention to what was ordained by Pharaoh Bainuter (Binothris II. 3) on a particular occasion. As apparently he had no son to succeed to his father's crown on his death, the usage was erected into a standing law for ever by him that the tender sex of the women should share the power of inheriting the throne. The working of this new usage was important for the fate of many a dynasty, as when the queen, after the demise of her husband, took the reins of government or stepped into the place of her youthful son, or when the heiress left by the dead pharaoh, who had not the good fortune to be lamented by a com- [61] pany of sons, gave her hand to a foreign husband. So far as the monuments which have been carefully examined seem to show, according to the ancient manner and usage, the mother's pedigree had a high value in inheriting, because it gave an unconditional feudal claim to the son as the true heir of 'the father of his mother.'

The husband of a princess heiress from her pharaonic blood had not the least rights under the title of husband, and it was the son issue of this marriage, who, on account of his maternal descent, was regarded as pharaoh by right and by birth. If, on the contrary, a king married a lady of a noble family, either Egyptian or foreign, the children, as appears from certain monumental indications, did not entirely possess a legitimate right to the crown.

The father of the new king was distinguished by the title of 'atef nuter,' 'the father of the divine one,' while the mother is called 'mut suten,' 'the mother of the king.' The succession of the dynasties is founded in the greater number of cases on alliance with princesses heiresses, whether the husband was of pharaonic descent or not. Thus are explained all the difficulties of succession in the royal house.

To mix poetry with prose, the annalist remarks that the government of King Nephercheres (II. 7) was distinguished by a very curious phenomenon, namely, that for eleven days the water of the Nile had the taste of honey. Although the old texts may perhaps have mentioned such a miracle, yet we moderns can feel [62] no more sympathy with such a fable than we can for the newly-discovered hair ointment of King Teta. The account of King Sesochris (II. 8) by Manetho is not less fabulous. Confounding him with the Sesostris, the sculptured effigies of whom of immense height were well known to the Greeks visiting Asia, he gave him a height of more than five cubits and a breadth of three cubits. In spite of his size he performed nothing which was judged worthy of being transmitted to posterity.

Under the reign of the first king of the third dynasty, Necherophes (this name is completely disfigured, and unlike the old real name), the Libyans revolted against their Egyptian masters. The king succeeded in subduing them by the aid of the fear which an immense increase of the moon caused among his enemies. The successor of this pharaoh, Tosorthros, was distinguished by his knowledge of medicine, which gained for him among the Egyptians the honorary name of the physician-god. He also invented a mode of constructing edifices with carved stone. He also introduced improvements in the painting of the writing.

Here ends, according to the Manethonian writing, the information—half fable, half true—of the first rulers of Egypt, and the strange account of their doings. It teaches us little. We are still waiting for the door of the chamber of the ancestors of the most ancient kingdom to be opened to us.

Near to the door now closed to us stands the venerable and historically true figure of King Senoferu. His name, the meaning of which is 'he who makes good,' [63] is justified by the fact, that he completed what was wanting in those before him. It is he who gives us the first morning greeting from the most distant ages, for from his time the monuments commence to shed their light and to unroll before our eyes the most ancient epoch of the world. What the wisdom of the Greeks did not disclose, what appeared as a secret to antiquity thirsting after the pure streams of truth, that lies clear before our eyes; for now the eloquent mouth of the dead stones begins to tell us the deeds of hoar antiquity.

With Senoferu begins first the practice, ordained by law, of adding to the name of the ruler on the throne of the pharaohs, which his parents gave him, the cartouche of honour of his holy name, and also to place before the double cartouche of the kings three carefully chosen sounding titles. The first title always began with a sign which signified the god 'the sun Hor,' who dispenses light and life, blessing and prosperity. His sparrow-hawk adorned with the kingly double crown, serves as the ancient representation of the pharaoh, the lord of the upper and the lower country.

The row of the other titles published in the same manner the honours of each king, 'the lord of both kingly diadems.' The image of honour 'of the golden Hor,' the conqueror of his opponent, stood at the head of the third title. The pharaoh was praised and exalted Bis a warrior in pompous, stilted words. The holy name of the king framed in a cartouche is easily recognised by the words placed before it: 'the king of [64] Upper and Lower Egypt.' In the last place, with the fullest writing of all the titles of honour, the especial name of the ruler was placed, which was given him by his father when a child, surrounded, like the holy name, with a cartouche. Before was the standing title 'son of Ra,' that is, the sun-god. The custom in old times required that behind each king's name, as if to remind, the fine sounding name pf the pyramid was placed for the better determining of the prince. It was a praiseworthy and pious custom, as often as the king's name or even a great noble's name was mentioned, immediately afterwards to add 'May he live!' 'May he be well!' 'Good health to him!'

So far as we are acquainted with the monuments, King Senoferu is the first ruler who had four titles of honour. Three name him commonly without difference 'the lord of truth;' the fourth is the name Senoferu, by which he was known to his father and his people. On the steep rock of Wady-Magharah, where ancient caverns have been formed by the hand of man, and the traces of the miners are easily discovered, Senoferu appears as a warrior, who strikes to the ground a vanquished enemy with a mighty club. The inscription, engraved by the side of the picture, mentions him clearly by name and with the title of 'vanquisher of foreign peoples' who in his time inhabited the cavernous valleys of the mountains round Sinai. The land, productive of a copper ore, with blue and green precious stones, seems in all ancient history to have been a much coveted possession by the rulers of 'Kemi,' and it was without doubt Senoferu who by the edge of the sword [65] gained possession of this mountainous peninsula and its foreign people. The soldiers of the king and the troops of miners with the steward and overseer reached the valley of the mines to extract the stone either by a short sea passage from Egypt or by a longer journey on the backs of asses. Even at this day the pilgrim, whom the desire of knowledge brings to these parts, and whose foot treads hurriedly the gloomy, barren valleys of Sinai, sees traces of the old works in the caverns dating from the spring-time of the worlds history. He sees and reads on the half-worn stone a vast number of pictures and writings. Standing on the high rock, which boldly commands the entrance to Wady-Magharah, his eye discovers without trouble the last ruins of a strong fortress, whose stout walls once contained huts near a deep well, and protected the Egyptian troops from hostile attack. There was also no want of temples, in which the wanderer raised his hands and eyes in prayer to the divine rulers of the land. Before all others was the sublime Hathor, queen of heaven and earth and the dark depths below, whom the Egyptians worshipped as the protectress of the land of Maikat, and beside her the sparrow-hawk of Supt, 'the lord of the East,' to whom the same honours were offered. The princes of the fourth and fifth dynasties maintained with powerful arm what Senoferu had won for them. The mines were permanently worked, the enemy conquered, and the small number of the gods worshipped.

Senoferu thought in time of raising to himself a [66] worthy monument. The proud building of the pyramid near Meidoum shining in the plain, which green as an emerald stretches eastward to the holy stream, contains, we doubt not, well hidden within it, the body of Senoferu. The name of the building is in good Egyptian Kha, a word which in the old language meant 'the rising,' sometimes 'the festival,' sometimes 'the crown.' Here it was, in close proximity to the pyramid of Meidoum, that some curious natives recently, either by accident or intentionally, discovered the entrance to the tombs of the old time and brought from the night of the grave to the light of day a double picture, a marvel of art, venerable from its antiquity, and exquisite in its workmanship. A long row of pictures and writings, executed with a master's hand in variegated mosaic of most effective colours, gave us clear information of Senoferu and the ancient times. The double picture, a little smaller than the natural size, shows a man and his wife in a dignified attitude sitting by the side of one another in a chair of the form of a die. The brilliancy of the eye—imitated in shining crystal and white ivory, and dark ore, in a masterly manner—had all the appearance of life. This picture is the one of the earliest known date, and will so remain until an older one is found. The man on the right, according to the words on the inscription, once when he enjoyed the light of day, bore the name Raho-tep. He was the son of a king (it does not say of what king), and had filled many important offices during his life. He led the warriors in the service of the king, and in On, the town of the god Ra, he executed the [67] holy office of chief of the priests. His wife, well-known as Nofert ('the beautiful' or 'the good'), was a granddaughter of a king not named.

We now take leave of the time of Senoferu, who, in the written records, had the name of a good king. The old rolls of books which De Prisse obtained possession of in Thebes, and the value of which we shall have to notice hereafter, speak thus of the Pharaoh Senoferu: 'Then died the holiness of King Huni. Then was raised up the holiness of King Senoferu as a good king over the whole country. Then was Kakem appointed governor of the city.'

In order to restore the names and order of the Pharaohs for the time of the fourth and fifth dynasties as completely as possible, the data of the two tables of kings, of Abydus and Saqqarah, as well as the surviving fragments of the Turin book of kings, must be compared with the lists of Manetho. By their aid we are enabled to regard the above list (p. 67) as a trustworthy record, approximating very closely to the truth. The reader will readily obtain the conviction that all the four columns of the table come from one and the same original source, if he takes the trouble to compare carefully with one another the names, succession, and numbers. Nor can he fail to notice what errors have crept into the extracts from Manetho, and how grievously careless transcribers have misplaced the names and numbers of the genuine MS. But even in remote antiquity, uncertainty and doubt seem already to have prevailed as to the succession of kings in the olden time; nay, even the stone monuments differ about their names and order. The enquiry is far from being closed, and it must be left for new discoveries to determine precisely, and finally, the succession and names of the old kings.

[69] According to the sure testimony of the tables of Abydus and Saqqarah, the successor of the good king Senoferu was Khufu. It is he whom the writers of Greek antiquity call sometimes Cheops (Herodotus), Chemmis or Chembes (Diodorus), while the epitomist of Manetho transcribes his name Suphis, and Eratosthenes, in the Theban list of kings, cites it as Saophis. With him begin the memorable traditions of Egyptian history, according to the accounts of the Greek and Roman authors, who without suspicion grafted the information of ancient times upon a modem stock.

No one who has had the happiness—whether from chance or purpose or in the way of his calling—to set foot on the black soil of Egypt, ever turns back on his homeward way before his eyes have looked upon that wonder of antiquity, the threefold mass of the pyramids on the steep edge of the desert, which you reach after an hour's ride over the long causeway from the village of Gizeh, which stands close upon the left bank of the Nile. The desert's boundless sea of yellow sand—whose billows are piled up around the gigantic mass of the Pyramids, deeply entombing the tomb itself, like a corpse long since deceased—surges hot and dry far up the green meadow, with its scattered vegetation where the grains of sand and com are intermingled. From the far distance you see the giant forms of the pyramids, as if they were regularly crystallised mountains, which the ever-creating Nature has called forth from the mother soil of rock, to lift themselves up towards the blue vault of heaven. And yet they are but tombs, built by the hands of men, which, raised by [70] king Khufu and two other Pharaohs of the same family and dynasty, have been the admiration and astonishment alike of the ancient and modem world, as an incomparable work of power. Perfectly adjusted to the cardinal points of the horizon—the S. and N., the E. and W.—they differ in breadth and height, as is, shown by the measurements of Colonel Vyse:

	Height	Breadth at base
1. Pyramid of Khufu	450.75 feet	746 feet (Eng)
2. Pyramid of Khafra	447.5	690.75
3. Pyramid of Menkara	203	352.878

The construction of these enormous masses was long an almost insoluble enigma for experts in such work; but the younger generation, applying its enquiring spirit to the unknown solution, has succeeded in stripping off the outer shell, so as to find the kernel. According to their ancient usages and customs, the Egyptians, while they still sojourned, in health and spirits, in the light of the sun-god Ra—who was daily born in royal splendour in the East, to bathe himself after his day's labour in the sea of night in the West—were still ever mindful to turn their looks to the region where the departing Ra took leave of life, where the door of the grave opened, where the body, well concealed at length found rest, to rise again to a new existence after an appointed time of long, long years; while the soul, though bound to the body, was at liberty to leave the grave and return to it during the daytime in any form it chose.

In such a belief it was the custom betimes to dig the grave in the form of a deep shaft in the rock, and [71] above 'this eternal dwelling' to raise a superstructure of sacrificial chambers, sometimes only a hall, sometimes several apartments, and to adorn them richly with coloured writing and painted sculptures, as was becoming to a house of pleasure and joy. Not seldom did death advance with a quick step, and pitilessly carried off the builder from life before his work was finished and the last hand had put the last stroke. In such a case the eye of the beholder finds pictures which the skilful hand of the draftsman sketched in outline with a red crayon on the polished surface of the stone wall, but time was not left for the painter to fill in the empty spaces of the picture with bright and varied colours. Frequently whole or half walls, often this or that piece of the picture, shows that the whole work still awaited its completion, when suddenly the early death of the builder put an end quite unexpected to the design and measure of the work. What, in the case of the tombs of the nobility, was a sad stoppage to the perfect completion of the design, must also have appeared enormous in the royal building of the Pyramids, when a Pharaoh departed from the light of day. Therefore he began his work from his accession. As soon as he mounted the throne, the sovereign gave orders to a nobleman, the master of all the buildings of his land, to plan the work and cut the stone. The kernel of the future edifice was raised on the limestone soil of the desert, in the form of a small pyramid built in steps, of which the well-constructed and finished interior formed the king's eternal dwelling, with his stone sarcophagus lying on the rocky floor.

[72] Let us suppose that this first building was finished while the Pharaoh still lived in the bright sunlight. A second covering was added, stone by stone, on the outside of the kernel; a third to this second; and to this even a fourth ; and the mass of the giant building grew greater the longer the king enjoyed existence. And then at last, when it became almost impossible to extend the area of the pyramid further, a casing of hard stone, polished like glass, and fitted accurately into the angles of the steps, covered the vast mass of the king's sepulchre, presenting a gigantic triangle on each of its four faces.

More than seventy such pyramids once rose on the margin of the desert, each telling of a king, of whom it was at once the tomb and monument. Had not the greater number of these sepulchres of the Pharaohs been destroyed almost to the foundation, and had the names of the builders of those which still stand been accurately preserved, it would have been easy for the enquirer to prove and make clear by calculation what was originally, and of necessity, the proportion between the masses of the pyramids and the years of the reigns of their respective builders.

The name 'pyramid'—first invented by the ancients to denote the tombs of the Egyptian kings, and still used in geometry to this day—is of Greek origin. The Egyptians themselves denoted the pyramid—both in the sense of a sepulchre and of a figure in Solid Geometry—by the word 'abumir'; while, on the other hand, the word 'pir-am-us' is equivalent to the 'edge of the pyramid,' namely, the four edges extend- [73] ing from the apex of the pyramid to each comer of the quadrangular base.

The fact, however, which the ancients never knew, or which they have persistently neglected to mention, is the special proper name which was assigned to every pyramid to distinguish it from its neighbours. Thus, the sepulchral monument of king Khufu bore the name of honour 'Khut,' i.e., 'the Lights,' and this word frequently appears as an addition to the royal name of Khufu. The stones, which the master's careful consideration chose for the building of 'the Lights,' were laboriously quarried out of the rock in three different places by the grievously oppressed workmen. The material—a spongy limestone without firmness—from which the inner kernel of the building was constructed and which remained afterwards hidden from every eye, was found close at hand; for the native rock on which the future building was raised yielded it in abundance to an unknown depth. The better sort of stone, chosen for the steps and the successive layers, was drawn upon rollers along the causeway (above half a mile long) which extends from the mountain on the right of the river to the plateau of the pyramids. To the present day the traveller is amazed at the number of gigantic caverns which traverse the range of Mokattam in a long series from north to south, from Turah to Massaarah. These are the names of two villages lying dose to the river, inhabited by Arabs, who follow the laborious occupation, like the ancients thousands of years ago, of cutting the stone in the neighbouring quarries and bringing it to the river on bullock-carts [74] or commodious tramways, and putting it on board the vessels waiting at the bank.

The name of Turah, well-known to the Greeks in the form of Troja, is of very ancient origin. As soon as the kings began to pile up pyramids, the writings of that early time mention the district of Tu-roau, that is 'the mountain of the great quarry,' in which the busy population of stone-cutters hewed innumerable blocks out of the walls of rock. An official called 'mm:' governed the place and people, and carefully executed the Pharaoh's orders.

The splendid covering of the pyramid of 'lights' was costly stone brought down the river from a great distance to its banks in the Memphian territory. On he southern border of Egypt, in close neighbourhood to the place called Suan (Syene, now Assuan), is still situated, now as then, the 'red mountain' (Tu-tesher), composed of a granite sprinkled with black and red, as hard as iron, and brilliantly beautiful when polished. In the quarries of the Red Mountain there always prevailed a stirring life, since the hardness, brilliancy, and durability of the syenite—well fitted for buildings to last for ever—made the possession of this stone much desired; and the kings vied with one another in the vain conceit to have the fame of subduing, by the hands of men and the clever inventive genius of the master, the opposition of the hardest material which Nature had created. The traces of this labour and severe work are still left visible from those ancient times: here may be clearly seen the sharp stroke of the chisel, there the mining hole; again at another [75] place we meet with the form of a giant statue, like a form in a mould; there hangs along its whole length, as if it grew there, the fourth side of an obelisk still in the rock, as if it was waiting for the master to loosen it from its bed. It lies there as if under a magic spell, in this dead world full of ancient life, which rise to the highest summit of humanity, and whose pulse beats in the inscriptions. It must not be thought that works like the construction of the pyramids and the temples were not considered by the ancient Egyptians as labours of enormous difficulty. The texts, more than once, speak of the merit of high functionaries who were charged by the pharaonic houses to cut the blocks in the quarries and transport them by way of the Nile to their place of destination. The statement of Herodotus, that ten years were necessary to draw the stones from the quarries and to arrange the base and underground chambers of the pyramid of Khufu (twenty years in all were spent in its erection) is extremely probable. The few monuments that remain of his time present to us King Khufu under a less unfavourable aspect than the traditions of the ancients would lead us to suppose. According to them this pharaoh was a brutal man and a tyrant, and forced people to compulsory labour. Animated by bad intentions, it is said that he closed the sanctuaries of the divinities, because he was afraid that the prayers and sacrifices of the people would encroach on their time for work; also, that he was so detested for his actions by all the Egyptians that they would not, after his death, even pronounce his name. In contradiction to this statement, the official language [76] of the monuments attests that King Khufu was one of the most active and valiant pharaohs. The valleys of Sinai beheld the warriors of this king who victoriously conquered the inhabitants of that country. The tables on the rock at Wady-Maghara represent him as the annihilator of his enemies. He founded a number of new towns in Egypt, the names of which are still read in the geographic texts which cover the walls of the mortuary chapels of his epoch.

The three small pyramids which rise opposite the east side of the great pyramid, without doubt belong to the wives or children of Khufu. It is a fact which the latest researches have gained for science that the great number of tombs built on the plateau of the desert around the great pyramids of Gizeh belonged to princes and nobles of the epoch of the fourth dynasty. All the nobility of this epoch chose their tomb in the neighbourhood of the pyramids, which contained the mummies of their ancient masters.

The successor of Khufu bears the name of Ratatef. He is little known, and we owe the mention of his name especially to the tables of Saqqarah and Abydus, The Greeks knew nothing of his existence, giving as the immediate successor of Khufu, Khafra, the third king of this dynasty, or, as they call him, Chephren, or Kephren, or Chabryes. They consider him sometimes as the brother, sometimes as the son, of Khufu. Who can be certain when the stones are silent? The pyramid which he raised as his funeral monument, and of which we have already given the principal dimensions, is close to that of Khufu. According to the texts it is [77] distinguished by the particular name of Urt, that is, 'the great.' If the monuments tell us little in illustration of the history of this pharaoh, his reputation has been all the same made for ever by the wonderful workmanship of his statues.

Only a few years ago there rose out of the deep sand of the desert, which, like a stream, encircles the image of the Sphinx, to the astonishment of all, that building which to this day is a mystery to the enquirer as to the age, origin, and object of the whole work. Small passages, then broad halls, then obscure small side rooms, succeeded one another, built with well-cut, huge blocks of hard-coloured stone from Suan, and shining yellow alabaster, fitted to a hair's breadth block to block, the comer-stone like a vice, alternately catching the opposite wall, all smooth and well fitted in a straight line and in a right angle. Bare of all marks or inscriptions, the building is a mysterious work of the foretime, when history had not yet been written. Who was the lord whose mouth pronounced the words, 'It shall be'? Who was the master whose clear intellect laid down the plan of the building? Whence came the giant race of men who loosed these stones of tons' weight from their bed, cut them with their sharp edges, and smoothed them; and then brought them from the southern boundary by the stream downwards to the edge of the sandy desert, and there fitted them together in the selected place ? As great and gigantic as was the work, so great and unexplainable remains the riddle of its existence. Eastwards, the stone-covered soil showed, in a long hall, the shaft of a well, filled with [78] clear water, in whose depths once, in the old time, for reasons to us unknown, a number of statues of King Khafra were rather thrown than sunken with care. The greater number of the statues suffered from the fall, and the noble work was in ruins. Only one survived the fall, and, preserved with only slight injuries, gives us Khafra's sitting figure of royal appearance, dignified in look and manner.

Behind the king seated, the figure of a sparrow-hawk spreads its wings in calm repose, as if to protect the royal lord. The name and titles of the king appear in writing on the upper part of the base of the statue, close to his nuked foot. The polish of the stone—a diorite—shines out of a green colour. It was seldom chosen for the execution of a monument.

As the discovery of the statues of King Khafra has proved an unparalleled addition to the history of the old empire, and the greatest treasure of antiquity, so we have not nearly yet exhausted the information to be derived from the statue of Khafra. As in the wooden statue of that Sheikh-el-Bellud, which was brought to the light, to the astonishment of the world, from the tombs at Saqqarah; as in the bright-coloured statues of limestone, which left the narrow 'Serdaub' of the tombs as witnesses of ancient life, to greet the youthful world of the new times; as every artistic production of those days, both picture, writing, and sculpture, bears the stamp of the highest perfection of art, so the statue of Khafra also teaches us that in the beginning of history their works were an honour to the artists.

[79] They also prove that the Egyptians in those remote times were well acquainted with the secret of over-coming the difficulties which the hardness of the stone offered to them. Without the use of steel, or the instruments and machines which modem art and industry have invented to facilitate work, the ancient Egyptians had acquired a technical knowledge and practice of which we do not yet possess adequate ideas. The fact is incontestable that the artists of our epoch remain confounded and stupefied in the presence of these monuments, and that they cannot give us a satisfactory answer on the question of the execution of these masterpieces of the highest antiquity.

There is, from west to east, almost in the same line with Khafra's pyramid, a colossal figure of a lion lying down, with the head of a man, better known under the name of the Sphinx, which the Greek travellers gave to this monster. It is the Abool-hol, 'the father of terror,' of the Arabs. It is now half buried in the sands of the desert. In ancient times, and as late as the times of the Greeks and Romans, this figure was of free access on all sides.

In quiet repose, the lion stretches out his paws, between which a narrow path leads to the temple at the breast of the monster ; and a memorial stone, richly ornamented with pictures and writing, announces that this was a gift of honour from the fourth Thutmes to the Sphinx. Greeks and Romans seldom left this consecrated spot without engraving a memorial of their visit on the rock in their own language. For the body of the lion was of the living rock, but fashioned by the [80] artist's hand to imitate more truly the appearance which a sport of nature had formed. Then where the holes in the stone interrupted the rounding of the body, a light mason's work was applied, to fill in what was wanting in the form.

The holy characters of the writing in the full flow of the language tell us in poetical phrases how one fine day the pharaoh mounted to the Sphinx to look at the heavenly face of his father. The words disappear towards the end, for time and the hand of man have erased what towards the conclusion fell from the poet's mouth. King Khafra was named in it, but it does not seem probable thence to conclude that K3iafra first caused the Hon to be executed. As another inscription teaches us. King Khafra had already seen the monster, or in other words says that already before him the statue existed, the work of an older pharaoh.

To the north of this huge form lay the temple of the goddess Isis; another dedicated to the god Osiris had its place on the southern side. A third temple was dedicated to the Sphinx. The inscription on the stone speaks as follows of these temples: 'He, the living Hor, king of the upper and the lower country, Khufu, he, the expender of life, founded a temple of the goddess Isis, the queen of the pyramid, beside the god's house of the Sphinx, north-west from the god's house and the town of Osiris, the lord of the place of the dead (Usiri nebrosata). He built his pyramids near the temple of the goddess, and he built one pyramid to the king's daughter, Hontsen, near this temple.' In another place the writing on the stone tells us: 'He, the living Hor, [81] king of the upper and the lower country, Khufu, caused to be consecrated the holy utensils copied on the surface of the monuments, to his mother Isis, the mother of the gods, who is Hathor, to the ruler and mistress of the place of the dead. He has arranged afresh their divine service, and built for her, in stone, the temple, choosing for her the company of the heavenly inhabitants of her dwelling.'

Although the monument of which we have reproduced a part of the texts is not contemporary with the time of Khufu, and dates from a late epoch in the history of Egypt, nevertheless this witness of antiquity loses nothing of its historical value.

We also completely share the opinion of M. de Rouge, who understands historically the words we have mentioned in the same way as we have done. The Sphinx is called in the text 'hu,' a word which designates the man-headed lion, while the real name of the god represented by the Sphinx was Hormakhu, that is to say, 'Horus on the horizon.' It is from this denomination that the Greeks formed the appellation Harmachis, or Harmais. A stele in the Louvre—the historic importance of which M. Lauth of Munich was the first to discover—confirms these proofs that the Kings Khufu and Khafra, and King Tatefra, particularly venerated the goddess Isis, 'the queen of the pyramids,' and her great neighbour Hormakhu. As late as the epoch of the twenty-sixth dynasty, that is to say, thirty-five centuries after Chufu, they had still preserved the worship of these kings and divinities. A certain Psametik, son of Uzahor, son of Psametik, [82] of Uzahor, son of Noferabra, is there mentioned as 'prophet of the god Tanen, prophet also of Isis, queen of the pyramids, prophet of King Khufu, prophet of Chafra, prophet of the divine Tatefira, prophet of Hormakhu.' This monumental tradition is all the more remarkable because the father of history, Herodotus, who, a century after this stele was written, visited Egypt, clearly assures us that the Egyptians would not even pronounce the names of the kings who constructed the great pyramids, because they had aroused such a feeling of hate and because the remembrance of them was so grievous. How, then, are we to explain the existence of priests who only one hundred years before presided at the worship of kings detested and apotheosised at the same time? Herodotus, we venture to maintain, has committed an error due to the loquacity and the bad tongue of his Egyptian dragomans.

We owe to the studies of M. de Rouge on the first six dynasties some precious notices concerning the family and worship of King Khafra. According to some texts found in the mortuary chapels which surround the pyramid, his wife bore the name of Merisanch. She was specially devoted to the worship of the god Thut (this is the Egyptian Hermes), to whom in the town of Hermopolis a much venerated temple was dedicated, bearing besides honorific titles which attributed to her the functions of priestess of some other divinities.

After Khafra's passage home to the realm of the dead, where the king of the gods, Osiris, held the sceptre, Men-kau-ra, Mencheres, ascended the throne. This is the Mykerinos, Mencherinos, about whom the Greek authors relate that he erected the third pyramid as a memorial of honour. It is called in the texts by the name of hir, that is, 'the high one.' When Colonel Vyse found his way to the middle of the chamber of the dead and entered into the silent space of 'Eternity,' his eye discerned, as the last trace of Menkaura's place of burial, the wooden cover of the sarcophagus, and the stone coffin hewn out of one hard block, beautifully adorned outside in the style of a temple, according to the fashion of the masters of the old empire. The sarcophagus rests now at the bottom of the Mediterranean, the English vessel which was conveying it having been wrecked near Gibraltar. The cover, which was saved, thanks to the material of which it was composed, is now exhibited in the gallery of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum. Its outside is adorned with a short text conceived in the following terms:

This prayer is of very ancient origin, for there are examples of it found on the covers of sarcophagi belonging to the dynasties of the ancient empire. The sense of it is full of significance. Delivered from mortal matter, the soul of the defunct king passes through the immense space of heaven to unite itself with God, after having overcome the evil which opposed it during its life on its terrestrial journey.

According to classic traditions King Mencheres enjoyed a very good reputation among pharaonic ancestors. He is described as a man distinguished for his justice and kindness, as also for his piety in regard to all that concerned the worship of the gods. For this reason the Egyptians after his death accorded him the honours of a god, by establishing a special worship dedicated to his memory. I do not know if we ought to attribute a great importance to this worship. The Egyptians rendered him the same honour which the kings, his predecessors, enjoyed after their decease. For the monuments of the time of the building of the pyramids mention priests and prophets which were devoted to the service of Kheops, Chabryes, and other rulers, and who offered them sacrifices and attended to their service, after the 'lord of the world' had left the light and descended to the depth of his grave. As to the religious sentiments which we attribute to the Pharaoh Mencheres, it seems in fact that Mencheres Pius occupied himself during his life by a certain predilection with sacred literature. The book called Pir- [85] em-heru, the so-called 'departure from day,' recalls his memory particularly in gate 64. According to the words of the text the author finishes the gate with this remark: 'This gate was discovered in the town of Hermopolis, engraved on a block of alabaster, and painted in blue colour under the feet of this god. It was discovered at the epoch of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mencheres the defunct, by the prince his son, Hortotef, when he undertook a journey to inspect the temples of Egypt. He brought it as a wonderful thing to the king, after having recognised the contents full of mystery.'

He was the successor of King Mencheres. We are well informed on the subject of the succession of this pharaoh by the inscriptions on a tomb which was discovered at Saqqarah, and which M. de Rouge has treated of for the first time in his work on the six first Egyptian dynasties. The personage for whom the tomb in question was constructed was called Patah-Shepses. He played a great part at the pharaonic court. King Mencheres had adopted him as his son, as appears from the following words: 'King Mencheres placed him among the royal children in the palace of the king in the interior of the harem.'

Soon after, as it appears, the good foster-father died, and King Shepseskaf ascended the throne, and placed the young page in his house, and at last gave him the hand of bis own daughter as a sign of royal favour.

[86] Then follow these words: 'His holiness gave him his eldest daughter, the princess Maat-kha, to be his wife. His holiness preferred that she should be with him rather than with any other man.' Being the son-in-law of the pharaoh, it is quite natural to see him rise from step to step, and be distinguished by every kind of favour on the part of the king. The following are some phrases which relate to his promotion:

We see from this remark that according to the pharaonic ceremonial persons admitted to the presence of the king were obliged to prostrate themselves in the dust, and kiss the ground which was trodden by the proud feet of their master. Other phrases make mention of offices which this personage held. As once Joseph, he filled 'the office of chief steward of the house of provisions, chief of all the works of the mines, prophet of the god Sokar, and chief of the temple of this god.' His highest dignity is contained in the title of 'chief of the priesthood of the god Patah, in the temple town of Memphis.'

Except in a certain number of tombs, the name of the King Shepseskaf is very rare upon the monuments. Among the persons who lived during his reign, and whose names are. composed with that of the pharaoh, we must mention a prophet of King Cheops, called [87] Shepseskaf-ankh, that is, 'Shepseskaf's life.' His family is as follows:

It is to different members of the family that the best known mortuary chapels in the necropolis of Memphis belong.

The pyramid which this pharaoh constructed for himself bears the monumental name Qebeh, 'the cool.'

According to the royal list of Manetho, King Oosercheres must be placed at the head of the fifth dynasty. It is he whom the table of Abydos acquaints us with under the name of Ooskaf. There is little to say about his reign and about the history of his epoch. In the inscriptions of several tombs and on some steles of the fifth dynasty and even of later times, he appears among the pharaohs for whom the priests preserved a religious remembrance and instituted a divine worship. His pyramid was distinguished by the name of Ab-setu, which signifies literally 'the purest of the places.' We know nothing as to its identity with one of the pyramids still existing in our day.

It is not thus with the pyramid of King Sahura, [88] the successor of Ooskaf. The name of this king, traced in red, has been discovered on the blocks of a pyramid to the north of the village of Abousir, which in ancient times bore the name of Kha-ba, 'rising of the souls.' The titles and the names of the Pharaoh Sahura are seen on the rocks of Wady-Magharah, 'the valley of the caverns,' where in a picture the king is represented as the vanquisher of his enemies. The text which accompanies the scenes gives him the epithet of 'the god who conquers all nations, and strikes all countries.' One inscription designates him as 'God, who strikes all nations, and reaches all countries with his arm.' The pious remembrance of him continued long after he lay beneath his pyramid, even to the epoch of the lower empire. As late as the time of the Ptolemies there existed a sanctuary in old Memphis, dedicated to his religious service, and the priests of which are found mentioned on several mortuary monuments. Perhaps also the town called Pa-Sahura, 'town of Sahura,' quite near to Esneh, is so called in remembrance of this king, as M. de Rouge with reason supposes.

The successor of this king, according to the table of Saqqarah, is called Nofer-ar-ka-ra. He is, without doubt, the Nephercheres of the Manethonian list. The pyramid which he caused to be constructed is called Ba, that is, 'the soul.' There are several tombs of this epoch which mention this king, particularly that of a royal relation of the name of Urchuru, 'the royal grandson.' It was M. de Rouge who, in his work on the first six dynasties, called the attention of the learned to this personage, who was specially devoted to [89] literary occupations. Hence he is called 'royal scribe of the palace, doctor, chief of writing, who serves as a light to all the writings in the house of Pharaoh.' He was, moreover, called 'master in the writings for the petitions of men, he who serves as a light for all the writing which relates to the administration, chief of the house of provisions;' and, besides these titles, 'general of the infantry which is composed of young men.' Another officer of this epoch, called Pehenuka, had civil chaises, among which we remark that of 'chief of the treasure, offerings, and provisions,' then 'chief of all the works of the king, chief of the writings of the king, and privy councillor of all the words pronounced by the king.' He was, without doubt, a sort of Secretary of State, who was employed in the reign of the above-named pharaoh.

Among the successors of this king we will mention him whom the monuments call Ranuser. He is the thirtieth of the table of Abydos, and the same who, in the list of kings according to Manetho, is transcribed by the name of Rathoores. This is the first pharaoh, as far as the monuments inform us, who added to his name of honour in his royal cartouche a second cartouche with his own name, the short and simple An.

King Ranuser followed the customs of his ancestors, in constructing a tomb, in the form of a pyramid, known under the denomination of Men-setu, a word which signifies 'the most firm place.' There has been found in the middle pyramid of Abousir the name of the king, traced in red, on one of its blocks. There is therefore little doubt about the person of this pharaoh, [90] whose mummy was formerly placed in the mortuary chamber of this pyramid. His memory was also preserved in other places. We will, before all, mention the presence of his name and titles on the rocks at Wady-Magharah, where a picture represents him as conqueror of the inhabitants of the peninsula of Sinai.

It is to M. de Rouge that science is indebted for precious remarks on a number of personages who lived at this epoch, and who were entrusted with high functions at the pharaonic court. The most interesting monument which has preserved the memory of an illustrious Egyptian of this time is, without doubt, the vast tomb of Ti, in the necropolis of Saqqarah. It is the tomb situated towards the north of the Serapeum, which travellers in our day never fail to visit, in order to admire the almost infinite number of pictures, representing scenes from ancient life. If we believe the texts which cover on all sides the walls of the tomb, the personage in question was invested with a number of honours, which make us recognise in him the first functionary of the court. Thus he was secretary of his lord in all his residences, secretary to proclaim the edicts of the king, chief of all the works of the king, chief of the royal writings. I pass in silence the long series of titles which relate to his honours as priest to different divinities. M. de Rouge has made a very curious observation, namely, that in the tomb of this dignitary we find neither the name of his father nor anything which indicates an illustrious parentage. If our Ti was really a parvenu, his alliance with a [91] princess of the blood royal makes us think that it was for great services rendered to the State that he was honoured with the hand of a daughter of the pharaoh. His wife was called Nofer-hotep; in very flattering terms she is described by titles which show her love and friendship for her beloved husband.

The three last pharaohs of this fifth dynasty had been already well known and classed before the discovery of the table of Abydos. The first among them is called Men-kau-hor; he is the Mencheres of the lists. The pyramid which he raised bears the name of Nuter-setu, which means 'the most holy place.' At the time of the discovery of the Serapeum there was found on a wall of the tomb of the Apis bulls a large block carried away from the temple of that pyramid, adorned with a bas-relief, in which we could recognise the portrait of the king, accompanied by his name and titles. It is possible that one of the pyramids of Saqqarah, near the Serapeum, contained his tomb. We must not forget to remark that the rocks at Wady-Magharah have preserved the memory of this king, to whom several hieroglyphic legends, sculptured on the mountain, have reference.

According to the monuments, his successor bore two names. The first, the most frequent, is Tat-ka-ra, and the second Assa. He has also left texts at Wady-Magharah, which tell us of works executed during his reign in the mines of this mountain. His pyramid is called nofer, that is, 'the beautiful;' unfortunately we have no means of fixing its position. A series of tombs at Saqqarah and at Gizeh have preserved to us [92] the memory of several personages who filled high functions at the court of this king. As the titles do not much differ from those we have given before, we will pass them now in silence. We must, however, make the remark that the Egyptians called Snoferu-nofer, Kakapu, and Khu-hotep appear to be priests already anciently attached to the worship of the king. In the tombs of Saqqarah, not less than in those of Gizeh, appear other noblemen, who in their time lived at the court of Assa, and were clothed with various offices.

A very precious recollection of King Assa has been preserved in a literary work composed by his son Prince Patah-hotep. Let us say a word on this papyrus, which is probably the most, ancient manuscript in the world, and which is better known under the name of the Prisse-papyrus. It was bought by a Frenchman of this name at Thebes, and given to the national library at Paris. The greater part of this document contains a treatise by the son of Assa, and relates to the virtues necessary for man, and to the best manner of arranging his life and making his way in the world. The general title is conceived in these words: 'This is the teaching of the governor Patah-hotep under the majesty of King Assa; long may he live.' At the time when he composed his book, he must have been very old, since he describes the decrepitude of his old age in very significant terms. 'The eyes,' he says, 'are very diminutive, and the ears stopped up; power is constantly diminished, the mouth is silent and does not speak, the memory is closed and does not remember the past. [93] The bones are not in a state to render service; that which was good is become bad. Even the taste is gone. Old age makes a man miserable in every way. The nose is stopped, and does not breathe.' It was thus that the prince begins the question which forms the subject of his book, which was to give to youth precepts which were justified by the practice of his long life, and frequently given in a humorous vein.

It is extremely interesting to follow the simple words which in an antique style represent the thoughts of the old man, and which touch almost all the conditions of human life. One of the most beautiful specimens is without doubt the following piece. He characterises admirably the spirit of humanity which breathes through these precepts of a very high moral tendency. 'If thou art become great, after thou hast been humble, and if thou hast amassed riches after poverty, being because of that the first in thy town; if thou art known for thy wealth and art become a great lord, let not thy heart become proud because of thy riches, for it is God who is the author of them for thee. Despise not another who is as thou wast; be towards him as towards thy equal.'

Although the tombs of this ancient epoch reveal to us frequently traits extremely favourable to our ideas of humanity, we cannot compare what they tell us with the naive and simple language of the precepts of Prince Patah-hotep. It is neither the priest nor the prince who addresses the youth of his day, it is simply the man who teaches them. Nor is he a morose philosopher. Is there anything truer, and at the same time more [94] persuasive, than his exhortation, 'Let thy face be cheerful as long as thou livest; has any one come out of the coffin after having once entered it?'

The last king of the fifth dynasty bears the name of Unas (Onnos according to the Greeks). Although we are not very well acquainted with his history, we nevertheless know the name of his pyramid, which was called Nofer-setu, 'the most beautiful place,' or 'the best place.' It is no other than that immense mortuary construction in the form of a great truncated pyramid, which rises in the middle of the desert to the north of the pyramids of Dashoor, known to the Arabs under the name of Mastabat-el-Faraoun, that is to say, 'the seat of Pharaoh.' We assisted at its opening by M. Mariette-Bey, and we were able to convince ourselves that one of the stones at its entrance bore pretty legible traces of the letters which compose the name of the king Unas.

It is with this king that the fifth dynasty of the Manethonian list ends, in accordance with the historical canon of Turin, which after the name of Unas terminates the first section of the series of the pharaohs, by giving the total of the years of their reigns and the number of the kings which preceded. Although the figures are now destroyed, it nevertheless results from the inspection of the papyrus that all these kings followed one another without any principal division, and in a successive order, which began with the king Mena, and ended by King Unas. This observation is of great importance for a classification of these kings of the [95] Egyptian canon, because it proves to us that they formed one entire group, probably belonging to the same family. These were, then, those famous kings of Memphis, the most ancient sovereigns in the history of the world.

M. De Rouge has well remarked that with the end of the fifth dynasty, in the necropolis of Gizeh as well as that of Saqqarah, the royal names of the ancient empire commence to disappear. It is no more Memphis and its neighbourhood alone, but it is in an especial manner Middle Egypt, which from the present time reveals to us recollections of the kings whom the monuments oblige us to regard as the successors of the pharaohs of the first dynasties.

The papyrus of Turin entirely favours this supposition. In spite of the miserable state of this precious historical document, the fragment which relates to the end of the fifth dynasty has been preserved. It is evident by the new section which commences that King Unas finished the series of the kings of Memphis, and that a new royal house continued the succession of the kings of the ancient empire. It is the second epoch of this empire which now presents itself for our study.

The first pharaoh of the sixth dynasty is he whom the monuments designate by the name of Teta. The tables of Abydos and of Saqqarah agree as to this sue- [97] cession, and the name of Othoes given by Manetho to the first pharaoh of the same dynasty is not so far removed from the Egyptian form as to permit doubt as to their identity. Besides, the succession of Teta after King Unas is very clearly indicated by the texts of a tomb at Saqqarah. The proprietor of a. mortuary chapel of the name of Patah-shepes informs us of the different titles with which he was honoured in his lifetime; and we discover among them the priesthood of the pyramid of King Unas, by the side bf the priesthood of the pyramid of Teta, who here bears, for the first time on the monuments, the title 'son of the sun.' The pyramid of Teta was called Tat-setu, 'the most lasting of places,' surely not without allusion to the king's own name.

It has been supposed that the name of Uskara, which the table of Abydos places after that of Teta, belongs as an official title to a King Ati, who at the same time built a pyramid, called in the writings Bai-u, 'the pyramid of the souls.' This pharaoh has also been regarded as the real founder of the sixth dynasty, who reigned, perhaps, in Middle Egypt simultaneously with Teta, the last descendant of the kings of Memphis. This is very probable, but it has yet to be proved.

What is certain is that the high functionary Una, of whom we will speak later, passed from King Ati (residing at Memphis) to his successor, who bears the official name of Meri-ra Pepi, Pepi's name shines brightly in the darkness of the history of those old kings. The rocks of Wady-Magharah, which contain so many recollections of the ancient [98] pharaohs of the race of Memphis, have also preserved the memory of Pepi. A large bas-relief which is there carved in the rocks relates to an inspection of mines carried out in the eighteenth year of his reign, by an overseer called Abton. In the pictures the king appears as the conqueror of his enemies, that is to say, of the foreign peoples who in his time dwelt in the Valley of Caverns. One of the blocks which has been discovered in the rich and massive ruins of the once celebrated city of Tanis is adorned with the names and titles of King Pepi. This is the most ancient monument which has been found in this town, the antiquity of which reaches back, according to this proof, as far as the epoch of the old empire. In the temple of Denderah is also found a mention of Pepi, who after King Khufu-Kheops had executed works at this sanctuary of the goddess Hathor. The valleys of Hammamat, the dark rocks near Assooan, and walls in the quarries of El-kab, are richly covered with inscriptions, which prove to us that under the reign of this Pharaoh Pepi, a powerful ruler in the land, a number of public works were executed in hard stone to command the admiration of posterity.

When Pepi, the lord of the double land, ruled over the Egyptian people, there lived a faithful servant of his lord, the noble Una, who when young began his career under Teta, at the court of the pharaohs, and received for his good service the approbation of the king. When Teta disappeared in the gloomy realm of Osiris, Pepi noticed the young man, placed him in the most confidential posts in the king's house, and honoured him with the richest marks of favour, since 'he was dearer [99] to the heart of the king than all the dear nobles and all the other servants in the land.'

Among many other duties, he received the order to bring a sarcophagus of limestone from the caverns of Troja, opposite to the old capital Memphis. Warriors and sailors accompanied him for the transport of the sarcophagus. The monolith arrived, loaded on one of the great barks of the king's residence. It was accompanied by its cover, and by many other hewn stones, destined to serve for the construction of the pyramid of King Pepi. 'Never,' says the text, 'was such a thing done by any servant; it was the most perfect pleasure for the heart of his majesty, and the greatest satisfaction which it was possible to procure for him.' The pharaoh also did not forget nobly to recompense his servant with titles and honours, even to his entrance into the women's house, where a secret charge was confided to him. If up to this time the services which Una rendered the king were of a pacific nature, the continuation of the text tells us of actions and deeds of this functionary during the wars undertaken by the king against the tribes of the Amu and the Hirusha, or the people living on the sands of the desert to the east of Lower Egypt. In order to prepare for this war his majesty assembled an army reckoned by tens of thousands, chosen among the population, beginning with the town of Elephantina in the south, and ending with the marshes of Lower Egypt. But it seems that the Egyptian army was not considered numerous enough to carry on the war, and we see the country of the negroes also called on for a contingent. On this occasion [100] we learn the names of several countries inhabited by the negroes, who already at this epoch were under the dominion of the Egyptian empire.

These are the countries of Artet, Zam, Amam, Uauat, Kerau, and Takam. Their contingents were ruled by captains, whom the pharaoh placed over them, to be instructed in the proper way of fighting. And now the army was ready, and fell upon the land of the Hirusha. And the warriors came and annihilated the land of the Hirusha, and returned fortunately home; and they took possession of the land of the Hirusha and returned fortunately home; and they destroyed the fortresses, and returned fortunately home. And they cut down the fig trees and the vines, and returned fortunately home. And they set fire to the dwellings of the enemy, and returned fortunately home. And they killed their chief men by tens of thousands, and returned fortunately home. And the warriors brought a great number of prisoners alive with them, and on that account were highly thought of by the king. And the king sent out Una five times to fight in the land of the Hirusha, and to check the rebellion by his warriors. He acted so that each time the king was pleased with him.

After these expeditions a new war was carried on by the king against a country called Terehbah (?), 'to the north of the Hirusha.' This time the army started in vessels, reached the extreme points of this region, and gained a complete victory over the enemy. It is difficult precisely to point out the country which was the theatre of this new war. As vessels are mentioned, it [101] is natural to suppose that it was some part of Syria situated to the north of the desert of Arabia.⁹

Before concluding the very interesting recital which this text furnishes, and which tells us of the brilliant termination of the career of Una, under a successor of Pepi, we will in a few words sum up what remains to be said on the history of Pepi.

Like his predecessors, during his lifetime he had constructed a pyramid, where his mortal remains were to be hidden, and for which Una had brought the necessary material. The pyramid bore the same name as the town of Memphis, that is, Men-nofer, 'the good station,' or 'the good entrance.' He was also the founder of a town called after his name, 'town of Pepi,' and situated in Middle Egypt.

We know the names of several great personages who lived under Pepi, and were invested with high dignities. Their tombs are found at Saqqarah, Bersheh, Zauwit-el-Meitin, Sheikh Said, Abydos, and other places. There is among their number a certain Meri-ra-anch, who is designated on his tomb as 'governor of Troja.' We may hazard the supposition that this employ 'was charged with the works in the quarries of Mokattam, which is all the [102] more probable because he besides bears the title of ' the chief of the public works of the king.' Another functionary, Meri-ra Meri-patah-ankh, was also chief of the public works under Pepi. A third person, called Pepi-nakht, whose tomb is at Abydos, was governor of 'the town of the Pyramid.' By this evidently is understood the sanctuary before the king's grave, in which pure men offered sacrifices to the dead pharaoh, burnt incense before his picture, and performed all other religious service according to the regulations and custom.

The same office, guardian, prophet, and priest of the pyramid of King Pepi, was filled by Pepi-na, who after his master's death enjoyed similar offices at the pyramid of Mer-en-ra, the son and successor of Pepi.

In the reign of Pepi mention is made for the first time on the monuments of his day of a festival closely connected with the chronology of Egypt, called Hib-set, 'the festival of the tail,' in memory of the end and the beginning of a new period of years. In the eighteenth year of his government took place the renewal of Hib-set, or the first section of 'the feast of the tail,' that is 'the cycle of 30 years.' A learned German, Mr. Gensler, who has specially occupied himself with enquiries and learning relating to the course of the stars in connection with the information of the monuments, has latterly put forth the opinion that the period of 30 years served to regulate, according to a fixed law of numbers, the coincident points of the solar and lunar calendar by means of eleven synodic months intercalated in the years 0, 4, 7, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 23, 26, 30 (=0) of the period. The [103] real nature of this circle of 30 years seems to us contained in the previously-mentioned period of years which as we said, were connected with the sun and moon. The Greek translator of the holy term Hib-set, in the Egyptian part of the celebrated Rosetta Stone, renders this expression by the term 'period of 30 years.' We shall later on furnish the material for proving that single portions of this circle are frequently found on the monuments.

King Pepi, who, according to the Greek accounts, sat for 100 years on the throne of his fathers, married a lady who was not of the blood royal. Her father was called Khua, and her mother Nekebet. After her coronation as queen, she adopted the name of Meri-ra-ankh-nes. Her tomb, the vast ruins of which were discovered at Abydos, has furnished us important information about the descendants of this high personage. She had two sons, the eldest called Mer-en-ra, and his brother, called Nofer-ka-ra. It was the eldest who succeeded his father Pepi.

The great text of the tomb of Una reveals to us a considerable part of the history of his time, and further enlightens the darkness which hangs over the history of Mer-en-ra. After the death of Pepi, Una had the honour of obtaining the high dignity of 'governor of Upper Egypt.' The limit of his government towards the south was bounded by the town of Elephantina, and to the north reached to the nome of Letopolis in the lower country. It seems that Una possessed the secret of quickly acquiring the favour of all men, including his masters. Thus the son of Pepi charged him with [104] all the works and the entire administration of the region of Upper Egypt. Una himself acknowledges this rare distinction accorded to an Egyptian by saying that 'never such a thing was done before in this country of Upper Egypt.'

According to ancient custom, in the first years of his reign, King Mer-en-ra was greatly preoccupied with the arrangements for his burial. It was again Una who was charged with all works for the preparation of the sepulchre, and was ordered to bring from the southernmost boundary of Egypt the hardest stone. 'His majesty,' so speaks Una himself, 'sent me to the country of Abhat,¹⁰ to bring back a sarcophagus with its cover, with a small pyramid and a statue of the king Merenra, whose pyramid is called Kha-nofer. His holiness sent me to Elephantina to bring back a holy shrine and its stand of hard granite, and the door-jambs and head of the same granite, and the doors, and pillars, and cornices, and also to bring back the granite jambs and thresholds for the temple opposite to the pyramid Kha-nofer, of King Mer-en-ra. The number of vessels destined for the transport of all these stones consisted of six broad ships, three tow-boats, three rafts, and one vessel of war.' It seems that these vessels were constructed in the south of Upper Egypt, for the text tells us that 'never had it happened that the inhabitants of Abhat, nor of Elephantina, had constructed a vessel [105] of war in the time of the old kings, who reigned before.'

After having executed the orders of the king, a new mission awaited the Governor Una, who this time was charged to cut blocks of alabaster and bring them to his lord. 'His holiness,' he thus relates, 'sent me to the country of Ha-nub, the gold town,¹¹ to fetch a large table of alabaster. I caused this table to be extracted for him in 17 days. For the building of the royal pyramid, which bore the name Kha-nofer,¹² 'the good rising,' 'they had to extract enormous blocks of hard stone from the quarries behind Assooan. They were obliged to construct vessels expressly for the transport of the enormous masses which they had dug out of the quarries. This was new toil and trouble to the poor people. Great rafts were made, 60 cubits long and 30 in breadth.¹³ As there was not water enough at this time, the season of the low waters having arrived, they were obliged to build smaller vessels, using wood that was found in the forests of the Negroes.' Una reports thereon literally as follows: 'His holiness sent me to cut down four forests in the South, in order to construct three large 106] vessels and four vessels for towing acacia wood in the country Wawa-at. And behold the officials of the countries of Araret, Aam, and Mata caused the wood to be cut down for this purpose. I did all this in the space of a year. As soon as the water rose I loaded the rafts with immense pieces of granite for the pyramid Kha-nofer of the King Mer-en-ra.'

This report of Una is our only source of information for the lives of Teta, Pepi, and Mer-en-ra. In order to fill up the numerous lacunae of the fragment we must again hunt among the dust and ruins of days long gone by.

After his brother's death Nofer-ka-ra followed him on the throne. His pyramid's name is also known to us. It was called Menankh, that is to say, 'the inn of life.' His name and his titles are preserved on the rocks of Wady-Magharah, where there is an inscription dated in the second year of his reign. The tombs of Middle Egypt make us acquainted with a number of noble personages who lived under his government, and were charged with various important functions. We will mention a certain Beba, because of his peculiar position of governor of the town of Pepi. This is the only occasion when we find on an Egyptian monument the mention of this town, which was built by Pepi, and was probably the residence of the kings of his family. It seems that later its name either totally disappeared or was changed. Egyptian history after Nofer-ka-ra is involved in deep darkness, which conceals even the slightest vestiges of the existence of kings whose mere names have [107] been preserved to us on the walls of Abydos and Saqqarah, names without deeds, empty sounds, which are no better to us than the inscriptions on the tombs of ordinary insignificant men. Unless we are greatly mistaken, we may suppose that the State was divided into small kingdoms, and was afflicted with civil wars and royal murders, and that among its haks or governors there was no saviour who with bold arm struck down the rebellious, seized with firm hand the fallen reins of a reunited monarchy, and had the intelligence to govern it.

The creaking vessel of the State continually approached nearer to destruction, until it again found a powerful master, who after severe storms once more brought it back into the safe harbour of quiet and order. Such a one appears to have been King Ra-neb-taui Mentu-hotep, according to the monuments. He was an offshoot of the eleventh dynasty, and a vigorous child of his unruly times.

A sure proof of the difficult times which the empire for many years had to pass through and this is borne out by the complete silence of the monuments which generally tell us so much—is shown in the tradition which is connected with the fabulous appearance of the beautiful queen Nitocris. The remains which have been preserved of the much-injured old Book of the Kings at Turin bear witness to the existence of this lady, celebrated by the father of history, and she there takes her place as Nit-aker, 'the perfect Nit,' in the list of the pharaohs of the sixth dynasty before Nofer-ka, Nefrus, and Ba-ab.

[108] Manetho also mentions a Queen Nitocris at the end of this dynasty, who reigned twelve years, 'the noblest and most beautiful woman of her time, fair in colour, the builder of the third pyramid.'

According to the narration of Herodotus, the brother of Nitocris was killed by his political adversaries, and the kingdom was given over to her. The beautiful Nitocris, with rosy cheeks, to avenge the death of her brother, constructed a vast underground building. Under pretext of its inauguration, she there assembled the principal authors of the murder. During the repast which she offered them, the queen made the waters of the river enter by a secret canal, so that they were all drowned. After that she retired into a chamber filled with ashes, and killed herself to avoid the vengeance which awaited her.

It is difficult to recognise the historical foundation of this tradition, but it proves what we meant to say, that at the lime of Queen Nitocris there was murder and violence prevailing in the kingdom—kept up by the deadly rivalry of those who were competitors for the throne.

According to Manetho, the same queen was the builder of the third pyramid, which monumental researches attribute to the Pharaoh Menkara the pious, 1,000 years before Nitocris. According to the investigations of the engineer, M. Perring, it certainly appears that the third pyramid has been reconstructed and increased.

'Queen Nitocris, in taking possession of the pyramid of Menkara, left the sarcophagus of the king in a [109] lower chamber and placed her own in the hall before it, if one may judge from the fragments of blue basalt which were found there. She doubled the dimensions of the. monument, and gave it that rich covering of well-polished granite, which was supposed later, according to the Greek storytellers, to have absorbed the immense sums which the courtesan Rhodopis collected from the ruin of her friends.¹⁴

Without occupying ourselves with the fruitless labour of endeavouring to reconstruct the dynasties of Manetho, from the seventh to the eleventh, we will have recourse to the monumental succession which is most completely represented in the table of Abydos. This enumerates twenty kings, who necessarily correspond with the anonymous kings who once composed five complete dynasties, according to the epitome of the work of Manetho. The number of these kings was double according to the Turin Book of Kings, if the computation, according to the fragments which have been preserved, be correct. According to the papyrus, the dynasty which preceded the twelfth contained six kings. Again before these there appeared a set of seventeen or eighteen kings. From Nitocris downwards to the first of these eighteen kings there was room on the papyrus for the names of about ten kings. We have, therefore, a total of 38 or at most 40 kings, to make up the five dynasties mentioned by Manetho. But, however this may be, we are satisfied with the number of 20 as on the wall of the temple of Abydos, who in all [110] probability belonged to the true race of old kings, of whom the following are the names:

The reader will perceive that several of these pharaohs bear a double name, as, for example, the 39th, 43rd, 44th, 45th, 49th, 51st, and the 52nd, the second of which belonged to the king before he ascended the throne.

We must stop at the 57th king of the series, who is called Neb-kher-ra. His other name was Mentuhotep, like some of his ancestors. His name on the monuments is Ra-neb-taui. Here the long silence of the stones begins to cease, and the mouth of the monuments to sing, and tell us tales of the olden time.

[111] The race of kings, among which the commanding figure of King Mentu-hotep rose, for the welfare of the reunited kingdom, was of Theban origin. The feeble ancestors of this race bore alternately the names of Nentef (or Anentef) and Mentu-hotep. They had fixed their royal seat in the future metropolis of Thebes, and their tombs (plain, simple pyramids built of brickwork) were placed at the foot of the western mountain of the Theban necropolis. Here a few ruins of ancient origin indicate the names of the kings. Here it was where, more than twenty years ago, Arabs seeking for treasure brought to light two very simple coffins of these pharaohs, not knowing what a treasure they had found. In that part of the necropolis which by the inhabitants is now called Assaseef, these coffins were discovered lightly hidden under loose heaps of stones and sand. The cover was richly gilt, and the band of hieroglyphics which occupied the middle of it contained the name of Anentef. During my stay in Egypt in 1854, when I first visited the banks of the Nile, I had the good luck to discover, in the lumber-room of the residence of the Greek consul, the coffin of a second Anentef, which was distinguished by the surname of 'the Great.' This last coffin is now in the collection of the Louvre, a very precious relic of the ancient kingdom of the pharaohs. Of that Mentu-hotep, who bore the royal name Ra-neb-taui (son of the master of the country), mention is made. On the black rocks of the island of Konosso, quite close to Philae, a bas-relief chiselled in the hard stone exhibits this pharaoh as the conqueror of thirteen foreign nations, and as the de- [112] voted servant of the ancient creator, Khem, the celebrated god of Coptos.

In those times a place of this name (it was called Qobt in the mouth of the Egyptians) was very celebrated. Placed on the right bank of the Nile, at about the spot where the valley of Hammamat opens towards the south, and here offers to the traveller, after a painful journey of eight days over the parched soil, a sight of the green fields and the Nile stream, this town with its haven served as a staple for many precious wares. In the valley of Hammamat, a mountainous district, with many devious roads, there lay hidden a valuable stone both for building and working, which the hand of the workman well knew how to fashion. Here the much-toiling people descended to the mines to draw out the gold and silver ore.

Here also the merchant passed on his journey, richly laden with treasures and much-sought-for wares, from the coast lands of the Red Sea towards the south, returning home to Egypt's green plains after a long pilgrimage. The wanderer who passed through the valley did not fail to say his prayers to 'the lord protector of the mountain,' the god Khem of Coptos, or on the walls of the rocks, 'for everlasting,' to carve out in tablet and holy characters his reverence for the god. Almost numberless is the mass of dedicatory inscriptions, due to pious custom and ancient manners, and of the greatest use to us modems, because they confirm to us what we have above stated.

Mentu-hotep also, whom we mentioned above, appears immortalised on the wall of the valley of rocks, [113] as well as his mother Ama. He had, so the inscription says, sunk a deep well, 10 ells in breadth, in the dry, bare desert, in order to provide fresh water for pilgrims with their beasts of burden, and the men whom the behest of the king ordered to cut stone in this hot valley. Another inscription of the same valley dating from the 15th of Paophi, in the second year of the reign of our Mentu-hotep, is addressed to the god Khem-Pan, the master of the tribes which inhabit this valley,' and to other divinities. The inscription continues by making a report how wonderfully they had succeeded in transporting some gigantic stones to the Nile, which were destined to serve for the housing of the royal corpse. A high functionary, chief of all such works for the king, by name Amenemhat, received the order to transport the sarcophagus and its cover to the eternal resting-place of his lord. One can imagine the size of this immense stone, the dimensions of which are mentioned in the text, the length being eight, the breadth four, and the height two cubits. After having made rich offerings to the divinities, it required 3,000 men to move the monolith from its place, and to roll it down the valley towards the Nile.

We have less information about the second Mentu-hotep, whose pyramid bore the name of Khu-setu, 'the most shining of places.' A gravestone found in the cemetery of Abydos commemorates a priest attached to this funeral monument, who offered the gifts for the dead to the deceased king at this pyramid. Sankh-ka-ra finishes this list of kings, the fifty-eighth [114] in the long succession of Abydos. The rocky valley of Hammamat commemorates him in an inscription of the highest value. As we have said, a road led from Coptos, in the midst of deserts, without water, to the coast of the Red Sea, much frequented by merchants, who, for the sake of gain, hazarded their lives, and in painful wanderings over lonely ways trusted themselves to frail barks to steer to the furthest coasts of the South, to bring from the land of Punt precious wares, and especially costly rich-smelling spices and incense, for their homes and the temples of the gods.

Under the name of Punt, the old inhabitants of Kemi meant a distant land, washed by the great ocean, full of valleys and hills, abounding in ebony and other rich woods, in incense, balsam, precious metals, and costly stones; rich also in beasts, as cameleopards, hunting leopards, panthers, dog-headed apes, and long-tailed monkeys.¹⁵ Birds with strange plumage rocked themselves on the branches of wonderful trees, especially the incense tree and the cocoa palm. Such was the Ophir of the Egyptians, without doubt the present coast of the Somauli land in sight of Arabia, but separated from it by the sea.

According to an old obscure tradition, the land of Punt was the original seat of the gods. From Punt the holy ones had travelled to the Nile valley, at their head Amon, Horus, Hathor. The passage of the gods sanctified the coast lands, which the shores of the Red Sea [115] washed as far as Punt, and whose name, ^ the lands of the gods ' (Ta-nuter), of itself disclosed a trace of the tradition. Amon was called Hak, i.e. 'King' of Punt; Hathor, in the same sense, 'Queen and ruler of Punt;' while Hor was honoured as 'the holy morning star which rose to the west of the land of Punt.' Peculiar to that land is the idol Bes, the oldest form of the godhead in the land of Punt, which wandered far, and gained a footing not only in Egypt, but in Arabia and in other lands of Asia, as far as the islands of the Greeks. The misshapen Bes, with apish countenance, is no other than the beneficent Dionysos, who as a pilgrim through the world, dispensed with hand rich in blessings, mild manners, peace and jollity to the nations.

Under Sankh-ka-ra took place the first journey to Ophir and Punt. According to the words of the inscription, everything was wisely provided which the journey required when Pharaoh entrusted the expedition to the noble Hannu, who relates to us as follows: 'I was sent,' says he, 'to conduct ships to the country of Punt, to bring back odoriferous gums, collected by the princes of the red land under the influence of the fear which he inspires among all nations. Behold, I left Coptos.

'His Holiness ordered that the troops which were to accompany me should be those from the south of the Thebais.'

After a great break, in which, however, some words have remained sufficiently l^ble to enable us to recognise that the armed force was destined to protect the expedition against enemies, and that one officer [116] had with him royal officers, stonecutters, and other workmen, the text continues the recital in the following manner:

M. Chabas, to whom we owe the explanation of the contents of this important inscription, accompanied his translation by excellent remarks on the subject of the [117] road which was followed across the desert from Coptos to the Red Sea. We see clearly that the Egyptians, already in these distant times, had opened a road to transport the products of the land of Punt into Egypt. One personage has indicated in his itinerary the names of the five principal stations where the caravans halted to supply water to the men and beasts of burden—that is, to the asses, which were the only beasts of burden in those limes. It was, in fact, the same road which, leading from Coptos towards the East, was followed afterwards by all the caravans which passed by the Red Sea up to the time of the Ptolemies and the Romans. It was the high road which, leading to the harbour of Leukos Limen (now Qosseir), on the Red Sea, brought the wonders of India and Arabia to Europe; it was the road of the merchants of all countries in the ancient world â€” the nations' bridge between Asia and Europe.

Although convinced by the latest discoveries, we no longer in 'Punt,' and in the name 'Holy Land,' which is so often repeated, recognise exclusively a description of the South and West coasts of what is properly called Arabia, yet there is nothing more probable than that already, in the reign of King Sankh-ka-ra, five-and-twenty centuries before the commencement of our era, the Egyptians possessed a knowledge of the coasts of Yemen and Hydramaut, which lay on the other side of the sea to Punt and the Holy Land, in sight of these incense-bearing countries. Here in these regions we ought to seek, as it appears to us, for those mysterious places which, in the fore ages of all history, [118] the wonder-loving Cushite races, like swarms of locusts, left, in passing from Arabia and across the sea, to set foot on the rich and blessed shores of Punt and the 'Holy Land,' and to continue their wanderings into the interior in western and northerly directions.

In the work of Manetho the first eleven dynasties of the Egyptian Empire formed the first part of his history of the ancient kings of Egypt who were said to have reigned 2,300 years. The second part of his work was occupied with the dynasties which followed, commencing with the twelfth down to the end of the nineteenth, and these kings were said to have reigned 2,120 years.

By using the materials which the monuments up to the present time have furnished to science, we have drawn out the following table of the kings who composed the twelfth dynasty (see p. 120).

Even a superficial examination of this table proves that the old Egyptians attributed to each Pharaoh the sum total of the duration of his reign, without taking into consideration the reductions that must be made for the simultaneous reigns of two princes, father and son, of which we possess several instances at the epoch of the first four kings. The figure, therefore, of 213 years, 1 month, and 17 days which the Canon of Turin gives as the duration of the reigns of the twelfth dynasty, must necessarily be diminished, since the double reigns are not taken into account.

The reader from this particular circumstance will be able to form some idea of the kind of difficulties with which science has continually to contend in order to present a correct picture of the succession and numbers of the old Egyptian reigns. The old custom by which the Pharaohs, towards the end of their reigns, called their sons to share their thrones with them, and by which these last, after their father's death, reckoned the years of their reign from the time when they began to share the throne with their fathers, without the inscriptions expressly mentioning this circumstance—now thousands of years after these events—places such difficulties and doubts in the way as to make one despair in putting together a chronological table of the old Egyptian Empire. Manetho states the princes of this house to be of Theban origin. This is more than probable, since the progeny of Anentef and Mentu-hotep have left behind [121] them in this metropolis of the highest antiquity the most scarce and precious remains. The sanctuary of the great temple of Amon, at Kamac, whose ruins present to us walls, columns (the so-called Proto-Doric), and pictures covered with the names of the kings of this house, kept on increasing from this time of its foundation, till it became an imperial building, whose walls of stone reveal to us the history of the Theban kings. And as the bright sun shines out of dark night and suddenly illumines with its rays what previously lay in deep darkness, so the accession of the twelfth dynasty may be compared to a stream of light which shines over the forgotten world of the past, to call back into new life by its gleams more than forty centuries before our days. It is, however, only from the ruins of those times which lie scattered on the ground of the earliest period of the world, that we can catch the faint gleams of the aurora of all historical remembrances.

What lends a high worth to these ages is not only the greatness of the kings, founded on the wisdom of their domestic rule, and the glory of their victories in foreign countries. Art also, with all its striving after beauty and noble forms, was cherished by these rulers, and skilful masters, the true children of Mer-ti-sen, the great artist of King Mentu-hotep, produced an immense number of beautiful works and pictures. Their ancestors of earlier times had already understood how to work with unknown but incomparable tools the hard substance of the granite and similar stones, to polish the surface like a mirror, and to fit the gigantic masses together, not unfrequently with [122] iron clamps, as in the structure of .the Great Pyramid. But although the hand of the studious artist had worked in hard stone, and fashioned after life what nature had already produced in flesh and bone, yet there was still wanting the stamp of perfection—namely, beauty which moves us to admiration. Beginning with the race of the Theban kings of the twelfth dynasty, the harmonious form of beauty united with truth and nobleness meets the eye of the beholder as well in buildings as in statues.

This is the name of the ruler who greets us on the threshold of this dynasty as the leader of his race. Unless we are deceived, he is a descendant of the prince of the same name who, under Neb-taui Mentu-hotep received the command to bring enormous stones from the valleys of Hammamat, and by doing so earned the praise of the king.¹⁶ His elevation to the throne was no peaceable succession as heir, but a struggle for crown and sceptre by the young king against other claimants, a fight of danger to life and limb. In the instructions which the Pharaoh Amenemhat I. wrote for the benefit of his own son, he speaks of the misfortunes which consumed the land—'for Egypt was to be compared to a bull which had lost all memory of the past'—from internal wars and conspirators, who [123] sought in a cowardly manner to rob the king of life in the stillness of night.¹⁷ After the fight was ended, the towns conquered, and order re-established, external wars had to be carried on. A memorial stone, which may be seen in London, bears witness that the sovereignty of the king was extended towards the South, beyond the bounds of the empire into the land of the negroes, since mention is made in the inscription of a steward of the mines, which yielded a gold bearing stone, to the king of the Egyptians. His dominion in the South is confirmed by a memorial inscription, engraved on a block at the entrance of the valley of Girgaooi, on the road from Korusko which informs us of a victory of Amenemhat I. over the inhabitants of the land of Wawa-t.¹⁸ Short and conclusive are the expressions: 'In the year nine-and-twenty of King Amenemhat, long may he live! he came here to beat the inhabitants of the land Wawa-t.'

Wawa-t could be reached by travelling Egyptians not only from the Nile, but by sea, since Korusko itself situated in the country of the same name, helps us to ascertain the geography of that country. It is almost certain that Wawa-t is the same as the gold-bearing valley of Ollaki, which stretched northwards, from Korusko to the sea.

What the inscription on stone historically teaches us is also confirmed by the words of the papyrus and the works of those old days. They tell us of campaigns [124] and wars which the king carried on against foreign nations, as the inhabitants of Wawa-t, the Mazai, the Sati, the Hirusha, and other 'rabble' of strangers in the South and North and East and West. By the side of the military operations, which brought to king and country equal honour, the service of the gods lay near to the heart of the king. He dedicated to them a great number of temples. He was the founder of the temple of Amon in Thebes, where his own portrait in red stone of Assooan bore witness to his work. Thebes, and also Memphis, the holy place of Patah, the country of the Fayoum and other places of this great empire were richly adorned through the piety of the king with stone pictures and temples. And if the last stones of these works were to remain silent, the ancient quarries of the limestone-hill of Mokattam and the valleys of the much-used Wady Hammamat would tell the tale.

Although a Theban, Amenemhat nevertheless followed the ancient custom of the Memphites, and built himself as his 'eternal dwelling,' his own pyramid with the name of 'beautiful-high' (Ka-nofer). Also, for the repose of his body, the Pharaoh carefully provided a stone sarcophagus during his lifetime. The chief of the priests of the god Khem, Anentef, the son of Sebek-nekht, was sent to the mountain of Rohannu in the Wady Hammamat to cut the stone of the sarcophagus from the wall of rock, and to roll towards the valley the precious burden, so immensely great that 'never the like had been provided since the time of the god Ra.'

[125] Amenemhat ruled over the whole land of Egypt 'from the Elephant-town even to the Athu, or lakes in the lowlands,' with might and power, and many an expression in the long-faded papyrus of ancient origin tells us that he was wise in thought and deed. Let us next consider the child-like, simple narrative of his contemporary, the Egyptian Sineh, who, from some unknown cause, left the court of his lord the king and took a road towards the north-east to leave the land of his fathers. He incurred in his flight many dangers from the guards of the roads and from foreign nations, so that the pilgrim, leading an unsettled wandering life in the Eastern provinces of the Empire, had much care and disquietude. There in the East the great 'wall' obstructed the free road. What the Egyptians call Anbu, i.e. 'wall,' was called in other languages by a term better known to us, Shur (Hebrew 'wall') or Gerrhon (Greek, i.e. enclosure, bounds), both designating the fortress at the entrance of the narrow way between the Egyptian Sea and the Lake Sirbonis, through which the high road led from the land of Kemi to the towns of the Ruten. Sineh escaped the watchmen at the ' wall,' and entered the barren, desolate wilderness. Provided with food and drink through the pity of the inhabitants of the district, the runaway reached the and of Edom, within the bounds of which the small kingdom of Tennu was situated. The king of the land, Amunensha, invited the Egyptian wanderer to his court, gave him his eldest daughter in marriage, and the fruitful district of Oa as his residence. Everything prospered in Sineh's hands; he collected riches, and was blessed [126] with many children. As David did Goliath, so the bold Egyptian killed an unmannerly, avaricious fellow much looked up to in Tennu on account of his strength, and gained hence much credit from the king and the inhabitants of the land. His yearning after his native country at last left him no peace. With the leave of his royal father-in-law he approached Pharaoh by a petition in writing to be allowed to return. He was received with gladness, and henceforward, loaded with honour, he lived at the court of the ruler of Egypt, who even had his grave erected for him, and 'so he was in the grace of the king till the day of his death arrived.' The simple story of Sineh has been made available for science from a hieratic roll in the old Egyptian collection at Berlin, through the great acuteness of a learned Englishman, Mr. Goodwin; it is venerable from its high antiquity and the childlike, biblical character of its expressions. We may, however, detect from it pretty clearly that, in the course of the reign of Amenemhat, disquiet and misunderstanding prevailed in the Empire, occasioned by the contest for the sceptre and crown, which the founder of the new dynasty did not so easily obtain. For the band of his opponents threatened him with conspiracies and the dagger, and the crowd of hostile-minded men reached in the night-time the sleeping-chamber of the palace. The king has well described this to his son and heir in a document still preserved, to place before him a mirror of the time and of the men, and to admonish him therein to be a just and true king on his exalted throne.

[127] As the stone monuments inform us, Amenembat reigned the last ten years of his life in common with his son, Usurtasen, when he was still in tender years. To him his father dedicated the memorial we have mentioned. When he ascended the throne he took the name

Under his rule the land gradually was quieted, and the old order was completely re-established by laws firmly carried out. Amenemhat I., as we learn from the great inscription of Beni-Hassan, had been obliged to pass through the revolted country with his soldiers, in order to find and to beat his opponents, since he was not allowed to enjoy the fruit of his deeds in quiet repose. It was reserved to his son Usurtasen I. to win over the minds of men, and before all things, by buildings in honour of the heavenly gods, to gain the favour of the earthly priests. His works as witnesses exist at the present day, and point with eloquent finger to Usurtasen I. as a mighty king.

In the first place the inscription commemorates him in a prominent way, although in a few unimportant sentences, on the well known and often-mentioned obelisk of Heliopolis. At ten hours' distance from Cairo, it rises in the midst of green cornfields, in the immediate neighbourhood of the village Matarieh, consisting of a few huts of poor Arabs and some houses of well-to-do Egyptians, who scarcely know on what a famous soil their feet tread. The temple and town, in truth, lay 1.88 metres underneath the present soil, and nearly 3.50 metres [128] under the present level of high-water. Besides the stone-pointed columns, worked with wonderful art in the hardest and most beautiful rose granite, the long earthen mounds under which lies the surrounding wall, show the extent of the former buildings of the temple, and are the only visible remains of the celebrated city of On or Heliopolis, which all antiquity so loudly praised by the voice of its wise men, its teachers, and priests.

The Egyptians gave the old town the name of Annu (properly meaning the 'pointed columns' or 'obelisks'), generally with the addition 'the north land ' to distinguish it from the other Annu in Southern Egypt, which was situated in the neighbourhood of the capital of the Empire, Thebes, better known by its Greek appellation, Hermonthis. Here in Annu (the On of the Bible), there existed from very early times a celebrated temple of the Sun-god, Atum or Tum, a particular local form of Ra, and his wife the goddess Hathor-Jusas, to which the Pharaohs were wont to make pilgrimages, according to ancient custom, to fulfil the directions for the royal consecration in the 'Great House' of the god. When King Piankhi, long after the times of the twelfth dynasty, visited the Temple of the Sun-town, Heliopolis, going from Memphis, on the right side of the river, where a road led by Kherkhau (Babylon, near the present Old Cairo), to On, there, as his stone memorial of victory teaches us, 'he betook himself to the place of the deep sand in On, and made a great offering at the same place of the deep sand opposite the rising sun, and the offering consisted [129] of white bulls, milk, balsam, incense, and all other sweet-smelling substances. When he approached, in order to enter the temple of the Sun-god Ra, the chief of the temple greeted him with respectful greeting, and the singing priest read the holy words to keep evil away from the king. And the king completed the consecration, putting on the fillets, and purifying himself by incense and holy water. Then he received the wreaths of flowers of the Benben chamber,¹⁹ and brought them forward, mounting the step to the great window, to look at the sun-god Ra in his Benben chamber. The king stood there all alone. He drew back the bolts, opened the door, and beheld his father, the Sun-god Ra in the splendid Benben chamber, and the morning bark of Ra and the evening bark of Tum. After this he shut the doors, laid sealing-earth upon them, and pressed upon it his own royal seal, thus commanding the priests: 'I, I have completed the locking up; no other of any kings shall any more enter in.' While he stood there, they threw themselves on their bellies before his holiness, while they said: 'you, always increasing the empire, may affliction never come to the divine Horus, the friend of the town of On!' And at his approach to enter the temple of Tum, the likeness of his father, the god Tum-cheper, the greatest god in On, was brought before him.

Although this description has only preserved gene-[130] rally a representation of the temple at On, of whose precincts as a prototype of all temple buildings the Greek geographer Strabo has left us a picture, yet it is enough to furnish us with an idea of its great importance. The temple at On was already existing in the times of Usurtasen, since the inscriptions of the reigns of his royal ancestors and predecessors frequently mention it.

The existence of the obelisks proves that the building under Usurtasen had reached the gates of the towers, before which it was the custom to erect these giant stone needles. A wonderful document, on parchment, which I had the good fortune to acquire in Thebes in 1858, and which for some years past has been in the possession of the Berlin collection of Egyptian antiquities, makes the fact certain that Usurtasen I., quite at the beginning of his reign, occupied himself with buildings at the temple of the city of the Sun. This important memorial informs us how he, in the third year of his empire, assembled round his throne the first officials of his court, to hear their opinion and their counsel about raising worthy buildings to the sun-god. As usual in such assemblies, the king begins his address with a solemn reference to his divine descent, and to his anticipation of succession to the throne, which was recognised for him already in the womb of his mother. He then connects with this a discourse on the 'importance of the buildings and monuments dedicated to the gods, starting from the idea that such alone are able to eternalise the memory of a ruler. After this address, the united counsellors [131] unanimously applaud the good intentions of their lord, and encourage him to carry out the same without delay. The pharaoh then immediately gives his orders to the proper court official, and enjoins him to watch over the uninterrupted progress of the work which had been determined upon. Then ensues, now undertaken by the king himself, the solemn laying of the foundations.

The great obelisk of King Usurtasen I., of which we have spoken above, stood in the principal entrance of the temple of the Sun. Its four sides contained hieroglyphical inscriptions of the following meaning, repeated four times in the same words:

The holy characters, deeply and beautifully cut in the red granite, contain nothing but honorary commemorations of the king, with the addition that Usurtasen caused to be raised the giant stone obelisks [132] on a certain holiday of the old Egyptian calendar. The reader would be deceived who thought himself entitled to make important discoveries of historical import or pious and wise proverbs in the four rows of inscriptions, and in their place he meets with only meaningless and unimportant expressions. But that is an unfortunate defect inherent in the most beautiful and grandest monuments of Egypt, which owe their origin to an effort of kingly power, that they contain in a similar way empty flatteries in honour of the king, with a customary repetition of the same idea, without any deep meaning which would correspond to the labour of the work and the choice of the material. In ancient Egypt they only knew this manner of singing praises to the proud temper and arrogance of the pharaohs, in contrast to our time and its intellectual efforts. Usurtasen must have had a peculiar preference for that sort of perpetuation of his name; at least, remains which have been discovered in other parts betoken his inclination to the laborious erection of stone obelisks. In the old district of the so-called Moeris lake, in the vicinity of the modern Arab village Begig, are the fragments of a similar memorial, which, according to the tenor of the inscription, was carried out by the king in honour of the local gods of the capital Shet or Sheti. The Greeks called it Crocodilopolis, from the name of the animal which was worshipped there.

As his father, the first Amenemhat, had begun to lay the foundations of the late imperial temple at Thebes, the so-called Temple of Apetu, the ruins of [133] which now cover the region of the neighbouring Arab village of Karnak, to the east of the granite building of the holy of holies, so the son of Usurtasen carried out in like manner new works, in addition to those of his father, as proofs of his veneration for the divine Amon. His care in this respect was not confined to the dwelling of the god, but he paid attention also to the principal holy servants of Amon. He dedicated to them a particular place, which bore the name of 'the holy dwelling of the first seer of Amon.' The fact is no longer proved by existing traces of this ancient building, but by an inscription, found in Thebes, which relates the re-erection of the same by the ninth king, of the name of Ramses (with the official name Nofer-ka-ra). In those times there lived and acted in Thebes the first seer of Amon, by name Amenhotep, a son of Ramses Nekht, who exercised the same office in the service of the god. After he had occupied the seat of his father, he thought it before all things incumbent on him to re-erect the great Court of Amon (p-iban-ao), and the dwelling of the first seer of Amon, and to defray the cost from his own means. He relates on this subject as follows: 'Since I now have found the holy dwelling of the first seer of Amon, who of old sat in the house of Amon the king of the gods, menaced with decay, since what, there was of it dated from the time of King Usurtasen the First, I caused it to be built anew, in beautiful work and with tasteful labour. I caused to be re-erected the thickness of the surrounding wall from behind to the fore part. I caused the buildings to be raised, and their columns [134] to be placed of hard stone in tasteful work.' Thus he makes his report. As a recognition of his generous sacrifices, the king made him, in the tenth year, and the nineteenth day of the month Hathor, a rich reward, as will be stated in the proper place.

One of the celebrated rock tombs, which on the steep height of the hills of Beni-Hassan already greet the traveller from a far distance, has preserved in its inscriptions, which deck the walls with rich representations, some historical remembrances of the first five rulers of this dynasty, and among them Usurtasen. It is the same tomb which exhibits the new appearance of the pillar changed into the column for the first time, and by the construction of the front, so plain to the eye, enhances the peculiar richness of its instructive pictures (now, alas ! always becoming more and more injured), and rivets the attention of the spectator. Chiselled in the rocks, like the whole row of tombs lying beside it, is the rock-hewn hall, dedicated to the service of the dead and to the memory of deceased lords and ladies of the olden time, all belonging to a race of ancient origin and hereditary possession of the region in the neighbourhood of their graves; The ancient writing designates it as the nome of Mah, the land of the inheritance, better known in later times as the region of the town of Antincie. The first Khnum-hotep is the first in time as well as in importance of the generations of the dead, whose genealogy may be thus represented by the help of notices from the inscriptions.

The history of Ameni, the founder of the genealogy, is related in an inscription in two columns, engraved in holy letters on the door of the entrance. He is introduced speaking himself, according to the ancient practice, and he tersely and simply relates the chief incidents of his life.

'In the year 43, under the majesty of the king Usurtasen I.—may he live long, even to eternity—which (year) corresponds with the twenty-fifth year, in the nome of Mah, where the chief Amen was himself governor.

'In the forty-third year, the fourteenth day of the month Paophi. Address to those who still love life, and who detest death. May they recite a prayer for the offerings of the dead in favour of the hereditary governor-in-chief, of the nome of Mah (some other titles follow), the steward of the holy seers. Amen, who has conquered (death). I accompanied my master when he made an expedition to beat the enemies in the country of the Atu. I took part in the expedition, as [136] the son of the most noble lord, who was commander of the troops and governor of the nome of Mah, as a substitute (?) for my father, who was old, and who had received rewards from the palace, for he was beloved at the court. I arrived at the country of Kash (the land of the negroes), ascending the stream, and the way led me to the extreme boundary of the land. I conducted the booty of my master, and my praises reached heaven when his holiness returned happily. He beat his enemies in the miserable country of Kash. I returned home in his retinue, with a happy countenance. No one was wanting of my warriors.'

'I left again to conduct the golden treasures to his holiness king Usurtasen—may he live long. I went with the eldest prince and heir Ameni—life, welfare, and health to him. I left with the number of 400 persons, the chosen of my warriors. They returned happily home, and no one was wanting. I brought the pieces of gold. It was for me the commencement of distinctions on the part of the kings.

'My father praised me. Behold that I again ascended the river to accompany the treasures to the town of Coptos, with the prince the heir, the highest governor of the town, Usurtasen—life, welfare, and health to him! I ascended the river with 400 men, the chosen of the warriors of the nome of Mah. I arrived happily. My warriors can certify all that I have said.

'I was full of goodness, and of a gentle character prince who loved his town. For years I exercised [137] my power as governor in the nome of Mah. All the works for the palace of the king were placed in my hands. Behold that the chiefs of ... of the temples of the divinities of the nome of Mah gave me thousands of bulls with their calves. I was praised for that on the part of the royal palace, because of the yearly delivery of cows in milk. I gave up all their products to the palace, and I kept back nothing for myself out of all his workshops. The whole nome of Mah worked for me with multiplied activity. But I never afflicted the child of the poor; I have not ill-treated the widow. I never disturbed any owner of land; I never drove away the herdsman. I never took away his men for (my) works from the five-hand master. There were none wretched in my time; the hungry did not exist in my time, even when there were years of famine. For, behold that I had ploughed all the fields of the district of Mah, up to its frontiers, both south and north. Thus I found food for its inhabitants, and gave them the food which they produced. There were no hungry people in it. I gave equally to the widow as to the married woman. I did not prefer a great personage to a humble man in all that I gave away; and when the inundations of the Nile were great, he who sowed was master of his crop. I kept back nothing for myself from the revenues of the field.'

The last part of this curious inscription, in which Amen sings his own praises, has not failed to attract the attention of several authors, who thought they could recognise in it an allusion to the history of Joseph in [138] Egypt, and to the seven years of famine under his government. We must, however, be on our guard, for two reasons, against believing that King Usurtasen I, under whose reign there was a famine in Egypt, was the Pharaoh of Joseph.

There is first of all the difference of time, which requires quite another reign for the history of the patriarch, and then the indubitable fact that there are other texts dating under quite different sovereigns which make mention of famines, and which according to facts and time entirely correspond with the biblical accounts of the years of famine which followed one another. What the inscription of Amen or Ameni is fitted to teach us in a historical point of view is confined to the information regarding a military expedition of the king directed against the inhabitants of the land of Kash, called in the Holy Scriptures the land of Kush. In this country dwelt anciently the dark-coloured race of pure negro blood from the Egyptian boundary at Syene, southwards towards the sources of the Nile. The names of the races of the land of Kush conquered by the first Usurtasen, or perhaps rather the names of the countries inhabited by them, are preserved on a memorial which was found in the neighbourhood of the present Wady Haifa, a little above the cataract, and is at present exhibited in the collection of Egyptian antiquities at Florence.²⁰

[139] They were named in their order Kas, Shemik, Chesea, Sheat, Acherkin; what follows on this precious monument has unfortunately been destroyed. Wady Haifa, the ancient place of the column of victory, was, without doubt, the last point to which Usurtasen extended his campaign against the inhabitants of the negroland we have mentioned. He undertook it in order to fix the boundaries of the newly acquired land at the second cataract, in the neighbourhood of which these tribes were located. We will further on relate how Wady Haifa became the well-fortified southern boundary of the empire.

The arms of the Egyptians thus succeeded in winning for their country in the South new territories and new precious productions of the soil (in Nubia it was the gold which they sought before everything else). Usurtasen also directed his view to the east, to the caverns and mountains of the Sinaitic peninsula, which had been already worked at an earlier period by the kings of Memphitic origin. Usurtasen sent new colonists to the lonely valleys of this district to beat out of the rock, and work up real Mafkat (turquoises) and copper for the wants of Egypt. Some inscriptions of the Egyptian workmen and officials, which the king had sent there, bear witness to their presence in the valley of Magharah, where the lapse of forty centuries has not obliterated the traces of their activity.

The road from Egypt to Sinai led from the low lands of the Delta by the narrow road which Sineha, in his flight from Egypt to Edom, was obliged to pass. Here, in the low lands on the eastern side, traces of the [140] power of Usurtasen show themselves. In Tanis, 'the great city' of the lower country, inhabited all round by races of Semitic origin, the kings of the twelfth dynasty had already raised buildings and invoked the sculptor's art, to do honour to the gods themselves by these splendid works. The portrait of Usurtasen even has been found in some ruins of this temple world.

Many noble people once served the king. The storm of thousands of years has generally swept away their remembrance, and traces of only a few of them have escaped destruction. Among these was the official Mentu-hotep, whose tombstone, covered with rich inscriptions, is exhibited at Boulak. According to the custom of the time, Mentu-hotep is introduced, sometimes speaking himself, sometimes being spoken of. And what he says is his own praise, his service to the gods, the king, and the country in which he once lived and worked. Let us listen to his confessions, for they disclose to us incidentally historical notices not without value for a knowledge of the times with which we are momentarily occupied. Thus does the mouth of Mentu-hotep, which has long been silent, describe himself in his own praise.

He prides himself on having been 'a man learned in the law, a legislator,' one who apportioned the duties and ordered the works of the district, who kept order in the whole land, who carried out all the behests of the king, who as judge decided and restored his property to its owner. As chief architect of the king he promoted the worship of the gods, and instructed the inhabitants of the country according to the best of his knowledge [141] 'as God orders to be done.' He protected the poor, and freed him who was in want of freedom. Peace was in the words which came from his mouth, and the book of the wise Thot was on his tongue. Very skilled in artistic work, with his own hand he carried out his designs as they ought to be carried out. Being the first in the country, the king's heart was full of him, and the great and distinguished of the court gave him their love. He knew the hidden thoughts of men, and he appreciated a man according to his value. He compelled the enemies of the king to submit to the court of justice of the thirty. He punished the foreigners, quieted the Herusha, and made peace with the negroes. He was governor in the towns of Ant and the lands of Tesher. He gave his orders to the land of the south, and imposed the taxes on the north land.' In a word, Mentu-hotep, who besides was invested with religious functions and entrusted with the treasure of the pharaoh, was the alter ego of the king. 'When he arrived, the great personages bowed down before him at the outer door of the royal palace.'

His panegyric, which embraces twenty-two long lines, finishes with a remark relating to certain buildings. These last, probably a sanctuary belonging to the temple of Osiris, and a well, were executed by the special order of king Mentu-hotep. He says on this subject: 'I it was who arranged the work for the building of the temple .... and sunk the well according to the order of the holiness of the royal lord.'

The well is probably the same about which, more than 2,000 years after its foundation, the Greek [142] geographer Strabo relates that in the Memnonium of Abydos there was a well, to the bottom of which there was a descent by a way covered with arches of a single stone across, admirable for size and architecture. We have as yet not been successful in finding it, in spite of several attempts to discover its situation. What is related as to the building of the temple of Abydos which Usurtasen caused to be carried out by Mentu-hotep, is furnished by a memorial stone in the Louvre (c. No. 12), which is of the time of one of the kings of the thirteenth Theban dynasty, the otherwise unknown King Ra-kha-n-maa Ra-n-ter. A governor of the temple of Abydos, by name Ameni-Seneb, who lived in the time of the above-mentioned ruler, relates about this subject as follows: 'There came to me the scribe of the governor Seneb, a son of the governor, to call me with reference to the proposal of the governor. And I went with him, and I found the governor, who was in his office. And this prince gave me the order in my presence, saying thus: "Be entrusted with the cleansing of the temple of Abydos. Workmen shall be given you with this object, and temple servants of the district of the holy workshop." And I cleansed it from below and from above, and its walls which surrounded the interior. And the writings were filled out with colour, and emblems, and other ornamental work, and all was renewed which king Usurtasen I. had built.'

The work of Mentu-hotep did not then, for some time to come, go to decay, although the drifting sand of the desert, in ancient times as now, did all that was [143] possible to fill the temple of Osiris right up to the roof. A second cleansing, and at the same time, restoration, of this very old temple of Osiris took place in the time and by order of the third Thutmes. An inscription still preserved, which we discovered at Abydos, informs us of this, as will be more fully stated in its place.

First under Seti, the father of the second Ramses, the temple, which had suffered much from the tooth of time, had the good fortune to be completely rebuilt—a fact for which Ramses takes to himself the greatest credit.

To return to our Mentu-hotep. We must recognise in him one of those men distinguished for all sorts of knowledge and accomplishments, who were entrusted again and again with dignities and offices, to which our later times offer nothing in comparison. For he was at the same time a man learned in the law and a legislator, an administrator of the private and the public buildings, who busied himself with priestly and divine things, and carried on foreign wars with the neighbours of the Egyptian empire. But the times were then different to what they now are. The extent of the administration of the State was then limited, and there did not exist preliminary schools for any particular career. The man of energy and industry occupied the place of the highly-trained official, who does not invent or develop anything out of his own resources, but receives from others instructions destined to be useful to him in the career which at some later time he chooses of his own free will.

[144] Among a number of other servants of the king we must, in conclusion, name Meri, the son of Menkhtu. From a stone inscription exhibited in the Egyptian Hall of the Louvre, of the 29th of Paophi, of the ninth year of the reign of Usurtasen I, it appears clear that Meri received from Pharaoh himself the commission to construct for his royal master 'the august places of long duration,' or in other words, the tombs on a grand scale, with columns, gates, and a great court of entrance, all carried out in well-hewn limestone from the old quarries of Troja, opposite the town of Memphis,

We will here leave king Usurtasen I., and turn to his successor, whom the monuments call by the double name

consequently the second Amenemhat according to our mode of speech. Few memorials of historical importance have survived to us of his days, to allow us to cast a glance upon the internal and external position of the Egyptian empire. But it is evident, from still existing inscriptions, that the second Amenemhat trod in the footsteps of his predecessor by extending the southern boundaries of the empire, and, by building well fortified places on the frontier, defended the inhabitants of the south against the incursions of the negroes. The possession of their country, as I have already remarked, had an especial importance for an Egyptian ruler, because its mountains, besides many precious stones, pro- [145] duced gold, which the ancients sought as eagerly as our later generations.

A stone memorial discovered in Abydos, relating to a distinguished official of the second Amenemhat, has preserved to us some remarkable notices about the journeys which were undertaken by some great men at the command of the king, to examine the conquered countries, and to urge on the collection of gold. Incidentally the memorial informs us of the well-known fact that the talented servants of the Pharaoh were entrusted with commissions of the most various kinds.

To these belonged Se-hathor, a true servant of his lord, one of the most distinguished officials of the court, who spared himself no pains to fulfil the commands of Pharaoh according to his wishes. In few but very instructive words, he tells us in the following manner his missions by the royal command: 'I here opened a mine with the young men, and forced the old to wash gold. I brought back the profits. I came as far as the border-land (since called Nubia). The negroes inhabiting it came, subdued by the fear which the lord of the land inspired. I entered the land Heba, visited its water places, and opened its harbours.' The land of Heba, or as it was also called, Heb, lay below the second cataract. Se-hathor seems to have been the first who explored its situation. Later, under the third Usurtasen, an immense stone covered with inscriptions was erected at Semneh, which served as a mark of the Egyptian boundary for the inhabitants of the country of Heba. The same Se-hathor, who [146] boasts 'that he was sent by his holiness many times on missions of all sorts/ mentions in another place of his memorial stone a service of a peculiar description. Let us hear him speak himself: 'They caused me to go over to the building of (king) Amenu, whose pyramid is called Khorp—may he live for ever!—to get made fifteen columns of long-lasting stone. It came to pass (the restoration of this), which was thrown down, was completed in three months. Never was the like done since the rule of the sun-god Ra.'

King Amenu, whose name and existence we only know from this short inscription, appears nowhere else on the monuments. He must, however, belong to the rulers immediately before the twelfth dynasty, and in all probability was an ancestor of the Pharaohs of that dynasty. As such he had a right to the reverence due to a king after his death. Fifteen statues in his house or grave were thrown down in one day. We can easily imagine the perpetration of such mischief in the stormy times of the struggle for the throne at the entrance of the twelfth dynasty in the list of Pharaohs. And it was the care of his successor Amenemhat to give the strictest orders for the re-establishment and re-erection of the public monuments which evidently had been injured. So Se-hathor required only two months to carry out the wishes of the king.

In some towns of Lower Egypt there are traces of the royal might of king Amenemhat; for there was found, under the rubbish and ruins of the destroyed temples, the life-size statue, in black granite, of the wife [147] of this king, who bore the name Nofert, which means either 'the good,' or 'the beautiful.' The royal lady sits with her hair done in ancient fashion, on her throne, on which her full names and titles are chiselled. After a reign of nine-and-twenty years, the king associated with him on the throne, his son. He bore the name

His history is only found here and there on the monuments in a disjointed manner. We can with all confidence affirm, from the scattered notices, that under the rule of this second Usurtasen the empire was in the height of its prosperity. Some lines which are engraven on the rock in the town of Assooan, the ancient Syene, and which date from the common reign of the two kings, father and son, bear witness that the ruler had directed his attention to the southern border-land (Nubia). In this case it is the region Wa-wat about which an official of the king gives information, making his report of the watch kept on the frontiers.

The first kings of the twelfth dynasty with whom we have been hitherto occupied, and after whom we will place the following Pharaoh, Usurtasen III., are mentioned in their succession on the long eloquent inscription which adorns the under border of the hall of sacrifice over the rock tomb of Khnumhotep at Beni-Hassan. In order to give the reader a correct account of the life and labours of these great lords in the pub- [148] lie life of those times, we will lay before him a literal translation of the old speech, in which, for the sake of brevity, we suppress only the particular titles of honour of the individual kings, because they are cumbersome and interrupt the connexion.

We will here finish the translation of this inscription, which the writer continues for many more lines.

The author of it relates to us, in ancient language, the history of one of the most noble families of the country, who lived and worked under the first kings of the twelfth dynasty. We recognise here, besides hints of warlike events in consequence of a change of dynasty, the happy times of a wise and peaceable government, animated with zeal for the welfare of the living, for the service of the gods, and for the remembrance of the dead. In the same places where in our day poor villages with a miserable population present themselves to the eyes of travellers, there were of yore flourishing towns inhabited by an industrious people, and a cultivated country watered by a number of canals extended at the foot of the hills. There were splendid temples frequented by religious multitudes; and the eye admired on the rocky heights magnificent tombs, with rich colouring, hewn in the rock of the mountain in honour of the dead, whose mummies, carefully embalmed and richly decorated, reposed in deep closed wells, deeply pierced in the rock and hidden from the eyes of the curious. Of all this grandeur [152] there have been only some few remains saved from the general destruction, which, thanks to their concealed situation and enormous strength, neither the hand of man nor the tooth of time have been able to destroy. Still, in their ruins, these remains recall to us a state of civilisation so high and so devoted to progress that our age of grand discoveries and high intellectual efforts remains stupefied in the presence of these giants of times gone by.

On examining attentively the words which the above-mentioned inscription puts into the mouth of Khnumhotep, some very interesting observations offer themselves for forming just ideas on the organisation of the public administration, and particularly on the rights which regulated the hereditary succession, according to which the sons and daughters of the governors of the towns and country played a great part. The nobility possessed these rights either by birth or by alliance with a daughter who possessed them hereditarily. It was the reigning Pharaoh who sanctioned them by decrees. The place and dignity of the hak, or governor, is especially of great importance in order to well understand the events which, in the history of Egypt, have so often upset dynasties and changed the regular progress of public affairs. We shall later on have occasion to return to this question, which will serve to explain several facts of great influence in the development of the political state of Egypt.

Another observation, which the text of Beni-Hassan requires us to make, relates to the interest which the Pharaohs took personally in the fixing of the limits which [153] separated the nomes and the towns, and in the distribution of the mass of water which at the epoch of the inundation was spread over the lands. There was good reason for this great care. On the one hand disputes were avoided, which are sometimes inevitable with regard to property, and on the other hand, 'the registers' mentioned in our text had the value of written proofs, which in the name of the Pharaoh, gave accurate information on the apportionment of the lands, according to which the taxes were of course levied.

A third and last point which we cannot pass by in silence relates rather to science than to the organisation of the administration. We speak of the long series of festivals of the old Egyptian calendar mentioned at length towards the end of the inscription. We see that already, at this remote epoch in the history of the world, the savans on the banks of the Nile were much occupied in watching the course of the stars and their return, to place them in connexion with regularly recurring appearances of the cultivated earth. They had firmly fixed ideas of the form of the various lengths of the year.

In order to elucidate this interesting question, we must give the translation of a calendrical text, which is engraved over the entrance door of the mortuary chapel of Khnumhotep at Beni-Hassan.

There are here enumerated the following series of funeral feasts, which we have arranged in such a manner as to make them easily understood by the reader. The days of the months, which we have placed against some of them, are taken from other [154] monuments, which thus more clearly determine the time of the feasts.

A comparison of these feasts with the catalogue of holidays which the long inscription quoted before gave us, enables us to perceive that the last, although less complete, contains three feasts beyond the number stated above. These are the feast of the beginning of the year, another feast at the end of the year, and a third, called the Shetat-feast. It is evident from a study of these calendrical feasts that 2500 B.C. the Egyptians had a know- [155] ledge of four different years. We should not be far wrong in laying down that the new year had reference to the so-called changing year, and the celebration of the beginning of the year to the fixed year. There then remains for the little year the hypothesis of its being the lunar year; and on the other hand we must suppose the great year to be the so-called dog-star circle, or the lunar year with an intercalation. It will depend on further researches to find an explanation of these four forms of years, and to show their calendrical connection.

The rich paintings placed with profusion on the walls of the tomb of Khnumhotep have an inappreciable value for a knowledge of the arts, the trades, and the domestic and public life of the Egyptians of this epoch, quite apart from the holy things to which, in detail, the paintings and inscriptions relate. The very interesting scenes with which the hall of sacrifice is adorned are of great importance in an historical point of view. They relate to the arrival in Egypt of a family of the Semitic nation of the Amu, which has quitted its native country to fix its abode on the blessed banks of the Nile, under the reign of Usurtasen II. This family is composed of thirty-seven persons, men, women, and children, who present their respects to the person of Khnumhotep, asking of him, as it seems, a good reception. The royal scribe Noferhotep, an official in the service of Khnumhotep, offers to his chief a leaf of papyrus, with an inscription in this sense: 'In the sixth year in the reign of King Usurtasen II.; an account of the [156] Amu who brought to the son of a prince Khnum-hotep, while he was alive, the paint for the eyes called Mastemut of the country of Pitshu. Their number is composed of thirty-seven persons.' The scribe in question is followed by another personage, an Egyptian by nation, which a small hieroglyphic legend designates as 'the steward of those, of the name of Khiti.' Without doubt, then, these Semitic immigrants, as soon as they arrived in the territory of Khnumhotep, were placed under the care of Khiti. After these personages who are charged with the introduction, the chief of the Amu presents himself with his suite. The first bears the name and the title of "hak prince of the country of Abesha." This name is of pure Semitic origin, and recalls that of Abishai, borne by the son of the sister of king David, who was distinguished by his military talents in the service of his uncle. Our Abesha approaches respectfully the person of Khnumhotep, whom 'the eldest son whom God had given him accompanies,' and offers him, as a gift or baksheesh, a magnificent wild goat of the kind still found in our day on the rocks of the peninsula of Sinai. Behind him we see his travelling companions, bearded men, armed with lances, bows, and clubs; the women, dressed in the lively fashions of the Amu; the children, and the asses, loaded with the baggage of the travellers, fixing their curious eyes on the Egyptian lord Khnumhotep; while a companion of the little party seems to elicit the harmony of sounds, by the aid of a plectrum, playing on a lyre of very old form. An inscription, traced above [157] the scene which we have been describing, informs us that it is an arrival to bring the 'paint for the eyes, Mastemut, which thirty-seven Amu bring.' The paint in question was an article very much prized in Egypt. It served as a cosmetic to dye the eyebrows and the eyelids a black colour, and they painted under the two eyes a green stripe as a strange adornment. This paint was furnished by the Arabs or Shasu, who inhabited the land called Pitshu (the particular Egyptian term for the better-known Midian), and, with their laden beasts, took the desert route from the East to Egypt, to traffic with the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. This curious picture may serve as an illustration of the history of the sons of Jacob, who arrived in Egypt to implore the favour of Joseph. But it would be a singular error to suppose in this picture at Beui-Hassan any allusion to the history in the Holy Scriptures.

We cannot finish the history of King Usur-tasen II. without returning to the long text of Beni-Hassan, which reveals to us the life of Khnumhotep and his children, in connection with the kings of their country, whose interest in their family was often shown by the posts and honours they conferred upon them. After having made known the events which distinguished his life, Khnumhotep continues to call the attention of the reader to the honours accorded to his descendants on the part of the Pharaohs. Khnum-hotep gives the following account:

In spite of several difficulties which are unavoidable in this very ancient language, thus much is evident, that Nekht, son of Khnumhotep, was named governor of the Cynopolitan nome, situated to the north of the nome of Mah, and at the same time that he had conferred upon him the dignity of chief of the 'Southern land.' It is almost certain that this embraced several nomes which were to the south of the Oxyrhynchite nome.

was the name of the previous king's successor. His name had a good sound in those days of the prosperity of the Egyptian empire, since he distinguished himself above all other kings by his power and wisdom. His fame long outlived him. The memory of this powerful and warlike king has also been preserved through the course of ages down to our own time, thanks to the sentiments of gratitude which made the Egyptians perpetuate the memory of the great king Usurtasen III., whom they honoured with divine worship, building him temples, and offering sacrifices to him. During the whole of his reign this Pharaoh was particularly engaged in military expeditions, which were directed against the unfortunate negroes inhabiting the land of Kush, with the view of regulating the frontiers and constructing fortresses to stop once for all the robber inroads into Egypt on the side of the south. His predecessors had extended their campaigns tolerably far to the south, some even to the second cataract; but the complete subjection of the inhabitants of these countries had not nearly been completed.

The inscription on a stone which was discovered on the island of Elephantina by an English traveller, beginning with, 'In the year 8, month Epiphi,' of our Usurtasen III., 'the friend of the goddess Sati, of Elephantina,' names especially this as the time when the king moved forward 'to beat the miserable land of Kush.' In another inscription coming [160] from Abydos mention is made of a similar campaign of the king against 'the miserable Kush,' under the date of the nineteenth year of the reign of the king. Of these two campaigns, the first finds its confirmation from the inscription of a memorial stone, which was found in the neighbourhood of Wady Haifa.

Here, close below the second cataract of the Nile, King Usurtasen built sanctuaries and fortresses on the heights which commanded both banks of the river. Their remains still exist in our day, and are now known under the name of Semne and Koomme. The origin of this denomination must be very ardent, since the words Samina and Koummou, traced in Greek characters before the Christian era, are found on an inscription of the walls of the temple of Semne. Two large stone columns, covered with long inscriptions, served anciently as boundary stones to fix the frontier between the negroland called Heh and the Egyptian empire. Both were placed here, on the territory of the above-named fortresses, under the reign and by the order of Usurtasen III., as a visible warning to the dusky-coloured races of the so-called Nubia. The inscription of the older stone begins with the short but eloquent words: 'This is the frontier of the South, which was fixed in the year 8, in the reign of his majesty King Usurtasen III., who gives life eternally. Let it not be permitted to any negro to cross it on his journey, except barks loaded with all kinds of cattle, oxen, goats, and asses belonging to the negroes, and except the negro who comes to barter in the land of Aken. To these, on the contrary, every- [161] thing good shall be given. But otherwise let it not be permitted to a vessel belonging to negroes to enter on its road the country of Heh.'

Without doubt Aken is the old name of the country of Nubia, which Pliny (vi. 184), in his enumeration of the towns of Ethiopia, described by the explorers of Nero, calls by the designation of Acina, since he mentions it directly after the well-known hill fortress, Primi (now Qasr Ibrim), and gives it a distance of 310,000 Roman paces from Syene. The situation of the place agrees sufficiently with the conditions which necessarily connect it with the Aken or Akin of the times of the third Usurtasen, near the Second Cataract.

The war against, and final subjection of, the lower negroland, Kush or Kash—since it is thus that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty expressly name the theatre of the warlike deeds of the Egyptians of this period—was carried on not without cruelty ; and the pictures—which on the stone columns of victory of the sixteenth year of Usurtasen III. give an idea of the way in which the war was carried on against the negroes—remind one of the most infamous razzias in the recent history of African warfare. The king, who penetrated into the interior of the country between the Nile and the Red Sea, took possession of the women, caught the men (who had gone to their wells), drove away the cattle, and set fire to the standing crops.

Such a merciless, continued persecution of the inhabitants of Nubia, who had been already oppressed by the Pharaohs, in the end intimidated them, and they were induced to submit to Egyptian supremacy and [162] protection, and to endure the unavoidable loss of their freedom and independence. Usurtasen gained his object, and from Syene to beyond the second cataract, the Nile valley and the country on both sides of the river became part of the Egyptian empire, and the gods of the Pharaohs took up their abode in their temples newly-founded on the territory which had been won.

As its conqueror, Usurtasen necessarily stood in especial honour with his contemporaries as well as with later generations—and we can quite understand that posterity should accord him the honours of a god-protector of Nubia. More than fifteen centuries after the events which had taken place on Nubian territory under Usurtasen III., the great Thutmes III.—the real Alexander of Egyptian history—caused to be built to his ancestor on the spot where he had raised the fortress of Semne, a temple which was consecrated for ever to the memory of the god-king Usurtasen III., beside the newly-created divinity of the country, Totun, a particular form of the ram-headed Khnum of Elephantina. Thus, for example, we can read at Semne the following inscription: 'you princes who approach this memorial stone, who love and invoke the gods of your country, who intend to reach again your native towns, say here your prayers before the Nubian god Totun .... and before the defunct king Usurtasen III., that they may graciously permit the usual funeral offering in memory of such a one.' The same King Thutmes III. had not omitted to consecrate standing altars to the before-named gods Totun and Usurtasen, and the god Khnum, and to found sacrifices, to [163] be offered on the anniversaries, and at the times of the principal feasts of the Egyptian calendar, by the priests of the temple of Semne. Thus it was, to use an expression of the Egyptians, that Thutmes III. caused to live again monumentally the memory of Ins glorious ancestor.

This is the text which contains the great dedicatory inscription put up by the Alexander of old Egypt in memory of these deeds.

After several groups, the mutilated state of which does not permit a continuous translation, the text continues:

There are a great number of memorials and inscriptions which are dedicated to the memory of the third Usurtasen, or the officials, who in his reign devoted their knowledge and industry to the service of the king in the execution of public works or holy buildings. The inexhaustible quarries of Hanmiamat furnished, as usual, the materials for building, to which the master quarrymen, accompanied by thousands, proceeded to cut the stone. Active life then reigned in the so-called valley of Rohan, where inscriptions have faithfully preserved down to the present day the remembrance of these ancient writers and their worship of the great mountain god, Khem-Pan of Coptos.

We will quote a tablet on the rock of the fourteenth year of the reign of the king to lay before the reader an example of this kind of memorial inscription drawn [165] from these distant ages of Egyptian antiquity: 'In the year 14, the 18th day of the month Khoiakh, in the reign of King Usurtasen III., living for ever, who loves the god Khem-Hor, of the town of Coptos, behold that his holiness ordered the departure for the country of Rohan, for the execution of a monument consecrated by his holiness to the god Harshef, master of the town of Heracleopolis-Magna.' As on all such occasions, the official to whom the work was confided does not fail to let his remarkable services be known, and to recommend himself to posterity by the highest self-praise.

one of the names of the succeeding king whose remembrance has been preserved less by the fame of successfully conducted wars than by works which have conferred the blessings of peace for more than twenty centuries ; for he was the founder of the wonderful Moeris Lake, of whose vastness and utility the ancients are never tired of telling us, so full were they of praise for the construction itself and the constructor of this artificial sea.

The prosperity of Egypt in ancient times, as in our own day, has always depended on the fertility of the soil produced by the periodic inundations of the Nile. When they are kept within proper bounds, they spread blessings over a rich country. When the waters of the river rise above the height which is necessary to irrigate the country, they completely destroy the hopes of the labourers. When, on the contrary, the river is short of water at the epoch of the inundation, sterility [166] and famine are the consequence. It was necessary, therefore—and it has always been so at all epochs of Egyptian history—to observe beforehand and to regulate the inundations by artificial means, by the construction of dykes, sluices, and canals. As in our advanced times, the rise and increase of the Nile is telegraphed from Khartoum to Cairo, to warn the Government in time how to deal with the coming waters, and to make the necessary preparations for the approaching inundation; so in the time of King Ame-nemhat and his successors, the southernmost point of the empire—the newly-founded fortress at Semne—served as a point of observation of the rise and increase of the river. From this point a message went to the countries lying more southwards. On the rocks of Semne and Koomme, there was always marked the highest point of the flood for comparison, and the stroke marking it was accompanied by a corresponding inscription. Thus we read on one place on the rock, 'Height of the Nile in the fourteenth year of the reign of his holiness King Amenemhat III., living for ever.' In several examples of this kind we moreover meet with the titles and the names of the employ who, before the entry of the great waters into Egypt, were sent to examine the gradual increase of the river, and to take the necessary measures. A great number of indications of this kind, which M. Lepsius first collected during his stay in Nubia, permits us to assert a very remarkable fact, that at the epoch of the twelfth dynasty—that is, forty-three centuries before our days—the point of the greatest height was 8.17 metres [167] above the greatest height which the inundation ever reaches in our day; and that the average height of the Nile under Amenemhat III. surpasses that of our times by more than seven metres.

The great attention which this king bestowed upon this question of the rise of the Nile will be best proved by noticing the construction of the enormous basin which he caused to be dug by the hands of men in the modem province of the Fayoom for the reception and storage of the superfluous water of the inundation. This lake, so rich in fish, was protected by artistic dams on all sides, and had a communication with the river by a tunnel for water, and locks which were constructed for the influx or the complete shutting off of the water. The name of Moeris, which the Greek authors gave to this lake—a name in which they thought they could recognise the name of a king—was derived from the Egyptian appellation Men, or Mi-uer, which means every kind of basin or lake. The Arab name Fayoom, given to the province of the ancient lake Moeris is explained by the older name Pha-joom, i.e. 'lake country.' For a long time it was supposed that this basin was the same as the Birket-el-keroon, a great natural lake to the west of the Fayoom, until, by his researches, M. Linant-Bey proved that the ancient lake Moeris was situated in the south-east part of the province of the Fayoum, where the depression of the ground and the ancient dykes exactly describe its site. At the epoch of the inundation the waters of the river entered by means of a canal into the lake, where locks retained them. At the time of the low waters, the [168] gates were opened to irrigate the great plains of the districts in the neighbourhood of the lake.

The same king was also the builder of the magnificent palace known under the name of the Labyrinth, near the aqueduct of the Lake Moeris, as well as of the pyramid which was not far from this edifice. The wonderful structure of the Labyrinth, which is entirely ignored on the Egyptian monuments, consisted, according to Herodotus, of three thousand halls and chambers, half above the soil, and the same number underneath it, with twelve covered courts, the entrances of which were opposite to each other. According to Strabo, the Labyrinth was like a small representation of the whole kingdom, composed of as many palaces as there were nomes, namely, twenty-seven. The description of the whole place, in which Strabo mentions the enormous mass of blocks of stone, makes it appear as a most astonishing work, of which, I may add at once, at this day only a small number of ruins remain. Blocks of stone, covered with traces of the names of Amenemhat III., and of the queen who followed him, Sebeknofru, are all that remain near the pyramid of Ellahoon as the last farewell greeting to us of the once celebrated Egyptian Labyrinth.

The province which anciently contained Lake Moeris has not had the good luck to be frequently mentioned in the texts engraved on the walls of the Egyptian sanctuaries. They hated it, and they hated its inhabitants, because of the worship with which they honoured the god Sebek, the tutelary divinity of this region, and the crocodile, his sacred animal. This last [169] being for the adorers of Osiris, one of the forms of the god Set, the Satan of the Egyptian mythology, we can very well explain the singular circumstance that, in the list of nomes, the province of Lake Moeris is struck out as hostile to Osiris. Thus it is that we know nothing of the Labyrinth, or the pyramid, or the towns, nor the worship of the neighbourhood of this lake. This want is very happily filled up by the discovery of a papyrus which relates to the geography of Lake Moeris, although in one sense it is far removed from geographical instruction. The manuscript, at present preserved in the Museum of Boolak, represents the plan of the basin, with its canal. Around the basin the author of the drawing has marked a certain number of towns and sanctuaries, accompanied by explanatory texts, which contain very precious information for a knowledge of the various places, and the worship of the divinities on the borders of the basin. Thanks to these indications, we are enabled clearly to ascertain the different names of the lake. It is sometimes called She, i.e. 'the basin or lake;' sometimes She-uer, 'the large lake basin;' sometimes Mi-uer (Moeris I), 'the great lake.' From the most universal name, She, the country was called Ta-She, 'the country of the lake,' of which the arab-copt word Fayoom is an accurate translation. Another appellation of the lake, including the tombs, is the following: Hunt, 'the water-dam,' a common expression, which was used in the list of names for the great basin in the back part of each district. The place at which the canal, coming from the Nile, entered into the valley of the great chain of mountains [170] of the Fayoom, was called Ape-tash, i.e. the defile of the country of the lake. Here was the opening of the sluice of the canal—the Ra-hunt or La-hunt, from which word certainly comes the modem name of the place Ellahoon, with the Arab article el before Lahoont. The same word is no doubt hidden in the Greek appellation of Labyrinth, which by the mouth of the Egyptians would have been pronounced Rape-ro-hunt, or Lape-ro-hunt, that is, 'the temple at the flood-gate of the canal.'

From the canal, in a straight direction westwards, we arrive at the capital of the old 'country of the lake,' in which the kings of the twelfth dynasty, in eager competition with one another, founded temples, and raised stone obelisks to the god Sebek, with the head of a crocodile and his whole family of gods, Amonao, Hershef, Sokar, Hor, and others. In the neighbourhood the chief place of the Fayoum, the so-called Medinet-el-Fayoom, which means 'chief city of the Fayoom,' bore, in ancient times, the name of Shat (with an uncertain meaning—cutting, cutting right through, well, canal), or Pi-Sebek, i.e. the dwelling of Sebek; whence, in a corresponding manner, the Greeks called it Crocodilopolis, or 'the city of the crocodile:' for, as Strabo rightly remarks, 'in this country the crocodile was much venerated.' An animal, carefully chosen, with the name Suchos (that is Sebek, Subek with the Greek ending os added), was kept there in a lake, and fed by visitors.

The large stones which were used for the construction of the monuments mentioned above were [171] drawn from the quarries of the valley of Hammamat. The texts sculptured on the rocks of these quarries make this fact incontestable. Thus it was that, in the second year of the reign of Amenemhat III., a personage of distinction, bearing the same name as the king, arrived there, with his men, to cause the works to be executed with which they were charged. In an inscription of fourteen lines he vaunts the greatness of his king, 'who had beaten the negroes and opened the world.' According to another text, dated in the year 9, the king went personally into the valley of Kohan, to give orders relating to the construction of monuments in the town of Crocodilopolis, among which is mentioned a statue of the king (seated), of five cubits in height. The continuation of the inscription relates that it was a certain Usurtasen who had the charge of superintending the works. Other texts engraved on the rock state the same fact. The Pharaoh sent on several occasions architects to Rohan to cause stones to be cut out which were used by the sculptors to execute the statues and other works.

The memory of Amenemhat lII. is further preserved in inscriptioos engraved on the rocks of the peninsula of Sinai, the mines and quarries of which were worked in the earliest times of Egyptian history. They are dated in different years, from 2 to 42, of his reign, and furnish us with a proof that the Egyptians kept up establishments in these desolate regions which were very melancholy to inhabit for a prolonged stay.

The principal envoys of the king, the treasurers, artists, officials of the quarrymen, and other similar [172] persons, who had any share whatever in carrying out the commands of the Pharaoh, never left their places without perpetuating on the rock the remembrance of their stay. Each writes his title, his name, and all his family, and invokes the gods of the place, and before all the divine Hathor, 'the lady of the Mafkat land,' Supt Hor, 'the lord of the East,' and the very ancient local god of the peninsula of Sinai, king Senofru, who had become almost fabulous.

In an inscription of the second year of the king on a rock tablet at the entrance of Wady Magharah, in which a picture of Amenemhat III. as king of Lower Egypt, appears standing before the deities we have mentioned, there is express mention of sending away Mafkat, or turquoises, and Khomet or copper. To what the number 736 relates which is written by the side is uncertain.

I have already pointed out, that the kings of the twelfth dynasty with remarkable zeal set themselves to venerate Osiris and to maintain his temple in Abydos. The fullest testimony to this fact is borne by a monumental stone discovered last year in the cemetery of Abydos, to a certain Sehotep-ab-ra, who was there buried, and who during his life under the reigns of the kings Usurtasen III. and Amenemhat III. was charged to take care of the temple and the worship of the god 'Osiris in the West,' and the jackal-headed guardian of the dead Apheru. As is proved by the immense number of 163 inscriptions with which the stone now exhibited in the museum at Boolak is covered, Sehotep-ab-ra had received the commission to attend to the [173] service of the mysterious places in the temple of Abydos, to regulate the feasts of the God, to superintend the priests, and in his especial province as a skilful artist to build the holy Temple-bark, and cover it with ornamental painting. In chosen but very difficult language, rich in poetical turns and uncommon words, the dead declares himself a master of worldly wisdom. He introduces his expressions rich in meaning with the words, 'I say a great thing; listen! I will teach you the nature of eternity,' and he ends his wise remarks with the usual requisition to survivors to visit his grave and to repeat the prayer of the sacrifices of the dead: 'Ye priests of Osiris in the West in the town of Abydos, you temple servants of the same God, you priests of the king Amenemhat IIL the eternal and ever living, and of king Usurtasen III. the defunct, and you temple servants of the same (kings), you inhabitants of this town and every one in the nome of Tinis, who will visit this grave, going away or coming, may you love your king, may you prize the gods of your country, and then will your children sit in your seat. You who enjoy life and do not yet know death, repeat the prayer of the offerings of the dead for the name of (here follow his titles) Sehotep-ab-ra.'

These sovereigns finish the twelfth dynasty, but the monuments fail to give us any important information about the history of the king and his sister queen Sebek-nofru-ra. This last was an heiress as the princess Nitaker [174] was at the end of the sixth and Nofertari at the end of the seventeenth dynasty. The succession to the empire went by marriage to a new race, with which we shall be more particularly occupied when we come to consider the thirteenth dynasty. The word Sebek, which is in the name of the Queen, reminds us again of the god of the Fayoom or 'country of the Lake,' which by the works of Amenemhat III. had become of such great importance for Egypt.

We cannot bid adieu to this remarkable period in the Egyptian empire without casting a glance on the great events, which so visibly distinguish the middle empire at its entry into the world.

Under the reign of the royal family which composes this dynasty the frontiers of Egypt were extended towards the south, as far as the second cataract. Above this were placed the two fortresses of Semne and Koomme, and formed the frontier, near the negro lands Heh and Akin. The domination of the Egyptian sceptre was vigorously maintained in the peninsula of Sinai. Officials of the king, supported by a large military force, maintained the Pharaonic sovereignty in the mountains of the land of Mafkat. The Egyptians of this epoch kept up also a very active commerce with the tribes of Libya towards the east, and with the inhabitants of Palestine and the neighbouring countries. The arrival in Egypt of representatives of these nations is a fact which is proved by numerous paintings and inscriptions in the [175] mortuary chapels. The light-coloured Libyans frequented Egypt to show their address in warlike games and dances. The dark-coloured inhabitants of Kush flocked there to serve the great lords, and Asiatics presented themselves at the frontier of Lower Egypt, which was secured by fortresses against an entrance without permission, or unexpected attack, to ask for permission to traffic on the banks of the Nile. The Egyptian empire appeared at that time as the centre of civilisation, and of all progress in intellect, in art, and in trade. This had a great effect on strangers, and led the neighbouring nations to look upon the Egyptians as an important and cultivated nation. In fact such an opinion of Egypt was well founded and justly deserved. Intellectual life developed itself fully. They strove after moral ennoblement; schools were established in the principal towns of the country; and human and divine wisdom was taught in the assemblages of the holy servants of the gods. The natural conditions of the country were improved by the constructions which served to regulate the periodic inundations of the Nile. The territory of the entire country was divided into districts, and engraved stones, fixed as limits, separated neighbouring properties. Written lists, which were laid up in the royal house, gave information on the superficies, the boundaries, and water supply of each nome. The kings constructed temples and raised monuments 'to their name,' in honour of the divinities, and in memory of their own persons ; they continued to build pyramids as tombs, and the great personages of the court, most of them allies of the [176] king, prepared their graves in the deepest pits in the mountains, and placed halls of sacrifice and chambers over the grave, in which all the art and splendour of the sculptors and the painters of those times were developed. In these by means of excessively rich inscriptions in the decorated rock-hewn halls, the different branches of human industry were represented with the most lively treatment, and in infinite detail, for the information of future generations and for the enjoyment of cotemporaries who still breathed in the light of the sun. They worked with tools unknown to us the precious quarries which existed in the valley of Hamamat; they drew the rose and the black granite from the 'red mountain,' near Assouan; they brought back the produce of gold from the parched deserts of Nubia, and worked the mineral riches of the peninsula of Sinai, to gain precious turquoises and useful copper.

At this epoch the centre of gravity of Egyptian administration was placed in Middle Egypt Two towns of that territory, Crocodilopolis, the town of Sebek on the shores of lake Moeris, and Heracleopolis 'the great,' whose position is indicated in our day by the site of the Arab town of Ahnas, rapidly rose to an importance of which we can only judge by their remains and by the information of the monuments. Art, in different directions of activity, had arrived at a height of perfection, the chief character of which we cannot better describe than in reproducing the sagacious judgment of M. de Rouge, a master in our science, who was too soon taken from us.

'Long generations,' says this learned Academician, [177] 'the precise dates of which we cannot fix, saw different phases in Egyptian art succeed each other. Our museums contain sufficient specimens to enable us to follow the principal transformations. We know not the commencement of this art; we find it existing from the monuments of the fourth dynasty. These, the first to which we can assign a certain rank, are extremely advanced in many respects. Architecture already shows us an inconceivable perfection in the cutting and placing of blocks of great dimensions. The passages of the great pyramid remain a model of exactness of building, which has never been surpassed. We are obliged to guess the exterior style of the temples of this first epoch, and to restore it from the bas-reliefs of the tombs, and the decoration of the sarcophagi. The style was simple and noble in the highest degree; the straight line and the play of the different levels of the outline were the only elements of decoration. One sole motive of ornament varies these dispositions; it was composed of two lotus leaves placed opposite to each other.

'The style of the figures, as well in the statues as in the bas-reliefs, of the earliest times is distinguished by a broad and squat appearance; it seems that in the course of centuries the race became thinner and more élancé from the action of the climate. In the primitive monuments they sought the imitation of nature with more simplicity, and keeping all due proportion. In the execution of the single parts, the muscles especially are always better placed, and indicated more strongly.

'The figures preserved this character till near the end of the twelfth dynasty. This is the epoch when [178] took slenderer and thinner forms. Architecture had then made great progress. With regard to ornamentation, we find under the seventeenth dynasty the first columns which have been preserved to our days in Egypt; thick, fluted, and covered with a simple top piece in the shape of a die. They resemble in a striking manner the first Doric columns.

'The bas-reliefs, devoid of all perspective, are often in the first empire of extreme delicacy. They were always coloured with care. There are some m which the freedom of the attitudes and the truth of the movements seem to promise to Egyptian art a destiny very different from that which was reserved to it in later centuries. The limestone statues were often entirely painted; the figures of granite were coloured in some of their parts, as the eyes, hair, and drapery. The chef d'oeuvre of the art of the first empire is a colossal leg of black granite, from the statue of king Usurtasen I., belonging to the Museum of Berlin, discovered in the ruins in a town of Lower Egypt, Tanis. This fragment suffices to prove that the first Egyptian school was in a better way of art than that of the second empire. The engraving of the sculptures leaves nothing to be desired in these first Egyptian monuments. It is generally executed in relief up to the fifth dynasty. The engraving in intaglio of the twelfth dynasty has never been surpassed at any epoch. The obelisks of Heliopolis and of the Fayoom authorise us to suppose temples of a grandeur and magnificence equal to these fine remains of the twelfth dynasty. We know, in fact, that one of the wonders of the world, the labyrinth [179] of the Fayoom, was constructed by one of these kings.'

Such are the striking observations on this subject by a master hand, and I will only venture to add a few remarks on the actual authors of those works. There is in all art histories of ancient and modern times, without excepting the most recent, constantly a depreciatory judgment given on the artists of those old days, who, when viewed most favourably, are placed on the same line with skilful mechanics. We cannot too strongly protest against such a judgment, arising from a complete ignorance of the inmost essence of Egyptian art, or from shallowness and a superficial way of looking at it, which ought not to be presumed to exist in judges of art. Egyptian art is art in the noblest meaning of the word. Let anyone look at the lifelike heads of the statues of Meidoom, the so-called Sheikh-el-Belled, of King Khephren, and the Pharaohs of the new empire, and maintain the contrary. But it is Egyptian art, that is to say, it is bound by fetters which the artist dared not loosen for fear of clashing with traditional directions and ancient usage. There floated before the Egyptian artists as well as the masters in the old history of Greek art higher ideals than the censurers brought up in 'the Greek school' alone dreamt of. In this respect we agree with the fullest conviction, in the workmanlike explanation and critique with which Lepsius, in his suggestive work 'On some Egyptian Art-forms and their Development,' has met these depreciatory judges of Egyptian art.

Attention has sometimes been called, in order to [180] designate the so-called mechanical style of Egyptian art, to the remarkable fact that history has not transmitted to us the names of any Egyptian masters. This is correct for those who are ignorant of the contents of Egyptian inscriptions, and hence do not know that the artist was the most honoured man in the empire, and stood close to the Pharaoh, who poured his favours in a full stream on the man of 'enlightened spirit and skilful hand.' The artists themselves relate this to us, and boast of their works and the means for creating them, which reflection and inventive genius had delivered to them. To make mention of an example, let us remember the words on the tomb and memorial stone²¹ of an old Egyptian master, named Martisen, who lived in the days of King Neb-kheru-ra Mentu-hotep;²² that is to say, forty-four centuries before our time, and who thought and worked as an artist. He calls himself 'a master among those who understand art, and a plastic artist,' who 'was a wise artist in his art.' He relates in succession his knowledge in the making of statues, in every position, according to prescribed use and measure; and brings forward, as his particular invention, an etching with colours, if I have rightly understood the expression, 'which can neither be injured by fire nor washed off by water;' and, as a further explanation of this, states that 'no man has arisen who has been able to do this, except himself alone and the eldest son of his race, whom God's will has created. He has arisen able to [181] do this, and the exercise of his hand has been admired in masterly works in all sorts of precious stones, from gold and silver, to ivory and ebony.' His son bore the name Usurtasen, and belonged to an artistic family, whose pedigree, according to the stone, is as follows:

Martisen and his son Usurtasen, without any doubt, opened the age of the highest art development in the old empire, under the kings of the twelfth dynasty, whose taste for art the monuments of their day clearly demonstrate. It will be for future generations to read from the inscriptions the succession of artists and their families who contributed this high state, and to enumerate their performances. For the purpose of knowing this particular branch of human activity, certain gaps require to be filled up, so that we of the present day must renounce the task of fully comprehending it. But science must not be a silent witness of those unintelligible complaints which are raised against the essential character of Egyptian art; she must loudly raise her voice, and point out that even the dead stones speak to us with living voice. Honour, therefore, to the most ancient art, honour to the first artists, whom we have principally to thank for the legacy which has been bequeathed to us of the youthful history of humanity.

Here we find very imperfect remains wherever we look. For the hope with which we left the times of the Amenemhats and Usurtasens, and turned our watchful and expectant gaze with joy to the next period of the history of the Egyptian empire and its wide-extending development, is dashed through the want of monuments. The table of the kings of Abydus passes with a sudden leap over this broad chasm, which stretches from the twelfth to the eighteenth dynasty, since it ranges the first king of the latter dynasty after the princess Sebek-nofru-ra. The traditions of the ancients, starting from the historical information in the Manethonian works upon the period of which we are treating, present us error and confusion instead of truth and clearness. The often-mentioned and priceless treasure of the canon of the Turin papyrus would be the only source which could serve us as a guide in this dark labyrinth; but a glance at the pieces of it which contain the list of the kings of the thirteenth house shows us at once the frightful gaps in the mutilated and tattered papyrus. Fate has done everything to place difficulties in the [183] way of the solution of this question, and the hard task is laid on human intelligence to collect the slight sparks for kindling a light which may illumine the darkness of five hundred years. With what active zeal has science endeavoured to fill up the huge gaps! How has she sought after a firm point, which might serve her as a sure basis! All has been in vain, and only the hope remains, to gain from hidden undiscovered memorials the solution of the riddle.

All that our endeavours have as yet succeeded in obtaining is limited to the well-grounded belief, that long after the conclusion of the twelfth dynasty native kings enjoyed unlimited sway in the land, until new lords, of foreign origin, seated in the eastern parts of the Egyptian low lands, gradually drove back the old race of kings, and established the right of conquest over the real heirs of the throne.

Before relating a history of these foreign conquerors from Manetho, we will give the succession of the dynasties, the number of the kings, and the time of their total duration from Manethonian sources, and on the authority of the last and newest researches of special inquirers:

13th	dynasty of	Thebes	60 kings	458 years
14th	"	Xois	76	484
15th	"	Hycsos	6	260
16th	"	Hycsos	?	251
17th	"	Thebes	?	?

Without stopping to examine the figures which easily lend themselves to all the chronological systems which might be formed to reconstruct the canon of Manetho, [184] science would not be much mistaken in arranging the above-mentioned series and their periods of duration in the following collateral branches:

A glance at the mutilated fragments of the royal canon of Turin will convince the reader that the five last columns of the once complete work were consecrated to the memory of kings who undoubtedly belonged to the preceding dynasties. One may reckon their total number in this MS. at (5 x 30), 150 but it is evident that the genealogical calculation could not be applied to fix approximatively the duration of their reign according to human generations. The figures which have been preserved in the canon, and which served to indicate the years of the reign of each of the kings of whom we have spoken, rarely surpass the number of three or four. It is almost certain therefore, that the history of Egypt at this epoch must have been made up of times of revolt and interior troubles, and murders and assassinations, by which the life and length of reign of the princes was not subjected to the [185] ordinary conditions of human existence. These were times about which Ramses III. remarks, in the so-called 'Harris Papyrus,' in the British Museum, that 'the land of Kem was in the hands of the princes of the towns of the foreigners, of whom one neighbour killed another.'

As we have remarked above, it is incontestable that the kings who immediately followed the twelfth dynasty were still in full possession of Upper and Lower Egypt. For a long time the opinion was prevalent that the thirteenth dynasty marked an epoch when foreigners made an invasion, so that Lower Egypt, or at least the eastern part of the lower country, was under the dominion of foreign kings. To this must be opposed the well-established fact that many kings of the thirteenth dynasty, and not only those who were first in order of time, enjoyed perfect quiet in the Delta on the east side, and were occupied in erecting monuments, the remains of which have been preserved to our day, and whose size and kind do not point to their having been hastily constructed. Li the days of their authors and their origin peaceful times must have prevailed, and nothing looks like a foreign occupation by the side of native kings. Among these monuments especially belong the wonderful stones and 'statues' in the fields of Tanis, the biblical Zoan, which was situated quite close to the territory occupied afterwards by the so-called kings of the Hycsos, who here placed their camps and planned their hostile invasions into -the neighbouring region of the low lands, and into the countries of Upper Egypt. This [186] sudden attack of the foreigners must have taken place towards the end of the thirteenth dynasty.

In the lists of Manetho, such as they exist in our day, the names of the kings of the thirteenth dynasty are passed by in obstinate silence, as if they were judged unworthy of historic recollection. The canon of Turin supplies in some sort this lacuna, and fortunately the remaining fragments of the papyrus are just sufficient to establish a few of the most important names of the Pharaohs belonging to this dynasty. According to a custom which we very often find in the monumental lists, the canon of Turin only informs us of the official names of the kings, and in particular cases alone the family name appears in the inside of the royal cartouche.

Nevertheless, thanks to the indications of the monuments of the epoch, which furnish the double Pharaonic names, we are sufficiently informed to be able to state that the greater number of the kings of this family bore the name of Sebek-hotep. The monuments have as yet enabled us to recognise seven princes of the name of Sebek-hotep. In spite of the Theban origin of the royal house which we are considering, the frequent occurrence of the name of Sebek-hotep, 'servants of Sebek,' shows unmistakably that the Pharaohs of the thirteenth dynasty specially venerated the god with the head of a crocodile, Sebek, the same to whom the kings of the preceding dynasty had built a very solid temple in the centre of the Fayoom, and in the neighbourhood of the famous lake Moeris. There was then an intimate connection between the two royal houses of the twelfth and thir- [187] teenth dynasties, and we may suppose that Queen Sebek-nofer-ra, the heiress of the twelfth dynasty, had transmitted the worship of the god Sebek to her son—for as such we must recognise him—whom the Canon of Turin places at the head of the thirteenth dynasty, and designates by the name Ra-Khu-taui, that is to say, 'the protecting Sun of the land.' His name appears not only at this time, but henceforward continually until the commencement of the eighteenth dynasty.

By following the fragments of the papyrus of Turin which have been preserved, we are able to prepare the following table of the kings who succeeded Sebek-hotep I. These Pharaohs belong to the thirteenth dynasty, which, according to Manetho, as we have said, was composed of the number of sixty kings. It is possible that Manetho made a choice out of a greater number of kings, who, at any rate, are certified to us on the authority of the papyrus.

About sixty other names complete the list, which fills the two last pages of the roll. Most unfortunately almost all the names on these pages are in such a state of destruction, and so broken into bits, that no approximate conjecture—and still less any suitable comparison—can be given of them. Only one peculiarity can be stated, that they seem sometimes to begin with the word Sokhem, and sometimes with the character meaning User.

To the names, which manifestly belong to a destroyed place in the table mentioned above, I reckon another, Sebek-hotep VI., who was more particularly designated in the official cartouche by the name Khaan-chra, and whom I have arranged in his proper place by the help of the list of the king's ancestors in the chamber of Karnak.

If we now question the monuments about the previous history of the king's cartouches in this long barren list, they very seldom satisfy our curiosity with [190] any valuable results. But just on this account, because the number of contemporary witnesses of this most obscure of all divisions of the history of the Egyptian empire is so limited, does their worth increase in the eyes of the inquirer, and their importance for arriving at a judgment on the dominion of the Hycsos becomes evidently almost priceless. In the following remarks we will call attention to the most important monuments of the thirteenth dynasty according to their sequence in point of time.

The appended genealogical table,²³ compiled with the assistance of a number of inscriptions containing accounts of families, will give the reader an idea of the descent of individual kings from persons not of royal origin, as also of their entrance into the circle of Pharaonic parentage by marriages with the daughters of kings. The queen Nubkhas (IV. race) furnishes a very important and instructive example.

Among the sources of information which the monuments have preserved for us concerning individual kings of this period, the inscriptions appear to us especially worthy of notice which exist at the most northern and most southern points of the Nubian country; in the one case on the rocky island at the first cataract in the neighbourhood of Philae; in the other case, on the stormy shores of Semne and Koomme above the second cataract. Sebekhotep III. did not fail, like his predecessor of the twelfth dynasty, to leave engraved a record of the highest point to which the overflow of the Nile reached in his day. We possess [191] four different accounts of this sort; that of the third year of his reign announces simply, 'Height of the Nile in the third year of the reign of Bang Sebekhotep III., living for ever.' Ranseneb, a distinguished courtier and commander of the armed forces in the fortress of Sokhem-khakaura, founded by King Usurtasen III., administered in those days the southern portion of the newly-conquered country, and in this capacity possessed the right to place his own name by the side of his royal lord.

The eighteenth king of the list, Smonkhkara, with the family name, Mermesha (perhaps it was also read Mermenfiu), claims especial attention from the fact that in the excavations of the field of ruins at Tanis two monuments came to light, statues of this king of colossal size, and wonderfully perfect in the execution of the individual parts. The names of the king are clearly legible in the middle column of the inscription. Both statues were once placed in the great temple of Patah, in Tanis, as witnesses of the undiminished strength of Mermesha. The chief of the Hycsos Apepi, no less than Ramses II., who lived 400 years later, immortalised themselves by cutting their own names on the monument of this king, as if Mermesha enjoyed, in their estimation, especial favour or respect. His name, Mermesha—or however people preferred to pronounce the last part of the name—meant the 'leader of armies,' or 'captain of warriors.' Without wishing to treat such a designation as a probable indication of a troublous and warlike period, we may, on the contrary, show that it had relation to a very [192] peaceful office, for the high-priest of the temple of Mendes (called in our time, Tmai-al-amdid), in the Egyptian delta, had the same designation as the old Pharaoh of the thirteenth dynasty.

The son also of Mentuhotep, King Sebekhotep IV., must also have been in full possession of the low lands of the valley of the Nile; for his statues, executed in granite, had assumed a place of honour in Tanis, which is proof enough for us that neither this town (which was afterwards called Eamses) nor the country lying around it to the east was possessed by enemies. This fact appears clear from the discovery of a statue of the fifth Sebekhotep at Bubastus, whose memorial was also preserved far away to the south, beyond the boundary of Semne and Koomme by another column on the island of Argo. The power of the kings of the thirteenth dynasty was therefore reduced neither in the south nor in the north of the empire, since the traces of their power and their consideration cannot be more evidently proved than by monuments such as we have described. The monuments of the same kings were also unmistakably preserved in the interior parts of Egypt. Thebes, Abydos, and the valley of rocks of Hammamat are rich in written proofs of the undiminished power of the Egyptian empire, and the collections of Europe contain a selection of the monumental remains of this thirteenth dynasty. I will mention before all others the memorial-stone of granite at Leyden, which the sixth Sebekhotep, with the official name Khaanckra, dedicated in honour of the god of Panopolis, Khemhor-nekht. [193] The kings who, in our list, begin with Sebek-hotep III., and finish with the seventh Sebekhotep (Nos.'16-27), and who in the appended table of families are partly connected with the most distinguished races of the country, seem especially to have formed a separate group of powerful princes of the thirteenth dynasty. As proof of this, the much discussed, but little understood representation in the Chamber of Karnak may be mentioned. It is well known that this relates to a succession, or rather a selection, of kings, who found a place in a hall devoted to them in the time of the third Thutmosis, an especial venerator of his forefathers. The right side of the general representation shows us the pictures and the names of the Theban princes of the thirteenth dynasty, but, as we said, only in a selection, the meaning and spirit of which is at once evident. The four ranks of the kings in order follow one another in the first and second steps of the series.

[194] At the first glance the motive of the choice of the kings must appear^ since they are the powerful Sebek-hoteps, of whom almost alone the monuments have remained to us as the last witnesses of their deeds. The table of Karnak shows us also in a further continuation a list of other royal names, whose importance is proved by contemporary monuments, while the other names, only mentioned in the papyrus, are wholly passed over, as those of undistinguished and unimportant petty kings. To the second group of distinguished princes of the thirteenth dynasty belongs, according to the guidance of the chamber of Karnak, Mer-kau-ra, the same who in the papyrus (No. 45) appears in the mutilated form Merka (ra). He is the Pharaoh called Meri-ka-ra on the rock-tomb chamber of a certain Tefab, son of Kheti, in the steep hillside behind the modem town of Ossiut, which stands on the site of the old ruined capital of the thirteenth nome Saut or Siaut, the Lycopolis, that is the Wolftown, of the Greeks. Tefab, according to the contents of the inscriptions of his grave, was the governor of the country of the south (Kama). Although the holy writing, which gives us information of his life and doings, is in a melancholy state of destruction, yet from the part which has been preserved, it may be stated with perfect confidence, that the former inhabitant of the tomb was commissioned during his lifetime by the Hak taui, 'the prince of the two worlds,' to carry out works by which the temple of the god Anubis, the protecting god of the before-mentioned town, was increased and embellished. I will not on this opportunity of mentioning that the same inscrip- [195] tion contains some indications which allow us to infer warlike events in the countries of Upper Egypt.

The tombs of Lycopolis—as many of them as are furnished with representations and explanatory notices (unfortunately the number of these diminishes from year to year)—show all of them a common origin, which points to the times of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties. The choice of expressions, the manner of the narratives, and particularly the dignities and offices, answer throughout to the conditions which this origin would require. Of great importance, but unfortunately too little investigated, is the rock-tomb chamber celebrated through the length and breadth of the land, and which goes under the name of the stable of Antar (we might call it the stable of Roland, for the hero Antar has a similar meaning with the Arabs as the Paladin in the end of the German Charlemagne has with us). The former tenant of this tomb was a high-priest of Anubis, or as the same god seems generally to have been called, of 'Apheru, the lord of Lycopolis.' Besides his dignity of high-priest, Hapzefa (a son of Ai), for so the defunct was called, enjoyed a number of offices at the royal court, which at the command of the king carried him as far as Elephantina.

The interior wall—the one turned towards the entrance—in the hall of the tomb contains, in its darkened height, a long and tolerably preserved inscription, the contents of which are of particular importance on several accounts. After the titles and offices of the defunct have been set forth, he sings the well-known song of his own praises and his own worth, [196] and calls attention to the way in which he had fulfilled his duties towards gods and men. Then he begs the future priestly guardian and preserver of his grave to care for him, the defunct, as he in his lifetime had cared for the deities of the town Siaut-Lycopolis.

He takes this opportunity of fixing the kind and number of the sacrifices, he speaks of the feast-days on which they should be offered, and gives for the first time in an Egyptian inscription a proof that the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley, great and small, were accustomed to dedicate the first-fruits of their harvest to the deity, just in the same manner as each Israelite, rich and poor, was bound to do. The feasts named in this Egyptian inscription took place at the end and at the beginning of the year, from the last day of the year (or the fifth intercalatory day) to the feast called Uak, which was wont to be celebrated on the eighteenth day of the month Thot.

As the greater number of the tombs of Lycopolis must have belonged, without doubt, to the times of the thirteenth dynasty, so also the testimony of the inscriptions which adorn the walls of the rock-chambers and tombs of El-Kab (the old Eileithyiapolis) points to the same period. Not taking into account that there is the same style and choice of expressions, and that there is present a cartouche of a Sebekhotep (with the official name Ra-Sokhem-sut-taui) in one of the tombs of this place, whose former tenant bore the name of Sebek-nekht, before all things else, the proper names which belonged to the dead, point with certainty in [197] the most unmistakable manner to the period of the thirteenth dynasty.

The moment is not distant when we shall have the opportunity of giving ample consideration to the old tenants of these tombs, and of speaking of the fortified city, which once stood on the ground of the present El-Kab. Even now the four comers of the remains of the walls of the tomb, built in sunburnt bricks, are to be seen, and bear witness to the real existence of the fortress, in which Aahmes, one of the brave champions in the war of the Egyptians against foreign kings, first saw the light.

We have already remarked that, according to the testimony of the Turin book of the kings, the reigns of the rulers, who towards the end of the thirteenth dynasty occupied the throne, must have been of comparatively short duration, since they scarcely lasted on an average for four years. The cause of such a striking fact must be sought in internal troubles in the empire, in civil wars and struggles of individual occupants of the throne, who interrupted the regular succession, and made the existence of collateral dynasties very probable. Next to the kings of the thirteenth dynasty of Theban or Upper Egyptian origin, there appeared 76 Pharaohs, who according to the Manethonian account had fixed their royal abode in the Lower Egyptian town Sakhau, or Khasau, called by the Greeks Xois. This internal discord, caused by the ambitious plans of the possessors of power in Upper and Lower Egypt, gives us on the one hand the explanation of the long silence of the contemporary monuments, and on the other hand a key to the full understanding of the success of the warlike invasion, which brought a foreign race into Egypt, who would never [199] have dared to oppose the armed powers of the united empire of Kemi.

Before we undertake to cast a glance at the time of the foreign dominion mentioned above, during which the race of the old native kings had sunk to the position of simple haks, or governors, or sub-kings, it seems to us to be profitable, and even necessary to examine more particularly the countries which were to be the future scenes of these events, and before all things to direct our particular attention to the population of those regions.

Beginning first with the Egyptian lowlands, it can scarcely excite surprise if we consider the inhabitants settled between the branches of the Nile to have been for the most part of pure Egyptian race. The boundary of demarcation, which separated this race from the neighbouring peoples, was on the west the so-called Canopic branch of the Nile, as the Pelusiac branch was the boundary in the opposite direction to the east. The inhabitants of the western or Lybian neighbouring lands belonged to the light-coloured race of the Tehen, and further to the west to the race of the Libu and Tamahu. From the neighbourhood of the Tritonis lake, where a cycle of legends existed, the central points of which the warlike armed Pallas-Athene (the Egyptian Neit) and the ruler of the sea Poseidon, united on the one side with the Greeks, on the other side with the Phoenician and Egyptian races, there extended the very migratory groups of peoples of the races we have mentioned, to whom the horse and the ass, besides the ox did good service as beasts of burden [200] in their wanderings along the northern coast of the African continent, and to whom the before named Canopic branch of the Nile formed their extreme and much desired eastern boundary. Here at its mouth lay the place called Karba or Karbana, the Karbanit of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions, a name pointing to a foreign origin, the Heracleum of later Egyptian Greek times. The town thus called appears for the first time in the great Harris papyrus, of the time of the third Ramses. Mention is there made of an irruption of the united Libu and Mashauasha, that is the Libyans and Maxyer, who possessed the whole country to the west of the Canopic branch of the Nile, 'from the town Memphis as far as the place Karbana.' The name of the last seems to be good Semitic, at least the first part of it Kar represents the well known word for a town Kar (Assyrian kar; Hebrew kir, kirjah).

When we turn to the eastern boundary of the Delta Semitism meets us according to the testimony of the monuments in the most evident manner. The principal region of it comprehends the country to the east of the Tanitic branch of the Nile in which were situated the three Lower Egyptian nomes VII, XIV and XX. The capital of the 14th nome, the town of Tanis, which gave its name to the branch of the Nile which runs by it, bore the foreign designation Zar, Zal and even in the plural Zaru, as if it was to be translated 'the town of Zar.' The name Tanis, which was given to it by the Greeks, is to be carried back to another designation of it, namely to the Egyptian form Zean, Zoan. It is the same name which we meet with in Holy Scripture as [201] Zoan, which was built seven years later than Hebron (Numbers xiii. 23). The town of Tanis is everywhere in the Egyptian inscriptions designated as an essentially foreign town, the inhabitants of which are represented 'as the people in the eastern border lands.' The eastern border land is however nothing else than the ordinary designation of what was later the Tanaitic nome, which, although not often, appears in the list of nomes under the denomination of Ta mazor, that is, 'the fortified land,' in which may easily be recognised the long sought most ancient form of the Hebrew name for Egypt, Mazor or Misraim.

On the granite memorial stone of the year 400, of the era of king Nubti or Nub, which was discovered in Tanis, and whose designation of the year to this day puzzles the heads of the learned, there appears 'a governor of the fortress,' Zal, who besides this office enjoyed the title of 'governor of the foreign peoples.' In this example also there is question of inhabitants of foreign origin in that portion of the Egyptian Delta which we have mentioned.

The papyrus rolls of the time of the nineteenth dynasty with a certain preference busy themselves with this town, which besides the two names we have mentioned bore also a third, Piramses, that is the 'town of Ramses.' About the origin of this name and about the identity of the town Ramses with the biblical Ramses, we will further on collect together what is necessary to elucidate the subject. With reference to this question the papyrus rolls to which we have alluded mention a number of lakes and waters, situated in the neigh- [202] bourhood of the foreign town Zal, whose peculiar designations at once remind us of their Semitic origin, I will mention as an example of the names of waters rich in fish and birds; the Shaanau, Putra, Nachal, Puharta or Puharat. The marshes and lakes rich in water plants, which at this day are known by the name of Birket Menzaleh, were then called by the name common to all these waters, Sufi (or with the Egyptian article Pa-sufi, which is the same as 'the Sufi') which word completely agrees with the Hebrew Suf. The interpreters generally understand this word in the sense of rushes or a rushy country, while in old Egyptian it almost completely answers to a water rich in papyrus plants. To the east of the Tanaitic nome or the 'Eastern border land,' another nome was situated on the sandy banks of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, the eighth or the general enumeration of the Egyptian nomes, which the inscriptions represent under the designation of the point of the east, although we will not conceal that our translation 'point' perhaps requires correction. This is, however, an unimportant matter for our object. It is on the contrary much more important to know that the capital of the nome we have mentioned bore the name Pi-tom, that is, 'the town of the sun-god Tum,' in which we must immediately recognise the Pithom of the Bible. The town occupied a central situation of the district, whose name also must be referred to a foreign origin. It is the district Suko or Sukot, the Succoth of the Holy Scriptures at the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, the meaning of which, [203] 'tent,' or 'tent camp,' can be only established by the help of the Semitic. Such a designation is not extraordinary for a district whose natural peculiarity quite answers to the meaning of the name, since it embraces places with meadows, the property of Pharaoh, on which the wandering Bedouins of the eastern desert pitched their tents to afford necessary food for their cattle. Even as late as the Greaco-Roman times of Egyptian history appears the designation 'tents,' and tent camp (Scenae), also applied to places where they were accustomed to pitch their camp of tents. I will only recall the scense veteranorum and the scena Mandrorum, which under the reign of Theodosius II. were used as the names of Egyptian places. The site of the town Kom is on the monuments frequently more closely defined by the important designation 'at the entrance of the east, at the eastern entrance,' namely from the desert into Egypt. A piece of water in the neighbourhood of the town received again a name borrowed not from the Egyptian, but Semitic language, namely, Charma, or Charoma, which means 'the piercing.'

To return once more to Sukot, we must remind the reader that the children of Israel in their journey out from the town Ramses pitched their first camp in the country called 'the tents.' On the second day they reached in their wanderings the place to which the Bible gives the name of Etham. I have elsewhere proved, that this place also, according to Egyptian testimony, was either in the country of Sukot, or at least in its close neighbourhood. It is the place called Chetam, on various occasions, in the hieratic papyrus rolls, the meaning of [204] which, 'a shut up place, fortress,' completely agrees with the Hebrew Etham. We shall have the opportunity of returning to this Chetam-Etham when we describe the Exodus of the children of Israel. In the same nome, the eighth of the description on the monuments, and the same which the Greeks and Romans used to call the Sethroitic,²⁴ lay without doubt that most important town, which became the turning point in the following history, the town Hauar, the literal interpretation of which is 'the house of the leg,' (uar). In a particular place in the Manethonian description of the dominion of the foreigners, the so-called Hyksos kings, which has fortunately been preserved in an extract of the Jewish historian Josephus, there occurs a mention of the same name. Manetho names the town Avaris—and incidentally deduces its origin from a pious Saga. A closer examination of the nome with its towns, as they are described to us in the different more or less detailed and well arranged lists on the monuments of the Ptolemies, renders it probable that other places also of the land of Egypt bore the name of Hauar, and particularly those which in their Serapeums, that is, in the temples of the dead, dedicated to the benefactor of the land Osiris, carefully preserved the legs of the god as holy relics. Thus was named for example the capital of the third Lower Egyptian nome, or the Libyan, with a name added, Hauar ament, that is 'the town of the right leg.' The great inscription, so important for a knowledge of the land of Egypt, on the [205] wall of the most holy place in the middle of the temple of Edfou, (Apollinopolis Magna), completely confirms the statement that the inhabitants of that town of the Libyan nome, 'worshipped this leg in one of the temples dedicated to the Apis bull.' We may, therefore, with complete justice, maintain that the name also of the town Avaris, on the eastern side of the Delta, was connected with this peculiar worship of the leg of Osiris. Lastly, it is not difficult to recognise the left leg of the god, because of the evident reference to the peculiar situation of the arms of the Nile, which was well known to be considered as another form and manifestation of Osiris. After the stream has divided itself at the point of the Delta, into a fork in the neighbourhood of a place called Kerkasorus (this designation seems to have the meaning of split 'Kerk,' of Osiris) so as to form two main arms, or as the Egyptians were accustomed to say legs, the Canopic to the west, and the Pelusiac to the east, the western arm was considered as the right leg of Osiris, and the Pelusiac on the contrary as the left leg of the god. The towns situated in the neighbourhood of the mouth, were naturally considered as peculiar Osiris cities, in whose holy of holies the legs of that god played so peculiar a part. By this method of understanding it the saga finds its full explanation

The town Hauar Avaris, with which we are at this moment occupied, lay as we said, to the east of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, with which according to all probability it was connected by a canal, if the theory should not be accepted that it was placed directly on [206] the shore of the branch of the Nile at its mouth, when the river had become very broad. By a gradual silting up of this branch in the course of thousands of years, the restitution of the ancient bed of the river,, and the right determination of the situation of the towns on its banks has become so difficult a task, that we can have no hope of finding anywhere the site of the Hyksos town Avaris, which has disappeared, unless some very fortunate accident should bring about its discovery. But that Hauar must in any case be sought in the neighbourhood of a lake is taught us in the most positive manner by the much cited inscription in the tomb at El-kab of the navigator Aahmes, the faithful servant of Pharaoh, who in the history of his life relates how he came there, when the Egyptian fleet was engaged in fighting the foreign enemies in the waters Pa-zetku or Zeku, of the town of Hauar. This name also, in spite of the Egyptian article placed before it, has a Semitic appearance, so that I should not hesitate to compare it with corresponding roots of Semitic languages.

Another place situated on the same territory of the Sethroite nome, bears on the monuments a purely Semitic name, Maktol or Magdol; this is nothing else than the Hebrew Migdol, with the meaning of a 'town,' or fortress, out of which the Greeks formed on their side the well-sounding name Magdolon. That the ancient Egyptians were well acquainted with the meaning of this word which was foreign to their language, is conclusively proved by the masculine article being placed before it, and the sign of a wall which was added to the foreign word when written in [207] Egyptian. The site of this Migdol, of which mention is made in the Bible, not only in the description of the exodus of the Jews out of Egypt, but also in occasional passages, was distinctly stated to be at one of the most northern points of the inhabited country of the Egyptians; and as it also bore on the monuments the native name of Samut, must be sought in the heaps of rubbish at Tell-es-Samut on the eastern side of Lake Menzaleh. With this fortress Migdol, between which and the sea king Ramses III. once tarried with a portion of his infantry, as a not inactive witness of the victory of his Egyptian fleet over the confederated sea-faring people of the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean, the list of defences, which were intended to protect the country on the east is not yet closed. There lay in the direction of the north-east, on the western border of the so-called Lake Sirbonis, an important place for the defence of the frontier, called Anbu, that is 'the wall,' 'the circumvallation.' It is frequently mentioned by the ancients, not under its Egyptian appellation but in the form of a translation. The Hebrews call it Shur, that is, 'the wall,' and the Greeks 'to Gerrhon,' or 'ta Gerrha,' which means 'the fences,' or 'enclosures.' This remark will at a stroke remove all difficulties which have hitherto existed with reference to the origin of this word, which in spite of difference in sound nevertheless refers to one and the same place.

Whoever travelled eastwards from Egypt to leave the country, was obliged to pass the place called 'the walls,' before he was allowed to enter the road of the [208] Philistines, as it is called in Holy Writ, on his further journey. An Egyptian garrison, under the command of a captain, guarded the passage through the fortress, which only opened and closed on the suspicious wanderer if he was furnished with a permission from the royal authorities. Anbu-Shur-Gerrhon was also the first stopping-place on the great military road, which led from the Delta by Chetam-Etham and Migdol to the desert of Shur. From Anbu, passing by the fortress of Uit, in the land of Hazi, or Hazion (Kassiotis of the ancients), the traveller reached the tower, or Bechen, of Aanecht (Ostrakene), where occurred the boundary of the countries of Kemi and Zaha. On the foreign territory of the last-named place the traveller reached, always passing along the coast of the sea, the place Ab-sakabu (having the same meaning in Semitic as Rhinokolura or Ehinokorura with the Greeks, namely, 'the place of the mutilation of the noses'), and at length reached the country of the inhabitants living on the borders of Palestine.

With the names of places which we have laid before the reader, the examples which show clear traces of a very early Semitic influence are not nearly terminated. We meet everywhere on the eastern side of the Delta with towns and fortresses, the names of which point to very ancient Semitic colonists. I will not cite the well-known Annu or On (the Heliopolis of the Greeks), the original meaning of which, as well in old Egyptian as in Hebrew, seems to have been 'stone ' or 'stone columns,' but other clearer examples, with which the 'Dictionary of the Egyptian Towns' will furnish.

[209] Thus there lay in the neighbourhood of Mendes, perhaps even in Mendes itself, a fortified place called 'the fortress of Azaba,' the last part of which does not belong to the Egyptian tongue but to a Semitic stock. This is the fortress of Ozaeb, in Hebrew, i.e. 'of the idol.' Another well-known town, in the account of the war of the first Meneptah against the Libyan groups of peoples on the east side of the Delta, bore the appellation Pi-bailos, 'the town Bailos' (Greek, By bios; Coptish, Phelbes), the Semitic origin of which is made clear by its evident relationship with the Hebrew, Balas (the mulberry). In its neighbourhood was the lake Shakana, also with a non-Egyptian name, the meaning of which is only explained by the Semitic root shakan—to settle down, to live, to be neighbours to. More inland, in the middle of the same region of the Delta, the traveller met, to the west of the Athribitic nome, the town Kahani, a name with a foreign Semitic sound, which recalls at once the Hebrew, koheu, 'priests.' In this way it is not difficult by comparative philology to point out other examples of the connection between the names of Egyptian settlements and towns and ancient Semitic inhabitants.

But the presence of Semitic natives on the Egyptian land shown in another direction, whether they were planted pure and unmixed on the soil, or were led by time and circumstances to seek their bread there. The memorial stones found in the cities of the dead in Ancient Egypt, and the coffins and the rolls of papyrus, show unmistakably the presence of Semitic persons/ who were settled in the valley of the Nile, and had, so [210] to speak, obtained the rights of citizenship, as also, on the other side, the inclination of the Egyptians to give to their children Semitic, or, by a singular mixture, half Egyptian and half Semitic names. One has but to cast a glance on Herr Lieblein's useful list of Egyptian proper names to be fully persuaded of this fact. There were Egyptians who bore names like those following: Adiroma, Abarokaro, Baal-Mohar, Pesahales, Mausan, Mashu, Namurod, Nanai, Pet-baal, Sagarta, Qapur, Karopusa, and others, without there appearing the slightest objection to the foreign character of these names.

The inclination of the Egyptian mind to Semitic modes of life must, in my opinion, be explained from their having long lived together, and from very early existing mutual relations of the Egyptian and Semitic races. Above all things else, it must not be lost sight of that the trade relations, which extended from the Nile to the Euphrates, had contributed to introduce into Egypt foreign expressions for many products of the soil and foreign works of art. The animal world also, when they had not their home in the valley of the Nile, brought their contributions of words borrowed from the Semitic, as, 'sus' for a horse,' 'kamal' for a camel, 'abir' for a particular kind of ox. The endeavour to pay court, in the most open manner, to whatever was Semitic, became, in the time of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties, a really absurd mania. They introduced Semitic words in place of Egyptian words already existing in their own mother tongue, and in the writing of their country; and turned even Egyptian words into Semitic, [211] by transposition of the syllables, if we may use such an expression. But the worst of it was that the most educated and best-informed portion of the Egyptian people, the world of priests and scribes, found an especial pleasure in decking their history with Semitic words, which they used to employ in the place of good Egyptian expressions. They used Semitic expressions like the following: rosh, 'head'; sar, 'a king'; beit, 'a house'; bab, 'a door'; bir, 'a spring'; birkata, 'a lake';' ketem, 'gold'; shalom, 'to greet'; rom, 'to be high'; barak, 'to bless'; and many others.

We must here, on this subject, not forget a remark which, when well understood, is calculated to explain in some degree this striking fact, and to excuse what seems worthy of blame in this mania for the introduction of foreign words into the mother tongue. In the east of the lowlands, in those countries of which we have spoken above, and whose central point was the cities of Ramses and Pitom, the Semitic immigration had extended so widely, and had reached such a preponderance over the Egyptian population, that, in the course of centuries, a gradual blending of both nations took place. It led to the formation of a mixed people, traces of which have been preserved unchanged in these places to the present day. The neighbouring Egyptians, weaker in numbers, found it convenient not only to adopt the manners and usages of the Semites, but began to take an inclination to the foreign worship of idols, and to enrich their own divine lore with new and hitherto unknown heavenly forms of foreign origin. At the head of all stood, half Egyptian and half [212] Semitic, the godhead of Set or Sutech, with the additional name Nub, 'gold,' who was considered universally as the representative and king of the foreign deities in the land of Mazour. According to his essence, a most ancient Egyptian creation, Set, at the same time gradually became the representative of all foreign countries, the god of the foreigners.

If I mention the names of Baal and Astarta, which we so frequently meet with in the inscriptions, it is scarcely necessary to mention that both have their origin in the Phoenician divine lore. As in Sidon so in Memphis, the warlike Astarta (who in the Egyptian monuments of a later time was represented as a lion-headed goddess, guiding with her own hand her team of horses yoked to the chariot of war) had her own temple; and we will later on give a proof that Ramses II. raised a particular temple to her honour and her service on the lonely shore of the Mediterranean, near the Lake Sirbonis.

Less frequently occurring on the monuments than the previously mentioned representatives of the Semitic divinities, the fierce Reshpu still had his place in the Egyptian host of heaven. He was called 'the end of long times, the king of eternity, the lord of strength in the midst of the host of gods;' and the goddess,

'It is a very remarkable fact, that from the times of the highest antiquity in Eastern representations, the curse of the Typhonic deities adheres to gold. According to a Greek tradition (Plutarch on Isis and Osiris, p. 30) at the sacrificial feast of Helion the worshippers of the god were directed to carry no gold about their persons, just as in the present day the followers of Mohammed take off all gold trinkets before they go through the appointed prayers.

[213] Kadosh, that is, 'the holy,' whose name already indicates the peculiar character of her heavenly existence. The frolicsome Bes, or Bas, also, of whom we have spoken above, the chief of song and of music, of pleasures, and all social amusements, must be mentioned again in this place, since he was, according to his origin, a pure child of the Semitic race of the Arabs. His name, in their language, means Lynx and Cat; and we think we are not carrying the comparison too far if we at once place by his side the cat-headed goddess, the protectress of the town of Bubastus, the much venerated lissom Bast. If we also mention that the Phoenician Onka, and the Syrian Anait or Anaitis, belong to those heavenly beings whose names and forms are again found in the Egyptian divine world, where they take their places under the names of Anka and Anta, then we have exhausted the principal representatives of the Semitic deities in the old Egyptian theology.

Perhaps the influence of the Semitic neighbourhood on Egyptian matters might be proved from looking at it in a new point of view. In this case a very remarkable and striking fact will bear convincing evidence in favour of our views. We allude here to the peculiar era, found nowhere else, which an Egyptian courtier once used, in the fourteenth century before Christ, to indicate the year of the execution of an inscription. I allude to the celebrated memorial-stone of Tanis, erected in the reign of the second Ramses.

Contrary to the custom and usage of reckoning time by the day, month, and year of the reigning [214] king, the stone of Tanis offers us the only example as yet discovered, which, according to appearances, resorts to a foreign and not an Egyptian mode of reckoning time. There is here question of the year 400 of King Nub, a prince belonging to the foreign lords of the Hyksos. In other words, if we do not misunderstand the main issue, in the town of Tanis, whose inhabitants for the most part belonged to Semitic races, this mode of reckoning was in such general use that the person who raised the memorial-stone thought it nothing extraordinary to employ it as a mode of reckoning time in the beautifully engraved inscription on granite which was exhibited before all eyes in a temple. There can hardly be a stronger proof of the influence of Semitic manners on the Egyptian spirit and customs than the testimony we have brought forward of the stone of Tanis. A preponderating and almost irresistible power of Semitism lies hidden here, the importance of which it is as well to remark upon before we undertake to describe the history of the irruption of the foreigners into Egypt, and the consequences connected with it on the condition of the empire.²⁵ Taking into consideration all this testimony, which [215] seems to speak in favour of our view of the importance of Semitic influence on Egyptian relations, we will question the monuments for confirmation of the presence of Semitic races and families on Egyptian soil. We will direct our attention to the eastern provinces of the Delta, which offered the only entrance to wanderers from the east.

As an answer, we insert the literal translation of a circular, which was composed in the course of the nineteenth dynasty, and with the view on the part of the writer to give a report to his superior on the admission of foreign immigrants to Egyptian soil.

In this extremely important document of the time of the first Mineptah, the son of Ramses II., there is [216] question of the races of the sons of the desert, or to use the Egyptian name for these, the races of the Shasu, in which science has for a long time and with perfect certainty recognised the Bedouins of the highest antiquity. They inhabited the great desert between Egypt and the land of Canaan, and extended their wanderings sometimes as far as the River Euphrates. According to the monuments, the Shasu belonged to the great race of the Amu, of which they were the head representatives. In the times of the first Seti, the father of Ramses II., the land passed through by the Shasu began at the fortress Zal Tanis, and stretched towards the East as far as the hill-town 'of Canana,' in Wady Araba to the south of the Dead Sea, which Seti I. took by storm in his campaign against the Bedouins. The author of the writing designates those Shasu who were permitted by superior authority to enter the Egyptian kingdom, as the Shasu of the land of Aduma which was the Edom of the Bible and the land of Iduraaea of later times. The tribes of the Shasu, who are referred to in the circular we have quoted, were therefore sufficiently designated as inhabitants of the land of Edom. The position of these last is more closely defined in Holy Writ as the mountainous country of Seir.

On this occasion we have the satisfaction to declare once again the complete agreement of the information on the monuments with the traditions of Holy Writ. In that place of the Harris papyrus, in which mention is made of the campaigns of King Eamses III. against these very Shasu, an important observation is intro- [217] duced into the speech of the king. He speaks namely, thus, 'ari-a sek Sair-u em mahaut Sasu;' that is, 'I annihilated the Sair among the tribes of the Shasu.' The name of Sair answers letter for letter with the Hebrew word Seir. The comparison must appear all the more founded, as the Egyptian writer has appended to the written words of the name the sign for dumbness, which is the hieroglyphic for a child, as if he wished by this to prove his knowledge of the Semitic language, in which Sa'ir means 'the little one.' The Se'irites, the children of Se'ir, were dwellers in caves and original inhabitants of the mountain range of Se'ir. At a later period, hunted down by the children of Esau, they yielded their land to the conquerors, to whom the appellation of Se'irites, as inhabitants of the Se'ir range, was afterwards transferred.

With the help of this knowledge beforehand, it is no longer difficult to assign their true place to the Shasu on the theatre of events which are the object of our inquiry. The land of Edom and the neighbouring hill country was the home of the principal races of the Shasu, which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries before our era left their mountains to fall upon Egypt with weapons in their hands, or in a friendly manner followed by their flocks and herds to beg sustenance for themselves and their cattle and to seek an entrance into the rich pastures of the land of Succoth. Manifestly the calls of hunger drove them to the rich corn lands of the blessed Delta, where they took up their abode in huts near their brethren of the same race, who had become settled inhabitants.

[218] As in the neighbourhood of the town of Bamses and the place Pitom the Semitic population had formed the main foundation of the inhabitants from hoar antiquity, and as subjects of the Pharaoh had been obedient to the laws of the Empire, so in the lapse of time in another part of the Eastern provinces in the country of Pibailos (the Bilbeis of modem maps), close on the edge of the desert and in sight of the cultivated land, disagreeable neighbours had fixed themselves and pitched their tents where they found pasture for their cattle. These were Bedouins, who according to all probability found their way from the dreary desert through the difficult paths of the great papyrus marsh near the present tow^n of Suez in a north-western direction, to find the object of their wandering near the town of Pibailos. Mineptah I., the son and successor of Ramses II., gives on the monument of his victories in Karnak a graphic account of the dangerous character of these unbidden guests to whom, from Pabailos to On and Memphis, the way lay open, without the kings his predecessors having found it worth while to establish fortresses, to bar the way of these strangers to the most important cities of the lower country. When the Pharaoh we have named succeeded to the throne of his fathers, the danger of a sudden irruption on this side appeared all the more threatening, because on the other side the Libyans, the western neighbours of the Egyptians, with their allies suddenly passed the frontiers of Kemi, and extended their plundering raids into the heart of the inhabited and cultivated western nomes of the Delta. According to the report of the inscription of his victories [219] (unfortunately injured by the lesion of the upper part), Mineptah I. saw himself obliged to take precautions for the safety of the land. For the protection of the Eastern frontier, the capitals On and Memphis were provided with the necessary fortifications, for as the cited inscription expressly says 'the foreigners had pitched their ahil²⁶ or tents before the town of Pibailos, and the districts at the lakes of Shakana to the north of the canal of the Heliopolite nome had remained unused, for they had been abandoned to serve as mere pasture of the herds because of the foreigners, and had become deserted from the time of our forefathers.²⁷ All the kings of Upper Egypt were living in their magnificent buildings, and the kings of Lower Egypt enjoyed peace in their cities. All around the order of the land was threatened by disturbers. The armed force was wanting in people to assist them to give them an answer.'

We will at this place make the remark that Ramses IIL was the first to protect the entrance into Egypt on this side by a newly-built fortress near the modern Qasr Agerud in the north-westerly direction from the GuK of Suez. The whole country, to which the fortified place belonged, near the 'great well,' bore the name Aina or Aian, which continued till the time of Pliny in the slightly changed form Aean. Under the [220] Graeco-Roman dominion the particular nome to which Aean belonged was called the Heliopolite nome after the name of its capital.

Before we cast a glance at the neighbours of the Egyptians of the Delta, who carried on war and traffic with the inhabitants of Kemi, it seems useful to attend to a particular circumstance, which is not without importance for arriving at a right judgment on Semitism.

Our advancing knowledge of the contents of the Egyptian papyri permits us, even at the present time, to cast an intelligent glance at the administration of the Eastern provinces, which had for its central point the town of foreigners Zoan-Tanis in the time of the great Ramessides and their successors. Hence went forth the commands of the king, or of the chief officials of the king, relating to the management of business or the regulation of trade with 'the foreign nations,' or to use the Egyptian expression for these, with the Pit. A portion of these consisted of the industrious settled population in towns and villages; another portion served in the army of Pharaoh as infantry and cavalry, or as sailors; others were used in the public works (the most laborious of these were the mines and quarries). Over each larger and smaller division of 'foreigners,' who with their names and origin were carried on the list of the royal archives, an official was placed, the so-called Hir-pit, or steward of the foreigners. His next superior was the captain of the district or Adon (here also they used the Semitic form for this title), while as chief authority the Ab of Pharaoh (this was the dignity which Joseph held), or [221] royal Wezer, issued orders is the name of the ruler. The authority over the foreign people lay in the hands of particular bailiffs (the so-called Mazai), who in the principal cities of the land had to look after and preserve public order, and who were under an Ur or superior by whom the carrying out of public buildings was frequently undertaken as an additional duty. I pass over a host of other officials who in the eastern provinces of the Delta as in the rest of Egypt carried on the administration of the nomes, and I will only mention that frequently the foreign subjects were promoted to important offices in connection with the Government. They seem to have been most appreciated as the bearers of official documents in the trade transactions between Egypt and the neighbouring Palestine. The chief seats of this trade, the importance of which is shown by individual papyri, besides the frontier town of Ramses, seem to have been the fortified places near the Mediterranean sea coast, and further inland to the east the country of the Edomites and Amorites.

We will embrace the opportunity we have long desired, in this place to consider the neighbours in Palestine, who continually carried on the most lively intercourse with the Egyptians in old time, and partially formed the foundation of the foreign inhabitants in the eastern provinces of the Delta. In the first line stand the Char, or Chal, by which name not only a people but the country they inhabited was also known, namely, those parts of Western Asia lying on the Syrian coast, and before all others the land of the Phoenicians. Richly laden ships went and came from [222] the land of Char; for the inhabitants of Char carried on a lively trade with the Egyptians, and seem, if we are not to mistrust the monuments and the rolls of the books, to have been a highly-esteemed and respectable people.

Even the male and female slaves from Char were a highly-esteemed merchandise who were procured by distinguished Egyptians at a high price, whether for their own houses, or for service in the holy dwellings of the Egyptian gods.

The land of the Char bears in the inscriptions another name, the most ancient mention of which is supported by all the testimony we could desire, namely, by witnesses in the first times of the eighteenth dynasty, about the year 1700 B.C. It is always called Kefa or Keft, Kefeth, Kefthu, on the monuments. As at a certain time of Egyptian history, namely, at the beginning of the reign of the first Seti, the territory of the Shasu extended as far as the town of Ramses, about a hundred years later, the seats of the people of Char, or the Phoenicians, were described as 'beginning with the fortress Zar (Tanis Eamses), and extending to Aupa or Aup.' The last-mentioned name designates a place in the North of Palestine, without our being able more nearly to define its situation. On the other hand, the information is of very great importance, that these same Char had extended their seats quite into the heart of the Tanitic nome. We can, after the reasons we have given above, no longer be surprised that these descendants of Phoenician race constituted in the eastern provinces of the Egyptian empire the real kernel of its [223] fixed, industrious, artistic, and before all, its seafaring and commercial population. In their habits and mode of life they were directly opposed to those wandering Shasu, the children of Esau, who traversed the deserts, and only remained with their herds so long on the property of Pharaoh as the pastures suited them and supplied sustenance for themselves and their cattle.

The influence of the settled Char on Egyptian life is unmistakable in a thousand details, for a knowledge of which we have to thank the monuments, and particularly the little rolls of papyrus. Even the fortified town of Zoar, if we are not completely deceived, seems to have been a very ancient habitation of the Phoenicians, since as well on the water side of it as by land Zoan-Tanis constituted at the entrance to the Delta on the east, an important emporium of intercourse and trade with the whole of the rest of Egypt. The name of the town Zor, by the side of that of Zoan, reminds us too much of the celebrated Zor-Tyrus in the native country of the Phoenicians, for us to leave it unnoticed in an account of the traces of the Phoenician race.

The presence of the Char-Phoenicians in Egypt is, as already observed, made known to us in the most detailed manner by the inscriptions. I have already before spoken of those Semitic inhabitants who were employed in Egypt in all sorts of official service. To these in the first line belong the Phoenicians, or Char. Their importance culminates in the fact newly communicated to us by the monuments, that a Char-Phoenician, towards the end of the nineteenth dynasty, [224] was able to conquer the throne and dominion over the Egyptians, as hereafter will be more fully narrated.

The Char spoke their own language, the Phoenician, upon the peculiarities of which, in relation to the other Semitic languages, the Phoenician inscriptions that have been hitherto discovered have already preserved plentiful information. Of all the languages spoken by Arab and Western Asiatic nations, the monuments only notice the language of the Char, with a clear reference to its importance as the most cultivated representative of all the others. Whoever lived in Egypt spoke Egyptian (the language of the people of Kemi); whoever stayed in the south was obliged to speak the language of the Nahesi, or dark-coloured people; while those who went to the north of the Asiatic region must have been well acquainted with the language of the Phoenicians, in order in some degree to understand the inhabitants of the country.

The historical fact, that the Phoenicians already, in the most ancient times of Egyptian history, formed a fixed settled population in the eastern provinces of the Egyptian empire, finds a kind of confirmation, or if it is preferred an explanation, from a remarkable circumstance. We mean the presence of the latest descendants of the old Phoenician race in the same seats which their forefathers occupied thousands of years ago. At this day the traveller meets on the shores of the Lake Menzaleh, near the old towns and districts of Ramses and Pitom, a peculiar race of fishermen and sailors, whose manners and customs, whose historical traditions, however weak they may be, and [225] whose ideas on religious matters, prove them to have been strangers to the real Egyptians. The inhabitants of this country, formerly Christians, who call themselves by the name of Malakin, were restless and obstinate servants of the Khalife. They are the same whom the Arab historians call sometimes Biamites or Bimaites, sometimes Bashmurites, without science having been able up to this time to discover the origin of their name. The so-called Bashmurite dialect of the Koptic language is a kind of peasants' language with certain peculiarities in the use of particular letters (for instance, b and 1 in place of f and r of the other dialects, the Sahidish and Memphite), and especially an unmistakably large number of Semitic words, the origin of which goes back to the ancient times of our history.

The same inhabitants of the eastern provinces, who at this day navigate in their barks the shallow waters of Lake Menzaleh, and carry on the fishery as their chief business, are, as has been said, the descendants of the Phoenician inhabitants of the Tanitic and Sethroitic nomes. These were the people who ages ago gave to the fortified places of their Egyptian lands, and to the towns and villages which they once inhabited, and to the lakes and canals on which they navigated, those Semitic appellations by which we well know these places from the papyrus rolls.

What most marks their ancient and now forgotten origin, is their non-Egyptian countenance, so like the pictures of the Hyksos, with broad cheek-bones, and with daring pouting lips, which more than anything [226] else marks the boatmen of Lake Menzaleli with the stamp of a foreign origin.

The history of the inhabitants of the eastern provinces lies buried and forgotten under the rubbish heaps of thousands of years. And yet their fathers were once the lords of the fate of Egypt, before whose rough strength the Pharaohs bowed themselves powerless, and were obliged for centuries to pass a furtive existence in the southern portions of the empire. Set had conquered Osiris. How that happened we shall see in the following portion of our history.

We have now arrived at that obscure portion of Egyptian history which Manetho, the Egyptian priest and savan, had in his mind when he spoke of the dynasty of the Hyksos. Whatever we may think of the value and the trustworthiness of this appellation, which has been handed down to us by those who had the luck to possess and copy the complete work of the Egyptian savan, which was afterwards lost, one thing remains confirmed in spite of frequent examinations and apparent difficulties, and that is the name of Hyksos. It deserves a very particular attention owing to the source from which it came, and this for two reasons; first, because this source was once an old Egyptian one, and next, because the monuments support it and in no way refuse the desired confirmation of the occurrences which have been related.

According to the Manethonian account which the Jewish historian Josephus has preserved to us by transcribing it, the Egyptian Netherlands were at a certain time overspread by a wild and rough people, which came from the countries of the East, overcame the native [228] kings who dwelt there, and took possession of the whole country, without finding any great opposition on the part of the Egyptians. The account of it in Josephus is literally as follows:

We will first of all turn our attention to the la&t statement, because it is of great importance for the fixing of the origin of this obscure people. If the kind reader will now recall to his thoughts what we have said about the Arab Bedouins, who inhabited the desert to the East of Egypt, and were called in Egyptian Shasu, (also Shasa, Shaus, Shauas), he will certainly be of the same opinion as ourselves, that those who maintain the Arab origin of the Hyksos, must have drawn their information from a pure Egyptian source. For that word Sos answers completely to the old Egyptian [230] Shasu, in which the sound sh which did not exist in Greek, according to usage was replaced by a simple s. Although Manetho, when he talks of the Hyksos, insists upon the meaning of shepherd, he could only do this in consequence of a strange confusion, since he turns to the new and popular language of his own time to explain the second syllable sos, in which accidentally SOS (or shos, as the same word is still pronounced in Coptic) means a shepherd.²⁸

We have already before remarked how from time to time the Bedouin people of the Shasu knocked at the eastern frontier door to obtain an entrance into Egypt. We have, on the ground of testimony from an inscription of the time of the nineteenth dynasty, stated the certainty of their presence on the Egyptian soil, when hunger drove them from their native hills and valleys to the Eastern provinces of the Pharaonic empire. Like the modem Bedouins, the Shasu were a pastoral people in the full sense of the word. The old name of the race of the Shasu and Shaus-Bedouins in the course of time became equivalent in the popular language to 'shepherds,' that is, a wandering people, who occupied themselves in bringing up cattle, which formed the only [231] wealth of the inhabitants of the desert in all times down to the present day.

If the objection should be raised that the monuments (note well, those which have been discovered up to the present time) pass over in complete silence the name of Hyksos, this appearance of proof has all its importance from the following consideration. By far the greater number of contemporary monuments which once existed as individual witnesses of the remembrance of the historical events under the rule of the foreign kings, have entirely disappeared from the surface of the Egyptian soil. It must be left to some lucky accident, that somewhere the stones now hidden or buried in the rubbish may come to the light of day, to give us new information about these portions of the history of the Egyptian empire, which are as obscure as they are important. The wonderland on the banks of the mighty Nile is a land of continual and startling/ discoveries, and will remain so for all coming times and generations. In the hope of finding important discoveries in the soil of Egypt in consequence of new excavations, we should esteem it unwise to give to our views the absolute form of a fixed unalterable judgment. But we may well be allowed to compare the information in the inscriptions of the few remains of the monuments which have been preserved with the accounts which the Greeks have handed down to us, and from this to form our own opinion, and leave it to the consideration of the future, if by a happy accident our conjectures should be confirmed or refuted.

At the present moment, he expressly, affirm the [232] complete agreement of the name of Hyksos with the Egyptian double word we have mentioned above—Hak Shaus, that is, 'king of the Arabs,' or 'king of the shepherds'—the probability of which is proved by the actual existence of a similar form in the termn Hak Abisha, 'king (or prince) of the land of Abisha,' which we meet with in the hall of the tomb of Chnumhotep at Beni-Hassan. We will not, however, on the other hand, maintain that the appellation Hak Shaus is the same which the bearers of it, of whatever descent they might boast, either formed of their own accord for themselves or assumed on account of their office. It is far more probable that the Egyptians, when at last they drove away their tyrants of Semitic blood, gave these princes who for several centuries had considered themselves as the legitimate kings of Egypt, the nickname Hak Shasu by way of a contemptuous expression.

An ancient tradition furnishes an important addition to the proofs of the Arab origin of the hated Hyksos kings, which has been preserved by several Arab historians of the Middle Ages. An Arab tradition tells us of a certain Sheddad (the name means a powerful ruler), the Adit, who made an irruption into Egypt, conquered the country, and extended his victorious campaign as far as the Straits of Gibraltar. He and his descendants, the founders of the Amalekite dynasty, are said to have maintained themselves more than two hundred years in Lower Egypt, where they made the town Awaris their capital.²⁹

According to another tradition, on the testimony of [233] Africanus (one of those who extracted from the work of Manetho), the Hyksos kings were Phoenicians, who took possession of Memphis, and made the town of Auaris or Awaris, in the Sethroite nome, their chief fortress. This tradition also is not without a certain air of truth, if the reader will recall to mind what I ventured to state above regarding the Char-Phoenicians and the town Auaris. The ancient seats of the Shasu-Arabs and of the Phoenicians extended towards the west as far as the same town of Zor-Tanis. The two races must therefore have been located together in the closest manner—the first as wanderers, the last as fixed inhabitants of the eastern provinces of the Egyptian empire, which were possessed by the foreigners. That the cultivated Khar in such a mixture of nations claimed the first rank, can scarcely need proof. Whether they or the Shasu were the originators of this movement against the native kings of the empire is a point for the decision of which scientific research has hitherto failed to discover the means.

Let us leave entirely the ground of conjectures and probabilities, and turn now to the monuments, to see if they can furnish us with any existing traces of these foreigners to assist our researches. The answer is decidedly in the affirmative, but in such a general way that further inspection and examination is very necessary. The inscriptions designate this foreign people, which once ruled in Egypt till it was driven from the country by the Theban kings, by the name of Men, or Menti. According to the great table of nations on the walls of the temple of Edfou, those called Menti are [234] inhabitants of the land of Asher. By the help of the demotic translation of the inscription, in two languages, on the great stone of Tanis (known under the name of the decree of Canopus, a voucher, it is true, of the Ptolemaic times), we can establish that such was the common name of Syria in the mouths of the Egyptians who were then living; while the older name of the same country, in the hieroglyphic part of the stone, was Rutennu, with the addition, 'of the East.' In the different languages, and in the different times of history, the following names: Syria, Rutennu of the East, Asher, and Menti were therefore synonymous. We wish here to point out, although we leave the matter undecided, that Asher, in late Egyptian, may perhaps have meant the Semitic Ashur, or Assyria, and at last may have become contracted both as to the extent of country and common usage to the well-known geographical term Syria.

Of high importance with regard to the foregoing question appears to us the derivation of the old national name Rutennu (of Lutennu), which, in the history of the eighteenth dynasty, and in the warlike campaigns of the Pharaohs in the East, plays such an important part. As to the geographical extent to which this name applied, we are fortunately so well informed that no mistake can ever occur again. In the great catalogue of the towns of Western Asia conquered by Thutmes III., whose inhabitants, after the battle of Megiddo, submitted to the Egyptian rule, they are described in a general superscription as all the population of 'the upper land of the Rutennu.' This proves, in the most [235] positive manner, that the name of Upper Rutennu must have included in its circumference almost exactly the frontiers of the country which was later that of the twelve tribes of Israel.

With this key in our hand, we can open many a closed door to the right understanding of the great movement of nations to the east of Egypt, so that we can survey with a clear glance the horizon of these migrations. If it is an undeniable fact, resulting from historical enquiry under the guidance of the monuments, that, immediately after the driving out of the Menti, the Egyptian kings of the eighteenth dynasty planned their campaigns of conquest against the countries of Western Asia inhabited by the Rutennu, then there lay at the bottom of these obstinate constantly repeated inroads a fixed feeling of revenge and retribution for losses and injuries received. The conviction forces itself upon us with almost irresistible force, that the irruption of the foreigners into Egypt was made by the Syrians, who, in their campaigns through the arid deserts, found in the Shasu-Arabs welcome allies who well knew the country. And here I am reminded of a similar alliance which Cambyses formed with the Arabs in his campaign against Egypt. They found also in the Semitic inhabitants settled in the eastern provinces brothers of the same race, with whose assistance they succeeded in giving a death-blow to the Egyptian empire, and of robbing it for centuries of all power of action and independent life.

The present state of Egyptian enquiry, concerning the history of the Hyksos, has enabled us to find an [236] answer to a number of questions which stand in close connection with these matters, and embrace the following facts:

We remarked above that the number of the monuments which contain memorials of the time of the Hyksos is very limited; and we must add that the names of the Hyksos kings, with which they ornamented their own memorial-stones (statues, Sphinxes, and similar works), or those of earlier Egyptian kings of the times before them, have arrived to us half obliterated or carefully chiselled out, so that the decypherment of the faint traces which remain has to struggle with great difficulties. These important lacunas in the study of the Egyptian monuments find a sufficient explanation in the proved and easily understood practice of the kings of native race who ascended the throne after the expulsion of the foreigners, and who [238] particularly set themselves carefully to obliterate all remembrance of the hated princes, and to destroy and annihilate their works.

The names of the Hyksos kings, which are engraved on the more than life-size statue at Tell Mukhdam, the border of the stand of the colossal Sphinxes in the Louvre, the lion found near Bagdad, the sacrificial stone in the Museum of Boulak, are scratched out with great care, so as to be almost undistinguishable; and science has to thank a happy accident for the preservation and decypherment of the names of two Hyksos kings. These are:

The name of the first-mentioned king, which would be pronounced in the Memphitic dialect Aphophi, differs little from that of the Shepherd king Aphobis or Aphophis, Apophis, which, according to the Manethonian tradition, was the fourth of the above-named Hyksos kings. We will also not withhold the remark, that many Egyptians of these times call themselves Apopi, or Apopa, in the same way, with a certain predilection.

The names which designate the other Hyksos kings are in a striking manner similar in sound with the names which the god 'Set-Nub the powerful ' is accustomed to bear on the Egyptian monuments. Was it the intention of the foreign prince to be prayed to as the god Set?

[239] In the deep obscurity in which a pitiless fate has hidden the history of the irruption and the dominion of the Hyksos kings in Egypt, a ray of light is visible only towards the close of the tyranny of the foreigners.

In a roll of papyrus in the British Museum (Sallier, No. 1) there is, although unfortunately much interrupted with lacunae, the beginning of an historical description which is connected with the names of the foreign king Apopi and the Egyptian underking Ra Sekenen (the victorious Sun-god Ra), both contemporaries. It is the glory of that master of science, E. de Rouge, too soon lost to us, to have first recognised the high value of this writing in its full importance. It begins with the following words:

The King Ra-Sekenen in 'the city of the south' had, according to all appearance, incurred the particu- [240] lar displeasure of the tyrant of Auaris, who intended to hurl him from the throne, and sought for means and pretexts to carry out his intention.

There had evidently before this begun a correspondence between the tyrant in the north and the Hak in the southern land, in which the first-named among other things required of the last to give up the worship of his gods, and to worship Amon Ra alone as the only divinity of the country. Ea-Sekenen had declared himself prepared for all, but had added a proviso to his letter in which he expressly declared, to allow him to speak for himself (II. 1) 'that he was not able to promise to serve no other of the gods which were worshipped in the whole country but Amon-Ra, the king of the gods alone.'

A new message to the unfortunate Hak of the southern city was deliberated upon and agreed to by King Apopi. The papyrus announces this in these words: 'Many days later after these events (II. 2) King Apopi sent to the governor of the town in the land of the south this message, .... which his secretaries had advised him. (3) And the messenger of Apopi betook himself to the governor of the city of the south. And (the messenger) was brought before the governor of the city of the south. (4) He spoke thus, when he spoke to the messenger of King Apopi: "Who sent thee here to this city of the south? How hast thou come to spy out?"'

The messenger of King Apopi thus addressed, first answered the governor in these simple words: 'King Apopi it is who sends to thee,' and thereupon delivers [241] his message, the particular contents of which are very disquieting to the first-mentioned personage. It was a question of stopping a canal. The first remark of the messenger that he had not taken sleep either day or night, until he had fulfilled his mission, must appear like scorn. The writer paints the situation of the Hak with few words, but those full of meaning.

But he nerved himself and made a speech to the messenger. Unfortunately the chief contents of it have been torn out by the destruction of the papyrus at this place. After the foreign messenger had been hospitably entertained, he betook himself back to the court of King Apopi, while Ra-Sekenen as quickly as possible called his friends around him. The papyrus thus relates what occurred:

After the following words, 'then sent King Apopi to the,' the writer breaks off in the middle of a sentence, without satisfying the curiosity of his readers two and thirty centuries afterwards. For next comes the be- [242] ginning of the letters of Pentaur, the poet of the well known heroic song of the great deeds of Ramses II. at Kadesh.

Although this precious writing is frequently, in the most important passages of the narrative of Apopi, interrupted through holes and rents, owing to the splitting of the papyrus, still what remains is amply sufficient to make known to us the persons, the places, and the circumstances of this historical drama.

King Apopi meets us as chief hero. His royal residence is in Auaris. The enemies, foreigners, have taken possession of Egypt. Its inhabitants are obliged to pay a tax of their possessions and substance to the foreign tyrants. Apopi worships his own divinity, the god Sutech, who is already known to us as the Egyptian expression of the Semitic Baal, especially of Baal Zapuna, the Baal-zephon of Holy Scripture. He builds a splendid temple to his god, and appoints festivals and offerings for him.

In the south of the land, in No, 'the town' of the south, that is in Thebes, the capital of Patoris, 'the region of the south' (the biblical Pathros), there sat an offshoot of the oppressed Pharaohs, Ea-Sekenen, only invested with the title of Hak, or sub-king.

King Apopi is the all-powerful lord, the general ruler of the land. Complaisant learned men belong to his court, who bear the remarkable title of Kechi-chet, that is, the experts.³⁰ They give counsel to the king, bad counsel as it appears, since they induce him to send [243] a messenger to the sub-king in No, with still more severe demands worthy of a Cambyses. The messenger enjoys no rest, but day and night hurries to the southern land.

The sub-king, Ra-Sekenen, receives him with the same question which Joseph, his contemporary, put to his own brethren when they came down to Egypt to buy corn, since he said to them, 'Whence come ye? Ye are spies, and ye are come here to see where the land is open.'

After the Hak had received all the communications of the tyrant Apopi from the mouth of his messenger he was deeply moved by their dangerous import. The great lords and chief men of his court were summoned to a council; and the leaders also of the army, the Uau or officers, and the Hauti or captains, took part in it.

But good counsel is dear. No one dared to make any proposal from the fear of unfortunate consequences.

Such is an abstract of this remarkable document. We may rest assured, even without knowing the conclusion of the whole story, that the author of it must have aimed, by his description, at portraying something more important than the humiliation of a native Hak. The subject without doubt really was the history of the uprising of the Egyptians against the yoke of the foreigners. In order to teach us the cause and meaning of this, the unknown narrator his history of the war of liberation, which was brought about in the way we have mentioned, by a description of the unfortunate position of the empire. His history, [244] which began so sadly, ends happily, and the actual proofs from the monuments bear out his fortunate conclusion.

In order to find the proofs from the monuments let us betake ourselves to the land of the south, let us pass by the towns of Thebes, Hermonthis and Latopolis, on both sides of the stream, and let us stop on the right bank, in sight of the most ancient walls of the city of El-Kab. This discovers to us the position and extent of the former capital of the third upper Egyptian nome, which the Greeks designated as the town of Eileithyia the goddess presiding over births, and the Romans as the town of Lucina in their description of Egyptian places. In the background towards the East, there rise rocky hills, with long rows of tombs, whose dark openings appear to the traveller like the broken windows of a ruined castle.

We will betake ourselves to the chambers of the tombs. Here the chequered world of the foretime, the life and activity of the old forefathers, and the forms of the ancestors who have passed away, meet us in the pictures which have been still preserved.

In truly venerable forms, which seem to people the chambers of the dead, we greet the contemporaries of the Hyksos kings, whose progeny belonged to the heroes of the great war of liberation of the Egyptians from the tyranny of the foreigners.

Let us enter these chambers of the dead, which a grandson has dedicated to the hero Aahmes, the son of Abana-Baba, and his whole house as the last memorial of their existence and of their deeds. The walls of the [245] narrow chamber are covered by a widely-spread genealogical tree of his race, which has suffered much injury. We have put it together as completely as possible in the appended table, according to the information of the inscriptions:

Before we listen to the words of the hero, who in a great text on a wall in one of the sepulchral chambers relates to us the history of his life in the simple language of the time, perhaps we may be permitted to offer beforehand some necessary observations on the kings who were contemporary with him.

The sub-king Ea-Sekenen, mentioned in the history of Apopi the shepherd king—who informs us also of his throne name—did not alone bear this appellation. Two other kings, his forefathers, were also called Ka-Sekenen, and to all three likewise belonged the family name, pronounced in the same manner, Taa. There were, therefore, three Ka-Sekenens with the same name Taa. The inscriptions distinguish them by particular additional names, so that Taa II. was distinguished by the addition A, or Ao, that is, 'the great,' and Taa III. by the additional name Ken, that is, 'the brave.'

They now lie buried in the same town in which Ra-Sckenen, the cotemporary of King Apopi, exercised his functions as a simple Hak. This was Thebes, or No, that is, 'the town' par excellence which was soon after raised, under the kings of the following house, to [246]

[247] the position of the widely celebrated No, that is, 'the great city.'

Even if the tombs of the Taa had not yet been discovered in their place, we might have been certain of their existence on Theban soil, from some indications of the old time. In the Abbot papyrus, which is among the most valuable treasures of the British Museum—the same which contains the official report from the times of the twentieth dynasty on the forcible opening and robbing of the royal tombs—the burial-places of these Pharaohs are mentioned.

The graves of the following kings and queens are enumerated in a succession in order of time, which also partly corresponded with their local position.

As they were placed in Thebes, these Taa must have reigned in Thebes. The dynasty to which they belonged must therefore have been a Theban one, that is the seventeenth dynasty of Diospolis, according to the statements of Manetho.

Instead of any further historical dissertation, we will lay before the reader a faithful translation of the inscription in which Aahmes portrayed in the old speech the course of his life as a picture of the time for posterity. The particular author of the inscription is 'the son of his daughter, who executed the work in [248] this sepulchral chamber, in order to perpetuate the name of the father of his mother, the master of the drawing art of Amon, Pahir.'

The following are the words of the inscription as the clever Pahir executed it:

We will here append a translation of the inscription on the memorial stone of another Aahmes, with the surname Pen-nukheb, which was also found in one of the chambers of the tomb at El-kab. He belonged to the same times. His death took place under the third Thutmes.

His successor, of the name of Kames, seems only to have reigned a short time. He was the husband of the much venerated queen Aah-hotep, whose coffin with the golden ornaments on the body was some years ago found by some Theban agriculturists in the ancient necropolis of No, buried only a few feet below the surface of the soil. These venerable artistic and historically precious remains of Egyptian antiquity, were delivered over to the Museum of Boolaq.

The cover of the coffin had the shape of a mummy, and it was gilt above and below. The holy royal asp decked the brow.

[253] The white of the eyes is represented by quartz, and the pupils by black glass. A rich imitation necklace covers the breast and shoulders; the Uraeus serpent and the vulture—the holy symbols of the Upper and the Lower land of Kemi—lie below the necklace. A closed pair of wings seems to protect the rest of the body. At the soles of the feet stand the statues of the mourning goddesses Isis and Nephthys. The inscription in the middle row gives us the name of the queen, Aah-hotep, that is, 'servant of the moon.'

When the coffin was opened, there were found between the linen coverings precious weapons and ornaments: daggers, a golden axe, a chain with three large golden bees, and a breastplate. On the body itself was found a golden chain with a scarabaeus attached, armlets, a fillet for the brow, and other objects. Two little ships in gold and silver, bronze axes, and great bangles for the ankles, lay immediately upon the wood of the coffin.

The golden bark and the metal axes exhibited the cartouche of king Kames (with the throne-name Uotkheper-ra); but the richest and the most precious of the ornaments showed the shields of the Pharaoh Aahmes. He bears on them the surname of Nakht, that is, 'the brave or victorious.' Without doubt, then. Queen Aah-hotep was buried in Thebes during the reign of her son Aahmes. Mention has already been made of the tomb of her royal husband at Thebes. Aah-hotep is therefore the proper ancestress of the eighteenth dynasty. It was her son Aahmes who was destined to rise up as the avenger of his native [254] country for the shame and oppression which it had so long endured.

And yet a strange enigma covers this age of shame the veil of which we are not yet able to lift. For on a minute examination of the monuments of the times of the seventeenth and eighteenth dynasties, many well-founded reflections force themselves upon us involuntarily; since, in fact, it would seem as if the hatred of the Egyptians against the Hyksos kings had not been so intense as the story handed down by Manetho appears to represent it. We of course except, when we speak of the Egyptians, the legitimate but oppressed kings of 'the region of the south,' in the Upper country, to whom the foreign tyrants in the Lowlands must have appeared in no agreeable light.

For had that hatred been so universal as Manetho's picture of the conflagrations, sacking of temples, and persecutions of the inhabitants by princes of the foreign hordes, gives us to understand, how are we to explain the strange fact that these same Egyptians, not excepting the college of priests of the Theban Amon, in the time of the Hyksos and the following dynasties, could prevail upon themselves to give their children pure Semitic names, borrowed from the language of their hereditary enemies? How could they themselves offer their homage to those gods of the strangers, who had done their land so much mischief, even to the extirpation of the native divinities? As an example, I may refer to a memorial stone of the time of king Amenhotep I. (now exhibited in the Louvre), on which a Theban family employed in the temple of Amon is portrayed [255] for six generations back, into the times of the Hyksos king. The members of the genealogical tree for the most part bear pure Semitic names. Even the original ancestor, Pet-baal, calls himself literally 'the servant of Baal,' and his wife bears the foreign name Abrakro. Among his descendants the following men figure under Semitic designations: Atu, Tura, Aei, Tetaa; the women: Ama, Tanafi, Hishelat,Kafeniae, Tir, Aui, Ituae. And were there not many Egyptians who called themselves Apopa, or Apopi, exactly like the shepherd-kings, the contemporaries of Ea-Sekenen? Let the reader turn over the pages of the dictionary of Mr. Lieblein, and he will meet everywhere with examples in proof of these facts. Instead of repudiating the foreign names, which more than anything else seemed calculated to recall the remembrance of the Semitic tyranny, the Egyptians seem of their own accord to have adopted the names of their so-called arch enemy, and did not even shrink from adopting the names of the kings themselves.

If on the grounds of such striking appearances we are justified in drawing any conclusions at all, they cannot be in favour of the Manethonian tradition. Between the Egyptian and Semitic races—and they were both tinged with the colouring of the latter race—there certainly was no deep-rooted hereditary enmity, as the interpreters would make us believe. There was, indeed, a hatred on the part of the Theban race of kings, to whom their humiliation by the foreigners appeared all the more unendurable, as they had not the strength and power to free themselves from their dependence [256] on the foreign lords of the Netherlands. They had only at their command the weapon of the weaker against the stronger—namely, an exaggeration of the real existing relations between them—by picturing the foreigners as relentless against everything native. Hence they derived consolation, and an excuse for their own incapability to shake off the yoke, and to regain the firm possession of the whole kingdom.

Perhaps from the stand-point of a higher statesmanship, which in the strife for independence would consider every means as right which would contribute to that object, a certain justification might be found for the mode in which the Upper Egyptians represented the reign of the Hyksos. The historian, however, has another task to fulfil. His duty is to declare the historical truth according to the facts which have happened, to separate the com from the husk, without having regard to the praise or blame of the partisans of this or that opinion. And in this view common justice ought not to be denied to the Hyksos before the judgment-seat of the history of the world. We will simply put the question, If those foreign kings were in fact desecrators of the temples, devastators and destroyers of the works of by-gone ages, how is it that these ancient works, although only the last remains of them, still exist, and especially in the chief scats of the Hyksos dominion; and further, that these foreign kings allowed their names to be engraved as memorial witnesses on the works of the native Pharaohs? Instead of destroying they preserved them, and sought by their own peculiar means to perpetuate [257] themselves and their remembrance on the monuments already existing of former rulers.

Zoan Tanis, the capital of the Egyptian eastern provinces, with its world of temples and statues of the times of the sixth, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties, had so little to suffer from the Hyksos, that on the contrary these princes thought it incumbent upon them to increase the splendour of this vast temple town by their own constructions, although in a Semitic style of execution.

To the Theban kings of the eighteenth dynasty must first be attributed the doubtful praise of making war on the dead stones as a vengeance against the Hyksos kings, which their forefathers had in vain sought to wreak on the living monarchs. To destroy the monuments of the opposition kings, to annihilate their names and titles so as to render them unrecognisable, and to falsify historical truth by inscribing their own names, such were the endeavours of the Egyptian Pharaohs, who set about their work with such success as nearly to root out from the face of the earth the contemporary memorials of the Hyksos kings. We have to thank this persecution for the difficulties which lie in the way of restoring the history of the most ancient domination of the foreigners in Egypt.

If the fact should be brought forward, or even urged as proof against us, that Aahmes, the conqueror of the Hyksos, and after him King Amenhotep III., according to the statements of the rock inscriptions of Mokattam, rebuilt and restored the temples which [258] had fallen into ruin, and therefore, as those who differ from us will say, had been destroyed by the Hyksos, we oppose to this statement that these inscriptions never declare that this ruin was a consequence of their having been destroyed by the Hyksos. For those who erected these rock tablets, the oldest of which goes back to the time of an Amenemhat of the twelfth dynasty,³¹ have used the same expressions in similar memorial inscriptions of all ages. They simply remark that the temples 'had fallen into ruin since the time of the forefathers.' The only allusion to foreigners, and this has nothing to do with any destruction by them, is found on the rock tablets of the twenty-second year of King Aahmes. This is a literal translation of them; 'these stones were drawn by oxen, which were brought here and given over to the foreign people of the Fenekh.' These Fenekh, or Fenikh, to whom we shall afterwards return, appear clearly to be the most ancient representatives of the Phoenicians on Egyptian soil.

Before we conclude this chapter perhaps we may be allowed to make some remarks on the relation, in point of time, of these historical events, with the stay of the Hyksos on one side, and on the other side with the stay of the children of Israel, on Egyptian soil. We have already made mention of a memorial stone [259] of the time of the second Ramses found in Tanis, the inscription on which commences with the following indication of its date: 'In the year 400, on the 4th day of the month Mesori of King Nub.' As on the basis of the newest and best enquiries into the question of old Egyptian chronology we fix the reign of Ramses II. at the year 1350 B.C. as a mean rate; between various proposals, the reign of the Hyksos King Nub, and probably the beginning of his reign would fall about the year 1750 B.C., that is, 400 years before Ramses II, Although we are completely in the dark as to what place King Nub occupied in the succession of the princes of his house, yet the number mentioned has a certain importance in fixing an approximative date for the stay of the foreign kings in Egypt. This importance becomes much enhanced by its very clear relation to a similar statement in Holy Writ in relation to the total duration of the stay of the children of Israel in Egypt. According to this statement (Deuteronomy xii. 40) the Hebrews from the time of the immigration of their ancestor Jacob till the exodus had remained 430 years in Egypt. In another place (Genesis xv. 13) the duration of their stay is expressed by the round number of 400 years. Now, as according to general acceptation the exodus from Egypt took place after the death of Ramses II., the Pharaoh of the oppression, the year 1300 will approximately correspond to the time of the exodus in the reign of Mineptah, the son and successor of Ramses II. If we take, therefore, 430 years as the expression for the total duration of the stay of the [260] Hebrews in Egypt, we arrive at the year 1730 B.C. as the approximative date of the immigration of Jacob into Egypt, and for the time of the official career of his son Joseph at the court of Pharaoh. In other words, we arrive at the conclusion that the time of Joseph (1730 B.C.) must have fallen in the time of the Hyksos' domination, about the reign of the previously mentioned foreign prince, Nub (1750).

This singular coincidence of numbers, as we openly admit, appears to us to have a higher value than the data fixed on the grounds of particular calculations of the chronological tables of Manetho and the fathers of the church. For these numbers neither change nor rectify the great building of general chronology. Their importance is of quite a different character. Independently of every kind of arrangement and combination of numbers they prove the probability of a fixed date for a very important section of the general history of the world on the grounds of two chronological data, which in a most striking way correspond with one another, and of which each separately has its origin in an equally trustworthy and respectable source.

The supposition that Joseph was sold into Egypt and afterwards rose to great honour under the Hyksos, as results from the chronological relations we have mentioned, receives fresh support for its probability from a Christian tradition preserved by V. Syncellus. According to this tradition 'received by the whole world,' Joseph ruled the land in the reign of King Aphophis (Apopi of the monuments), whose age within [261] a few years corresponds with the commencement of the 18th dynasty.

We have great satisfaction in adding another very remarkable and clear confirmation of our remarks upon the time of Joseph and his master the Pharaoh. Upon the grounds of an old Egyptian inscription hitherto unknown, whose author must have been a cotemporary of Joseph and his family, we hope to adduce a proof that Joseph and the Hyksos cannot henceforth be separated from one another.

As a previous remark we will recall to the recollection of our readers the well-known fact that/in the days of the patriarch in Egypt a seven years' famine occurred, the consequence of a deficiency of water in the overflowing of the Nile at that time.

This inscription, which appears to us so important, exists in one of the tombs at El-Kab, of which we have before spoken more particularly. From the peculiarities of the language, and from the style of the internal pictorial decoration of the rock chambers, but principally from the name of its former possessor, Baba, we may consider that the tomb was erected in the times immediately preceding the eighteenth dynasty. Although no royal cartouche ornaments the walls of the tomb to give us certain information about the exact time of its erection, yet the following considerations are calculated to inform us on this point, and fortunately to fill up the gaps.

The name of the old possessor of the tomb, Baba, is already well known to us. Among the members of the great family of the times of the thirteenth dynasty, [262] whose genealogical tree we have before laid before our readers, and the greater number of whose tombs are situated in the rocky city of the dead at El-Kab, Baba appears in the third generation as the additional name of a certain Sebek-tut, the father of Queen Nubkhas. In the genealogical tree of the family of the Captain Aahmes at El-Kab the name Baba appears on another occasion, and also as the second appellation of our hero, Abana, a captain under King Ra-Sekenen (Taa III). Unless we are mistaken it is this Baba, whose tomb, situated near that of Aahmes at El-kab, promises us important disclosures. For the whole descendants of Aahmes, children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, repose in their ancestors' tomb, and in the excavations of the rock which Pahir, once the governor of Eileithyia, had prepared for himself and them. We should, however, in vain look round the sepulchral chambers of the ancestors of Baba were it not for the rock tomb of a Baba in the neighbourhood of that we have already mentioned. The inscription, which exists in' the hall of sacrifice of this tomb on the wall opposite to the door of entrance contains the following simple childlike representation of his happy existence on earth owing to his great riches in point of children:

There ought not to be the smallest doubt as to whether the last words of the inscription relate to an historical fact or not; to something definite or something only general. Strongly as we are inclined to recognise a general way of speaking in the narrative of [264] Ameni (see p. 154), where 'years of famine' are spoken of, here we are compelled by the context of the report before us to understand the term 'the many years' of the famine which arose as relating to a definite historical time. For famines following one another on account of a deficiency of water in the overflowing of the Nile were of the greatest rarity, and history knows and mentions only one example of it, namely, the seven years' famine of the Pharaoh of Joseph. Besides, Baba (or if the term is preferred the Babas, for the most part the cotemporaries of the thirteenth and seventeenth dynasties), about the same time as Joseph exercised his office under one of the Hyksos kings lived and worked under the native king Ra-Sekenen Taa III. in the old town of El-Kab. The only just conclusion is that the many years of famine in the time of Baba must precisely correspond with the seven year's of famine under Joseph's Pharaoh, one of the shepherd kings.

We leave it to the judgment of the reader to arrive at a conclusion on the probability of a clear connection between the two different reports on the same extraordinary occurrence. The simple words of the biblical account and the inscription in the tomb of Baba are too clear and convincing, to leave any room for reproach on the ground of possible error. The account in Holy Scripture of the elevation of Joseph under one of the Hyksos kings, of his life at their court, of the reception of his father and brothers in Egypt with all their belongings is in complete accordance with the manners and customs, as also with the place and time.

Joseph's Hyksos-Pharaoh reigned in Auaris or [265] Zoan the later Ramses-town, and held his court in the Egyptian style but without excluding the Semitic language. His Pharaoh has proclaimed before him in Semitic language an Abrek, that is, 'bow the knee,' a word which is still retained in the hieroglyphic dictionary,³⁴ and was adopted by the Egyptians to express their feeling of reverence at the sight of an important person or object. He bestows on him the high dignity of a Zaphnatpaneakh, 'governor of the Sethroitic nome.'³⁵ On the Egyptian origin of the offices of an Adon and Ab which Joseph attributes to himself before his family, I have already made all the remarks that are necessary. The name of his wife Asnat is pure Egyptian and almost entirely confined to the old and middle empire. It is derived from the very common female name Sant, or Snat. The father of his wife, the priest of On-Heliopolis, is a pure Egyptian, whose name Potiphera meant in the native language Putiper'a (or pher'a) 'the gift of the sun.' The chamberlain who bought the boy Joseph from his brothers, and whose wife tempted the virtue of the young servant was Putipher, a name which could not be pronounced in Egyptian otherwise than Putipar or (phar), 'the gift of the risen one.' His titles are given in Semitic language although the word Saris or chamberlain is found written with Egyptian letters.³⁶

[266] We will not neglect at the mention of Putiphar's wife to call attention to the passage of the Orbiney papyrus which at the same time is calculated to cast a bad light on the wantonness of the Egyptian women, but which before all things stands in a particular relation to the history of Joseph. Anepu, a married man, sends his young brother, the unmarried hero of the story from the field to the house to fetch seed corn. What occurred the following literal translation sufficiently explains:

We will break off at this place the thread of the narrative in which the simple mode of speech and exposition corresponds in the most striking manner with the style of the Bible. What we want to point out, the reader of the foregoing sentences will immediately perceive. Potiphar's wife and Anepu's wife precisely resemble one another, and Joseph's and Bata's resistance and virtue appear so closely allied that one is almost inclined to assign a common origin to both traditions. In any case the passage we have just quoted from the Egyptian poem of the two brothers [269] is a most precious and important elucidation of the history of Joseph in Egypt.

That Joseph was in fact clothed with the highest rank at court next to his king is evident from the office he filled of an Adon 'over all Egypt' (compare Genesis xlv., 9). On the monuments Adon answers to the Greek Epistates, an overse