ABYDOS.
Series longissima rerum
Per tot ducta viros antiquæ ab origine gentis.—VIRGIL.
In descending the river we stopped at Bellianéh to visit Abydos. It
was from Abydos, the primæval This, that Menes came, whose name stands
first on the list of Egyptian kings. From it also came the dynasty that
succeeded that of Menes. The great extent of cultivable land—the valley
here opening out to double its usual width—gave space enough for a rich
and populous state, the rulers of which appeared to have overpowered
their neighbours, and, by consolidating their conquests, to have formed
an enduring monarchy. As the great preponderance of population and wealth
was thenceforth in the Delta and Lower Egypt, the head of the Delta
became the centre of gravity, and so, by natural causes, the centre of
affairs, and the site of the capital.
Was This, in Upper Egypt, the first seat of Egyptian power, and if so,
how came it to be so? These are questions of much interest, the important
bearing of which on early Egyptian history has been indicated already.
The landing-place at Bellianéh is overshadowed by a grove of palms, the
crowns of which are tenanted by turtle-doves. Among the palms we saw
that the ground was covered with crude bricks, lately moulded, and going
through their first stage of desiccation. We were soon surrounded by a
crowd of bare-legged idlers from the town, most of whom were boys.
We had the day before despatched a telegram to the Governor of Bellianéh
to request him to have donkeys in readiness for our party. The telegram,
however, had not arrived; we, therefore, sent into the town to collect
the beasts our party would require. Before long they came; but most
of them were ill able to carry even their own wasted weight. Few had
bridles, or anything that could have been mistaken for a saddle: a piece
of ragged cloth or matting, merely intended to hide their distressing
sores, was all that was on most of them. The first I mounted sank to
the ground under the weight of ten stone ten. At last, the three most
impetuous of our party selected the three least emaciated, and started
for Abydos. Later in the day our telegram arrived, and the Governor
immediately sent down to the landing a dozen fairly-conditioned animals;
but it was then too late in the day for the rest of the party to
undertake so long a ride.
It was the 3rd of January. The wheat was about two feet high, and the
beans were in flower. The word field would mislead. As we rode on, mile
after mile, there appeared to be no divisions of the land, except the
limits of the different kinds of grain growing upon it. We crossed two or
three large canals by earthen bars, which had been thrown across them.
The use of these bars is, as soon as the river begins to sink, to retain
the water with which the canals are then full. We also passed several
villages. At the first of these our dragoman engaged the services of
a stout young fellow, who came to accompany us, provided with a heavy
staff, about two inches or a little more in diameter, and five feet
in length. The villagers about Abydos have a bad character, and are
occasionally troublesome, and this young fellow was to be our escort and
guide. We did not ride through any of the villages on our way, for the
road was always made to skirt the outside of the walls. At the gate of
one we passed, we saw a woman and a lad seated on the ground, playing at
a game resembling draughts. The board was marked out on the road, which
had also supplied the men, in the form of pieces of camel dirt. The
sight gave one a little shock. These poor women, however, spend no small
portion of their lives in converting the raw material of this natural
product into manufactured fuel, and the whole of their lives in the odour
of its smoke.
In the open, by the roadside, we saw some rectangular enclosures of about
six yards by four. In each of them a family was residing. I supposed
they were engaged in watching the crops. As these enclosures consist of
nothing but four thin screens, about seven feet high, of wattled reeds,
their inmates, if that is an appropriate term, must sleep, wrapped in
their burnouses, beneath the stars. The reed fence can only be intended
to keep out the wind, the jackals, and the eyes of curious passers-by;
but Arabs do not mind exposure at night as long as their heads are
wrapped up. I saw, at Assouan and Miniéh, several sleeping in this way,
in the open market-place, on their goods. At Suez, being out at dawn, I
saw in the Arab town the men sleeping outside their huts on a morning
when the mercury had sunk to freezing point. With us Europeans, the first
thought is to keep the feet warm. About this extremity of his personal
domain the Arab is heedless. His care, like the nigger’s, is for his
head—-just as the Esquimaux dog, when sleeping, covers his nostrils with
his bushy tail, or the pig buries his snout in the straw, so does the
Arab, when he makes himself up for the night, envelope his whole head in
some thick wrapper. Is this a consequence of his practice of never having
his head uncovered during the day? I suppose they are none the worse for
breathing and rebreathing the same air all night, with the exception of
the little that may filter through the wrapper.
The rubbish mounds of Abydos are, by their height, and the extent of
ground they cover, infallible witnesses to the importance of the old
primæval city. From among these mounds two grand structures of the days
of Sethos and Rameses have been disinterred. One is a palace, the joint
work of father and son. That the genius of Egypt was, as might have been
expected at this culminating era of its glory, advancing, and full of
invention, is seen in the ceilings of the halls of this palace: they are
vaulted. These vaulted roofs, however, are not arches of construction,
but formed by placing the enormous slabs of sandstone, of which the roof
is made, not with their broad, but with their narrow, faces on the plane
of the ceiling. This gave a roof of vast thickness, from which the vault
of the roof was excavated. The colouring of these roofs, as of all the
decorations of these two grand buildings at Abydos, is remarkably good
and well preserved.
The other building, which was dedicated to Osiris, who was supposed to
have been buried here, was once his most sacred and frequented temple. It
was much enlarged and embellished by the great Rameses. The inner walls
of the sanctuary were encrusted with alabaster, which still remains. I
saw nowhere else Egyptian work in purer taste, nor sculptures so well
preserved, both in form and colour. One might have supposed that some of
them had been chiselled and coloured last week. I observed a figure of
the great king so absolutely untouched by time, that the colour of every
bead in his necklace, or collar, is quite fresh.
It was here that was found the celebrated tablet of Abydos, which
Rameses put up in the temple of Osiris, inscribed with the names of
all the kings who had preceded him. This and its fellow tablet, placed
at Karnak by Tuthmosis III., about two hundred years before the time
of Rameses, are invaluable, as they show that the records preserved by
the priests in writing, of which we have transcripts in the dynasties
of the priest Manetho, and in the Turin papyrus, are in accord with
the monuments. The monumental evidence, it may be observed, is of two
kinds. Speaking generally, it is absolutely contemporary—the record
having been sculptured in the lifetime of the man, the memory of whose
actions, possessions, and thoughts it preserved. There are, however, in
these two tablets of Karnak and Abydos, most precious exceptions to the
contemporaneousness of the monumental history. How strong and clear was
the historical sentiment in the mind of these old Egyptians! We not only
find each generation endeavouring to perpetuate a knowledge of its own
day, but, in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries before the Christian
era, we find Egyptian kings endeavouring to transmit to posterity the
names, and the order of their predecessors. This tablet of Abydos is one
of the glories of our National Museum.
The cemeteries of Abydos were very extensive. Their extent grew out of
the wish, very generally felt among well-to-do and educated Egyptians,
to be laid themselves where Osiris, the judge of all, had once been laid.
As I have intimated, the site of This may, perhaps, cast some faint ray
of light on the question of how, and where, the first ancestors of the
Egyptians had entered Egypt. It throws, however, a flood of light on the
question of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. We have seen that in
Egypt, in consequence of the absence, or scantiness of rain, there are
no springs, and that another consequence of this want of rain is that
the nitre, which the soil collects from the air, is not dissolved and
washed away, but accumulates to such a degree as to render the water
of the wells, which has percolated from the river through the soil,
brackish, and unfit for drinking. Now the distance of This, in a direct
line from the river, is seven miles and a half; if, then, we put these
points together, we shall see in them another argument for the extreme
antiquity of Egyptian civilization, besides those drawn from the use of
writing, the mythology, and from the absence of anything like a beginning
in the history of the useful arts, and of their social arrangements.
The combined force of these arguments amounts to a demonstration that
civilization was not in its infancy six thousand years ago, at the era of
the Thinite dynasties.
Here is the form of this contributory to the demonstration. An
uncivilized people would undoubtedly have placed their town on the banks
of the river, close to the water. But a people among whom labour is
organized, and who will be willing because they are civilized, to go to
a great deal of trouble and expense for an adequate object, instead of
giving up much good land for a large city, and on a site, too, where it
would be troubled by inundations, would prefer to build it at a distance
from the river, where the land was not suitable for cultivation, and
where it would be safe from inundations. But in order to do this they
must cut a canal seven and a half miles long at the least, and so bring
the water of the river to the city. These thoughts the Egyptians had, and
this work they accomplished, in the ages which preceded Menes. No savage,
or semi-savage people would have entertained this scheme of the canal, or
would have carried it out. The site of This is thus alone strong evidence
of a very advanced contemporary civilization, no one can tell how many
centuries before the time of Menes; but at least for a sufficient tract
of time to allow of the growth of a powerful state, capable at last in
his time of imposing a dynasty on Egypt. The first cities in Egypt must
have been on the banks of the river; or in places where the _háger_ was
near the bank. The first comers did not cut canals seven and a half miles
long at least; and none but a people already powerful could protect such
a canal, upon which their existence depended. The people, then, were
already civilized and powerful who placed their city on such a site as
that of This.
There were kings in Egypt, we may be sure, before Menes. The Egyptians
themselves spoke of his predecessors as ‘the deceased,’ that is, those
human rulers whose names had been lost. It was in the time of these
prehistoric, we may even say premythical kings, that this This Canal,
and indeed, probably, that the great Bahr Jusuf Canal itself, which is
throughout Egypt a second Nile, were constructed. There were, therefore,
at that day, men who were as great in hydraulic engineering as any who
came after them, but who yet lived at so remote a time, that no trace of
them could be found even in the far-reaching and tenacious traditions of
Egypt. If the Bahr Jusuf, which passed by This, was older than the city,
so much the better for our argument.