PERSISTENCY OF CUSTOM IN THE EAST.
Meddle not with them that are given to change.—_Book of
Proverbs._
Every traveller in the East is struck with the obstinate persistency
of forms of expression even, as well as of customs, he meets with. In
bargaining in the Khan Khaleel Bazaar, at Cairo, for an amber mouthpiece
for a pipe, I had to go through the very dialogue which passed between
Ephron and Abraham. I objected to the price. ‘Nay, then,’ replied the
modern Hittite, ‘I give it thee. Take it, I give it thee.’ At last the
price was agreed upon, and he took his money. Some time afterwards, at
Jaffa, I noticed that a roguish hanger-on for odd jobs at the hotel was
using precisely the same words, in an attempt he was making to get a
friend I was with to give him for a box of oranges ten times the price
they were selling at in the market, only a couple of hundred yards off.
I was struck with the coincidence, and, on mentioning the matter to
one familiar with the ways of the East, I learnt that this pretended
gratuitous offer of the article represented a regular recognized stage in
the form of bargaining. For three thousand years, at all events, it has
been in stereotype.
Marriages are arranged now, as was that of Isaac and Rebekah, without the
principals having seen each other.
Women in the East to-day wear the veil just as they did in the time of
the Patriarchs.
The shoes are still taken off on entering holy places. The worshipper, in
praying, still turns his face in the direction of the great sanctuary of
his religion.
“Jezebel stimmied her eyes.” So the Septuagint version has it. This
translation was made at Alexandria by Jews. Their own wives and daughters
had made them familiar with the practice, and with the word technically
used to express it; and they very naturally and properly adopted the
technical term in their translation. They again used it in the parallel
passage of Ezekiel. The rendering in our English Bible of this incident
in Jezebel’s last toilet is misleading. It makes her “paint her face.”
This suggests the rouge-pot and the cheeks, instead of the kohl-stick and
the eyes. On the monuments we see that the ladies of old Egypt had the
same practice. In the streets of the Cairo of to-day you find that the
ladies of modern Egypt have retained it. The object of the practice is
two-fold—to give prominency to the eyes, the most expressive feature, and
to make the complexion of the face, by the effect of the contrast with
the thus deepened darkness of the eyes, appear somewhat fairer.
The history of Joseph, I might almost call it the Josephead, the more
distinctly to indicate my meaning, wears very much the appearance of an
episode in a great national epic cycle, which had been handed down from
the legendary age, and which must have been, as is still the case with
oriental romances, in form prose, though in style and spirit full of
dramatic force and poetry. I can imagine the men and children sitting
at the tent-door, and the women within, to hear its recital. Just
such histories are now recited daily throughout the East. While their
incidents interest and entrance the imagination, they teach history,
morality, and religion. How pleasingly do the high moral aims of this
story of Joseph, so simple and natural, so true and profound, contrast
with the frivolous, mawkish, false, sensational sentimentality of the
modern novel! Its ideas, style, form, and colouring supply almost a
collective illustration of the obstinate persistency we are noticing in
everything oriental. With the exception of slavery, which, in deference
to the ideas and feelings of the Christian world, has lately been
abolished by law in Egypt—though I understand the law is very imperfectly
observed—this history may be read to-day just as if its object were to
give a picture of the thought, feelings, and practices of modern Egyptian
life. If its dialogue, and all its minutiæ of detail, were heard for
the first time at the date of the Exodus, it would still possess a very
remote antiquity. It is, however, curious that we have every particular
of Joseph’s adventure with Potiphar’s wife in the story of the ‘Two
Brothers,’ the only Egyptian romance we have recovered, and the papyrus
manuscript of which is somewhat older, at least, than the Exodus; for
it was written, or edited, by Kagabu, one of the nine literati attached
to the household of Rameses the Great, for the instruction of the
crown-prince, Meneptha, in whose reign the Exodus took place.
Jusuf, by the way, is one of the commonest names in Egypt. Among others
of this name I met with was a lad, the most beautiful boy I saw in the
East, who had been, I was told, donkey-boy to the Prince of Wales at
Thebes, and who served me in that capacity on one of my visits to Karnak.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, of course in their
Arabic forms, are all very common names. They must have been introduced
at the time of the Mahomedan invasion, unless the Christian invasion had
brought them in some centuries earlier.
The modern Egyptians’ ideas of unclean things and persons, of the
obligation of washing hands before meals, and their practice, while
eating, of sitting round the dish and dipping into it, were, we know,
very much the same among the Hebrews.
The serpent charmer still charms the adder, as in the Psalmist’s day,
with neither more nor less of wisdom.
It was an enactment of the law given by Moses, that if a poor man pawned
his clothes, they should be returned to him at sunset, that he might have
something to sleep in. So is it with the modern Arab; he passes the night
in the clothes he had worn during the day.
Hospitality, the treatment of women, the relation of the sexes, respect
for age and for learning, belief in dreams, the arbitrary character of
the government, indifference to human suffering, absence of repugnance to
take human life, and, indeed, almost all that goes to constitute what is
distinctive in the life of a people, is the same now in the East as it
was in the earliest days of which we have any record. Some differences,
however, and not unimportant ones, are obvious at a glance—as, for
instance, that in the organization of society, and the well-being of its
members, there has been great and lamentable retrogression. For this our
good friends, the Turks, are in no small degree responsible.
The perpetual change among Europeans in great things as well as in
small—in manners and customs, in social ideas and practices, in dress, in
laws, in ideas and forms of government—indicate the operation of widely
different influences.