and good qualities are celebrated. Nothing is known there of a river and
boatman of the under world, but the old Mohammedan legend is there
current, of the invisible angel Asrael, or as he is here called, Osraîn.
He, it is said, is commissioned by God to receive the souls of the dead,
and lead the good to the place of reward, the bad to the place of
punishment. He lives in a tree, el ségerat mohàna (the tree of
fulfilling), which has as many leaves as there are inhabitants in the
world. On each leaf is a name, and when a child is born a new one grows.
If any one become ill, his leaf fades, and should he be destined to die,
Osraîn breaks it off.[82] Formerly he used to come visibly to those whom
he was going to carry away, and thus put them in great terror. Since the
Prophet’s time, however, he has been invisible; for when he came to
fetch Mohammed’s soul, he told him that it was not good that by his
visible appearance he should frighten mankind. They might then easily
die of terror, before praying; for he himself, although a courageous and
spirited man, was somewhat perturbed at his appearance. Therefore the
Prophet begged Allah to make Osraîn invisible, which prayer was granted.
Of other tribes in Fazoql, Osman Bey told me, that with them the king
should hold a court of justice every day under a certain tree. If he be
absent three days by illness or any other reason that makes him unfit to
attend to it, he is hanged: two razors are put in the noose, which cut
his throat on the rope being tightened.
The meaning of another of their customs is obscure. At a certain time of
the year they have a kind of carnival, at which every one does as he
likes. Four ministers then carry the king from his house to an open
place on an anqareb, to one leg of which a dog is tied. The whole
population assemble from every quarter. Then they throw spears and
stones at the dog till it dies, after which, the king is carried back to
his house.
Over these and other stories and particulars regarding those races,
which were also certified by the old High Sheikh Ahmed, we finished the
roasted sheep in the open air, before the tent. Night had long
commenced, and the camp fires near and far, with the people busy around
them, sitting still or walking to and fro among the trees, was immensely
picturesque and peculiar. Gradually they went out, all except the watch
fires; the poor prisoners were bound more tightly, and it grew quieter
in the camp.
Osman Bey is a powerful, merry, and natural man, also a strict and
esteemed officer. He promised me a specimen of the discipline and good
order among his soldiers,--whose outward appearance would not inspire
any very favourable prejudice,--in having the reveillé beaten at an
unprepared time. I slept with a military cloak about me on an anqareb in
the open tent. About three o’clock I awoke, through a slight noise;
Osman, who lay beside me on the ground, rose and gave the order to beat
the reveillé to the nearest drummer of the principal guard. He struck
some broken and quickly silent notes on his drum. These were immediately
repeated at the post of the next regiment, then at the third, fourth,
fifth, and succeeding encampments; and suddenly the whole mass of 5,000
men were under arms. A soft whispering and hissing of the soldiers
waking each other, and the slight crackling sound caused by the muskets,
was all that could be heard. I went through the camp with Dr. Peney, who
came out of the neighbouring tent, and we found there the whole army in
rank and file under arms, the officers going up and down in front. When
we returned and told Osman Bey of the surprising punctuality in carrying
out his commands, he allowed the soldiers to disperse again, and first
gave the signal for departure at four o’clock. This had a very different
effect. Everything was in activity and motion; the camels raised their
screaming voices and pitiful bleatings during the loading, the tents
were taken down, and in less than half an hour the army marched off to
the sound of fife and drum to the south.
I took my way in the contrary direction. The early morning and bright
moonlight was very refreshing; the birds woke up with the grey dawn; a
fresh wind arose, and we trotted lustily along through the alleys of
prickly sont-trees. Soon after sunrise we met a stately procession of
well-dressed men and servants with camels and donkeys. It was King
Mahmûd Welled Shauish, whose father, the warlike Shauish, King of
Shaiqie, is known from the history of the conquering campaigns of Ismael
Pasha, to whom he succumbed at a late period, and at whose house at
Hellet e’ Solimân, near Messelemieh, we had stayed some weeks before. He
had gone with Ahmed Pasha Menekle to Taka, and followed the army to
Halfaï, where he now resides. At half-past nine, we again came to the
pyramids, after my camel, yet young and very difficult to manage, had
galloped round in a circle with me, and finally stumbling over a high
mound of grass, fell down on one knee, and sent me far away over his
head, fortunately without doing me any damage.
After my return I employed myself continually on the pyramids and their
inscriptions, had several chambers excavated, and drew out a careful
description of each pyramid. Altogether I had found nearly thirty
different names of Ethiopian kings and queens. I have not as yet brought
them into any chronological order, but have in the comparison of the
inscriptions learned much on the kind of succession and the form of
government. The King of Meroë[83] (which is written Meru or Merua in
one of the southernmost pyramids) was at the same time High Priest of
Ammon: if his wife outlived him she followed him in the government, and
the male heir of the crown only occupied a second place by her; under
other circumstances, it seems, the son succeeded to the crown, having
already, during his father’s lifetime, borne the royal cartouche and
title, and held the post of second priest of Ammon. Thus we see here the
priest government of which Diodorus and Strabo speak, and the precedence
of the worship of Ammon already mentioned by Herodotus.
The inscriptions on the pyramids show that at the time of their erection
the hieroglyphic system of writing was no longer perfectly understood,
and that the hieroglyphical signs were often put there for ornament,
without any intended meaning. Even the royal names are rendered doubtful
by this, and this prevented my recognizing for a long time the pyramids
of the three royal personages who had built the principal temples in
Naga, Ben Naga and in Wadi Temêd, and belonged, no doubt, to the most
shining period of the Meroitic Empire. I am now sure, that the pyramid,
with antechamber arched in the Roman style, in the wall of which Ferlini
found the treasure concealed, notwithstanding the slight change in the
name, belonged to the same mighty and warlike queen who appears in Naga
with her rich dress and her nails almost an inch long. Ferlini’s
jewellery, by the circumstance that they belonged to a known, and, it
seems to me, the greatest of all Meroitic queens, who built almost all
the preserved temples of the island, acquired a far greater importance
for the history of the Ethiopian art in which they now take a certain
position. The purchase of that remarkable treasure is a considerable
gain for our Museum. At that time an Ethiopian demotic character,
resembling the Egyptian demotic in its letters, although with a very
limited alphabet of twenty-five to thirty signs, was more generally
employed and understood than the hieroglyphics. The writing is read from
right to left as there, but always with a distinct division of the words
by two strong points. I have already found twenty-six such demotic
inscriptions, some on steles and libatory slabs, some in the
antechambers of the pyramids over the figures in the processions (which
are generally proceeding towards the deceased king with palm-branches),
some outside on the smooth surfaces of the pyramids, and always plainly
of the same date as the representations, and not added at a subsequent
period. The decipherment of this writing will perhaps not be difficult
on a narrower examination, and would then give us the first certain
sounds of the Ethiopian language spoken here at that time, and decide
its relation to the Egyptian; while the almost perfect identity of the
Ethiopian and Egyptian hieroglyphics would till now give decidedly no
sanction to any conclusion as to a similar identity between the two
languages. On the contrary, it seems, and may be safely asserted for the
later Meroitic period, that the Egyptian hieroglyphics were taken from
Egypt as the sacred monumental writing, without change, but also without
a full comprehension of their signification. The few continually
recurring signs prove that the Ethiopian-demotic writing is purely
alphabetic, which must very much lighten the labour of decipherment. The
partition of the words is perhaps taken from the Roman writing. The
analogy with the development of writing in Egypt, however, proceeded
still farther; for next to this Ethiopian-demotic there occurs at a
later period, an Ethiopian-Greek, which may be fairly compared with the
Koptic, and indeed has borrowed several letters from it. It is found in
the inscriptions of Soba and in some others on the walls of the temple
ruins of Wadi e’ Sofra. We have now therefore, as in Egypt, two
doubtless successive systems of writing, which contain the actual
Ethiopian popular dialect. It is customary now to call the old
Abyssinian-Geez language the Ethiopic, which has no right to this
denomination in an ethnographical point of view, as a Semetic language
brought from Arabia, but only as a local term. A Geez inscription, which
I have found in the chamber of a pyramid, has evidently been added at a
later period.
I hope that by the study of the native inscriptions, and the yet living
languages, some important results may be obtained. The name Ethiopian
with the ancients comprehended much of very various import. The ancient
population of the whole Nile valley to Chartûm, and perhaps along the
Blue River, as also the tribes in the desert east of the Nile, and the
Abyssinians, then probably were more broadly distinguished from the
negroes than at present, and belonged to the Caucasian race; the
Ethiopians of Meroë (according to Herodotus, the mother state of all the
Ethiopians) were reddish-brown people, like the Egyptians, only darker,
as at the present day. This is also proved by the monuments, on which I
have more than once found the red skin of the kings and queens
preserved.[84] In Egypt the women were always painted yellow,
particularly during the Old Empire, before the Ethiopian mixture, at the
time of the Hyksos; and the Egyptian women of the present day, who have
grown pale in the harems, incline to the same colour.[85] After the
eighteenth dynasty, however, red women appear, and so it is certain the
Ethiopian women were always represented. It seems that the so-called
Barâbra nation has much Ethiopian blood mixed with it, and perhaps this
may be more fully shown at some time by their language.[86] It is no
doubt the ancient Nubian, and has continued under that name in somewhat
distant south-westerly regions; for the languages of the Nubians in and
about Kordofan are, to some extent, evidently related to the Berber
language. That this last, which is now only spoken from Assuan to Dar
Shaiqîeh, south of Dongola, in the Nile valley, ruled for a time in the
province of Berber, and still higher up, I have found enough proof in
the names of the localities.
Next to the ruins of Meroë are situated, along the river, from south to
north, the villages of Marûga, Danqêleh and e’ Sûr, which are
comprehended in the name Begerauîeh, so that one almost always only
hears the last name. Five minutes to the north of e’ Sûr, lies the
village of Qala, and ten minutes farther, el Guês, which are both
included in the name Ghabîne. An hour down the stream are two villages,
called Marûga, already deserted before the conquest of the country, but
a little distant from each other, and still more northward, near the
Omarâb mountains, running to the river from the east, is a third
village, called Gebel (Mount village), only inhabited by Fukara.
Cailliaud was only acquainted with the southernmost of the three
Marûgas, lying by the great temple ruins. The name attracted his
attention by its similarity to Meroë. The similarity is still greater
when one knows that the actual name is Maru, as--_ga_ is only the
general noun termination, which is added or omitted according to the
grammar, and does not belong to the root. In the dialect of Kenus and
Dongola this ending is--_gi_; in the dialect of Mahass and Sukkôt--_ga_.
When I went through the different names of the upper countries with one
of our Berber servants, I learned that _maro_, or _marôgi_, in the one
dialect, _maru_, or _marûga_, in the other, signifies “ruined mound,
ruined temple;” thus are the ruins of ancient Syene, or those of the
island Philæ, called Marôgi. Quite different from it is another Berber
word, Mérua, which is also pronounced Méraui, by which all white rocks,
white stones, are distinguished; for instance, a rock near Assuan, on
the east side of the Nile, by the village of el Gezîret. By this it is
clear that the name Marûga has nothing to do with the name Meroë, as it
is not usual to call a city “Ruin-town,” immediately on its foundation.
On the other hand, the name Merua, Méraui (in English “white rock”),
would be a very good name for a city, if the position of the place were
favourable, as it is at Mount Barkal, although not here.
LETTER XXI.
KELI, OPPOSITE MEROE.
_April 29, 1844._
Franke did not return from his expedition at Ben Naga until the 23rd. He
brought the altar hither in sixteen blocks, on a bark. The stones which
we shall have to take hence, a wearisome journey of six or seven days
through the wilderness, are a load for about twenty camels, so that our
train will be considerably greater than before. Unfortunately, we have
been unable to bring away anything from Naga, in the desert, on account
of the difficulty of transportation, except the already mentioned Roman
inscription, and another large peculiarly carved work. There are on it
some particularly curious representations; among others, a sitting
figure in front, a nimbus round the hair, the left arm raised in a right
angle, and the first and middle fingers of the hand pointing upward, as
the old Byzantine figures of Christ are represented. The right hand
holds a long staff resting on the ground, like that of John the Baptist.
This figure is wholly strange to the Egyptian representation, and is
doubtlessly derived from another source, as also another
often-represented deity, also represented in full front, with a richly
curling beard, which one would be inclined to compare with a Jupiter or
Serapis in posture and appearance. The mixture of religions at that
evidently late era had obtained exceedingly, and I should not be
astonished if later researches were to show that the Ethiopian kings
included Christ and Jupiter among their widely different classes of
gods. The god with the three or four lions’ heads is probably not of
ancient origin, but taken from somewhere else.
On the 24th, we crossed the Nile in our bark, in order to take our way
to Gebel Barkal by the desert. Camels again seemed to be difficult to
procure, but the threat that I should not call the Sheîkh, but the
government to account, by virtue of my firman, if he would not manage to
obtain the necessary animals, worked so fast, that we could already
depart to the desert from Gôs Burri with eighty camels.
Here, at Keli, I had again opportunity to witness a funeral, this time
for a deceased Fellah, at which nearly two hundred people were
assembled, the men parted from the women. The men sat down opposite each
other in pairs, embraced each other, laid their heads on their
shoulders, raised them again, beat themselves, clapped their hands, and
cried as much as they could. The women lamented, sang songs of misery,
strewed themselves with ashes, went about in procession, and threw
themselves on the ground, in a similar way to Wed Médineh, only their
dance resembled rather the violent motions of the derwishes. The rest of
the inhabitants of Keli sat around in groups, under the shadow of the
trees, their heads down, sighing and complaining.
While we were obliged to wait for the camels, I crossed to Begerauîeh
again, to seek some ruins, said to lie more to the north. From El Guês,
I got to the two villages of Marûga, lying not very far from one
another, in three-quarters of an hour. A great number of grave mounds
lie to the east of the first of these, on the low heights, looking like
a group of pyramids in the distance. The elevation runs along in a
crescent-like form, and is covered with these round hillocks of black
desert-stones, which were fifty-six in number, on my counting them from
a large one in the centre.
Five minutes farther into the desert is a second group of similar
hillocks, twenty-one in number; but many others are scattered around on
small single plateaux. Still lower down and nearly by the bushes, I
found to the south of both groups, another, consisting of forty graves,
of which some still clearly showed their original four-cornered shape.
The best grave had fifteen to eighteen feet on each side; it had been,
like several others, dug up in the middle, and had filled itself with
pluvial earth, in which a tree was growing; at another there was still a
great four-cornered circumvallation of twenty-four paces to be seen; the
undermost foundations were built of little black stones; and a tumulus
seems to have been erected inside the enclosure, though not in the
middle. Another well-preserved stronger circumvallation had a little
less extent, but seemed to have been quite filled up by a pyramid. Of an
actual casing there was nothing to be seen anywhere. The hillocks went
farther south into the bushes, and altogether they might be estimated at
two hundred in number. Perhaps they continued to stretch along toward
Meroe, at the edge of the desert, whither I should have ridden, had I
not sent the boat, which I had now to find in a hurry, too far down the
river. It seems from this that here was the actual burial place of
Meroë, and that pyramidal, or when flat sides were wanted, tumular
hillocks of stone were the usual form of the graves of private persons
also at that period.
LETTER XXII.
BARKAL.
_May 9, 1844._
The desert of Gilif, which we traversed on our way hither, in order to
cut off the great eastern bend of the Nile, takes its name from the
principal mountain lying in the midst of it. On the maps it is confused
with the desert of Bahiûda, joining it on the south-east, and through
which lies the road from Chartûm to Ambukôl and Barkal. Our direction
was at first due east to a well, then north-west through the Gilif
mountains to the great Wadi Abû Dôm, which then conducted us in the same
direction to the westerly bend of the Nile.
The general character of the country here is not that of a desert, like
that between Korusko and Abu Hammed, but rather of a sandy steppe. It is
almost everywhere overgrown with gesh (reed bushes), and not unusually
with low trees, mostly sont-trees. The rains, which fall here at certain
seasons of the year, have washed down considerable masses of earth into
the levels, that might well be cultivated, and are occasionally broken
by rain-streams three to four feet deep. The earth is yellow, and formed
of a clayey sand. The species of rock in the soil and all the mountains,
with the exception of the high Gilif chain, is sandstone. The ground is
much covered with hard black blocks of the same, the road uneven and
undulating. Numerous gazelles and great white antelopes, with only one
brown stripe down the spine, find a rich subsistence in these plains,
which are also visited in the rainy season by herds of camels and goats.
We departed from the river on the 29th of April; yet this was only a
trial of strength, as is very customary with greater caravans, like that
of birds of passage, before their great migration. After two hours’
journey up to Gôs Burri, lying off from the river, the guide again
permitted the uneasy swarm to settle; the camel-drivers lacked
provisions, a few more animals were obtained, some changed. Thus we were
not in order and full readiness until the following noon. We stayed the
night at Wadi Abu Hommed, where we had Gebel Omarda on the right.
The third day we left early, passed Gebel Qermâna, and came to the well
Abu Ilêh, which turned our road far to the east, and detained us several
hours beyond noon. Hence we crossed a broad plain in seven hours, and
encamped about ten o’clock at night near Gebel Sergên. On the 2nd of May
we arrived, after four hours, at a woody district to the right of Gebel
Nusf, the “Mountain of the half,” situated half-way between the wells of
Abu Tlêh and Gaqedûl, which, in the desert, always form the hour of the
desert clock.
The Arabs from the district of Gôs Burri, who guide us, are of the
’Auadîeh race; they are far more considerable than the Ababde, have a
hasty indistinct utterance, and seem altogether to have little capacity.
They have commingled much with the Fellahîn of the country, who here
call themselves Qaleâb, Homerâb, and Gaalin. Shaiqîeh Arabs also exist
here, probably since the Egyptian conquest; they have shields and spears
like the Ababde. The rich sheikh Emîn, of Gôs Burri, had given us his
brother, the Fakîr Fadl Allah, as a guide, and his own son, Fadl Allah,
as overseer of the camels; but even the nobles of the people here make a
poor and evanescent impression in comparison with our conductors of
Korusko. The order of the day here was this, that we generally set out
about six o’clock in the morning, and continued going on until ten
o’clock; then the caravan rested during the noonday heat till about
three, when it journeyed again until ten or eleven o’clock at night.
The whole afternoon we rode through the extensive plain, El Gôs,
probably so called from the great sand-downs, so characteristic of this
region, and which assume, in the southern districts, a peculiar form.
They have almost all the form of a crescent, opening toward the
south-west, so that one looks from the road into a number of
amphitheatres, the steep sand-walls of which rise ten feet with the
north wind, which blows inside, and clears away the sand, which would
otherwise rapidly fill the cavity, from the inner field. How quickly
these moveable sand structures change their place, is shown by the
traces of the caravan road, often lost beneath high sand-hills. Toward
eight in the evening we left the Gebel Barqugrês to the left, and
stopped for the night at a short distance from the Gilif mountains.
On the 3rd of May we passed through the Wadi Guâh el ’âlem, much
overgrown with trees, into the mountains, principally porphyritical,
and like all original mountains, containing more vegetation than the
sandy plains, by the longer holding of the precipitated damp and scarce
rains. After three hours we came into Wadi G’aqedûl, luxuriantly overrun
with gesh and prickly trees of every kind--sont, somra, and serha. We
here found grazing herds of camels and goats, particularly in the
neighbourhood of the water, which has also attracted numerous birds,
among them ravens and pigeons. In the wide, deep-lying grotto, which may
be 300 feet in diameter, and is enclosed by high walls of granite, the
water is said to remain three years without requiring replenishment. It
was, however, so foul and bad smelling, that it was even despised by my
thirsty ass. The drinkable water lies farther up the mountain, and is
difficult to be obtained.
We here forsook the northerly direction, which the wells after Gebel
Nusf had obliged us to take, and went westerly by the Gilif mountains,
in Wadi el Mehêt, crossed the dry Chôr el Ammer, whence the way to
Ambukôl branches off, and encamped at night after ten o’clock in the
Wadi el Uêr, called by others the Wadi Abu Harôd. From this place the
Gilif mountains retreated eastward again for some time, and only left
sand-hills in the foreground, by which we travelled on the following
morning. To the W.N.W. we saw another chain, no longer called Gilif; a
single projecting double-pointed mountain was called Miglik. The great
creek of the Gilif chain, filled with sand-rock, is two hours’ journey
broad; then the way leads northward into these mountains, which is
called Gebêl el Mágeqa after the well of Mágeqa.
Before the entrance into these mountains we came to a place covered with
heaps of stones, which might be taken for grave tumuli, but under which
no one lies buried. When the date-merchants, whom we encountered on the
following day with their large round wicker-baskets, come this way, they
are here asked for money by their camel-driver. Whoever will not give
them anything has such a cenotaph raised from its stones, as a memorial
of his hardheartedness. We also found a similar place in the desert of
Korusko. After nine o’clock we got to the well; we did not however stop,
but ascended a wild valley to a considerable height, where we encamped
towards noon.