Chapter I) the identical galleys by which, in late Neolithic

[Illustration: Book Spines]

HISTORY OF EGYPT

CHALDEA, SYRIA, BABYLONIA, AND ASSYRIA

IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT DISCOVERY

BY L. W. KING and H. R. HALL

Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, British Museum

Containing over 1200 colored plates and illustrations.

Copyright 1906

[Illustration: Frontispiece1]

[Illustration: Frontispiece1-text]

[Illustration: Titlepage1]

[Illustration: Versa1]

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

It should be noted that many of the monuments and sites of excavations

in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Kurdistan described in this volume

have been visited by the authors in connection with their own work in

those countries. The greater number of the photographs here published

were taken by the authors themselves. Their thanks are due to M. Ernest

Leroux, of Paris, for his kind permission to reproduce a certain number

of plates from the works of M. de Morgan, illustrating his recent

discoveries in Egypt and Persia, and to Messrs. W. A. Mansell & Co., of

London, for kindly allowing them to make use of a number of photographs

issued by them.

PREFACE

The present volume contains an account of the most important additions

which have been made to our knowledge of the ancient history of Egypt

and Western Asia during the few years which have elapsed since the

publication of Prof. Maspero’s _Histoire Ancienne des Peuples de

l’Orient Classique_, and includes short descriptions of the excavations

from which these results have been obtained. It is in no sense a

connected and continuous history of these countries, for that has

already been written by Prof. Maspero, but is rather intended as an

appendix or addendum to his work, briefly recapitulating and describing

the discoveries made since its appearance. On this account we

have followed a geographical rather than a chronological system of

arrangement, but at the same time the attempt has been made to suggest

to the mind of the reader the historical sequence of events.

At no period have excavations been pursued with more energy and

activity, both in Egypt and Western Asia, than at the present time, and

every season’s work obliges us to modify former theories, and extends

our knowledge of periods of history which even ten years ago were

unknown to the historian. For instance, a whole chapter has been added

to Egyptian history by the discovery of the Neolithic culture of the

primitive Egyptians, while the recent excavations at Susa are revealing

a hitherto totally unsuspected epoch of proto-Elamite civilization.

Further than this, we have discovered the relics of the oldest

historical kings of Egypt, and we are now enabled to reconstitute from

material as yet unpublished the inter-relations of the early dynasties

of Babylon. Important discoveries have also been made with regard to

isolated points in the later historical periods. We have therefore

attempted to include the most important of these in our survey of recent

excavations and their results. We would again remind the reader that

Prof. Maspero’s great work must be consulted for the complete history of

the period, the present volume being, not a connected history of Egypt

and Western Asia, but a description and discussion of the manner in

which recent discovery and research have added to and modified our

conceptions of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilization.

CONTENTS

I. The Discovery of Prehistoric Egypt

II. Abydos and the First Three Dynasties

III. Memphis and the Pyramids

IV. Recent Excavations in Western Asia and the Dawn of Chaldæan History

V. Elam and Babylon, the Country of the Sea and the Kassites

VI. Early Babylonian Life and Customs

VII. Temples and Tombs of Thebes

VIII. The Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires in the Light of Recent

Research

IX. The Last Days of Ancient Egypt

EGYPT AND MESOPOTAMIA

_In the Light of Recent Excavation and Research_

CHAPTER I--THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC EGYPT

During the last ten years our conception of the beginnings of Egyptian

antiquity has profoundly altered. When Prof. Maspero published the

first volume of his great _Histoire Ancienne des Peuples des l’Orient

Classique_, in 1895, Egyptian history, properly so called, still began

with the Pyramid-builders, Sne-feru, Khufu, and Khafra (Cheops and

Chephren), and the legendary lists of earlier kings preserved at Abydos

and Sakkara were still quoted as the only source of knowledge of the

time before the IVth Dynasty. Of a prehistoric Egypt nothing was known,

beyond a few flint flakes gathered here and there upon the desert

plateaus, which might or might not tell of an age when the ancestors

of the Pyramid-builders knew only the stone tools and weapons of the

primeval savage.

Now, however, the veil which has hidden the beginnings of Egyptian

civilization from us has been lifted, and we see things, more or less,

as they actually were, unobscured by the traditions of a later day.

Until the last few years nothing of the real beginnings of history in

either Egypt or Mesopotamia had been found; legend supplied the only

material for the reconstruction of the earliest history of the oldest

civilized nations of the globe. Nor was it seriously supposed that any

relics of prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia ever would be found. The

antiquity of the known history of these countries already appeared

so great that nobody took into consideration the possibility of our

discovering a prehistoric Egypt or Mesopotamia; the idea was too remote

from practical work. And further, civilization in these countries had

lasted so long that it seemed more than probable that all traces

of their prehistoric age had long since been swept away. Yet the

possibility, which seemed hardly worth a moment’s consideration in 1895,

is in 1905 an assured reality, at least as far as Egypt is concerned.

Prehistoric Babylonia has yet to be discovered. It is true, for example,

that at Mukay-yar, the site of ancient Ur of the Chaldees, burials

in earthenware coffins, in which the skeletons lie in the doubled-up

position characteristic of Neolithic interments, have been found; but

there is no doubt whatever that these are burials of a much later date,

belonging, quite possibly, to the Parthian period. Nothing that may

rightfully be termed prehistoric has yet been found in the Euphrates

valley, whereas in Egypt prehistoric antiquities are now almost as well

known and as well represented in our museums as are the prehistoric

antiquities of Europe and America.

With the exception of a few palasoliths from the surface of the Syrian

desert, near the Euphrates valley, not a single implement of the Age

of Stone has yet been found in Southern Mesopotamia, whereas Egypt

has yielded to us the most perfect examples of the flint-knapper’s

art known, flint tools and weapons more beautiful than the finest that

Europe and America can show. The reason is not far to seek. Southern

Mesopotamia is an alluvial country, and the ancient cities, which

doubtless mark the sites of the oldest settlements in the land, are

situated in the alluvial marshy plain between the Tigris and the

Euphrates; so that all traces of the Neolithic culture of the country

would seem to have disappeared, buried deep beneath city-mounds, clay

and marsh. It is the same in the Egyptian Delta, a similar country; and

here no traces of the prehistoric culture of Egypt have been found. The

attempt to find them was made last year at Buto, which is known to be

one of the most antique centres of civilization, and probably was one of

the earliest settlements in Egypt, but without success. The infiltration

of water had made excavation impossible and had no doubt destroyed

everything belonging to the most ancient settlement. It is not going too

far to predict that exactly the same thing will be found by any explorer

who tries to discover a Neolithic stratum beneath a city-mound of

Babylonia. There is little hope that prehistoric Chaldæa will ever be

known to us. But in Egypt the conditions are different. The Delta is

like Babylonia, it is true; but in the Upper Nile valley the river flows

down with but a thin border of alluvial land on either side, through the

rocky and hilly desert, the dry Sahara, where rain falls but once in two

or three years. Antiquities buried in this soil in the most remote

ages are preserved intact as they were first interred, until the modern

investigator comes along to look for them. And it is on the desert

margin of the valley that the remains of prehistoric Egypt have been

found. That is the reason for their perfect preservation till our own

day, and why we know prehistoric Egypt so well.

The chief work of Egyptian civilization was the proper irrigation of

the alluvial soil, the turning of marsh into cultivated fields, and the

reclamation of land from the desert for the purposes of agriculture.

Owing to the rainless character of the country, the only means

of obtaining water for the crops is by irrigation, and where the

fertilizing Nile water cannot be taken by means of canals, there

cultivation ends and the desert begins. Before Egyptian civilization,

properly so called, began, the valley was a great marsh through which

the Nile found its way north to the sea. The half-savage, stone-using

ancestors of the civilized Egyptians hunted wild fowl, crocodiles,

and hippopotami in the marshy valley; but except in a few isolated

settlements on convenient mounds here and there (the forerunners of the

later villages), they did not live there. Their settlements were on

the dry desert margin, and it was here, upon low tongues of desert hill

jutting out into the plain, that they buried their dead. Their simple

shallow graves were safe from the flood, and, but for the depredations

of jackals and hyenas, here they have remained intact till our own

day, and have yielded up to us the facts from which we have derived our

knowledge of prehistoric Egypt. Thus it is that we know so much of the

Egyptians of the Stone Age, while of their contemporaries in Mesopotamia

we know nothing, nor is anything further likely to be discovered.

But these desert cemeteries, with their crowds of oval shallow graves,

covered by only a few inches of surface soil, in which the Neolithic

Egyptians lie crouched up with their flint implements and polished

pottery beside them, are but monuments of the later age of prehistoric

Egypt. Long before the Neolithic Egyptian hunted his game in the

marshes, and here and there essayed the work of reclamation for the

purposes of an incipient agriculture, a far older race inhabited the

valley of the Nile. The written records of Egyptian civilization go back

four thousand years before Christ, or earlier, and the Neolithic Age of

Egypt must go back to a period several thousand years before that. But

we can now go back much further still, to the Palaeolithic Age of Egypt.

At a time when Europe was still covered by the ice and snows of the

Glacial Period, and man fought as an equal, hardly yet as a superior,

with cave-bear and mammoth, the Palaeolithic Egyptians lived on the

banks of the Nile. Their habitat was doubtless the desert slopes, often,

too, the plateaus themselves; but that they lived entirely upon the

plateaus, high up above the Nile marsh, is improbable. There, it is

true, we find their flint implements, the great pear-shaped weapons of

the types of Chelles, St. Acheul, and Le Moustier, types well known

to all who are acquainted with the flint implements of the “Drift” in

Europe. And it is there that the theory, generally accepted hitherto,

has placed the habitat of the makers and users of these implements.

The idea was that in Palaeolithic days, contemporary with the Glacial

Age of Northern Europe and America, the climate of Egypt was entirely

different from that of later times and of to-day. Instead of dry desert,

the mountain plateaus bordering the Nile valley were supposed to have

been then covered with forest, through which flowed countless streams

to feed the river below. It was suggested that remains of these streams

were to be seen in the side ravines, or wadis, of the Nile valley, which

run up from the low desert on the river level into the hills on either

hand. These wadis undoubtedly show extensive traces of strong water

action; they curve and twist as the streams found their easiest way

to the level through the softer strata, they are heaped up with great

water-worn boulders, they are hollowed out where waterfalls once fell.

They have the appearance of dry watercourses, exactly what any mountain

burns would be were the water-supply suddenly cut off for ever, the

climate altered from rainy to eternal sun-glare, and every plant and

tree blasted, never to grow again. Acting on the supposition that this

idea was a correct one, most observers have concluded that the climate

of Egypt in remote periods was very different from the dry, rainless one

now obtaining. To provide the water for the wadi streams, heavy

rainfall and forests are desiderated. They were easily supplied, on the

hypothesis. Forests clothed the mountain plateaus, heavy rains fell, and

the water rushed down to the Nile, carving out the great watercourses

which remain to this day, bearing testimony to the truth. And the

flints, which the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the plateau-forests made

and used, still lie on the now treeless and sun-baked desert surface.

[Illustration: 007.jpg THE BED OF AN ANCIENT WATERCOURSE IN THE WADIYÊN,

THEBES.]

This is certainly a very weak conclusion. In fact, it seriously damages

the whole argument, the water-courses to the contrary notwithstanding.

The palæoliths are there. They can be picked up by any visitor. There

they lie, great flints of the Drift types, just like those found in the

gravel-beds of England and Belgium, on the desert surface where they

were made. Undoubtedly where they were made, for the places where

they lie are the actual ancient flint workshops, where the flints were

chipped. Everywhere around are innumerable flint chips and perfect

weapons, burnt black and patinated by ages of sunlight. We are taking

one particular spot in the hills of Western Thebes as an example, but

there are plenty of others, such as the Wadi esh-Shêkh on the right bank

of the Nile opposite Maghagha, whence Mr. H. Seton-Karr has brought

back specimens of flint tools of all ages from the Palaeolithic to the

Neolithic periods.

The Palæolithic flint workshops on the Theban hills have been visited of

late years by Mr. Seton-Karr, by Prof. Schweinfurth, Mr. Allen Sturge,

and Dr. Blanckenhorn, by Mr. Portch, Mr. Ayrton, and Mr. Hall. The

weapons illustrated here were found by Messrs. Hall and Ayrton, and are

now preserved in the British Museum. Among these flints shown we notice

two fine specimens of the pear-shaped type of St. Acheul, with curious

adze-shaped implements of primitive type to left and right. Below, to

the right, is a very primitive instrument of Chellean type, being merely

a sharpened pebble. Above, to left and right, are two specimens of the

curious half-moon-shaped instruments which are characteristic of

the Theban flint field and are hardly known elsewhere. All have the

beautiful brown patina, which only ages of sunburn can give. The

“poignard” type to the left, at the bottom of the plate, is broken off

short.

[Illustration: 008.jpg Palaeolithic Implements of the Quaternary Period.

From the desert plateau and slopes west of Thebes.]

In the smaller illustration we see some remarkable types: two scrapers

or knives with strongly marked “bulb of percussion” (the spot where the

flint-knapper struck and from which the flakes flew off), a very regular

_coup-de-poing_ which looks almost like a large arrowhead, and on the

right a much weathered and patinated scraper which must be of immemorial

age.

[Illustration: 009.jpg (right): PALAEOLITHIC IMPLEMENTS. From Man,

March, 1905.]

This came from the top plateau, not from the slopes (or subsidiary

plateaus at the head of the _wadis_), as did the great St. Acheulian

weapons. The circular object is very remarkable: it is the half of the

ring of a “morpholith “(a round flinty accretion often found in the

Theban limestone) which has been split, and the split (flat) side

carefully bevelled. Several of these interesting objects have been

found in conjunction with Palæolithic implements at Thebes. No doubt the

flints lie on the actual surface where they were made. No later water

action has swept them away and covered them with gravel, no later human

habitation has hidden them with successive deposits of soil, no gradual

deposit of dust and rubbish has buried them deep. They lie as they were

left in the far-away Palæolithic Age, and they have lain there till

taken away by the modern explorer.

But this is not the case with all the Palæolithic flints of Thebes. In

the year 1882 Maj.-Gen. Pitt-Rivers discovered Palæolithic flints in the

deposit of diluvial detritus which lies between the cultivation and the

mountains on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor. Many of these are

of the same type as those found on the surface of the mountain plateau

which lies at the head of the great _wadi_ of the Tombs of the Kings,

while the diluvial deposit is at its mouth. The stuff of which the

detritus is composed evidently came originally from the high plateau,

and was washed down, with the flints, in ancient times.

This is quite conceivable, but how is it that the flints left behind

on the plateau remain on the original ancient surface? How is it

conceivable that if (on the old theory) these plateaus were in

Palæolithic days clothed with forest, the Palæolithic flints could even

in a single instance remain undisturbed from Palæolithic times to the

present day, when the forest in which they were made and the forest soil

on which they reposed have entirely disappeared? If there were woods and

forests On the heights, it would seem impossible that we should find,

as we do, Palæolithic implements lying _in situ_ on the desert surface,

around the actual manufactories where they were made. Yet if the

constant rainfall and the vegetation of the Libyan desert area in

Palæolithic days is all a myth (as it most probably is), how came the

embedded palaeoliths, found by Gen. Pitt-Rivers, in the bed of diluvial

detritus which is apparently _débris_ from the plateau brought down by

the Palæolithic _wadi_ streams?

Water erosion has certainly formed the Theban _wadis_. But this water

erosion was probably not that which would be the result of perennial

streams flowing down from wooded heights, but of torrents like those

of to-day, which fill the _wadis_ once in three years or so after heavy

rain, but repeated at much closer intervals. We may in fact suppose

just so much difference in meteorological conditions as would make it

possible for sudden rain-storms to occur over the desert at far more

frequent intervals than at present. That would account for the detritus

bed at the mouth of the _wadi_, and its embedded flints, and at the

same time maintain the general probability of the idea that the desert

plateaus were desert in Palæolithic days as now, and that early man only

knapped his flints up there because he found the flint there. He himself

lived on the slopes and nearer the marsh.

This new view seems to be much sounder and more probable than the old

one, maintained by Flinders Petrie and Blanckenhorn, according to which

the high plateau was the home of man in Palæolithic times, when the

rainfall, as shown by the valley erosion and waterfalls, must have

caused an abundant vegetation on the plateau, where man could live and

hunt his game.[1] Were this so, it is patent that the Palæolithic

flints could not have been found on the desert surface as they are. Mr.

H. J. L. Beadnell, of the Geological Survey of Egypt, to whom we are

indebted for the promulgation of the more modern and probable view,

says: “Is it certain that the high plateau was then clothed with

forests? What evidence is there to show that it differed in any

important respect from its present aspect? And if, as I suggest, desert

conditions obtained then as now, and man merely worked his flints along

the edges of the plateaus overlooking the Nile valley, I see no reason

why flint implements, dating even from Palæolithic times should not in

favourable cases still be found in the spots where they were left,

surrounded by the flakes struck off in manufacture. On the flat

plateaus the occasional rains which fall--once in three or four

years--can effect but little transport of material, and merely lower

the general level by dissolving the underlying limestone, so that the

plateau surface is left with a coating of nodules and blocks of

insoluble flint and chert. Flint implements might thus be expected to

remain in many localities for indefinite periods, but they would

certainly become more or less ‘patinated,’ pitted on the surface, and

rounded at the angles after long exposure to heat, cold, and blown

sand.” This is exactly the case of the Palæolithic flint tools from the

desert plateau.

[1] Petrie, _Nagada and Ballas_, p. 49.

[Illustration: 012.jpg UPPER DESERT PLATEAU, WHERE PALEOLITHIC

IMPLEMENTS ARE FOUND, Thebes: 1,400 leet above the Nile.]

We do not know whether Palæolithic man in Egypt was contemporary with

the cave-man of Europe. We have no means of gauging the age of the

Palæolithic Egyptian weapons, as we have for the Neolithic period.

The historical (dynastic) period of Egyptian annals began with the

unification of the kingdom under one head somewhere about 4500 B.C. At

that time copper as well as stone weapons were used, so that we may say

that at the beginning of the historical age the Egyptians were living

in the “Chalcolithic” period. We can trace the use of copper back for

a considerable period anterior to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty,

so that we shall probably not be far wrong if we do not bring down the

close of the purely Neolithic Age in Egypt--the close of the Age of

Stone, properly so called--later than +5000 B.C. How far back in the

remote ages the transition period between the Palæolithic and Neolithic

Ages should be placed, it is utterly impossible to say. The use of stone

for weapons and implements continued in Egypt as late as the time of

the XIIth Dynasty, about 2500-2000 B.C. But these XIIth Dynasty stone

implements show by their forms how late they are in the history of the

Stone Age. The axe heads, for instance, are in form imitations of

the copper and bronze axe heads usual at that period; they are stone

imitations of metal, instead of the originals on whose model the metal

weapons were formed. The flint implements of the XIIth Dynasty were

a curious survival from long past ages. After the time of the XIIth

Dynasty stone was no longer used for tools or weapons, except for the

sacred rite of making the first incision in the dead bodies before

beginning the operations of embalming; for this purpose, as Herodotus

tells us, an “Ethiopian stone” was used. This was no doubt a knife of

flint or chert, like those of the Neolithic ancestors of the Egyptians,

and the continued use of a stone knife for this one purpose only is a

very interesting instance of a ceremonial survival. We may compare the

wigs of British judges.

[Illustration: 014.jpg FLINT KNIFE]

We have no specimen of a flint knife which can definitely be asserted to

have belonged to an embalmer, but of the archaistic flint weapons of the

XIIth Dynasty we have several specimens. They were found by Prof. Petrie

at the place named by him “Kahun,” the site of a XIIth Dynasty town

built near the pyramid of King Usertsen (or Senusret) II at Illahun,

at the mouth of the canal leading from the Nile valley into the

oasis-province of the Payyum. These Kahun flints, and others of probably

the same period found by Mr. Seton-Karr at the very ancient flint

works in the Wadi esh-Shêkh, are of very coarse and poor workmanship

as compared with the stone-knapping triumphs of the late Neolithic and

early Chalcolithic periods. The delicacy of the art had all been lost.

But the best flint knives of the early period--dating to just a little

before the time of the Ist Dynasty, when flint-working had attained its

apogee, and copper had just begun to be used--are undoubtedly the most

remarkable stone weapons ever made in the world. The grace and utility

of the form, the delicacy of the fluted chipping on the side, and

the minute care with which the tiny serrations of the cutting edge,

serrations so small that often they can hardly be seen with the naked

eye, are made, can certainly not be parallelled elsewhere. The art

of flint-knapping reached its zenith in Ancient Egypt. The specimen

illustrated has a handle covered with gold decorated with incised

designs representing animals.

The prehistoric Egyptians may also fairly be said to have attained

greater perfection than other peoples in the Neolithic stage of culture,

in other arts besides the making of stone tools and weapons. Their

pottery is of remarkable perfection. Now that the sites of the Egyptian

prehistoric settlements have been so thoroughly explored by competent

archæologists (and, unhappily, as thoroughly pillaged by incompetent

natives), this prehistoric Egyptian pottery has become extremely well

known. In fact, it is so common that good specimens may be bought

anywhere in Egypt for a few piastres. Most museums possess sets of this

pottery, of which great quantities have been brought back from Egypt

by Prof. Petrie and other explorers. It is of very great interest,

artistically as well as historically. The potter’s wheel was not yet

invented, and all the vases, even those of the most perfect shape, were

built up by hand. The perfection of form attained without the aid of the

wheel is truly marvellous.

The commonest type of this pottery is a red polished ware vase with

black top, due to its having been baked mouth downward in a fire, the

ashes of which, according to Prof. Petrie, deoxidized the hæmatite

burnishing, and so turned the red colour to black. “In good examples

the hæmatite has not only been reduced to black magnetic oxide, but

the black has the highest polish, as seen on fine Greek vases. This is

probably due to the formation of carbonyl gas in the smothered fire.

This gas acts as a solvent of magnetic oxide, and hence allows it to

assume a new surface, like the glassy surface of some marbles subjected

to solution in water.” This black and red ware appears to be the most

ancient prehistoric Egyptian pottery known. Later in date are a red

ware and a black ware with rude geometrical incised designs, imitating

basketwork, and with the incised lines filled in with white. Later again

is a buff ware, either plain or decorated with wavy lines, concentric

circles, and elaborate drawings of boats sailing on the Nile, ostriches,

fish, men and women, and so on.

[Illustration: 017.jpg (right) BUFF WARE VASE, Predynastic period,

before 4000 B.C.]

These designs are in deep red. With this elaborate pottery the Neolithic

ceramic art of Egypt reached its highest point; in the succeeding period

(the beginning of the historic age) there was a decline in workmanship,

exhibiting clumsy forms and bad colour, and it is not until the time of

the IVth Dynasty that good pottery (a fine polished red) is once more

found. Meanwhile the invention of glazed pottery, which was unknown to

the prehistoric Egyptians, had been made (before the beginning of the

Ist Dynasty). The unglazed ware of the first three dynasties was bad,

but the new invention of light blue glazed faience (not porcelain

properly so called) seems to have made great progress, and we possess

fine specimens at the beginning of the Ist Dynasty. The prehistoric

Egyptians were also proficient in other arts. They carved ivory and they

worked gold, which is known to have been almost the first metal worked

by man; certainly in Egypt it was utilized for ornament even before

copper was used for work. We may refer to the illustration of a flint

knife with gold handle, already given.[2]

[2] See illustration.

The date of the actual introduction of copper for tools and weapons into

Egypt is uncertain, but it seems probable that copper was occasionally

used at a very early period. Copper weapons have been found in

pre-dynastic graves beside the finest buff pottery with elaborate red

designs, so that we may say that when the flint-working and pottery of

the Neolithic Egyptians had reached its zenith, the use of copper was

already known, and copper weapons were occasionally employed. We can

thus speak of the “Chalcolithic” period in Egypt as having already begun

at that time, no doubt several centuries before the beginning of the

historical or dynastic age. Strictly speaking, the Egyptians remained

in the “Chalcolithic” period till the end of the XIIth Dynasty, but in

practice it is best to speak of this period, when the word is used, as

extending from the time of the finest flint weapons and pottery of the

prehistoric age (when the “Neolithic” period may be said to close) till

about the IId or IIId Dynasty. By that time the “Bronze,” or, rather,

“Copper,” Age of Egypt had well begun, and already stone was not in

common use.

The prehistoric pottery is of the greatest value to the archæologist,

for with its help some idea may be obtained of the succession of periods

within the late Neolithic-Chalcolithic Age. The enormous number of

prehistoric graves which have been examined enables us to make an

exhaustive comparison of the different kinds of pottery found in

them, so that we can arrange them in order according to pottery they

contained. By this means we obtain an idea of the development of

different types of pottery, and the sequence of the types. Thus it is

that we can say with some degree of confidence that the black and red

ware is the most ancient form, and that the buff with red designs is one

of the latest forms of prehistoric pottery. Other objects found in the

graves can be classified as they occur with different pottery types.

With the help of the pottery we can thus gain a more or less reliable

conspectus of the development of the late “Neolithic” culture of Egypt.

This system of “sequence-dating” was introduced by Prof. Petrie, and is

certainly very useful. It must not, however, be pressed too far or be

regarded as an iron-bound system, with which all subsequent discoveries

must be made to fit in by force. It is not to be supposed that all

prehistoric pottery developed its series of types in an absolutely

orderly manner without deviations or throws-back. The work of man’s

hands is variable and eccentric, and does not develop or evolve in an

undeviating course as the work of nature does. It is a mistake, very

often made by anthropologists and archæologists, who forget this

elementary fact, to assume “curves of development,” and so forth, or

semi-savage culture, on absolutely even and regular lines. Human culture

has not developed either evenly or regularly, as a matter of fact.

Therefore we cannot always be sure that, because the Egyptian black and

red pottery does not occur in graves with buff and red, it is for

this reason absolutely earlier in date than the latter. Some of the

development-sequences may in reality be contemporary with others instead

of earlier, and allowance must always be made for aberrations and

reversions to earlier types.

This caveat having been entered, however, we may provisionally

accept Prof. Petrie’s system of sequence-dating as giving the best

classification of the prehistoric antiquities according to development.

So it may fairly be said that, as far as we know, the black and red

pottery (“sequence-date 30--“) is the most ancient Neolithic Egyptian

ware known; that the buff and red did not begin to be used till about

“sequence-date 45;” that bone and ivory carvings were commonest in the

earlier period (“sequence-dates 30-50”); that copper was almost unknown

till “sequence-date 50,” and so on. The arbitrary numbers used range

from 30 to 80, in order to allow for possible earlier and later

additions, which may be rendered necessary by the progress of discovery.

The numbers are of course as purely arbitrary and relative as those

of the different thermometrical systems, but they afford a convenient

system of arrangement. The products of the prehistoric Egyptians are, so

to speak, distributed on a conventional plan over a scale numbered from

30 to 80, 30 representing the beginning and 80 the close of the term,

so far as its close has as yet been ascertained. It is probable that

“sequence-date 80” more or less accurately marks the beginning of the

dynastic or historical period.

This hypothetically chronological classification is, as has been said,

due to Prof. Petrie, and has been adopted by Mr. Randall-Maclver and

other students of prehistoric Egypt in their work.[3] To Prof. Petrie

then is due the credit of systematizing the study of Egyptian

prehistoric antiquities; but the further credit of having _discovered_

these antiquities themselves and settled their date belongs not to him

but to the distinguished French archæologist, M. J. de Morgan, who was

for several years director of the museum at Giza, and is now chief of

the French archæological delegation in Persia, which has made of late

years so many important discoveries. The proof of the prehistoric date

of this class of antiquities was given, not by Prof. Petrie after his

excavations at Dendera in 1897-8, but by M. de Morgan in his volume,

_Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte: l’Âge de la Pierre et les

Métaux_, published in 1895-6. In this book the true chronological

position of the prehistoric antiquities was pointed out, and the

existence of an Egyptian Stone Age finally decided. M. de Morgan’s work

was based on careful study of the results of excavations carried on for

several years by the Egyptian government in various parts of Egypt, in

the course of which a large number of cemeteries of the primitive type

had been discovered. It was soon evident to M. de Morgan that these

primitive graves, with their unusual pottery and flint implements,

could be nothing less than the tombs of the prehistoric Egyptians, the

Egyptians of the Stone Age.

[3] _El Amra and Abydos_, Egypt Exploration Fund, 1902.

Objects of the prehistoric period had been known to the museums for many

years previously, but owing to the uncertainty of their provenance and

the absence of knowledge of the existence of the primitive cemeteries,

no scientific conclusions had been arrived at with regard to them; and

it was not till the publication of M. de Morgan’s book that they were

recognized and classified as prehistoric. The necropoles investigated

by M. de Morgan and his assistants extended from Kawâmil in the north,

about twenty miles north of Abydos, to Edfu in the south. The chief

cemeteries between these two points were those of Bât Allam, Saghel

el-Baglieh, el-’Amra, Nakâda, Tûkh, and Gebelên. All the burials were

of simple type, analogous to those of the Neolithic races in the rest

of the world. In a shallow, oval grave, excavated often but a few inches

below the surface of the soil, lay the body, cramped up with the knees

to the chin, sometimes in a rough box of pottery, more often with only

a mat to cover it. Ready to the hand of the dead man were his flint

weapons and tools, and the usual red and black, or buff and red, pots

lay beside him; originally, no doubt, they had been filled with the

funeral meats, to sustain the ghost in the next world. Occasionally a

simple copper weapon was found. With the body were also buried slate

palettes for grinding the green eye-paint which the Egyptians loved even

at this early period. These are often carved to suggest the forms of

animals, such as birds, bats, tortoises, goats, etc.; on others are

fantastic creatures with two heads. Combs of bone, too, are found,

ornamented in a similar way with birds’ or goats’ heads, often double.

And most interesting of all are the small bone and ivory figures of men

and women which are also found. These usually have little blue beads for

eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here

we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with

inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work

this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which

is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric Egyptian

antiquities go. It is almost as good in style as the early Ist Dynasty

objects. Such were the objects which the simple piety of the early

Egyptian prompted him to bury with the bodies of his dead, in order that

they might find solace and contentment in the other world.

All the prehistoric cemeteries are of this type, with the graves pressed

closely together, so that they often impinge upon one another. The

nearness of the graves to the surface is due to the exposed positions,

at the entrances to _wadis_, in which the primitive cemeteries are

usually found. The result is that they are always swept by the winds,

which prevent the desert sand from accumulating over them, and so have

preserved the original level of the ground. From their proximity to

the surface they are often found disturbed, more often by the agency of

jackals than that of man.

Contemporaneously with M. de Morgan’s explorations, Prof. Flinders

Petrie and Mr. J. Quibell had, in the winter of 1894-5, excavated in

the districts of Tukh and Nakada, on the west bank of the Nile opposite

Koptos, a series of extensive cemeteries of the primitive type, from

which they obtained a large number of antiquities, published in their

volume Nagada and Dallas. The plates giving representations of the

antiquities found were of the highest interest, but the scientific value

of the letter-press is vitiated by the fact that the true historical

position of the antiquities was not perceived by their discoverers, who

came to the conclusion that these remains were those of a “New Pace” of

Libyan invaders. This race, they supposed, had entered Egypt after the

close of the flourishing period of the “Old Kingdom” at the end of the

VIth Dynasty, and had occupied part of the Nile valley from that time

till the period of the Xth Dynasty.

This conclusion was proved erroneous by M. de Morgan almost as soon

as made, and the French archæologist’s identification of the primitive

remains as pre-dynastic was at once generally accepted. It was obvious

that a hypothesis of the settlement of a stone-using barbaric race in

the midst of Egypt at so late a date as the period immediately preceding

the XIIth Dynasty, a race which mixed in no way with the native

Egyptians themselves, and left no trace of their influence upon the

later Egyptians, was one which demanded greater faith than the simple

explanation of M. de Morgan.

The error of the British explorers was at once admitted by Mr. Quibell,

in his volume on the excavations of 1897 at el-Kab, published in

1898.[4] Mr. Quibell at once found full and adequate confirmation of M.

de Morgan’s discovery in his diggings at el-Kab. Prof. Petrie admitted

the correctness of M. de Morgan’s views in the preface to his volume

Diospolis Parva, published three years later in 1901.[5] The preface to

the first volume of M. de Morgan’s book contained a generous

recognition of the method and general accuracy of Prof. Petrie’s

excavations, which contrasted favourably, according to M. de Morgan,

with the excavations of others, generally carried on without scientific

control, and with the sole aim of obtaining antiquities or literary

texts.[6] That M. de Morgan’s own work was carried out as

scientifically and as carefully is evident from the fact that his

conclusions as to the chronological position of the prehistoric

antiquities have been shown to be correct. To describe M. de Morgan’s

discovery as a “happy guess,” as has been done, is therefore beside the

mark.

[4] El-Kab. Egyptian Research Account, 1897, p. 11.

[5] Diospolis Parva. Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901, p. 2.

[6] Recherches: Age de la Pierre, p. xiii.

Another most important British excavation was that carried on by

Messrs. Randall-Maclver and Wilkin at el-’Amra. The imposing lion-headed

promontory of el-’Amra stands out into the plain on the west bank of the

Nile about five miles south of Abydos. At the foot of this hill M. de

Morgan found a very extensive prehistoric necropolis, which he examined,

but did not excavate to any great extent, and the work of thoroughly

excavating it was performed by Messrs. Randall-MacIver and Wilkin for

the Egypt Exploration Fund. The results have thrown very great light

upon the prehistoric culture of Egypt, and burials of all prehistoric

types, some of them previously unobserved, were found. Among the most

interesting are burials in pots, which have also been found by Mr.

Garstang in a predynastic necropolis at Ragagna, north of Abydos. One

of the more remarkable observations made at el-’Amra was the progressive

development of the tombs from the simplest pot-burial to a small brick

chamber, the embryo of the brick tombs of the Ist Dynasty. Among the

objects recovered from this site may be mentioned a pottery model of

oxen, a box in the shape of a model hut, and a slate “palette” with what

is perhaps the oldest Egyptian hieroglyph known, a representation of the

fetish-sign of the god Min, in relief. All these are preserved in the

British Museum. The skulls of the bodies found were carefully preserved

for craniometric examination.

In 1901 an extensive prehistoric cemetery was being excavated by Messrs.

Reisner and Lythgoe at Nag’ed-Dêr, opposite Girga, and at el-Ahaiwa,

further north, another prehistoric necropolis has been excavated by

these gentlemen, working for the University of California.

[Illustration: 027.jpg CAMP OF THE EXPEDITION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF

CALIFORNIA AT NAG’ ED-DÊR, 1901.]

The cemetery of Nag’ed-Dêr is of the usual prehistoric type, with its

multitudes of small oval graves, excavated just a little way below the

surface. Graves of this kind are the most primitive of all. Those at

el-’Amra are usually more developed, often, as has been noted, rising to

the height of regular brick tombs. They are evidently later, nearer to

the time of the Ist Dynasty. The position of the Nag’ed-Dêr cemetery is

also characteristic. It lies on the usual low ridge at the entrance to a

desert _wadi_, which is itself one of the most picturesque in this

part of Egypt, with its chaos of great boulders and fallen rocks. An

illustration of the camp of Mr. Reisner’s expedition at Nag’ed-Dêr is

given above. The excavations of the University of California are carried

out with the greatest possible care and are financed with the greatest

possible liberality. Mr. Reisner has therefore been able to keep an

absolutely complete photographic record of everything, even down to

the successive stages in the opening of a tomb, which will be of the

greatest use to science when published.

For a detailed study of the antiquities of the prehistoric period the

publications of Prof. Petrie, Mr. Quibell, and Mr. Randall-Maclver are

more useful than that of M. de Morgan, who does not give enough details.

Every atom of evidence is given in the publications of the British

explorers, whereas it is a characteristic of French work to give

brilliant conclusions, beautifully illustrated, without much of the

evidence on which the conclusions are based. This kind of work does not

appeal to the Anglo-Saxon mind, which takes nothing on trust, even

from the most renowned experts, and always wants to know the why and

wherefore. The complete publication of evidence which marks the British

work will no doubt be met with, if possible in even more complete

detail, in the American work of Messrs. Reisner, Lythgoe, and Mace (the

last-named is an Englishman) for the University of California, when

published. The question of speedy versus delayed publication is a very

vexing one. Prof. Petrie prefers to publish as speedily as possible; six

months after the season’s work in Egypt is done, the full publication

with photographs of everything appears. Mr. Reisner and the French

explorers prefer to publish nothing until they have exhaustively studied

the whole of the evidence, and can extract nothing more from it. This

would be admirable if the French published their discoveries fully, but

they do not. Even M. de Morgan has not approached the fulness of

detail which characterizes British work and which will characterize Mr.

Reisner’s publication when it appears. The only drawback to this method

is that general interest in the particular excavations described tends

to pass away before the full description appears.

Prof. Petrie has explored other prehistoric sites at Abadiya, and Mr.

Quibell at el-Kab. M. de Morgan and his assistants have examined a large

number of sites, ranging from the Delta to el-Kab. Further research has

shown that some of the sites identified by M. de Morgan as prehistoric

are in reality of much later date, for example, Kahun, where the late

flints of XIIth Dynasty date were found. He notes that “large numbers

of Neolithic flint weapons are found in the desert on the borders of

the Fayyum, and at Helwan, south of Cairo,” and that all the important

necropoles and kitchen-middens of the predynastic people are to be found

in the districts of Abydos and Thebes, from el-Kawamil in the North to

el-Kab in the South. It is of course too soon to assert with confidence

that there are no prehistoric remains in any other part of Egypt,

especially in the long tract between the Fayyûm and the district of

Abydos, but up to the present time none have been found in this region.

This geographical distribution of the prehistoric remains fits in

curiously with the ancient legend concerning the origin of the ancestors

of the Egyptians in Upper Egypt, and supports the much discussed theory

that they came originally to the Nile valley from the shores of the Red

Sea by way of the Wadi Hammamat, which debouches on to the Nile in the

vicinity of Koptos and Kus, opposite Ballas and Tûkh. The supposition

seems a very probable one, and it may well be that the earliest

Egyptians entered the valley of the Nile by the route suggested and

then spread northwards and southwards in the valley. The fact that their

remains are not found north of el-Kawâmil nor south of el-Kab might

perhaps be explained by the supposition that, when they had extended

thus far north and south from their original place of arrival, they

passed from the primitive Neolithic condition to the more highly

developed copper-using culture of the period which immediately preceded

the establishment of the monarchy. The Neolithic weapons of the Fayyûm

and Hel-wân would then be the remains of a different people, which

inhabited the Delta and Middle Egypt in very early times. This people

may have been of Mediterranean stock, akin to the primitive inhabitants

of Palestine, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and they no doubt were identical

with the inhabitants of Lower Egypt who were overthrown and conquered by

Kha-sekhem and the other Southern founders of the monarchy (who belonged

to the race which had come from the Red Sea by the Wadi Hammamat), and

so were the ancestors of the later natives of Lower Egypt. Whether the

Southerners, whose primitive remains we find from el-Kawâmil to el-Kab,

were of the same race as the Northerners whom they conquered, cannot

be decided. The skull-form of the Southerners agrees with that of the

Mediterranean races. But we have no nécropoles of the Northerners to

tell us much of their peculiarities. We have nothing but their flint

arrowheads.

But it should be observed that, in spite of the present absence of all

primitive remains (whether mere flints, or actual graves with bodies and

relics) of the primeval population between the Fayyûm and el-Kawâmil,

there is no proof that the primitive race of Upper Egypt was not

coterminous and identical with that of the lower country. It

might therefore be urged that the whole Neolithic population was

“Mediterranean” by its skull-form and body-structure, and specifically

“Nilotic” (indigenous Egyptian) in its culture-type. This is quite

possible, but we have again to account for the legends of distant origin

on the Red Sea coast, the probability that one element of the Egyptian

population was of extraneous origin and came from the east into the Nile

valley near Koptos, and finally the historical fact of an advance of the

early dynastic Egyptians from the South to the conquest of the North.

The latter fact might of course be explained as a civil war analogous

to that between Thebes and Asyût in the time of the IXth Dynasty, but

against this explanation is to be set the fact that the contemporary

monuments of the Southerners exhibit the men of the North as of foreign

and non-Egyptian ethnic type, resembling Libyans. It is possible that

they were akin to the Libyans; and this would square very well with the

first theory, but it may also be made to fit in with a development of

the second, which has been generally accepted.

According to this view, the whole primitive Neolithic population of

North and South was Miotic, indigenous in origin, and akin to the

“Mediterraneans “of Prof. Sergi and the other ethnologists. It was not

this population, the stone-users whose nécropoles have been found by

Messrs. de Morgan, Pétrie, and Maclver, that entered the Nile valley by

the Wadi Hammamat. This was another race of different ethnic origin,

which came from the Red Sea toward the end of the Neolithic period,

and, being of higher civilization than the native Nilotes, assumed the

lordship over them, gave a great impetus to the development of their

culture, and started at once the institution of monarchy, the knowledge

of letters, and the use of metals. The chiefs of this superior tribe

founded the monarchy, conquered the North, unified the kingdom, and

began Egyptian history. From many indications it would seem probable

that these conquerors were of Babylonian origin, or that the culture

they brought with them (possibly from Arabia) was ultimately of

Babylonian origin. They themselves would seem to have been Semites,

or rather proto-Semites, who came from Arabia to Africa by way of

the straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and proceeded up the coast to about the

neighbourhood of Kusêr, whence the Wadi Hammamat offered them an open

road to the valley of the Nile. By this route they may have entered

Egypt, bringing with them a civilization, which, like that of the other

Semites, had been profoundly influenced and modified by that of the

Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia. This Semitic-Sumerian culture,

mingling with that of the Nilotes themselves, produced the civilization

of Ancient Egypt as we know it.

This is a very plausible hypothesis, and has a great deal of evidence in

its favour. It seems certain that in the early dynastic period two

races lived in Egypt, which differed considerably in type, and also,

apparently, in burial customs. The later Egyptians always buried the

dead lying on their backs, extended at full length. During the period of

the Middle Kingdom (XIth-XIIIth Dynasties) the head was usually turned

over on to the left side, in order that the dead man might look through

the two great eyes painted on that side of the coffin. Afterward the

rigidly extended position was always adopted. The Neolithic Egyptians,

however, buried the dead lying wholly on the left side and in a

contracted position, with the knees drawn up to the chin. The bodies

were not embalmed, and the extended position and mummification were

never used. Under the IVth Dynasty we find in the necropolis of Mêdûm

(north of the Payyûm) the two positions used simultaneously, and the

extended bodies are mummified. The contracted bodies are skeletons, as

in the case of most of the predynastic bodies. When these are found with

flesh, skin, and hair intact, their preservation is due to the dryness

of the soil and the preservative salts it contains, not to intentional

embalming, which was evidently introduced by those who employed the

extended position in burial. The contracted position is found as late as

the Vth Dynasty at Dashasha, south of the Eayyûm, but after that date it

is no longer found.

The conclusion is obvious that the contracted position without

mummification, which the Neolithic people used, was supplanted in the

early dynastic period by the extended position with mummification, and

by the time of the VIth Dynasty it was entirely superseded. This points

to the supersession of the burial customs of the indigenous Neolithic

race by those of another race which conquered and dominated the

indigenes. And, since the extended burials of the IVth Dynasty are

evidently those of the higher nobles, while the contracted ones are

those of inferior people, it is probable that the customs of extended

burial and embalming were introduced by a foreign race which founded the

Egyptian monarchical state, with its hierarchy of nobles and officials,

and in fact started Egyptian civilization on its way. The conquerors of

the North were thus not the descendants of the Neolithic people of the

South, but their conquerors; in fact, they dominated the indigenes both

of North and South, who will then appear (since we find the custom of

contracted burial in the North at Dashasha and Mêdûm) to have originally

belonged to the same race.

The conquering race is that which is supposed to have been of Semitic or

proto-Semitic origin, and to have brought elements of Sumerian culture

to savage Egypt. The reasons advanced for this supposition are the

following:--

(1) Just as the Egyptian race was evidently compounded of two elements,

of conquered “Mediterraneans” and conquering x, so the Egyptian language

is evidently compounded of two elements, the one Nilotic, perhaps

related in some degree to the Berber dialects of North Africa, the other

not x, but evidently Semitic.

(2) Certain elements of the early dynastic civilization, which do not

appear in that of the earlier pre-dynastic period, resemble well-known

elements of the civilization of Babylonia. We may instance the use of

the cylinder-seal, which died out in Egypt in the time of the XVIIIth

Dynasty, but was always used in Babylonia from the earliest to the

latest times. The early Egyptian mace-head is of exactly the same

type as the early Babylonian one. In the British Museum is an Egyptian

mace-head of red breccia, which is identical in shape and size with

one from Babylonia (also in the museum) bearing the name of

Shargani-shar-ali (i.e. Sargon, King of Agade), one of the earliest

Chaldæan monarchs, who must have lived about the same time as the

Egyptian kings of the IId-IIId Dynasties, to which period the Egyptian

mace-head may also be approximately assigned. The Egyptian art of the

earliest dynasties bears again a remarkable resemblance to that of early

Babylonia. It is not till the time of the IId Dynasty that Egyptian art

begins to take upon itself the regular form which we know so well, and

not till that of the IVth that this form was finally crystallized. Under

the 1st Dynasty we find the figure of man or, to take other instances,

that of a lion, or a hawk, or a snake, often treated in a style very

different from that in which we are accustomed to see a man, a lion, a

hawk, or a snake depicted in works of the later period. And the striking

thing is that these early representations, which differ so much from

what we find in later Egyptian art, curiously resemble the works of

early Babylonian art, of the time of the patesis of Shirpurla or the

Kings Shargani-shar-ali and Narâm-Sin. One of the best known relics

of the early art of Babylonia is the famous “Stele of Vultures” now in

Paris. On this we see the enemies of Eannadu, one of the early rulers

of Shirpurla, cast out to be devoured by the vultures. On an Egyptian

relief of slate, evidently originally dedicated in a temple record of

some historical event, and dating from the beginning of the Ist Dynasty

(practically contemporary, according to our latest knowledge, with

Eannadu), we have an almost exactly similar scene of captives being cast

out into the desert, and devoured by lions and vultures. The two reliefs

are curiously alike in their clumsy, naïve style of art. A further

point is that the official represented on the stele, who appears to be

thrusting one of the bound captives out to die, wears a long fringed

garment of Babylonish cut, quite different from the clothes of the later

Egyptians.

(3) There are evidently two distinct and different main strata in the

fabric of Egyptian religion. On the one hand we find a mass of myth and

religious belief of very primitive, almost savage, cast, combining

a worship of the actual dead in their tombs--which were supposed

to communicate and thus form a veritable “underworld,” or, rather,

“under-Egypt”--with veneration of magic animals, such as jackals, cats,

hawks, and crocodiles. On the other hand, we have a sun and sky worship

of a more elevated nature, which does not seem to have amalgamated with

the earlier fetishism and corpse-worship until a comparatively late

period. The main seats of the sun-worship were at Heliopolis in the

Delta and at Edfu in Upper Egypt. Heliopolis seems always to have been

a centre of light and leading in Egypt, and it is, as is well known,

the On of the Bible, at whose university the Jewish lawgiver Moses is

related to have been educated “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” The

philosophical theories of the priests of the Sun-gods, Râ-Harmachis and

Turn, at Heliopolis seem to have been the source from which sprang the

monotheistic heresy of the Disk-Worshippers (in the time of the XVIIIth

Dynasty), who, under the guidance of the reforming King Akhunaten,

worshipped only the disk of the sun as the source of all life, the door

in heaven, so to speak, through which the hidden One Deity poured

forth heat and light, the origin of life upon the earth. Very early

in Egyptian history the Heliopolitans gained the upper hand, and the

Râ-worship (under the Vth Dynasty, the apogee of the Old Kingdom) came

to the front, and for the first time the kings took the afterwards

time-honoured royal title of “Son of the Sun.” It appears then as a

more or less foreign importation into the Nile valley, and bears most

undoubtedly a Semitic impress. Its two chief seats were situated, the

one, Heliopolis, in the North on the eastern edge of the Delta,--just

where an early Semitic settlement from over the desert might be expected

to be found,--the other, Edfu, in the Upper Egyptian territory south

of the Thebaïd, Koptos, and the Wadi Ham-mamat, and close to the chief

settlement of the earliest kings and the most ancient capital of Upper

Egypt.

(4) The custom of burying at full length was evidently introduced into

Egypt by the second, or x race. The Neolithic Egyptians buried in the

cramped position. The early Babylonians buried at full length, as far

as we know. On the same “Stele of Vultures,” which has already been

mentioned, we see the burying at full length of dead warriors.[7] There

is no trace of any _early_ burial in Babylonia in the cramped position.

The tombs at Warka (Erech) with cramped bodies in pottery coffins are

of very late date. A further point arises with regard to embalming. The

Neolithic Egyptians did not embalm the dead. Usually their cramped

bodies are found as skeletons. When they are mummified, it is merely

owing to the preservative action of the salt in the soil, not to any

process of embalming. The second, or x race, however, evidently

introduced the custom of embalming as well as that of burial at full

length and the use of coffins. The Neolithic Egyptian used no box or

coffin, the nearest approach to this being a pot, which was inverted

over the coiled up body. Usually only a mat was put over the body.

[7] See illustration.

[Illustration: 038.jpg Portion of the “Stele of Vultures” Found at

Telloh]

[Illustration: 038-text.jpg]

Now it is evident that Babylonians and Assyrians, who buried the dead at

full length in chests, had some knowledge of embalming. An Assyrian king

tells us how he buried his royal father:--

“Within the grave, the secret place,

In kingly oil, I gently laid him.

The grave-stone marketh his resting-place.

With mighty bronze I sealed its entrance,

And I protected it with an incantation.”

The “kingly oil” was evidently used with the idea of preserving the body

from decay. Salt also was used to preserve the dead, and Herodotus

says that the Babylonians buried in honey, which was also used by the

Egyptians. No doubt the Babylonian method was less perfect than the

Egyptian, but the comparison is an interesting one, when taken in

connection with the other points of resemblance mentioned above.

We find, then, that an analysis of the Egyptian language reveals a

Semitic element in it; that the early dynastic culture had certain

characteristics which were unknown to the Neolithic Egyptians but are

closely parallelled in early Babylonia; that there were two elements in

the Egyptian religion, one of which seems to have originally belonged to

the Neolithic people, while the other has a Semitic appearance; and that

there were two sets of burial customs in early Egypt, one, that of the

Neolithic people, the other evidently that of a conquering race, which

eventually prevailed over the former; these later rites were analogous

to those of the Babylonians and Assyrians, though differing from them

in points of detail. The conclusion is that the x or conquering race

was Semitic and brought to Egypt the Semitic elements in the Egyptian

religion and a culture originally derived from that of the Sumerian

inhabitants of Babylonia, the non-Semitic parent of all Semitic

civilizations.

The question now arises, how did this Semitic people reach Egypt? We

have the choice of two points of entry: First, Heliopolis in the North,

where the Semitic sun-worship took root, and, second, the Wadi Hamma-mat

in the South, north of Edfu, the southern centre of sun-worship, and

Hierakonpolis (Nekheb-Nekhen), the capital of the Upper Egyptian kingdom

which existed before the foundation of the monarchy. The legends which

seem to bring the ancestors of the Egyptians from the Red Sea coast have

already been mentioned. They are closely connected with the worship

of the Sky and Sun god Horus of Edfu. Hathor, his nurse, the “House of

Horus,” the centre of whose worship was at Dendera, immediately opposite

the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat, was said to have come from Ta-neter,

“The Holy Land,” i.e. Abyssinia or the Red Sea coast, with the company

or _paut_ of the gods. Now the Egyptians always seem to have had some

idea that they were connected racially with the inhabitants of the Land

of Punt or Puenet, the modern Abyssinia and Somaliland. In the time of

the XVIIIth Dynasty they depicted the inhabitants of Punt as greatly

resembling themselves in form, feature, and dress, and as wearing the

little turned-up beard which was worn by the Egyptians of the earliest

times, but even as early as the IVth Dynasty was reserved for the

gods. Further, the word _Punt_ is always written without the hieroglyph

determinative of a foreign country, thus showing that the Egyptians did

not regard the Punites as foreigners. This certainly looks as if the

Punites were a portion of the great migration from Arabia, left behind

on the African shore when the rest of the wandering people pressed on

northwards to the Wadi Hammamat and the Nile. It may be that the modern

Gallas and Abyssinians are descendants of these Punites.

Now the Sky-god of Edfu is in legend a conquering hero who advances

down the Nile valley, with his _Mesniu_, or “Smiths,” to overthrow the

people of the North, whom he defeats in a great battle near Dendera.

This may be a reminiscence of the first fights of the invaders with the

Neolithic inhabitants. The other form of Horus, “Horus, son of Isis,”

has also a body of retainers, the _Shemsu-Heru_, or “Followers of

Horns,” who are spoken of in late texts as the rulers of Egypt before

the monarchy. They evidently correspond to the dynasties of _Manes_,

Νεκύες or “Ghosts,” of Manetho, and are probably intended for the early

kings of Hierakonpolis.

The mention of the Followers of Horus as “Smiths” is very interesting,

for it would appear to show that the Semitic conquerors were notable

as metal-users, that, in fact, their conquest was that old story in the

dawn of the world’s history, the utter overthrow and subjection of the

stone-users by the metal-users, the primeval tragedy of the supersession

of flint by copper. This may be, but if the “Smiths” were the Semitic

conquerors who founded the kingdom, it would appear that the use of

copper was known in Egypt to some extent before their arrival, for we

find it in the graves of the late Neolithic Egyptians, very sparsely

from “sequence-date 30” to “45,” but afterwards more commonly. It was

evidently becoming known. The supposition, however, that the “Smiths”

were the Semitic conquerors, and that they won their way by the aid of

their superior weapons of metal, may be provisionally accepted.

In favour of the view which would bring the conquerors by way of the

Wadi Hammamat, an interesting discovery may be quoted. Immediately

opposite Den-dera, where, according to the legend, the battle between

the _Mesniu_ and the aborigines took place, lies Koptos, at the mouth of

the Wadi Hammamat. Here, in 1894, underneath the pavement of the ancient

temple, Prof. Petrie found remains which he then diagnosed as belonging

to the most ancient epoch of Egyptian history. Among them were some

extremely archaic statues of the god Min, on which were curious

scratched drawings of bears, _crioceras-shells_, elephants walking over

hills, etc., of the most primitive description. With them were lions’

heads and birds of a style then unknown, but which we now know to belong

to the period of the beginning of the Ist Dynasty. But the statues of

Min are older. The _crioceras-shells_ belong to the Red Sea. Are we to

see in these statues the holy images of the conquerors from the Red Sea

who reached the Nile valley by way of the Wadi Hammamat, and set up the

first memorials of their presence at Koptos? It may be so, or the Min

statues may be older than the conquerors, and belong to the Neolithic

race, since Min and his fetish (which we find on the slate palette from

el-’Amra, already mentioned) seem to belong to the indigenous Nilotes.

In any case we have in these statues, two of which are in the Ashmolean

Museum at Oxford, probably the most ancient cult-images in the world:

This theory, which would make all the Neolithic inhabitants of Egypt

one people, who were conquered by a Semitic race, bringing a culture of

Sumerian origin to Egypt by way of the Wadi Hammamat, is that generally

accepted at the present time. It may, however, eventually prove

necessary to modify it. For reasons given above, it may well be that the

Neolithic population was itself not indigenous, and that it reached the

Nile valley by way of the Wadi Hammamat, spreading north and south

from the mouth of the _wadi_. It may also be considered probable that

a Semitic wave invaded Egypt by way of the Isthmus of Suez, where

the early sun-cultus of Heliopolis probably marks a primeval Semitic

settlement. In that case it would seem that the _Mesniu_ or “Smiths,”

who introduced the use of metal, would have to be referred to the

originally Neolithic pre-Semitic people, who certainly were acquainted

with the use of copper, though not to any great extent. But this is not

a necessary supposition. The _Mesniu_ are closely connected with the

Sky-god Horus, who was possibly of Semitic origin, and another Semitic

wave, quite distinct from that which entered Egypt by way of the

Isthmus, may very well also have reached Egypt by the Wadi Hammamat, or,

equally possibly, from the far south, coming down to the Nile from the

Abyssinian mountains. The legend of the coming of Hathor from Ta-neter

may refer to some such wandering, and we know that the Egyptians of the

Old Kingdom communicated with the Land of Punt, not by way of the Red

Sea coast as Hatshepsut did, but by way of the Upper Nile. This would

tally well with the march of the _Mesniu_ northwards from Edfu to their

battle with the forces of Set at Dendera.

In any case, at the dawn of connected Egyptian history, we find two main

centres of civilization in Egypt, Heliopolis and Buto in the Delta

in the North, and Edfu and Hierakonpolis in the South. Here were

established at the beginning of the Chalcolithic stage of culture, we

may say, two kingdoms, of Lower and Upper Egypt, which were eventually

united by the superior arms of the kings of Upper Egypt, who imposed

their rule upon the North but at the same time removed their capital

thither. The dualism of Buto and Hierakonpolis really lasted throughout

Egyptian history. The king was always called “Lord of the Two Lands,”

and wore the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt; the snakes of Buto and

Nekhebet (the goddess of Nekheb, opposite Nekhen or Hierakonpolis)

always typified the united kingdom. This dualism of course often led to

actual division and reversion to the predynastic order of things, as,

for instance, in the time of the XXIst Dynasty.

It might well seem that both the impulses to culture development in the

North and South came from Semitic inspiration, and that it was to

the Semitic invaders in North and South that the founding of the two

kingdoms was due. This may be true to some extent, but it is at the same

time very probable that the first development of political culture at

Hierakonpolis was really of pre-Semitic origin. The kingdom of Buto,

since its capital is situated so near to the seacoast, may have owed

its origin to oversea Mediterranean connections. There is much in

the political constitution of later Egypt which seems to have been of

indigenous and pre-Semitic origin. Especially does this seem to be so in

the case of the division and organization of the country into nomes. It

is obvious that so soon as agriculture began to be practised on a large

scale, boundaries would be formed, and in the unique conditions of

Egypt, where all boundaries disappear beneath the inundation every

year, it is evident that the fixing of division-lines as permanently as

possible by means of landmarks was early essayed. We can therefore with

confidence assign the formation of the nomes to very early times. Now

the names of the nomes and the symbols or emblems by which they were

distinguished are of very great interest in this connection. They are

nearly all figures of the magic animals of the primitive religion, and

fetish-emblems of the older deities. The names are, in fact, those of

the territories of the Neolithic Egyptian tribes, and their emblems are

those of the protecting tribal demons. The political divisions of the

country seem, then, to be of extremely ancient origin, and if the nomes

go back to a time before the Semitic invasions, so may also the kingdoms

of the South and North.

Of these predynastic kingdoms we know very little, except from legendary

sources. The Northerners who were conquered by Aha, Narmer, and

Khâsekhehiui do not look very much like Egyptians, but rather resemble

Semites or Libyans. On the “Stele of Palermo,” a chronicle of early

kings inscribed in the period of the Vth Dynasty, we have a list of

early kings of the North,--Seka, Desau, Tiu, Tesh, Nihab, Uatjântj,

Mekhe. The names are primitive in form. We know nothing more about them.

Last year Mr. C. T. Currelly attempted to excavate at Buto, in order to

find traces of the predynastic kingdom, but owing to the infiltration of

water his efforts were unsuccessful. It is improbable that anything is

now left of the most ancient period at that site, as the conditions in

the Delta are so very different from those obtaining in Upper Egypt.

There, at Hierakonpolis, and at el-Kab on the opposite bank of the Nile,

the sites of the ancient cities Nekhen and Nekheb, the excavators have

been very successful. The work was carried out by Messrs. Quibell and

Green, in the years 1891-9. Prehistoric burials were found on the hills

near by, but the larger portion of the antiquities were recovered from

the temple-ruins, and date back to the beginning of the 1st Dynasty,

exactly the time when the kings of Hierakonpolis first conquered the

kingdom of Buto and founded the united Egyptian monarchy.

The ancient temple, which was probably one of the earliest seats of

Egyptian civilization, was situated on a mound, now known as _el-Kom

el-ahmar_, “the Red Hill,” from its colour. The chief feature of the

most ancient temple seems to have been a circular mound, revetted by a

wall of sandstone blocks, which was apparently erected about the end of

the predynastic period. Upon this a shrine was probably erected. This

was the ancient shrine of Nekhen, the cradle of the Egyptian monarchy.

Close by it were found some of the most valuable relics of the earliest

Pharaonic age, the great ceremonial mace-heads and vases of Narmer and

“the Scorpion,” the shields or “palettes” of the same Narmer, the vases

and stelas of Khâsekhemui, and, of later date, the splendid copper

colossal group of King Pepi I and his son, which is now at Cairo. Most

of the 1st Dynasty objects are preserved in the Ashmo-lean Museum at

Oxford, which is one of the best centres for the study of early Egyptian

antiquities. Narmer and Khâsekhemui are, as we shall see, two of the

first monarchs of all Egypt. These sculptured and inscribed mace-heads,

shields, etc., are monuments dedicated by them in the ancestral shrine

at Hierakonpolis as records of their deeds. Both kings seem to have

waged war against the Northerners, the _Anu_ of Heliopolis and the

Delta, and on these votive monuments from Hierakonpolis we find

hieroglyphed records of the defeat of the _Anu_, who have very

definitely Semitic physiognomies.

On one shield or palette we see Narmer clubbing a man of Semitic

appearance, who is called the “Only One of the Marsh” (Delta), while

below two other Semites fly, seeking “fortress-protection.” Above is a

figure of a hawk, symbolizing the Upper Egyptian king, holding a rope

which is passed through the nose of a Semitic head, while behind is a

sign which may be read as “the North,” so that the whole symbolizes the

leading away of the North into captivity by the king of the South. It

is significant, in view of what has been said above with regard to the

probable Semitic origin of the Heliopolitan Northerners, to find the

people typical of the North-land represented by the Southerners as

Semites. Equally Semitic is the overthrown Northerner on the other

side of this well-known monument which we are describing; he is being

trampled under the hoofs and gored by the horns of a bull, who, like the

hawk, symbolizes the king. The royal bull has broken down the wall of a

fortified enclosure, in which is the hut or tent of the Semite, and the

bricks lie about promiscuously.

In connection with the Semitic origin of the Northerners, the form of

the fortified enclosures on both sides of this monument (that to whose

protection the two Semites on one side fly, and that out of which the

kingly bull has dragged the chief on the other) is noticeable. As usual

in Egyptian writing, the hieroglyph of these buildings takes the form of

a plan. The plan shows a crenelated enclosure, resembling the walls of

a great Babylonian palace or temple, such as have been found at Telloh,

Warka, or Mukayyar. The same design is found in Egypt at the Shuret

ez-Zebib, an Old Kingdom fortress at Abydos, in the tomb of King Aha at

Nakâda, and in many walls of mastaba-tombs of the early time. This is

another argument in favour of an early connection between Egypt and

Babylonia. We illustrate a fragment of another votive shield or palette

of the same kind, now in the museum of the Louvre, which probably came

originally from Hierakonpolis. It is of exactly similar workmanship to

that of Narmer, and is no doubt a fragment of another monument of that

king. On it we see the same subject of the overthrowing of a Northerner

(of Semitic aspect) by the royal bull. On one side, below, is a

fortified enclosure with crenelated walls of the type we have described,

and within it a lion and a vase; below this another fort, and a bird

within it. These signs may express the names of the two forts, but,

owing to the fact that at this early period Egyptian orthography was

not yet fixed, we cannot read them. On the other side we see a row of

animated nome-standards of Upper Egypt, with the symbols of the god Min

of Koptos, the hawk of Horus of Edfu, the ibis of Thot of Eshmunên, and

the jackals of Anubis of Abydos, which drag a rope; had we the rest

of the monument, we should see, bound at the end of the rope, some

prisoner, king, or animal symbolic of the North. On another slate

shield, which we also reproduce, we see a symbolical representation of

the capture of seven Northern cities, whose names seem to mean the “Two

Men,” the “Heron,” the “Owl,” the “Palm,” and the “Ghost” Cities.

“Ghost City” is attacked by a lion, “Owl City” by a hawk, “Palm City” by

two hawk nome-standards, and another, whose name we cannot guess at, is

being opened up by a scorpion.

[Illustration: 050.jpg (left) OBVERSE OF A SLATE RELIEF.]

The operating animals evidently represent nomes and tribes of the Upper

Egyptians. Here again we see the same crenelated walls of the Northern

towns, and there is no doubt that this slate fragment also, which is

preserved in the Cairo Museum, is a monument of the conquests of Narmer.

It is executed in the same archaic style as those from Hierakonpolis.

The animals on the other side no doubt represent part of the spoil of

the North.

Returning to the great shield or palette found by Mr. Quibell, we see

the king coming out, followed by his sandal-bearer, the _Hen-neter_ or

“God’s Servant,”[8] to view the dead bodies of the slain Northerners which

lie arranged in rows, decapitated, and with their heads between their

feet. The king is preceded by a procession of nome-standards.

[Illustration: 051.jpg (right)]

Above the dead men are symbolic representations of a hawk perched on a

harpoon over a boat, and a hawk and a door, which doubtless again refer

to the fights of the royal hawk of Upper Egypt on the Nile and at the

gate of the North. The designs on the mace-heads refer to the same

conquest of the North.

[8] In his commentary (Hierakonpolis, i. p. 9) on this scene,

Prof. Petrie supposes that the seven-pointed star sign means

“king,” and compares the eight-pointed star “used for king

in Babylonia.” The eight-pointed star of the cuneiform

script does not mean “king,” but “god.” The star then ought

to mean “god,” and the title “servant of a god,” and this

supposition may be correct. _Hen-neter_, “god’s servant,”

was the appellation of a peculiar kind of priest in later

days, and was then spelt with the ordinary sign for a god,

the picture of an axe. But in the archaic period, with which

we are dealing, a star like the Babylonian sign may very

well have been used for “god,” and the title of Narmer’s

sandal-bearer may read _Hen-neter_. He was the slave of the

living god Narmer. All Egyptian kings were regarded as

deities, more or less.

The monuments Khâsekhemui, a king, show us that he conquered the North

also and slew 47,209 “Northern Enemies.” The contorted attitudes of the

dead Northerners were greatly admired and sketched at the time, and were

reproduced on the pedestal of the king’s statue found by Mr. Quibell,

which is now at Oxford. It was an age of cheerful savage energy, like

most times when kingdoms and peoples are in the making. About 4000 B.C.

is the date of these various monuments.

[Illustration: 052.jpg OBVERSE OP A SLATE RELIEF.]

Khâsekhemui probably lived later than Narmer, and we may suppose that

his conquest was in reality a re-conquest. He may have lived as late

as the time of the IId Dynasty, whereas Narmer must be placed at the

beginning of the Ist, and his conquest was probably that which first

united the two kingdoms of the South and North. As we shall see in

the next chapter, he is probably one of the originals of the legendary

“Mena,” who was regarded from the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty onwards

as the founder of the kingdom, and was first made known to Europe by

Herodotus, under the name of “Menés.”

[Illustration: 053.jpg REVERSE OF A SLATE RELIEF, REPRESENTING ANIMALS.]

Narmer is therefore the last of the ancient kings of Hierakonpolis, the

last of Manetho’s “Spirits.” We may possibly have recovered the names of

one or two of the kings anterior to Narmer in the excavations at Abydos

(see Chapter II), but this is uncertain. To all intents and purposes we

have only legendary knowledge of the Southern kingdom until its close,

when Narmer the mighty went forth to strike down the Anu of the North,

an exploit which he recorded in votive monuments at Hierakonpolis, and

which was commemorated henceforward throughout Egyptian history in the

yearly “Feast of the Smiting of the Anu.” Then was Egypt for the first

time united, and the fortress of the “White Wall,” the “Good Abode” of

Memphis, was built to dominate the lower country. The Ist Dynasty was

founded and Egyptian history began.

[Illustration: 054.jpg ]

CHAPTER II--ABYDOS AND THE FIRST THREE DYNASTIES

Until the recent discoveries had been made, which have thrown so much

light upon the early history of Egypt, the traditional order and names

of the kings of the first three Egyptian dynasties were, in default of

more accurate information, retained by all writers on the history of the

period. The names were taken from the official lists of kings at Abydos

and elsewhere, and were divided into dynasties according to the system

of Manetho, whose names agree more or less with those of the lists and

were evidently derived from them ultimately. With regard to the fourth

and later dynasties it was clear that the king-lists were correct, as

their evidence agreed entirely with that of the contemporary monuments.

But no means existed of checking the lists of the first three dynasties,

as no contemporary monuments other than a IVth Dynasty mention of a IId

Dynasty king, Send, had been found. The lists dated from the time of

the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, so that it was very possible that with

regard to the earliest dynasties they might not be very correct. This

conclusion gained additional weight from the fact that no monuments of

these earliest kings were ever discovered; it therefore seemed probable

that they were purely legendary figures, in whose time (if they ever did

exist) Egypt was still a semi-barbarous nation. The jejune stories told

about them by Manetho seemed to confirm this idea. Mena, the reputed

founder of the monarchy, was generally regarded as a historical figure,

owing to the persistence of his name in all ancient literary accounts

of the beginnings of Egyptian history; for it was but natural to suppose

that the name of the man who unified Egypt and founded Memphis would

endure in the mouths of the people. But with regard to his successors

no such supposition seemed probable, until the time of Sneferu and the

pyramid-builders.

This was the critical view. Another school of historians accepted all

the kings of the lists as historical _en bloc_, simply because the

Egyptians had registered their names as kings. To them Teta, Ateth, and

Ata were as historical as Mena.

Modern discovery has altered our view, and truth is seen to lie between

the opposing schools, as usual. The kings after Mena do not seem to be

such entirely unhistorical figures as the extreme critics thought;

the names of several of them, e.g. Merpeba, of the Ist Dynasty, are

correctly given in the later lists, and those of others were simply

misread, e. g. that of Semti of the same dynasty, misread “Hesepti” by

the list-makers. On the other hand, Mena himself has become a somewhat

doubtful quantity. The real names of most of the early monarchs of Egypt

have been recovered for us by the latest excavations, and we can now see

when the list-makers of the XIXth Dynasty were right and when they were

wrong, and can distinguish what is legendary in their work from what is

really historical. It is true that they very often appear to have been

wrong, but, on the other hand, they were sometimes unexpectedly near

the mark, and the general number and arrangement of their kings

seems correct; so that we can still go to them for assistance in the

arrangement of the names which are communicated to us by the newly

discovered monuments. Manetho’s help, too, need never be despised

because he was a copyist of copyists; we can still use him to direct our

investigations, and his arrangement of dynasties must still remain the

framework of our chronological scheme, though he does not seem to have

been always correct as to the places in which the dynasties originated.

More than the names of the kings have the new discoveries communicated

to us. They have shed a flood of light on the beginnings of Egyptian

civilization and art, supplementing the recently ascertained facts

concerning the prehistoric age which have been described in the

preceding chapter. The impulse to these discoveries was given by the

work of M. de Morgan, who excavated sites of the early dynastic as

well as of the predynastic age. Among these was a great mastaba-tomb at

Nakâda, which proved to be that of a very early king who bore the name

of Aha, “the Fighter.” The walls of this tomb are crenelated like

those of the early Babylonian palaces and the forts of the Northerners,

already referred to. M. de Morgan early perceived the difference between

the Neolithic antiquities and those of the later archaic period of

Egyptian civilization, to which the tomb at Nakâda belonged. In the

second volume of his great work on the primitive antiquities of Egypt

_(L’Age des Métaux et lé Tombeau Royale de Négadeh)_, he described

the antiquities of the Ist Dynasty which had been found at the time he

wrote. Antiquities of the same primitive period and even of an earlier

date had been discovered by Prof. Flinders Petrie, as has already been

said, at Koptos, at the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat. But though Prof.

Petrie correctly diagnosed the age of the great statues of the god

Min which he found, he was led, by his misdating of the “New Race”

antiquities from Ballas and Tûkh, also to misdate several of the

primitive antiquities,--the lions and hawks, for instance, found at

Koptos, he placed in the period between the VIIth and Xth Dynasties;

whereas they can now, in the light of further discoveries at Abydos, be

seen to date to the earlier part of the Ist Dynasty, the time of Narmer

and Aha.

It is these discoveries at Abydos, coupled with those (already

described) of Mr. Quibell at Hierakonpolis, which have told us most of

what we know with regard to the history of the first three dynasties.

At Abydos Prof. Petrie was not himself the first in the field, the site

having already been partially explored by a French Egyptologist, M.

Amélineau. The excavations of M. Amélineau were, however, perhaps

not conducted strictly on scientific lines, and his results have been

insufficiently published with very few photographs, so that with the

best will in the world we are unable to give M. Amélineau the full

credit which is, no doubt, due to him for his work. The system of Prof.

Petrie’s publications has been often, and with justice, criticized, but

he at least tells us every year what he has been doing, and gives us

photographs of everything he has found. For this reason the epoch-making

discoveries at Abydos have been coupled chiefly with the name of Prof.

Petrie, while that of M. Amélineau is rarely heard in connection with

them. As a matter of fact, however, M. Amélineau first excavated the

necropolis of the early kings at Abydos, and discovered most of the

tombs afterwards worked over by Prof. Petrie and Mr. Mace. Yet most of

the important scientific results are due to the later explorers, who

were the first to attempt a classification of them, though we must

add that this classification has not been entirely accepted by the

scientific world.

The necropolis of the earliest kings of Egypt is situated in the great

bay in the hills which lies behind Abydos, to the southwest of the main

necropolis. Here, at holy Abydos, where every pious Egyptian wished to

rest after death, the bodies of the most ancient kings were buried. It

is said by Manetho that the original seat of their dominion was This,

a town in the vicinity of Abydos, now represented by the modern Grîrga,

which lies a few miles distant from its site (el-Birba). This may be a

fact, but we have as yet obtained no confirmation of it. It may well be

that the attribution of a Thinite origin to the Ist and IId Dynasties

was due simply to the fact that the kings of these dynasties were buried

at Abydos, which lay within the Thinite nome. Manetho knew that they

were buried at Abydos, and so jumped to the conclusion that they lived

there also, and called them “Thinites.”

[Illustration: 060.jpg PROF. PETRIE’S CAMP AT ABYDOS, 1901.]

Their real place of origin must have been Hierakonpolis, where the

pre-dynastic kingdom of the South had its seat. The Hid Dynasty was no

doubt of Memphite origin, as Manetho says. It is certain that the

seat of the government of the IVth Dynasty was at Memphis, where the

pyramid-building kings were buried, and we know that the sepulchres

of two Hid Dynasty kings, at least, were situated in the necropolis of

Memphis (Sakkâra-Mêdûm). So that probably the seat of government was

transferred from Hierakonpolis to Memphis by the first king of the Hid

Dynasty. Thenceforward the kings were buried in the Memphite necropolis.

The two great nécropoles of Memphis and Abydos were originally the

seats of the worship of the two Egyptian gods of the dead, Seker and

Khentamenti, both of whom were afterwards identified with the Busirite

god Osiris. Abydos was also the centre of the worship of Anubis, an

animal-deity of the dead, the jackal who prowls round the tombs at

night. Anubis and Osiris-Khentamenti, “He who is in the West,” were

associated in the minds of the Egyptians as the protecting deities of

Abydos. The worship of these gods as the chief Southern deities of the

dead, and the preeminence of the necropolis of Abydos in the South, no

doubt date back before the time of the Ist Dynasty, so that it would

not surprise us were burials of kings of the predynastic Hierakonpolite

kingdom discovered at Abydos. Prof. Petrie indeed claims to have

discovered actual royal relics of that period at Abydos, but this seems

to be one of the least certain of his conclusions. We cannot definitely

state that the names “Ro,” “Ka,” and “Sma” (if they are names at all,

which is doubtful) belong to early kings of Hierakonpolis who were

buried at Abydos. It may be so, but further confirmation is desirable

before we accept it as a fact; and as yet such confirmation has not been

forthcoming. The oldest kings, who were certainly buried at Abydos, seem

to have been the first rulers of the united kingdom of the North and

South, Aha and his successors. N’armer is not represented. It may

be that he was not buried at Abydos, but in the necropolis of

Hierakonpolis. This would point to the kings of the South not having

been buried at Abydos until after the unification of the kingdom.

That Aha possessed a tomb at Abydos as well as another at Nakâda seems

peculiar, but it is a phenomenon not unknown in Egypt. Several kings,

whose bodies were actually buried elsewhere, had second tombs at Abydos,

in order that they might _possess_ last resting-places near the tomb

of Osiris, although they might not prefer to _use_ them. Usertsen (or

Senusret) III is a case in point. He was really buried in a pyramid at

Illahun, up in the North, but he had a great rock tomb cut for him in

the cliffs at Abydos, which he never occupied, and probably had never

intended to occupy. We find exactly the same thing far back at the

beginning of Egyptian history, when Aha possessed not only a great

mastaba-tomb at Nakâda, but also a tomb-chamber in the great necropolis

of Abydos. It may be that other kings of the earliest period also had

second sepulchres elsewhere. It is noteworthy that in none of the early

tombs at Abydos were found any bodies which might be considered those

of the kings themselves. M. Amélineau discovered bodies of attendants

or slaves (who were in all probability purposely strangled and buried

around the royal chamber in order that they should attend the king

in the next world), but no royalties. Prof. Petrie found the arm of a

female mummy, who may have been of royal blood, though there is nothing

to show that she was. And the quaint plait and fringe of false hair,

which were also found, need not have belonged to a royal mummy. It is

therefore quite possible that these tombs at Abydos were not the actual

last resting-places of the earliest kings, who may really have been

buried at Hierakonpolis or elsewhere, as Aha was. Messrs. Newberry

and Gtarstang, in their _Short History of Egypt_, suppose that Aha was

actually buried at Abydos, and that the great tomb with objects bearing

his name, found by M. de Morgan at Nakâda, is really not his, but

belonged to a royal princess named Neit-hetep, whose name is found in

conjunction with his at Abydos and Nakâda. But the argument is equally

valid turned round the other way: the Nakâda tomb might just as well be

Aha’s and the Abydos one Neit-hetep’s. Neit-hetep, who is supposed by

Messrs. Newberry and Garstang to have been Narmer’s daughter and Aha’s

wife, was evidently closely connected with Aha, and she may have been

buried with him at Nakâda and commemorated with him at Abydos.[1] It is

probable that the XIXth Dynasty list-makers and Manetho considered the

Abydos tombs to have been the real graves of the kings, but it is by no

means impossible that they were wrong.

[1] A princess named Bener-ab (“Sweet-heart”), who may have

been Aha’s daughter, was actually buried beside his tomb at

Abydos.

This view of the royal tombs at Abydos tallies to a great extent with

that of M. Naville, who has energetically maintained the view that M.

Amélineau and Prof. Petrie have not discovered the real tombs of the

early kings, but only their contemporary commemorative “tombs” at

Abydos. The only real tomb of the Ist Dynasty, therefore, as yet

discovered is that of Aha at Nakâda, found by M. de Morgan. The fact

that attendant slaves were buried around the Abydos tombs is no bar to

the view that the tombs were only the monuments, not the real graves,

of the kings. The royal ghosts would naturally visit their commemorative

chambers at Abydos, in order to be in the company of the great Osiris,

and ghostly servants would be as necessary to their Majesties at Abydos

as elsewhere.

It must not be thought that this revised opinion of the Abydos tombs

detracts in the slightest degree from the importance of the discovery of

M. Amélineau and its subsequent and more detailed investigation by Prof.

Petrie. These monuments are as valuable for historical purposes as

the real tombs themselves. The actual bodies of these primeval kings

themselves we are never likely to find. The tomb of Aha at Nakâda had

been completely rifled in ancient times.

The commemorative tombs of the kings of the Ist and IId Dynasties at

Abydos lie southwest of the great necropolis, far within the bay in the

hills. Their present aspect is that of a wilderness of sand hillocks,

covered with masses of fragments of red pottery, from which the site has

obtained the modern Arab name of _Umm el-Ga’ab_, “Mother of Pots.” It

is impossible to move a step in any direction without crushing some

of these potsherds under the heel. They are chiefly the remains of the

countless little vases of rough red pottery, which were dedicated here

as _ex-votos_ by the pious, between the XIXth and XXVIth Dynasties, to

the memory of the ancient kings and of the great god Osiris, whose tomb,

as we shall see, was supposed to have been situated here also.

[Illustration: 065.jpg (right) THE TOMB OF KING DEN AT ABYDOS. About

4000 B.C.]

Intermingled with these later fragments are pieces of the original

Ist Dynasty vases, which were filled with wine and provisions and were

placed in the tombs, for the refreshment and delectation of the royal

ghosts when they should visit their houses at Abydos. These were thrown

out and broken when the tombs were violated. Here and there one sees a

dip in the sand, out of which rise four walls of great bricks, forming

a rectangular chamber, half-filled with sand. This is one of the royal

tomb-chambers of the Ist Dynasty. That of King Den is illustrated above.

A straight staircase descends into it from the ground-level above. In

several of the tombs the original flooring of wooden beams is still

preserved. Den’s is the most magnificent of all, for it has a floor of

granite blocks; we know of no other instance of stone being used for

building in this early age. Almost every tomb has been burnt at some

period unknown. The brick walls are burnt red, and many of the alabaster

vases are almost calcined. This was probably the work of some unknown

enemy.

The wide complicated tombs have around the main chamber a series of

smaller rooms, which were used to store what was considered necessary

for the use of the royal ghost. Of these necessaries the most

interesting to us are the slaves, who were, as there is little reason to

doubt, purposely killed and buried round the royal chamber so that their

spirits should be on the spot when the dead king came to Abydos; thus

they would be always ready to serve him with the food and other things

which had been stored in the tomb with them and placed under their

charge. There were stacks of great vases of wine, corn, and other food;

these were covered up with masses of fat to preserve the contents,

and they were corked with a pottery stopper, which was protected by

a conical clay sealing, stamped with the impress of the royal

cylinder-seal. There were bins of corn, joints of oxen, pottery dishes,

copper pans, and other things which might be useful for the ghostly

cuisine of the tomb. There were numberless small objects, used, no

doubt, by the dead monarch during life, which he would be pleased to see

again in the next world,--carved ivory boxes, little slabs for grinding

eye-paint, golden buttons, model tools, model vases with gold tops,

ivory and pottery figurines, and other _objets d’art_; the golden royal

seal of judgment of King Den in its ivory casket, and so forth. There

were memorials of the royal victories in peace and war, little ivory

plaques with inscriptions commemorating the founding of new buildings,

the institution of new religious festivals in honour of the gods, the

bringing of the captives of the royal bow and spear to the palace, the

discomfiture of the peoples of the North-land.

[Illustration: 067.jpg CONICAL VASE-STOPPERS. From Abydos. 1st Dynasty:

about 4000 B.C.]

All these things, which have done so much to reconstitute for us the

history of the earliest period of the Egyptian monarchy, were placed

under the care of the dead slaves whose bodies were buried round the

empty tomb-chamber of their royal master in Abydos.

The killing and entombment of the royal servants is of the highest

anthropological interest, for it throws a vivid light upon the manners

of the time. It shows the primeval Egyptians as a semi-barbaric people

of childishly simple ways of thought. The king was dead. For all his

kingship he was a man, and no man was immortal in this world. But yet

how could one really die? Shadows, dreams, all kinds of phenomena which

the primitive mind could not explain, induced the belief that, though

the outer man might rot, there was an inner man which could not die

and still lived on. The idea of total death was unthinkable. And where

should this inner man still live on but in the tomb to which the outer

man was consigned? And here, doubtless it was believed, in the house to

which the body was consigned, the ghost lived on. And as each ghost had

his house with the body, so no doubt all ghosts could communicate with

one another from tomb to tomb; and so there grew up the belief in a

tomb-world, a subterranean Egypt of tombs, in which the dead Egyptians

still lived and had their being. Later on the boat of the sun, in which

the god of light crossed the heavens by day, was thought to pass through

this dead world between his setting and his rising, accompanied by the

souls of the righteous. But of this belief we find no trace yet in the

ideas of the Ist Dynasty. All we can see is that the _sahus_, or bodies

of the dead, were supposed to reside in awful majesty in the tomb,

while the ghosts could pass from tomb to tomb through the mazes of

the underworld. Over this dread realm of dead men presided a dead god,

Osiris of Abydos; and so the necropolis of Abydos was the necropolis of

the underworld, to which all ghosts who were not its rightful citizens

would come from afar to pay their court to their ruler. Thus the man

of substance would have a monumental tablet put up to himself in this

necropolis as a sort of _pied-à-terre_, even if he could not be buried

there; for the king, who, for reasons chiefly connected with local

patriotism, was buried near the city of his earthly abode, a second tomb

would be erected, a stately mansion in the city of Osiris, in which his

ghost could reside when it pleased him to come to Abydos.

Now none could live without food, and men living under the earth needed

it as much as men living on the earth. The royal tomb was thus provided

with an enormous amount of earthly food for the use of the royal ghost,

and with other things as well, as we have seen. The same provision had

also to be made for the royal resting-place at Abydos. And in both cases

royal slaves were needed to take care of all this provision, and to

serve the ghost of the king, whether in his real tomb at Nakâda, or

elsewhere, or in his second tomb at Abydos. Ghosts only could serve

ghosts, so that of the slaves ghosts had to be made. That was easily

done; they died when their master died and followed him to the tomb.

No doubt it seemed perfectly natural to all concerned, to the slaves as

much as to anybody else. But it shows the child’s idea of the value of

life. An animate thing was hardly distinguished at this period from an

inanimate thing. The most ancient Egyptians buried slaves with their

kings as naturally as they buried jars of wine and bins of corn with

them. Both were buried with a definite object. The slaves had to die

before they were buried, but then so had the king himself. They all had

to die sometime or other. And the actual killing of them was no worse

than killing a dog, no worse even than “killing” golden buttons and

ivory boxes. For, when the buttons and boxes were buried with the king,

they were just as much dead as the slaves. Of the sanctity of _human_

life as distinct from other life, there was probably no idea at all. The

royal ghost needed ghostly servants, and they were provided as a matter

of course.

But as civilization progressed, the ideas of the Egyptians changed

on these points, and in the later ages of the ancient world they were

probably the most humane of the peoples, far more so than the Greeks,

in fact. The cultured Hellenes murdered their prisoners of war without

hesitation. Who has not been troubled in mind by the execution of Mkias

and Demosthenes after the surrender of the Athenian army at Syracuse?

When we compare this with Grant’s refusal even to take Lee’s sword

at Appomattox, we see how we have progressed in these matters; while

Gylippus and the Syracusans were as much children as the Ist Dynasty

Egyptians. But the Egyptians of Gylippus’s time had probably advanced

much further than the Greeks in the direction of rational manhood. When

Amasis had his rival Apries in his power, he did not put him to death,

but kept him as his coadjutor on the throne. Apries fled from him,

allied himself with Greek pirates, and advanced against his generous

rival. After his defeat and murder at Momemphis, Amasis gave him a

splendid burial. When we compare this generosity to a beaten foe with

the savagery of the Assyrians, for instance, we see how far the later

Egyptians had progressed in the paths of humanity.

The ancient custom of killing slaves was first discontinued at the death

of the lesser chieftains, but we find a possible survival of it in the

case of a king, even as late as the time of the XIth Dynasty; for at

Thebes, in the precinct of the funerary temple of King Neb-hapet-Râ

Mentuhetep and round the central pyramid which commemorated his memory,

were buried a number of the ladies of his _harîm_. They were all buried

at one and the same time, and there can be little doubt that they were

all killed and buried round the king, in order to be with him in the

next world. Now with each of these ladies, who had been turned into

ghosts, was buried a little waxen human figure placed in a little model

coffin. This was to replace her own slave. She who went to accompany

the king in the next world had to have her own attendant also. But, not

being royal, a real slave was not killed for her; she only took with her

a waxen figure, which by means of charms and incantations would, when

she called upon it, turn into a real slave, and say, “Here am I,” and do

whatever work might be required of her. The actual killing and burial

of the slaves had in all cases except that of the king been long

“commuted,” so to speak, into a burial with the dead person of

_ushabtis_, or “Answerers,” little figures like those described above,

made more usually of stone, and inscribed with the name of the deceased.

They were called “Answerers” because they answered the call of their

dead master or mistress, and by magic power became ghostly servants.

Later on they were made of wood and glazed _faïence_, as well as stone.

By this means the greater humanity of a later age sought a relief from

the primitive disregard of the death of others.

Anthropologically interesting as are the results of the excavations at

Umm el-Gra’ab, they are no less historically important. There is no need

here to weary the reader with the details of scientific controversy; it

will suffice to set before him as succinctly and clearly as possible the

net results of the work which has been done.

Messrs. Amélineau and Petrie have found the secondary tombs and have

identified the names of the following primeval kings of Egypt. We

arrange them in their apparent historical order.

1. Aha Men (?).

2. Narmer (or Betjumer) Sma (?).

3. Tjer (or Khent). Besh.

4. Tja Ati.

5. Den Semti.

6. Atjab Merpeba.

7. Semerkha Nekht.

8. Qâ Sen.

9. Khâsekhem (Khâsekhemui)

10. Hetepsekhemui.

11. Räneb.

12. Neneter.

13. Sekhemab Perabsen.

Two or three other names are ascribed by Prof. Petrie to the

Hierakonpolite dynasty of Upper Egypt, which, as it occurs before the

time of Mena and the Ist Dynasty, he calls “Dynasty 0.” Dynasty 0,

however, is no dynasty, and in any case we should prefer to call the

“predynastic” dynasty “Dynasty I.” The names of “Dynasty minus One,”

however, remain problematical, and for the present it would seem safer

to suspend judgment as to the place of the supposed royal names “Ro” and

“Ka”(Men-kaf), which Prof. Petrie supposes to have been those of two

of the kings of Upper Egypt who reigned before Mena. The king

“Sma”(“Uniter”) is possibly identical with Aha or Narmer, more

probably the latter. It is not necessary to detail the process by which

Egyptologists have sought to identify these thirteen kings with the

successors of Mena in the lists of kings and the Ist and IId Dynasties

of Manetho. The work has been very successful, though not perhaps quite

so completely accomplished as Prof. Petrie himself inclines to believe.

The first identification was made by Prof. Sethe, of Gottingen, who

pointed out that the names Semti and Merpeba on a vase-fragment found

by M. Amélineau were in reality those of the kings Hesepti and Merbap

of the lists, the Ousaphaïs and Miebis of Manetho. The perfectly certain

identifications are these:--

5. Den Semti = Hesepti, _Ousaphaïs_, Ist Dynasty.

6. Atjab Merpeba = Merbap, _Miebis_, Ist Dynasty.

7. Semerkha Nekht= Shemsu or Semsem (?), _Semempres_, Ist Dynasty.

8. Qâ Sen = Qebh, _Bienehhes_, Ist Dynasty.

9. Khâsekhemui Besh = Betju-mer (?), _Boethos_, IId Dynasty.

10. Neneter = Bineneter, _Binothris_, IId Dynasty.

Six of the Abydos kings have thus been identified with names in the

lists and in Manetho; that is to say, we now know the real names of six

of the earliest Egyptian monarchs, whose appellations are given us

under mutilated forms by the later list-makers. Prof. Petrie further

identifies (4) Tja Ati with Ateth, (3) Tjer with Teta, and (1) Aha with

Mena. Mena, Teta, Ateth, Ata, Hesepti, Merbap, Shemsu (?), and Qebh are

the names of the 1st Dynasty as given in the lists. The equivalent of

Ata Prof. Petrie finds in the name “Merneit,” which is found at Umm

el-Ga’ab. But there is no proof whatever that Merneit was a king; he

was much more probably a prince or other great personage of the reign

of Den, who was buried with the kings. Prof. Petrie accepts the

identification of the personal name of Aha as “Men,” and so makes him

the only equivalent of Mena. But this reading of the name is still

doubtful. Arguing that Aha must be Mena, and having all the rest of the

kings of the Ist Dynasty identified with the names in the lists, Prof.

Petrie is compelled to exclude Narmer from the dynasty, and to relegate

him to “Dynasty 0,” before the time of Mena. It is quite possible,

however, that Narmer was the successor, not the predecessor, of Mena.

He was certainly either the one or the other, as the style of art in his

time was exactly the same as that in the time of Aha. The “Scorpion,”

too, whose name is found at Hierakonpolis, certainly dates to the same

time as Narmer and Aha, for the style of his work is the same. And it

may well be that he is not to be counted as a separate king, belonging

to “Dynasty 0 “(or “Dynasty -I”) at all, but as identical with Narmer,

just as “Sma” may also be. We thus find that the two kings who left the

most developed remains at Hierakonpolis are the two whose monuments at

Abydos are the oldest of all on that site. That is to say, the kings

whose monuments record the conquest of the North belong to the period

of transition from the old Hierakonpolite dominion of Upper Egypt to the

new kingdom of all Egypt. They, in fact, represent the “Mena” or Menés

of tradition. It may be that Aha bore the personal name of _Men_, which

would thus be the original of Mena, but this is uncertain. In any case

both Aha and Narmer must be assigned to the Ist Dynasty, with the result

that we know of more kings belonging to the dynasty than appear in the

lists.

Nor is this improbable. Manetho’s list is evidently based upon old

Egyptian lists derived from the authorities upon which the king-lists of

Abydos and Sakkâra were based. These old lists were made under the

XIXth Dynasty, when an interest in the oldest kings seems to have been

awakened, and the ruling monarchs erected temples at Abydos in their

honour. This phenomenon can only have been due to a discovery of Umm

el-Ga’ab and its treasures, the tombs of which were recognized as

the burial-places (real or secondary) of the kings before the

pyramid-builders. Seti I. and his son Ramses then worshipped the kings

of Umm el-Ga’ab, with their names set before them in the order, number,

and spelling in which the scribes considered they ought to be inscribed.

It is highly probable that the number known at that time was not quite

correct. We know that the spelling of the names was very much garbled

(to take one example only, the signs for _Sen_ were read as one sign

_Qebh_), so that one or two kings may have been omitted or displaced.

This may be the case with Narmer, or, as his name ought possibly to be

read, _Betjumer_. His monuments show by their style that he belongs to

the very beginning of the Ist Dynasty. No name in the Ist Dynasty list

corresponds to his. But one of the lists gives for the first king of the

IId Dynasty (the successor of “Qebh” = Sen) a name which may also be read

Betjumer, spelt syllabically this time, not ideographically. On this

account Prof. Naville wishes to regard the Hierakonpolite monuments of

Narmer as belonging to the IId Dynasty, but, as we have seen, they are

among the most archaic known, and certainly must belong to the beginning

of the Ist Dynasty. It is therefore probable that Khasekhemui Besh

and Narmer (Betjumer?) were confused by this list-maker, and the

name Betjumer was given to the first king of the IId Dynasty, who was

probably in reality Khasekhemui. The resemblance of _Betju_ to _Besh_

may have contributed to this confusion.

So Narmer (or Betjumer) found his way out of his proper place at the

beginning of the 1st Dynasty. Whether Aha was also called “Men” or not,

it seems evident that he and Narmer were jointly the originals of the

legendary Mena. Narmer, who possibly also bore the name of Sma, “the

Uniter,” conquered the North. Aha, “the Fighter,” also ruled both South

and North at the same period. Khasekhemui, too, conquered the North, but

the style of his monuments shows such an advance upon that of the days

of Aha and Narmer that it seems best to make him the successor of Sen

(or “Qebh “), and, explaining the transference of the name Betjumer

to the beginning of the IId Dynasty as due to a confusion with

Khasekhemui’s personal name Besh, to make Khasekhemui the founder of the

IId Dynasty. The beginning of a new dynasty may well have been marked

by a reassertion of the new royal power over Lower Egypt, which may have

lapsed somewhat under the rule of the later kings of the Ist Dynasty.

Semti is certainly the “Hesepti” of the lists, and Tja Ati is probably

“Ateth.” “Ata” is thus unidentified. Prof. Petrie makes him = Merneit,

but, as has already been said, there is no proof that the tomb of

Merneit is that of a king. “Teta” may be Tjer or Khent, but of this

there is no proof. It is most probable that the names “Teta,” “Ateth,”

and “Ata” are all founded on Ati, the personal name of Tja. The king

Tjer is then not represented in the lists, and “Mena” is a compound of

the two oldest Abydos kings, Narmer (Betjumer) Sma (?) and Aha Men (?).

These are the bare historical results that have been attained with

regard to the names, identity, and order of the kings. The smaller

memorials that have been found with them, especially the ivory plaques,

have told us of events that took place during their reigns; but, with

the exception of the constantly recurring references to the conquest of

the North, there is little that can be considered of historical interest

or importance. We will take one as an example. This is the tablet No.

32,650 of the British Museum, illustrated by Prof. Petrie, _Royal Tombs_

i (Egypt Exploration Fund), pi. xi, 14, xv, 16. This is the record of

a single year, the first in the reign of Semti, King of Upper and Lower

Egypt. On it we see a picture of a king performing a religious dance

before the god Osiris, who is seated in a shrine placed on a dais. This

religious dance was performed by all the kings in later times. Below we

find hieroglyphic (ideographic) records of a river expedition to fight

the Northerners and of the capture of a fortified town called An. The

capture of the town is indicated by a broken line of fortification,

half-encircling the name, and the hoe with which the emblematic hawks

on the slate reliefs already described are armed; this signifies the

opening and breaking down of the wall.

On the other half of the tablet we find the viceroy of Lower Egypt,

Hemaka, mentioned; also “the Hawk (i. e. the king) seizes the seat of

the Libyans,” and some unintelligible record of a jeweller of the palace

and a king’s carpenter. On a similar tablet (of Sen) we find the words

“the king’s carpenter made this record.” All these little tablets are

then the records of single years of a king’s life, and others like them,

preserved no doubt in royal archives, formed the base of regular annals,

which were occasionally carved upon stone. We have an example of one of

these in the “Stele of Palermo,” a fragment of black granite, inscribed

with the annals of the kings up to the time of the Vth Dynasty, when

the monument itself was made. It is a matter for intense regret that the

greater portion of this priceless historical monument has disappeared,

leaving us but a piece out of the centre, with part of the records

of only six kings before Snefru. Of these six the name of only one,

Neneter, of the lid Dynasty, whose name is also found at Abydos, is

mentioned. The only important historical event of Neneter’s reign seems

to have occurred in his thirteenth year, when the towns or palaces of

_Ha_ (“North”) and Shem-Râ (“The Sun proceeds”) were founded. Nothing

but the institution and celebration of religious festivals is recorded

in the sixteen yearly entries preserved to us out of a reign of

thirty-five years. The annual height of the Nile is given, and the

occasions of numbering the people are recorded (every second year):

nothing else. Manetho tells us that in the reign of Binothris, who

is Neneter, it was decreed that women could hold royal honours and

privileges. This first concession of women’s rights is not mentioned on

the strictly official “Palermo Stele.”

More regrettable than aught else is the absence from the “Palermo Stele”

of that part of the original monument which gave the annals of the

earliest kings. At any rate, in the lines of annals which still exist

above that which contains the chronicle of the reign of Neneter no

entry can be definitely identified as belonging to the reigns of Aha

or Narmer. In a line below there is a mention of the “birth of

Khâsekhemui,” apparently a festival in honour of the birth of that king

celebrated in the same way as the reputed birthday of a god. This shows

the great honour in which Khâsekhemui was held, and perhaps it was he

who really finally settled the question of the unification of North and

South and consolidated the work of the earlier kings.

As far as we can tell, then, Aha and Narmer were the first conquerors

of the North, the unifiers of the kingdom, and the originals of the

legendary Mena. In their time the kingdom’s centre of gravity was still

in the South, and Narmer (who is probably identical with “the Scorpion”)

dedicated the memorials of his deeds in the temple of Hierakonpolis. It

may be that the legend of the founding of Memphis in the time of “Menés”

is nearly correct (as we shall see, historically, the foundation may

have been due to Merpeba), but we have the authority of Manetho for

the fact that the first two dynasties were “Thinite” (that is, Upper

Egyptian), and that Memphis did not become the capital till the time of

the Hid Dynasty. With this statement the evidence of the monuments fully

agrees. The earliest royal tombs in the pyramid-field of Memphis date

from the time of the Hid Dynasty, so that it is evident that the kings

had then taken up their abode in the Northern capital. We find that soon

after the time of Khâsekhemui the king Perabsen was especially connected

with Lower Egypt. His personal name is unknown to us (though he may

be the “Uatjnes” of the lists), but we do know that he had two

banner-names, Sekhem-ab and Perabsen. The first is his hawk or

Horus-name, the second his Set-name; that is to say, while he bore the

first name as King of Upper Egypt under the special patronage of Horus,

the hawk-god of the Upper Country, he bore the second as King of Lower

Egypt, under the patronage of Set, the deity of the Delta, whose fetish

animal appears above this name instead of the hawk. This shows how

definitely Perabsen wished to appear as legitimate King of Lower as well

as Upper Egypt. In later times the Theban kings of the XIIth Dynasty,

when they devoted themselves to winning the allegiance of the

Northerners by living near Memphis rather than at Thebes, seem to have

been imitating the successors of Khâsekhemui.

Moreover, we now find various evidences of increasing connection with

the North. A princess named Ne-maat-hap, who seems to have been the

mother of Sa-nekht, the first king of the Hid Dynasty, bears the name of

the sacred Apis of Memphis, her name signifying “Possessing the right of

Apis.” According to Manetho, the kings of the Hid Dynasty are the first

Memphites, and this seems to be quite correct. With Ne-maat-hap the

royal right seems to have been transferred to a Memphite house. But the

Memphites still had associations with Upper Egypt: two of them, Tjeser

Khet-neter and Sa-nekht, were buried near Abydos, in the desert at Bêt

Khallâf, where their tombs were discovered and excavated by Mr. Garstang

in 1900. The tomb of Tjeser is a great brick-built mastaba, forty feet

high and measuring 300 feet by 150 feet. The actual tomb-chambers are

excavated in the rock, twenty feet below the ground-level and sixty feet

below the top of the mastaba. They had been violated in ancient times,

but a number of clay jar-sealings, alabaster vases, and bowls belonging

to the tomb furniture were found by the discoverer. Sa-nekht’s tomb is

similar. In it was found the preserved skeleton of its owner, who was a

giant seven feet high.

[Illustration: 082.jpg THE TOMB OF KING TJESER AT BÊT KHALLÂF. About

3700 B.C.]

It is remarkable that Manetho chronicles among the kings of the early

period a king named Sesokhris, who was five cubits high. This may have

been Sa-nekht.

Tjeser had two tombs, one, the above-mentioned, near Abydos, the

other at Sakkâra, in the Memphite pyramid-field. This is the famous

Step-Pyramid. Since Sa-nekht seems really to have been buried at Bêt

Khal-laf, probably Tjeser was, too, and the Step-Pyramid may have been

his secondary or sham tomb, erected in the necropolis of Memphis as a

compliment to Seker, the Northern god of the dead, just as Aha had his

secondary tomb at Abydos in compliment to Khentamenti. Sne-feru, also,

the last king of the Hid Dynasty, seems to have had two tombs. One of

these was the great Pyramid of Mêdûm, which was explored by Prof. Petrie

in 1891, the other was at Dashûr. Near by was the interesting necropolis

already mentioned, in which was discovered evidence of the continuance

of the cramped position of burial and of the absence of mummification

among a certain section of the population even as late as the time of

the IVth Dynasty. This has been taken to imply that the fusion of the

primitive Neolithic and invading sub-Semitic races had not been effected

at that time.

With the IVth Dynasty the connection of the royal house with the South

seems to have finally ceased. The governmental centre of gravity was

finally transferred to Memphis, and the kings were thenceforth for

several centuries buried in the great pyramids which still stand in

serried order along the western desert border of Egypt, from the Delta

to the province of the Fayyum. With the latest discoveries in this

Memphite pyramid-field we shall deal in the next chapter.

The transference of the royal power to Memphis under the Hid Dynasty

naturally led to a great increase of Egyptian activity in the Northern

lands. We read in Manetho of a great Libyan war in the reign of

Neche-rophes, and both Sa-nekht and Tjeser seem to have finally

established Egyptian authority in the Sinaitic peninsula, where their

rock-inscriptions have been found.

In 1904 Prof. Petrie was despatched to Sinai by the Egypt Exploration

Fund, in order finally to record the inscriptions of the early kings

in the Wadi Maghara, which had been lately very much damaged by the

operations of the turquoise-miners. It seems almost incredible that

ignorance and vandalism should still be so rampant in the twentieth

century that the most important historical monuments are not safe from

desecration in order to obtain a few turquoises, but it is so. Prof.

Petrie’s expedition did not start a day too soon, and at the suggestion

of Sir William Garstin, the adviser to the Ministry of the Interior, the

majority of the inscriptions have been removed to the Cairo Museum for

safety and preservation. Among the new inscriptions discovered is one of

Sa-nekht, which is now in the British Museum. Tjeser and Sa-nekht were

not the first Egyptian kings to visit Sinai. Already, in the days of the

1st Dynasty, Semerkha had entered that land and inscribed his name upon

the rocks. But the regular annexation, so to speak, of Sinai to Egypt

took place under the Memphites of the Hid Dynasty.

With the Hid Dynasty we have reached the age of the pyramid-builders.

The most typical pyramids are those of the three great kings of the IVth

Dynasty, Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura, at Giza near Cairo. But, as

we have seen, the last king of the Hid Dynasty, Snefru, also had one

pyramid, if not two; and the most ancient of these buildings known to

us, the Step-Pyramid of Sakkâra, was erected by Tjeser at the beginning

of that dynasty. The evolution of the royal tombs from the time of the

1st Dynasty to that of the IVth is very interesting to trace. At the

period of transition from the predynastic to the dynastic age we have

the great mastaba of Aha at Nakâda, and the simplest chamber-tombs

at Abydos. All these were of brick; no stone was used in their

construction. Then we find the chamber-tomb of Den Semti at Abydos

with a granite floor, the walls being still of brick. Above each of the

Abydos tombs was probably a low mound, and in front a small chapel, from

which a flight of steps descended into the simple chamber. On one of the

little plaques already mentioned, which were found in these tombs, we

have an archaic inscription, entirely written in ideographs, which

seems to read, “The Big-Heads (i. e. the chiefs) come to the tomb.” The

ideograph for “tomb” seems to be a rude picture of the funerary chapel,

but from it we can derive little information as to its construction.

Towards the end of the Ist Dynasty, and during the lid, the royal tombs

became much more complicated, being surrounded with numerous chambers

for the dead slaves, etc. Khâsekhemui’s tomb has thirty-three such

chambers, and there is one large chamber of stone. We know of no other

instance of the use of stone work for building at this period except in

the royal tombs. No doubt the mason’s art was still so difficult that it

was reserved for royal use only.

Under the Hid Dynasty we find the last brick mastabas built for royalty,

at Bêt Khallâf, and the first pyramids, in the Memphite necropolis.

In the mastaba of Tjeser at Bêt Khallâf stone was used for the great

portcullises which were intended to bar the way to possible plunderers

through the passages of the tomb. The Step-Pyramid at Sakkâra is, so to

speak, a series of mastabas of stone, imposed one above the other; it

never had the continuous casing of stone which is the mark of a true

pyramid. The pyramid of Snefru at Mêdûm is more developed. It also

originated in a mastaba, enlarged, and with another mastaba-like

erection on the top of it; but it was given a continuous sloping casing

of fine limestone from bottom to top, and so is a true pyramid. A

discussion of recent theories as to the building of the later pyramids

of the IVth Dynasty will be found in the next chapter.

In the time of the Ist Dynasty the royal tomb was known by the name of

“Protection-around-the-Hawk, i.e. the king”(_Sa-ha-heru_); but under

the Hid and IVth Dynasties regular names, such as “the Firm,” “the

Glorious,” “the Appearing,” etc., were given to each pyramid.

[Illustration: 086.jpg FALSE DOOR OF THE TOMB OF TETA, about 3600 B.C.]

We must not omit to note an interesting point in connection with the

royal tombs at Abydos, In that of King Khent or Tjer (the reading of

the ideograph is doubtful) M. Amélineau found a large bed or bier of

granite, with a figure of the god Osiris lying in state sculptured in

high relief upon it. This led him to jump to the conclusion that he

had found the tomb of the god Osiris himself, and that a skull he found

close by was the veritable cranium of the primeval folk-hero, who,

according to the euhemerist theory, was the deified original of the god.

The true explanation is given by Dr. Wallis Budge in his _History of

Egypt_, i, p. 19. It is a fact that the tomb of Tjer was regarded by

the Egyptians of the XIXth Dynasty as the veritable tomb of Osiris.

They thought they had discovered it, just as M. Amélineau did. When the

ancient royal tombs of Umm el-Ga’ab were rediscovered and identified at

the beginning of the XIXth Dynasty, and Seti I built the great temple of

Abydos to the divine ancestors in honour of the discovery, embellishing

it with a relief of himself and his son Ramses making offerings to the

names of his predecessors (the “Tablet of Abydos “), the name of King

Khent or Tjer (which is perhaps the really correct original form) was

read by the royal scribes as “Khent” and hastily identified with the

first part of the name of the god _Khent-amenti_ Osiris, the lord of

Abydos. The tomb was thus regarded as the tomb of Osiris himself, and

it was furnished with a great stone figure of the god lying on his bier,

attended by the two hawks of Isis and Nephthys; ever after the site was

visited by crowds of pilgrims, who left at Umm el-Ga’ab the thousands of

little votive vases whose fragments have given the place its name of the

“Mother of Pots.” This is the explanation of the discovery of the “Tomb

of Osiris.” We have not found what M. Amélineau seems rather naively to

have thought possible, a confirmation of the ancient view that Osiris

was originally a man who ruled over Egypt and was deified after his

death; but we have found that the Egyptians themselves were more or less

euhemerists, and did think so.

It may seem remarkable that all this new knowledge of ancient Egypt is

derived from tombs and has to do with the resting-places of the kings

when dead, rather than with their palaces or temples when living. Of

temples at this early period we have no trace. The oldest temple in

Egypt is perhaps the little chapel in front of the pyramid of Snefru at

Mêdûm. We first hear of temples to the gods under the IVth Dynasty, but

of the actual buildings of that period we have recovered nothing but one

or two inscribed blocks of stone. Prof. Petrie has traced out the plan

of the oldest temple of Osiris at Abydos, which may be of the time of

Khufu, from scanty evidences which give us but little information. It is

certain, however, that this temple, which is clearly one of the oldest

in Egypt, goes back at least to his time. Its site is the mound

called Kom es-Sultan, “The Mound of the King,” close to the village of

el-Kherba, and on the borders of the cultivation northeast of the royal

tombs at Umm el-Oa’ab.

Of royal palaces we have more definite information. North of the Kom

es-Sultan are two great fortress-enclosures of brick: the one is known

as _Sûnet es-Zebîb_, “the Storehouse of Dried Orapes;” the other is

occupied by the Coptic monastery of Dêr Anba Musâs. Both are certainly

fortress-palaces of the earliest period of the Egyptian monarchy. We

know from the small record-plaques of this period that the kings were

constantly founding or repairing places of this kind, which were always

great rectangular enclosures with crenelated brick walls like those of

early Babylonian buildings.

We have seen that the Northern Egyptian possessed similar

fortress-cities which were captured by Narmer. These were the seats of

the royal residence in various parts of the country. Behind their walls

was the king’s house, and no doubt also a town of nobles and retainers,

while the peasants lived on the arable land without.

[Illustration: 089.jpg THE SHUNET EZ-ZEBIB: THE FORTRESS-TOWN, About

3900 B.C.]

The Shûnet ez-Zebîb and its companion fortress were evidently the royal

cities of the 1st and IId Dynasties at Abydos. The former has been

excavated by Mr. E. R. Ayrton for the Egypt Exploration Fund, under the

supervision of Prof. Petrie. He found jar-sealings of Khâsekhemui and

Perabsen. In later times the place was utilized as a burial-place for

ibis-mummies (it had already been abandoned as a city before the time of

the XIIth Dynasty), and from this fact it received the name of _Shenet

deb-hib_, or “Storehouse of Ibis Burials.” The Arab invaders adapted

this name to their own language in the nearest form which would have

any meaning, as _Shûnet ez-Zebïb_, “the Storehouse of Dried Grapes.”

The Arab word _shûna_ (“Barn” or “Storehouse”) was, it should be noted,

taken over from the Coptic _sheune,_ which is the old-Egyptian _shenet_.

The identity of _sheune_ or _shûna_ with the German “Scheune” is a

quaint and curious coincidence. In the illustration of the Shûnet

ez-Zebib the curved line of crenelated wall, following the contour of

the hill, should be noted, as it is a remarkable example of the building

of this early period.

It will have been seen from the foregoing description of what

far-reaching importance the discoveries at Abydos have been. A new

chapter of the history of the human race has been opened, which contains

information previously undreamt of, information which Egyptologists

had never dared to hope would be recovered. The sand of Egypt indeed

conceals inexhaustible treasures, and no one knows what the morrow’s

work may bring forth.

_Ex Africa semper aliquid novi!_

CHAPTER III--MEMPHIS AND THE PYRAMIDS

Memphis, the “beautiful abode,” the “City of the White Wall,” is said

to have been founded by the legendary Menés, who in order to build it

diverted the stream of the Nile by means of a great dyke constructed

near the modern village of Koshêsh, south of the village of Mitrahêna,

which marks the central point of the ancient metropolis of Northern

Egypt. It may be that the city was founded by Aha or Narmer, the

historical originals of Mena or Menés; but we have another theory with

regard to its foundation, that it was originally built by King Merpeba

Atjab, whose tomb was also discovered at Abydos near those of Aha and

Narmer. Merpeba is the oldest king whose name is absolutely identified

with one occurring in the XIXth Dynasty king-lists and in Manetho. He

is certainly the “Merbap” or “Merbepa” (“Merbapen”) of the lists and the

_Miebis_ of Manetho. In both the lists and in Manetho he stands fifth in

order from Mena, and he was therefore the sixth king of the Ist Dynasty.

The lists, Manetho, and the small monuments in his own tomb agree in

making him the immediate successor of Semti Den (Ousaphaïs), and from

the style of these latter it is evident that he comes after Tja, Tjer,

Narmer, and Aha. That is to say, the contemporary evidence makes him the

fifth king from Aha, the first original of “Menés.”

Now after the piety of Seti I had led him to erect a great temple at

Abydos in memory of the ancient kings, whose sepulchres had probably

been brought to light shortly before, and to compile and set up in the

temple a list of his predecessors, a certain pious snobbery or snobbish

piety impelled a worthy named Tunure, who lived at Memphis, to put up in

his own tomb at Sakkâra a tablet of kings like the royal one at Abydos.

If Osiris-Khentamenti at Abydos had his tablet of kings, so should

Osiris-Seker at Sakkâra. But Tunure does not begin his list with Mena;

his initial king is Merpeba. For him Merpeba was the first monarch to be

commemorated at Sakkâra. Does not this look very much as if the strictly

historical Merpeba, not the rather legendary and confused Mena, was

regarded as the first Memphite king? It may well be that it was in

the reign of Merpeba, not in that of Aha or Narmer, that Memphis was

founded.

The XIXth Dynasty lists of course say nothing about Mena or Merpeba

having founded Memphis; they only give the names of the kings, nothing

more. The earliest authority for the ascription of Memphis to “Menés”,

is Herodotus, who was followed in this ascription, as in many other

matters, by Manetho; but it must be remembered that Manetho was writing

for the edification of a Greek king (Ptolemy Philadelphus) and his Greek

court at Alexandria, and had therefore to evince a respect for the great

Greek classic which he may not always have really felt. Herodotus is

not, of course, accused of any wilful misstatement in this or in any

other matter in which his accuracy is suspected. He merely wrote

down what he was told by the Egyptians themselves, and Merpeba was

sufficiently near in time to Aha to be easily confounded with him by

the scribes of the Persian period, who no doubt ascribed everything

to “Mena” that was done by the kings of the Ist and IId Dynasties.

Therefore it may be considered quite probable that the “Menés” who

founded Memphis was Merpeba, the fifth or sixth king of the Ist Dynasty,

whom Tunure, a thousand years before the time of Herodotus and his

informants, placed at the head of the Memphite “List of Sakkâra.”

The reconquest of the North by Khâsekhemui doubtless led to a further

strengthening of Memphis; and it is quite possible that the deeds of

this king also contributed to make up the sum total of those ascribed to

the Herodotean and Manethonian Menés.

It may be that a town of the Northerners existed here before the time of

the Southern Conquest, for Phtah, the local god of Memphis, has a very

marked character of his own, quite different from that of Khen-tamenti,

the Osiris of Abydos. He is always represented as a little bow-legged

hydrocephalous dwarf very like the Phoenician _Kabeiroi_. It may be

that here is another connection between the Northern Egyptians and the

Semites. The name “Phtah,” the “Opener,” is definitely Semitic. We may

then regard the dwarf Phtah as originally a non-Egyptian god of the

Northerners, probably Semitic in origin, and his town also as antedating

the conquest. But it evidently was to the Southerners that Memphis owed

its importance and its eventual promotion to the position of capital of

the united kingdom. Then the dwarf Phtah saw himself rivalled by another

Phtah of Southern Egyptian origin, who had been installed at Memphis by

the Southerners. This Phtah was a sort of modified edition of Osiris, in

mummy-form and holding crook and whip, but with a refined edition of

the Kabeiric head of the indigenous Phtah. The actual god of “the White

Wall” was undoubtedly confused vith the dead god of the necropolis,

whose name was Seker or Sekri (Sokari), “the Coffined.” The original

form of this deity was a mummied hawk upon a coffin, and it is very

probable that he was imported from the South, like the second Phtah, at

the time of the conquest, when the great Northern necropolis began

to grow up as a duplicate of that at Abydos. Later on we find Seker

confused with the ancient dwarf-god, and it is the latter who was

afterwards chiefly revered as Phtah-Socharis-Osiris, the protector of

the necropolis, the mummied Phtah being the generally recognized ruler

of the City of the White Wall.

It is from the name of Seker that the modern Sak-kâra takes its title.

Sakkâra marks the central point of the great Memphite necropolis, as it

is the nearest point of the western desert to Memphis. Northwards the

necropolis extended to Griza and Abu Roâsh, southwards, to Daslmr;

even the nécropoles of Lisht and Mêdûm may be regarded as appanages of

Sakkâra. At Sakkâra itself Tjeser of the IIId Dynasty had a pyramid,

which, as we have seen, was probably not his real tomb (which was

the great mastaba at Bêt Khallâf), but a secondary or sham tomb

corresponding to the “tombs” of the earliest kings at Umm el-Ga’ab in

the necropolis of Abydos. Many later kings, however, especially of the

Vith Dynasty, were actually buried at Sakkâra. Their tombs have all been

thoroughly described by their discoverer, Prof. Maspero, in his history.

The last king of the Hid Dynasty, Snefru, was buried away down south at

Mêdûm, in splendid isolation, but he may also have had a second pyramid

at Sakkâra or Abu Roash.

The kings of the IVth Dynasty were the greatest of the pyramid builders,

and to them belong the huge edifices of Griza. The Vth Dynasty favoured

Abusîr, between Cîza and Sakkâra; the Vith, as we have said, preferred

Sakkâra itself. With them the end of the Old Kingdom and of Memphite

dominion was reached; the sceptre fell from the hands of the Memphite

kings and was taken up by the princes of Herakleopolis (Ahnasyet

el-Medina, near Béni Suêf, south of the Eayyûm) and Thebes. Where the

Herakleopolite kings were buried we do not know; probably somewhere in

the local necropolis of the Gebel es-Sedment, between Ahnasya and the

Fayyûm. The first Thebans (the XIth Dynasty) were certainly buried at

Thebes, but when the Herakleopolites had finally disappeared, and all

Egypt was again united under one strong sceptre, the Theban kings seem

to have been drawn northwards. They removed to the seat of the dominion

of those whom they had supplanted, and they settled in the neighbourhood

of Herakleopolis, near the fertile province of the Fayyûm, and between

it and Memphis. Here, in the royal fortress-palace of Itht-taui,

“Controlling the Two Lands,” the kings of the XIIth Dynasty lived,

and they were buried in the nécropoles of Dashûr, Lisht, and Illahun

(Hawara), in pyramids like those of the old Memphite kings. These facts,

of the situation of Itht-taui, of their burial in the southern an ex of

the old necropolis of Memphis, and of the fori of their tombs (the

true Upper Egyptian and Thebian form was a rock-cut gallery and chamber

driven deep into the hill), show how solicitous were the Amenemhats

and Senusrets of the suffrages of Lower Egypt, how anxious they were to

conciliate the ancient royal pride of Memphis.

Where the kings of the XIIIth Dynasty and the Hyksos or “Shepherds” were

buried, we do not know. The kings of the restored Theban empire were

all interred at Thebes. There are, in fact, no known royal sepulchres

between the Fayyûm and Abydos. The great kings were mostly buried in

the neighbourhood of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. The sepulchres of the

“Middle Empire”--the XIth to XIIIth Dynasties--in the neighbourhood

of the Fayyûm may fairly be grouped with those of the same period at

Dashûr, which belongs to the necropolis of Memphis, since it is only a

mile or two south of Sakkâra.

It is chiefly with regard to the sepulchres of the kings that the most

momentous discoveries of recent years have been made at Thebes, and at

Sakkâra, Abusîr, Dashûr, and Lisht, as at Abydos. For this reason we

deal in succession with the finds in the nécropoles of Abydos, Memphis,

and Thebes respectively. And with the sepulchres of the “Old Kingdom,”

in the Memphite necropolis proper, we have naturally grouped those of

the “Middle Kingdom” at Dashûr, Lisht, Illahun, and Hawara.

Some of these modern discoveries have been commented on and illustrated

by Prof. Maspero in his great history. But the discoveries that have

been made since this publication have been very important,--those at

Abusîr, indeed, of first-rate importance, though not so momentous as

those of the tombs of the Ist and IId Dynasties at Abydos, already

described. At Abu Roash and at Gîza, at the northern end of the Memphite

necropolis, several expeditions have had considerable success, notably

those of the American Dr. Reisner, assisted by Mr. Mace, who excavated

the royal tombs at Umm el-Ga’ab for Prof. Petrie, those of the

German Drs. Steindorff and Borchardt,--the latter working for the

_Beutsch-Orient Gesellschaft_,--and those of other American excavators.

Until the full publication of the results of these excavations appears,

very little can be said about them. Many mastaba-tombs have, it is

understood, been found, with interesting remains. Nothing of great

historical importance seems to have been discovered, however. It is

otherwise when we come to the discoveries of Messrs. Borchardt and

Schâfer at Abusîr, south of Gîza and north of Sakkâra. At this place

results of first-rate historical importance have been attained.

The main group of pyramids at Abusir consists of the tombs of the kings

Sahurà, Neferarikarâ, and Ne-user-Râ, of the Vth Dynasty. The pyramids

themselves are smaller than those of Gîza, but larger than those of

Sakkâra. In general appearance and effect they resemble those of Gîza,

but they are not so imposing, as the desert here is low. Those of Gîza,

Sakkâra, and Dashûr owe much of their impressiveness to the fact that

they are placed at some height above the cultivated land. The excavation

and planning of these pyramids were carried out by Messrs. Borchardt and

Schâfer at the expense of Baron von Bissing, the well-known Egyptologist

of Munich, and of the _Deutsch-Orient Gesell-schaft_ of Berlin. The

antiquities found have been divided between the museums of Berlin and

Cairo.

One of the most noteworthy discoveries was that of the funerary temple

of Ne-user-Râ, which stood at the base of his pyramid. The plan is

interesting, and the granite lotus-bud columns found are the most

ancient yet discovered in Egypt. Much of the paving and the wainscoting

of the walls was of fine black marble, beautifully polished. An

interesting find was a basin and drain with lion’s-head mouth, to

carry away the blood of the sacrifices. Some sculptures in relief were

discovered, including a gigantic representation of the king and the

goddess Isis, which shows that in the early days of the Vth Dynasty the

king and the gods were already depicted in exactly the same costume as

they wore in the days of the Ramses and the Ptolemies. The hieratic art

of Egypt had, in fact, now taken on itself the final outward appearance

which it retained to the very end. There is no more of the archaism

and absence of conventionality, which marks the art of the earliest

dynasties.

We can trace by successive steps the swift development of Egyptian art

from the rude archaism of the Ist Dynasty to its final consummation

under the Vth, when the conventions became fixed. In the time of

Khäsekhemui, at the beginning of the IId Dynasty, the archaic character

of the art has already begun to wear off. Under the same dynasty we

still have styles of unconventional naïveté, such as the famous Statue

“No. 1” of the Cairo Museum, bearing the names of Kings Hetepahaui,

Neb-râ, and Neneter. But with the IVth Dynasty we no longer look for

unconventionality. Prof. Petrie discovered at Abydos a small ivory

statuette of Khufu or Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid of Gîza.

The portrait is a good one and carefully executed. It was not till

the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, indeed, that the Egyptians ceased

to portray their kings as they really were, and gave them a purely

conventional type of face. This convention, against which the heretical

King Amenhetep IV (Akhunaten) rebelled, in order to have himself

portrayed in all his real ungainliness and ugliness, did not exist till

long after the time of the IVth and Vth Dynasties.

[Illustration: 100.jpg STATUE NO. 1 OF THE CAIRO MUSEUM, About 3900

B.C.]

The kings of the XIIth Dynasty especially were most careful that their

statues should be accurate portraits; indeed, the portraits of Usertsen

(Senusret) III vary from a young face to an old one, showing that the

king was faithfully depicted at different periods of his life.

But the general conventions of dress and deportment were finally fixed

under the Vth Dynasty. After this time we no longer have such absolutely

faithful and original presentments as the other little ivory statuette

found by Prof. Petrie at Abydos (now in the British Museum), which shows

us an aged monarch of the Ist Dynasty. It is obvious that the features

are absolutely true to life, and the figure wears an unconventionally

party-coloured and bordered robe of a kind which kings of a later day

may have worn in actual life, but which they would assuredly never be

depicted as wearing by the artists of their day. To the end of Egyptian

history, the kings, even the Roman emperors, were represented on the

monuments clothed in the official costume of their ancestors of the IVth

and Vth Dynasties, in the same manner as we see Khufu wearing his robe

in the little figure from Abydos, and Ne-user-Rà on the great

relief from Abusîr. There are one or two exceptions, such as the

representations of the original genius Akhunaten at Tell el-Amarna and

the beautiful statue of Ramses II at Turin, in which we see these kings

wearing the real costume of their time, but such exceptions are very

rare.

The art of Abusîr is therefore of great interest, since it marks the end

of the development of the priestly art. Secular art might develop as it

liked, though the crystallizing influence of the ecclesiastical canon is

always evident here also. But henceforward it was an impiety, which only

an Akhunaten could commit, to depict a king or a god on the walls of a

temple otherwise (except so far as, the portrait was concerned) than as

he had been depicted in the time of the Vth Dynasty.

Other buildings have been excavated by the Germans at Abusîr, notably

the usual town of mastaba-tombs belonging to the chief dignitaries of

the reign, which is always found at the foot of a royal pyramid of this

period. Another building of the highest interest, belonging to the same

age, was also excavated, and its true character was determined. This is

a building at a place called er-Rîgha or Abû Ghuraib, “Father of Crows,”

between Abusîr and Gîza. It was formerly supposed to be a pyramid, but

the German excavations have shown that it is really a temple of the

Sun-god Râ of Heliopolis, specially venerated by the kings of the Vth

Dynasty, who were of Heliopolitan origin. The great pyramid-builders of

the IVth Dynasty seem to have been the last true Memphites. At the end

of the reign of Shepseskaf, the last monarch of the dynasty, the sceptre

passed to a Heliopolitan family. The following VIth Dynasty may again

have been Memphite, but this is uncertain. The capital continued to be

Memphis, and from the beginning of the Hid Dynasty to the end of the Old

Kingdom and the rise of Herakle-opolis and Thebes, Memphis remained the

chief city of Egypt.

The Heliopolitans were naturally the servants of the Sun-god above all

other gods, and they were the first to call themselves “Sons of the

Sun,” a title retained by the Pharaohs throughout all subsequent

history. It was Ne-user-Râ who built the Sun-temple of Abu Ghuraib,

on the edge of the desert, north of his pyramid and those of his two

immediate predecessors at Abusir. As now laid bare by the excavations of

1900, it is seen to consist of an artificial mound, with a great court

in front to the eastward. On the mound was erected a truncated obelisk,

the stone emblem of the Sun-god. The worshippers in the court below

looked towards the Sun’s stone erected upon its mound in the west,

the quarter of the sun’s setting; for the Sun-god of Heliopolis was

primarily the setting sun, Tum-Râ, not Râ Harmachis, the rising sun,

whose emblem is the Great Sphinx at Gîza, which looks towards the east.

The sacred emblem of the Heliopolitan Sun-god reminds us forcibly of the

Semitic _bethels_ or _baetyli_, the sacred stones of Palestine, and may

give yet another hint of the Semitic origin of the Heliopolitan cult.

In the court of the temple is a huge circular altar of fine alabaster,

several feet across, on which slain oxen were offered to the Sun, and

behind this, at the eastern end of the court, are six great basins of

the same stone, over which the beasts were slain, with drains running

out of them by which their blood was carried away. This temple is a most

interesting monument of the civilization of the “Old Kingdom” at the time

of the Vth Dynasty.

At Sakkâra itself, which lies a short distance south of Abusir, no new

royal tombs have, as has been said, been discovered of late years. But a

great deal of work has been done among the private mastaba-tombs by the

officers of the _Service des Antiquités_, which reserves to itself the

right of excavation here and at Dashûr. The mastaba of the sage and

writer Kagernna (or rather Gemnika, “I-have-found-a-ghost,” which

sounds very like an American Indian appellation) is very fine.

“I-have-found-a-ghost” lived in the reign of the king Tatkarâ Assa, the

“Tancheres” of Manetho, and he wrote maxims like his great contemporary

Phtahhetep (“Offered to Phtah”), who was also buried at Sakkâra. The

officials of the _Service des Antiquités_ who cleaned the tomb unluckily

misread his name Ka-bi-n (an impossible form which could only mean,

literally translated, “Ghost-soul-of” or “Ghost-soul-to-me”), and they

have placed it in this form over the entrance to his tomb. This mastaba,

like those, already known, of Mereruka (sometimes misnamed “Mera”)

and the famous Ti, both also at Sakkâra, contains a large number of

chambers, ornamented with reliefs. In the vicinity M. Grébaut, then

Director of the Service of Antiquities, discovered a very interesting

Street of Tombs, a regular Via Sacra, with rows of tombs of the

dignitaries of the VIth Dynasty on either side of it. They are generally

very much like one another; the workmanship of the reliefs is fine, and

the portrait of the owner of the tomb is always in evidence.

Several of the smaller mastabas have lately been disposed of to the

various museums, as they are liable to damage if they remain where they

stand; moreover, they are not of great value to the Museum of Cairo,

but are of considerable value to various museums which do not already

possess complete specimens of this class of tombs. A fine one, belonging

to the chief Uerarina, is now exhibited in the Assyrian Basement of the

British Museum; another is in the Museum of Leyden; a third at Berlin,

and so on. Most of these are simple tombs of one chamber. In the centre

of the rear wall we always see the _stele_ or gravestone proper,

built into the fabric of the tomb. Before this stood the low table

of offerings with a bowl for oblations, and on either side a tall

incense-altar. From the altar the divine smoke (_senetr_) arose when

the _hen-ka_, or priest of the ghost (literally, “Ghost’s Servant”),

performed his duty of venerating the spirits of the deceased, while the

_Kher-heb_, or cantor, enveloped in the mystic folds of the leopard-skin

and with bronze incense-burner in hand, sang the holy litanies and

spells which should propitiate the ghost and enable him to win his way

to ultimate perfection in the next world.

The stele is always in the form of a door with pyloni-form cornice. On

either side is a figure of the deceased, and at the sides are carved

prayers to Anubis, and at a later date to Osiris, who are implored to

give the funerary meats and “everything good and pure on which the god

there (as the dead man in the tomb has been constituted) lives;” often

we find that the biography and list of honorary titles and dignities of

the deceased have been added.

Sakkâra was used as a place of burial in the latest as well as in the

earliest time. The Egyptians of the XXVIth Dynasty, wearied of the long

decadence and devastating wars which had followed the glorious epoch of

the conquering Pharaohs of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, turned for

a new and refreshing inspiration to the works of the most ancient kings,

when Egypt was a simple self-contained country, holding no intercourse

with outside lands, bearing no outside burdens for the sake of pomp and

glory, and knowing nothing of the decay and decadence which follows in

the train of earthly power and grandeur. They deliberately turned their

backs on the worn-out and discredited imperial trappings of the Thothmes

and Ramses, and they took the supposed primitive simplicity of the

Snefrus, the Khufus, and the Ne-user-Râs for a model and ensampler to

their lives. It was an age of conscious and intended archaism, and in

pursuit of the archaistic ideal the Mem-phites of the Saïte age had

themselves buried in the ancient necropolis of Sakkâra, side by side

with their ancestors of the time of the Vth and VIth Dynasties. Several

of these tombs have lately been discovered and opened, and fitted with

modern improvements. One or two of them, of the Persian period, have

wells (leading to the sepulchral chamber) of enormous depth, down which

the modern tourist is enabled to descend by a spiral iron staircase. The

Serapeum itself is lit with electricity, and in the Tombs of the Kings

at Thebes nothing disturbs the silence but the steady thumping pulsation

of the dynamo-engine which lights the ancient sepulchres of the

Pharaohs. Thus do modern ideas and inventions help us to see and so to

understand better the works of ancient Egypt. But it is perhaps a little

too much like the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. The interiors of

the later tombs are often decorated with reliefs which imitate those of

the early period, but with a kind of delicate grace which at once marks

them for what they are, so that it is impossible to confound them with

the genuine ancient originals from which they were adapted.

Riding from Sakkâra southwards to Dashûr, we pass on the way the

gigantic stone mastaba known as the _Mastabat el-Fara’ûn_, “Pharaoh’s

Bench.” This was considered to be the tomb of the Vth Dynasty king,

Unas, until his pyramid was found by Prof. Maspero at Sakkâra. From its

form it might be thought to belong to a monarch of the Hid Dynasty, but

the great size of the stone blocks of which it is built seems to point

rather to the XIIth. All attempts to penetrate its secret by actual

excavation have been unavailing.

Further south across the desert we see from the Mastabat el-Fara’ûn

four distinct pyramids, symmetrically arranged in two lines, two in each

line. The two to the right are great stone erections of the usual

type, like those of Gîza and Abusîr, and the southernmost of them has a

peculiar broken-backed appearance, due to the alteration of the angle

of inclination of its sides during construction. Further, it is covered

almost to the ground by the original casing of polished white limestone

blocks, so that it gives a very good idea of the original appearance

of the other pyramids, which have lost their casing. These two

pyramids very probably belong to kings of the Hid Dynasty, as does the

Step-Pyramid of Sakkâra. They strongly resemble the Gîza type, and

the northernmost of the two looks very like an understudy of the Great

Pyramid. It seems to mark the step in the development of the royal

pyramid which was immediately followed by the Great Pyramid. But no

excavations have yet proved the accuracy of this view. Both pyramids

have been entered, but nothing has been found in them. It is very

probable that one of them is the second pyramid of Snefru.

The other two pyramids, those nearest the cultivation, are of very

different appearance. They are half-ruined, they are black in colour,

and their whole effect is quite different from that of the stone

pyramids. For they are built of brick, not of stone. They are pyramids,

it is true, but of a different material and of a different date from

those which we have been describing. They are built above the sepulchres

of kings of the XIIth Dynasty, the Theban house which transferred

its residence northwards to the neighbourhood of the ancient Northern

capital. We have, in fact, reached the end of the Old Kingdom at

Sakkâra; at Dashûr begin the sepulchres of the Middle Kingdom. Pyramids

are still built, but they are not always of stone; brick is used,

usually with stone in the interior. The general effect of these brick

pyramids, when new, must have been indistinguishable from that of the

stone ones, and even now, when it has become half-ruined, such a great

brick pyramid as that of Usertsen (Senusret) III at Dashûr is not

without impressiveness. After all, there is no reason why a brick

building should be less admirable than a stone one. And in its own way

the construction of such colossal masses of bricks as the two eastern

pyramids of Dashûr must have been as arduous, even as difficult, as that

of building a moderate-sized stone pyramid. The photograph of the brick

pyramids of Dashûr on this page shows well the great size of these

masses of brickwork, which are as impressive as any of the great brick

structures of Babylonia and Assyria.

[Illustration: EXTERIOR OF THE SOUTHERN BRICK PYRAMID OF DASHÛR:

XIITH DYNASTY.

Excavated by M. de Morgan, 1895. This is the secondary tomb of

Amenemhat III; about 2200 B.C.

The XIIth Dynasty use of brick for the royal tombs was a return to the

custom of earlier days, for from the time of Aha to that Tjeser, from

the 1st Dynasty to the Hid, brick had been used for the building of the

royal mastaba-tombs, out of which the pyramids had developed.

At this point, where we take leave of the great pyramids of the Old

Kingdom, we may notice the latest theory as to the building of these

monuments, which has of late years been enunciated by Dr. Borchardt, and

is now generally accepted. The great Prussian explorer Lepsius, when he

examined the pyramids in the ‘forties, came to the conclusion that each

king, when he ascended the throne, planned a small pyramid for himself.

This was built in a few years’ time, and if his reign were short, or if

he were unable to enlarge the pyramid for other reasons, it sufficed for

his tomb. If, however, his reign seemed likely to be one of some length,

after the first plan was completed he enlarged his pyramid by building

another and a larger one around it and over it. Then again, when this

addition was finished, and the king still reigned and was in possession

of great resources, yet another coating, so to speak, was put on to the

pyramid, and so on till colossal structures like the First and Second

Pyramid of Giza, which, we know, belonged to kings who were unusually

long-lived, were completed. And finally the aged monarch died, and was

buried in the huge tomb which his long life and his great power had

enabled him to erect. This view appeared eminently reasonable at the

time, and it seemed almost as though we ought to be able to tell whether

a king had reigned long or not by the size of his pyramid, and even

to obtain a rough idea of the length of his reign by counting the

successive coats or accretions which it had received, much as we tell

the age of a tree by the rings in its bole. A pyramid seemed to have

been constructed something after the manner of an onion or a Chinese

puzzle-box.

Prof. Pétrie, however, who examined the Griza pyramids in 1881, and

carefully measured them all up and finally settled their trigonometrical

relation, came to the conclusion that Lepsius’s theory was entirely

erroneous, and that every pyramid was built and now stands as it was

originally planned. Dr.

[Illustration: 111.jpg THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZA DURING THE INUNDATION.]

Borchardt, however, who is an architect by profession, has examined

the pyramids again, and has come to the conclusion that Prof. Pétrie’s

statement is not correct, and that there is an element of truth in

Lepsius’s hypothesis. He has shown that several of the pyramids, notably

the First and Second at Giza, show unmistakable signs of a modified,

altered, and enlarged plan; in fact, long-lived kings like Khufu seem

to have added considerably to their pyramids and even to have entirely

remodelled them on a larger scale. This has certainly been the case with

the Great Pyramid. We can, then, accept Lepsius’s theory as modified by

Dr. Borchardt.

Another interesting point has arisen in connection with the Great

Pyramid. Considerable difference of opinion has always existed between

Egyptologists and the professors of European archaeology with regard

to the antiquity of the knowledge of iron in Egypt. The majority of

the Egyptologists have always maintained, on the authority of the

inscriptions, that iron was known to the ancient Egyptians from the

earliest period. They argued that the word for a certain metal in old

Egyptian was the same as the Coptic word for “iron.” They stated that in

the most ancient religious texts the Egyptians spoke of the firmament

of heaven as made of this metal, and they came to the conclusion that it

was because this metal was blue in colour, the hue of iron or steel; and

they further pointed out that some of the weapons in the tomb-paintings

were painted blue and others red, some being of iron, that is to

say, others of copper or bronze. Finally they brought forward as

incontrovertible evidence an actual fragment of worked iron, which had

been found between two of the inner blocks, down one of the air-shafts,

in the Great Pyramid. Here was an actual piece of iron of the time of

the IVth Dynasty, about 3500 B.C.

This conclusion was never accepted by the students of the development of

the use of metal in prehistoric Europe, when they came to know of it.

No doubt their incredulity was partly due to want of appreciation of the

Egyptological evidence, partly to disinclination to accept a conclusion

which did not at all agree with the knowledge they had derived from

their own study of prehistoric Europe. In Southern Europe it was quite

certain that iron did not come into use till about 1000 B.C.; in Central

Europe, where the discoveries at Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut exhibit

the transition from the Age of Bronze to that of Iron, about 800 B.C.

The exclusively Iron Age culture of La Tène cannot be dated earlier than

the eighth century, if as early as that. How then was it possible that,

if iron had been known to the Egyptians as early as 3500 B.C., its

knowledge should not have been communicated to the Europeans until over

two thousand years later? No; iron could not have been really known to

the Egyptians much before 1000 B.C. and the Egyptological evidence was

all wrong. This line of argument was taken by the distinguished

Swedish archaeologist, Prof. Oscar Montelius, of Upsala, whose previous

experience in dealing with the antiquities of Northern Europe, great as

it was, was hardly sufficient to enable him to pronounce with authority

on a point affecting far-away African Egypt. And when dealing with Greek

prehistoric antiquities Prof. Montelius’s views have hardly met with

that ready agreement which all acknowledge to be his due when he is

giving us the results of his ripe knowledge of Northern antiquities. He

has, in fact, forgotten, as most “prehistoric” archaeologists do forget,

that the antiquities of Scandinavia, Greece, Egypt, the Semites,

the bronze-workers of Benin, the miners of Zimbabwe, and the Ohio

mound-builders are not to be treated all together as a whole, and that

hard and fast lines of development cannot be laid down for them, based

on the experience of Scandinavia.

We may perhaps trace this misleading habit of thought to the influence

of the professors of natural science over the students of Stone Age and

Bronze Age antiquities. Because nature moves by steady progression and

develops on even lines--_nihil facit per sal-tum_--it seems to have been

assumed that the works of man’s hands have developed in the same way,

in a regular and even scheme all over the world. On this supposition it

would be impossible for the great discovery of the use of iron to have

been known in Egypt as early as 3500 B.C. for this knowledge to have

remained dormant there for two thousand years, and then to have

been suddenly communicated about 1000 B.C. to Greece, spreading with

lightning-like rapidity over Europe and displacing the use of bronze

everywhere. Yet, as a matter of fact, the work of man does develop

in exactly this haphazard way, by fits and starts and sudden leaps of

progress after millennia of stagnation. Throwsback to barbarism are just

as frequent. The analogy of natural evolution is completely inapplicable

and misleading.

Prof. Montelius, however, following the “evolutionary” line of thought,

believed that because iron was not known in Europe till about 1000 B.C.

it could not have been known in Egypt much earlier; and in an important

article which appeared in the Swedish ethnological journal _Ymer_ in

1883, entitled _Bronsaldrn i Egypten_ (“The Bronze Age in Egypt”), he

essayed to prove the contrary arguments of the Egyptologists wrong. His

main points were that the colour of the weapons in the frescoes was of

no importance, as it was purely conventional and arbitrary, and that the

evidence of the piece of iron from the Great Pyramid was insufficiently

authenticated, and therefore valueless, in the absence of other definite

archaeological evidence in the shape of iron of supposed early date. To

this article the Swedish Egyptologist, Dr. Piehl, replied in the same

periodical, in an article entitled _Bronsaldem i Egypten_, in which he

traversed Prof. Montelius’s conclusions from the Egyptological point of

view, and adduced other instances of the use of iron in Egypt, all,

it is true, later than the time of the IVth Dynasty. But this protest

received little notice, owing to the fact that it remained buried in

a Swedish periodical, while Prof. Montelius’s original article was

translated into French, and so became well-known.

For the time Prof. Montelius’s conclusions were generally accepted, and

when the discoveries of the prehistoric antiquities were made by M. de

Morgan, it seemed more probable than ever that Egypt had gone through a

regular progressive development from the Age of Stone through those of

copper and bronze to that of iron, which was reached about 1100 or 1000

B.C. The evidence of the iron fragment from the Great Pyramid was put on

one side, in spite of the circumstantial account of its discovery

which had been given by its finders. Even Prof. Pétrie, who in 1881

had accepted the pyramid fragment as undoubtedly contemporary with that

building, and had gone so far as to adduce additional evidence for its

authenticity, gave way, and accepted Montelius’s view, which held its

own until in 1902 it was directly controverted by a discovery of Prof.

Pétrie at Abydos. This discovery consisted of an undoubted fragment of

iron found in conjunction with bronze tools of VIth Dynasty date; and it

settled the matter.[1] The VIth Dynasty date of this piece of iron, which

was more probably worked than not (since it was buried with tools), was

held to be undoubted by its discoverer and by everybody else, and, if

this were undoubted, the IVth Dynasty date of the Great Pyramid fragment

was also fully established. The discoverers of the earlier fragment had

no doubt whatever as to its being contemporary with the pyramid, and

were supported in this by Prof. Pétrie in 1881. Therefore it is now

known to be the fact that iron was used by the Egyptians as early as

3500 B.C.[2]

[1] See H. R. Hall’s note on “The Early Use of Iron in Egypt,”

in _Man_ (the organ of the Anthropological Society of

London), iii (1903), No. 86.

[2] Prof. Montelius objected to these conclusions in a review

of the British Museum “Guide to the Antiquities of the

Bronze Age,” which was published in Man, 1005 (Jan.), No 7.

For an answer to these objections, see Hall, ibid., No. 40.

It would thus appear that though the Egyptians cannot be said to have

used iron generally and so to have entered the “Iron Age” before about

1300 B.C. (reign of Ramses II), yet iron was well known to them and had

been used more than occasionally by them for tools and building purposes

as early as the time of the IVth Dynasty, about 3500 B.C. Certainly

dated examples of its use occur under the IVth, VIth, and XIIIth

Dynasties. Why this knowledge was not communicated to Europe before

about 1000 B.C. we cannot say, nor are Egyptologists called upon to find

the reason. So the Great Pyramid has played an interesting part in the

settlement of a very important question.

It was supposed by Prof. Pétrie that the piece of iron from the Great

Pyramid had been part of some arrangement employed for raising the

stones into position. Herodotus speaks of the machines, which were used

to raise the stones, as made of little pieces of wood. The generally

accepted explanation of his meaning used to be that a small crane or

similar wooden machine was used for hoisting the stone by means

of pulley and rope; but M. Legrain, the director of the works of

restoration in the Great Temple of Karnak, has explained it differently.

Among the “foundation deposits” of the XVIIIth Dynasty at Dêr el-Bahari

and elsewhere, beside the little plaques with the king’s name and the

model hoes and vases, was usually found an enigmatic wooden object like

a small cradle, with two sides made of semicircular pieces of wood,

joined along the curved portion by round wooden bars. M. Legrain has now

explained this as a model of the machine used to raise heavy stones from

tier to tier of a pyramid or other building, and illustrations of

the method of its use may be found in Choisy’s _Art de Bâtir chez les

anciens Egyptiens_. There is little doubt that this primitive machine

is that to which Herodotus refers as having been used in the erection of

the pyramids.

The later historian, Diodorus, also tells us that great mounds or ramps

of earth were used as well, and that the stones were dragged up these

to the requisite height. There is no doubt that this statement also is

correct. We know that the Egyptians did build in this very way, and

the system has been revived by M. Legrain for his work at Karnak, where

still exist the remains of the actual mounds and ramps by which the

great western pylon was erected in Ptolemaïc times. Work carried on

in this way is slow and expensive, but it is eminently suited to the

country and understood by the people. If they wish to put a great stone

architrave weighing many tons across the top of two columns, they do not

hoist it up into position; they rear a great ramp or embankment of earth

against the two pillars, half-burying them in the process, then drag

the architrave up the ramp by means of ropes and men, and put it into

position. Then the ramp is cleared away. This is the ancient system

which is now followed at Karnak, and it is the system by which, with the

further aid of the wooden machines, the Great Pyramid and its compeers

were erected in the days of the IVth Dynasty. _Plus cela change, plus

c’est la même chose_.

The brick pyramids of the XIIth Dynasty were erected in the same way,

for the Egyptians had no knowledge of the modern combination of wooden

scaffolding and ladders. There was originally a small stone pyramid of

the same dynasty at Dashûr, half-way between the two brick ones, but

this has now almost disappeared. It belonged to the king Amenemhat II,

while the others belonged, the northern to Usertsen (Sen-usret) III, the

southern to Amenemhat III. Both these latter monarchs had other tombs

elsewhere, Usertsen a great rock-cut gallery and chamber in the cliff at

Abydos, Amenemhat a pyramid not very far to the south, at Hawara, close

to the Fayyûm. It is uncertain whether the Hawara pyramid or that of

Dashûr was the real burial-place of the king, as at neither place is his

name found alone. At Hawara it is found in conjunction with that of his

daughter, the queen-regnant Se-bekneferurâ (Skemiophris), at Dashûr with

that of a king Auabrâ Hor, who was buried in a small tomb near that of

the king, and adjoining the tombs of the king’s children. Who King Hor

was we do not quite know. His name is not given in the lists, and was

unknown until M. de Morgan’s discoveries at Dashûr. It is most probable

that he was a prince who was given royal honours during the lifetime of

Amenemhat III, whom he predeceased.[3] In the beautiful wooden statue

of him found in his tomb, which is now in the Cairo Museum, he is

represented as quite a youth. Amenemhat III was certainly succeeded by

Amenemhat IV, and it is impossible to intercalate Hor between them.

[3] See below, p. 121. Possibly he was a son of Amenemhat III.

The identification of the owners of the three western pyramids of Dashûr

is due to M. de Morgan and his assistants, Messrs. Legrain and Jéquier,

who excavated them from 1894 till 1896. The northern pyramid, that of

Usertsen (Senusret) III, is not so well preserved as the southern. It is

more worn away, and does not present so imposing an appearance. In

both pyramids the outer casing of white stone has entirely disappeared,

leaving only the bare black bricks. Each stood in the midst of a great

necropolis of dignitaries of the period, as was usually the case.

Many of the mastabas were excavated by M. de Morgan. Some are of older

periods than the XIIth Dynasty, one belonging to a priest of King

Snefru, Aha-f-ka (“Ghost-fighter”), who bore the additional titles of

“director of prophets and general of infantry.” There were pluralists

even in those days. And the distinction between the privy councillor

(Geheimrat) and real privy councillor (Wirk-licher-Greheimrat) was quite

familiar; for we find it actually made, many an old Egyptian officially

priding himself in his tomb on having been a real privy councillor! The

Egyptian bureaucracy was already ancient and had its survivals and its

anomalies even as early as the time of the pyramid-builders.

In front of the pyramid of Usertsen (Senusret) III at one time stood the

usual funerary temple, but it has been totally destroyed. By the side of

the pyramid were buried some of the princesses of the royal family, in

a series of tombs opening out of a subterranean gallery, and in this

gallery were found the wonderful jewels of the princesses Sit-hathor and

Merit, which are among the greatest treasures of the Cairo Museum. Those

who have not seen them can obtain a perfect idea of their appearance

from the beautiful water-colour paintings of them by M. Legrain, which

are published in M. de Morgan’s work on the “Fouilles à Dahchour”

(Vienna, 1895). Altogether one hundred and seven objects were recovered,

consisting of all kinds of jewelry in gold and coloured stones. Among

the most beautiful are the great “pectorals,” or breast-ornaments, in

the shape of pylons, with the names of Usertsen II, Usertsen III, and

Amenemhat III; the names are surrounded by hawks standing on the sign

for gold, gryphons, figures of the king striking down enemies, etc., all

in _cloisonné_ work, with beautiful stones such as lapis lazuli, green

felspar, and carnelian taking the place of coloured enamels. The massive

chains of golden beads and cowries are also very remarkable. These

treasures had been buried in boxes in the floor of the subterranean

gallery, and had luckily escaped the notice of plunderers, and so by a

fortunate chance have survived to tell us what the Egyptian jewellers

could do in the days of the XIIth Dynasty. Here also were found two

great Nile barges, full-sized boats, with their oars and other gear

complete. They also may be seen in the Museum of Cairo. It can only be

supposed that they had served as the biers of the royal mummies, and had

been brought up in state on sledges. The actual royal chamber was not

found, although a subterranean gallery was driven beneath the centre of

the pyramid.

The southern brick pyramid was constructed in the same way as the

northern one. At the side of it were also found the tombs of members of

the royal house, including that of the king Hor, already mentioned, with

its interesting contents. The remains of the mummy of this ephemeral

monarch, known only from his tomb, were also found. The entrails of the

king were placed in the usual “canopic jars,” which were sealed with the

seal of Amenemhat III; it is thus that we know that Hor died before him.

In many of the inscriptions of this king, on his coffin and stelo, a

peculiarly affected manner of writing the hieroglyphs is found,--the

birds are without their legs, the snake has no tail, the bee no head.

Birds are found without their legs in other inscriptions of this period;

it was a temporary fashion and soon discarded.

In the tomb of a princess named Nubhetep, near at hand, were found more

jewels of the same style as those of Sit-hathor and Merit. The pyramid

itself contained the usual passages and chambers, which were reached

with much difficulty and considerable tunnelling by M. de Morgan. In

fact, the search for the royal death-chambers lasted from December 5,

1894, till March 17, 1895, when the excavators’ gallery finally struck

one of the ancient passages, which were found to be unusually extensive,

contrasting in this respect with the northern pyramid. The royal

tomb-chamber had, of course, been emptied of what it contained. It must

be remembered that, in any case, it is probable that the king was not

actually buried here, but in the pyramid of Hawara.

The pyramid of Amenemhat II, which lies between the two brick pyramids,

was built entirely of stone. Nothing of it remains above ground, but the

investigation of the subterranean portions showed that it was remarkable

for the massiveness of its stones and the care with which the masonry

was executed. The same characteristics are found in the dependent tombs

of the princesses Ha and Khnumet, in which more jewelry was found. This

splendid stonework is characteristic of the Middle Kingdom; we find it

also in the temple of Mentuhetep III at Thebes.

Some distance south of Dashûr is Mêdûm, where the pyramid of Sneferu

reigns in solitude, and beyond this again is Lisht, where in the

years 1894-6 MM. Gautier and Jéquier excavated the pyramid of Usertsen

(Sen-usret) I. The most remarkable find was a cache of the seated

statues of the king in white limestone, in absolutely perfect condition.

They were found lying on their sides, just as they had been hidden. Six

figures of the king in the form of Osiris, with the face painted red,

were also found. Such figures seem to have been regularly set up in

front of a royal sepulchre; several were found in front of the funerary

temple of Mentu-hetep III, Thebes, which we shall describe later. A

fine altar of gray granite, with representations in relief of the nomes

bringing offerings, was also recovered. The pyramid of Lisht itself is

not built of bricks, like those of Dashûr, but of stone. It was not,

however, erected in so solid a fashion as those of earlier days at Gîza

or Abusîr, and nothing is left of it now but a heap of débris. The XIIth

Dynasty architects built walls of magnificent masonry, as we have

seen, and there is no doubt that the stone casing of their pyramids

was originally very fine, but the interior is of brick or rubble; the

wonderful system of building employed by kings of the IVth Dynasty at

Giza was not practised.

South of Lisht is Illahun, and at the entrance to the province of the

Fayyûm, and west of this, nearer the Fayyûm, is Hawara, where Prof.

Petrie excavated the pyramids of Usertsen (Senusret) II and Amenem-hat

III. His discoveries have already been described by Prof. Maspero in his

history, so that it will suffice here merely to compare them with the

results of M. de Morgan’s later work at Dashûr and that of MM. Gautier

and Jéquier at Lisht, to note recent conclusions in connection with

them, and to describe the newest discoveries in the same region.

Both pyramids are of brick, lined with stone, like those of Dashûr, with

some differences of internal construction, since stone walls exist in

the interior. The central chambers and passages leading to them were

discovered; and in both cases the passages are peculiarly complex, with

dumb chambers, great stone portcullises, etc., in order to mislead

and block the way to possible plunderers. The extraordinary sepulchral

chamber of the Hawara pyramid, which, though it is over twenty-two feet

long by ten feet wide over all, is hewn out of one solid block of hard

yellow quartzite, gives some idea of the remarkable facility of dealing

with huge stones and the love of utilizing them which is especially

characteristic of the XIIth Dynasty. The pyramid of Hawara was provided

with a funerary temple the like of which had never been known in Egypt

before and was never known afterwards. It was a huge building far larger

than the pyramid itself, and built of fine limestone and crystalline

white quartzite, in a style eminently characteristic of the XIIth

Dynasty. In actual superficies this temple covered an extent of ground

within which the temples of Karnak, Luxor, and the Ramesseum, at Thebes,

could have stood, but has now almost entirely disappeared, having been

used as a quarry for two thousand years. In Roman times this destroying

process had already begun, but even then the building was still

magnificent, and had been noted with wonder by all the Greek visitors to

Egypt from the time of Herodotus downwards. Even before his day it

had received the name of the “Labyrinth,” on account of its supposed

resemblance to the original labyrinth in Crete.

That the Hawara temple was the Egyptian labyrinth was pointed out by

Lepsius in the ‘forties of the last century. Within the last two or

three years attention has again been drawn to it by Mr. Arthur Evans’s

discovery of the Cretan labyrinth itself in the shape of the Minoan

or early Mycenæan palace of Knossos, near Candia in Crete. It is

impossible to enter here into all the arguments by which it has been

proved that the Knossian palace is the veritable labyrinth of the

Minotaur legend, nor would it be strictly germane to our subject were we

to do so; but it may suffice to say here that the word

[Illustration: 125.jpg (Greek word)]

has been proved to be of Greek-or rather of pre-Hellenic-origin, and

would mean in Karian “Place of the Double-Axe,” like La-braunda in

Karia, where Zeus was depicted with a double axe (labrys) in his hand.

The non-Aryan, “Asianic,” group of languages, to which certainly Lycian

and probably Karian belong, has been shown by the German philologer

Kretschmer to have spread over Greece into Italy in the period before

the Aryan Greeks entered Hellas, and to have left undoubted traces of

its presence in Greek place-names and in the Greek language itself.

Before the true Hellenes reached Crete, an Asianic dialect must have

been spoken there, and to this language the word “labyrinth” must

originally have belonged. The classical labyrinth was “in the Knossian

territory.” The palace of Knossos was emphatically the chief seat of the

worship of a god whose emblem was the double-axe; it was the Knossian

“Place of the Double-Axe,” the Cretan “Labyrinth.”

It used to be supposed that the Cretan labyrinth had taken its name from

the Egyptian one, and the, word itself was supposed to be of Egyptian

origin. An Egyptian etymology was found for it as “_Ro-pi-ro-henet_,”

“Temple-mouth-canal,” which might be interpreted, with some violence to

Egyptian construction, as “The temple at the mouth of the canal,” i.e.

the Bahr Yusuf, which enters the Fayyûm at Hawara. But unluckily this

word would have been pronounced by the natives of the vicinity as

“Elphilahune,” which is not very much like

[Illustration: 126.jpg (Greek word)]

“_Ro-pi-ro-henet_” is, in fact, a mere figment of the philological

imagination, and cannot be proved ever to have existed. The element

_Ro-henet_, “canal-mouth” (according to the local pronunciation of the

Fayyûm and Middle Egypt, called _La-hunè_), is genuine; it is the

origin of the modern Illahun (_el-Lahun_), which is situated at the

“canal-mouth.” However, now that we know that the word labyrinth can be

explained satisfactorily with the help of Karian, as evidently of Greek

(pre-Aryan) origin, and as evidently the original name of the Knossian

labyrinth, it is obvious that there is no need to seek a far-fetched

explanation of the word in Egypt, and to suppose that the Greeks called

the Cretan labyrinth after the Egyptian one.

The contrary is evidently the case. Greek visitors to Egypt found a

resemblance between the great Egyptian building, with its numerous halls

and corridors, vast in extent, and the Knossian palace. Even if very

little of the latter was visible in the classical period, as seems

possible, yet the site seems always to have been kept holy and free from

later building till Roman times, and we know that the tradition of the

mazy halls and corridors of the labyrinth was always clear, and was

evidently based on a vivid reminiscence. Actually, one of the most

prominent characteristics of the Knossian palace is its mazy and

labyrinthine system of passages and chambers. The parallel between the

two buildings, which originally caused the Greek visitors to give the

pyramid-temple of Hawara the name of “labyrinth,” has been traced still

further. The white limestone walls and the shining portals of “Parian

marble,” described by Strabo as characteristic of the Egyptian

labyrinth, have been compared with the shining white selenite or gypsum

used at Knossos, and certain general resemblances between the Greek

architecture of the Minoan age and the almost contemporary Egyptian

architecture of the XIIth Dynasty have been pointed out.[4] Such

resemblances may go to swell the amount of evidence already known, which

tells us that there was a close connection between Egyptian and Minoan

art and civilization, established at least as early as 2500 B.C.

[4] See H. R. Hall, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1905 (Pt.

ii). The Temple of the Sphinx at Gîza may also be compared

with those of Hawara and Knossos. It seems most probable

that the Temple of the Sphinx is a XIIth Dynasty building.

For it must be remembered that within the last few years we have learned

from the excavations in Crete a new chapter of ancient history, which,

it might almost seem, shows us Greece and Egypt in regular communication

from nearly the beginnings of Egyptian history. As the excavations which

have told us this were carried on in Crete, not in Egypt, to describe

them does not lie within the scope of this book, though a short sketch

of their results, so far as they affect Egyptian history in later days,

is given in Chapter VII. Here it may suffice to say that, as far as

the early period is concerned, Egypt and Crete were certainly in

communication in the time of the XIIth Dynasty, and quite possibly in

that of the VIth or still earlier. We have IIId Dynasty Egyptian vases

from Knossos, which were certainly not imported in later days, for no

ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the time of the Saïtes in

Egypt and of the Romans still later. In fact, this communication seems

to go so far back in time that we are gradually being led to perceive

the possibility that the Minoan culture of Greece was in its origin an

offshoot from that of primeval Egypt, probably in early Neolithic times.

That is to say, the Neolithic Greeks and Neolithic Egyptians were both

members of the same “Mediterranean” stock, which quite possibly may have

had its origin in Africa, and a portion of which may have crossed the

sea to Europe in very early times, taking with it the seeds of culture

which in Egypt developed in the Egyptian way, in Greece in the Greek

way. Actual communication and connection may not have been maintained

at first, and probably they were not. Prof. Petrie thinks otherwise, and

would see in the boats painted on the predynastic Egyptian vases (see

Chapter I) the identical galleys by which, in late Neolithic

times, commerce between Crete and Egypt was carried on across the

Mediterranean. It is certain, however, that these boats are ordinary

little river craft, the usual Nile _felûkas_ and _gyassas_ of the time;

they are depicted together with emblems of the desert and cultivated

land,-ostriches, antelopes, hills, and palm-trees,-and the thoroughly

inland and Upper Egyptian character of the whole design springs to the

eye. There can be no doubt whatever that the predynastic boats were not

seagoing galleys.

It was probably not till the time of the pyramid-builders that

connection between the Greek Mediterraneans and the Nilotes was

re-established. Thence-forward it increased, and in the time of the

XIIth Dynasty, when the labyrinth of Amenemhat III was built, there

seems to have been some kind of more or less regular communication

between the two countries.

It is certain that artistic ideas were exchanged between them at this

period. How communication was carried on we do not know, but it was

probably rather by way of Cyprus and the Syrian coast than directly

across the open sea. We shall revert to this point when we come to

describe the connection between Crete and Egypt in the time of the

XVIIIth Dynasty, when Cretan ambassadors visited the Egyptian court and

were depicted in tomb paintings at Thebes. Between the time of the XIIth

Dynasty and that of the XVIIIth this connection seems to have been very

considerably strengthened; for at Knossos have been found an Egyptian

statuette of an Egyptian named Abnub, who from his name must have lived

about the end of the XIIIth Dynasty, and the top of an alabastron with

the royal name of Khian, one of the Hyksos kings.

Quite close to Hawara, at Illahun, in the ruins of the town which was

built by Usertsen’s workmen when they were building his pyramid, Prof.

Petrie found fragments of pottery of types which we now know well from

excavations in Crete and Cyprus, though they were then unknown. They are

fragments of the polychrome Cretan ware called, after the name of the

place where it was first found in Crete, Kamares ware, and of a black

ware ornamented with small punctures, which are often filled up with

white. This latter ware has been found elsewhere associated with XIIIth

Dynasty antiquities. The former is known to belong in Crete to the

“early Minoan” period, long anterior to the “late Minoan” or “Palace”

period, which was contemporary with the Egyptian XVIIIth Dynasty.

We have here another interesting proof of a connection between XIIth

Dynasty Egypt and early Minoan Crete. The later connection, under the

XVIIIth and following dynasties, is also illustrated in the same reign

by Prof. Petrie’s finds of late Mycenaean objects and foreign graves at

Medinet Gurob.[5]

[5] One man who was buried here bore the name An-Tursha,

“Pillar of the Tursha.” The Tursha were a people of the

Mediterranean, possibly Tylissians of Crete.

These excavations at Hawara, Illahun, Kahun, and Gurob were carried out

in the years 1887-9. Since then Prof. Petrie and his co-workers have

revisited the same district, and Gurob has been re-examined (in 1904)

by Messrs. Loat and Ayrton, who discovered there a shrine devoted to

the worship of fish. This work was carried on at the same time as Prof.

Petrie’s main excavation for the Egypt Exploration Fund at Annas, or

Ahnas-yet el-Medina, the site of the ancient Henensu, the Herakleopolis

of the Greeks. Prof. Naville had excavated there for the Egypt

Exploration Fund in 1892, but had not completely cleared the temple.

This work was now taken up by Prof. Petrie, who laid the whole building

bare. It is dedicated to Hershefi, the local deity of Herakleopolis.

This god, who was called Ar-saphes by the Greeks, and identified with

Herakles, was in fact a form of Horus with the head of a ram; his name

means “Terrible-Face.” The greater part of the temple dates to the time

of the XIXth Dynasty, and nothing of the early period is left. We know,

however, that the Middle Kingdom was the flourishing period of the

city of Hershefi. For a comparatively brief period, between the age of

Memphite hegemony and that of Theban dominion, Herakleopolis was the

capital city of Egypt. The kings of the IXth and Xth Dynasties were

Herakleopolites, though we know little of them. One, Kheti, is said to

have been a great tyrant. Another, Nebkaurâ, is known only as a figure

in the “Legend of the Eloquent Peasant,” a classical story much in vogue

in later days. Another, Merikarâ, is a more real personage, for we have

contemporary records of his days in the inscriptions of the tombs at

Asyût, from which we see that the princes of Thebes were already wearing

down the Northerners, in spite of the resistance of the adherents of

Herakleopolis, among whom the most valiant were the chiefs of Asyût. The

civil war eventuated in favour of Thebes, and the Theban XIth Dynasty

assumed the double crown. The sceptre passed from Memphis and the North,

and Thebes enters upon the scene of Egyptian history.

With this event the Nile-land also entered upon a new era of

development. The metropolis of the kingdom was once more shifted to the

South, and, although the kings of the XIIth Dynasty actually resided

in the North, their Theban origin was never forgotten, and Thebes

was regarded as the chief city of the country. The XIth Dynasty kings

actually reigned at Thebes, and there the later kings of the XIIIth

Dynasty retired after the conquest of the Hyksos. The fact that with

Thebes were associated all the heroic traditions of the struggle against

the Hyksos ensured the final stability of the capital there when the

hated Semites were finally driven out, and the national kingdom

was re-established in its full extent from north to south. But for

occasional intervals, as when Akhunaten held his court at Tell el-Amarna

and Ramses II at Tanis, Thebes remained the national capital for six

hundred years, till the time of the XXIId Dynasty.

Another great change which differentiates the Middle Kingdom

(XIth-XIIIth Dynasties) from the Old Kingdom was caused by Egypt’s

coming into contact with other outside nations at this period. During

the whole history of the Old Kingdom, Egyptian relations with the outer

world had been nil. We have some inkling of occasional connection

with the Mediterranean peoples, the _Ha-nebu_ or Northerners; we have

accounts of wars with the people of Sinai and other Bedawin and negroes;

and expeditions were also sent to the land of Punt (Somaliland) by way

of the Upper Nile. But we have not the slightest hint of any connection

with, or even knowledge of, the great nations of the Euphrates valley

or the peoples of Palestine. The Babylonian king Narâm-Sin invaded the

Sinaitic peninsula (the land of Magan) as early as 3750 b. c, about

the time of the IIId Egyptian Dynasty. The great King Tjeser, of that

dynasty, also invaded Sinai, and so did Snefru, the last king of the

dynasty. But we have no hint of any collision between Babylonians and

Egyptians at that time, nor do either of them betray the slightest

knowledge of one another’s existence. It can hardly be that the two

civilized peoples of the world in those days were really absolutely

ignorant of each other, but we have no trace of any connection between

them, other than the possible one before the founding of the Egyptian

monarchy.

This early connection, however, is very problematical. We have seen that

there seems to be in early Egyptian civilization an element ultimately

of Babylonian origin, and that there are two theories as to how it

reached Egypt. One supposes that it was brought by a Semitic people of

Arab affinities (represented by the modern Grallas), who crossed the

Straits of Bab el-Man-deb and reached Egypt either by way of the Wadi

Hammamat or by the Upper Nile. The other would bring it across the

Isthmus of Suez to the Delta, where, at Heliopolis, there certainly

seems to have been a settlement of a Semitic type of very ancient

culture. In both cases we should have Semites bringing Babylonian

culture to Egypt. This, as we may remind the reader, was not itself of

Semitic origin, but was a development due to a non-Semitic people,

the Sumerians as they are called, who, so far as we know, were the

aboriginal inhabitants of Babylonia. The Sumerian language was of

agglutinative type, radically distinct both from the pure Semitic idioms

and from Egyptian. The Babylonian elements of culture which the early

Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of

Sumerian origin. Sumerian civilization had profoundly influenced the

Semitic tribes for centuries before the Semitic conquest of Babylonia,

and when the Sumerians became more and more a conquered race, finally

amalgamating with their conquerors and losing their racial and

linguistic individuality, they were conquered by an alien race but not

by an alien culture. For the culture of the Semites was Sumerian, the

Semitic races owing their civilization to the Sumerians. That is as

much as to say that a great deal of what we call Semitic culture is

fundamentally non-Semitic.

In the earliest days, then, Egypt received elements of Sumerian culture

through a Semitic medium, which introduced Semitic elements into the

language of the people, and a Semitic racial strain. It is possible.

that both theories as to the routes of these primeval conquerors are

true, and that two waves of Semites entered the Nile valley towards

the close of the Neolithic period, one by way of the Upper Nile or Wadi

Hammamat, the other by way of Heliopolis.

After the reconsolidation of the Egyptian people, with perhaps an

autocratic class of Semitic origin and a populace of indigenous Nilotic

race, we have no trace of further connection with the far-away centre of

Semitic culture in Babylonia till the time of the Theban hegemony.

Under the XIIth Dynasty we see Egyptians in friendly relations with the

Bedawin of Idumsea and Southern Palestine. Thus Sanehat, the younger son

of Amenemhat I, when the death of his royal father was announced, fled

from the new king Usertsen (Senusret) into Palestine, and there married

the daughter of the chief Ammuanshi and became a Syrian chief himself,

only finally returning to Egypt as an old man on the assurance of the

royal pardon and favour. We have in the reign of Usertsen (Senusret) II

the famous visit of the Arab chief Abisha (Abêshu’) with his following

to the court of Khnumhetep, the prince of the Oryx nome in Middle Egypt,

as we see it depicted on the walls of Khnumhetep’s tomb at Beni Hasan.

We see Usertsen (Senusret) III invading Palestine to chastise the land

of Sekmem and the vile Syrians.[6]

[6] We know of this campaign from the interesting historical

stele of the general Sebek-khu (who took part in it), which

was found during Mr. Garstang’s excavations at Abydos, not

previously referred to above. They were carried out in 1900,

and resulted in the complete clearance of a part of the

great cemetery which had been created during the XIIth

Dynasty. The group of objects from the tombs of this

cemetery, and those of XVIIIth Dynasty tombs also found, is

especially valuable as showing the styles of objects in use

at these two periods (see Garstang, el-Ardbah, 1901).

The arm of Egypt was growing longer, and its weight was being felt in

regions where it had previously been entirely unknown. Eventually the

collision came. Egypt collided with an Asiatic power, and got the worst

of the encounter. So much the worse that the Theban monarchy of the

Middle Kingdom was overthrown, and Northern Egypt was actually conquered

by the Asiatic foreigners and ruled by a foreign house for several

centuries. Who these conquering Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, were no

recent discovery has told us. An old idea was that they were Mongols. It

was supposed that the remarkable faces of the sphinxes of Tanis, now

in the Cairo Museum, which bore the names of Hyksos kings, were of

Mongolian type, as also those of two colossal royal heads discovered

by M. Naville at Bubastis. But M. Golénischeff has now shown that these

heads are really those of XIIth Dynasty kings, and not of Hyksos at all.

Messrs. Newberry and Garstang have lately endeavoured to show that this

type was foreign, and probably connected with that of the Kheta, or

Hittites, of Northern Syria, who came into prominence as enemies of

Egypt at a later period. They think that the type was introduced into

the Egyptian royal family by Nefret, the queen of Usertsen (Senusret)

II, whom they suppose to have been a Hittite princess. At the same time

they think it probable that the type was also that of the Hyksos, whom

they consider to have been practically Hittites. They therefore revive

the theory of de Cara, which connects the Hyksos with the Hittites and

these with the Pelasgi and Tyrseni.

This is a very interesting theory, which, when carried out to its

logical conclusion, would connect the Hyksos and Hittites racially with

the pre-Hellenic “Minoan” Mycenseans of Greece, as well as with the

Etruscans of Italy. But there is little of certainty in it. It is by no

means impossible that we may eventually come to know that the Hittites

(_Kheta_, the _Khatte_ of the Assyrians) and other tribes of Asia

Minor were racially akin to the “Minoans” of Greece, but the connection

between the Hyksos and the Hittites is to seek. The countenances of the

Kheta on the Egyptian monuments of Ramses II’s time have an angular

cast, and so have those of the Tanis sphinxes, of Queen Nefret, of

the Bubastis statues, and the statues of Usertsen (Senusret) III

and Amenemhat III. We might then suppose, with Messrs. Newberry and

Garstang, that Nefret was a Kheta princess, who gave her peculiar racial

traits to her son Usertsen (Senusret) III and his son Amenem-hat, were

it not far more probable that the resemblance between this peculiar

XIIth Dynasty type and the Kheta face is purely fortuitous.

There is really no reason to suppose that the type of face presented by

Nefret, Usertsen, and Amenemhat is not purely Egyptian. It may be seen

in many a modern fellah, and the truth probably is that the sculptors

have in the case of these rulers very faithfully and carefully depicted

their portraits, and that their faces happen to have been of a rather

hard and forbidding type. But, if we grant the contention of Messrs.

Newberry and Garstang for the moment, where is the connection between

these XIIth Dynasty kings and the Hyksos? All the Tanite monuments with

this peculiar facial type which would be considered Hyksos are certainly

of the XIIth Dynasty. The only statue of a Hyksos king, which was

undoubtedly originally made for him and is not one of the XIIth Dynasty

usurped, is the small one of Khian at Cairo, discovered by M. Naville at

Bubastis, and this has no head. So that we have not the slightest idea

of what a Hyksos looked like. Moreover, the evidence of the Hyksos names

which are known to us points in quite a different direction. The Kheta,

or Hittites, were certainly not Semites, yet the Hyksos names are

definitely Semitic. In fact it is most probable that the Hyksos, or

Shepherd Kings, were, as the classical authorities say they were, and as

their name (_hiku-semut_ or _hihu-shasu_,) “princes of the deserts” or

(“princes of the Bedawîn”) also testifies, purely and simply Arabs.

Now it is not a little curious that almost at the same time that a nomad

Arab race conquered Lower Egypt and settled in it as rulers (just as

‘Amr and the followers of Islam did over two thousand years later),

another Arab race may have imposed its rule upon Babylonia. Yet this

may have been the case; for the First Dynasty of Babylon, to which the

famous Hammurabi belonged, was very probably of Arab origin, to judge by

the forms of some of the royal names. It is by no means impossible that

there was some connection between these two conquests, and that both

Babylonia and Egypt fell, in the period before the year 2000 B.C. before

some great migratory movement from Arabia, which overran Babylonia,

Palestine, and even the Egyptian Delta.

In this manner Egypt and Babylonia may have been brought together

in common subjection to the Arab. We do not know whether any regular

communication between Egypt, under Semitic rule, and Babylonia was now

established; but we do know that during the Hyksos period there were

considerable relations between Egypt and over-sea Crete, and relations

with Mesopotamia may possibly have been established. At any rate, when

the war of liberation, which was directed by the princes of Thebes, was

finally brought to a successful conclusion and the Arabs were expelled,

we find the Egyptians a much changed nation. They had adopted for war

the use of horse and chariot, which they learnt from their Semitic

conquerors, whose victory was in all probability largely gained by their

use, and, generally speaking, they had become much more like the Western

Asiatic nations. Egypt was no longer isolated, for she had been forcibly

brought into contact with the foreign world, and had learned much.

She was no longer self-contained within her own borders. If the Semites

could conquer her, so could she conquer the Semites. Armed with horse

and chariot, the Egyptians went forth to battle, and their revenge was

complete. All Palestine and Syria were Egyptian domains for five hundred

years after the conquest by Thothmes I and III, and Ashur and Babel sent

tribute to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

The reaction came, and Egypt was thrown prostrate beneath the feet of

Assyria; but her claim to dominion over the Western Asiatics was never

abandoned, and was revived in all its pomp by Ptolemy Euergetes, who

brought back in triumph to Egypt the images of the gods which had been

removed by Assyrians and Babylonians centuries before. This claim was

never allowed by the Asiatics, it is true, and their kings wrote to the

proudest Pharaoh as to an absolute equal. Even the King of Cyprus calls

the King of Egypt his brother. But Palestine was admitted to be

an Egyptian possession, and the Phoenicians were always energetic

supporters of the Egyptian régime against the lawless Bedawîn tribes,

who were constantly intriguing with the Kheta or Hittite power to the

north against Egypt.

The existence of this extra-Egyptian imperial possession meant that the

eyes of the Egyptians were now permanently turned in the direction of

Western Asia, with which they were henceforth in constant and intimate

communication. The first Theban period and the Hyksos invasion,

therefore, mark a turning-point in Egyptian history, at which we may

fitly leave it for a time in order to turn our attention to those

peoples of Western Asia with whom the Egyptians had now come into

permanent contact.

Just as new discoveries have been made in Egypt, which have modified our

previous conception of her history, so also have the excavators of

the ancient sites in the Mesopotamian valley made, during the last few

years, far-reaching discoveries, which have enabled us to add to and

revise much of our knowledge of the history of Babylonia and Assyria. In

Palestine and the Sinaitic peninsula also the spade has been used with

effect, but a detailed account of work in Sinai and Palestine falls

within the limits of a description of Biblical discoveries rather than

of this book. The following chapters will therefore deal chiefly with

modern discoveries which have told us new facts with regard to the

history of the ancient Sumerians themselves, and of the Babylonians,

Elamites, Kassites, and Assyrians, the inheritors of the ancient

Sumerian civilization, which was older than that of Egypt, and which, as

we have seen, probably contributed somewhat to its formation. These

were the two primal civilizations of the ancient world. For two thousand

years each marched upon a solitary road, without meeting the other.

Eventually the two roads converged. We have hitherto dealt with the road

of the Egyptians; we now describe that of the Mesopotamians, up to the

point of convergence.