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PEEPS AT
MANY LANDS
ANCIENT EGYPT
[Illustration: PLATE 1.
AN EGYPTIAN GALLEY.]
PEEPS AT MANY LANDS
ANCIENT
EGYPT
BY
REV. JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.
AUTHOR OF "PEEPS AT THE HEAVENS," "THE STORY OF
THE PHARAOHS," "THE SEA KINGS OF CRETE," ETC.
WITH SIXTEEN FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS,
THOSE IN COLOUR BEING BY
CONSTANCE N. BAIKIE
A. & C. BLACK, LTD.
4, 5 & 6, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
1916
* * * * *
_First published October 1912_
_Reprinted January and April 1916_
AGENTS
AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
AUSTRALASIA OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE
CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO
INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD.
Macmillan Building, BOMBAY
309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA
_Printed in Great Britain._
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A LAND OF OLD RENOWN 1
II. A DAY IN THEBES 6
III. A DAY IN THEBES (_continued_) 11
IV. PHARAOH AT HOME 17
V. THE LIFE OF A SOLDIER 24
VI. CHILD-LIFE IN ANCIENT EGYPT 33
VII. SOME FAIRY-TALES OF LONG AGO 41
VIII. SOME FAIRY-TALES OF LONG AGO
(_continued_) 47
IX. EXPLORING THE SOUDAN 54
X. A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY 59
XI. EGYPTIAN BOOKS 66
XII. TEMPLES AND TOMBS 72
XIII. AN EGYPTIAN'S HEAVEN 82
* * * * *
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
*1. AN EGYPTIAN GALLEY, 1500 B.C. _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. THE GODDESS ISIS DANDLING THE KING 9
3. THE GREAT GATE OF THE TEMPLE OF LUXOR, WITH OBELISK 16
*4. RAMSES II. IN HIS WAR-CHARIOT--SARDINIAN GUARDSMEN ON FOOT 25
*5. ZAZAMANKH AND THE LOST CORONET 32
6. GRANITE STATUE OF RAMSES II. 35
7. NAVE OF THE TEMPLE AT KARNAK 38
*8. "AND THE GOOSE STOOD UP AND CACKLED" 41
*9. AN EGYPTIAN COUNTRY HOUSE 48
10. STATUES OF KING AMENHOTEP III. 51
11. THE SPHINX AND THE SECOND PYRAMID 54
*12. A DESERT POSTMAN 57
*13. THE BARK OF THE MOON, GUARDED BY THE DIVINE EYES 64
14. GATEWAY OF THE TEMPLE OF EDFU 73
15. WALL-PICTURES IN A THEBAN TOMB 80
*16. PHARAOH ON HIS THRONE 20
_Sketch-Map of Ancient Egypt on page viii_
* These eight illustrations are in colour; the others are in black
and white.
* * * * *
[Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF ANCIENT EGYPT.]
ANCIENT EGYPT
CHAPTER I
"A LAND OF OLD RENOWN"
If we were asked to name the most interesting country in the world, I
suppose that most people would say Palestine--not because there is
anything so very wonderful in the land itself, but because of all the
great things that have happened there, and above all because of its
having been the home of our Lord. But after Palestine, I think that
Egypt would come next. For one thing, it is linked very closely to
Palestine by all those beautiful stories of the Old Testament, which
tell us of Joseph, the slave-boy who became Viceroy of Egypt; of Moses,
the Hebrew child who became a Prince of Pharaoh's household; and of the
wonderful exodus of the Children of Israel.
But besides that, it is a land which has a most strange and wonderful
story of its own. No other country has so long a history of great Kings,
and wise men, and brave soldiers; and in no other country can you see
anything to compare with the great buildings, some of them most
beautiful, all of them most wonderful, of which Egypt has so many. We
have some old and interesting buildings in this country, and people go
far to see cathedrals and castles that are perhaps five or six hundred
years old, or even more; but in Egypt, buildings of that age are looked
upon as almost new, and nobody pays very much attention to them. For the
great temples and tombs of Egypt were, many of them, hundreds of years
old before the story of our Bible, properly speaking, begins.
The Pyramids, for instance, those huge piles that are still the wonder
of the world, were far older than any building now standing in Europe,
before Joseph was sold to be a slave in Potiphar's house. Hundreds upon
hundreds of years before anyone had ever heard of the Greeks and the
Romans, there were great Kings reigning in Egypt, sending out their
armies to conquer Syria and the Soudan, and their ships to explore the
unknown southern seas, and wise men were writing books which we can
still read. When Britain was a wild, unknown island, inhabited only by
savages as fierce and untaught as the South Sea Islanders, Egypt was a
great and highly civilized country, full of great cities, with noble
palaces and temples, and its people were wise and learned.
So in this little book I want to tell you something about this wonderful
and interesting old country, and about the kind of life that people
lived in it in those days of long ago, before most other lands had begun
to waken up, or to have any history at all. First of all, let us try to
get an idea of the land itself. It is a very remarkable thing that so
many of the countries which have played a great part in the history of
the world have been small countries. Our own Britain is not very big,
though it has had a great story. Palestine, which has done more than any
other country to make the world what it is to-day, was called "the least
of all lands." Greece, whose influence comes, perhaps, next after that
of Palestine, is only a little hilly corner of Southern Europe. And
Egypt, too, is comparatively a small land.
It looks a fair size when you see it on the map; but you have to
remember that nearly all the land which is called Egypt on the map is
barren sandy desert, or wild rocky hill-country, where no one can live.
The real Egypt is just a narrow strip of land on either side of the
great River Nile, sometimes only a mile or two broad altogether, never
more than thirty miles broad, except near the mouth of the river, where
it widens out into the fan-shaped plain called the Delta. Someone has
compared Egypt to a lily with a crooked stem, and the comparison is very
true. The long winding valley of the Nile is the crooked stem of the
lily, and the Delta at the Nile mouth, with its wide stretch of fertile
soil, is the flower; while, just below the flower, there is a little
bud--a fertile valley called the Fayum.
Long before even Egyptian history begins, there was no bloom on the
lily. The Nile, a far bigger river then than it is now, ran into the sea
near Cairo, the modern capital of Egypt; and the land was nothing but
the narrow valley of the river, bordered on either side by desert hills.
But gradually, century by century, the Nile cut its way deeper down into
the land, leaving banks of soil on either side between itself and the
hills, and the mud which it brought down in its waters piled up at its
mouth and pressed the sea back, till, at last, the Delta was formed,
much as we see it now. This was long before Egypt had any story of its
own; but even after history begins the Delta was still partly marshy
land, not long reclaimed from the sea, and the real Egyptians of the
valley despised the people who lived there as mere marsh-dwellers. Even
after the Delta was formed, the whole country was only about twice as
large as Wales, and, though there was a great number of people in it for
its size, the population was only, at the most, about twice as great as
that of London.
An old Greek historian once said, "Egypt is the gift of the Nile," and
it is perfectly true. We have seen how the great river made the country
to begin with, cutting out the narrow valley through the hills, and
building up the flat plain of the Delta. But the Nile has not only made
the country; it keeps it alive. You know that Egypt has always been one
of the most fertile lands in the world. Almost anything will grow there,
and it produces wonderful crops of corn and vegetables, and, nowadays,
of cotton. It was the same in old days. When Rome was the capital of the
world, she used to get most of the corn to feed her hungry thousands
from Egypt by the famous Alexandrian corn-ships; and you remember how,
in the Bible story, Joseph's brethren came down from Palestine because,
though there was famine there, there was "corn in Egypt." And yet Egypt
is a land where rain is almost unknown. Sometimes there will come a
heavy thunder-shower; but for month after month, year in and year out,
there may be no rain at all.
How can a rainless country grow anything? The secret is the Nile. Every
year, when the rains fall in the great lake-basin of Central Africa,
from which one branch of the great river comes, and on the Abyssinian
hills, where the other branch rises, the Nile comes down in flood. All
the lower lands are covered, and a fresh deposit of Nile mud is left
upon them; and, though the river does not rise to the higher grounds,
the water is led into big canals, and these, again, are divided up into
little ones, till it circulates through the whole land, as the blood
circulates through your arteries and veins. This keeps the land fertile,
and makes up for the lack of rain.
Apart from its wonderful river, the country itself has no very striking
features. It is rather a monotonous land--a long ribbon of green running
through a great waste of yellow desert and barren hills. But the great
charm that draws people's minds to Egypt, and gives the old land a
never-failing interest, is its great story of the past, and all the
relics of that story which are still to be seen.
In no other land can you see the real people and things of the days of
long ago as you can see them in Egypt. Think how we should prize an
actual building that had been connected with the story of King Arthur,
if such a thing could be found in our country, and what wonderful
romance would belong to the weapons, the actual shields and helmets,
swords and lances, of the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot and
Tristram and Galahad--if only we could find them. Out there in Egypt you
can see buildings compared with which King Arthur's Camelot would be
only a thing of yesterday; and you can look, not only on the weapons,
but on the actual faces and forms of great Kings and soldiers who lived,
and fought bravely for their country, hundreds of years before Saul and
Jonathan and David began to fight the battles of Israel. You can see the
pictures of how people lived in those far-away days, how their houses
were built, how they traded and toiled, how they amused themselves, how
they behaved in time of sorrow, how they worshipped God--all set down by
themselves at the very time when they were doing these things. You can
even see the games at which the children used to play, and the queer
old-fashioned toys and dolls that they played with, and you can read the
stories which their mothers and their nurses used to tell them.
These are the things which make this old land of Egypt so interesting to
us all to-day; and I want to try to tell you about some of them, so that
you may be able to have in your mind's eye a real picture of the life of
those long past days.