LIFE, ARTS, AND CRAFTS IN THE LAND OF THE NILE
Practically the whole of our knowledge of the conditions under which
life was lived in Egypt, of the organisation of society, of the arts
and crafts by which the needs and tastes of the people were met, is
due to the results of excavation during the last century. We owe, of
course, a great deal to the statements of Herodotus and Diodorus as to
the conditions which they found existing in their time; but the great
source of information must always be the mass of first-hand material
which has been gathered, mainly from the tombs with their wealth of
funerary furnishings, by the work of the excavator. Therefore it would
seem that the fitting conclusion to our brief survey of the various
aspects of excavation should be a sketch of the life of ancient Egypt,
with the arts and crafts which ministered to its necessities and its
luxuries. Such a sketch must, of course, be of the slightest and least
elaborated type, for the amount of material is so enormous that only
the most salient points can be touched; but it may still be true so far
as it goes, and may perhaps serve as an outline within which further
details may be inserted by the student of ancient Egyptian life.
First of all, we may take the framework of society. Through the whole
of Egyptian history the outline of this is very much the same, though
there are many variations in the relative importance of the various
parts. The head of the state is always the Pharaoh, placed on a level
immensely above even the most powerful of his subjects, but, as we
shall see, by no means an irresponsible tyrant, but rather a limited
monarch, governing in accordance with strictly defined customs.
Beneath him are the great nobles and the great official class--two
sections of society which were not in ancient Egypt, as in so many
other ancient realms, virtually different names for the same thing.
Then came the priestly class, at all times one of the most important
in the land, and tending at certain periods, with the weakening of the
royal power, to overshadow all the other interests.
It appears that there was a definitely military class, with definite
lands assigned to it for its support, though in the earlier days of
the kingdom the wars were not the business of a separate class of
professional soldiers, but were carried on by a general levy of the
people. The other great land-holding class of the nation was that of
the husbandmen, who apparently were much of our own old yeoman type,
holding their land by the payment of taxes.
Behind these classes, which, so to speak, formed the backbone of
the nation, came the shepherds, hunters, artificers, traders, and
workers at other subsidiary occupations. These held no land, and their
occupations appear to have been mainly hereditary, no artisan being
allowed to pass from one trade to another, or to have his children
reckoned in any other class than his own. The various trades must
have been organised more or less after the plan of the mediæval
trade-guilds, though in the case of Egypt the organisation was
apparently a national, and not a local affair. Beneath the tradesmen
came the slave class, whose number varied pretty much according to the
wars on which the nation was engaged, and their fruitfulness, or the
opposite, in yielding captives.
Slave labour was never a prominent feature of Egyptian life, and Petrie
estimates the slave population of the land at its maximum at no more
than a quarter of a million out of a possible population of twelve
millions.
To the imagination of most folk probably the mention of “Pharaoh,
King of Egypt,” suggests a typical Oriental tyrant, responsible to
nothing but his own passions, and governing according to the whim
of the moment. Such a picture may have been true of an Assyrian or
Babylonian king, like Ashurbanipal or Nebuchadnezzar, and perhaps
the frequency of assassination in the records of the Assyrian kings
hints that it was; but it certainly was not true of ancient Egypt.
Pharaoh’s own grandiose inscriptions, and the fiction which regarded
him as a god incarnate, may suggest unbridled power; but as a matter
of fact, Pharaoh was anything but the rampant and romantic despot whom
we imagine distributing life and death at his own capricious will, but
rather a somewhat humdrum constitutional monarch, whose every action
was regulated for him centuries before he was born, by an unchanging
custom, and who could no more step beyond the limits which immemorial
laws had assigned to him than he could jump out of his skin, or off his
own shadow.
The thing which amazed the Greeks, with their experience of
irresponsible tyrants, was the fact that so great a king as Pharaoh
was not the master, but the servant of the laws. “He could not do any
public business, condemn or punish any man to gratify his own humour or
revenge, or for any other unjust cause; but was bound to do according
as the laws had ordered in every particular case.... The kings,
therefore, carrying this even hand towards all their subjects, were
more beloved by them than by their own kindred.”
Petrie has suggested that it is this limitation of the power of the
Pharaoh which is accountable for the unusual stability of the Egyptian
throne. “The absence of republican interludes, so frequent in other
parts of the Mediterranean, was apparently due to the monarchy being
strictly limited by law. However bad an Egyptian might be personally,
he could not earn the hatred of his subjects like the irresponsible
Greek tyrants or Roman emperors.”
[Illustration: 27. PORTRAIT-STATUE OF MENTUEMHAT, CAIRO MUSEUM.]
Indeed Pharaoh according to fact is a very different figure from
Pharaoh according to imagination. We must try to substitute for
the gorgeous tiger of our fancies the figure, gorgeous enough indeed,
so far as concerns his apparel, of a laborious servant of the State
whose life, instead of being spent in wild orgies of licence and wild
explosions of ferocity, was mainly occupied, from the time when he rose
in the morning to the time when he crawled to bed at night, in a manner
quite familiar to royalty in our own country, in signing dull reports,
and reading dull dispatches, presiding over long and wearisome temple
services, and travelling about the country to see that everything was
working smoothly.
The new picture is by no means so picturesque as the old one; but it
is the real Pharaoh, and no doubt it was for the good, both of his
subjects and himself, that “Pharaoh had to act every hour according
to fixed routine, without room for the licence of a Dionysius or a
Caligula.” The brilliant tiger looks romantic in a story, but when
his despotism becomes unbearable it has generally to be tempered by
assassination, as with Sargon, Sennacherib, and many another; but as a
matter of fact the Egyptian Pharaoh generally managed to die quietly in
his own bed when his time came.
Not that he had not his own power, and his own initiative. His headship
of the State involved headship of the army in war, and this was no
polite fiction, where Pharaoh reaped the glory while his soldiers had
the danger. Seqenen-Ra’s mummy, with its ghastly wounds on head and
face, tells us how real was the duty of Egyptian royalty in the day
of battle. Thothmes III led the van of his army through the defile of
Aaruna, when his chosen captains shirked the task, and though we need
not believe all that Ramses II tells us about his share in the battle
of Kadesh, there is no doubt that he fought hand to hand with the
Hittites in the forefront of the battle, and at least proved himself a
good trooper, whatever may be thought of his generalship. Much power
also lay in his hands in respect of the selection and advancement of
able men from the lower to the higher ranks of the public service, and
of rewarding their work with grants of land, of initiating the great
public works which were often of such untold benefit to the land, and
of conducting the Foreign-Office business of the country, and the
negotiation of treaties. In short, Pharaoh had no lack of work to do,
and was probably like his modern successors in Kingship, one of the
hardest-worked men in the land; but from start to finish, the Egyptian
monarchy was a limited one.
Two instances of the limitation of the royal power, and its strict
subjection to law, may be given. When Queen Amtes was tried, in the
reign of Pepy I of the VIth Dynasty, for some unspecified offence,
the trial was conducted without even the presence of the king. “His
Majesty,” says Una in his famous inscription, “caused me to enter in
order to hear the case alone. No chief judge and vizier at all, no
prince at all was there, but only I alone, because I was excellent,
because I was pleasant to the heart of His Majesty.” Again, in
the time of King Ramses III of the XXth Dynasty, there was a great
palace conspiracy arising out of an intrigue in the harem to dethrone
Ramses, and put the son of one of the harem ladies on the throne. In
most other Oriental palaces the discovery of such a thing would have
been the signal for a general massacre. Instead of executing summary
justice, Ramses appointed a commission, giving them these remarkable
instructions: “What the people have spoken, I do not know. Hasten to
investigate it. You will go and question them, and those who must die,
you will cause to die by their own hand, without my knowing anything
of it. You will also cause the punishment awarded to the others to be
carried out without my knowing anything of it.”
Pharaoh may not always have been a model of propriety or of rectitude;
but he was far too strictly hedged about by precedent to allow of
the brutal tyranny and licence which have so often marked other
Eastern monarchies, and, besides, one fails to see how, with his time
so completely filled as we know it to have been, with all sorts of
necessary routine, he can have had much opportunity for mischief, even
if he had the desire.
The king’s chief functionary and right-hand man was the Vizier, who
must have been just about as hard-worked a man as his master. The
inscription in the tomb of Rekhmara, who was vizier under Thothmes III,
enumerates thirty separate functions which had to be discharged by the
fortunate holder of this great office. “The vizier is Grand Steward of
all Egypt, and all the activities of the State are under his control.
He has general oversight of the treasury, and the chief treasurer
reports to him; he is chief justice, or head of the judiciary; he
is chief of police, both for the residence-city and the kingdom; he
is minister of war, both for army and navy; he is secretary of the
interior and of agriculture, while all general executive functions of
State, with many that may not be classified, are incumbent upon him.
There is indeed no prime function of the State which does not operate
through his office. He is a veritable Joseph, and it must be this
office which the Hebrew writer has in mind in the story of Joseph.”
Altogether we may conclude that, whatever the salary of the vizier may
have been, he probably earned it.
A quaint picture of the way in which a high Egyptian official was
hedged about with routine is given by Rekhmara in his description
of the procedure of the court of justice. “As for every act of this
official, the vizier while hearing in the hall of the vizier, he shall
sit upon a chair, with a rug upon the floor, and a dais upon it, a
cushion under his back, a cushion under his feet, and a baton at his
hand; the forty skins [parchments of the codified law] shall be open
before him. Then the magnates of the South shall stand in the two
aisles before him, while the master of the privy chamber is on his
right, the receiver of income on his left, the scribes of the vizier
at his either hand; one corresponding to another, with each man at his
proper place. One shall be heard after another, without allowing one
who is behind to be heard before one who is in front.”
The great offices of State, of course, often fell to men of high rank,
and of hereditary influence. Rekhmara himself came of noble family,
and succeeded his uncle in the vizierate. But this was by no means
necessarily the case. Egypt always presented the career open to talent
which Napoleon desired. “All through the history there was a free
rising of ability from the lower levels, as we see in England--Wolsey,
the butcher’s son, and many others.... This was a chief cause of the
durability of Egyptian society; great as the differences were, there
was a gradation interlocking all through, as in England.”
A notable instance of the rise of a talented man is given by the
tomb-inscription of that same Una whom we have already seen presiding
over the trial of Queen Amtes. Beginning his official career as an
“inferior custodian of the domain of Pharaoh,” Una during three reigns
steadily climbed up the official ladder, until at last he became
governor of the South under Merenra, and was the favoured official
chosen to fetch the granite for the royal sarcophagus and pyramid from
the quarries at Aswan. Senmut again, the famous architect and minister
of Queen Hatshepsut, tells us in the inscription on his statue at
Karnak that he was “the greatest of the great in the whole land,” and
seems to have held power not inferior to that of the vizier, though
there is no evidence that he held that office; yet he tells us in his
Berlin inscription that “his ancestors were not found in writing,” or
in other words, that he was a self-made man.
The elaborately organised court held many offices both ornamental and
useful, which gave openings for talent or ambition. Perhaps one of the
most influential positions was one which involved no very important
duties, but brought the holder of it into close and constant touch
with Pharaoh. This was the position of the “fan-bearer at the king’s
right hand.” His function was purely ornamental, and he can be seen
in paintings and reliefs carrying a tiny fan beside the king’s litter
as the symbol of his office, while the real work of fanning is done
by the ordinary fan-bearers with their big business-like fans; but
he was the highest court-official, a sort of Lord Chamberlain, with
powers of giving or denying entry to the presence, and no doubt his
favour was all-important to a petitioner, as that of one who had the
ear of Pharaoh. As to the rest of the court, there was a multitude of
officials quite comparable to the tail of useless boot-lickers who
adorned the court of Louis XIV; but one imagines that, in earlier days
at least, the courtier of Pharaoh had to do more for his position than
the hanger-on of the Grand Monarque.
The priesthood formed a very large and very influential class. In
theory, the King was always the Supreme Priest, the Pontifex Maximus
of the kingdom, and very often several of the high-priesthoods of the
different gods were held by members of the royal family, thus securing
that the Pharaoh should be represented in the priestly councils whose
loyalty or disloyalty might mean so much to the stability of his
throne. Thus in the reign of Ramses II, his favourite son Khaemuast,
the Wizard-Prince of the Setna papyrus, was high-priest of Ptah at
Memphis. No doubt the fact that there was such a multitude of gods,
whose priesthoods were all jealous of one another, was some security
against the overwhelming influence of the priestly caste, especially in
the earlier days; but the fate of Akhenaten’s movement showed that in
spite of local jealousies the priestly caste was really one in face of
any attempt to diminish its power and privileges; and in the end the
unquestioned supremacy of Amen led to the Amen priesthood gaining a
position and influence which was superior to that of the weak Ramesside
Pharaohs, and which resulted in the supersession of the true royal
line, and the substitution for it of the XXIst Dynasty of priest-kings.
Even before things had reached such a pitch, the immense wealth which
the piety of successive kings had accumulated in the coffers of the
priesthoods, and especially of that of Amen, must have constituted a
real danger to the state, while the amount of land held by the priests,
and so exempt from taxation, went with the other accumulation to
constitute a steady drain on the national resources which in the end
they were not able to bear.
The class of the great nobles was held in strict subordination to
the royal power in the days of the strong early monarchs of the
Old Kingdom; but, with the weakening of the royal authority which
followed the Vth Dynasty, the honours and powers which Pharaoh had
heaped on his faithful courtiers, and which had been a convenient
relief to the central authority as shifting part of the burden of
local administration to the shoulders of the local great men, proved
a danger to the State. A kind of feudal system grew up in which the
local chieftains assumed the powers and as much as they could afford
of the splendours of Pharaoh himself, claiming to hold their offices
by hereditary right, maintaining their own armies, holding their own
courts of justice, and even daring to place after their own names in
their proclamations the formula, “Living for ever and ever,” which had
hitherto been the sacred attribute of the crown alone.
The revival of the monarchy, first under the Antefs and Mentuhoteps
of the XIth Dynasty, and then under the Senuserts and Amenemhats of
the XIIth Dynasty, however, soon curbed the pretensions of these petty
princelets, and the changes of the Hyksos invasion and the War of
Independence wiped out the last relics of the Egyptian feudal system,
which never revived under the New Empire. Even under strong kings like
the Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, the courts of the local nomarchs
were no small things, as they might employ anything from fifty to a
hundred officials, from the steward down to the “mat-spreader.”
[Illustration: 28. Vth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TOMB OF PTAH-HETEP.]
Tomb-inscriptions are not perhaps the most trustworthy sources as to
the personal character of a class of men, nor are we to expect that
Ameny or Khnemhotep will tell us anything of the shady side of
their administration. Yet it must be confessed that Ameny’s story
of his administration of the Oryx Nome gives a pleasant picture of
the relations of a great local noble and official to the people of
his province; and we may say that if Egypt in the time of the Middle
Kingdom had many nomarchs of his stamp, she was a fortunate land.
“There was no citizen’s daughter whom I misused,” says the great
man, “there was no widow whom I oppressed, there was no peasant whom
I repulsed, there was no shepherd whom I repelled, there was not a
foreman of five from whom I took his men for forced work. There was not
a pauper around me; there was not a hungry man of my time. When there
came years of famine, I arose, I ploughed all the fields of the Oryx
Nome to its southern and its northern boundary, I kept its inhabitants
alive, making provision so that there was not a hungry man in it. I
gave to the widow as to her that possessed a husband; nor did I exalt
the great above the small in all that I gave. Thereafter great rises of
the Nile took place, producing wheat and barley and all things; but I
did not exact the arrears of the farm.” “I gave bread to the hungry,”
says another noble, “and clothes to the naked, and gave a passage in my
own boat to those who could not cross. I was a father to the orphan, a
husband to the widow, a protection from the wind to the shivering; I am
one who spake what was good, and related what was good. I acquired my
possessions in a just manner.”
All this may savour a little of Pharisaic self-righteousness to us;
but at least it shows that there was a recognised idea, among the
governing class, of the duties which a great man owed to those under
him, and the possession of such an ideal must have made bad government
more difficult.
The same praise can scarcely be given to the ideals of the other
important, though minor, official class, the scribes. The Egyptian
scribe belonged to a type with which we are perfectly familiar still,
the type of the petty official who thinks that there is nothing in
all the world so fine as petty officialdom, unless it be superior
officialdom, and who looks down on all other professions with a scorn
which is only equalled by his ignorance. In a land where writing was so
complicated a matter, and where it so early assumed supreme importance,
where also the annual inundation with its obliterating of landmarks
made the possession of written records a matter of great importance,
the scribe obviously had a splendid field for his work, and for the
development of all his peculiar vices. It was possible for a careful
scribe to climb from the humblest position to one of great dignity and
power, and the Egyptian scribe never forgot that every scribe carried
in his writing-case the wand of office of a potential vizier.
The scribes have left us many examples of what they thought of
themselves and of all other people and professions, and it may be
safely said that of no other class of Egyptian do we carry away so
unpleasant an impression as of that one which no doubt imagined that
it was impressing its own immense superiority on the minds of all
posterity. The Egyptian cherished a profound admiration for learning;
but his devotion to letters was not because of the beauty of learning
in itself, but simply because it was the avenue to preferment and the
way of escape from the miseries of toil or the dangers of war. Both the
admiration and the mercenary reason for it are expressed in the words
of an ancient sage recorded for us in the Sallier Papyrus:
“Give thy heart to learning and love her like a mother,
For there is nothing that is so precious as learning ...
Behold there is no profession which is not governed,
It is only the learned man who rules himself.”
The scribe saw himself, because of his possession of letters,
immeasurably above all the poor creatures who had to earn their bread
by the sweat of their brow. He was exempt from all the pains and
anxieties of the workman, and loved maliciously to contemplate them
while he issued the orders which imposed further burdens on backs
already heavily burdened. “The poor ignorant man, ‘whose name is
unknown, is like a heavily-laden donkey, he is driven by the scribe,’
while the fortunate man ‘who has set his heart upon learning’ is above
work, and becomes a wise prince.” “The learned man has enough to eat
because of his learning.” Therefore, “set to work and become a scribe,
for then thou shalt become a leader of men.”
No matter what the trade was, or how wonderful its results, it seemed
to the smug scribe a contemptible thing in comparison with his own
precious profession of letters. Here is his opinion of the craftsmen
who created the miracles of metal- and wood-work of the Middle Kingdom:
“I have never seen the smith as an ambassador,
Or the goldsmith carry tidings;
But I have seen the smith at his work
At the mouth of his furnace,
His fingers were like crocodile skin,
He stank more than the roe of fish ...
Each artist who works with the chisel
Tires himself more than he who hoes a field.
The wood is his field, of metal are his tools.
In the night--is he free?
He works more than his arms are able,
In the night--he lights a light.”
No doubt this seemed very fine and humorous to our scribe; but we who
have the chance of comparing his literary achievement with the works
of the craftsmen whom he satirised may be pardoned for preferring the
diadems of Khnumit and Sat-Hathor, or the statues of Senusert and
Amenemhat to all the paltry drivel he ever wrote.
[Illustration: 29. XIXth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF SETY I, ABYDOS.]
Nor was his opinion of the soldier’s calling any higher. Indeed the
ancient Egyptian was no more of a warlike person than his successor
the modern fellah, who makes a good enough soldier under British
officers, but is about the most unmilitary person on earth when left
to the freedom of his own will. There is no more curious inversion of
fact than the common idea which pictures the Egyptian as one of the
great warrior races of the world, and classes him along with that
bloodthirsty tiger the Assyrian. Only at one period of his history
did the Egyptian ever show the least sign of developing a craving for
world-dominion and the warfare which goes along with it; and when the
brief imperial fever of his early XVIIIth Dynasty had wrought itself
out, he reverted for the rest of his history to his natural rôle of
the finest craftsman on earth, only bestirring himself when there was
need to defend his frontiers, a business which he did fairly, but only
fairly, well. On the whole, he would have thoroughly agreed with Alan
Breck Stewart that war “is generally rather a bauchle of a business.”
But it was reserved for the smug and flabby scribe--you can see him
still in the Louvre with his cunning eyes and his rolls of unhealthy
flesh--to make a mock of the calling which won for Egypt all the empire
she ever possessed, and which was that of her greatest Pharaohs.
“Oh, what does it mean,” says this early pacifist, “Oh, what does
it mean that thou sayest: ‘The officer has a better lot than the
scribe’? Come, let me relate to thee the fate of the officer, so full
of trouble.” Then he goes on to relate in a fashion which he no doubt
thinks humorous, the life of an officer on active duty in Syria:
“Come, let me relate to thee how he travels to Syria,
How he marches in the upland country.
His food and his water he has to carry on his arm,
Laden like a donkey;
This makes his neck stiff like that of a donkey,
And the bones of his back break ...
If he arrives in face of the enemy,
He is like a bird in a snare ...
If he arrives at his home in Egypt ...
He is ill, and must lie down.
They have to bring him home on the donkey,
Whilst his clothes are stolen, and his servants run away.
Therefore, O scribe,
Reverse thine opinion about the happiness of the scribe and of the
officer.”
As literature this precious effusion is merely contemptible; but
it is very illuminating as to the character of the class which was
responsible for the production of it. Generally speaking, the Egyptian
leaves you with the pleasant impression that he is a decent kindly
fellow, with a cheery outlook on life, and a love of pretty things
and laughter; but the scribe is an undoubted fly in the ointment. He
thought himself its finest perfume; but that is just precisely what
makes him so unquestionably the fly.
We need not imagine that the condition either of the soldier or of the
artisan was quite so miserable as the scribe would have us believe. The
misfortune is that it was only the scribe who was vocal. If the soldier
or the craftsman had been able to leave behind him his opinion of the
scribe, it would probably have been quite as unflattering, and perhaps
more pungently expressed. It would not have required great genius to
make fun of a profession which lived by the favour of the great man,
and whose typical figure is the kneeling scribe of the Cairo Museum,
with his twisted deprecating smile, and his submissively crossed
hands, waiting, like a dog, uncertain whether his master will kick him
or fling him a bone.
Behind all the glitter of the court and official circle, with its
innumerable hangers-on, there comes the great mass of the people, the
farmers, the skilled workmen, the shepherds, fishers, toilers of all
sorts. Of no race in the world can it be said that the conditions of
its workers have been so fully depicted as of the Egyptians. On the
sculptured and painted tomb-reliefs we see the workmen of almost every
trade under heaven busily engaged in the prosecution of their calling.
Whatever the scribe might think of the indignity of being a smith or a
carpenter, his impression was confined to himself, and the great man
had not the least objection to see these and a score of other common
occupations pictured on the walls of his “eternal habitation.” But
while the outward aspect of these callings is thus fully represented,
so that it might be possible to produce a handbook of the Egyptian
crafts, we are not so well informed as to the environment in which
these wonderfully skilled workmen spent their lives, what were the
conditions of their service, the manner of their housing, and the
question of whether their lot was a happy one or not. Petrie’s
excavations at Kahun have given us the almost complete plan of an Old
Kingdom workmen’s town, where the skilled masons who were building the
pyramid of Senusert II were housed. Though this is only a temporary
town, we may probably take its conditions as more or less typical of
those which prevailed for the artisan class in the Old Kingdom. The
houses are of all sizes, ranging from four rooms to sixty, the larger
houses being, no doubt, those of the overseers and clerks of works. The
streets are narrow, varying from 11 feet to 15 feet wide, and having
a drain down the middle of each. The simplest type of small house has
an open court opposite the entrance, a common room on one side, and
two storerooms on the other, with a stair leading up to the roof. The
larger class of artisan’s house has a court, four rooms opening off
it, and five other rooms dependent on the main rooms. On the whole,
one would imagine that the housing conditions were not so very bad;
though certainly the houses were too crowded together. The average
artisan’s house of the present day has not the number of rooms which
were possessed by the pyramid mason of four thousand years ago, though
his advantages in other respects are considerable.
[Illustration: 30. XIXth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF RAMSES II,
LUXOR.]
The workman’s wages were at all events partly paid in kind. Herodotus
tells us of the amount expended in provision for the workmen who built
the Great Pyramid: “On the pyramid is shown an inscription, in Egyptian
characters, how much was expended in radishes, onions, and garlic,
for the workmen; which the interpreter, as I well remember, reading
the inscription, told me amounted to one thousand six hundred talents
of silver.” Payment was still in kind in the time of the New Empire.
One of the foremen of the craftsmen of the Theban necropolis in the
time of Ramses IX (1142–1123 B.C.), fortunately kept with great care
a record of all that happened to his gang, noting whether the men
were on full work or were “idle.” Festival days broke in considerably
on their working time, as we hear of two full months’ holiday, and
again of another month, in the same year; but the workmen’s rations
ran on all the same whether they were working or not. The worry was
that the rations were often behind time, and when that happened there
was trouble. One month the rations were only one day late, but another
they did not come at all, and then the workmen went on strike. This
produced the supplies; but ere long the same thing happened again, and
this time the gang went in a body to Thebes, and complained to the
“great princes,” and the “chief prophets of Amen.” Again the result was
good, and the journal of the careful foreman gives us a quaint hint
of how it had been necessary to use a little palm-oil in the case of
the influential “fan-bearer” to secure the desired end. “We received
to-day our corn-rations; we gave two boxes and a writing-tablet to the
fan-bearer.”
We cannot be sure whether the condition of the necropolis workmen,
who were mostly skilled craftsmen, metal workers, carvers, painters,
and so forth, was worse than that of the workmen in the city of the
living; probably the conditions in both cases were much the same. In
any case, it is the necropolis workmen who supply us with our instances
of insufficient or delayed payment, and who give us the first historic
examples of strikes. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses III (1170 B.C.)
things were pretty bad in the necropolis, and wages had not been paid
for half a year. After giving the officials nine days’ grace, the
workmen naturally went on strike in a body.
They left the necropolis, with their wives and children, and though the
two overseers tried to entice them back to work “with great oaths,”
the workmen were not to be caught with chaff, and stayed outside the
necropolis walls. Finally the affair assumed so threatening an aspect
that two chiefs of police and a number of priests tried to make them
return to duty; but in vain. Their answer was, “We have been driven
here by hunger and thirst, we have no clothes, we have no oil, we have
no food. Write to our lord the Pharaoh on the subject, and write to
the governor who is over us that they may give us something for our
sustenance.” This unheard-of request had its effect--“on that day they
received the provision for the month Tybi.” In another month, however,
they were back again, as supplies had failed once more. This time the
governor of the town met them, and though he asked them how he was to
pay their wages when the storehouses were empty, he at least ordered
that they should receive half of the overdue rations.
Altogether the evidence goes to show that life was not all pleasure in
ancient Egypt, any more than in other lands; but it is only fair to
say that the other side of the matter has been grossly exaggerated,
and that life in the Land of the Pharaohs was not the gloomy, morbid,
perpetually death-contemplating thing which it has been represented as
being. This idea, of course, we owe, partly to the amiable Herodotus
and his picture of the model coffin and mummy being carried round at
all their banquets, with the words, “Look on this, then drink and enjoy
yourself; for when dead you will be like this,” and partly to the fact
that practically all the knowledge we have of the Egyptians comes from
their tombs.
The necessary corrective to this one-sided view of a great nation is
given by their books, and particularly by the romantic fiction which
they were the first nation to cultivate. Erman has said that “the
romances are not to be relied upon; the country which they describe is
not Egypt but fairyland.” This may be so as regards scenery and detail;
but the writer of the Tale of the Doomed Prince, or of Setna and the
Magic Roll, whether he may cast the scene of his story in Naharina
or in Egypt, cannot help revealing in his tale the habitual outlook
on life of the Egypt of his time; and in this respect the romances
are far more to be relied upon than either the vainglorious vauntings
of a royal inscription or the carefully dressed-up moralisings of a
scribe. The picture which they give of the Egyptian nature is that of
a simple, kindly race, singularly free from the savage cruelty which
disgraced their great rivals the Assyrians, loving pleasure, and all
the brightness and beauty of life, with a straightforward and childlike
affection, not greedy of power, but ready to live and let live,
singularly advanced in their conception of family life, and especially
worthy of our admiration in the respect which they paid to women, and
the position accorded to woman from the very earliest times.
It is time to rid our minds of that sinister conception of the Egyptian
as a dark, uncanny, supernaturally wise and diabolically malignant
being, which is still to be found in second-rate fiction, and in the
vain imaginings of gropers in the occult and the miraculous, and to see
this great race as it really was--a race of true children of the Sun,
leading in the dawn of the world’s story a clean, healthy, open-air
life, with its own imperfections and weaknesses, but with its plain
virtues as well, and with a moral standard not unworthy of comparison
with that of any race in the world. What they have accomplished is
plain for all the world to see; surely it is common sense to see also
that such things were not the work of gloomy fanatics or of drivelling
dabblers in the black arts, but of men.
[Illustration: 31. XXth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF RAMSES III,
MEDINET HABU.]
We turn now to consider the art of ancient Egypt as it has now come
to be known by the accumulation of specimens of it during the last
century. Egyptian art has been somewhat slow in coming to its own
in the judgment of the world, and that for two reasons. First that
opinion, which had been accustomed to very different things, had to be
gradually trained to appreciate the merit of work which differed from
the accepted canons in many respects, even in the type of material
which it used for its self-expression; and next, that the Egyptian
work by which the national art was first introduced to the attention
of the modern world was mostly of a period which we have now learned
to know as decadent. Denderah, Esneh, Edfu, Philæ, these were the
products of Egyptian art which first roused the wonder of European
visitors; and very naturally, for these great shrines are not only
wonderful in themselves, but are also in a state of preservation which
renders them intelligible and attractive to everyone who sees them. But
all the same they are very unworthy to be taken as examples of what
Egyptian art could do at its best, and so we need not wonder that, when
the first impulse of surprise had passed away, the voice of criticism
was heard, pointing out the conspicuous faults in this claimant for
recognition among the great arts of the world, and refusing to allow
the claim. Similarly with the works of sculpture on which another part
of the Egyptian claim must be based, in almost all cases the specimens
of Egyptian sculpture which were first brought under the eyes of the
judges were colossal fragments of a style and a period which had their
own merits, but were far from being representative of the actual work
of the Egyptian sculptor at its best, as we have now come to know it.
In these circumstances it is not to be wondered at that Egyptian art
has only found slow and grudging recognition as one of the great arts
of the world. What is strange, however, is that even to-day, when
the periods of Egyptian architecture are as clearly defined, perhaps
more clearly defined than the periods of Gothic, and when Egyptian
sculpture is represented all over the world by either originals or
reproductions of its best work in all respects, the judgment which was
not unaccountable, or inapplicable in the day of the beginnings of
knowledge of things Egyptian should still be repeated, and Egyptian
art be characterised as a thing, interesting indeed, but essentially
crude and barbaric, the product of a race which has no claim to rank
alongside the other great artistic races of the world.
Thus we find so learned an art critic as Lord Balcarres remarking
(_Donatello_, p. 21), “The massive and abiding art of Egypt ignored
the personality of its gods and Pharaohs, distinguishing the various
persons by dress, ornament, and attribute.” For the gods, this may
pass, but when such a thing is said of the Pharaohs one can only say
that it is simply the opposite of the truth. Is it possible that the
author of such a statement had never seen, before he made it, such
vivid impressions of personality as the great diorite Khafra, with its
splendid dignity, or, at the opposite end of the scale, the Reisner
Menkaura, the very embodiment of a bourgeois “Farmer George” royalty,
doing his best to look as dignified as becomes the wearer of the double
crown, and failing so absolutely? Here are two successive occupants of
the Egyptian throne, whose personality, according to Lord Balcarres,
should be ignored in Egyptian art, and yet the sharp discrimination of
personality is just the thing that immediately strikes everyone who
sees the two statues together.
Lord Balcarres, however, is not the only sinner in this respect.
“The emptiness of the Sphinx’s face,” says Mr. March Phillipps in
his charming book, _The Works of Man_, “is a prevailing trait in all
Egyptian sculpture. All Egyptian faces stare before them with the
same blank regard which can be made to mean anything precisely because
it means nothing.... The truth is, Egyptian sculpture is a sculpture
barren of intellectual insight and intellectual interest.”
Has the writer of this confident condemnation, one wonders, ever seen
the granite Senusert III, either of the Cairo or of the British Museum,
with the strong harsh features which express, if ever any work of the
sculptor’s hands expressed, both the pride and the bitter weariness
of power, or, to take a New Empire instance, the masterful Thothmes
III of the Cairo Museum, the face of a daring soldier, if there ever
was one, or the ugly capable face of Prince Mentuemhat, also at Cairo?
Mentuemhat has no claims to personal beauty, and, one imagines, no
illusions on that matter; but strong character has seldom been more
admirably expressed than in this specimen of the art which, as we are
told, is “barren of intellectual insight and intellectual interest.”
The fact is, that both these criticisms, and many others similar to
them, rest upon a fundamental misconception about Egyptian sculpture.
It is quite obvious that both Lord Balcarres and Mr. March Phillipps,
in making them, are founding upon the colossal pieces of Egyptian
sculpture which are the prominent objects in the galleries of our
Museums, and taking them as adequately representative of the art which
they are criticising; and to do this is hopelessly to misconceive the
actual position.
Egyptian sculpture in the round had two entirely different objects,
which were reached by different methods, and are seen in different
examples. The first was purely monumental and decorative, and its
purposes are served by the production of the colossal statues,
monuments of royal pride and glory, and, not less, pieces of decoration
in a great architectural scheme. These gigantic works are not to be
viewed as portraiture in the strict sense, and that the Egyptians
themselves did not so view them is manifest from the fact that a
reigning Pharaoh seldom hesitated to appropriate to himself any
convenient statues of one of his predecessors by the simple process of
cutting his own cartouche on the figure, and obliterating that of the
original owner.
The question of likeness or unlikeness was a very small one; what was
required was a figure which should convey the impression of power and
dignity, linked with the name of a particular Pharaoh. In this respect,
and as elements of an architectural whole, these statues unquestionably
served their purpose; more was never expected of them, and to criticise
them as lacking in expression, and in individuality, is to do them an
injustice. They can only be judged as what they were designed to be,
not as something radically different.
[Illustration: 32. PTOLEMAIC RELIEF-WORK, KOM OMBOS.]
The position is quite different with regard to the other object of
Egyptian sculpture, which was definitely portraiture. Apart from his
monumental work, which in a limited sense may be said to have ideal
elements in it, the Egyptian sculptor, unlike his successor, the
Greek, produced no ideal work. He was simply and solely, from first
to last, a portrait sculptor, and in this respect he has seldom been
excelled. The whole object of his work was to produce a tomb-statue,
which should be the refuge of the _Ka_ of the dead man when his mummy
had perished by lapse of time. Therefore the one condition of his art
was that it should produce likenesses as absolute as the power of man
could compass. The result of such an aim is manifest, both in the
successes and in the limitations of Egyptian sculpture. In the one
point to which he gave his whole strength, the sculptor scored, not
always, of course, but in many instances, a most astonishing success.
It is impossible to imagine anything more lifelike than the heads of
some of the Old Kingdom statues--the Ti or the Ranefer of the Cairo
Museum, or among royal statues, the Menkaura with the figures of the
Nomes, or in later times the exquisite Berlin head of Queen Nefertiti,
the astonishing ebony head of a royal princess of the same period, who
may be Queen Tiy, or, to come down to still later days, the other head
of Mentuemhat which Miss Benson and Miss Gourlay unearthed from the
temple of Mut, or in the very latest days of Egyptian independence,
the head of an unknown man in green schist which is now in the Berlin
Museum. Until the rise of Roman portrait-sculpture, no ancient school
of art presents anything to be compared with the realism of the ancient
Egyptian sculptor.
Unfortunately for the completeness of his art, the absolute dominance
of the need for recognisable likeness in the head limited his work in
other respects. So long as the head was a success, the rest of the body
did not matter so much; and consequently we have, even in such fine
examples as the Ti and the Ranefer, a noble head joined to a body which
is much less thoroughly studied, while in examples of poorer quality
the contrast between the care with which the head is worked out and the
rude blocking out of the torso and the extremities is almost ludicrous.
Still, Egyptian art, like all art, is entitled to be judged by its
best, and not, as has so often been done, by its worst; and even when
we admit all its limitations the fact remains that to charge it with
incapacity to interpret individuality is, to anyone who is familiar
with its best work, merely ridiculous.
The case is the same when we turn to the criticisms which have been
directed against the other great branch of Egyptian sculpture--its
relief-work. The great reliefs of the temples, with their battle
pictures and scenes of offerings, are what at once commands the
attention and invites the criticism. We are told, and very justly
so far, that “Kings, gods, prisoners, the smiting champion, and the
transfixed victim are all equally expressionless. Clearly the idea that
art can be charged with, and visibly body forth, the emotions and ideas
of the human mind was never grasped by Egyptian sculptors”; but who in
the world ever dreamed of taking the vast advertisements of the glory
and valour of Pharaoh, for that is what the battle reliefs of Karnak
and Medinet Habu are--contract work, at so much the square yard--as
fair representatives of the delicate and most decorative work which has
given us the tomb-reliefs of the Old Kingdom?
In some respects Egyptian relief-work is decidedly inferior to the
remarkable animal sculpture with which the Assyrian kings decorated
their palaces. The Egyptian sculptor rarely attempts anything like the
difficulty of the problems of motion which the Assyrian tackled with
such dash and light-heartedness, and when he does make the attempt
his work is apt to seem stiff beside that of his rival, whose hunting
scenes have rarely been equalled; but in his portrayal of quiet scenes
of home, field, and farmyard the Egyptian comes to his own again, and
it is difficult to imagine anything more effective as wall decoration
than his quiet and unstrained work, which, unlike that of the bitter
Assyrian, almost invariably leaves a pleasant impression on the mind.
The comprehension and appreciation of Egyptian architecture has been
hindered by the same fact which has delayed the appreciation of the art
of the Nile Valley--namely, that the specimens of it which are to-day
the most complete, and which command for that reason most attention,
belong, not to the days when Egypt was at the summit of her achievement
in all respects, but to periods when taste and artistic feeling were
decaying along with power. To take, as is often done, such a temple
as Medinet Habu as fairly representative of Egyptian architecture, is
simply to make adequate appreciation of what Egyptian architecture
is a thing impossible. The Egyptian builders had, no doubt, great
faults, which have already been touched upon. They were often, indeed
almost always, strangely careless about the very factors which should
ensure the “eternal duration” which they craved for the works of their
hands; they had, generally speaking, comparatively little of that
exquisite sense of proportion which makes a fine Greek temple seem
a thing inevitable, though sometimes, as at Der el-Bahri, and the
little temple of Amenhotep III at Elephantine, now, alas, destroyed,
something of this was revealed to them; they sometimes mistook mere
mass for greatness, and the multiplication of forms for beauty, as in
the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, where a magnificent opportunity was lost
because the architect did not know that too much is too much. But with
it all they have left us a heritage of which it can safely be said that
few of the works of man can surpass it in impressiveness. “It is a part
of my intention,” says Mr. Lethaby (_Architecture_, pp. 65, 66), “to
try to point out what contributions were made to universal architecture
by the several civilisations as they arose and passed away, but to do
so of Egypt would be practically to rewrite what has been said; to a
large degree Architecture is an Egyptian art.”
The nation of which such a statement can be made needs no further
witness as to its place among the great master-building nations of the
world’s history.
Whatever hesitations and doubts there may be as to the right of the
ancient Egyptian to rank high among the artistic nations of the world,
there can be none as to his place as a craftsman. In prehistoric days
he was already the finest flint-worker that the world has ever known,
so that his flint knives are to this day the standards by which all
other similar work falls to be tested, and in presence of which it
always comes short; while his vessels of hard stone were shaped, with
a skill and a patience which to us seem little short of marvellous,
into shapes of grace and beauty which have never been surpassed by
the workers of any land or time. Later he translated these into fine
pottery, and was always a skilful and satisfying potter, though his
work never perhaps attained the grace and beauty of that of his brother
craftsman over the sea in Crete. His greatest gift to us in this
respect was his development of the art of covering pottery of all kinds
with the exquisite glazes which still charm us on scarabs, amulets,
ushabti figures, and all sorts of vessels.
As a linen worker, of course, he was incomparable, and the finest
specimens of modern linen look wretchedly coarse when viewed under
a microscope alongside the best products of his loom. The earliest
jewellery of the world was of his workmanship, and the bracelets of the
Ist Dynasty queen found at Abydos show us that the Egyptian jeweller of
six thousand years ago needed no lessons from any of the most skilled
modern practitioners of the crafts. Indeed, all through the history
of the land the craftsmanship of the goldsmith was beyond reproach.
In the later periods his design was much inferior to the happy
inspirations of the morning of art, though his technique was fairly
well maintained to the end; but in the best days of the craft, which
pretty closely correspond to the best days of the history, design and
technique were alike admirable.
Anything finer in their own way than the diadems of Khnumit, the
royal crown, or the pectorals of the Lahun treasure, it is impossible
to imagine, while if the standard of the furniture in the tomb of
Tutankhamen is maintained by the jewellery, we may look for evidence
from this source that the skill of the craftsman had not degenerated in
the interval between the Middle Kingdom and the New Empire.
With regard to woodwork, the evidence of the furniture which has
been found in the tombs is conclusive both as to the skilful and
sound design of the Egyptian cabinet-maker, and as to his careful and
accurate workmanship. The chairs, the coffers, and the couches from the
tomb of Yuaa and Tuau are delightful to the eye, with their simple and
sensible lines, and suggest that they would be equally satisfactory in
use. The wonders which have been disclosed in the tomb of Tutankhamen
have already been discussed in their own place, so far as that is
possible at present, and while they reveal nothing new, save the ugly
and clumsy state couches, whose provenance has been also discussed,
they show an amount of richness in detail and material for which even
previous discoveries had scarcely prepared us.
Professor Petrie tells us that structurally the work of the Egyptian
joiner was as good as it was satisfying to the eye, and the state in
which his works have come down to us through so many centuries bears
witness to the soundness of the materials which he used, and of the
work which he put out upon them; and perhaps the carefully moderate
estimate of so great an expert is more impressive as to the quality of
Egyptian craftsmanship than the multiplication of superlatives would
be. “The powerful technical skill of Egyptian art, its good sense of
limitations, and its true feeling for harmony and expression, will
always make it of the first importance to the countries of the West
with which it was so early and so long connected.”
In sum the debt which the modern world owes to the culture of ancient
Egypt is no small one. We owe to Egypt the first book, the first
building, the first ship, the first statue, the first romance, the
first relief, and the first picture, in the modern sense, of which we
have any knowledge; and if some of these anticipations are crude and
primitive, and show but little sign of the wonderful development of
which the future was to prove them capable, yet it is only due to this
pioneer nation to remember that it is to her that we owe the seed which
has borne so manifold a harvest.
INDEX
Aahmes Nefertari, Queen, 160
Aah-hotep, Queen, 27, 156
Aashait, Princess, 99
Abbott Papyrus, 128
Abd-er-Rassoul, Ahmed, 157;
Mohamed, 158
Abu-Roash, 49, 52
Abusir, 50, 68, 69
Abydos, Temple of Sety I, 31;
Royal Tombs, 135 _et seq._
Akerblad, 14
Akhenaten, 113, 118, 168, 171, 172 _et seq._, 189
Akhetaten, 174, 190
Amélineau, 136, 140, 141
Amen, 111
Amenartas, 26
Amenemhat I, 72;
II, 73;
III, 51, 73, 81, 82
Amenhotep I, 160;
II, 100, 130,
tomb of, 165 _et seq._;
III, 116, 148, 166
Ameny, 224, 225
Amherst Papyrus, 128
Ammit, 205, 206
Amtes, Queen, 218, 221
Ankh.s.en.Amen (Ankh.s.en.pa. Aten), 174, 189, 190 _et seq._
Antefs, the, 224
Anubis, 186
Apis, 19
Archæology, methods and aims of, 35 _et seq._
Architecture, Egyptian, 243 _et seq._
Art, Egyptian, 236 _et seq._
Artisans, condition of, 231 _et seq._
Ashurbanipal, 112
Astemkheb, Queen, 130
Ay (Pharaoh), 113, 188, 191
Ayrton, Mr., 168
Balcarres, Lord, 238
Begarawiyah, 50
Belzoni, 9, 11, 12, 13, 63, 64, 105, 151–3
Benson, Miss, 118, 241
Biban el-Moluk, 148 _et seq._
Bib-khuru-Riyas (Tutankhamen), 192
Boghaz-Kyoi, 192
Book of the Dead, 151
Book of the Gates, 151
Book of Him who is in the Duat, 151
Breasted, Prof., 41, 196
Browne, Sir T., 61
Brugsch, E., 158 _et seq._
Brune, 94
Budge, Sir E. A. W., 205, 206, 209
Canopic Jars, 186
Carnarvon, Lord, 177 _et seq._
Carter, Mr. Howard, 168, 177 _et seq._
Caviglia, Capt., 63
Champollion, J. F., 13, 14, 92
Clarke, Somers, 96
Corselet of Eiorhoreru, 201
Corselet of Tutankhamen, 200
Couches, State (Tutankhamen’s), 204 _et seq._
Craftsmanship, Egyptian, 245 _et seq._
Dadefra, 49
Dahshur, 73, 77
Dakhamun (Ankh.s.en.Amen), 192
Daoud Pasha, 157–8
Davis, T. M., 168 _et seq._
Denon, V., 8, 18
Der el-Bahri, 31, 87 _et seq._;
_Cache_ of, 158 _et seq._
_Description de l’Egypte_, 8
Devilliers, 86, 91
Diodorus, 213
Drovetti, 9
Edfu, 32
Edwards, Miss A., 45–6
Elliot Smith, Prof., 163, 173
Eugenie, Empress, 29
Fan-bearer, the, 222, 233
Fayum, the, 49
Gebel Barkal (Napata), 50
Gizeh, 48, 49, 50, 52
Gourlay, Miss, 118, 241
Hall, H. R., 96
Hamed Aga, 155–6
Hasan, Sultan, 62
Hathor, shrine, Der el-Bahri, 100
Hatshepsut, Queen, 31, 78 _et seq._, 119, 120, 168
Hawara, 51, 73, 75, 76
Henhenit, Princess, 99
Hent-taui, Queen, 160
Herodotus, 7, 213, 232, 235
Hichens, R., 90
Hierakonpolis, 145
Horemheb, 118, 168, 175, 190, 199
Hunefer, Papyrus of, 206
Huy, 190, 191
Hyksos Sphinxes, 26
Hypostyle Hall, Karnak, 113
Illahun, 51, 78
Imhotep, 70
Ismail, Khedive, 29
Jewellery, Egyptian, 78, 79, 82, 142, 144
Jollois, 86, 91
Ka. amenhotep, 201
Kadashman-Enlil, 205
Kagemni, 71
Kahun, 75, 231
Karnak, temple of, 105 _et seq._;
Mariette’s work at, 31
Kauit, Princess, 99
Kemsit, Princess, 99
Keneh, Mudir of, 27, 155, 156–8
Khaemuas, the Governor, 129
Khafra, pyramid of, 53, 54
Kha-Sekhem, tomb of, 142, 145
Khenti, 139, 140
Khnemhotep, 224
Khnumit, Princess, 78, 82
Khonsu, 111;
temple of, 118
Khufu, pyramid of, 52 _et seq._
Labyrinth, the, 15, 108
Lahun, 73, 75, 80
Layard, 43, 156
Legrain, work of, at Karnak, 108, 111, 124 _et seq._
Lepsius, 14–16, 93
Lesseps, F. de, 24
Lethaby, W. R., on Egyptian Architecture, 244
Lisht, 51, 73
Loret, 165
Luxor, work of Amenhotep III at, 117
Macalister, R. A. S., 9, 16, 39, 41, 43
Maghareh, Wady, 15
Makt-aten, 189
Mamun, 62
Manetho, 137
Mannikin, the, 8, 207
March Phillipps, on Egyptian Art, 238–9
Mariette, A., 10, 17, 18, 34, 93, 156
Maspero, Sir G., 10, 23, 32, 35, 40, 41, 68, 101, 124, 157, 161, 164,
165, 168
Mastabas, 58, 71
Medinet Habu, Mariette’s work at, 31
Medum, pyramid of, 54
Memphis, 19
Mena, 45, 137, 143
Menkaura, pyramid of, 54–64, 65;
statue of, 238
Mentu, 117
Mentuemhat, Prince, 239, 241
Mentuherkhepshef, Prince, 168
Mentuhotep-neb-Hepet-Ra, 89, 96 _et seq._, 147
Merenptah, 117, 166
Merenra, 70, 221
Mereruka, 71
Meroë, 15, 50
Mertisen, 89
Meryt-Aten, 189
Moeris, Lake, 15
Morgan, J. de, 78, 165
Murray, Miss M. A., 102
Mursil II, 192
Mut, 111, 117, 118
Napata, 15, 50
Napoleon I, 7
Napoleon III, 24
Narmer, 143, 144
Naville, E. de, 31, 95 _et seq._;
102 _et seq._
Necho, 154
Nectanebo, 20
Nefer-ka-Ra, 68
Nefer-ka-ra-em-per-Amen, 129
Nekht, tomb of, 150
Nesamen, Pharaoh’s Scribe, 129
Ne-user-Ra, temple of, 69
Nezem-mut, Queen, 160
Osireion, Abydos, 31, 102 _et seq._
Osiris, 139;
bed of, 140, 141
Osiris-Apis (Serapis), 19
Paser, Governor of Thebes, 128, 129
Passalacqua, 10
Pedubast, 201
Peet, Prof. T. E., 132, 137
Pentaur, poem of, 116
Pepy I, 70, 218
Pepy II, 70
Perring, 14
Petrie, Sir W. M. F., 47, 53, 61, 66, 67, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81,
102, 108, 115, 136, 141, 145, 205, 216, 231, 247
Pewero, 128, 129
Pharaoh, conditions of rule of, 215 _et seq._
Philæ, Obelisk of, 13
Philip Arrhidæus, chapel of, at Karnak, 121
Pimay, 201
Pinezem I and II, 160
Pococke, 91
Pool of Osiris, Abydos, 102 _et seq._
Predynastic tombs, 138
Priesthood, the Egyptian, 223
Proctor, R. A., 54
Psamtek II, 154
Ptah, 19
Ptah-hetep, 71
Ptolemaic work at Karnak, 110, 113, 125
Punt, 32, 95
Pyramids, the, 48 _et seq._
Pyramid temples, 58 _et seq._
Pyramid texts, 70, 71
Quft, 161
Rainer Papyrus, 201
Ramses I, 110, 112, 113
Ramses II, 26, 40, 113, 114, 117, 160, 162, 218
Ramses III, 31, 111, 148, 160, 165, 219, 233
Ramses IV and V, 166
Ramses VI, 166, 180
Ramses IX, 128, 232
Ramses X, 129
Ramses XII, 151
Razedef, 49, 52
Rehoboam, 112
Reisner, G. A., 68
Rekhmara, 122, 150, 129
Rosellini, 14
Rosetta Stone, the, 13
Sadhe, Princess, 99
Said, Khedive, 24–7
Sallier Papyrus, 227
Saqqara, Mariette’s work at, 31;
stepped pyramid at, 70
Sat-hathor-ant, Princess, 79
“Scorpion,” the, 143
Scribes, the Egyptian, 226 _et seq._
Sebek-em-saf, 13, 130, 146
Sekhmet, 117
Semti, seal of, 145
Seneferu, pyramid of, 51, 69, 146, 199
Senmut, 89, 122, 221
Senusert I, 72
Senusert II, 51, 73, 75, 87, 231
Senusert III, 73, 125
Seqenen Ra, 160, 164, 217
Serabit el-Khadem, 15
Serapeum, Serapis, 19 _et seq._
Setna-Khaemuast, 40, 223
Sety I, 11, 113, 148, 160, 163;
tomb of, 153 _et seq._
Sety II, 113
Sheshanq, 112
Shubbiluliuma, 192
Siptah, 166, 168
Smenkhara, 188, 189
Society in Egypt, 214 _et seq._
Sphinx, temple of, 60
Strabo, 19, 102, 103, 151
Strikes of workmen, 233, 234
Taharqa, 112
Tanutamen, 112
Tell el-Amarna, 174;
tablets, 178;
art of, 197
Temples, Der el-Bahri, 86, 87 _et seq._;
Karnak, 105 _et seq._
Teti, 70
Thothmes I, 119
Thothmes II, 119, 160
Thothmes III, 26, 100, 119, 120, 121, 122, 125, 160, 218
Thothmes IV, 166, 168
Throne of Tutankhamen, 196
Ti, 71
Tiy, Queen, 168, 171, 173, 174
Tuau, 168 _et seq._
Tutankhamen, 36, 113, 175, 177 _et seq._;
reign of, 188
Tutankhaten, 174
Umm el-Ga’ab, 140
Una, 218, 221
Unas, 70
Valley of the Kings, 148 _et seq._
Vizier, duties of, 219–221
Vyse, Col. H., 14, 64, 65
Weigall, 168, 172
Westcar Papyrus, 199
Wilkinson, 92
Young, 14
Yuaa, tomb of, 168 _et seq._
Zawiyet el-Aryan, 68
Zazamankh, 199
Zer, King, 142, 144, 145
Zeser, pyramid of, 51, 70, 146
THE END
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
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