On the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Assiout,
the traveller from Cairo to Assouan passes a line of mounds which are
known by the name of Tel el-Amarna. _Tel_ is the name given to the
artificial mounds which cover the remains of ancient cities, while
_el-Amarna_ denotes the Bedouin tribe of Beni-Amran whose descendants
inhabit the district in which the line of mounds is found. Between the
mounds and the Nile is a fertile strip of bank, green with corn in the
winter and spring, and shaded with groves of lofty palms. On the other
side of them is a tawny desert plain, shut in by an amphitheatre of hills.
The limestone cliffs of the latter are broken in three places, where
ravines lead through them to the Arabian plateau beyond. The central
ravine is short and rugged; that to the north, however, though its lofty
walls of rock seem at times almost to meet, eventually carries the
explorer by a slow ascent into the heart of the Arabian desert. About
three miles from its mouth, and in a side-valley, the tomb has lately been
discovered of the founder of the city, of which the mounds of Tel
el-Amarna are now the sole representatives. The tomb is worthy of the
monarch for whom it was intended. In the distant solitude of the desert
gorge, it is cut deep into the solid rock. Steps first convey the visitor
downwards to the huge door of the sepulchre. Within is a broad sloping
passage, to the right of which are the sculptured chambers in which the
body of one of the Pharaoh’s daughters once rested, while at the end of it
is a vast columned hall, within which the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh
himself was placed.
The Pharaoh had been named by his father, Amenôphis III., after himself,
but Amenôphis IV. had not long mounted the throne before he gave himself a
new name, and was henceforth known as Khu-n-Aten, “the Glory of the Solar
Disk.” The change of name was the outward sign and token of a religious
revolution. The king publicly renounced the ancient religion of Egypt, of
which he was the official representative, and declared himself a convert
to an Asiatic form of faith. The very name of Amon, the supreme god of
Thebes and of the royal family to which Khu-n-Aten belonged, was
proscribed, and erased from the monuments wherever it occurred. In the
temples and tombs and quarries alike it was defaced; even the name of the
king’s own father, which contained it, was not spared. When the arm of the
persecutor was thus extended to the written and sculptured monument, we
cannot suppose that the adherents of the ancient cult would be treated
with a gentle hand.
It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes
were at open war. But the priesthood proved too strong for the king. He
quitted the capital of his fathers and built himself a new city farther
north. It is the site of this city which is now covered by the mounds of
Tel el-Amarna.
Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose
ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the
most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. The walls and columns were
inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned
with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may
judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the
highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn
with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the
nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before
Christ.
The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it
were the houses of the nobles and officers of the court. They too
reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their
walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of
every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which
the documents of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the
foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with
the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of
foreign states.
In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk,
the new object of the Pharaoh’s adoration. Though the name was Egyptian,
the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to
whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-god,
whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-god who
was not only supreme over all other gods; they were absorbed into him, and
existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus
that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-god, is addressed by the Pharaoh’s
queen: “Thou disk of the Sun, thou living god, there is none other beside
thee! Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all
things!” One of Khu-n-Aten’s officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in
similar terms: “Thou, O god, who in truth art the living one, standest
before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which
formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being
through the word of thy mouth.”
The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the worship of Baal with the
philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the worship of the
Egyptian Sun-god, Ra, at Heliopolis. The worship of Baal had lost its
grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism
was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one god to whom
adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The
personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the
Aten worship of Egypt.
Along with the new religion came a new style of art. Asiatic artists and
workmen manufactured the variegated glass and bright-coloured porcelain of
Tel el-Amarna, or discarded the conventionalism of Egyptian art in their
delineation of animal and vegetable life, while architecture branched out
in new directions, and the sculptor exaggerated the peculiarities of the
king’s personal appearance. Every effort, in fact, was made to break away
from the past, and from the mannerisms and traditions of Egyptian art.
That art had been closely associated with the ancient religion of the
country, and with the change of religion came a change in all things else.
The causes of the change can now in great measure be traced. To some
extent it was due to the character of the king himself. A plaster cast of
his face, taken immediately after death, has been found by Professor
Petrie, and is an eloquent witness of what the man himself was like. It is
the face of a philosopher and a mystic, of one whose interest lay rather
in the problems of religious belief than in the affairs of state. In
studying it we feel that the man to whom it belonged was destined to be a
religious reformer.
But this destiny was assisted by the training and education which
Khu-n-Aten had received. His mother, Teie, bore a foremost part in the
introduction of the cult of Aten. She must have been a woman of strong
character, and her influence over her son must also have been great. If,
as is probable, Khu-n-Aten was very young when he ascended the throne, the
religious reform he endeavoured to effect must have been in great measure
his mother’s work. That she had aroused deep feelings of hatred among the
adherents of the older creed may be gathered from the condition of
Khu-n-Aten’s tomb. Though the body of the Pharaoh was despoiled, and the
sarcophagus in which it rested shattered into fragments, they had
nevertheless been deposited in the sepulchre that had been constructed to
receive them. But no trace of the queen-mother’s mummy has been met with,
and the corridor in the royal tomb, which seems to have been excavated for
her, has never been finished, any more than the two or three tombs which
were cut in the immediate neighbourhood. After the death of her son, Queen
Teie seems to have found no protector from the vengeance of her enemies.
It is probable that Teie was of Asiatic birth, though no certain proof of
it has yet been found. Her husband, Amenôphis III., was fond of connecting
himself by marriage with the royal houses of Asia, and more than one of
the wives who occupied a secondary rank in the Pharaoh’s household were of
Asiatic extraction. His own mother had been an Asiatic princess, the
daughter of the king of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament.
From Mitanni also had come two of his own wives, as well as the wife of
his son and successor, Amenôphis IV. (Khu-n-Aten).
There is little room for wonder that, with their Asiatic proclivities and
half-Asiatic descent, the later Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty should
have surrounded themselves with Asiatic officials and courtiers. The
conquest of Western Asia by Thothmes III. had brought Asiatic fashions
into Egypt. Thothmes himself, on the walls of his temple at Karnak, shows
the spirit of an Asiatic rather than of an Egyptian conqueror. The
inscriptions engraved upon them differ wholly from those which usually
adorn the walls of an Egyptian temple. There are no praises or lists of
the gods, no description of the offerings made to them, no interminable
catalogue of the empty titles of the Pharaoh; we have, on the contrary, a
business-like account of his campaigns, much of it copied from the
memoranda of the scribes who accompanied the army on its march. It reads
like an inscription on the walls of an Assyrian palace rather than one
belonging to an Egyptian temple. It is, in fact, unique, the solitary
example of a historical text which the great monuments of Egypt have
bequeathed to us. It is, of itself, an eloquent testimony to the influence
which Asia had already acquired in the valley of the Nile.
The conquests of Thothmes III. placed the northern boundary of the
Egyptian empire at the banks of the Euphrates. The kingdoms to the east,
including Assyria, offered tribute to the Egyptian monarch, and those of
northern Syria and eastern Asia Minor paid him homage. Farther south,
Palestine, Phœnicia, and the land of the Amorites, which lay to the north
of Palestine, became Egyptian provinces, garrisoned by Egyptian troops and
administered by Egyptian officers. Even the country beyond the Jordan,
Bashan and the Haurân, formed part of the Egyptian empire.
In many cases the native princes were left to manage the affairs of their
several states, like the protected princes of modern India, but they were
controlled by “commissioners” sent from the valley of the Nile. More
frequently their place was taken by Egyptian governors, a very
considerable number of whom, however, were of Canaanitish descent. This,
indeed, is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the Egyptian
empire in Asia; it was governed for the Pharaoh by natives rather than by
Egyptians. But this was not all. Under Khu-n-Aten Egypt itself was invaded
by the Asiatic stranger. The high places about the court were filled with
foreigners whose names proclaim their Canaanitish origin; even the Vizier
was called Dudu, the Biblical Dodo, to which the name of David is akin.
The adherents of the cult of Aten who gathered round the Pharaoh at Tel
el-Amarna seem largely to have belonged to Asia instead of Egypt.
Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The
language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of
the same country. The Babylonian script and language were used from the
banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium
of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an
Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the
reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office.
The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to
explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to
the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became
a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of
Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian
cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element
in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the
expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be
employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western
Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script.
All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of
Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which
adjoined the royal palace, the _fellahin_ found a collection of clay
tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned
out to be the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When
Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and
to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself
received.
Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on
the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of
deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before
they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British
Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses
56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.
The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the
past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common
medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the
century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more
startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era.
Letters passed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling
subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court
of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin
chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the
Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal;
the vassal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him
against his personal enemies; the governors of Phœnicia and the land of
the Amorites describe the threatening attitude of the Hittites in the
north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his
relationship to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of
Assyria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it
is as plentiful as “the dust,” or discuss questions of international
policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much
like our own;—a world in which education is widely spread, where schools
and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist.
The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate
that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily
difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no assistance was
afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and
external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted
merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the
Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely
large, and each character not only represented more than one phonetic
value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus
the same character may not only represent the phonetic values _kur_,
_mat_, _nat_, _lat_, _sat_, and _gin_; it may also denote the ideas of
“country,” “mountain,” and “conquest.” But this was not all. The original
picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been
invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldæa, from whom it
had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors.
Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in
Sumerian—the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldæa—were taken over by
the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course,
with a totally different pronunciation. In Sumerian, for example,
_mer-sig_ signified “trousers,” but though the two characters _mer_ and
_sig_ continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the
word, the pronunciation attached to them was _sarbillu_, the modern Arabic
_shirwâl_.
The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all
thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of
Chaldæa. It was far more necessary in his case than a knowledge of Latin
would be in our own. Moreover, it was necessary for him to learn the
various forms which the same cuneiform character assumed in different
countries or at different periods in the same country. These various forms
were very numerous, and they often differed more than black letter differs
from ordinary modern type.
The fact, then, that the cuneiform syllabary was studied and used from the
banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile, brings with it the further
fact that throughout this area there must have been numerous schools and
teachers. Time and persevering labour were needed for its acquisition,
while a knowledge of the Babylonian language which accompanied its study
could not have been obtained without the help of teachers. It is
accordingly a matter of no small astonishment that the letters received at
the Egyptian foreign office were written, not only by professional
scribes, but also by officials and soldiers.
Naturally the study of the foreign syllabary and language was facilitated
in every possible way. In his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, Professor
Flinders Petrie has discovered fragments of lists of cuneiform characters,
as well as of comparative dictionaries of Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian.
Moreover, a Babylonian mythological text has been found, in which the
words have been divided from one another by dots of red paint, in order to
assist the learner in making his way through the legend.
This mythological text is not the only one which has been met with among
the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The existence of such texts is a proof that
the literature of Babylonia, as well as its language and script, was
carried to the West. From very remote times public libraries, consisting
for the most part of clay-books, were to be found in the Babylonian and
Assyrian cities, and when Babylonian culture made its way to the West,
similar libraries must have sprung up there also. The revelations made to
us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna show that these libraries, like those
of Babylonia, were stocked with books written upon clay, many of which
contained copies of Babylonian legends and myths.
One of the mythological tales discovered at Tel el-Amarna is the latter
portion of a story which described the creation of the first man, Adapa or
Adama, and the introduction of death into the world. Adapa had broken the
wings of the south wind, and was accordingly ordered to appear before Anu,
the lord of the sky. There he refused to touch the food and water of
“death” that were offered him, and when subsequently the heart of Anu was
“softened” towards him, he refused also the food and water of “life.”
Whereupon “Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: ‘O
Adapa, wherefore eatest thou not? wherefore drinkest thou not? The gift of
life cannot now be thine.’ ”
The beginning of the story has been in the British Museum many years. It
is a fragment of a copy of the myth which was made for the library of
Nineveh some eight centuries after the rest of the story, which has now
been disinterred on the banks of the Nile, had been buried under the ruins
of Khu-n-Aten’s city. I copied it nearly twenty years ago, but had to wait
for the discovery of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna before ascertaining its
true meaning and significance. Nineveh and Tel el-Amarna had to unite in
the restoration of the old Babylonian myth.
Canaan was the country in which the two streams of Babylonian and Egyptian
culture met together, and we now know that Canaan was the centre of that
literary activity which the Tel el-Amarna tablets have revealed to us.
Canaan, in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, was emphatically the land of
scribes and letter-writers. If libraries existed anywhere in Western Asia,
they would surely have done so in the cities of Canaan.
One of these cities, Kirjath-Sepher, or “Book-town,” is mentioned in the
Old Testament. It was also called Kirjath-Sannah, or “City of
Instruction,” doubtless from the school which was attached to its library.
The site of it is unfortunately lost; should it ever be recovered, we may
expect to find beneath it literary treasures similar to those which the
mounds of Assyria and Babylonia have yielded. Perhaps some day the papyri
of Egypt will tell us where exactly to look for it.
A reference to it has already been met with. In the time of Ramses II., an
Egyptian scribe composed an ironical account of the adventures of a
military officer in Palestine. The officer in question was called a Mohar,
a word borrowed from the Babylonians, in whose language it signified “an
envoy.”
The Egyptian work is consequently usually known as _The Travels of a
Mohar_, and it gives us an interesting picture of Canaan shortly before
the Israelitish Exodus. The author was clearly very proud of his
geographical knowledge, and has therefore introduced the names of a large
number of places. In one passage he asks: “Hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab
together with Beth-Sopher? Dost thou not know Adullam and Zidiputha?” Dr.
W. Max Müller, to whom the correct reading of the passage is due, points
out that the scribe has interchanged the words Kirjath, “city,” and Beth,
“house,” and that he ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher.
That he was acquainted, however, with the meaning of the Canaanitish word
Sopher (in Egyptian Thupar) is shown by his adding to it the determinative
of “writing.” _Sopher_, in fact, means “scribe,” just as _sepher_ means
“book,” and indicates the fact that Kirjath-Sepher was not only a town of
books, but of book-writers as well. It will be remembered that Beth-Anab,
“the house of grapes,” in the abbreviated form of Anab, is associated with
Kirjath-Sepher in the Old Testament (Josh. xi. 21; xv. 49, 50), just as it
is in the Egyptian papyrus.
In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we have a picture of Canaan in the century
which preceded the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. As we have seen,
it was at that time an Egyptian province. We can thus understand why, in
the tenth chapter of Genesis, Canaan is made a brother of Mizraim, or
Egypt. For a while it obeyed the same sovereign and was administered by
the same laws; the natives of Canaan held office in the court of the
Pharaoh, and Egyptian governors ruled in the Canaanitish cities. It was
not until after the death of Ramses II., of the nineteenth dynasty, and
about the very time when the Israelites were escaping from their house of
bondage, that Canaan ceased to be an Egyptian dependency. From that time
forward it was politically and geographically severed from the valley of
the Nile, and the geographer could never again couple it with the land of
Egypt.
When Khu-n-Aten was Pharaoh, the cities of Canaan were numerous and
wealthy. The people were highly cultured, and excelled especially as
workers in gold and silver, as manufacturers of porcelain and
vari-coloured glass, and as weavers of richly-dyed linen. Their merchants
already traded to distant parts of the known world. The governors
appointed by the Pharaoh were for the most part of native origin, and at
times a representative of the old line of kings was left among them,
though an Egyptian prefect was often placed at his side. The governors
were controlled by the presence of Egyptian garrisons, as well as by the
visits of an Egyptian “commissioner.” Their rivalries and quarrels form
the subject of many of the letters which have been found at Tel el-Amarna,
both sides appealing to the Pharaoh for protection and help, and alike
protesting their loyalty to him. It seems to have been the part of
Egyptian policy to encourage these quarrels, or at all events to hold an
even balance between the rival governors.
As long as the power of Egypt remained intact, _these quarrels_, which
sometimes _resulted in open war_, offered no cause for alarm. Egyptian
troops could always be sent to the scene of disturbance before it could
become dangerous. But in the troublous days of Khu-n-Aten’s reign, when
Egypt itself was restless and inclined for revolt, the position of affairs
was changed. The Egyptian forces were needed at home, and the Pharaoh was
compelled to turn a deaf ear to the piteous appeals that were made to him
for assistance. The enemies of Egyptian rule began to multiply and grow
powerful. In the south the Khabiri or “Confederates” threatened the
Egyptian domination; in the north, Amorite rebels intrigued with the
Hittites and with the kings of Naharaim and Babylonia, while in all parts
of Palestine the Sute or Bedouin were perpetually on the watch to take
advantage of the weakness of the government.
It was the vassal-king of Jerusalem, Ebed-tob by name, who was especially
menaced by the Khabiri. In his letters he describes himself as unlike the
other governors, in that he had been appointed to his office by the “arm”
or “oracle” of “the Mighty King,” the supreme deity of his city. It was
not from his father or his mother, consequently, that he had derived his
royal dignity. He was, in fact, a priest-king, like his predecessor
Melchizedek, to whom Abram had paid tithes. Ebed-tob, however, was unable
to make head against his enemies the Khabiri. One by one the towns which
were included in the territory of Jerusalem, from Keilah and Gath-Karmel
to Rabbah, fell into their hands; the Pharaoh was unable to send him the
help for which he so earnestly begged, and we finally hear of his having
fallen into the hands of his Bedouin enemy, Labai, along with the cities
of which he was in charge. Labai was in alliance with a certain Malchiel,
who also writes letters to the Egyptian monarch, as well as with Tagi of
Gath and the Khabiri. The latter seem to have given the name of Hebron,
“the Confederacy,” to the old city of Kirjath-Arba.
Megiddo was the seat of an Egyptian governor, like Gaza, near Shechem. The
name of Shechem has not been found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, but a
reference is made to its “mountain,” in the _Travels of a Mohar_. Either
Mount Ebal or Mount Gerizim must consequently have been already well known
in Egypt. Another Egyptian governor was in command of Phœnicia. Gebal,
north of Beyrût, was his chief residence, but he had palaces also at Tyre
and Zemar, in the mountains of the interior. In one of his letters he
alludes to the wealth of Tyre, which must therefore have been already
famous.
Phœnicia and Palestine are alike included under the name of “Canaan” in
the cuneiform documents, though in the hieroglyphic records they are
called Zahi and Khal (or Khar). North of Palestine came “the land of the
Amorites,” of which Ebed-Asherah and his son, Aziru or Ezer, were
governors, and to the east of the Jordan was “the field of Bashan.” The
Egyptian supremacy was acknowledged as far south as the frontier of Edom;
the latter country preserved its independence.
Such was the condition of Canaan when the cuneiform correspondence of Tel
el-Amarna comes suddenly to an end. The death of Khu-n-Aten had been the
signal for a revolt against the faith which he had endeavoured to impose
upon Egypt, as well as against the Asiatic influences by which he had been
surrounded. He left daughters only behind him. One of them was married to
a prince who, in order to secure the throne, was forced to return to the
old religion of the country, and to call himself by the name of
Tutânkh-Amon. But his reign was short, like those of one or two other
relations and followers of Khu-n-Aten who have left traces of themselves
upon the monuments. A rival king, Ai by name, held possession of Egypt for
a while, and after his death Hor-m-hib, the Armais of Manetho, ruled once
more at Thebes over a united Egypt, and the worship of the solar disk was
at end.
But the ruins of Tel el-Amarna show that the restoration of the old creed
and the overthrow of Khu-n-Aten’s adherents had not been without a
struggle. Most of the tombs in the cliffs and sandhills which surround the
old city have been unfinished: the followers of the new cult for whom they
were intended have never been allowed to occupy them. The royal sepulchre
itself, as we have seen, is in an equally unfinished condition, and the
sarcophagus in which the body of the king rested was violated soon after
his mummy had been placed in it. Indeed, it had never been deposited in
the niche that had been cut to receive it; its shattered fragments were
discovered far away on the floor of the great columned hall. The capital
of the “heretic king” was destroyed by its enemies soon after his death,
and never inhabited again. The ruins of its palace and houses were full of
broken statues and other objects which their owners had no time to carry
away. The city lasted only for about thirty years, and the sands of the
desert then began to close over its fallen greatness. How sudden and
complete must have been its overthrow is proved by the cuneiform tablets;
not only were these imperial archives not carried elsewhere, the
correspondence contained in them breaks off suddenly with a half-told tale
of disaster and dismay. The Asiatic empire of Egypt is falling to pieces,
its enemies are enclosing it on every side; the Hittites have robbed it of
its northern provinces, and revolt is shaking it from within. The
governors and vassals of the Pharaoh send more and more urgent requests
for instant aid: “If troops come this year, then there will remain both
provinces and governors to the king, my lord; but if no troops come, no
provinces or governors will remain.” But no answer was returned to these
pressing appeals, and the sudden cessation of the correspondence under the
ruins of the Egyptian foreign office itself gives us the reason why.
One of the first acts of Hor-m-hib after the settlement of affairs at home
was to chastise the Asiatics, who had doubtless taken advantage of the
momentary weakness of Egypt. With the death of Hor-m-hib, after a reign of
five years,(7) the eighteenth dynasty came to an end. Ramses I., the
founder of the nineteenth dynasty, introduced a new type of royal name,
and also, as we learn from the monuments, a new type of royal face. After
a short reign of two years, he was succeeded by his son, Seti I., in whose
name we have an evidence that the proscribed worship of the god Set—the
god of the Delta—was again taken under royal patronage. It was an
indication that the new dynasty traced its descent from northern Egypt.
Seti I. once more led the Egyptian armies to victory in Asia. With the
spoils of conquest temples were built and decorated, and the names of
conquered nations engraved upon their walls. One of these temples was at
Abydos, the most beautiful of all those which have been left to us in
Egypt. But Seti’s fame as a builder was far eclipsed by that of his son
and successor, Ramses II., and even the temples which he had raised at
Abydos and Qurnah were completed, and to a certain extent appropriated, by
his better-known son.
We are told in the Book of Exodus that two of the “treasure cities” which
the Israelites built for the Pharaoh of the Oppression were “Pithom and
Raamses.” The discovery of Pithom was, as we have already seen, the
inaugural work of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The discovery, as has been
already stated, was made by Dr. Naville, who was led to the site by
certain monuments of Ramses II., which had been found there by the French
engineers of M. de Lesseps. These monuments consisted of a great tablet
and monolith of red granite, two sphinxes of exquisitely polished black
granite, and a broken shrine of red sandstone which had been transported
to Ismailîyeh, where they formed the chief ornament of the little public
garden. As they all showed that Tum, the setting sun, was the supreme
deity of the place from which they had come, Dr. Naville concluded that it
would prove to be Pi-Tum, “the abode of Tum,” the Pithom of Scripture, and
not the companion city of Raamses, as Lepsius had believed.
The mounds from which the monuments had been disinterred are about twelve
miles to the west of Ismailîyeh, and are called Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the
Mound of the Image.” In the last century, however, they were known as Abu
Kêshêd, and were famous for a half-buried monolith of granite representing
Ramses II. seated between Tum and Râ, the hieroglyphic inscription on the
back of which has been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson. The canal made
by the Pharaohs for uniting the Nile with the Red Sea, and afterwards
cleared of the sand that choked it by Darius, by Trajan, and by the Arab
conqueror ’Amru, skirted the southern side of the mounds. At present the
modern Freshwater Canal runs along their northern edge, to the north of
which again is the line of the railway from Cairo to Suez. The
fortifications erected by Arabi, however, hide the site of the old city
from the traveller in the train.
Dr. Naville’s excavations proved him to have been right in identifying Tel
el-Maskhuteh with Pithom. The inscriptions he found there showed that its
ancient name was Pi-Tum, and that it stood in the district of Thukut, the
Succoth of the Old Testament. The name of this district was already known
from papyri of the age of the nineteenth dynasty, and Dr. Brugsch had
pointed out its identity with the Biblical Succoth.
But the discovery of the ancient name was not the only result of the
explorer’s work. It turned out that the city had been built by Ramses II.,
and that it contained a number of large brick buildings which seem to have
been intended for magazines. Here, then, at last was a proof that the
Egyptologists were correct in making Ramses II. the Pharaoh of the
Oppression.
The site of Raamses or Ramses, the companion city of Pithom, has still to
be discovered. But it cannot be far distant from Tel el-Maskhuteh, and,
like the latter, must have been in that land of Goshen in which the
Israelites were settled. The discoveries which enabled Dr. Naville to
determine the boundaries of the land of Goshen and to fix the site of its
ancient capital have already been described. The site of Zoan, the modern
Sân, had long been known, and the excavations, first of Mariette Pasha and
then of Professor Flinders Petrie, have laid bare the foundations of its
temple and brought to light the monuments of the kings who enriched and
adorned it. Built originally in the age of the Old Empire, it was restored
by the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and became under them a centre of
influence and power.
Goshen, Zoan and Pithom, the sites around which the early history of
Israel gathered, have thus been brought to light. The disputes which have
raged about them are at last ended. Here and there a persistent sceptic,
who has been reared in the traditions of the past, may still express
doubts concerning the discoveries of recent years, but for the
Egyptologist and the archæologist the question has been finally settled.
We can visit “the field of Zoan” and explore the mounds of Pithom with no
misgivings as to their identity. When the train carries us from Ismailîyeh
to Cairo, we may feel assured that we are passing through the district in
which Jacob and his family were settled, and where the kinsfolk of Moses
had their homes. The Egypt of the patriarchs and the Exodus was an Egypt
narrow in compass and easily traversed in these days of steam; it
represented the western part of the Delta, more especially the strip of
cultivable land which stretches along the banks of the Freshwater Canal
from Zagazig to Ismailîyeh: that is all. The eastern and northern Delta,
Upper Egypt—even the district in which Cairo now stands—lay outside it.
The history which attaches itself to them is not the history of the early
Israelites.