From Coptic Christianity, just preparing to confront twelve centuries of
Mohammedan persecution, we must now turn back to Pagan Greece. The Persian
wars have breathed a new life into Greece and its colonies, and given them
a feeling of unity such as they never possessed before. Athens has taken
its place as leader not only in art and literature, but also in war, and
under the shelter of her name the Ionians of Asia Minor have ventured to
defy their Persian lord, and the Ionic dialect has ceased to be an object
of contempt. The Greek, always restless and curious to see and hear “some
new thing,” is now beginning to indulge his tastes at leisure, and to
visit as a tourist the foreign shores of the Mediterranean. Art has leaped
at a single bound to its perfection in the sculptures of Pheidias; poetry
has become divine in the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles, and history
is preparing to take part in the general development. The modern world of
Europe is already born.
The founder of literary history—of history, that is to say, which aims at
literary form and interest—was Herodotos of Halikarnassos. If Greek
tradition may be trusted, his uncle had been put to death by Lygdamis, the
despot of the city, and the subsequent expulsion of the tyrant was in some
measure due to the political zeal of the future historian. Herodotos was
wealthy and well educated, as fond of travel as the majority of his
countrymen, and not behind them in curiosity and vanity. He had cultivated
the literary dialect of Ionia, perhaps during his stay in Samos, and had
made good use there of the library of Polykratês, the friend and
correspondent of Amasis. What other libraries he may have consulted we do
not know, but his history shows that he had a considerable acquaintance
with the works of his predecessors, whom he desired to eclipse and
supersede. Hekatæus of Miletus, who had travelled in Egypt as far south as
Thebes, if not Assuan, and had written a full account of the country, its
people and its history, Xanthus, the Lydian, who had compiled the annals
of his native land, beside numberless other authors, historians and
geographers, poets and dramatists, philosophers and physicists, had been
made to contribute to his work. Now and again he refers to the older
historians when he wishes to correct or contradict them; more frequently
he silently incorporates their statements and words without mentioning
them by name. It was thus, we are told by Porphyry, that he “stole” the
accounts given by Hekatæus of the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the
phœnix, and the incorrectness of his description of that marvellous bird,
which, like Hekatæus, he likens to an eagle, proves that the charge is
correct. Reviewers did not exist in his days, nor were marks of quotation
or even footnotes as yet invented, and Herodotos might therefore plead
that, although he quoted freely without acknowledgment, he was not in any
real sense a plagiarist. He only acted like other Greek writers of his
time, and if his plagiarisms exceeded theirs it was only because he had
read more and made a more diligent use of his note-book.
It is we, and not the Greek world for which he wrote, who are the
sufferers. It is frequently difficult, if not impossible, for us to tell
whether Herodotos is speaking from his own experience or quoting from
others, whose trustworthiness is doubtful or whose statements may have
been misunderstood. From time to time internal evidence assures us that we
are dealing, not with Herodotos himself, but with some other writer whose
remarks he has embodied. His commentators have continually argued on the
supposition that, wherever the first person is used, it is Herodotos
himself who is speaking. Statements of his accordingly have been declared
to be true, in spite of the contrary evidence of oriental research,
because, it is urged, he is a trustworthy witness and has reported
honestly what he heard and saw. But if he did not hear and see the
supposed facts, the case is altered and the argument falls to the ground.
Herodotos took part in the foundation of the colony of Thurii in southern
Italy in B.C. 445, and there, rather than at the Olympic festival, as
later legend believed, he read to the assembled Greeks the whole or a part
of his history. His travels in Egypt, therefore, must have already taken
place. Their approximate date, indeed, is fixed by what he tells us about
the battlefield of Paprêmis (iii. 12).
At Paprêmis, for the first time, an Egyptian army defeated the Persian
forces. Its leader was Inarôs the Libyan, and doubtless a large body of
Libyans was enrolled in it. Along with Amyrtæos he had led the Egyptians
to revolt in the fifth year of the reign of Artaxerxes I. (B.C. 460).
Akhæmenes, the satrap of Egypt, was routed and slain, and for six years
Egypt maintained a precarious freedom. The fortresses at Memphis and
Pelusium, however, remained in the hands of the Persians, and in spite of
all the efforts of the Egyptians, they could not be dislodged. Greek aid
accordingly was sought, and the Athenians, still at war with Persia, sent
two hundred ships from Cyprus to the help of the insurgents. The ships
sailed up the Nile as far as Memphis, where the Persian garrison still
held out.
All attempts to oust it proved unavailing, and the approach of a great
Persian army under Megabyzos obliged the Greeks to retreat to the island
of Prosopites. Here they were blockaded for a year and a half; then the
besiegers turned the river aside and marched over its dry bed against the
camp of the allies, which they took by storm. The Greek expedition was
annihilated, and Inarôs fell into the hands of his enemies, who sent him
to Persia and there impaled him. Amyrtæos, however, still maintained
himself in the marshes of the Delta, and in B.C. 449 Kimon sent sixty
ships of the Athenian fleet to assist him in the struggle. But before they
could reach the coast of Egypt news arrived of the death of Kimon, and the
ships returned home. Four years later, if we may trust Philokhorus,
another Egyptian prince, Psammetikhos, who seems to have succeeded
Amyrtæos, sent 72,000 bushels of wheat to Athens in the hope of buying
therewith Athenian help. But it does not appear to have been given, and
Egypt once more sullenly obeyed the Persian rule. We learn from Herodotos
(iii. 15) that “the great king” even allowed Thannyras and Pausiris, the
sons of his inveterate enemies Inarôs and Amyrtæos, to succeed to the
principalities of their fathers.
Paprêmis was visited by Herodotos, and he saw there the sham fight between
the priests at the door of the temple on the occasion of their chief
festival. He also went to the site of the battle-field, and there beheld
“a great marvel.” The skeletons of the combatants lay on separate sides of
the field just as they had fallen, and whereas the skulls of the Persians
were so thin that they could be shattered by a pebble, those of the
Egyptians were thick and strong enough to resist being battered with a
stone. The cause of this difference was explained to him by the dragoman:
the Egyptians shaved their heads from childhood and so hardened the bones
of it against the sun, while the Persians shaded their heads by constantly
wearing caps of thick felt.
Not many years could have elapsed since the battle had occurred. The visit
of the Greek traveller to the scene of it may therefore be laid between
B.C. 455 and 450. The patriots of Egypt must have been still struggling
for their liberty among the marshes of the northern Delta.
But the rebellion must have been practically crushed. No Greek could have
ventured into Persian territory while his countrymen were fighting against
its Persian masters. The army of Megabyzos must have done its work, and
the Athenian fleet been utterly destroyed. Moreover, it is evident that
when Herodotos entered the valley of the Nile the country was at peace.
His references to the war are to a past event, and when he speaks of
Inarôs and Amyrtæos it is of men who have ceased to be a danger to the
foreign government. The passage, indeed, in which he notices the peaceable
appointment of their sons to the principalities of their fathers may have
been inserted after his return to Greek lands, but this makes no
difference as to the main fact. When he came to Egypt it had again lapsed
into tranquil submission to the Persian power.
In B.C. 450, Kimon, the son of Miltiades, had destroyed the naval power of
Persia, and in the following year Megabyzos was overthrown at Salamis. It
was then that the “peace of Kimon” is said to have been concluded between
Athens and the Persian king, which put an end to the long Persian war,
freed the Greek cities of Asia, and made the Mediterranean a Greek sea.
The reality of the peace has been doubted, because there is no allusion to
it in the pages of Thucydides, and it may be that it was never formally
drawn up. But the fact embodied by the story remains: for many years to
come there was truce between Greece and Persia, and the independence of
the Greek colonies in Asia Minor was acknowledged at the Persian court.
The year 449 marks the final triumph of Athens and the beginning of
Persian decline.
Had Herodotos travelled in Egypt a year or two later, the ease and
security with which he did so would be readily explained. But in this case
we should be brought too near the time when his history was finished and
he himself was a resident in Italy. We must therefore believe that he was
there before the final blow had been struck at Persian supremacy in the
Mediterranean, but when the Athenian invasion of Egypt was already a thing
of the past, and the unarmed trader and tourist were once more able to
move freely about.
For more than half a century Egypt had been closed to Greek curiosity.
There had been an earlier period, when the Delta at least had been
well-known to the Hellenic world. The Pharos of the future Alexandria is
already mentioned by Homer (_Od._ iv. 355); it was there, “in front of
Egypt,” that Menelaos moored his ships and forced “Egyptian Prôteus” to
declare to him his homeward road. Even “Egyptian Thebes,” with its hundred
temple-gates, is known both to the _Iliad_ (ix. 381) and to the _Odyssey_
(iv. 126), and the Pharaoh Polybos dwelt there when Alkandra, his wife,
loaded Menelaos with gifts. Greek mercenaries enabled Psammetikhos to
shake off the yoke of Assyria, and Greek traders made Naukratis and Daphnæ
wealthy centres of commerce. Solon visited Egypt while Athens was putting
into practice the laws he had promulgated, and there he heard from the
priest of Sais that, by the side of the unnumbered centuries of Egyptian
culture, the Greeks were but children and their wisdom but the growth of
to-day. Before the Ionic revolt had broken out, while Ionia and Egypt were
still sister provinces of the same Persian empire, Hekatæos of Miletus had
travelled through the valley of the Nile, enjoying advantages for
information which no Greek could possess again till Egypt had become a
Macedonian conquest, and embodying his knowledge and experiences in a
lengthy book.
But the Persian wars had put an end to all this peaceful intercourse
between Greece and the old land of the Pharaohs, and the Karian dragomen
who had made their living by acting as interpreters between the Greeks and
the Egyptians were forced to turn to other work. At length, however, Egypt
was once more open to visitors, and once more, therefore, visitors came
from Greece. Anaxagoras, the philosopher and friend of Periklês, was among
the first to arrive and to investigate the causes of the rise and fall of
the Nile. Hellanikos the historian, too, the older contemporary of
Herodotos, seems to have travelled in Egypt, though doubt has been cast on
the authenticity of the works in which he is supposed to have recorded his
experiences of Egyptian travel. At any rate, Herodotos found a public
fresh and eager to hear what he had to tell them about the dwellers on the
Nile.
Herodotos must have reached Egypt in the summer. When he arrived, the
whole of the Delta was under water. He describes with the vividness of an
eye-witness how its towns appeared above the surface of the water, like
the islands in the Ægean, and how the traveller could sail, not along the
river, but across the plain. At the time of the inundation, he says, all
Egypt “becomes a sea, above which the villages alone show themselves.” The
voyage from Naukratis to Memphis was direct and rapid, and the tourists in
making it passed by the pyramids instead of the apex of the Delta.
In northern Egypt the rise of the Nile begins to be perceptible during the
first few days of July. Criers go about the streets of Cairo announcing
each day how high it has risen, and in the first or second week of August
the ceremony of cutting the Khalîg or Canal of Cairo, and therewith
declaring that the Nile was once more flooding its banks, used to be
observed with great rejoicings. It is, in fact, in August that the land is
first covered with the flood. For another month the height of the water
continues to increase, and then for a short while to remain stationary.
But towards the end of October, when the canals of Upper Egypt are
emptied, there is again another rise, soon followed by a rapid fall. If
the Delta was like a sea when Herodotos saw it, he must have been there
between the beginning of July and the end of October.
These are the limits of the time which he could have spent in the country.
That he did not remain till after the fall of the river and the drying up
of the land is evident from incidental statements in his work. Thus when
he visited the Fayyûm it was like the Delta, a sea of waters, and the
pyramids of Biahmu, which Professor Petrie’s excavations have shown to
have always stood on dry land, as they still do to-day, were seen by him
in the middle of a vast lake. Nowhere, indeed, is there any hint of his
having seen the country in its normal condition. Even his reference to
Kerkosôros, at the apex of the Delta, which every traveller to Memphis had
to pass except at the period of high Nile, is derived from “the Ionian”
writers of a previous generation, not from his own experience. Neither in
going nor in returning was his boat obliged to pass that way. We need not
be surprised, therefore, at finding that the festivals he witnessed in the
Egyptian towns were those which took place in the summer.
Herodotos had not the time to imitate the example of his predecessor
Hekatæos and visit Upper Egypt, nor, indeed, was the summer a fitting
season for doing so. Consequently, while he lavishes his admiration on the
temples and pyramids of the Delta, of Memphis and of the Fayyûm, he has
nothing to say about the still more striking temples of the south.
“Hundred-gated Thebes,” whose fame had already penetrated to the Homeric
Greeks, and whose tombs and colossi led the Greek tourists of the
Macedonian age to scribble upon them their expressions of admiration and
awe, is known to him only by name. The extravagance of his praise is
reserved for the Labyrinth; about the nobler and more majestic buildings
of the capital of Upper Egypt he is absolutely silent. Against the statues
of the Egyptian kings which Hekatæos saw at Thebes, Herodotos can bring
only a smaller number which he saw at Memphis.
The monuments even now contain evidence that, after the age of Hekatæos,
Greek sightseers did not make their way into southern Egypt until the
Macedonian conquest had made travel there easy and safe. At Abu-Simbel in
Nubia and Abydos in Upper Egypt are the records of the Greek mercenaries
of Psammetikhos and their Greek and Karian contemporaries who visited the
oracle of Abydos. But then comes a long blank in the history of Greek
writing in Egypt. With the foundation of Alexander’s empire a new epoch in
it begins. From that time forward the walls of the tombs and temples were
covered with the scrawls of innumerable Greek visitors. At Thebes the
royal tombs were especial objects of attention, and ciceroni led the
inquisitive stranger round them just as they do to-day.
But among all the mass of Greek names that have been collected from the
monuments of Upper Egypt we find neither that of Herodotos nor of any
other of his countrymen of the same age. In fact, it was not a time for
sightseeing in the southern valley of the Nile. The population were in
only half-repressed rebellion against their Persian rulers, and the whole
country swarmed with bandits. Persian authority was necessarily weaker
than in the north, and the people were more combative and had near allies
in the desert, the Bedouin and the Ethiopians. A voyage up the river was
even more dangerous than in the anarchical days of the last century:
pirates abounded, and out of reach of the Persian garrison at Memphis the
traveller carried his life in his hand. As in the time of Norden no
Egyptian bey could or would allow the traveller in Nubia to go south of
Dirr, so in the time of Herodotos the southern limit of the foreigner’s
travels was the Fayyûm. The “Egypt into which Greeks sail” was, as he
himself declares, the Egypt which lay north of the Theban nome and Lake
Mœris.
Even a visit to the Fayyûm was doubtless a bold and unusual undertaking,
and on this account Herodotos describes what he saw there at more than
ordinary length, and extols the wonders of the district at the expense of
the better-known monuments of Memphis and the Delta. But the Oasis had
suffered much from the civil troubles which had afflicted Egypt. The dykes
which kept out the inundation had been neglected, and the fertile nome was
transformed into a stagnant lake. Herodotos saw it as the French _savans_
saw it at the beginning of the present century; the embankments were
broken, and fields and roads were alike submerged.
From the walls of the capital of the province, whose mounds now lie
outside Medînet el-Fayyûm, Herodotos looked northward over a vast expanse
of water. “Nearly in the middle of it,” he tells us, “stand two pyramids,
each of them rising 304 feet above the water ... and both surmounted by
colossal stone figures seated upon a throne.” The shattered fragments of
the colossi were found by Professor Petrie in 1888, scattered round the
pyramidal pedestals, twenty-one feet high, on which they had been placed.
Cut out of hard quartzite sandstone, they represented Amon-em-hat III.,
the creator of the Fayyûm, and their discoverer calculates that they were
each thirty-five feet in height. The fragments are now at Oxford in the
Ashmolean Museum. The statues faced northward, and the court within which
they stood was surrounded by a wall with a gateway of red granite. The
pedestals still remain fairly intact, and the road by the side of which
they had been erected is still used to-day. The monuments, in fact, were
erected high above the inundation, and that Herodotos should have seen
them in the midst of the water is but a further proof of the condition of
the country at the time. The Lake Mœris he describes was not the true
Mœris of Egyptian geography; it was the Fayyûm itself buried beneath the
flood.
The total height of the colossi from the ground, according to Professor
Petrie, was about sixty feet. Between this and the 304 feet assigned to
them by the Greek traveller there is indeed a wide difference. But
Herodotos could not have seen them close at hand, and the measurement he
gives must have been a mere guess. It warns us, however, not to put
overmuch faith in his statements, even when they are the results of
personal observation. He was but a tourist, not a man of science, and he
cared more for the tales of his dragoman and novel sights than for
scientific surveying and exactitude.
Hence comes the assertion that before the time of Menes the whole country
between the sea and Lake Mœris was a marsh. Such a statement is
intelligible only if we remember that, when Herodotos sailed up the Nile,
its banks were inundated on either side. Had he seen the country south of
Memphis as the modern traveller sees it when the water is subsiding and
green fields begin to line the course of the river, he could never have
entertained the belief. But all distinction between the Delta and the rest
of Egypt was hidden from him by the waters of the inundation. That he
should have made the Fayyûm the limit of the marsh is indeed natural; it
was the limit of his exploration of Upper Egypt, and consequently he did
not know that from Memphis southward to Edfu the valley of the Nile
presents the same features.
The strange error he twice commits in imagining that there were vaults
under the pyramid of Kheops in an island formed by a canal which the
builder had introduced from the Nile is due to the same cause. Doubtless
his dragoman had told him something of the kind. A subterraneous chamber
in the rock actually exists under the great pyramid, as was discovered by
Caviglia, and there are pyramids into whose lower chambers the Nile has
long since infiltrated. Professor Maspero found his exploration of the
pyramids of Lisht, south of Dahshûr, stopped by the water which had filled
them, and Professor Petrie had the same experience in the brick pyramid of
Howâra, though here the infiltration of the water seems to have been
caused by a canal dug in Arab times. But the pyramids of Gizeh stand on a
plateau of limestone rock secure against the approach of water, and the
story reported by Herodotos is more probably the result of misapprehension
on his own part than of intentional falsehood on the part of his guides.
His ready credence of it, however, can be explained only by the condition
of the country at the time of his visit. The whole land was covered with
water, and in going to Memphis he had to sail by the pyramids themselves.
It was in a boat that his visit to them must have been made; and it was
easy, therefore, to believe that a canal ran from the water on which he
sailed through the tunnelled rock whereon they stood. He did not know that
the lowest chamber of the pyramid was high above the utmost level of the
flood.
Surprise has often been expressed that Herodotos should make no mention of
the Sphinx, which to Arabs and modern Europeans alike has appeared one of
most noteworthy monuments of Gizeh. But in sailing along the canal which
led from Memphis to the pyramids he would have passed by it without
notice. As his boat made its way to the rocky edge on which the huge
sepulchres of Kheops and Khephren are built, it would have been concealed
from his view; and buried as it was in sand his guides did not think it an
object of such surpassing importance as to lead him to it over the burning
sand. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great pyramid he was
surrounded by monuments more interesting and more striking, which were
quite enough to occupy his day and satisfy his curiosity.
South of the Fayyûm and the adjoining city of Herakleopolis, whose ruins
are now known as Ahnas el-Medîneh, all that Herodotos has to tell us is
derived from older authors. Now and then, it is true, the first person is
used, and we think for a moment that he is describing his own adventures.
But he is merely quoting from others, and there are no marks of quotation
in the manuscript to show us that such is the case. His book is thus like
that of another and later Egyptian traveller, Mr. J. A. St. John, whose
_Egypt and Nubia_ was published in English only fifty years ago. He too
embodies the narratives of his predecessors in the record of his own
journey up the Nile without any notice or signs that he is doing so, and
it is not until we suddenly light on the name of an earlier writer at the
bottom of the page that we become aware of the fact. Herodotos has not
given us even this help; and we need not wonder, therefore, that
commentators who have never been in Egypt have been deceived by his method
of work. But he has preserved fragments of older writers which would
otherwise have been lost, and if he has mingled them with the stories he
heard from the dragomen of Memphis and Sais, or the answers he received to
his questions about Greek legends, we must not feel ungrateful.
Upper Egypt is mentioned only incidentally in his narrative, and, as might
be expected in a writer who had to depend upon others for his information,
what he tells us about it is very frequently incorrect. Thus he asserts
that the hippopotamus was “sacred in the nome of Paprêmis, but nowhere
else in Egypt,” although it was also worshipped in Thebes, and he fancies
that all the cats in the country were embalmed and buried at Bubastis, all
the hawks and mice at Buto, and all the ibises at Hermopolis or Damanhur.
But this was because he had visited these places and had not travelled in
the south. Had he done so, he would never have imagined that the body of
every cat or hawk that died was carried to a distant place in the Delta.
Indeed, in the hot weather of the summer months, anything of the kind
would have been impossible. Cemeteries, however, of these sacred animals
are found all up and down the Nile. The mummies of the sacred cats are to
be met with in the cliffs of Gebel Abu Foda, at Thebes, and above all at
Beni Hassan, where a little to the south of the Speos Artemidos such
quantities of them were recently discovered as to suggest that a
commercial profit might be made out of their bones. Tons of them were
accordingly shipped to Liverpool, there to be converted into manure; but
as it was found that the mummified bones refused to yield to the process,
the exportation ceased. Mummies of the sacred hawks were disinterred in
equal numbers when the ancient cemeteries of Ekhmîm were excavated a few
years ago, and the construction of the canal on the eastern bank opposite
Abutîg has lately brought to light another of their burial-places, thus
fixing the site of Hierakon, “the city of the Hawk,” the capital of the
twelfth nome.
In his geography of the river above the Fayyûm Herodotos was similarly
misinformed. Thus, he avers that “the country above the Fayyûm for the
distance of a three days’ voyage resembles the country below it.” A three
days’ voyage would mean about eighty miles, since he reckons it a voyage
of seven days from the sea to the Fayyûm, a distance of about 190 miles.
Dahabîyeh travellers will willingly assent to the calculation. With a fair
wind, a day’s voyage is about thirty miles, more or less, so that 190
miles could be easily traversed in seven days. Now eighty miles would
bring the visitor from the Fayyûm to Qolosaneh and the Gebel et-Têr. For
many miles before reaching the Gebel the banks of the Nile wear a very
different aspect from that which they present lower down. In place of a
dull monotony of sand-banks and level plains, there are picturesque lines
of cliff, amphitheatres of desert and rugged headlands. It is only as far
as Feshn, twenty miles to the south of Herakleopolis, that the description
of Herodotos is correct. It is, in fact, merely based on what he could see
from the southernmost point to which he attained.
The view which he had from thence over the flat desert reaches of Libya
led him to make another statement equally wide of the truth. It is that
for four days after leaving Heliopolis the valley of the Nile is narrow,
but that then it once more becomes broad. But such was the case only where
the Fayyûm and the province of Beni-Suef spread towards the west, and
there too only when they are covered with the waters of the inundation.
Elsewhere the cultivated valley is for the most part narrower even than in
the neighbourhood of Memphis, where it seemed to the Greek traveller to be
so confined; here and there, indeed, as at Abydos and Thebes, it broadens
out for a space, but otherwise the wilderness encroaches upon it ever more
and more until at Silsilis the barren rocks obliterate it altogether.
Herodotos knows nothing of the great monuments of Thebes, and the Pharaohs
accordingly whose names he records have no connection with the ancient
capital of the empire. They belong to Memphis, to the Fayyûm, and to the
Delta—none of them to Thebes. Even Sesostris, in whom some of the features
of Ramses II. may be detected, reigns in the north rather than in the
south. Of all the multitudinous monuments that he has left, two only are
known to the Greek traveller, and these are the two statues of himself
which stood before the temple of Ptah in Memphis.
Of Thothmes and Amenôphis and the other great monarchs of the eighteenth
dynasty whose memorials were to be found chiefly in the south, Herodotos
had never heard. All that he knew of the kings of Egypt before the age of
Psammetikhos was derived from the stories which his guides attached to the
monuments which he actually saw. Had he visited the temples and tombs of
Thebes and Abydos and Assuan we should have been told how Memnon led his
troops to Troy or how Osymandyas conquered the world. But we have to turn
to others for the dragoman’s tales of Upper Egypt; Herodotos could not
record them, for he was never there. The Fayyûm is the southernmost limit
of his historical knowledge, because it is also the southernmost limit of
his geographical knowledge.
And yet here and there we come across notices of Upper Egypt, some of
which have been written by an eye-witness. But the eye-witness was not
Herodotos himself, and in giving them he generally gives an indication of
the fact. Thus he describes Khemmis or Ekhmîm as “near Neapolis,” the
modern Qeneh, although the distance between the two towns is really
ninety-five miles, a voyage of at least three days, and Neapolis was but
an insignificant city by the side of Khemmis itself, or of other towns
like This and Abydos that were nearer to it. Even Tentyris or Denderah,
with its ancient temple of Hathor opposite Neapolis, was more important
and better-known, while Thebes itself was only forty-five miles higher up
the river.
But the account given by Herodotos of Khemmis and its temple is a mere
product of the imagination. Indeed, he implies that he received it from
certain “people of Khemmis” whom he had questioned, probably through his
interpreter. They told him that the temple, of which a few remains are
still visible, and which was really dedicated to Min or Amon-Khem, was
that of the Greek hero Perseus—a name suggested, it may be, by its
likeness to that of the sacred persea tree. Each year, it was further
alleged, gymnastic games in the Greek fashion were celebrated in honour of
the foreign deity, who at times appeared to his worshippers, leaving
behind him his sandal famous in Greek mythology. But the inventive powers
of the informants of the Greek traveller did not stop here. He further
assures us that the pylon of the temple bore on the summits of its two
towers two images of the deity. The statement is of itself sufficient to
discredit the whole story and to prove that Herodotos could never have
seen the temple with his own eyes. The watch-towers that guarded the
entrance of an Egyptian temple never had, and never could have, images on
their roofs. They were needed for other purposes, and the very idea of
their supporting statues was contrary to the first principles of Egyptian
architecture and religion. It was a conception wholly Greek.
Equally wide of the truth is what Herodotos has to tell us about the First
Cataract. Like other travellers to Egypt before and since he was anxious
to learn something about the sources of the Nile. But neither “the
Egyptians nor the Libyans nor the Greeks” whom he met could give him any
information. Perhaps had he sailed as far as Assuan some of the Ethiopians
who lived there might have been more communicative. At last, however, he
was introduced to one of the sacred scribes in the temple of Neit at
Sais—the only Egyptian priest, in fact, of higher rank, whom he seems to
have conversed with—and the scribe humoured the curiosity of the traveller
to the utmost of his desires, though even Herodotos suspected that he was
being made fun of. However, as in duty bound, he gravely writes down what
he was told. “Two mountains are there with pointed tops, between Syênê, a
city of the Thebais, and Elephantinê, which are called Krôphi and Môphi.
Out of the heart of these mountains flow the sources of the Nile, which
are bottomless, half the water running towards Egypt and the north, while
the other half goes to Ethiopia and the south. That the sources are
bottomless was proved by Psammetikhos, the king of Egypt, for after
letting down into them a rope several hundred thousand fathoms in length,
he did not find the bottom.” Herodotos adds that this was probably because
there were violent eddies in the water which carried the rope away.
Egyptian priests did not, as a rule, know Greek, and they avoided any kind
of intercourse with the “unclean” foreigner. Even to have conversed with
him would have caused pollution. Consequently “the priests” to whom
Herodotos so frequently alludes were merely the “beadles” of the day, who
took the tourist over the temples and showed him the principal objects of
interest. The sacred scribe of Sais was an exception to the general rule.
Since the days of Psammetikhos, Sais had been accustomed to Greek
visitors, and the prejudices against them were less strong there than in
other Egyptian towns. It is quite possible, therefore, that the scribe
whom Herodotos met was acquainted with the Greek language, and that no
dragoman was required to interpret his words.
There is a reason for thinking that such was the case. The story of Krôphi
and Môphi, in spite of the suspicions of Herodotos, is remarkably correct;
even the name of Krôphi has not undergone a greater amount of
transformation than it might have done if Herodotos had written it down
himself from the scribe’s mouth. It is the Egyptian Qerti or Qoriti, “the
two holes” out of which Egyptian mythology supposed Hâpi, the Nile-god, to
emerge at the period of the inundation. The Qerti were at the foot of the
granite peaks of Senem, the island of Bigeh, and of the opposite cliff on
the southern side of the First Cataract. We can almost fix the exact spot
where one of these Qerti was believed to have been. On the western bank of
Philæ, immediately facing Bigeh, is a portal built in the reign of
Hadrian, on the inner north wall of which is a picture of it. We see the
granite blocks of Bigeh piled one upon the other up to the summit of the
island where Mut the divine mother, and Horus the saviour, sit and keep
watch over the waters of the southern Nile. Below is the cavern, encircled
by a guardian serpent, within which the Nile-god is crouched, pouring from
a vase in either hand the waters of the river. Though in certain points
Herodotos has misunderstood his informant, on the whole the story of
Krôphi and Môphi is a fairly accurate page from the volume of Egyptian
mythology. Even the jingling Môphi may be derived from the Egyptian
_moniti_ or “mountains” between which the river ran, though Lauth may be
right in holding that Krôphi is Qer-Hâpi, “the hollow of the Nile,” and
Môphi Mu-Hâpi, “the waters of the Nile.”
But in one point the Greek historian has made a serious mistake. It was
not between Assuan and Elephantinê that the sources of the Nile were
placed, but between Bigeh and the mainland, on the other side of the
Cataract. Between Assuan and Elephantinê there are no “mountains,” only
the channel of the river. In saying therefore that Krôphi and Môphi were
mountains and that they rose between Syênê and Elephantinê, Herodotos
proves beyond all possibility of doubt that he had never been at the spot.
Had he actually visited Assuan the words of the sacred scribe would have
been reported more correctly.
At Elephantinê honours were paid to “the great” god of the Nile, who rose
from his caverns in the neighbourhood. Of this we have been assured by a
mutilated Greek inscription on a large slab of granite which was
discovered by English sappers at Assuan in 1885. It records the endowments
and privileges which were granted to the priests of Elephantinê by the
earlier Ptolemies, and one line of it refers to the places “wherein is the
fountain of the Nile.” But long before the days of the Ptolemies and of
Greek visitors to Egypt, when the First Cataract was the boundary of
Egyptian rule and knowledge, the fountain of the Nile was already placed
immediately beyond it. This infantile belief of Egyptian mythology was
preserved, like so much else of prehistoric antiquity, in the mythology of
later days. In the temple of Redesîyeh, on the road from Edfu to Berenikê,
an inscription relates how Seti I. dug a well in the desert and how the
water gushed up, “as from the depth of the two Qerti of Elephantinê.” Here
the bottomless springs are transferred from Bigeh to Elephantinê, thus
explaining how Herodotos could have been led into his error of supposing
them to be two mountains between Elephantinê and Assuan. Doubtless the
sacred scribe had marked the position of the island of Bigeh by its
relation to the better known island of Elephantinê.
The very name of the city which stood on the southern extremity of
Elephantinê implied that here, in the days of its foundation, was placed
the source of the Egyptian Nile. It was called Qebhu, the city of “fresh
water,” a word represented by the picture of a vase from which water is
flowing. At times the city was also called Abu, but Abu was more correctly
the name of the island on which it stood. Abu, in fact, signified the
island “of elephants,” of which the Greek Elephantinê was but a
translation. In that early age, when it first became known to the
Egyptians, the African elephant must still have existed there.
Herodotos does not seem to have been aware that Elephantinê was an island
as well as a city. Except where he is reporting the words of the sacred
scribe, he always speaks of it as “a city,” sometimes to the exclusion of
the more important Syênê. It is another sign that his voyage up the Nile
did not extend so far.
We need not point out other instances of his ignorance of the country
above the Fayyûm. Those which have been already quoted are enough. The
summer months which he spent in Egypt were more than fully employed in
visiting the wonders of Memphis and the chief cities of the Delta, and in
exploring the Fayyûm. Upper Egypt was closed to him, as it was to the rest
of his countrymen for many a long day.
But we are now able to trace his journey with some degree of exactness. He
must have arrived about the beginning of July at the mouth of the Kanôpic
arm of the Nile—the usual destination of Greek ships—and thus have made
his way by Hermopolis or Damanhur to the Greek capital Naukratis. There he
doubtless hired his Karian dragoman, with whom he sailed away over the
inundated land to Sais. But his expedition to Sais was only an excursion,
from which he returned to continue his voyage in a direct line past
Prosôpitis and the pyramids of Gizeh to Memphis. There he inspected the
great temple of Ptah, whom his countrymen identified with their Hephæstos,
and from thence he went by water to see the pyramids. It was while he was
at Memphis, moreover, that he paid a visit to Heliopolis, with its
university and its temple, of which all that is left to-day is the obelisk
of Usertesen. Next he made his voyage up the Nile, past the brick pyramids
of Dahshûr, to Anysis or Herakleopolis, and from thence to the Fayyûm.
Then he returned to Memphis, and then again passing Heliopolis sailed
northward to Bubastis and Buto. It was now probably that he made
excursions to Paprêmis and Busiris, though our ignorance of the precise
situation of these places unfortunately prevents us from being certain of
the fact. Eventually he found himself at Daphnæ, on the Pelusiac branch of
the Nile. This brought him to Pelusium, where he took ship for Tyre.