NAUKRATIS.
1885.
Before beginning work in the end of 1883 I visited Gizeh; and, as usual,
many small antiquities were offered to me by the Arabs. Among such was
the upper part of an alabaster figure of a soldier, wearing a helmet and
armlets, which was plainly of archaic Greek or Cypriote work. I at once
gave the man what he asked for it (never run risks in important cases),
and then enquired where he got it. ‘From Nebireh,’ was his answer, and
that was somewhere near Damanhur. So, a month or two later, I took an
opportunity of going down to that region, and, after some mistakes and
enquiries, I at last reached the place, in course of a twenty mile walk,
and having only half-an-hour to spare before going on to the train.
There I met a sight which I had never hoped for,--almost too strange to
believe. Before me lay a long low mound of town ruins, of which all the
core had been dug out by the natives for earth, thus baring the very
lowest level of the town all over the middle of it. Wherever I walked in
this crater I trod on pieces of archaic Greek pottery; soon I laded my
pockets with scraps of vases and of statuettes, and at last tore myself
away, longing to resolve the mystery of these Greeks in Egypt. Up to
that time no Greek remains earlier than the Ptolemaic age, and
Alexander, had been found in the country, and to step back two or three
centuries, into the days of black-figured and rosette-ornamented vases,
and archaic statuettes, was quite a new departure.
[Illustration: 23. CYPRIOTE SOLDIER.]
[Illustration: 24. DEDICATION OF STATUE TO HELIODOROS, BY THE
NAUKRATITES. 1: 6.]
That season’s work was already laid out, and I was bound to go to Tanis;
but the next season I returned to this curious site, determined to
understand its history. The only place that I could find to live in
about there was an old country house of a pasha; and, while looking at
it, I noticed two blocks of dark grey stone by the side of the entrance.
Turning one of them over, I there saw the glorious heading
ΗΠΟΛΙΣΗΝΑΥΚΡΑΤΙ ...; a decree of the city of Naukratis was before me,
and the unknown town now had a name; and that a name which had been
sought for often, and far from this place, and which was one of the
objects of Egyptian research to discover and truly assign. All that day
‘Naukratis’ rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that
splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found.
In England, some hesitated, and some doubted, but none denied it; and
after the season’s work there was no longer any question. The next year
I continued the excavations along with Mr. Ernest Gardner, and was soon
able to leave the remainder of the clearing in his hands, while I moved
on to fresh discoveries, on the east of the country.
The origin of Naukratis was evidently entirely Greek; down on the flat
surface of Nile mud, which shows the level of the country when the city
was founded, the earliest remains are Greek potsherds. The date of its
foundation was certainly before Amasis; and the discovery of the fort of
Defenneh (Tahpanhes) the next year explained the origin of this city.
When Psamtik I, in 665 B.C., had wrested the throne of Egypt from the
dodecarchy, or local princes (who had assumed authority on the fall of
the Ethiopian rule of Tirhaka), he based his power on ‘the brazen men
from the sea,’ the Karian and Ionian mercenaries. But he knew too well
the temper of his countrymen to obtrude this strength needlessly; and at
the same time he needed special defence from Libya and from Asia. He
therefore planted his Greek troops in two great garrisons, one on his
Libyan frontier at Naukratis, the other on his Asiatic frontier at
Tahpanhes; at each place founding a large square fort and a walled camp
around it.
These Greeks brought with them their national worship; and of the
temples mentioned by Herodotos, those of Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hera,
have been found, and also one to the Dioskouroi, not recorded in
history. The temple of the Milesian Apollo appears to have been the
oldest: it stood in the centre of the town, outside of the fort, and was
first built of mud-brick, plastered over, and later on--about the fifth
century--of
[Illustration: 25. NECKING OF COLUMN, APOLLO TEMPLE.]
white stone, some pieces of which I found. The site had been nearly
cleared out by the native diggers; and I only came in time to get
fragments of the temple, and to open up the great rubbish trench, where
all the temple refuse was thrown. Very precious this rubbish was to me,
layer under layer of broken vases, from the innumerable small bowls to
the great craters of noble size and design; and most precious of all
were the hundreds of dedications inscribed on the pottery, some of them
probably the oldest examples of Greek writing known, and altogether far
outnumbering all our past material for the
[Illustration: 26. OLDEST IONIC DEDICATION, 660? B.C. 2: 5.]
[Illustration: 27. NAUKRATITE CUP. 1: 3.]
archaic alphabets. The temple of Aphrodite I found the next year, and
Mr. Gardner cleared it out, and unearthed three successive buildings,
one over the other. Though, perhaps, as old as that of Apollo, its
inscriptions are not so primitive; but it has a charm from the tale of
Athenaios about the mariners from Cyprus, who had a statuette of the
goddess a span high in their boat; and how they besought it in the
storm, and were soon at peace, and their boat bespread with myrtle
boughs; wherefore they dedicated the statuette in the temple of
Aphrodite at Naukratis, and the people of the city made myrtle wreaths
for many an age after. Fine vases were found here; and great quantities
of a particular kind of cup, which was apparently made on purpose for
offering here. It is a bowl with a very tall upright brim, deeper than
the bowl itself, and covered over with a white coat, on which delicate
painting in brown is sometimes added; that these were specially made
here we know from the name of Aphrodite being painted on one before the
baking. The temple of Hera has been entirely swept away, and we only
know of its place from some pieces of dedication on bowls found by Mr.
Gardner; these lay not far from the Apollo temple, in a great enclosure,
which I planned the first season. The Dioskouroi had a small temple near
that of Apollo; of which only some brick pillars, and flakes of
brilliant red and blue stucco, were found. But several pieces of
dedicated bowls showed the nature and early age of this shrine.
[Illustration: 28. EXAMPLES OF DEDICATIONS (TRANSLITERATED) TO APOLLO,
APHRODITE, HERA, AND THE DIOSKOUROI. 2: 3.]
The greatest and most celebrated building of Naukratis was the
Panhellenion, with the central altar of the Greek community in Egypt.
This was in the large enclosure around the fort, as all are agreed; but
the depth of earth there prevented my reaching any remains of the altar.
Herodotos expressly mentions that certain Greek towns were excluded from
the
[Illustration: 29. FOUNDATION DEPOSIT MODELS. IRON: 1, HOE; 7, MORTAR
RAKE. 2, ALABASTER PEG. BRONZE: 3, KNIFE; 5, AXE; 8, ADZE; 9, TROWEL;
11, CHISEL; 12, HATCHET. GLAZED: 4, CUP; 10, LIBATION VASE; 14, BLOCK.
6, NAME OF PTOLEMY II ON LAZULI. MATERIALS: 13, MUD-BRICK; 15-23,
TURQUOISE, JASPER, LAZULI, AGATE-GOLD, SILVER, LEAD, COPPER, IRON. 1: 4]
common participation in the Panhellenion, and that hence arose the
separate temples in the town. Now as the sanctuary and the fort were in
one, it seems readily explained how the mercenaries welcomed their
kinsmen and townsfolk in the camp to join at the common altar; while
those traders who came from other cities would be left outside, and
would found their own temples. If it were so, we may conclude that
neither Miletos, Samos, nor Aegina, furnished any of the mercenaries of
Psamtik. In the time of Ptolemy Philadelphos, as the old camp and
Panhellenion no longer needed defence, the entrance was widened and
occupied with a large building; of which the foundation deposits,
consisting of models of the iron and bronze tools, of the materials, and
of the libation vases, were discovered in each corner of the bed of sand
which was laid beneath the foundations. An avenue led up to this from
the west, and marble rams, a large granite sphinx, and a base of a
figure dedicated to Zeus of Thebes (i.e. Amen, identified with Zeus),
were found here.
[Illustration: 30. DEDICATION OF PALAISTRA. 1: 6.]
To turn now to the town; probably one of the most important buildings in
the fifth century B.C. was the palaistra, dedicated to Apollo by
Kleainetos, Aristothemios, and Maiandrios, according to the beautiful
marble inscription found here. Unfortunately we do not know the site of
it, as the inscribed block had been re-used in later times, and was also
dug up before I went to the place. It was shown to me one night in a
native hut, by a glimmering lamp; I instantly copied it, for fear of any
difficulty arising, and then laid down ten francs on it, and told the
owner to take which he pleased, the stone or the money; with a little
hesitation at having the pleasure of haggling so cut short, he picked up
the unexpected price, and I walked off behind the precious block to my
house. The natives had so cleared out the earth from the heart of the
town that all the Roman, Ptolemaic, and Persian houses and remains were
gone; and the floor of the crater thus dug out consisted of the oldest
[Illustration: 31. SCARAB MOULD AND SCARAB. 1: 1.]
[Illustration: 32. COIN OF NAUKRATIS. 1: 1]
town, underlaid by a bed of ashes, which apparently showed that the
first settlement outside of the camp was a cluster of mere booths. Here
I found a scarab factory, where they had made the scarabs of white and
blue paste, so well known in Greek cemeteries in Rhodes and elsewhere.
Hundreds of earthenware moulds and many scarabs were unearthed, and this
factory is the leading point for dating the early town. The work of the
scarabs is manifestly a Greek imitation of Egyptian style; and the names
of the kings upon them show the dates to come down to the time of
Uah-ab-ra (Apries), but not a single example of Amasis was found,
proving the factory to have been extinct before his time. Probably the
great defeat of the Greek troops by Amasis was a severe blow to Greek
work for the time; although Naukratis reaped the benefit of the
annihilation of the other Greek centres (such as Defenneh), by being
tolerated and having the exclusive privilege of trade. The first
autonomous coin of Naukratis yet known was found in the town; with heads
of Naukratis and of the hero Alexander.
[Illustration: 33. IRON TOOLS. 1, SICKLE; 2, 3, CHISELS; 4, AXE; 5, 6,
CHISELS; 7, AXE; 8, FISH-HOOK; 9, ARROW-HEAD; 10, HAMMER. 1: 8.]
The old town had been so laid bare by the native diggers, that it was
possible to form a tolerable plan of the streets and houses. The street
lines were distinguished by the rubbish thrown out, mostly remains of
food, shells, and bones; while in later times, from the fifth century,
the streets were regularly mended with limestone chips and dust; and
often one may trace the section of a puddle hole filled up with chips
and levelled. Among the houses many fine pieces of vases were found, and
a small hoard of early Greek silver coins and lumps of silver. But the
most interesting matter was the history of tools, shown by the variety
of iron tools; we here meet, for the first time, what may be looked on
as practically our modern forms of chisels, &c.; and we see what a debt
we owe to European invention, when we compare these with the bronze
tools of the Egyptians which preceded them.
The cemetery has not yet been entirely found; a portion of it, mainly of
the Alexandrine age, was cleared by Mr. Gardner, on a low mound to the
north of the town, alongside of the canal; but it was not rich, and the
principal objects were the Medusa heads, moulded in terra cotta, which
were affixed to the wooden coffins. Probably the greater part of it is
beneath the modern village.
The potteries of Naukratis were famous in the time of Athenaios, and
long before that also, as we see by the great heaps of burnt earth and
potters’ waste, and by the distinctive style of much of the early
pottery. On comparing the characteristic styles of this place with those
of Defenneh, also inhabited by Greeks of the same period, it is plain
that most of the vases found were made here by a local school of
potters. And though the clay is apparently of Greek origin, yet it would
be immeasurably easier to import a ton of clay as ballast in a boat,
than to move about a thousand brittle and bulky vases.
We will now sum up the results of this discovery, in its general
connection with other antiquities. The site now found fills a gap in
Egyptian geography; and it shows us how the Greeks were posted near the
capital of that age,--Sais, but toward the Libyan frontier, where
defence was needed; moreover they dwelt on a canal, which could be used
by Greek traders at all seasons of the year, and which kept them apart
from the Egyptians on the Nile. The plan of the town shows the fort,
which became the
[Illustration: 34. NEGRO ON NAUKRATITE VASE.]
[Illustration: 35. NAUKRATITE DESIGN. 1: 4.]
Panhellenion, with a settlement extending along the bank of the canal
for half a mile below it; amidst which stood the temples of the separate
external colonies of traders, Milesian, Samian, and Aeginetan. The
dedications found on the vases have been much discussed; but, viewed in
the light of the history of the town, they are generally agreed now to
be probably the earliest Ionic writing yet known. The styles of the
vases made here are now fixed, and those found in other places which
were exported from here can be identified; similarly we now know the
source of the paste scarabs of mock-Egyptian design, often found in
Greek tombs. The history of vase-painting is assisted by the successive
periods of the layers of the Apollo remains, which extend over what was
a doubtful age; and the history of tools and of Greek manufactures has
been much extended. On almost every side this fresh view of the early
sojourn of the Greeks in Egypt has consolidated and enlarged our
knowledge; and given for the first time an actual insight into three
centuries most important in their bearing on Greek development, and for
which we were entirely dependent hitherto on literature and tradition.
[Illustration: 36. PART OF EMBOSSED GOLD BAND. ABOUT 70 A.D. 1: 2.]
[Illustration: 37. RUINS OF DAPHNAE, IN THE DESERT.]