drawn into the movement, and Judah, for example, remained faithful to
its suzerain till the last moment,* but Sin-shar-ishkun received no help
from them, and was obliged to fight his last battles single-handed. He
shut himself up in Nineveh, and held out as long as he could; but when
all his resources were exhausted--ammunitions of war, men and food
supplies--he met his fate as a king, and burnt himself alive in his
palace with his children and his wives, rather than fall alive into the
hands of his conquerors (608 B.C.). The Babylonians would take no
part in pillaging the temples, out of respect for the gods, who were
practically identical with their own, but the Medes felt no such
scruples. Their king, the intrepid one, entirely destroyed the
sanctuaries of the gods of Assur, and the cities of Accad which had
shown themselves hostile to the lord of Accad, and had not rendered him
assistance. He destroyed their holy places, and left not one remaining;
he devastated their cities, and laid them waste as it were with a
hurricane. Nineveh laid low, Assyria no longer existed. After the lapse
of a few years, she was named only among the legends of mythical days:
two centuries later, her very site was forgotten, and a Greek army
passed almost under the shadow of her dismantled towers, without a
suspicion that there lay before it all that remained of the city where
Semiramis had reigned in her glory.**
* It was to oppose the march of Necho _against the King of
Assyria_ that Josiah fought the battle of Megiddo (2 Kings
xxiii. 29, 30; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-24, where the mention
of the King of Assyria is suppressed).
** This is what the _Ten Thousand_ did when they passed
before Larissa and Mespila. The name remained famous, and
later on the town which bore it attained a relative
importance.
It is true that Egypt, Chaldæa, and the other military nations of the
East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest
consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had
mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into
slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued. But
the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at least, accomplished a work of
civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of
reprisal. It was from Egypt and Chaldæa that the knowledge and the
arts of antiquity--astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural
sciences--spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though
Chaldæa yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments
of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to
prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts
of the sculptor and the architect. But on turning to Assyria, if,
after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held
supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides
her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not
borrowed from extraneous sources. She received all her inspirations from
Chaldæa--her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries
and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature: one
thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals
and the excellence of her soldiery. From the day when Assyria first
realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as
soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field
of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished,
and she passed away.
Two great kingdoms rose simultaneously from her ruins. Cyaxares
claimed Assyria proper and its dependencies on the Upper Tigris, but he
specially reserved for himself the yet unconquered lands on the northern
and eastern frontiers, whose inhabitants had only recently taken part
in the political life of the times. Nabopolassar retained the suzerainty
over the lowlands of Elam, the districts of Mesopotamia lying along
the Euphrates, Syria, Palestine, and most of the countries which had
hitherto played a part in history;* he claimed to exert his supremacy
beyond the Isthmus, and the Chaldæan government looked upon the Egyptian
kings as its feudatories because for some few years they had owned the
suzerainty of Nineveh.**
* There was no actual division of the empire, as has been
often asserted, but each of the allies kept the portion
which fell into his power at the moment of their joint
effort. The two new states gradually increased in power by
successive conquests, each annexing by degrees the ancient
provinces of Assyria nearest to its own frontier.
** This seems to be implied by the terms in which Berosus
speaks of Necho: he considers him as a rebel satrap over the
provinces of Egypt, Coele-Syria, and Phoenicia, and
enumerates Egypt in conjunction with Syria, Phoenicia, and
Arabia among the dependencies of Nabopolassar and
Nebuchadrezzar. Just as the Egyptian state documents never
mentioned the Lotanu or the Kharu without entitling them
_Children of Rebellion_, so the Chaldæan government, the
heir of Assyria, could only look upon the kings of Syria,
Arabia, and Egypt as rebellious vassals.
[Illustration: 330. MAP OF THE EASTERN WORLD IN THE TIME OF
NEBUCHADNEZZAR]
The Pharaoh, however, did not long tolerate this pretension, and far
from looking forward to bend the knee before a Chaldæan monarch, he
believed himself strong enough to reassert his ancestral claims to the
possession of Asia. Egypt had experienced many changes since the day
when Tanuatamanu, returning to Ethiopia, had abandoned her to the
ambition of the petty dynasties of the Delta. One of the romances
current among the people of Sais in the fifth century B.C. related that
at that time the whole land was divided between twelve princes. They
lived peaceably side by side in friendly relations with each other,
until an oracle predicted that the whole valley would finally belong to
that prince among them who should pour a libation to Phtah into a brazen
cup, and thenceforward they jealously watched each other each time they
assembled to officiate in the temple of Memphis. One day, when they had
met together in state, and the high priest presented to them the golden
cups they were wont to use, he found he had mistaken their number, and
had only prepared eleven. Psammetichus was therefore left without one,
and in order not to disarrange the ceremonial he took off his brazen
helmet and used it to make his libation; when the rest perceived this,
the words of the oracle came to their remembrance, and they exiled the
imprudent prince to the marshes along the sea-coast, and forbade him
ever to quit them. He secretly consulted the oracle of Isis of Buto to
know what he might expect from the gods, and she replied that the means
of revenge would reach him from the sea, on the day when brazen soldiers
should issue from its waters. He thought at first that the priests were
mocking him, but shortly afterwards Ionian and Carian pirates, clad in
their coats of mail, landed not far from his abode. The messenger who
brought tidings of their advent had never before seen a soldier fully
armed, and reported that brazen men had issued from the waves and
were pillaging the country. Psammetichus, realising at once that the
prediction was being fulfilled, ran to meet the strangers, enrolled them
in his service, and with their aid overthrew successively his eleven
rivals.*
* The account given by Diodorus of these events is in
general derived from that of Herodotus, with additional
details borrowed directly or indirectly from some historian
of the same epoch, perhaps Hellanicus of Mitylene: the
reason of the persecution endured by Psammetichus is,
according to him, not the fear of seeing the prediction
fulfilled, but jealousy of the wealth the Saite prince had
acquired by his commerce with the Greeks. I have separated
the narrative of Herodotus from his account of the Labyrinth
which did not originally belong to it, but was connected
with a different cycle of legends. The original romance was
part of the cycle which grew up around the oracle of Buto,
so celebrated in Egypt at the Persian epoch, several other
fragments of which are preserved in Herodotus; it had been
mixed up with one of the versions of the stories relating to
the Labyrinth, probably by some dragoman of the Fayyûm. The
number twelve does not correspond with the information
furnished by the Assyrian texts, which enumerate more than
twenty Egyptian princes; it is perhaps of Greek origin, like
the _twelve_ great gods which the informants of Herodotus
tried to make out in Egypt, and was introduced into the
Egyptian version by a Greek interpreter.
A brazen helmet and an oracle had dethroned him; another oracle and
brazen men had replaced him on his throne. A shorter version of these
events made no mention of the twelve kings, but related instead that a
certain Pharaoh named Tementhes had been warned by the oracle of Amon to
beware of cocks. Now Psammetichus had as a companion in exile a Carian
named Pigres, and in conversing with him one day, he learned by chance
that the Carians had been the first people to wear crested helmets; he
recalled at once the words of the oracle, and hired from Asia a number
of these cocks, with whose assistance he revolted and overthrew his
suzerain in battle under the walls of Memphis, close to the temple of
Isis. Such is the legendary account of the Saite renaissance; its true
history is not yet clearly and precisely known. Egypt was in a state
of complete disintegration when Psammetichus at length revived the
ambitious projects of his family, but the dissolution of the various
component parts had not everywhere taken place in the same manner.
[Illustration: 335.jpg THREE HOPLITES IN ACTION]
Drawn by faucher-Gudin, from an archaic vase-painting in the
collection of Salzmann.
In the north, the Delta and the Nile valley, as far as Siut, were in the
power of a military aristocracy, supported by irregular native troops
and bands of mercenaries, for the most part of Libyan extraction, who
were always designated by the generic name of Mashauasha. Most of these
nobles were in possession of not more than two or three cities apiece:
they had barely a sufficient number of supporters to maintain their
precarious existence in their restricted domains, and would soon have
succumbed to the attacks of their stronger neighbours, had they not
found a powerful protector to assist them. They had finally separated
themselves into two groups, divided roughly by the central arm of the
Nile. One group comprised the districts that might be designated as
the Asiatic zone of the country--Heliopolis, Bubastis, Mendes, Tanis,
Busiris, and Seben-nytos--and it recognised as chief the lord of one or
other of those wealthy cities, now the ruler of Bubastis, now of Tanis,
and lastly Pakruru of Pisaptit. The second group centred in the lords
of Sais, to whom the possession of Memphis had secured a preponderating
voice in the counsels of the state for more than a century.*
* This grouping, which might already have been suspected
from the manner in which the Assyrian and Egyptian monuments
of the period show us the feudal princes rallying round
Necho I. and Pakruru, is indicated by the details in the
demotic romance published by Krall, where the foundation of
the story is the state of Egypt in the time of the twelve
kings.
The fiefs and kingdoms of Middle Egypt wavered between the two
groups, playing, however, a merely passive part in affairs: abandoning
themselves to the stream of events rather than attempting to direct it,
they owed allegiance to Sais and Tanis alternately as each prevailed
over its rival. On passing thence into the Thebaid a different world
appeared to be entered. There Amon reigned, ever increasingly supreme,
and the steady advance of his influence had transformed his whole domain
into a regular theocracy, where the women occupied the highest position
and could alone transmit authority. At first, as we have seen, it
was passed on to their husbands and their children, but latterly the
rapidity with which the valley had changed masters had modified this law
of succession in a remarkable way. Each time the principality shifted
its allegiance from one king to another, the new sovereign naturally
hastened to install beside the _divine female worshipper_ a man devoted
to his interests, who should administer the fief to the best advantage
of the suzerain. It is impossible to say whether he actually imposed
this minister on her as a husband, or whether the time came when she was
obliged to submit to as many espousals as there occurred revolutions
in the destinies of Egypt.* However this may be, we know that from
the first half of the seventh century B.C. the custom arose of placing
beside the divine worshipper a princess of the dominant family, whom
she adopted, and who thus became her heiress-designate. Taharqa had in
this way associated one of his sisters, Shapenuapît II., with the
queen Amenertas when the latter had lost her husband, Piônkhi; and
Shapenuapît, succeeding her adopted mother, had reigned over Thebes in
the Ethiopian interest during many years. There is nothing to show
that she was married, and perhaps she was compensated for her official
celibacy by being authorised to live the free life of an ordinary
Pallacide;** her minister Montumihâît directed her affairs for her so
completely that the Assyrian conquerors looked upon him as petty king
of Thebes. Tanuatamanu confirmed him in his office when the Assyrians
evacuated the Said, and the few years which had elapsed since that event
had in no way modified the _régime_ established immediately on their
departure.
* They would have been, in fact, in the same condition as
the Hova queens of our century, who married the ministers
who reigned in their names.
** It is perhaps these last female descendants of the high
priests that are intended in a passage where Strabo speaks
of the Pallacides who were chosen from among the most noble
families of the city. Diodorus mentions their tombs, quoting
from Hecatous of Abdera, but he does not appear to know the
nature of their life; but the name of Pallacides which he
applies to them proves that their manner of life was really
that which Strabo describes.
It is uncertain how long Assur-bani-pal in the north, and Tanuatamanu
in the south, respectively maintained a precarious sovereignty over the
portions of Egypt nearest to their own capitals.
[Illustration: 338.jpg STATUE OF A THEBAN QUEEN]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by M. de Bissing. The
statue, whose feet are missing, represents either Amenertas
I. or Mutertas; it was never completely finished, and
several of the parts have never received their final polish.
The opening of the reign of Psammetichus seems to have been fraught with
difficulties, and the tradition which represents him as proscribed by
his peers, and confined to the marshes of the sea-coast, has probably a
certain basis of truth. Pakruru, who had brought all the western part
of the Delta under his own influence, and who, incessantly oscillating
between Assyria and Ethiopia, had yet been able to preserve his power
and his life, had certainly not of his own free will renounced the
hope of some day wearing the double crown. It was against him or his
successor that Psammetichus must have undertaken his first wars, and
it was perhaps with the help of Assyrian governors that the federal
coalition drove him back to the coast. He extricated himself from this
untoward situation by the help of Greek and Asiatic mercenaries, his
Ionians and Carians. Some historians stated that the decisive battle
was fought near Memphis, in sight of the temple of Isis; others affirmed
that it took place at Momemphis, that several of the princes perished
in the conflict, and that the rest escaped into Libya, whence they never
returned; others, again, spoke of an encounter on the Nile, when the
fleet of the Saite king dispersed that of his rivals. It is, in fact,
probable that a single campaign sufficed for Psammetichus, as formerly
for the Ethiopian pretenders, to get the upper hand, and that the
Egyptian feudal lords submitted after one or two defeats at most, hoping
that, as in days gone by, when the first dash made by the new Pharaoh
was over, his authority would decline, and their own would regain the
ascendency. Events showed that they were deceived. Psammetichus, better
served by his Hellenes than Tafnakhti or Bocchoris had been by
their Libyans, or Piônkhi and Tanuatamanu by their Ethiopians, soon
consolidated his rule over the country he had conquered. From 660 or
659 B.C. he so effectively governed Egypt that foreigners, and even the
Assyrians themselves commonly accorded him the title of king. The fall
of the Ninevite rule had been involved in that of the feudal lords,
but it was generally believed that Assur-bani-pal would leave no
means untried to recall the countries of the Nile to their obedience:
Psammetichus knew this, and knew also that, as soon as they were no
longer detained by wars or rebellions elsewhere, the Assyrian armies
would reappear in Egypt. He therefore entered into an alliance with
Gyges,* and subsequently, perhaps, with Shamash-shumukîn also; then,
while his former suzerain was waging war in Elam and Chaldæa, he turned
southwards, in 658 B.C., and took possession of the Thebaid without
encountering any opposition from the Ethiopians, as his ancestor
Tafnakhti had from Piônkhi-Miamun. Mon-tumihâît** negotiated this
capitulation of Thebes, as he had already negotiated so many others;
in recompense for this service, he was confirmed in his office, and his
queen retained her high rank.
* The annexation of the Thebaid and the consequent
pacification of Egypt was an accomplished fact in the year
IX. of Psammetichus I. The analogy of similar documents,
e.g. the stele of the high priest Menkhopirrî, shows that
the ceremony of adoption which consecrated the reunion of
Upper and Lower Egypt cannot have been separated by a long
interval from the completion of the reunion itself: in
placing this at the end of the year VIII., we should have
for the two events the respective dates of 658-657 and 657-
656 B.C.
** The part played by Montumihâît in this affair is easily
deduced: (1) from our knowledge of his conduct some years
previously under Taharqa and Tanuatamanu; (2) from the
position he occupied at Thebes, in the year IX., with regard
to Shapenuapît, according to the stele of Legrain.
A century or two earlier Psammetichus would have married one of the
princesses of sacerdotal lineage, and this union would have sufficed to
legalise his position; perhaps he actually associated Shapenuapît with
himself by a show of marriage, but in any case he provided her with an
adopted daughter according to the custom instituted by the Ethiopian
Pharaohs. She already had one daughter by adoption, whom she had
received at the hands of Taharqa, and who, in changing her family, had
assumed the name of Amenertas in honour of the queen who had preceded
Shapenuapît: Psammetichus forced her to replace the Ethiopian princess
by one of his own daughters, who was henceforth called Shapenuapît,
after her new mother. A deputation of the nobles and priests of Thebes
came to escort the princess from Memphis, in the month of Tybi, in the
ninth year of the reign: Psammetichus formally presented her to them,
and the ambassadors, having listened to his address, expatiated in the
customary eulogies on his splendour and generosity. They shall endure
as long as the world lasteth; all that thou ordainest shall endure. How
beautiful is that which God hath done for thee, how glorious that which
thy divine father hath done for thee? He is pleased that thy double
should be commemorated, he rejoices in the pronouncing of thy name, for
our lord Psammetichus has made a gift to his father Amon, he has given
him his eldest daughter, his beloved Mtauqrît Shapenuapît, to be his
divine spouse, that she may shake the sistrum before him! On the 28th
of Tybi the princess left the harem, clothed in fine linen and adorned
with ornaments of malachite, and descended to the quay, accompanied by
an immense throng, to set out for her new home. Relays stationed along
the river at intervals made the voyage so expeditious that at the end
of sixteen days the princess came in sight of Thebes. She disembarked on
the 14th of Khoiak, amid the acclamations of the people: She comes, the
daughter of the King of the South, Nitauqrît, to the dwelling of
Amon, that he may possess her and unite her to himself; she comes, the
daughter of the King of the North, Shapenuapît, to the temple of
Karnak, that the gods may there chant her praises. As soon as the
aged Shapenuapît had seen her coadjutor, she loved her more than
all things, and assigned her a dowry, the same as that which she had
received from her own parents, and which she had granted to her
first adopted daughter Amenertas. The magnates of Thebes--the aged
Montumihâît, his son Nsiphtah, and the prophets of Amon--vied with each
other in their gifts of welcome: Psammetichus, on his side, had acted
most generously, and the temples of Egypt assigned to the princess an
annual income out of their revenues, or bestowed upon her grants of
houses and lands, in all constituting a considerable inheritance,
which somewhat consoled the Thebans for their subjection to a dynasty
emanating from the cities of the north. The rest of the principality
imitated the example of Thebes and the whole of Egypt, from the shores
of the Mediterranean to the rocks of the first cataract, once more found
itself reunited under the sceptre of an Egyptian king. A small part of
Nubia, the portion nearest to Elephantine, followed this movement, but
the greater part refused to cut itself off from the Ethiopians. These
latter were henceforth confined to the regions along the middle course
of the Nile, isolated from the rest of the world by the deserts, the
Red Sea, and Egypt. It is probable that they did not give up without a
struggle the hope of regaining the ground they had lost, and that their
armies made more than one expedition in a northerly direction. The
inhabitants of the Thebaid could hardly fail to remain faithful to them
at heart, and to recognise in them the legitimate representatives of the
posterity of Amon; it is possible that now and again they succeeded in
penetrating as far as the ancient capital, but if so, their success was
always ephemeral, and their sojourn left no permanent traces. The same
causes, however, which had broken up the constituent elements, and
destroyed the unity of Greater Egypt at the end of the Theban period,
were still at work in Saite times to prevent the building up again of
the empire. The preservation of the balance of power in this long and
narrow strip of country depended on the centre of attraction and on the
seat of government being nearly equidistant from the two extremities.
This condition had been fulfilled as long as the court resided at
Thebes; but as the removal of the seat of government to the Delta caused
the loss and separation of the southern provinces, so its sudden return
to the extreme south, with a temporary sojourn at Napata, necessarily
produced a similar effect, and led to the speedy secession of the
northern provinces. In either case, the dynasty placed at one extremity
of the empire was unable to sustain for any length of time the weight
depending on it at the other; when once the balance became even
slightly disturbed, it could not regain its equilibrium, and there was
consequently a sudden dislocation of the machinery of government.
The triumph of the Saite dynasty accomplished the final ruin of the work
begun under the Papis, and brought to completion by the Amenemhâîts and
the Usirtasens. Greater Egypt ceased to exist, after more than twenty
centuries of glorious life, and was replaced by the Little Egypt of the
first ages of history. The defeat of the military chiefs of the north,
the annexation of the principality of Amon, and the final expulsion of
the Ethiopians and the Asiatics had occupied scarcely nine years, but
these feats constituted only the smaller part of the work Psammetichus
had to accomplish: his subsequent task lay in restoring prosperity to
his kingdom, or, at all events, in raising it from the state of misery
into which two centuries of civil wars and invasions had plunged it. The
important cities had suffered grievously: Memphis had been besieged and
taken by assault by both Piônkhi and Esar-haddon, Thebes had been twice
sacked by the veterans of Assur-bani-pal, and from Syenê to Pelusium
there was not a township but had suffered at the hands of foreigners
or of the Egyptians themselves. The country had enjoyed a moments
breathing-space under Sabaco, but the little good which this prince had
been able to accomplish was effaced immediately after his death: the
canals and dykes had been neglected, the supervision of the police
relaxed, and the population, periodically decimated or driven to take
refuge in the strongholds, had often allowed the lands to lie waste, so
that famine had been superadded to the other evils under which the land
already groaned. Psammetichus, having forced the feudal lords to submit
to his supremacy, deprived them of the royal titles they had unduly
assumed; he no longer tolerated their habits of private warfare, but
restricted them to the functions of hereditary governors, which their
ancestors had exercised under the conquering dynasties of former times,*
and this enforced peace soon allowed the rural population to devote
themselves joyfully to their regular occupations.
* During the last few years records of a certain number of
persons have been discovered whose names and condition prove
that they were the descendants of semi-independent princes
of the Ethiopian and Bubastite periods: e.g. a certain
Akaneshu, who was prince of Sebennytos under Psammetichus
I., and who very probably was the grandson of Akaneshu,
prince of the same town under Piônkhi; and a Sheshonq of
Busiris, who was perhaps a descendant of Sheshonq, prince of
Busiris under Piônkhi.
With so fertile a soil, two or three years of security, during which
the fellahîn were able to sow and reap their crops free from the fear
of marauding bands, sufficed to restore abundance, if not wealth, to
the country, and Psammetichus succeeded in securing both these and
other benefits to Egypt, thanks to the vigilant severity of his
administration. He would have been unable to accomplish these reforms
had he relied only on the forces which had been at the disposal of
his ancestors--the native troops demoralised by poverty, and the
undisciplined bands of Libyan mercenaries, which constituted the sole
normal force of the Tanite and Bubastite Pharaohs and the barons of the
Delta and Middle Egypt. His experience of these two classes of soldiery
had decided him to look elsewhere for a less precarious support, and
ever since chance had brought him in contact with the Ionians and
Carians, he had surrounded himself with a regular army of Hellenic and
Asiatic mercenaries. It is impossible to exaggerate the terror that the
apparition of these men produced in the minds of the African peoples, or
the revolution they effected, alike in peace or war, in Oriental states:
the charge of the Spanish soldiery among the lightly clad foot-soldiers
of Mexico and Peru could not have caused more dismay than did that
of the hoplites from beyond the sea among the half-naked archers and
pikemen of Egypt and Libya. With their bulging corselets, the two plates
of which protected back and chest, their greaves made of a single piece
of bronze reaching from the ankle to the knee, their square or oval
bucklers covered with metal, their heavy rounded helmets fitting closely
to the head and neck, and surmounted by crests of waving plumes, they
were, in truth, men of brass, invulnerable to any Oriental weapon. Drawn
up in close array beneath their tortoise, they received almost unhurt
the hail of arrows and stones hurled against them by the lightly armed
infantry, and then, when their own trumpet sounded the signal for
attack, and they let themselves fall with their whole weight upon the
masses of the enemy, brandishing their spears above the upper edge
of their bucklers, there was no force of native troops or company of
Mashauasha that did not waver beneath the shock and finally give
way before their attack. The Egyptians felt themselves incapable of
overcoming them except by superior numbers or by stratagem, and it was
the knowledge of their own hopeless inferiority which prevented the
feudal lords from attempting to revenge themselves on Psammetichus. To
make themselves his equals, they would have been obliged either to take
a sufficient number of similar warriors into their own pay--and this
they were not able to afford--or they must have won over those
already in the employ of their suzerain; but the liberality with
which Psammetichus treated his mercenaries gave them good cause to be
faithful, even if military honour had not sufficed to keep them loyal to
their employer. Psammetichus granted to them and their compatriots, who
were attracted by the fame of Egypt, a concession of the fertile lands
of the Delta stretching along the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, and
he was careful to separate the Ionians from the Carians by the whole
breadth of the river: this was a wise precaution, for their union
beneath a common flag had not extinguished their inherited hatred of
one another, and the authority of the general did not always suffice
to prevent fatal quarrels breaking out between contingents of different
nationalities.
[Illustration: 347.jpg THE SAITE FORTRESS OF DAPHNE]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a restoration by Fl. Petrie.
They occupied, moreover, regularly entrenched camps, enclosed within
massive walls, containing a collection of mud huts or houses of
brick, the whole enclosure commanded by a fortress which formed the
headquarters of the general and staff of officers. Some merchants from
Miletus, emboldened by the presence of their fellow-countrymen, sailed
with thirty vessels into the mouth of the Bolbitine branch of the
Nile, and there founded a settlement which they named the Port of the
Milesians, and, following in their wake, successive relays of emigrants
arrived to reinforce the infant colony. The king entrusted a certain
number of Egyptian children to the care of these Greek settlers, to be
instructed in their language,* and the interpreters thus educated in
their schools increased in proportion as the bonds of commercial and
friendly intercourse between Greece and Egypt became strengthened, so
that ere long, in the towns of the Delta, they constituted a regular
class, whose function was to act as intermediaries between the two
races.
* Diodorus, or rather the historian whom he follows, assures
us that Psammetichus went still further, and gave his own
children a Greek education; what is possible and even
probable, is, that he had them taught Greek. A bronze Apis
in the Gizeh Museum was dedicated by an interpreter who
inscribed on it a bilingual inscription in hieroglyphics and
Carian.
[Illustration: 348a.jpg EGYPTIAN GREEK]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from PI, Pétrie. The original
statuette in alabaster is now in the Gizeh Museum; the
Cyprian style of the figure is easily recognised.
[Illustration: 348b.jpg EGYPTIAN GREEK]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from PI. Pétrie. The original
limestone statuette is in the Gizeh Museum.
By thus bringing his subjects in contact with an active, industrious,
and enterprising nation, full of youthful vigour, Psammetichus no doubt
hoped to inspire them with some of the qualities which he discerned in
the colonists, but Egypt during the last two centuries had suffered too
much at the hands of foreigners of all kinds to be favourably disposed
to these new-comers. It would have been different had they presented
themselves in humble guise like the Asiatics and Africans to whom Egypt
had opened her doors so freely after the XVIIIth dynasty, and if
they had adopted the obsequious manners of the Phoenician and Hebrew
merchants; but they landed from their ships fully equipped for war, and,
proud of their own courage and ability, they vied with the natives of
the ancient race, whether of plebeian or noble birth, for the favour
of the sovereign. Their language, their rude military customs, their
cunning devices in trade, even the astonishment they manifested at the
civilisation of the country, rendered them objects of disdain, as well
as of jealous hatred to the Egyptian. The food of which they partook
made them unclean in native estimation, and the horrified fellah shunned
contact with them from fear of defiling himself, refusing to eat with
them, or to use the same knife or cooking-vessel: the scribes and
members of the higher classes, astonished at their ignorance, treated
them like children with no past history, whose ancestors a few
generations back had been mere savages.
Although unexpressed at first, this hostility towards the Hellenes was
not long in manifesting itself openly. The Saite tradition attributed it
to a movement of wounded vanity. Psammetichus, to recompense the prowess
of his Ionian and Carian soldiers, had attached them to his own person,
and assigned to them the post of honour on the right wing when the army
was drawn up for review or in battle array.*
* Diodorus Siculus states that it was during the Syrian war
that the king thus honoured his mercenary troops. Wiedemann
thinks this is an erroneous inference drawn from the passage
of Herodotus, in which he explains the meaning of the word
Asmakh.
They reaped thus the double advantage of the glory, which they greatly
prized, and of the higher pay attached to the title of body-guard, but
the troops who had hitherto enjoyed these advantages were naturally
indignant at losing them, and began to murmur. One particularly galling
circumstance at last caused their discontent to break out. The eastern
and southern frontiers of Egypt were conterminous with those of two
conquering empires, Assyria and Ethiopia, and on the west the Libyan
tribes along the shores of the Mediterranean were powerful enough
to demand constant vigilance on the part of the border garrisons.
Psammetichus, among other reforms, had reorganised the ancient system
of defence. While placing outposts at the entrance to the passes leading
from the desert into the Nile valley, he had concentrated considerable
masses of troops at the three most vulnerable points--the outlets of
the road to Syria, the country surrounding Lake Mareotis, and the first
cataract; he had fortified Daphnse, near the old town of Zalu, as a
defence against the Assyrians, Marea against the Libyan Bedâwin, and
Elephantine against the Ethiopians. These advanced posts had been
garrisoned with native troops who were quartered there for a year at a
time. To be condemned to such an exile for so long a period raised
in them a sense of profound indignation, but when the king apparently
forgot them and left them there three years without sending other troops
to relieve them, their anger knew no bounds. They resolved to put an end
to such treatment, and as the hope of a successful rebellion seemed but
small, they decided to leave the country. Two hundred and forty thousand
of them assembled on a given day with their arms and baggage, and
marched in good order towards Ethiopia. Psammetichus, warned of their
intentions when ifc was too late, hastened after them with a handful of
followers, and coming up with them, besought them not to desert their
national gods, their wives, and their children. He had nearly prevailed
on them to return, when one soldier, with a significant gesture,
intimated that while manhood lasted they had power to create new
families wherever they might chance to dwell. The details of this story
betray the popular legend, but nevertheless have a basis of truth. The
inscriptions from the time of Psammetichus onwards never mention the
Mashauasha, while their name and their exploits constantly recur in the
history of the preceding dynasties: henceforth they and their chiefs
vanish from sight, and discord and brigandage simultaneously cease in
the Egyptian nomes. It was very probably the most turbulent among these
auxiliaries who left the country in the circumstances above narrated:
since they could not contest the superiority of their Greek rivals,
they concluded that their own part was played out, and rather than be
relegated to the second rank, they preferred to quit the land in a body.
Psammetichus, thus deprived of their support at the moment when Egypt
had more than ever need of all her forces to regain her rightful
position in the world, reorganised the military system as best he could.
He does not seem to have relied much upon the contingents from Upper
Egypt, to whom was doubtless entrusted the defence of the Nubian
frontier, and who could not be withdrawn from their posts without danger
of invasion or revolt. But the source of imminent peril did not lie in
this direction, where Ethiopia, exhausted by the wars of Taharqa and
Tanuatamanu, perhaps needed repose even more than Egypt itself, but
rather on the Asiatic side, where Assur-bani-pal, in spite of the
complications constantly arising in Karduniash and Elam, had by no means
renounced his claims to the suzerainty of Egypt. The Pharaoh divided the
feudatory militia of the Delta into two classes, which resided apart
in different sets of nomes. The first group, who were popularly called
Hermotybies, were stationed at Busiris, Sais, and Khemmis, in the island
of Prosopitis, and in one half of Natho--in fact, in the district which
for the last century had formed the centre of the principality of
the Saite dynasty: perhaps they were mostly of Libyan origin, and
represented the bands of Mashauasha who, from father to son, had served
under Tafnakhti and his descendants. Popular report numbered them at
160,000 men, all told, and the total number of the other class, known as
the Calasiries, at 250,000; these latter belonged, in my opinion, to the
pure Egyptian race, and were met with at Thebes, while the troops of
the north, who were more generally called out, were scattered over the
territory which formerly supported the Tanite and Bubastite kings, and
latterly Pakruru, and which comprised the towns of Bubastis, Aphthis,
Tanis, Mendes, Sebennytos, Athribis, Pharbaathos, Thmuis, Onuphis,
Anysis, and Myecphoris. Each year one thousand Hermotybies and one
thousand Calasiries were chosen to form the royal body-guard, and these
received daily five minae of bread apiece, two minas of beef, and four
bowls of wine; the jealousy which had been excited by the Greek
troops was thus lessened, as well as the discontent provoked by the
emigration.*
* _Calasiris_, the exact transcription of _Khala-shiri,
Khala-shere_, signifying _young man_. The meaning and
original of the word transcribed Hermotybies by Herodotus,
and Hermotymbies according to a variant given by Stephen of
Byzantium, is as yet unknown, but it seems to me to conceal
a title analogous to that of _Hir-mazaîu_, and to designate
what remained of Libyan soldiers in Egypt. This organisation
of the army is described by Herodotus as existing in his own
days, and there were Calasiries and Hermotybies in the
Egyptian contingent which accompanied the army of Mardonius
to Greece; it is nowhere stated that it was the work of
Psammetichus, but everything points to the conclusion that
it was so, at all events in the form in which it was known
to the Greeks.
The King of Napata gladly welcomed the timely reinforcements which
arrived to fill up the vacancies in his army and among his people,
weakened by a century of rapid changes, and generously gave them
permission to conquer for themselves some territory in the possession
of his enemies! Having driven out the barbarians, they established
themselves in the peninsula formed by the White and Blue Niles, and
their numbers increased so greatly that in course of time they became a
considerable nation. They called themselves Asmakh, the men who stand on
the kings left hand, in memory of the affront put upon them, and which
they had avenged by their self-exile: Greek travellers and geographers
called them sometimes Automoli, sometimes Sembrites, names which clung
to them till almost the beginning of our present era.
This departure of the Mashauasha was as the last blast of wind after a
storm: the swell subsided by degrees, and peace reigned in the interior.
Thebes accommodated itself as best it could to the new order of
things under the nominal administration of the Divine Spouses, the two
Shapenuapîts. Building works were recommenced at all points where it
appeared necessary, and the need of restoration was indeed pressing
after the disorders occasioned by the Assyrian invasion and the
Ethiopian suzerainty. At Karnak, and in the great temples on both banks
of the Nile, Psammetichus, respecting the fiction which assigned the
chief authority to the Pallacides, effaced himself in favour of them,
allowing them to claim all the merit of the work; in the cities they
erected small chapels, in which they are portrayed as queens fulfilling
their sacerdotal functions, humbly escorted by the viceroy who in other
respects exercised the real power. The kings zeal for restoration is
manifest all along the Nile, at Coptos, Abydos,* and in the plains of
the Delta, which are crowded with memorials of him. His two favourite
capitals were Memphis and Sais, on both of which he impartially lavished
his favours.
* The first Egyptologists attributed the prénommai cartouche
of Psammetichus I. to Psammetichus II., and _vice versa_:
this error must always be kept in mind in referring to their
works.
At Memphis he built the propylons on the south side of the temple of
Phtah, and the court in which the living Apis took his exercise and was
fed: this court was surrounded by a colonnade, against the pillars of
which were erected statues twelve cubits high, probably representing
Osiris as in the Eames-seum and at Medinet-Habu. Apis even when dead
also received his share of attention. Since the days when Ramses II.
had excavated the subterranean Serapeum as a burial-place of the sacred
bulls, no subsequent Pharaoh who had reigned at Memphis had failed to
embellish their common tomb, and to celebrate with magnificence their
rites of sepulture.
[Illustration: 355.jpg CHAMBER AND SARCOPHAGUS OF AN APIS]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an engraving published in
Mariette.
The body of the Apis, carefully embalmed, was sealed up in a coffin or
sarcophagus of hard stone, the mouth of the vault was then walled up,
and against the fresh masonry, at the foot of the neighbouring rocks,
on the very floor of the passage, or wherever there was a clear space
available, the high dignitaries, the workmen or the priests who had
taken any part in the ceremonial, set up a votive stele calling down
upon themselves and their families divine benedictions.
[Illustration: 356.jpg THE GREAT GALLERY OF THE SERAPEUM]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from an engraving of Devéria.
The gallery was transformed by degrees into a kind of record-office,
where each dynasty in turn recorded its name, whenever a fresh
apotheosis afforded them the opportunity: these records were discovered
in our own time by Mariette, almost perfect in spite of the destroying
hand of men, and comprised inscriptions by the Bubastites, by Bocchoris,
and even by the Ethiopians. Taharqa, when menaced by the Assyrians, had
stayed at Memphis, only a year before his death, in the interval between
two campaigns, in order to bury an Apis, and Psammetichus likewise
took care not to neglect this part of his regal duties. He at first was
content to imitate his predecessors, but a subsidence having occurred in
that part of the Serapeum where the Apis who had died in the twentieth
year of his reign reposed, he ordered his engineers to bore another
gallery in a harder vein of limestone, and he performed the opening
ceremony in his fifty-second year. It was the commencement of a thorough
restoration. The vaults in which the sacred bulls were entombed were
severally inspected, the wrappings were repaired together with the mummy
cases, the masonry of the chapel was strengthened, and the building
endowed with woods, stuffs, perfumes, and the necessary oils. No less
activity apparently was displayed at Sais, the native home and favourite
residence of the Pharaoh; but all the monuments which adorned the place,
including the temple of Nit, and the royal palace, have been entirely
destroyed; the enclosing wall of unbaked bricks alone remains, and here
and there, amid the _débris_ of the houses, may be seen some heaps of
shattered stone where the public buildings once stood. On several blocks
the name and titles of Psammetichus may yet be deciphered, and there are
few cities in the Delta which cannot make a similar show. From one end
of the Nile valley to the other the quarries were reopened, and the
arts, stimulated by the orders which flowed in, soon flourished anew.
The engraving of hieroglyphics and the art of painting both attained
a remarkable degree of elegance; fine statues and bas-reliefs were
executed in large numbers, and a widely spread school of art was
developed. The local artists had scrupulously observed and handed down
the traditions which obtained in the time of the Pyramids, and more
especially those of the first Theban period; even the few fragments
that have come down to us of the works of these artists in the age of
the Ramessides recall rather the style of the VIth and XIIth dynasties
than that of their Theban contemporaries. Their style, brought to
perfection by evident imitation of the old Memphite masters, pleases
us by its somewhat severe elegance, the taste shown in the choice of
detail, and the extraordinary skill displayed in the working of
the stone. The Memphites had by preference used limestone for their
sculpture, the Thebans red and grey granite or sandstone; but the
artists of the age of Psammetichus unhesitatingly attacked basalt,
breccia, or serpentine, and obtained marvellous effects from these
finely grained materials of regular and even texture. The artistic
renaissance which they brought to its height had been already
inaugurated under the Ethiopians, and many of the statues we possess
of the reign of Taharqa are examples of excellent workmanship. That of
Amenertas was over-praised at the time of its discovery; the face, half
buried by the wig which we usually associate with the statues of the
goddesses, has a dull and vacant expression in spite of its set smile,
and the modelling of the figure is rather weak, but nevertheless there
is something easy and refined in the gracefulness of the statue as a
whole.
[358.jpg Chieck Beled--Gizeh Museum]
A statuette of another Divine Spouse, though mutilated and
unfinished, is pleasing from its greater breadth of style, although such
breadth is rarely found in the works of this school, which toned down,
elongated, and attenuated the figure till it often lost in vigour what
it gained in distinction. The one point in which the Saite artists made
a real advance, was in the treatment of the heads of their models.
[Illustration: 359.jpg MEMPHITE BAS-RELIEF OF THE SAITE EPOCH]
Drawn by Boudier, from a heliogravure in Mariette. The bas-
relief was worked into the masonry of a house in Memphis in
the Byzantine period, and it was in order to fit it to the
course below that the masons bevelled the lower part of it.
The expression is often refined and idealised as in the case of older
works, but occasionally the portraiture is exact even to coarseness. It
was not the idealised likeness of Montumihâît which the artist wished
to portray, but Montumihâît himself, with his low forehead, his small
close-set eyes, his thin cheeks, and the deep lines about his nose and
mouth. And besides this, the wrinkles, the crows feet, the cranial
projections, the shape of ear and neck, are brought out with minute
fidelity. A statue was no longer, as in earlier days, merely a piece
of sacred stone, the support of the divine or human double, in which
artistic value was an accessory of no importance and was esteemed only
as a guarantee of resemblance: without losing aught of its religious
significance, a statue henceforward became a work of art, admired and
prized for the manner in which the sculptor faithfully represented his
model, as well as for its mystic utility.
The reign of Psammetichus lasted till nearly the end of the century, and
was marked by peace both at home and abroad. No doubt skirmishes of some
kind took place in Lydia and Nubia, but we know nothing of them, nor
have we any account of engagements with the Asiatics which from time to
time must have taken place during this reign. Psammetichus followed with
a vigilant eye the revolutionary changes beyond the isthmus, actuated
at first by the fear of an offensive movement on the part of Syria, and
when that ceased to be a danger, by the hope of one day recovering,
in Southern Syria, at all events, that leading position which his
predecessors had held so long. Tradition asserts that he wisely confined
his ambition to the conquest of the Philistine Pentapolis; it is even
reported that he besieged Ashdod for twenty-nine years before gaining
possession of it. If we disregard the cipher, which is evidently
borrowed from some popular romance, the fact in itself is in no way
improbable. Ashdod was a particularly active community, and had played
a far more important part in earlier campaigns than any other member of
the Pentapolis. It possessed outside the town proper, which was situated
some little distance from the coast, a seaport similar to that of Gaza,
and of sufficient size to shelter a whole fleet.
[Illustration: 361.jpg THE RUINS OF SAIS]
Drawn by Boudior, from a photograph by Golenischeff.
Whoever held this harbour could exercise effective control over the main
routes leading from Syria into Egypt. Psammetichus probably undertook
this expedition towards the end of his life, when the victories gained
by the Medes had demonstrated the incapacity of Assyria to maintain the
defence of her distant provinces.*
* At one time I was inclined to explain this period of
twenty-nine years by assuming that the fall of Ashdod took
place in the twenty-ninth year of the kings reign, and that
Herodotus had mistaken the date of its surrender for the
duration of the siege: such an hypothesis is, however,
unnecessary, since it is very probable that we have here one
of those exaggerated estimates of time so dear to the hearts
of popular historians. If we are to believe the account
given by Diodorus, it was in Syria that Psammetichus granted
the honour of a place in the right wing of his army to the
Greek mercenaries: the capture of Ashdod must, in this case,
have occurred before the emigration of the native troops. In
Jer. xxv. 20, reference is made to the remnant of Ashdod,
in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, i.e. about 603 B.C., and
the decadence of the city is generally attributed to the war
with Egypt; it might with equal probability be ascribed to
the Scythian invasion.
The attack of the Scythians, which might have proved dangerous to Egypt,
had it been pushed far enough, had left her unharmed, and was in the
end even advantageous to her. It was subsequent to the retreat of the
barbarians, no doubt, that Psam-metichus sent his troops into Philistia
and succeeded in annexing the whole or part of it. After this success
he was content to wait and watch the course of events. The surprising
revival of Egypt must have had the effect of infusing fresh life into
the Egyptian factions existing in all the autonomous states, and in the
prefectures of Syria. The appearance of the Pharaohs troops, and
the toleration of their presence within the territory of the Assyrian
empire, aroused on all sides the hope of deliverance, and incited the
malcontents to take some immediate action.
We do not know what may have happened at Tyre and Sidon, or among the
peoples of Edom and Arabia, but Judah, at any rate, under the rule of
Josiah, carefully abstained from any action inconsistent with the pledge
of fidelity which it had given to Assyria. Indeed, the whole kingdom
was completely absorbed in questions of a theological nature, and the
agitations which affected the religious life of the nation reacted on
its political life as well. Josiah, as he grew older, began to identify
himself more and more with the doctrines taught by the prophets, and,
thanks to his support, the party which sought to complete the reforms
outlined by Hezekiah gained fresh recruits every day. The opposition
which they had formerly aroused among the priests of the temple had
gradually died out, partly as the result of genuine conviction, and
partly because the priests had come to realise that the establishment
of a single exclusive sanctuary would work for their own interest
and advantage. The high priest Hilkiah took up the line followed by
Jeremiah, and was supported by a number of influential personages such
as Shaphan the scribe, son of Azaliah, Ahikam, Achbor son of Micaiab,
and a prophetess named Huldah, who had married the keeper of the royal
wardrobe. The terrors of the Scythian invasion had oppressed the hearts
and quickened the zeal of the orthodox. Judah, they declared, had no
refuge save Jahveh alone; all hope was lost if it persisted in the
doctrines which had aroused against the faithless the implacable wrath
of Jahveh; it must renounce at once those idols and superstitious rites
with which His worship had been disfigured, and overthrow the altars
which were to be found in every part of the country in order to
concentrate all its devotion on the temple of Solomon. In a word, Judah
must return to an observance of the strict letter of the law, as it had
been followed by their forefathers. But as this venerable code was not
to be found either in the Book of the Covenant or in any of the other
writings held sacred by Israel, the question naturally arose as to where
it was now hidden. In the eighteenth year of his reign, Josiah sent
Shaphan the scribe to the temple in order to audit the accounts of the
sums collected at the gates for the maintenance of the building. After
the accounts had been checked, Hilkiah suddenly declared that he had
found the Book of the Law in the temple, and thereupon handed the
document to Shaphan, who perused it forthwith. On his return to the
palace, the scribe made his report: Thy servants have emptied out the
money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand
of the workmen; then he added Hilkiah the priest hath delivered me a
book, and proceeded to read it to the king. When the latter had heard
the words contained in this Book of the Law, he was seized with anguish,
and rent his garments; then, unable to arrive at any decision by
himself, he sent Hilkiah, Shaphan, Ahikam, Achbor, and Asaiah to inquire
of Jahveh for him and for his people, for great is the wrath of the
Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened
unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is
written concerning us.
[Illustration: 364.jpg DECORATIONS ON THE WRAPPINGS OF A MUMMY.]
The envoys betook themselves not to the official oracle or the
recognised prophets, but to a woman, the prophetess Huldah, who was
attached to the court in virtue of her husbands office; and she bade
them, in the name of the Most High, to summon a meeting of the faithful,
and, after reading the new code to them, to call upon all present to
promise that they would henceforth observe its ordinances: thus Jahveh
would be appeased, and since the king had rent his garments and wept
before Me, I also have heard thee, saith Jahveh. Therefore, behold, I
will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave
in peace. Josiah thereupon having summoned the elders of Judah and
Jerusalem, went up into the temple, and there, standing on the platform,
he read the Book of the Law in the presence of the whole people.*
* 2 Kings xxii. 3-20; xxiii. 1, 2. The narrative has
undergone slight interpolation in places, e.g. verses 46,
5a, 6, and 7, where the compiler has made it harmonise with
events previously recorded in connection with the reign of
Joash (2 Kings xii. 6-16). The beginning of Huldahs
prophecy was suppressed, when the capture of Jerusalem
proved that the reform of divine worship had not succeeded
in averting the wrath of Jahveh. It probably contained
directions to read the _Book of the Covenant_ to the people,
and to persuade them to adopt its precepts, followed by a
promise to save Judah provided it remained faithful to its
engagements.
It dealt with questions which had been frequent subjects of debate in
prophetic circles since the days of Hezekiah, and the anonymous writer
who had compiled it was so strongly imbued with the ideas of Jeremiah,
and had so closely followed his style, that some have been inclined to
ascribe the work to Jeremiah himself. It has always been a custom among
Orientals to affirm that any work for which they profess particular
esteem was discovered in the temple of a god; the Egyptian priests,
for instance, invented an origin of this nature for the more important
chapters of their Book of the Dead, and for the leading treatises in the
scientific literature of Egypt. The author of the Book of the Law had
ransacked the distant past for the name of the leader who had delivered
Israel from captivity in Egypt. He told how Moses, when he began to feel
the hand of death upon him, determined to declare in Gilead the decrees
which Jahveh had delivered to him for the guidance of His people.* In
these ordinances the indivisible nature of God, and His jealousy of
any participation of other deities in the worship of His people, are
strongly emphasised. Ye shall surely destroy all the places wherein
the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high
mountains and upon the hills, and under every green tree: and ye shall
break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and burn
their Asherim with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of
their gods; and ye shall destroy their name out of that place. **
* Even St. Jerome and St. John Chrysostom admitted that
Deuteronomy was the book discovered by Hilkiah in the temple
during the reign of Josiah, and this view is accepted at
present, though it is applied, not to the book of
Deuteronomy as it appears in the Pentateuch, but rather to
the nucleus of this book, and especially chaps, xii.-xxvi.
** Deut. xii. 2, 3.
Even were a prophet or dreamer of dreams to arise in the midst of the
faithful and direct them by a sign or a miracle to turn aside after
those accursed gods, they must not follow the teaching of these false
guides, not even if the sign or miracle actually came to pass, but must
seize and slay them. Even if thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy
son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is
as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve
other gods,... thou shalt not consent unto him nor hearken unto him:
neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither
shalt thou conceal him: but thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall
be first upon him to put him to death, and, afterwards the hand of all
the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones that he die; because he
hath sought to draw thee away from Jahveh!* And this Jahveh was not the
Jahveh of any special place. He was not the Jahveh of Bethel, or of Dan,
or of Mizpah, or of Geba, or of Beersheba; He is simply Jahveh.** Yet
the seat of His worship was not a matter of indifference to Him. Unto
the place which Jahveh shall choose out of all your tribes to put His
name there, even unto His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shalt
thou come: and thither shall ye bring your... sacrifices and your
tithes. *** Jerusalem is not mentioned by name, but the reference to it
was clear, since every one knew that the suppression of the provincial
sanctuaries must necessarily benefit it. One part of the new code dealt
with the relations between different members of the community. The king
was to approximate as closely as possible to the ideal priest; he was
not to lift up his heart above his brethren, nor set his mind on the
possession of many chariots, horses, or wives, but must continually read
the law of God and ponder over His ordinances, and observe them word for
word all the days of his life.****
* Deut. xiii. 1-10.
** Deut. vi. 4. The expression found in Zecli. xiv. 9 was
borrowed from the second of the introductions added to
_Deuteronomy_ at a later date; the phrase harmonises so
closely with the main purpose of the book itself, that there
can be no objection to employing it here.
*** Deut. xii. 5, 6.
**** Deut. xvii. 14-20; cf. xx. 1-9 for the regulations in
regard to the levying of troops.
Even in time of war he was not to put his trust in his soldiers or in
his own personal valour; here again he must allow himself to be guided
by Jahveh, and must undertake nothing without first consulting Him
through the medium of His priests. The poor,* the widow, and the
orphan,** the bondservant,*** and even the stranger within the gates--in
remembrance of the bondage in Egypt ****--were all specially placed
under the divine protection; every Jew who had become enslaved to a
fellow-countryman was to be set at liberty at the end of six years, and
was to receive a small allowance from his master which would ensure him
for a time against starvation.^
* As to the poor, and the charitable obligations towards
them imposed by their common religion, cf. Deut. xv. 7-11;
as to the rights of the hired servant, cf. xxiv. 14, 15.
** Deut. xxiv. 17-22 forbids the taking of a widows
clothing in pledge, and lays down regulations in regard to
gleaning permitted to widows and orphans (cf. Lev. xix. 9,
10); reference is also made to their share in triennial
tithe (Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13) and in the solemn
festivals (Deut. xvi. 11-14).
*** Slaves were allowed to share in the rejoicings during
the great festivals (Deut. xvi. 11, 14), and certain rights
were accorded to women taken prisoners in war who had become
their captors concubines (Deut. xxi. 10-14).
****Participation of the stranger in the triennial tithe
(Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13).
^ Deut. xv. 12-18.
The regulations in regard to divine worship had not as yet been drawn
up in that spirit of hair-splitting minuteness which, later on, became
a characteristic of Hebrew legislation. Only three great festivals are
mentioned in the Book of the Law. The Passover was celebrated in the
month of Abîb, when the grain is in the ear, and had already come to be
regarded as commemorative of the Exodus; but the other two, the Feast
of Weeks and the Feast of Tabernacles, were merely associated with the
agricultural seasons, and took place, the former seven weeks after the
beginning of the harvest, the latter after the last of the crops had
been housed.* The claim of the priest to a share in the victim and in
the offerings made on various occasions is maintained, and the lawgiver
allows him to draw a similar benefit from the annual and triennial
tithes which he imposes on corn and wine and on the firstborn of cattle,
the produce of this tithe being devoted to a sort of family festival
celebrated in the Holy Place.** The priest was thus placed on the same
footing as the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, and his
influence was but little greater than it had been in the early days of
the monarchy. It was to the prophet and not to the priest that the duty
belonged of directing the public conscience in all those cases for which
the law had made no provision. I will put My words into his mouth (said
Jahveh), and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.
And it shall come to pass that whosoever will not hearken unto My words
which he shall speak in My name, I will require it of him. But the
prophet which shall speak a word presumptuously in My name, which I have
not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other
gods, that same prophet shall die. And if thou say in thine heart, How
shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken?--when a prophet
speaketh in the name of Jahveh, if the thing follow not, nor come to
pass, that is the thing which Jahveh hath not spoken: the prophet hath
spoken it presumptuously; thou shalt not be afraid of him.
* Deut. xvi. 1-17.
** Deut. xviii. 1-8; as to the share in the triennial tithe,
cf. Deut. xiv. 28, 29; xxvi. 12, 13.
When the reading of the law had ended, Josiah implored the people to
make a covenant with Jahveh; that is to say, to walk after Jahveh, and
to keep His commandments, and His testimonies, and His statutes, with
all their hearts and all their souls, to confirm the words of this
covenant that were written in this book. The final words, which
lingered in every ear, contained imprecations of even more terrible
and gloomy import than those with which the prophets had been wont to
threaten Judah. If thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jahveh thy
God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I
command thee this day; then all these curses shall come upon thee, and
overtake thee. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou
be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough.
Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, the
increase of thy kine, and the young of thy flock.... Thou shalt betroth
a wife, and another man shall lie with her; thou shalt build an house,
and shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not
use the fruit thereof. Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and
thou shalt not eat thereof.... Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given
unto another people; and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing
for them all the day: and there shall be naught in the power of thine
hand.... Jahveh shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the end
of the earth, as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue thou shalt not
understand; a nation of fierce countenance, which shalt not regard the
person of the old, nor show favour to the young. This enemy was to burn
and destroy everything: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates,
throughout all thy land, which Jahveh thy God hath given thee. And thou
shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy sons and of thy
daughters... in the straitness wherewith thine enemies shall straiten
thee. Those who escape must depart into captivity, and there endure for
many a long year the tortures of direst slavery; thy life shall hang
in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear night and day, and shalt have
none assurance of thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it
were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for
the fear of thine heart which thou shalt fear, and for the sight of
thine eyes which thou shalt see. *
* Deut. xxviii. The two sets of imprecations (xxvii.,
xxviii.) which terminate the actual work are both of later
redaction, but the original MS. undoubtedly ended with some
analogous formula. I have quoted above the most
characteristic parts of the twenty-eighth chapter.
The assembly took the oath required of them, and the king at once
displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the
ordinances contained in the Book of the Law. His first step was to
purify the temple: Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols
contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in
honour of strange gods--the Baals, the Asherim, and all the Host of
Heaven--and, carrying them out of Jerusalem into the valley of the
Kidron, cast them into the flames, and scattered the ashes upon the
place where all the filth of the city was cast out. The altars and the
houses of the Sodomites which defiled the temple courts were demolished,
the chariots of the sun broken in pieces, and the horses of the god
sent to the stables of the kings chamberlain;* the sanctuaries and high
places which had been set up at the gates of the city, in the public
places, and along the walls were razed to the ground, and the Tophet,
where the people made their children pass through the fire, was
transformed into a common sewer.
* [The Hebrew text admits of this meaning, which is,
however, not clear in the English A.V.--Tr.]
The provincial sanctuaries shared the fate of those of the capital; in
a short time, from Geba to Beersheba, there remained not one of those
high places, at which the ancestors of the nation and their rulers
had offered prayers for generations past. The wave of reform passed even
across the frontier and was borne into the Assyrian province of Samaria;
the temple and image which Jeroboam had set up at Bethel were reduced to
ashes, and human bones were burnt upon the altar to desecrate it beyond
possibility of purification.*
* 2 Kings xxiii. 3-20, 24-27, where several glosses and
interpolations are easily recognisable, such as the episode
at Bethel (v. 15-20), the authenticity of which is otherwise
incontestable. The account in 2 Chron. xxxiv. is a defaced
reproduction of that of 2 Kings, and it places the reform,
in part at least, before the discovery of the new law.
The governor offered no objection to these acts; he regarded them, in
the first place, as the private affairs of the subjects of the empire,
with which he had no need to interfere, so long as the outburst of
religious feeling did not tend towards a revolt: we know, moreover, that
Josiah, guided on this point by the prophets, would have believed that
he was opposing the divine will had he sought to free himself from the
Assyrian yoke by ordinary political methods; besides this, in 621, under
Assur-etililâni, five years after the Scythian invasion, the prefect of
Samaria had possibly not sufficient troops at his disposal to oppose the
encroachments of the vassal princes. It was an affair of merely a few
months. In the following year, when the work of destruction was
over, Josiah commanded that the Passover should be kept in the manner
prescribed in the new book; crowds flocked into Jerusalem, from Israel
as well as from Judah, and the festival made a deep impression on the
minds of the people. Centuries afterwards the Passover of King Josiah
was still remembered: There was not kept such a Passover from the days
of the Judges... nor in all the days of the Kings of Israel, nor of the
Kings of Judah. *
1 2 Kings xxiii. 21-23; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 1-19. The text of
the Soptuagint appears to imply that it was the first
Passover celebrated in Jerusalem. It also gives in chap.
xxii. 3, after the mention of the eighteenth year, a date of
the seventh or eighth month, which is not usually accepted,
as it is in contradiction with what is affirmed in chap,
xxiii. 21-23, viz. that the Passover celebrated at Jerusalem
was in the same year as the reform, in the eighteenth year.
It is to do away with the contradiction between these two
passages that the Hebrew text has suppressed the mention of
the month. I think, however, it ought to be considered
authentic and be retained, if we are allowed to place the
celebration of the Passover in what would be one year after.
To do this it would not be needful to correct the regnal
date in the text: admitting that the reform took place in
621, the Passover of 620 would still quite well have taken
place in the eighteenth year of Josiah, that being dependent
on the time of year at which the king had ascended the
throne.
The first outburst of zeal having spent itself, a reaction was ere long
bound to set in both among the ruling classes and among the people, and
the spectacle that Asia at that time presented to their view was truly
of a nature to incite doubts in the minds of the faithful. Assyria--that
Assyria of which the prophets had spoken as the irresistible emissary of
the Most High--had not only failed to recover from the injuries she had
received at the hands, first of the Medes, and then of the Scythians,
but had with each advancing year seen more severe wounds inflicted upon
her, and hastening her irretrievably to her ruin. And besides this,
Egypt and Chaldæa, the ancient kingdoms which had for a short time bent
beneath her yoke, had now once more arisen, and were astonishing the
world by their renewed vigour. Psammetichus, it is true, after having
stretched his arm across the desert and laid hands upon the citadel
which secured to him an outlet into Syria for his armies, had proceeded
no further, and thus showed that he was not inclined to reassert
the ancient rights of Egypt over the countries of the Jordan and the
Orontes; but he had died in 611, and his son, Necho II., who succeeded
him, did not manifest the same peaceful intentions.*
* The last dated stele of Psammetichus I. is the official
epitaph of the Apis which died in his fifty-second year. On
the other hand, an Apis, born in the fifty-third year of
Psammetichus, died in the sixteenth year of Necho, after
having lived 16 years, 7 months, 17 days. A very simple
calculation shows that Psammetichus I. reigned fifty-four
years, as stated by Herodotus and Manetho, according to
Julius Africanus.
If he decided to try his fortune in Syria, supported by his Greek and
Egyptian battalions, what would be the attitude that Judah would assume
between moribund Assyria and the kingdom of the Pharaohs in its renewed
vigour? It was in the spring of 608 that the crisis occurred. Nineveh,
besieged by the Medes, was on the point of capitulating, and it was easy
to foresee that the question as to who should rule there would shortly
be an open one: should Egypt hesitate longer in seizing what she
believed to be her rightful heritage, she would run the risk of finding
the question settled and another in possession. Necho quitted Memphis
and made his way towards the Asiatic frontier with the army which his
father had left to him. It was no longer composed of the ill-organised
bands of the Ethiopian kings or the princes of the Delta, temporarily
united under the rule of a single leader, but all the while divided by
reciprocal hatreds and suspicions which doomed it to failure. All the
troops which constituted it--Egyptians, Libyans, and Greeks alike--were
thoroughly under the control of their chief, and advanced in a compact
and irresistible mass like the Nile: like a river its volume rolls
onward. It said: I arise, I inundate the earth, I will drown cities
and people! Charge, horses! Chariots, fly forward at a gallop! Let the
warriors march, the Ethiopian and the Libyan under the shelter of his
buckler, the fellah bending the bow!*
* Jer. xlvi. 7-9, where the prophet describes, not the army
which marched against Josiah, but that which was beaten at
Carchemish. With a difference of date of only three or four
years, the constituent elements of the army were certainly
the same, so that the description of one would apply to the
other.
As soon as Josiah heard the news, he called together his troops
and prepared to resist the attack. Necho affected not to take his
demonstrations seriously, and sent a disdainful message recommending him
to remain neutral: What have I to do with thee, thou King of Judah? I
come not against thee this day, but against the house wherewith I have
war: and God hath commanded me to make haste: forbear thee from meddling
with God who is with me, that He destroy thee not!*
* The message of Necho to Josiah is known to us from 2
Chron. xxxv. 20-22.
Having despatched the message, probably at the moment of entering the
Shephelah, he continued in a northerly direction, nothing doubting that
his warning had met a friendly reception; but however low Nineveh had
fallen, Josiah could not feel that he was loosed from the oaths which
bound him to her, and, trusting in the help of Jahveh, he threw himself
resolutely into the struggle. The Egyptian generals were well acquainted
with the route as far as the farther borders of Philistia, having
passed along it a few years previously, at the time of the campaign of
Psammetichus; but they had no experience of the country beyond Ashdod,
and were solely dependent for guidance on the information of merchants
or the triumphant records of the old Theban Pharaohs. These monuments
followed the traditional road which had led their ancestors from Gaza
to Megiddo, from Megiddo to Qodshu, from Qodshu to Carchemish, and they
were reckoning on passing through the valley of the Jordan, and then
that of the Orontes, without encountering any resistance, when, at the
entrance to the gorges of Carmel, they were met by the advance guard of
the Judæan army.
Josiah, not having been warned in time to meet them as they left the
desert, had followed a road parallel to their line of march, and had
taken up his position in advance of them on the plain of Megiddo, on the
very spot where Thutmosis III. had vanquished the Syrian confederates
nearly ten centuries before. The King of Judah was defeated and killed
in the confusion of the battle, and the conqueror pushed on northwards
without, at that moment, giving the fate of the scattered Jews a further
thought.* He rapidly crossed the plain of the Orontes by the ancient
caravan track, and having reached the Euphrates, he halted under the
walls of Carchemish. Perhaps he may have heard there of the fall of
Nineveh, and the fear of drawing down upon himself the Medes or the
Babylonians prevented him from crossing the river and raiding the
country of the Balikh, which, from the force of custom, the royal
scribes still persisted in designating by the disused name of Mitanni.**
* 2 Kings xxiii. 29; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 22, 23. It is
probably to this battle that Herodotus alludes when he says
that Necho overcame the Syrians at Magdôlos. The identity of
Magdôlos and Megiddo, accepted by almost all historians, was
disputed by Gutschmid, who sees in the Magdôlos of Herodotus
the Migdol of the Syro-Egyptian frontier, and in the
engagement itself, an engagement of Necho with the Assyrians
and their Philistine allies; also by Th. Reinach, who
prefers to identify Magdôlos with one of the Migdols near
Ascalon, and considers this combat as fought against the
Assyrian army of occupation. If the information in Herodotus
were indeed borrowed from Hecatasus of Miletus, and by the
latter from the inscription placed by Necho in the temple of
Branchidae, it appears to me impossible to admit that
Magdôlos does not here represent Megiddo.
** The text of 2 Kings xxiii. 29 says positively that Necho
was marching towards the Euphrates. The name Mitanni is
found even in Ptolemaic times.
He returned southwards, after having collected the usual tributes and
posted a few garrisons at strategic points; at Biblah he held a kind of
_Durbar_ to receive the homage of the independent Phoenicians* and of
the old vassals of Assyria, who, owing to the rapidity of his movements,
had not been able to tender their offerings on his outward march.
* The submission of the Phoenicians to Necho is gathered
from a passage in Berosus, where he says that the Egyptian
army beaten at Carchemish comprised Phoenicians, besides
Syrians and Arabs.
[Illustration: 378.jpg Victorious Necho]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph published in
Mariette. This scarab, now in the Gizeh Museum, is the only
Egyptian monument which alludes to the victories of Necho.
Above, the king stands between Nît and Isis; below, the
vanquished are stretched on the ground.
The Jews had rescued the body of their king and had brought it back in
his chariot to Jerusalem; they proclaimed in his stead, not his eldest
son Eliakim, but the youngest, Shallum, who adopted the name of Jehoahaz
on ascending the throne. He was a young man, twenty-three years of age,
light and presumptuous of disposition, opposed to the reform movement,
and had doubtless been unwise enough to display his hostile feelings
towards the conqueror. Necho summoned him to Eiblah, deposed him after
a reign of three months, condemned him to prison, and replaced him by
Eliakim, who changed his name to that of Jehoiakim--he whom Jahveh
exalts; and after laying Judah under a tribute of one hundred talents
of silver and one of gold, the Egyptian monarch returned to his own
country. Certain indications lead us to believe that he was obliged to
undertake other punitive expeditions. The Philistines, probably deceived
by false rumours of his defeat, revolted against him about the time that
he was engaged in hostilities in Northern Syria, and on receiving news
not only of his safety, but of the victory he had gained, their alarm
was at once aroused. Judah forgot her own sorrows on seeing the peril in
which they stood, and Jeremiah pronounced against them a prophecy full
of menace. Behold, he cried, waters rise up out of the north, and
shall become an overflowing stream, and shall overflow the land and all
that is therein, the city and them that dwell therein; and the men shall
cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl... for the Lord will
spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the Isle of Caphtor. Baldness is
come upon Gaza; Ascalon is dumb with terror, and you, all that are left
of the giants, how long will ye tear your faces in your mourning? *
Ascalon was sacked and then Gaza,** and Necho at length was able to
re-enter his domains, doubtless by the bridge of Zalu, following in this
his models, his heroic ancestors of the great Theban dynasties.
* [R.V., Ashkolon is brought to nought, the remnant of
their valley: how long wilt thou cut thyself?--Tr.]
** Jer. xlvii., which is usually attributed to a period
subsequent to the defeat at Carchemish or even later; the
title, which alone mentions the Egyptians, is wanting in the
LXX. If we admit that the enemy coming from the north is the
Egyptian and not the Chaldaean, as do most writers, the only
time that danger could have threatened Philistia from the
Egyptians coming from the north, was when Necho, victorious,
was returning from his first campaign. In this case, the
Kadytis of Herodotus, which has caused so much trouble to
commentators, would certainly be Gaza, and there would be no
difficulty in explaining how the tradition preserved by the
Greek historian placed the taking of this town after the
battle of Megiddo.
He wished thereupon to perpetuate the memory of the Greeks who had
served him so bravely, and as soon as the division of the spoil had been
made, he sent as an offering to the temple of Apollo at Miletus, the
cuirass which he had worn throughout the campaign.
We can picture the reception which his subjects gave him, and how the
deputations of priests and nobles in white robes flocked out to meet him
with garlands of flowers in their hands, and with acclamations similar
to those which of old had heralded the return of Seti I. or Ramses II.
National pride, no doubt, was flattered by this revival of military
glory, but other motives than those of vanity lay at the root of the
delight exhibited by the whole country at the news of the success of the
expedition. The history of the century which was drawing to its close,
had demonstrated more than once how disadvantageous it was to Egypt to
be separated from a great power merely by the breadth of the isthmus.
If Taharqa, instead of awaiting the attack on the banks of the Nile, had
met the Assyrians at the foot of Carmel, or even before Gaza, it would
have been impossible for Esarhaddon to turn the glorious kingdom of the
Pharaohs into an Assyrian province after merely a few weeks of fighting.
The dictates of prudence, more than those of ambition, rendered,
therefore, the conquest of Syria a necessity, and Necho showed his
wisdom in undertaking it at the moment when the downfall of Nineveh
reduced all risk of opposition to a minimum; it remained to be seen
whether the conquerors of Sin-shar-ishkun would tolerate for long the
interference of a third robber, and would consent to share the spoil
with these Africans, who, having had none of the trouble, had hastened
to secure the profit. All the Mediterranean dependencies of Assyria,
such as Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judæ, fell naturally within the
sphere of Babylon rather than that of Media, and, indeed, Cyaxares never
troubled himself about them; and Nabopolassar, who considered them
his own by right, had for the moment too much in hand to permit of his
reclaiming them. The Aramæans of the Khabur and the Balikh, the nomads
of the Mesopotamian plain, had not done homage to him, and the country
districts were infested with numerous bands of Cimmerians and Scythians,
who had quite recently pillaged the sacred city of Harrân and violated
the temple of the god Sin.* Nabopolassar, who was too old to command
his troops in person, probably entrusted the conduct of them to
Nebuchadrezzar, who was the son he had appointed to succeed him, and who
had also married the Median princess. Three years sufficed this prince
to carry the frontier of the new Chaldæan empire as far as the Syrian
fords of the Euphrates, within sight of Thapsacus and Carchemish. Harrân
remained in the hands of the barbarians,** probably on condition of
their paying a tribute, but the district of the Subaru was laid waste,
its cities reduced to ashes, and the Babylonian suzerainty established
on the southern slopes of the Masios.
* _Inscrip. of the Cylinder of Nabonidus_ mentions the
pillage of Harrân as having taken place fifty-four years
before the date of its restoration by Nabonidus. This was
begun, as we know, in the third year of that king, possibly
in 554-3. The date of the destruction is, therefore, 608-7,
that is to say, a few months before the destruction of
Nineveh.
** The passage in the _Cylinder of Nabonidus_ shows that the
barbarians remained in possession of the town.
Having brought these preliminary operations to a successful issue,
Nabopolassar, considering himself protected on the north and north-east
by his friendship with Cyaxares, no longer hesitated to make an effort
to recover the regions dominated by Egyptian influence, and, if the
occasion presented itself, to reduce to submission the Pharaoh who was
in his eyes merely a rebellious satrap. Nebuchadrezzar again placed
himself at the head of his troops; Necho, warned of his projects,
hastened to meet him with all the forces at his disposal, and, owing
probably to the resistance offered by the garrisons which he possessed
in the Hittite fortresses, he had time to continue his march as far as
the Euphrates. The two armies encountered each other at Carchemish; the
Egyptians were completely defeated in spite of their bravery and the
skilful tactics of their Greek auxiliaries, and the Asiatic nations, who
had once more begun to rely on Egypt, were obliged to acknowledge that
they were as unequal to the task of overcoming Chaldaea as they had been
of sustaining a struggle with Assyria.*
* Jer. xlvi. 2; cf. 2 Kings xxiv. 7, where the editor,
without mentioning the battle of Carchemish, recalls in
passing that the King of Babylon had taken, from the brook
of Egypt unto the river Euphrates, all that pertained to the
King of Egypt.
The religious party in Judah, whose hopes had been disappointed by the
victory of Pharaoh at Megiddo, now rejoiced at his defeat, and when the
remains of his legions made their way back across the Philistine plain,
closely pressed by the enemy, Jeremiah hailed them as they passed with
cutting irony. Two or three brief, vivid sentences depicting the spirit
that had fired them a few months before, and then the picture of their
disorderly flight: Order ye the buckler and shield, and draw near to
battle. Harness the horses; and get up, ye horsemen, and stand forth
with your helmets; furbish the spears, put on the coats of mail.
Wherefore have I seen it? They are dismayed and turn backward; and their
mighty ones are beaten down, and are fled apace, and look not back;
terror is on every side, saith the Lord. Let not the swift flee away,
nor the mighty man escape; in the north by the river Euphrates have
they stumbled and fallen.... Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin
daughter of Egypt; in vain dost thou use many medicines; there is no
healing for thee. The nations have heard of thy shame, and the earth is
full of thy cry: for the mighty man hath stumbled against the mighty,
they are fallen both of them together. * Nebuchadrezzar received by the
way the submission of Jehoiakim, and of the princes of Ammon, Moab, and
the Philistines;** he was nearing Pelusium on his way into Egypt, when a
messenger brought him the news of his fathers death.
* Jer. xlvi. 3-6, 11, 12.
** The submission of all these peoples is implied by the
passage already cited in 2 Kings xxiv. 7; Berosus speaks of
the Phoenician, Jewish, and Syrian prisoners whom
Nebuchadrezzar left to his generals, when he resolved to
return to Babylon by the shortest route.
He feared lest a competitor should dispute his throne--perhaps his
younger brother, that Nabu-shum-lishir who had figured at his side
at the dedication of a temple to Marduk. He therefore concluded an
armistice with Necho, by the terms of which he remained master of the
whole of Syria between the Euphrates and the Wady el-Arish, and then
hastily turned homewards. But his impatience could not brook the
delay occasioned by the slow march of a large force, nor the ordinary
circuitous route by Carchemish and through Mesopotamia. He hurried
across the Arabian desert, accompanied by a small escort of light
troops, and presented himself unexpectedly at the gates of Babylon. He
found all in order. His Chaldæan ministers had assumed the direction of
affairs, and had reserved the throne for the rightful heir; he had only
to appear to be acclaimed and obeyed (B.C. 605).
His reign was long, prosperous, and on the whole peaceful. The recent
changes in Asiatic politics had shut out the Chaldæans from the majority
of the battle-fields on which the Assyrians had been wont to wage
warfare with the tribes on their eastern and northern frontiers. We no
longer see stirring on the border-land those confused masses of tribes
and communities of whose tumultuous life the Ninevite annals make such
frequent record: Elam as an independent state no longer existed, neither
did Philipi and Namri, nor the Cossæans, nor Parsua, nor the Medes
with their perpetual divisions, nor the Urartians and the Mannai in
a constant state of ferment within their mountain territory; all that
remained of that turbulent world now constituted a single empire, united
under the hegemony of the Medes, and the rule of a successful conqueror.
The greater part of Blam was already subject to those Achæmenides who
called themselves sovereigns of Anshân as well as of Persia, and whose
fief was dependent on the kingdom of Ecbatana:* it is probable that
Chaldasa received as her share of the ancient Susian territory the low
countries of the Uknu and the Ulai, occupied by the Aramæan tribes
of the Puqudu, the Eutu, and the Grambulu;** but Susa fell outside her
portion, and was soon transformed into a flourishing Iranian town.
* The king and the princes of Elam mentioned in Jer. xxv.
25, xlix.35-39, and in Ezele. xxxii. 24, 25, in the time of
Nebuchadrezzar, are probably the Persian kings of Anshân and
their Elamite vassals--not only, as is usually believed, the
kings and native princes conquered by Assur-bani-pal; the
same probably holds good of the Elam which an anonymous
prophet associates with the Medes under Nabonidus, in the
destruction of Babylon (Isa. xxi. 2). The princes of Malamîr
appear to me to belong to an anterior epoch.
** The enumeration given in Ezelc. xxiii. 23, the
Babylonians and all the Chaldæans, Pelted, and Shoa, and
Koa, shows us probably that the Aramæans of the Lower
Tigris represented by Pekôd, as those of the Lower Euphrates
are by the Chaldæans, belonged to the Babylonian empire in
the time of the prophet. They are also considered as
belonging to Babylon in the passage of an anonymous prophet
(Jer. I. 21), who wrote in the last days of the Chaldæn
empire: Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against
it and the inhabitants of Pekod. Translators and
commentators have until quite recently mistaken the import
of the name Pekôd.
The plains bordering the right bank of the Tigris, from the Uknu to
the Turnat or the Eadanu, which had belonged to Babylon from the very
earliest times, were no doubt still retained by her;* but the mountain
district which commanded them certainly remained in the hands of
Cyaxares, as well as the greater part of Assyria proper, and there
is every reason to believe that from the Eadanu northwards the Tigris
formed the boundary between the two allies, as far as the confluence of
the Zab.
* This is what appears to me to follow from the account of
the conquest o£ Babylon by Cyrus, as related by Herodotus.
The entire basin of the Upper Tigris and its Assyrian colonies, Amidi
and Tushkân were now comprised in the sphere of Medic influence, and the
settlement of the Scythians at Harrân, around one of the most venerated
of the Semitic sanctuaries, shows to what restrictions the new authority
of Chaldasa was subjected, even in the districts of Mesopotamia, which
were formerly among the most faithful possessions of Nineveh. If these
barbarians had been isolated, they would not long have defied the King
of Babylon, but being akin to the peoples who were subject to Cyaxares,
they probably claimed his protection, and regarded themselves as his
liege men; it was necessary to treat them with consideration, and
tolerate the arrogance of their presence upon the only convenient road
which connected the eastern with the western provinces of the kingdom.
It is therefore evident that there was no opening on this side for those
ever-recurring struggles in which Assyria had exhausted her best powers;
one war was alone possible, that with Media, but it was fraught with
such danger that the dictates of prudence demanded that it should be
avoided at all costs, even should the alliance between the two courts
cease to be cemented by a royal marriage. However great the confidence
which he justly placed in the valour of his Chaldæans, Nebuchadrezzar
could not hide from himself the fact that for two centuries they had
always been beaten by the Assyrians, and that therefore he would run
too great a risk in provoking hostilities with an army which had got the
better of the conquerors of his people. Besides this, Cyaxares was fully
engaged in subjecting the region which he had allotted to himself, and
had no special desire to break with his ally. Nothing is known of his
history during the years which followed the downfall of Nineveh, but it
is not difficult to guess what were the obstacles he had to surmount,
and the result of the efforts which he made to overcome them. The
country which extends between the Caspian and the Black Sea--the
mountain block of Armenia, the basins of the Araxes and the Kur, the
valleys of the Halys, the Iris, and the Thermodon, and the forests
of the Anti-Taurus and the Taurus itself--had been thrown into utter
confusion by the Cimmerians and the Scythians. Nothing remained of the
previous order of things which had so long prevailed there, and the
barbarians who for a century and a half had destroyed everything in the
country seemed incapable of organising anything in its place. Urartu had
shrunk within its ancient limits around Ararat, and it is not known
who ruled her; the civilisation of Argistis and Menuas had almost
disappeared with the dynasty which had opposed the power of Assyria, and
the people, who had never been much impregnated by it, soon fell back
into their native rude habits of life. Confused masses of European
barbarians were stirring in Etiaus and the regions of the Araxes,
seeking a country in which to settle themselves, and did not succeed in
establishing themselves firmly till a much later period in the district
of Sakasênê, to which was attached the name of one of their tribes.*
* Strabo states that Armenia and the maritime regions of
Cappadocia suffered greatly from the invasion of the
Scythians.
Such of the Mushku and the Tabal as had not perished had taken refuge in
the north, among the mountains bordering the Black Sea, where they were
ere long known to the Greeks as the Moschi and the Tibarenians. The
remains of the Cimmerian hordes had taken their place in Cappadocia,
and the Phrygian population which had followed in their wake had spread
themselves over the basin of the Upper Halys and over the ancient
Milidu, which before long took from them the name of Armenia.* All these
elements constituted a seething, struggling, restless mass of people,
actuated by no plan or method, and subject merely to the caprice of its
chiefs; it was, indeed, the seething cauldron of which the
Hebrew prophets had had a vision, which at times overflowed over the
neighbouring nations, and at others was consumed within and wasted
itself in fruitless ebullition.**
* The Phrygian origin of the Armenians is pointed out by
Herodotus and by Eudoxius.
** Jer. i. 13.
It took Cyaxares years to achieve his conquests; he finally succeeded,
however, in reducing the various elements to subjection--Urartians,
Scythians, Cimmerians, Chaldæ, and the industrious tribes of the
Chalybes and the White Syrians--and, always victorious, appeared at last
on the right hank of the Halys; but having reached it, he found himself
face to face with foes of quite a different calibre from those with
whom he had hitherto to deal. Lydia had increased both in wealth and
in vigour since the days when her king Ardys informed his ally
Assur-bani-pal that he had avenged the death of his father and driven
the Cimmerians from the valley of the Msoander.
He had by so doing averted all immediate danger; but as long as the
principal horde remained unexterminated, another invasion was always
to be feared; besides which, the barbarian inroad, although of short
duration, had wrought such havoc in the country that no native power in
Asia Minor appeared, nor in reality was, able to make the effort needful
to destroy them. Their king Dugdamis, it will be remembered, met his
death in Cilicia at the hands of the Assyrians about the year 640, and
Kôbos, his successor, was defeated and killed by the Scythians under
Madyes about 633. The repeated repulses they had suffered had the effect
of quickly relieving Lydia, Phrygia, and the remaining states of the
Ægean and the Black Sea from their inroads; the Milesians wrested
Sinope from them about 630, and the few bands left behind when the main
body set out for the countries of the Euphrates were so harried and
decimated by the people over whom they had terrorised for nearly a
century, that they had soon no refuge except round the fortress of
Antandros, in the mountains of the Troad. Most of the kingdoms whose
downfall they had caused never recovered from their reverses; but
Lydia, which had not laid down its arms since the death of Gyges, became
possessed by degrees of the whole of their territory; Phrygia proper
came back to her in the general redistribution, and with it most of the
countries which had been under the rule of the dynasty of Midas, from
the mountains of Lycia to the shores of the Black Sea. The transfer was
effected, apparently, with very slight opposition and with little loss
of time, since in the four or five years which followed the death of
Kôbos, Ardys had risen in the estimation of the Greeks to the position
enjoyed by Gyges; and when, in 628, Aristomenes, the hero of the
Messenian wars, arrived at Rhodes, it is said that he contemplated
proceeding from thence, first to Sardes and then to Ecbatana, for the
purpose of gaining the adherence of Lydia and Media to his cause.
[Illustration: 390.jpgA VIEW IN THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MESSOGIS]
Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.
Death put an end to his projects, but he would not for a moment have
entertained them had not Ardys been at that time at the head of a
renowned and flourishing kingdom. The renewal of international commerce
followed closely on the re-establishment of peace, and even if the long
period of Scythian invasion, followed by the destruction of Nineveh,
rendered the overland route less available for regular traffic than
before, at all events relations between the inhabitants of the Euphrates
valley and those of the iEgean littoral were resumed to such good
purpose that before long several fresh marts were opened in Lydia.
[Illustration: 391.jpg THE SITE OF PRIÊNÊ.]
Drawn by Boudier, from the heliogravure of Rayet and Thomas.
Kymê and Ephesus put the region of the Messogis and the Tmolus into
communication with the sea, but the lower valleys of the Hermos and
the Masander were closed by the existence of Greek colonies at
Smyrna, Clazomenas, Colophon, Priênê, and Miletus--all hostile to the
Mermnadæ--which it would be necessary to overcome if these countries
were to enjoy the prosperity shared by other parts of the kingdom; hence
the principal effort made by the Lydians was either directly to annex
these towns, or to impose such treaties on them as would make them their
dependencies. Ardys seized Priênê towards 620, and after having thus
established himself on the northern shore of the Latrnio Gulf,* he
proceeded to besiege Miletus in 616, at the very close of his career.
Hostilities were wearily prolonged all through the reign of Sadyattes
(615-610), and down to the sixth year of Alyattes.**
* The well-known story that Priênê was saved under Alyattes
by a stratagem of the philosopher Bias is merely a fable, of
which several other examples are found. It would not be
possible to conclude from it, as Grote did, that Ardys rule
over the town was but ephemeral.
** The periods of duration assigned here to the reigns of
these princes are those of Euschius--that is to say, 15
years for Crosus, 37 for Alyattes, 5 for Sadyattes, 37 for
Ardys; Julius Africanus gives 15 for Sadyattes and 38 for
Ardys, while Herodotus suggests 14 for Crosus, 57 for
Alyattes, 12 for Sadyattes, and 59 for Ardys.
The position of Miletus was too strong to permit of its being carried by
a _coup de main_; besides which, the Lydians were unwilling to destroy
at one blow a town whose colonies, skilfully planted at the seaports
from the coasts of the Black Sea to those of Egypt, would one day
furnish them with so many outlets for their industrial products. Their
method of attacking it resolved itself into a series of exhausting
raids. Every year, as soon as the fruit crops and the harvests began
to ripen, Alyattes set out at the head of his troops, whom he caused
to march and encamp to the sound of instruments. Having arrived in the
Milesian territory, he completely destroyed the crops and the orchards,
and then again withdrew. In these expeditions he was careful to
avoid any excesses which would have made the injury inflicted appear
irretrievable; his troops were forbidden to destroy dwelling-houses
or buildings dedicated to the gods; indeed, on one occasion, when the
conflagration which consumed the lands accidentally spread to the temple
of Athena near Assêsos, he rebuilt two temples for the goddess at his
own expense. The Milesians sustained the struggle courageously, until
two reverses at Limeneion and in the plain of the Maeander at length
induced them to make terms. Their tyrant, Thrasybulus, acting on the
advice of the Delphic Apollo and by the mediation of Periander of
Corinth, concluded a treaty with Alyattes in which the two princes,
declaring themselves the guest and the ally one of the other, very
probably conceded extensive commercial privileges to one another both by
land and sea (604).*
* Thrasybulus stratagem is said to have taken place at
Priênê by Diogenes Laertes and by Polysenus. The war begins
under Ardys, lasts for five years under Sadyattes, instead
of the six years which Herodotus attributes to it, and five
years under Alyattes.
Alyattes rewarded the oracle by the gift of a magnificent bowl, the work
of Glaucus of Chios, which continued to be shown to travellers of
the Roman period as one of the most remarkable curiosities of Delphi.
Alyattes continued his expeditions against the other Greek colonies, but
directed them prudently and leisurely, so as not to alarm his European
friends, and provoke the formation against himself of a coalition of the
Hellenic communities shattered over the isles or along the littoral
of the Ægean. We know that towards the end of his reign he recovered
Colophon, which had been previously acquired by Gyges, but had regained
its independence during the Cimmerian crisis;* he razed Smyrna to the
ground, and forced its inhabitants to occupy unfortified towns, where
his suzerainty could not be disputed;** he half devastated Clazomense,
whose citizens saved it by a despairing effort, and he renewed the
ancient alliances with Ephesus, Kymê, and the cities of the region of
the Caicus and the Hellespont,*** though it is impossible to attribute
an accurate date to each of these particular events.
* Polysenus tells the story of the trick by which Alyattes,
after he had treated with the people of Colophon, destroyed
their cavalry and seized on their town. The fact that a
treaty was made seems to be confirmed by a fragment of
Phylarchus, and the surrender of the town to the Lydians by
a fragment of Xenophanes, quoted in Athenseus. Schubert does
not seem to believe that the town was taken by Alyattes; I
have adopted the opinion of Ladet on this point.