THE PREHISTORIC AND HISTORIC IN THE EAST
The term prehistoric was first used by my friend Sir Daniel Wilson in
his _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_. It was intended to express 'the
whole period disclosed to us by archæological evidence as distinguished
from what is known by written records.' As Wilson himself reminds us,
the term has no definite chronological significance, since historic
records, properly so-called, extend back in different places to very
different times. With reference, for example, to the Chaldean and Hebrew
peoples, if we take their written records as history, this extends back
to the Deluge at least. Written history in Egypt reaches to at least
3000 years B.C., while in Britain it extends no farther than to the
landing of Julius Cæsar, and in America to the first voyage of Columbus.
In Palestine we possess written records back to the time of Abraham, but
these relate mainly to the Hebrew people. Of the populations which
preceded the Abrahamic immigration, those 'Canaanites who were already
in the land,' we have little history before the Exodus, except the
remarkable letters recently unearthed at Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt. In
Egypt we have very early records of the dwellers on the Nile, but of the
Arabian and African peoples, whom they called Pun and Kesh, and the
Asiatic peoples, whom they knew as Cheta and Hyksos, we have till lately
known little more than their names and the representations of them on
Egyptian monuments. In both countries there may be unsounded depths of
unwritten history before the first Egyptian dynasty, and before the
Abrahamic clan crossed the Jordan.
What, then, in Egypt and Palestine may be regarded as prehistoric? I
would answer--(1) The geographical and other conditions of these
countries immediately before the advent of man. (2) The evidence which
they afford of the existence, habits, and history of man in periods
altogether antecedent to any written history, except such notes as we
have in the Bible and elsewhere as to the so-called antediluvian world.
(3) The facts gleaned by archæological evidence as to tribes known to us
by no records of their own, but only by occasional notices in the
history or monuments of other peoples. In Egypt and Palestine such
peoples as the Hyksos, the Anakim, the Amalekites, the Hittites, and
Amorites are of this kind, though contemporary with historic peoples.
Prehistoric annals may thus, in these countries, embrace a wide scope,
and may introduce us to unexpected facts and questions respecting
primitive humanity. I propose in the present chapter to direct attention
to some points which may be regarded as definitely ascertained in so far
as archæological evidence can give any certainty, though I cannot
pretend, in so limited a space, to enter into details as to their
evidence.
Before proceeding, I may refer by way of illustration to another
instance brought into very prominent relief by the publication of
Schuchardt's work on Schliemann's excavations. We all know how shadowy
and unreal to our youthful minds were the Homeric stories of the heroic
age of Greece, and our faith and certainty were not increased when we
read in the works of learned German critics that the Homeric poems were
composite productions of an age much later than that to which they were
supposed to belong, and that their events were rather myths than
history. How completely has all this been changed by the discoveries of
Schliemann and his followers! Now we can stand on the very threshold
over which Priam and Hector walked. We can see the jewels that may have
adorned Helen or Andromache. We can see double-handled cups like that of
old Nestor, and can recognise the inlaid work of the shield of Achilles,
and can walk in the halls of Agamemnon. Thus the old Homeric heroes
become real men, as those of our time, and we can understand their
political and commercial relations with other old peoples before quite
as shadowy. Recent discoveries in Egypt take us still farther back. We
now find that the 'Hanebu,' who invaded Egypt in the days of the Hebrew
patriarchs, were prehistoric Greeks, already civilised, and probably
possessing letters ages before the date of the Trojan War. So it is with
the Bible history, when we see the contemporary pictures of the Egyptian
slaves toiling at their bricks, or when we stand in the presence of the
mummy of Rameses II. and know that we look on the face of the Pharaoh
who enslaved the Hebrews, and from whose presence Moses fled.
Such discoveries give reality to history, and similar discoveries are
daily carrying us back to old events, and to nations of whom there was
no history whatever, and are making them like our daily friends and
companions. A notable case is that of the children of Heth, known to us
only incidentally by a few members of the nation who came in contact
with the early Hebrews. Suddenly we found that these people were the
great and formidable Kheta, or Khatti, who contended on equal terms with
the Egyptians and Assyrians for the empire of Western Asia; and when we
began to look for their remains, there appeared, one after another,
stone monuments, seals, and engraved objects, recording their form and
their greatness, till the tables have quite been turned, and there is
danger that we may attach too much importance to their agency in times
of which we have scarcely any written history. Thus, just as the quarry
and the mine reveal to us the fossil remains of animals and plants great
in their time, but long since passed away, so do the spade and pick of
the excavator constantly turn up for us the bones and the works of a
fossil and prehistoric humanity.
Egypt may be said to have no prehistoric period, and our task with it
will be limited to showing that its written history scarcely goes back
as far as many Egyptologists suppose and confidently affirm, and that
beyond this it has as yet afforded nothing. Egypt, in short, old though
it seems, is really a new country. When its priests, according to Plato,
taunted Solon with the newness of the Greeks and referred to the old
western empire of Atlantis, they were probably trading on traditions of
antediluvian times, which had no more relation to the actual history of
the Egyptian people than to that of the Greeks.
The limestones and sandstones which bound the Nile valley, sometimes
rising in precipitous cliffs from the bank of the stream, sometimes
receding for many miles beyond the edge of the green alluvial plain, are
rocks formed in cretaceous and early tertiary times under the sea, when
all Northern Africa and Western Asia were beneath the ocean. When raised
from the sea-bed to form land, they were variously bent and fractured,
and the Nile valley occupies a rift or fault, which, lying between the
hard ridges of the Arabian hills on the east and the more gentle
elevations of the Nubian desert on the west, afforded an outlet for the
waters of interior Africa and for the great floods which in the rainy
season pour down from the mountains of Abyssinia.
This outlet has been available and has been in process of erosion by
running water from a period long anterior to the advent of man, and with
this early pre-human history belonging to the miocene and pliocene
periods of geology we have no need to meddle, except to state that it
was closed by a great subsidence, that of the pleistocene or glacial
period, when the land of North Africa and Western Asia was depressed
several hundred feet, when Africa was separated from Asia, when the Nile
valley was an arm of the sea, and when sea-shells were deposited on the
rising grounds of Lower Egypt at a height of two hundred feet or
more.[64] Such raised beaches are found not only in the Nile valley but
on the shores of the Red Sea, and, as we shall see, along the coast of
Palestine; but, so far as known, no remains of man have been found in
connection with them. This great depression must, however, geologically
speaking, have been not much earlier than the advent of man, since in
many parts of the world we find human remains in deposits of the next
succeeding era.
[64] Hull, _Geology of Palestine and adjacent Districts_, Palestine
Exploration Fund. Dawson, _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, p. 311 and
Appendix. References will be found in these works to the labours of
Fraas, Schweinfurth, and others.
This next period, that known to geologists as the post-glacial or early
modern, was characterised by an entire change of physical conditions.
The continents of the northern hemisphere were higher and wider than
now. The details of this we have already considered, and have seen that
at this time the Mediterranean was divided into two basins, and a broad
fringe of low land, now submerged, lay around its eastern end. This was
the age of those early palæolithic or palæocosmic men whose remains are
found in the caverns and gravels of Europe and Asia. What was the
condition of Egypt at this time? The Nile must have been flowing in its
valley; but there was probably a waterfall or cataract at Silsilis in
Upper Egypt, and rapids lower down, and the alluvial plain was much less
extensive than now and forest-clad, while the river seems to have been
unable to reach the Mediterranean and to have turned abruptly eastward,
discharging into a lake where the Isthmus of Suez now is, and probably
running thence into the Red Sea, so that at this time the waters of the
Nile approached very near to those of the Jordan, a fact which accounts
for that similarity of their modern fauna which has been remarked by so
many naturalists. I have myself collected in the deposits of this old
lake, near Ismailia, fresh-water shells of kinds now living in the Upper
Nile. If at this time men visited the Nile valley, they must have been
only a few bold hunters in search of game, and having their permanent
homes on the Mediterranean plains now submerged.
If they left any remains we should find these in caverns or rock
shelters, or in the old gravels belonging to this period which here and
there project through the alluvial plain. At one of these places, Jebel
Assart, near Thebes, General Pitt-Rivers has satisfied himself of the
occurrence of flint chips which may have been of human workmanship;[65]
but after a day's collecting at the spot, I failed to convince myself
that the numerous flint flakes in the gravel were other than accidental
fragments. If they really are flint knives they are older than the
period we are now considering, and must be much older than the first
dynasty of the Egyptian historic kings.[66] These gravels were indeed,
in early Egyptian times, so consolidated that tombs were excavated in
them. Independently of this case, I know of no trustworthy evidence of
the residence of the earliest men in Egypt. Yet we know that at this
time rude hunting tribes had spread themselves over Western Asia, and
over Europe as far as the Atlantic, and were slaying the mammoth, the
hairy rhinoceros, the wild horse, and other animals now extinct. They
were the so-called 'palæolithic' or historically antediluvian men,
belonging, like the animals they hunted, to extinct races, quite
dissimilar physically from the historical Egyptians. And yet in a recent
review of the late Miss Edwards's charming work, _Pharaohs, Fellahs, and
Explorers_, she was taken to task by an eminent Egyptologist for
statements similar to the above. On the evidence of two additional finds
of flint implements _on the surface_, he affirms the existence of man
in Egypt at a time when 'the Arabian deserts were covered with verdure
and intersected by numerous streams,' that is, geologically speaking, in
the early pleistocene or pliocene period, or even in the miocene!
[65] _Journal of Archæological Society_, 1881. Haynes's _Journal of the
American Academy of Sciences_.
[66] Dawson, _Egypt and Syria_, p. 149.
Singularly enough, therefore, Egypt is to the prehistoric annalist not
an old country--less old indeed than France and England, in both of
which we find evidence of the residence of the palæolithic cave men of
the mammoth age. Thus, when we go beyond local history into the
prehistoric past, our judgment as to the relative age of countries may
be strangely reversed.
It is true that in Egypt, as in most other countries, flint flakes, or
other worked flints, are common on the surface and in the superficial
soil; but there is no good evidence that they did not belong to historic
times. A vivid light has been thrown on this point by Petrie's
discovery, in _débris_ attributed to the age of the twelfth dynasty, or
approximately that of the Hebrew patriarchs, of a wooden sickle of the
ordinary shape, but armed with flint fakes serrated at their edges,[67]
though the handle is beautifully curved in such a manner as to give a
better and more convenient hold than with those now in use. This
primitive implement presents to us the Egyptian farmer of that age
reaping his fields of wheat and barley with implements similar to those
of the palæocosmic men. No doubt, at the same time, he used a harrow
armed with rude flints, and may have used flint flakes for cutting wood
or for pointing his arrows. Yet he was a member of a civilised and
highly-organised nation, which could execute great works of canalisation
and embankment, and could construct tombs and temples that have not
since been surpassed. Can we doubt that the common people in Palestine
and other neighbouring countries were equally in the flint age, or be
surprised that, somewhat later, Joshua used flint knives to circumcise
the Israelites?[68] How remarkable are these links of connection between
early Eastern civilisation and the stone age! and they relate to mere
flakes, such as if found separately might be styled 'palæolithic.'
[67] _Kahun and Garob_, Egyptian Exploration Fund publications.
[68] Joshua v. 2, marginal reading.
In accordance with all this, when we examine the tenants of the oldest
Egyptian tombs, who are known to us by their sculptured statues and
their carved and painted portraits, we find them to be the same with the
Egyptians of historic times, and not very dissimilar from the modern
Copts, and we also find that their arts and civilisation were not very
unlike those of comparatively late date.
There are, however, some points in which the early condition of even
historic Egypt was different from the present or from anything recorded
in written history.
I have elsewhere endeavoured, with the aid of my friend Dr.
Schweinfurth, to restore the appearance of the Nile valley when first
visited by man in the post-diluvial period. It was then probably
densely wooded with forests similar to those in the modern Soudan, and
must have swarmed with animal life in the air, on the land, and in the
water, including many formidable and dangerous beasts. On the other
hand, to a people derived from the Euphratean plains and accustomed to
irrigation, it must have seemed a very garden of the Lord in its
fertility and resources.
There is good reason to credit the Egyptian traditions that the first
colonists crossed over from Southern Arabia by the Red Sea from that
land of Pun to which the Egyptians attributed their theology, and
settled in the neighbourhood of Abydos, and that they made their way
thence to the northward, at a time when the delta was yet a mere
swamp,[69] and when they had slowly to extend their cultivation in Lower
Egypt by dikes and canals. If we ask when the first immigrants arrived,
we are met by the most extravagantly varied estimates, derived mainly
from attempts to deduce a chronology from the dynastic lists of Egyptian
kings. That these are very uncertain, and in part duplicated, is now
generally understood, but still there is a tendency to ask for a time
far exceeding that for which we have any good warrant in authentic
history elsewhere. Herodotus estimated the time necessary for the
deposition of the mud of the delta at 20,000 years; but if we assume
that this deposit has been formed since the land approximately attained
to its present level, allowing for some subsidence in the delta in
consequence of the weight of sediment, and estimating the average rate
of deposition at one fifteenth of an inch per annum, which is as low an
amount as can probably be assumed, we shall have numbers ranging from
5,300 to about 7,000 years for the lapse of time since the delta was a
bay of the Mediterranean.
[69] _Herodotus_, Book II. chap. 15.
It is true that the recent borings in the delta, under the officers of
the British Engineers, have shown a great depth in some places without
reaching the original bottom of the old bay. Some geologists have
accordingly inferred from this a much greater age for the deposit than
that above stated,[70] and in this they are in one respect justified;
but they have to bear in mind that only the upper part of the material
belongs to the modern period. A vast thickness is due to the pleistocene
and pliocene ages, when the Nile was cutting out its valley and
depositing the excavated material in the sea at its mouth. A careful
examination of the borings proves by their composition that this is
actually the case.[71] Geologists who have been guided by these facts in
their estimates of time have been taunted as affirming that a great
diluvial catastrophe occurred while quiet government and civilised life
were going on in Egypt. The evidence for this early date of Egyptian
colonisation of the Nile valley is, as everyone knows, doubtful, and it
might be retorted that archæologists represent the Egyptian government
as dating from a period when the Nile valley was an inland district, and
when the centres of human population must have been, principally at
least, on lands now submerged.
[70] Judd, _Report to Royal Society_, 1885.
[71] _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, where evidence of similar dates in
other countries is stated.
As an example of the fanciful way in which this subject is sometimes
treated, I may cite the fabulous antiquity attributed to the great
sphinx of Gizeh. We are told that it is the most ancient monument in
Egypt, antedating the pyramids, and belonging to the time of the mystic
'Horshesu,' or people of Horus, of Egyptian tradition. In one sense this
is true, since the sphinx is merely an undisturbed mass of the eocene
limestone of the plateau. But its form must have been given to it after
the surrounding limestone was quarried away by the builders of the
pyramids, and consequently long after the founding of Memphis by the
first Egyptian king Mena. The sphinx is, in short, a block of stone left
by the quarrymen, and probably shaped by them as an appropriate monument
to the workmen who died while the neighbouring pyramids were being
built. A similar monument, of immensely greater antiquity from a
geological point of view, exists near Montreal, in a huge boulder of
Laurentian gneiss, placed on a pedestal by the workmen employed on the
Victoria Bridge, in memory of immigrants who died of ship fever in the
years when the bridge was being built.
It follows from all this that the monumental history of Egypt, extending
to about 3000 years B.C., gives us the whole story of the country,
unless some chance memorial of a population belonging to the
post-glacial age should in future be found. There are, however, things
in Egypt which illustrate prehistoric times in other countries, and some
of these have lately thrown a new and strange light on the early history
of Palestine, and especially on the Bible history.
One of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, whose historical position
was probably between the time of Joseph and that of Moses, Amunoph III.,
is believed to have married an Asiatic wife, and under her influence, he
and his successor, Amunoph IV., or Khu en-Aten, seem to have swerved
from the old polytheism of Egypt, and introduced a new worship, that of
Aten, a god visibly represented by the disk of the sun, and, therefore,
in some sense identical with Ra, the chief god of Egypt; but there was
something in this new worship offensive to the priests of Ra. Perhaps it
was regarded as a Semitic or Asiatic innovation, or led to the
introduction of unpopular Semitic priests and officers. Amunoph IV.
consequently abandoned the royal residence at Thebes, and established a
new capital at a place now called Tel-el-Amarna, almost at the boundary
of Upper and Lower Egypt, and from this place he ruled not only Egypt
but a vast region in Western Asia, which had been subjected to the
Egyptian government in the reign of the third Amunoph. From these
subject districts, extending from the frontiers of Egypt to Asia Minor
on the north, and to the Euphrates on the east, came great numbers of
despatches to the Pharaoh, and these were written not on papyrus or
skin, but on tablets of clay hardened by baking, and the writing was not
that of Egypt, but the arrow-head script of Chaldea, which seems at this
time to have been the current writing throughout Western Asia.[72]
[72] It is possible, however, that it may really have been a language of
diplomacy merely, and may have been used by the Semitic agents of
Amunoph as a cipher to communicate with the Egyptian court, and which
could not be read by messengers or enemies acquainted only with Hittite
or Egyptian hieroglyphics or with the Phœnician characters. For a
similar case see 2 Kings xviii. 26.
The scribes of the Egyptian king read these documents, answered them as
directed by their master, docketed them, and laid them up for reference;
and, strange to say, a few years ago, Arabs, digging in the old mounds,
brought them to light, and we have before us, translated into English, a
great number of letters, written from cities of Palestine and its
vicinity about a hundred years before the Exodus, and giving us
word-pictures of the politics and conflicts of the Canaanites and
Hittites and other peoples, long before Joshua came in contact with
them. Among other things in this correspondence, we find remarkable
confirmation of the sacred and political influence of Jerusalem, which
the Bible presents to us in the widely separated stories of Melchisedec,
king of Salem, in the time of Abraham, and of the suzerainty of
Adonizedec, king of Jerusalem, in the time of Joshua.
At the time in question, Jerusalem was ruled by a king or chief, subject
to Egypt, but, as in the times of Abraham and Joshua, exercising some
headship over neighbouring cities. He complains of certain hostile
peoples called _chabiri_, a name supposed by Zimmel[73] to be equivalent
to Ibrim or Hebrews, which to some may seem strange, as the Israelites
were, according to the generally received chronology, at this time in
Egypt. We must bear in mind, however, that according to the Bible the
Israelites were not the only 'children of Eber.' The Edomites, Moabites,
Ammonites, Ishmaelites, and Midianites were equally entitled to this
name; and we know, from the second chapter of Deuteronomy, that these
were warlike and intrusive peoples, who had, before the Exodus,
dispossessed several native tribes, so that we do not wonder at the fact
that a king of Jerusalem might have been suffering from their attacks
long before the Exodus.[74] It may be noted incidentally here, that this
wide application of the term Hebrew accords with the use of the name
_Aperiu_ for Semitic peoples other than Israelites in Egypt.
[73] Inaugural Lecture, Halle, 1891. Possibly these people were merely
'confederate' Hittites and Amorites (Sayce, _Records cf the Past_).
[74] I cannot agree with Conder that the Exodus took place as early as
the time of Amunoph III. The evidence we have from Egyptian sources
plainly indicates one of the immediate successors of Rameses II. as the
Pharaoh of the Exodus.
We have here also a note on an obscure passage in the life of Moses,
namely, his apparent want of acquaintance with the name Jehovah until
revealed to him at Horeb.[75] Now, as reported in Exodus, Moses in that
interview addressed God as 'Adon,' which is supposed to be the Hebrew
equivalent of 'Aten,' the meaning being Lord. This is a curious
incidental agreement with the prevalence of the Aten worship in Egypt,
and shows that this name may have been currently used by the Israelites,
whose God Moses himself calls Adon, till commanded to use the name
Jehovah.
[75] Exodus iii. 16 _et seqq._ This passage has been often
misunderstood, but it certainly shows that the name Jehovah had become
nearly obsolete among the Hebrews in Egypt, and that the name usually
given to God was Adon or Aten.
A second point of contact of Egypt and Palestine is in the painting and
sculptures of hostile and conquered nations in Egyptian temples and
tombs. These were evidently intended to be portraits, and an admirable
series of them has been published by Mr. Petrie under a commission from
the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By means of
these excellent photographs, now before me, we can see for ourselves the
physiognomy and form of head of the Amorite, Philistine, Hittite, and
many other peoples previously known to us only by name and a few
historical facts; and thus with their correspondence, as preserved in
the Tel-el-Amarna tablets, and their pictures as given by Petrie, we
have them before us much as we have the speeches and portraits of our
contemporaries in the illustrated newspapers, and can venture to express
some opinion as to their ethnic affinities and appearance, and can judge
more accurately as to the familiar statements of the Bible respecting
them.[76] Lastly, Maspero and Tomkins have, with the aid of the names
fixed by the survey of Western Palestine, revised the lists given by
Thothmes III., in the temple of Karnak, of the places which this
Egyptian Alexander had conquered; and they have thus verified the Hebrew
geography of the Books of Joshua and Judges.
[76] Sayce, _Races of the Old Testament_, Religious Tract Society.
Another unexpected acquisition is the solution of the mystery which has
enshrouded that mysterious people known as Hyksos or shepherd kings, who
invaded Egypt about the time of the Hebrew patriarchs, and, after
keeping the Egyptians in subjection for centuries, were finally expelled
by the predecessors of the Amunoph already referred to. They constitute
a great feature in early Egyptian history, but disappear mysteriously,
leaving no trace but a few sculptured heads, Turanian in aspect and
markedly contrasting with those of the native Egyptians. It now appears
that a people of Northern Syria and Mesopotamia, known to the Egyptians
at a later time as Mitanni, and who were neighbours of and associated
with the Northern Hittites, have the features of the Hyksos. It also
seems from a letter in the Tel-el-Amarna tablets that they spoke a
non-Semitic or Turanian language akin to that of the Hittites. Thus we
have traced the shepherd kings to their origin, and, curiously enough,
Cushanrish-athaim, who oppressed the Israelites in the days of Othniel,
seems to represent a later inroad of the same people.
Such 'restitutions of decayed intelligence' now meet us on every hand as
the results of modern exploration, and are enabling us to bridge over
the gaps which have separated the geological ages from the prehistoric
and historic human periods in those ancient countries where civilisation
seems to have originated.