had been shut up in Qodshû, together with the inhabitants, made a
general sortie; the Egyptians were for a moment held in check, and
the fugitives meanwhile were able to enter the town. Either there was
insufficient provision for so many mouths, or the enemy had lost all
heart from the disaster; at any rate, further resistance appeared
useless. The next morning Khâtusaru sent to propose a truce or peace to
the victorious Pharaoh. The Egyptians had probably suffered at least
as much as their adversaries, and perhaps regarded the eventuality of
a siege with no small distaste; Ramses, therefore, accepted the offers
made to him and prepared to return to Egypt. The fame of his exploits
had gone before him, and he himself was not a little proud of the energy
he had displayed on the day of battle. His predecessors had always shown
themselves to be skilful generals and brave soldiers, but none of them
had ever before borne, or all but borne, single-handed the brunt of an
attack. Ramses loaded his shield-bearer Manna with rewards for having
stood by him in the hour of danger, and ordered abundant provender and
sumptuous harness for the good horses--Strength-in-Thebaid and Nûrît
the satisfied--who had drawn his chariot.*
* A gold ring in the Louvre bears in relief on its bezel two
little horses; which are probably Strength-in-Thebaid and
Nûrît satisfied.
He determined that the most characteristic episodes of the campaign--the
beating of the spies, the surprise of the camp, the kings repeated
charges, the arrival of his veterans, the flight of the Syrians, and the
surrender of Qodshû--should be represented on the walls and pylons of
the temples. A poem in rhymed strophes in every case accompanies
these records of his glory, whether at Luxor, at the Eamesseum, at the
Memnonium of Abydos, or in the heart of Nubia at Abu Simbel. The author
of the poem must have been present during the campaign, or must have had
the account of it from the lips of his sovereign, for his work bears no
traces of the coldness of official reports, and a warlike strain runs
through it from one end to the other, so as still to invest it with life
after a lapse of more than thirty centuries.*
* The author is unknown: Pentaûr, or rather Pentaûîrît, to
whom E. de Rougé attributed the poem, is merely the
transcriber of the copy we possess on papyrus.
But little pains are bestowed on the introduction, and the poet does not
give free vent to his enthusiasm until the moment when he describes
his hero, left almost alone, charging the enemy in the sight of his
followers. The Pharaoh was surrounded by two thousand five hundred
chariots, and his retreat was cut off by the warriors of the perverse
Khâti and of the other nations who accompanied them--the peoples of
Arvad, Mysia, and Pedasos; each of their chariots contained three men,
and the ranks were so serried that they formed but one dense mass. No
other prince was with me, no general officers, no one in command of the
archers or chariots. My foot-soldiers deserted me, my charioteers
fled before the foe, and not one of them stood firm beside me to fight
against them. Then said His Majesty: Who art thou, then, my father
Amon? A father who forgets his son? Or have I committed aught against
thee? Have I not marched and halted according to thy command? When he
does not violate thy orders, the lord of Egypt is indeed great, and he
overthrows the barbarians in his path! What are these Asiatics to
thy heart? Amon will humiliate those who know not the god. Have I
not consecrated innumerable offerings to thee? Filling thy holy
dwelling-place with my prisoners, I build thee a temple for millions of
years, I lavish all my goods on thy storehouses, I offer thee the whole
world to enrich thy domains.... A miserable fate indeed awaits him who
sets himself against thy will, but happy is he who finds favour with
thee by deeds done for thee with a loving heart. I invoke thee, O my
father Amon! Here am I in the midst of people so numerous that it cannot
be known who are the nations joined together against me, and I am alone
among them, none other is with me. My many soldiers have forsaken me,
none of my charioteers looked towards me when I called them, not one of
them heard my voice when I cried to them. But I find that Amon is more
to me than a million soldiers, than a hundred thousand charioteers, than
a myriad of brothers or young sons, joined all together, for the number
of men is as nothing, Amon is greater than all of them. Each time I have
accomplished these things, Amon, by the counsel of thy mouth, as I do
not transgress thy orders, I rendered thee glory even to the ends of the
earth. So calm an invocation in the thick of the battle would appear
misplaced in the mouth of an ordinary man, but Pharaoh was a god, and
the son of a god, and his actions and speeches cannot be measured by
the same standard as that of a common mortal. He was possessed by the
religious spirit in the hour of danger, and while his body continued
to fight, his soul took wing to the throne of Amon. He contemplates the
lord of heaven face to face, reminds him of the benefits which he had
received from him, and summons him to his aid with an imperiousness
which betrays the sense of his own divine origin. The expected help was
not delayed. While the voice resounds in Hermonthis, Amon arises at my
behest, he stretches out his hand to me, and I cry out with joy when he
hails me from behind: Face to face with thee, face to face with thee,
Ramses Miamun, I am with thee! It is I, thy father! My hand is with
thee, and I am worth more to thee than hundreds of thousands. I am the
strong one who loves valour; I have beheld in thee a courageous heart,
and my heart is satisfied; my will is about to be accomplished! I am
like Montû; from the right I shoot with the dart, from the left I seize
the enemy. I am like Baal in his hour, before them; I have encountered
two thousand five hundred chariots, and as soon as I am in their midst,
they are overthrown before my mares. Not one of all these people has
found a hand wherewith to fight; their hearts sink within their breasts,
fear paralyses their limbs; they know not how to throw their darts, they
have no strength to hold their lances. I precipitate them into the water
like as the crocodile plunges therein; they are prostrate face to the
earth, one upon the other, and I slay in the midst of them, for I have
willed that not one should look behind him, nor that one should return;
he who falls rises not again. This sudden descent of the god has, even
at the present day, an effect upon the reader, prepared though he is
by his education to consider it as a literary artifice; but on the
Egyptian, brought up to regard Amon with boundless reverence, its
influence was irresistible. The Prince of the Khâti, repulsed at the
very moment when he was certain of victory, recoiled with terror. He
sends against the enemy the various chiefs, followed by their chariots
and skilled warriors,--the chiefs of Arvad, Lycia, and Ilion, the
leaders of the Lycians and Dardanians, the lords of Carchemish, of the
Girgashites, and of Khalupu; these allies of the Khâti, all together,
comprised three thousand chariots. Their efforts, however, were in
vain. I fell upon them like Montû, my hand devoured them in the space
of a moment, in the midst of them I hewed down and slew. They said one
to another: This is no man who is amongst us; it is Sûtkhû the great
warrior, it is Baal incarnate! These are not human actions which he
accomplishes: alone, by himself, he repulses hundreds of thousands,
without leaders or men. Up, let us flee before him, let us seek to save
our lives, and let us breathe again! When at last, towards evening,
the army again rallies round the king, and finds the enemy completely
defeated, the men hang their heads with mingled shame and admiration as
the Pharaoh reproaches them: What will the whole earth say when it is
known that you left me alone, and without any to succour me? that not a
prince, not a charioteer, not a captain of archers, was found to place
his hand in mine? I fought, I repulsed millions of people by myself
alone. Victory-in-Thebes and Nûrît satisfied were my glorious
horses; it was they that I found under my hand when I was alone in the
midst of the quaking foe. I myself will cause them to take their food
before me, each day, when I shall be in my palace, for I was with them
when I was in the midst of the enemy, along with the Prince Manna my
shield-bearer, and with the officers of my house who accompanied me, and
who are my witnesses for the combat; these are those whom I was with.
I have returned after a victorious struggle, and I have smitten with my
sword the assembled multitudes.
The ordeal was a terrible one for the Khâti; but when the first moment
of defeat was over, they again took courage and resumed the campaign.
This single effort had not exhausted their resources, and they rapidly
filled up the gaps which had been made in their ranks. The plains of
Naharaim and the mountains of Cilicia supplied them with fresh chariots
and foot-soldiers in the place of those they had lost, and bands of
mercenaries were furnished from the table-lands of Asia Minor, so that
when Ramses II. reappeared in Syria, he found himself confronted by a
completely fresh army. Khâtusaru, having profited by experience, did not
again attempt a general engagement, but contented himself with disputing
step by step the upper valleys of the Litany and Orontes. Meantime his
emissaries spread themselves over Phoenicia and Kharû, sowing the seeds
of rebellion, often only too successfully. In the kings VIIIth year
there was a general rising in Galilee, and its towns--Galaput in the
hill-country of Bît-Aniti, Merorn, Shalama, Dapur, and Anamaîm*--had to
be reduced one after another.
* Episodes from this war are represented at Karnak. The list
of the towns taken, now much mutilated, comprised twenty-
four names, which proves the importance of the revolt.
Dapur was the hardest to carry. It crowned the top of a rocky eminence,
and was protected by a double wall, which followed the irregularities of
the hillside. It formed a rallying-point for a large force, which had to
be overcome in the open country before the investment of the town could
be attempted. The siege was at last brought to a conclusion, after
a series of skirmishes, and the town taken by scaling, four Egyptian
princes having been employed in conducting the attack. In the Pharaohs
IXth year a revolt broke out on the Egyptian frontier, in the Shephelah,
and the king placed himself at the head of his troops to crush it.
Ascalon, in which the peasantry and their families had found, as they
hoped, a safe refuge, opened its gates to the Pharaoh, and its fall
brought about the submission of several neighbouring places. This, it
appears, was the first time since the beginning of the conquests in
Syria that the inhabitants of these regions attempted to take up arms,
and we may well ask what could have induced them thus to renounce their
ancient loyalty. Their defection reduced Egypt for the moment almost to
her natural frontiers. Peace had scarcely been resumed when war again
broke out with fresh violence in Coele-Syria, and one year it reached
even to Naharaim, and raged around Tunipa as in the days of Thûtmosis
III. Pharaoh assembled his foot-soldiers and chariots, and he commanded
his foot-soldiers and his chariots to attack the perverse Khâti who were
in the neighbourhood of Tunipa, and he put on his armour and mounted his
chariot, and he waged battle against the town of the perverse Khâti at
the head of his foot-soldiers and his chariots, covered with his armour;
the fortress, however, did not yield till the second attack. Ramses
carried his arms still further afield, and with such results, that,
to judge merely from the triumphal lists engraved on the walls of the
temple of Karnak, the inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates, those
in Carchemish, Mitanni, Singar, Assyria, and Mannus found themselves
once more at the mercy of the Egyptian battalions. These victories,
however brilliant, were not decisive; if after any one of them the
princes of Assyria and Singar may have sent presents to the Pharaoh, the
Hittites, on the other hand, did not consider themselves beaten, and it
was only after fifteen campaigns that they were at length sufficiently
subdued to propose a treaty. At last, in the Egyptian kings XXIst year,
on the 21st of the month Tybi, when the Pharaoh, then residing in his
good town of Anakhîtû, was returning from the temple where he had been
offering prayers to his father Amon-Eâ, to Harmakhis of Heliopolis,
to Phtah, and to Sûtkhû the valiant son of Nûît, Eamses, one of the
messengers who filled the office of lieutenant for the king in Asia,
arrived at the palace and presented to him Tartisubu, who was authorised
to make peace with Egypt in the name of Khâtusaru.* Tartisubu carried
in his hand a tablet of silver, on which his master had prescribed the
conditions which appeared to him just and equitable. A short preamble
recalling the alliances made between the ancestors of both parties, was
followed by a declaration of friendship, and a reciprocal obligation to
avoid in future all grounds of hostility.
* The treaty of Ramses II. with the Prince of the Khâti was
sculptured at Karnak.
Not only was a perpetual truce declared between both peoples, but they
agreed to help each other at the first demand. Should some enemy march
against the countries subject to the great King of Egypt, and should he
send to the great Prince of the Khâti, saying: Come, bring me forces
against them, the great Prince of the Khâti shall do as he is asked by
the great King of Egypt, and the great Prince of the Khâti shall destroy
his enemies. And if the great Prince of the Khâti shall prefer not to
come himself, he shall send his archers and his chariots to the great
King of Egypt to destroy his enemies. A similar clause ensured aid
in return from Ramses to Khâtusaru, his brother, while two articles
couched in identical terms made provision against the possibility of any
town or tribe dependent on either of the two sovereigns withdrawing its
allegiance and placing it in the hands of the other party. In this case
the Egyptians as well as the Hittites engaged not to receive, or at
least not to accept, such offers, but to refer them at once to the
legitimate lord. The whole treaty was placed under the guarantee of the
gods both, of Egypt and of the Khâti, whose names were given at length:
Whoever shall fail to observe the stipulations, let the thousand gods
of Khâti and the thousand gods of Egypt strike his house, his land, and
his servants. But he who shall observe the stipulations engraved on the
tablet of silver, whether he belong to the Hittite people or whether
he belong to the people of Egypt, as he has not neglected them, may the
thousand gods of Khâti and the thousand gods of Egypt give him health,
and grant that he may prosper, himself, the people of his house, and
also his land and his servants. The treaty itself ends by a description
of the plaque of silver on which it was engraved. It was, in fact, a
facsimile in metal of one of those clay tablets on which the Chaldæans
inscribed their contracts. The preliminary articles occupied the upper
part in closely written lines of cuneiform characters, while in the
middle, in a space left free for the purpose, was the impress of
two seals, that of the Prince of the Khâti and of his wife Pûûkhîpa.
Khâtusaru was represented on them as standing upright in the arms of
Sûtkhû, while around the two figures ran the inscription, Seal of
Sûtkhû, the sovereign of heaven. Pûûkhîpa leaned on the breast of a
god, the patron of her native town of Aranna in Qaauadana, and the
legend stated that this was the seal of the Sun of the town of Àranna,
the regent of the earth. The text of the treaty was continued beneath,
and probably extended to the other side of the tablet. The original
draft had terminated after the description of the seals, but, to
satisfy the Pharaoh, certain additional articles were appended for the
protection of the commerce and industry of the two countries, for the
prevention of the emigration of artisans, and for ensuring that steps
taken against them should be more effectual and less cruel. Any criminal
attempting to evade the laws of his country, and taking refuge in that
of the other party to the agreement, was to be expelled without delay
and consigned to the officers of his lord; any fugitive not a criminal,
any subject carried off or detained by force, any able artisan quitting
either territory to take up permanent residence in the other, was to be
conducted to the frontier, but his act of folly was not to expose him
to judicial condemnation. He who shall thus act, his fault shall not
be brought up against him; his house shall not be touched, nor his wife,
nor his children; he shall not have his throat cut, nor shall his eyes
be touched, nor his mouth, nor his feet; no criminal accusation shall be
made against him.
This treaty is the most ancient of all those of which the text has
come down to us; its principal conditions were--perfect equality
and reciprocity between the contracting sovereigns, an offensive and
defensive alliance, and the extradition of criminals and refugees. The
original was drawn up in Chaldæan script by the scribes of Khâtusaru,
probably on the model of former conventions between the Pharaohs and
the Asiatic courts, and to this the Egyptian ministers had added a few
clauses relative to the pardon of emigrants delivered up by one or other
of the contracting parties. When, therefore, Tartisubu arrived in the
city of Eamses, the acceptance of the treaty was merely a matter of
form, and peace was virtually concluded. It did not confer on the
conqueror the advantages which we might have expected from his
successful campaigns: it enjoined, on the contrary, the definite
renunciation of those countries, Mitanni, Naharaim, Alasia, and Amurru,
over which Thûtmosis III. and his immediate successors had formerly
exercised an effective sovereignty. Sixteen years of victories had left
matters in the same state as they were after the expedition of Harmhabî,
and, like his predecessor, Ramses was able to retain merely those
Asiatic provinces which were within the immediate influence of Egypt,
such as the Phoenician coast proper, Kharû, Persea beyond Jordan, the
oases of the Arabian desert, and the peninsula of Sinai.*
* The _Anastasi Papyrus I_. mentions a place called _Zaru of
Sesostris_, in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, in a part of
Syria which was not in Egyptian territory: the frontier in
this locality must have passed between Arvad and Byblos on
the coast, and between Qodshû and Hazor from Merom inland.
Egyptian rule on the other side of the Jordan seems to be
proved by the monument discovered a few years ago in the
Haurân, and known under the name of the Stone of Job by
the Bedawîn of the neighbourhood.
This apparently unsatisfactory result, after such supreme efforts, was,
however, upon closer examination, not so disappointing. For more than
half a century at least, since the Hittite kingdom had been developed
and established under the impulse given to it by Sapalulu, everything
had been in its favour. The campaign of Seti had opposed merely a
passing obstacle to its expansion, and had not succeeded in discouraging
its ambitions, for its rulers still nursed the hope of being able
one day to conquer Syria as far as the isthmus. The check received at
Qodshû, the abortive attempts to foment rebellion in Galilee and the
Shephelah, the obstinate persistence with which Ramses and his army
returned year after year to the attack, the presence of the enemy at
Tunipa, on the banks of the Euphrates, and in the provinces then forming
the very centre of the Hittite kingdom--in short, all the incidents of
this long struggle--at length convinced Khâtusaru that he was powerless
to extend his rule in this direction at the expense of Egypt. Moreover,
we have no knowledge of the events which occupied him on the other
frontiers of his kingdom, where he may have been engaged at the same
time in a conflict with Assyria, or in repelling an incursion of the
tribes on the Black Sea. The treaty with Pharaoh, if made in good faith
and likely to be lasting, would protect the southern extremities of his
kingdom, and allow of his removing the main body of his forces to the
north and east in case of attack from either of these quarters. The
security which such an alliance would ensure made it, therefore, worth
his while to sue for peace, even if the Egyptians should construe his
overtures as an acknowledgment of exhausted supplies or of inferiority
of strength. Ramses doubtless took it as such, and openly displayed
on the walls at Karnak and in the Eamesseum a copy of the treaty so
flattering to his pride, but the indomitable resistance which he had
encountered had doubtless given rise to reflections resembling those of
Khâtusaru, and he had come to realise that it was his own interest not
to lightly forego the good will of the Khâti. Egypt had neighbours
in Africa who were troublesome though not dangerous: the Timihû, the
Tihonu, the Mashûasha, the negroes of Kûsh and of Pûanît, might be a
continual source of annoyance and disturbance, even though they were
incapable of disturbing her supremacy. The coast of the Delta, it is
true, was exposed to the piracy of northern nations, but up to that time
this had been merely a local trouble, easy to meet if not to obviate
altogether. The only real danger was on the Asiatic side, arising
from empires of ancient constitution like Chaldæa, or from hordes who,
arriving at irregular intervals from the north, and carrying all before
them, threatened, after the example of the Hyksôs, to enter the Delta.
The Hittite kingdom acted as a kind of buffer between the Nile valley
and these nations, both civilized and barbarous; it was a strongly armed
force on the route of the invaders, and would henceforth serve as a
protecting barrier, through which if the enemy were able to pass
it would only be with his strength broken or weakened by a previous
encounter. The sovereigns loyally observed the peace which they had
sworn to each other, and in his XXXIVth year the marriage of Ramses with
the eldest daughter of Khâtusaru strengthened their friendly relations.
[Illustration: 214.jpg KHÂTUSARU, PRINCE OF KHÂTI, AND HIS DAUGHTER]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the plate in Lepsius; the triad
worshipped by Khâtusaru and his daughter is composed of
Ramses II., seated between Amon-Râ and Phtah-Totûnen.
Pharaoh was not a little proud of this union, and he has left us a naive
record of the manner in which it came about. The inscription is engraved
on the face of the rock at Abu Simbel in Nubia; and Ramses begins by
boasting, in a heroic strain, of his own energy and exploits, of the
fear with which his victories inspired the whole world, and of the
anxiety of the Syrian kinglets to fulfil his least wishes. The Prince of
the Khâti had sent him sumptuous presents at every opportunity, and,
not knowing how further to make himself agreeable to the Pharaoh, had
finally addressed the great lords of his court, and reminded them how
their country had formerly been ruined by war, how their master Sûtkhû
had taken part against them, and how they had been delivered from their
ills by the clemency of the Sun of Egypt. Let us therefore take our
goods, and placing my eldest daughter at the head of them, let us
repair to the domains of the great god, so that the King Sesostris may
recognise us. He accordingly did as he had proposed, and the embassy
set out with gold and silver, valuable horses, and an escort of
soldiers, together with cattle and provisions to supply them with food
by the way. When they reached the borders of Khâru, the governor wrote
immediately to the Pharaoh as follows: Here is the Prince of the Khâti,
who brings his eldest daughter with a number of presents of every kind;
and now this princess and the chief of the country of the Khâti, after
having crossed many mountains and undertaken a difficult journey from
distant parts, have arrived at the frontiers of His Majesty. May we be
instructed how we ought to act with regard to them. The king was
then in residence at Ramses. When the news reached him, he officially
expressed his great joy at the event, since it was a thing unheard of
in the annals of the country that so powerful a prince should go to such
personal inconvenience in order to marry his daughter to an ally. The
Pharaoh, therefore, despatched his nobles and an army to receive them,
but he was careful to conceal the anxiety which he felt all the while,
and, according to custom, took counsel of his patron god Sûtkhû: Who
are these people who come with a message at this time to the country of
Zahi? The oracle, however, reassured him as to their intentions, and
he thereupon hastened to prepare for their proper reception. The embassy
made a triumphal entry into the city, the princess at its head, escorted
by the Egyptian troops told off for the purpose, together with the
foot-soldiers and charioteers of the Khâti, comprising the flower of
their army and militia. A solemn festival was held in their honour, in
which food and drink were served without stint, and was concluded by the
celebration of the marriage in the presence of the Egyptian lords and of
the princes of the whole earth.*
* The fact of the marriage is known to us by the decree of
Phtah Totûnen at Abu Simbel in the XXXVth year of the kings
reign. The account of it in the text is taken from the stele
at Abu Simbel. The last lines are so mutilated that I have
been obliged to paraphrase them. The stele of the Princess
of Bakhtan has preserved the romantic version of this
marriage, such as was current about the Saite period. The
King of the Khâti must have taken advantage of the
expedition which the Pharaoh made into Asia to send him
presents by an embassy, at the head of which he placed his
eldest daughter: the princess found favour with Ramses, who
married her.
Ramses, unwilling to relegate a princess of such noble birth to the
companionship of his ordinary concubines, granted her the title of
queen, as if she were of solar blood, and with the cartouche gave her
the new name of Ûirimaûnofîrurî--She who sees the beauties of the Sun.
She figures henceforth in the ceremonies and on the monuments in the
place usually occupied by women of Egyptian race only, and these unusual
honours may have compensated, in the eyes of the young princess, for the
disproportion in age between herself and a veteran more than sixty years
old. The friendly relations between the two courts became so intimate
that the Pharaoh invited his father-in-law to visit him in his own
country. The great Prince of Khâti informed the Prince of Qodi:
Prepare thyself that we may go down into Egypt. The word of the king
has gone forth, let us obey Sesostris. He gives the breath of life to
those who love him; hence all the earth loves him, and Khâti forms but
one with him. They were received with pomp at Ramses-Anakhîtû, and
perhaps at Thebes. It was with a mixture of joy and astonishment that
Egypt beheld her bitterest foe become her most faithful ally, and the
men of Qimît having but one heart with the chiefs of the Khâti, a thing
which had not happened since the ages of Pa.
The half-century following the conclusion of this alliance was a period
of world-wide prosperity. Syria was once more able to breathe freely,
her commerce being under the combined protection of the two powers who
shared her territory. Not only caravans, but isolated travellers, were
able to pass through the country from north to south without incurring
any risks beyond those occasioned by an untrustworthy guide or a few
highwaymen. It became in time a common task in the schools of Thebes to
describe the typical Syrian tour of some soldier or functionary, and we
still possess one of these imaginative stories in which the scribe takes
his hero from Qodshû across the Lebanon to Byblos, Berytus, Tyre, and
Sidon, the fish of which latter place are more numerous than the
grains of sand; he then makes him cross Galilee and the forest of
oaks to Jaffa, climb the mountains of the Dead Sea, and following the
maritime route by Raphia, reach Pelusium. The Egyptian galleys thronged
the Phoenician ports, while those of Phoenicia visited Egypt. The latter
drew so little water that they had no difficulty in coming up the Nile,
and the paintings in one of the tombs represent them at the moment of
their reaching Thebes. The hull of these vessels was similar to that
of the Nile boats, but the bow and stern were terminated by structures
which rose at right angles, and respectively gave support to a sort of
small platform. Upon this the pilot maintained his position by one of
those wondrous feats of equilibrium of which the Orientals were masters.
[Illustration: 218.jpg PHOENICIAN BOATS LANDING AT THEBES]
Drawn by Boudier, from the photograph published by Daressy.
An open rail ran round the sides of the vessel, so as to prevent goods
stowed upon the deck from falling into the sea when the vessel lurched.
Voyages to Pûanît were undertaken more frequently in quest of incense
and precious metals. The working of the mines of Akiti had been the
source of considerable outlay at the beginning of the reign. The
measures taken by Seti to render the approaches to them practicable at
all seasons had not produced the desired results; as far back as the
IIIrd year of Ramses the overseers of the south had been forced to
acknowledge that the managers of the convoys could no longer use any of
the cisterns which had been hewn and built at such great expense. Half
of them die of thirst, together with their asses, for they have no means
of carrying a sufficient number of skins of water to last during the
journey there and back. The friends and officers whose advice had been
called in, did not doubt for a moment that the king would be willing to
complete the work which his father had merely initiated. If thou sayest
to the water, Come upon the mountain, the heavenly waters will spring
out at the word of thy mouth, for thou art Râ incarnate, Khopri
visibly created, thou art the living image of thy father Tûmû, the
Heliopolitan.--If thou thyself sayest to thy father the Nile, father
of the gods, added the Viceroy of Ethiopia, Raise the water up to the
mountain, he will do all that thou hast said, for so it has been with
all thy projects which have been accomplished in our presence, of which
the like has never been heard, even in the songs of the poets. The
cisterns and wells were thereupon put into such a condition that the
transport of gold was rendered easy for years to come. The war with the
Khâti had not suspended building and other works of public utility;
and now, owing to the establishment of peace, the sovereign was able
to devote himself entirely to them. He deepened the canal at Zalû; he
repaired the walls and the fortified places which protected the frontier
on the side of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and he built or enlarged the
strongholds along the Nile at those points most frequently threatened
by the incursions of nomad tribes. Ramses was the royal builder _par
excellence_, and we may say without fear of contradiction that, from the
second cataract to the mouths of the Nile, there is scarcely an edifice
on whose ruins we do not find his name. In Nubia, where the desert
approaches close to the Nile, he confined himself to cutting in the
solid rock the monuments which, for want of space, he could not build in
the open. The idea of the cave-temple must have occurred very early
to the Egyptians; they were accustomed to house their dead in the
mountain-side, why then should they not house their gods in the same
manner? The oldest forms of speos, those near to Beni-Hasan, at Deîr
el-Baharî, at Bl-Kab, and at Gebel Silsileh, however, do not date
further back than the time of the XVIIIth dynasty. All the forms of
architectural plan observed in isolated temples were utilised by Ramses
and applied to rock-cut buildings with more or less modification,
according to the nature of the stratum in which he had to work. Where
space permitted, a part only of the temple was cut in the rock, and the
approaches to it were built in the open air with blocks brought to
the spot, so that the completed speos became only in part a grotto--a
hemi-speos of varied construction. It was in this manner that the
architects of Ramses arranged the court and pylon at Beît-Wally, the
hypostyle hall, rectangular court and pylon at Gerf-Hosseîn, and the
avenue of sphinxes at Wady es-Sebuah, where the entrance to the
avenue was guarded by two statues overlooking the river. The pylon
at Gerf-Hosseîn has been demolished, and merely a few traces of the
foundations appear here and there above the soil, but a portion of the
portico which surrounded the court is still standing, together with its
massive architraves and statues, which stand with their backs against
the pillars.
[Illustration: 221.jpg THE PROJECTING COLUMNS OF THE SPEOS OF
GERF-HOSSEÎN]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger.
The sanctuary itself comprised an antechamber, supported by two columns
and flanked by two oblong recesses; this led into the Holy of Holies,
which was a narrow niche with a low ceiling, placed between two lateral
chapels. A hall, nearly square in shape, connected these mysterious
chambers with the propylæa, which were open to the sky and faced with
Osiride caryatides.
[Illustration: 221.jpg THE CARYATIDES OF GERF-HOSSEÎN]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger and
Daniel Héron.
These appear to keep rigid and solemn watch over the approaches to the
tabernacle, and their faces, half hidden in the shadow, still
present such a stern appearance that the semi-barbaric Nubians of the
neighbouring villages believe them to be possessed by implacable genii.
They are supposed to move from their places during the hours of night,
and the fire which flashes from their eyes destroys or fascinates
whoever is rash enough to watch them.
Other kings before Ramses had constructed buildings in these spots, and
their memory would naturally become associated with his in the future;
he wished, therefore, to find a site where he would be without a rival,
and to this end he transformed the cliff at Abu Simbel into a monument
of his greatness. The rocks here project into the Nile and form
a gigantic conical promontory, the face of which was covered with
triumphal stelæ, on which the sailors or troops going up or down the
river could spell out as they passed the praises of the king and his
exploits. A few feet of shore on the northern side, covered with dry and
knotty bushes, affords in winter a landing-place for tourists. At the
spot where the beach ends near the point of the promontory, sit four
colossi, with their feet nearly touching the water, their backs leaning
against a sloping wall of rock, which takes the likeness of a pylon. A
band of hieroglyphs runs above their heads underneath the usual cornice,
over which again is a row of crouching cynocephali looking straight
before them, their hands resting upon their knees, and above this line
of sacred images rises the steep and naked rock. One of the colossi is
broken, and the bust of the statue, which must have been detached by
some great shock, has fallen to the ground; the others rise to the
height of 63 feet, and appear to look across the Nile as if watching the
wadys leading to the gold-mines.
[Illustration 224.jpg THE TWO COLOSSI OF ABU SIMBEL TO THE SOUTH OF THE
DOORWAY]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger and
Daniel Héron.
The pschent crown surmounts their foreheads, and the two ends of the
head-dress fall behind their ears; their features are of a noble type,
calm and serious; the nose slightly aquiline, the under lip projecting
above a square, but rather heavy, chin. Of such a type we may picture
Ramses, after the conclusion of the peace with the Khâti, in the full
vigour of his manhood and at the height of his power.
[Illustration: 225.jpg THE INTERIOR OF THE SPEOS OF ABU SIMBEL]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger and Daniel
Héron.
The doorway of the temple is in the centre of the façade, and rises
nearly to a level with the elbows of the colossi; above the lintel,
and facing the river, stands a figure of the god Râ, represented with a
human body and the head of a sparrow-hawk, while two images of the king
in profile, one on each side of the god, offer him a figure of Truth.
The first hall, 130 feet long by 58 feet broad, takes the place of the
court surrounded by a colonnade which in other temples usually follows
the pylon. Her eight Osiride figures, standing against as many square
pillars, appear to support the weight of the superincumbent rock. Their
profile catches the light as it enters through the open doorway, and
in the early morning, when the rising sun casts a ruddy ray over their
features, their faces become marvellously life-like. We are almost
tempted to think that a smile plays over their lips as the first beams
touch them. The remaining chambers consist of a hypostyle hall nearly
square in shape, the sanctuary itself being between two smaller
apartments, and of eight subterranean chambers excavated at a lower
level than the rest of the temple. The whole measures 178 feet from the
threshold to the far end of the Holy of Holies. The walls are covered
with bas-reliefs in which the Pharaoh has vividly depicted the wars
which he carried on in the four corners of his kingdom; here we see
raids against the negroes, there the war with the Khâti, and further
on an encounter with some Libyan tribe. Ramses, flushed by the heat of
victory, is seen attacking two Timihu chiefs: one has already fallen
to the ground and is being trodden underfoot; the other, after vainly
letting fly his arrows, is about to perish from a blow of the conqueror.
[Illustration: 228.jpg THE FACE OF THE ROCK AT ABU SIMGEL]
His knees give way beneath him, his head falls heavily backwards, and
the features are contracted in his death-agony. Pharaoh with his left
hand has seized him by the arm, while with his right he points his
lance against his enemys breast, and is about to pierce him through
the heart. As a rule, this type of bas-relief is executed with a
conventional grace which leaves the spectator unmoved, and free to
consider the scene merely from its historical point of view, forgetful
of the artist.
[Illustration: 229.jpg RAMSES II. PIERCES a Libyan chief with his lance]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Mons. do Bock.
An examination of most of the other wall-decorations of the speos will
furnish several examples of this type: we see Ramses with a suitable
gesture brandishing his weapon above a group of prisoners, and the
composition furnishes us with a fair example of official sculpture,
correct, conventional, but devoid of interest. Here, on the contrary,
the drawing is so full of energy that it carries the imagination hack to
the time and scene of those far-off battles.
[Illustration: 230.jpg RAMSES II. STRIKES A GROUP OF PRISONERS]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger.
The indistinct light in which it is seen helps the illusion, and we
almost forget that it is a picture we are beholding, and not the action
itself as it took place some three thousand years ago. A small speos,
situated at some hundred feet further north, is decorated with standing
colossi of smaller size, four of which represent Ramses, and two of them
his wife, Isit Nofrîtari. This speos possesses neither peristyle
nor crypt, and the chapels are placed at the two extremities of the
transverse passage, instead of being in a parallel line with the
sanctuary; on the other hand, the hypostyle hall rests on six pillars
with Hathor-headed capitals of fine proportions.
[Illustration: 231.jpg THE FAÇADE OF THE LITTLE SPEOS OF HAUTHOR AT ABU
SIMBEL]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the plates in Champollion.
A third excavated grotto of modest dimensions served as an accessory
chamber to the two others. An inexhaustible stream of yellow sand
poured over the great temple from the summit of the cliff, and partially
covered it every year. No sooner were the efforts to remove it relaxed,
than it spreads into the chambers, concealing the feet of the colossi,
and slowly creeping upwards to their knees, breasts, and necks; at the
beginning of this century they were entirely hidden. In spite of all
that was done to divert it, it ceaselessly reappeared, and in a few
summers regained all the ground which had been previously cleared.
It would seem as if the desert, powerless to destroy the work of the
conqueror, was seeking nevertheless to hide it from the admiration of
posterity.*
* The English engineers have succeeded in barring out the
sand, and have prevented it from pouring over the cliff any
more.--Ed.
Seti had worked indefatigably at Thebes, but the shortness of his reign
prevented him from completing the buildings he had begun there. There
existed everywhere, at Luxor, at Karnak, and on the left bank of the
Nile, the remains of his unfinished works; sanctuaries partially roofed
in, porticoes incomplete, columns raised to merely half their height,
halls as yet imperfect with blank walls, here and there covered with
only the outlines in red and black ink of their future bas-reliefs,
and statues hardly blocked out, or awaiting the final touch of the
polisher.*
* This is the description which Ramses gave of the condition
in which he found the Memnonium of Abydos. An examination of
the inscriptions existing in the Theban temples which Seti
I. had constructed, shows that it must have applied also to
the appearance of certain portions of Qurneh, Luxor, and
Karnak in the time of Ramses II.
Ramses took up the work where his father had relinquished it. At Luxor
there was not enough space to give to the hypostyle hall the extension
which the original plans proposed, and the great colonnade has an
unfinished appearance.
[Illustration: 230.jpg COLUMNS OF TEMPLE AT LUXOR]
The Nile, in one of its capricious floods, had carried away the land
upon which the architects had intended to erect the side aisles; and if
they wished to add to the existing structure a great court and a pylon,
without which no temple was considered complete, it was necessary to
turn the axis of the building towards the east.
[Illustration: 233.jpg THE CHAPEL OF THUTMOSIS III. AND ONE OF THE
PYLONS OF RAMSES II. AT LUXOR]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.
In their operations the architects came upon a beautiful little edifice
of rose granite, which had been either erected or restored by Thûtmosis
III. at a time when the town was an independent municipality and was
only beginning to extend its suburban dwellings to meet those of Karnak.
They took care to make no change in this structure, but set to work to
incorporate it into their final plans. It still stands at the north-west
corner of the court, and the elegance of its somewhat slender little
columns contrasts happily with the heaviness of the structure to which
it is attached. A portion of its portico is hidden by the brickwork of
the mosque of Abul Haggag: the part brought to light in the course of
the excavations contains between each row of columns a colossal statue
of Ramses II. We are accustomed to hear on all sides of the degeneracy
of the sculptors art at this time, and of its having fallen into
irreparable neglect. Nothing can be further from the truth than this
sweeping statement. There are doubtless many statues and bas-reliefs of
this epoch which shock us by their crudity and ugliness, but these owed
their origin for the most part to provincial workshops which had been
at all times of mediocre repute, and where the artists did not receive
orders enough to enable them to correct by practice the defects of their
education. We find but few productions of the Theban school exhibiting
bad technique, and if we had only this one monument of Luxor from which
to form our opinion of its merits, it would be sufficient to prove that
the sculptors of Ramses II. were not a whit behind those of Harmham or
Seti I. Adroitness in cutting the granite or hard sandstone had in no
wise been lost, and the same may be said of the skill in bringing
out the contour and life-like action of the figure, and of the art of
infusing into the features and demeanour of the Pharaoh something of
the superhuman majesty with which the Egyptian people were accustomed to
invest their monarchs. If the statues of Ramses II. in the portico are
not perfect models of sculpture, they have many good points, and their
bold treatment makes them effectively decorative.
[Illustration: 235.jpg THE COLONNADE OF SETI I. AND THE THREE COLOSSAL
STATUES OF RAMSES II. AT LUXOR]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.
Eight other statues of Ramses are arranged along the base of the
façade, and two obelisks--one of which has been at Paris for half a
century*--stood on either side of the entrance.
* The colonnade and the little temple of Thûtmosis III. were
concealed under the houses of the village; they were first
brought to light in the excavations of 1884-86.
The whole structure lacks unity, and there is nothing corresponding to
it in this respect anywhere else in Egypt. The northern half does
not join on to the southern, but seems to belong to quite a distinct
structure, or the two parts might be regarded as having once formed
a single edifice which had become divided by an accident, which the
architect had endeavoured to unite together again by a line of columns
running between two walls. The masonry of the hypostyle hall at Karnak
was squared and dressed, but the walls had been left undecorated, as
was also the case with the majority of the shafts of the columns and the
surface of the architraves. Ramses covered the whole with a series of
sculptured and painted scenes which had a rich ornamental effect; he
then decorated the pylon, and inscribed on the outer wall to the south
the list of cities which he had captured. The temple of Amon then
assumed the aspect which it preserved henceforward for centuries. The
Ramessides and their successors occupied themselves in filling it with
furniture, and in taking steps for the repair of any damage that might
accrue to the hall or pillars; they had their cartouches or inscriptions
placed in vacant spaces, but they did not dare to modify its
arrangement. It was reserved for the Ethiopian and Greek Pharaohs, in
presence of the hypostyle and pylon of the XIXth dynasty, to conceive of
others on a still vaster scale.
[Illustration: 236.jpg PAINTINGS OF CHAIRS]
Ramses, having completed the funerary chapel of Seti at Qurneh upon the
left bank of the river, then began to think of preparing the edifice
destined for the cult of his double--that Eamesseum whose majestic
ruins still stand at a short distance to the north of the giants of
Amenôthes. Did these colossal statues stimulate his spirit of emulation
to do something yet more marvellous? He erected here, at any rate,
a still more colossal figure. The earthquake which shattered Memnon
brought it to the ground, and fragments of it still strew the soil where
they fell some nineteen centuries ago. There are so many of them that the
spectator would think himself in the middle of a granite quarry.*
* The ear measures 3 feet 4 inches (feet ?) in length; the
statue is 58 feet high from the top of the head to the
sole of the foot, and the weight of the whole has been
estimated at over a thousand tons.
[Illustration: 237.jpg THE REMAINS OF THE COLOSSAL STATUE OF RAMSES II.
AT THE RAMESSEUM]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato
The portions forming the breast, arms, and thighs are in detached
pieces, but they are still recognisable where they lie close to each
other. The head has lost nothing of its characteristic expression, and
its proportions are so enormous, that a man could sleep crouched up
in the hollow of one of its ears as if on a sofa. Behind the court
overlooked by this colossal statue lay a second court, surrounded by a
row of square pillars, each having a figure of Osiris attached to it.
The god is represented as a mummy, the swathings throwing the body and
limbs into relief.
[Illustration: 238.jpg THE RAMESSEUM]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Beato; the great
blocks in the foreground are the fragments of the colossal
statue of Ramses II.
His hands are freed from the bandages and are crossed on the breast, and
hold respectively the flail and crook; the smiling face is surmounted by
an enormous head-dress. The sanctuary with the buildings attached to
it has perished, but enormous brick structures extend round the ruins,
forming an enclosure of storehouses. Here the priests of the double
were accustomed to dwell with their wives and slaves, and here they
stored up the products of their domains--meat, vegetables, corn, fowls
dried or preserved in fat, and wines procured from all the vineyards of
Egypt.
These were merely the principal monuments put up by Ramses II. at Thebes
during the sixty-seven years of his rule. There would be no end to the
enumeration of his works if we were to mention all the other edifices
which he constructed in the necropolis or among the dwellings of the
living, all those which he restored, or those which he merely repaired
or inscribed with his cartouches. These are often cut over the name of
the original founder, and his usurpations of monuments are so numerous
that he might be justly accused of having striven to blot out the memory
of his predecessors, and of claiming for himself the entire work of the
whole line of Pharaohs. It would seem as if, in his opinion, the glory
of Egypt began with him, or at least with his father, and that no
victorious campaigns had been ever heard of before those which he
conducted against the Libyans and the Hittites.
The battle of Qodshû, with its attendant episodes--the flogging of the
spies, the assault upon the camp, the charge of the chariots, the flight
of the Syrians--is the favourite subject of his inscriptions; and the
poem of Pentaûîrît adds to the bas-reliefs a description worthy of the
acts represented. This epic reappears everywhere, in Nubia and in the
Said, at Abu Simbel, at Beît-Wally, at Derr, at Luxor, at Karnak, and
on the Eamesseum, and the same battle-scenes, with the same accompanying
texts, reappear in the Memnonium, whose half-ruined walls still crown
the necropolis of Abydos.
[Illustration: 240.jpg THE RUINS OF THE MEMNONIUM OF RAMSES II. AT
ABYDOS]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
He had decided upon the erection of this latter monument at the very
beginning of his reign, and the artisans who had worked at the similar
structure of Seti I. were employed to cover its walls with admirable
bas-reliefs. Ramses also laid claim to have his own resting-place at
the Cleft; in this privilege he associated all the Pharaohs, from whom
he imagined himself to be descended, and the same list of their names,
which we find engraved in the chapel of his father, appears on his
building also. Some ruins, lying beyond Abydos, are too formless to do
more than indicate the site of some of his structures. He enlarged
the temple of Harshafîtû and that of Osiris at Heracleopolis, and, to
accomplish these works the more promptly, his workmen had recourse
for material to the royal towns of the IVth and XIIth dynasties; the
pyramids of Usirtasen II. and Snofrûi at Medûm suffered accordingly the
loss of the best part of their covering. He finished the mausoleum at
Memphis, and dedicated the statue which Seti had merely blocked out;
he then set to work to fill the city with buildings of his own
device--granite and sandstone chambers to the east of the Sacred Lake,*
monumental gateways to the south,** and before one of them a fine
colossal figure in granite.*** It lay not long ago at the bottom of a
hole among the palm trees, and was covered by the inundation every year;
it has now been so raised as to be safe from the waters. Ramses could
hardly infuse new life into all the provinces which had been devastated
years before by the Shepherd-kings; but Heliopolis,**** Bubastes,
Athribis, Patûmû, Mendis, Tell Moqdam, and all the cities of the eastern
corner of the Delta, constitute a museum of his monuments, every object
within them testifying to his activity.
* Partly excavated and published by Mariette, and partly by
M. de Morgan. This is probably the temple mentioned in the
_Great Inscription of Abu Simbel_.
** These are probably those mentioned by Herodotus, when he
says that Sesostris constructed a propylon in the temple of
Hephaistos.
*** This is Abu-1-hôl of the Arabs.
**** Ruins of the temple of Râ bear the cartouche of Ramses
II. Cleopatras Needle, transported to Alexandria by one
of the Ptolemies, had been set up by Ramses at Heliopolis;
it is probably one of the four obelisks which the
traditional Sesostris is said to have erected in that city,
according to Pliny.
He colonised these towns with his prisoners, rebuilt them, and set to
work to rouse them from the torpor into which they had fallen after
their capture by Ahmosis. He made a third capital of Tanis, which
rivalled both Memphis and Thebes.
[Illustration: 242.jpg THE COLOSSAL STATUE OF RAMSES II. AT MITRAHINEH]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph brought back by
Bénédite.
Before this it had been little more than a deserted ruin: he cleared
out the _débris_, brought a population to the place; rebuilt the temple,
enlarging it by aisles which extended its area threefold; and here he
enthroned, along with the local divinities, a triad, in which Amonrâ and
Sûtkhû sat side by side with his own deified double. The ruined
walls, the overturned stelæ, the obelisks recumbent in the dust, and
the statues of his usurped predecessors, all bear his name. His colossal
figure of statuary sandstone, in a sitting attitude like that at the
Eamesseum, projected from the chief court, and seemed to look down upon
the confused ruin of his works.*
* The fragments of the colossus were employed in the Græco-
Roman period as building material, and used in the masonry
of a boundary wall.
We do not know how many wives he had in his harem, but one of the lists
of his children which has come down to us enumerates, although mutilated
at the end, one hundred and eleven sons, while of his daughters we know
of fifty-five.*
* The list of Abydos enumerates thirty-three of his sons and
thirty-two of his daughters, that of Wady-Sebua one hundred
and eleven of his sons and fifty-one of his daughters; both
lists are mutilated. The remaining lists for the most part
record only some of the children living at the time they
were drawn up, at Derr, at the Eamesseum, and at Abu Simbel.
The majority of these were the offspring of mere concubines or foreign
princesses, and possessed but a secondary rank in comparison with
himself; but by his union with his sisters Nofrîtari Marîtmût and
Isîtnofrît, he had at least half a dozen sons and daughters who might
aspire to the throne. Death robbed him of several of these before
an opportunity was open to them to succeed him, and among them
Amenhikhopshûf, Amenhiunamif, and Ramses, who had distinguished
themselves in the campaign against the Khâti; and some of his
daughters--Bitanîti, Marîtamon, Nibîttaûi--by becoming his wives lost
their right to the throne. About the XXXth year of his reign, when he
was close upon sixty, he began to think of an associate, and his choice
rested on the eldest surviving son of his queen Isîtnofrît, who was
called Khâmoîsît. This prince was born before the succession of his
father, and had exhibited distinguished bravery under the walls of
Qodshu and at Ascalon. When he was still very young he had been invested
with the office of high priest of the Memphite Phtah, and thus had
secured to him the revenues of the possessions of the god, which were
the largest in all Egypt after those of the Theban Anion. He had a great
reputation for his knowledge of abstruse theological questions and of
the science of magic--a later age attributing to him the composition of
several books on magic giving directions for the invocation of spirits
belonging to this world and the world beyond. He became the hero also of
fantastic romances, in which it was related of him how, in consequence
of his having stolen from the mummy of an old wizard the books of
Thot, he became the victim of possession by a sort of lascivious and
sanguinary ghoul. Ramses relieved himself of the cares of state by
handing over to Khâmoîsîfc the government of the country, without,
however, conferring upon him the titles and insignia of royalty. The
chief concern of Khâmoîsît was to secure the scrupulous observance
of the divine laws. He celebrated at Silsilis the festivals of the
inundation; he presided at the commemoration of his fathers apotheosis,
and at the funeral rites of the Apis who died in the XXXth year of the
kings reign. Before his time each sacred bull had its separate tomb
in a quarter of the Memphite Necropolis known to the Greeks as the
Serapeion. The tomb was a small cone-roofed building erected on a square
base, and containing only one chamber. Khâmoîsît substituted for this a
rock-tomb similar to those used by ordinary individuals. He had a tunnel
cut in the solid rock to a depth of about a hundred yards, and on either
side of this a chamber was prepared for each Apis on its death, the
masons closing up the wall after the installation of the mummy. His
regency had lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, when, the burden
of government becoming too much for him, he was succeeded in the LVth
year of Ramses by his younger brother Mînephtah, who was like himself
a son of Isîtnofrît.* Mînephtah acted, during the first twelve years of
his rule, for his father, who, having now almost attained the age of
a hundred, passed peacefully away at Thebes in the LXVIII year of his
reign, full of days and sated with glory.** He became the subject of
legend almost before he had closed his eyes upon the world.
* Mînephtah was in the order of birth the thirteenth son of
Ramses II.
** A passage on a stele of Ramses IV. formally attributes to
him a reign of sixty-seven years. I procured at Koptos a
stele of his year LXVI.
[Illustration: 245.jpg THE CHAPEL OF THE APIS OF AMEKÔTHES III.]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Mariette.
He had obtained brilliant successes during his life, and the scenes
describing them were depicted in scores of places. Popular fancy
believed everything which he had related of himself, and added to
this all that it knew of other kings, thus making him the Pharaoh of
Pharaohs--the embodiment of all preceding monarchs. Legend preferred to
recall him by the name Sesûsû, Sesûstûrî--a designation which had been
applied to him by his contemporaries, and he thus became better known to
moderns as Sesostris than by his proper name Ramses Mîamûn.*
* This designation, which is met with at Medinet-Habu and in
the Anmtasi Papyrus I., was shown by E. de Rougé to refer to
Ramses II.; the various readings Sesû, Sesûsû, Sesûstûrî,
explain the different forms Sesosis, Sesoosis, Sesostris.
Wiedemann saw in this name the mention of a king of the
XVIIIth dynasty not yet classified.
According to tradition, he was at first sent to Ethiopia with a fleet
of four hundred ships, by which he succeeded in conquering the coasts
of the Red Sea as far as the Indus. In later times several stelæ in the
cinnamon country were ascribed to him. He is credited after this with
having led into the east a great army, with which he conquered Syria,
Media, Persia, Bactriana, and India as far as the ocean; and with having
on his return journey through the deserts of Scythia reached the Don
[Tanais], where, on the shore of the Masotic Sea, he left a number of
his soldiers, whose descendants afterwards peopled Colchis. It was
even alleged that he had ventured into Europe, but that the lack of
provisions and the inclemency of the climate had prevented him from
advancing further than Thrace.
[Illustration: 246.jpg STATUE OF KHAMOISIT]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a statue in the British Museum.
He returned to Egypt after an absence of nine years, and after
having set up on his homeward journey statues and stelæ everywhere in
commemoration of his victories. Herodotus asserts that he himself had
seen several of these monuments in his travels in Syria and Ionia. Some
of these are of genuine Egyptian manufacture, and are to be attributed
to our Ramses; they are to be found near Tyre, and on the banks of the
Nahr el-Kelb, where they mark the frontier to which his empire extended
in this direction. Others have but little resemblance to Egyptian
monuments, and were really the work of the Asiatic peoples among whom
they were found. The two figures referred to long ago by Herodotus,
which have been discovered near Ninfi between Sardis and Smyrna, are
instances of the latter.
[Illustration: 247.jpg STELE OF THE NAHR EL-KELB]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
The shoes of the figures are turned up at the toe, and the head-dress
has more resemblance to the high hats of the people of Asia Minor
than to the double crown of Egypt, while the lower garment is striped
horizontally in place of vertically. The inscription, moreover, is in an
Asiatic form of writing, and has nothing Egyptian about it. Ramses
II. in his youth was the handsomest man of his time. He was tall and
straight; his figure was well moulded--the shoulders broad, the arms
full and vigorous, the legs muscular; the face was oval, with a firm and
smiling mouth, a thin aquiline nose, and large open eyes.
[Illustration: 248.jpg THE BAS-BELIEF OF NINFI]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
[Illustration: 249.jpg THE COFFIN AND MUMMY OF RAMSES II]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph taken from the mummy
itself, by Emil Brugsch-Bey.
There may be seen below the cartouche the lines of the official report
of inspection written during the XXIst dynasty. Old age and death did
not succeed in marring the face sufficiently to disfigure it. The coffin
containing his body is not the same as that in which his children placed
him on the day of his obsequies; it is another substituted for it by one
of the Ramessides, and the mask upon it has but a distant resemblance
to the face of the victorious Pharaoh. The mummy is thin, much shrunken,
and light; the bones are brittle, and the muscles atrophied, as one
would expect in the case of a man who had attained the age of a hundred;
but the figure is still tall and of perfect proportions.*
* Even after the coalescence of the vertebrae and the shrinkage produced
by mummification, the body of Ramses II. still measures over 5 feet 8
inches.
The head, which is bald on the top, is somewhat long, and small in
relation to the bulk of the body; there is but little hair on the
forehead, but at the back of the head it is thick, and in smooth stiff
locks, still preserving its white colour beneath the yellow balsams
of his last toilet. The forehead is low, the supra-orbital ridges
accentuated, the eyebrows thick, the eyes small and set close to the
nose, the temples hollow, the cheek-bones prominent; the ears, finely
moulded, stand out from the head, and are pierced, like those of a
woman, for the usual ornaments pendant from the lobe. A strong jaw and
square chin, together, with a large thick-lipped mouth, which reveals
through the black paste within it a few much-worn but sound teeth, make
up the features of the mummied king. His moustache and beard, which were
closely shaven in his lifetime, had grown somewhat in his last sickness
or after his death; the coarse and thick hairs in them, white like those
of the head and eyebrows, attain a length of two or three millimetres.
The skin shows an ochreous yellow colour under the black bituminous
plaster. The mask of the mummy, in fact, gives a fair idea of that of
the living king; the somewhat unintelligent expression, slightly brutish
perhaps, but haughty and firm of purpose, displays itself with an air
of royal majesty beneath the sombre materials used by the embalmer.
The disappearance of the old hero did not produce many changes in the
position of affairs in Egypt: Mînephtah from this time forth possessed
as Pharaoh the power which he had previously wielded as regent. He was
now no longer young. Born somewhere about the beginning of the reign of
Ramses II., he was now sixty, possibly seventy, years old; thus an old
man succeeded another old man at a moment when Egypt must have needed
more than ever an active and vigorous ruler. The danger to the country
did not on this occasion rise from the side of Asia, for the relations
of the Pharaoh with his Kharu subjects continued friendly, and, during a
famine which desolated Syria,* he sent wheat to his Hittite allies.
* A document preserved in the _Anastasi Papyrus III._ shows
how regular the relations with Syria had become. It is the
journal of a custom-house officer, or of a scribe placed at
one of the frontier posts, who notes from day to day the
letters, messengers, officers, and troops which passed from
the 15th to the 25th of Pachons, in the IIIrd year of the
reign.
The nations, however, to the north and east, in Libya and in the
Mediterranean islands, had for some time past been in a restless
condition, which boded little good to the empires of the old world. The
Tirnihû, some of them tributaries from the XIIth, and others from the
first years of the XVIIIth dynasty, had always been troublesome, but
never really dangerous neighbours. From time to time it was necessary
to send light troops against them, who, sailing along the coast or
following the caravan routes, would enter their territory, force them
from their retreats, destroy their palm groves, carry off their cattle,
and place garrisons in the principal oases--even in Sîwah itself.
For more than a century, however, it would seem that more active and
numerically stronger populations had entered upon the stage. A current
of invasion, having its origin in the region of the Atlas, or possibly
even in Europe, was setting towards the Nile, forcing before it the
scattered tribes of the Sudan. Who were these invaders? Were they
connected with the race which had planted its dolmens over the plains of
the Maghreb? Whatever the answer to this question may be, we know that
a certain number of Berber tribes*--the Labû and Mashaûasha--who had
occupied a middle position between Egypt and the people behind them,
and who had only irregular communications with the Nile valley, were now
pushed to the front and forced to descend upon it.**
* The nationality of these tribes is evidenced by the names
of their chiefs, which recall exactly those of the
Numidians--Massyla, Massinissa, Massiva.
** The Labû, Laûbû, Lobû, are mentioned for the first time
under Ramses II.; these are the Libyans of classical
geographers. The Mashaûasha answer to the Maxycs of
Herodotus; they furnished mercenaries to the armies of
Ramses II.
They were men tall of stature and large of limb, with fair skins, light
hair, and blue eyes; everything, in fact, indicating their northern
origin. They took pleasure in tattooing the skin, just as the Tuaregs
and Kabyles are now accustomed to do, and some, if not all, of them
practised circumcision, like a portion of the Egyptians and Semites. In
the arrangement of the hair, a curl fell upon the shoulder, while the
remainder was arranged in small frizzled locks. Their chiefs and braves
wore on their heads two flowering plumes. A loin-cloth, a wild-beasts
skin thrown over the back, a mantle, or rather a covering of woollen
or dyed cloth, fringed and ornamented with many-coloured needlework,
falling from the left shoulder with no attachment in front, so as to
leave the body unimpeded in walking,--these constituted the ordinary
costume of the people. Their arms were similar to those of the
Egyptians, consisting of the lance, the mace, the iron or copper dagger,
the boomerang, the bow and arrow, and the sling.
[Illustration: 253.jpg A LIBYAN]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
They also employed horses and chariots. Their bravery made them a foe
not to be despised, in spite of their ignorance of tactics and their
want of discipline. When they were afterwards formed into regiments and
conducted by experienced generals, they became the best auxiliary troops
which Egypt could boast of. The Labû from this time forward were the
most energetic of the tribes, and their chiefs prided themselves upon
possessing the leadership over all the other clans in this region of the
world.*
* This was the case in the wars of Mînephtah and Ramses
III., in which the Labû and their kings took the command of
the confederate armies assembled against Egypt.
The Labû might very well have gained the mastery over the other
inhabitants of the desert at this period, who had become enfeebled
by the frequent defeats which they had sustained at the hands of the
Egyptians. At the moment when Mînephtah ascended the throne, their king,
Mâraîû, son of Didi, ruled over the immense territory lying between the
Fayûm and the two Syrtes: the Timihu, the Kahaka, and the Mashaûasha
rendered him the same obedience as his own people. A revolution had
thus occurred in Africa similar to that which had taken place a century
previously in Naharaim, when Sapalulu founded the Hittite empire. A
great kingdom rose into being where no state capable of disturbing
Egyptian control had existed before. The danger was serious. The
Hittites, separated from the Nile by the whole breadth of Kharu, could
not directly threaten any of the Egyptian cities; but the Libyans, lords
of the desert, were in contact with the Delta, and could in a few days
fall upon any point in the valley they chose. Mînephtah, therefore,
hastened to resist the assault of the westerns, as his father had
formerly done that of the easterns, and, strange as it may seem, he
found among the troops of his new enemies some of the adversaries with
whom the Egyptians had fought under the walls of Qodshû sixty years
before. The Shardana, Lycians, and others, having left the coasts of the
Delta and the Phoenician seaports owing to the vigilant watch kept by
the Egyptians over their waters, had betaken themselves to the Libyan
littoral, where they met with a favourable reception. Whether they had
settled in some places, and formed there those colonies of which a Greek
tradition of a recent age speaks, we cannot say. They certainly followed
the occupation of mercenary soldiers, and many of them hired out their
services to the native princes, while others were enrolled among the
troops of the King of the Khâti or of the Pharaoh himself. Mâraîû
brought with him Achæans, Shardana, Tûrsha, Shagalasha,* and Lycians
in considerable numbers when he resolved to begin the strife.** This was
not one of those conventional little wars which aimed at nothing further
than the imposition of the payment of a tribute upon the conquered, or
the conquest of one of their provinces. Mâraîû had nothing less in view
than the transport of his whole people into the Nile valley, to settle
permanently there as the Hyksôs had done before him.
* The Shakalasha, Shagalasha, identified with the Sicilians
by E. de Rougé, were a people of Asia Minor whose position
there is approximately indicated by the site of the town
Sagalassos, named after them.
** The _Inscription of Mînephtah_ distinguishes the Libyans
of Mâraîû from the people of the Sea.
He set out on his march towards the end of the IVth year of the
Pharaohs reign, or the beginning of his Vth, surrounded by the elite
of his troops, the first choice from among all the soldiers and all the
heroes in each land. The announcement of their approach spread terror
among the Egyptians. The peace which they had enjoyed for fifty years
had cooled their warlike ardour, and the machinery of their military
organisation had become somewhat rusty. The standing army had almost
melted away; the regiments of archers and charioteers were no longer
effective, and the neglected fortresses were not strong enough to
protect the frontier. As a consequence, the oases of Farafrah and of the
Natron lakes fell into the hands of the enemy at the first attack, and
the eastern provinces of the Delta became the possession of the invader
before any steps could be taken for their defence. Memphis, which
realised the imminent danger, broke out into open murmurs against the
negligent rulers who had given no heed to the countrys ramparts, and
had allowed the garrisons of its fortresses to dwindle away. Fortunately
Syria remained quiet. The Khâti, in return for the aid afforded them
by Mînephtah during the famine, observed a friendly attitude, and
the Pharaoh was thus enabled to withdraw the troops from his Asiatic
provinces. He could with perfect security take the necessary measures
for ensuring Heliopolis, the city of Tûmû, against surprise, for
arming Memphis, the citadel of Phtah-Tonen, and for restoring all things
which were in disorder: he fortified Pibalîsît, in the neighbourhood of
the Shakana canal, on a branch of that of Heliopolis, and he rapidly
concentrated his forces behind these quickly organised lines.*
* Chabas would identify Pibalîsît with Bubastis; I agree
with Brugsch in placing it at Belbeîs.
Mâraîû, however, continued to advance; in the early months of the summer
he had crossed the Canopic branch of the Nile, and was now about to
encamp not far from the town of Pirici. When the king heard of this he
became furious against them as a lion that fascinates its victim; he
called his officers together and addressed them: I am about to make you
hear the words of your master, and to teach you this: I am the sovereign
shepherd who feeds you; I pass my days in seeking out that which is
useful for you: I am your father; is there among you a father like me
who makes his children live? You are trembling like geese, you do not
know what is good to do: no one gives an answer to the enemy, and
our desolated land is abandoned to the incursions of all nations. The
barbarians harass the frontier, rebels violate it every day, every one
robs it, enemies devastate our seaports, they penetrate into the fields
of Egypt; if there is an arm of a river they halt there, they stay for
days, for months; they come as numerous as reptiles, and no one is able
to sweep them back, these wretches who love death and hate life, whose
hearts meditate the consummation of our ruin. Behold, they arrive with
their chief; they pass their time on the land which they attack in
filling their stomachs every day; this is the reason why they come to
the land of Egypt, to seek their sustenance, and their intention is to
install themselves there; mine is to catch them like fish upon their
bellies. Their chief is a dog, a poor devil, a madman; he shall never
sit down again in his place. He then announced that on the 14th of
Epiphi he would himself conduct the troops against the enemy.
These were brave words, but we may fancy the figure that this king of
more than sixty years of age would have presented in a chariot in the
middle of the fray, and his competence to lead an effective charge
against the enemy. On the other hand, his absence in such a critical
position of affairs would have endangered the _morale_ of his soldiers
and possibly compromised the issue of the battle. A dream settled the
whole question.*
* Ed. Meyer sees in this nothing but a customary rhetorical
expression, and thinks that the god spoke in order to
encourage the king to defend himself vigorously.
While Mînephtah was asleep one night, he saw a gigantic figure of Phtah
standing before him, and forbidding him to advance. Stay, cried
the god to him, while handing him the curved khopesh: put away
discouragement from thee! His Majesty said to him: But what am I to do
then? And Phtah answered him: Despatch thy infantry, and send before
it numerous chariots to the confines of the territory of Piriû.**
* This name was read Pa-ari by E. de Rougé, Pa-ali by Lauth,
and was transcribed Pa-ari-shop by Brugsch, who identified
with Prosopitis. The orthography of the text at Athribis
shows that we ought to read Piri, Pirû, Piriû; possibly the
name is identical with that of larû which is mentioned in
the Pyramid-texts.
The Pharaoh obeyed the command, and did not stir from his position.
Mâraîû had, in the mean time, arranged his attack for the 1st of Epiphi,
at the rising of the sun: it did not take place, however, until the 3rd.
The archers of His Majesty made havoc of the barbarians for six
hours; they were cut off by the edge of the sword. When Mâraîû saw
the carnage, he was afraid, his heart failed him; he betook himself
to flight as fast as his feet could bear him to save his life, so
successfully that his bow and arrows remained behind him in his
precipitation, as well as everything else he had upon him. His
treasure, his arms, his wife, together with the cattle which he had
brought with him for his use, became the prey of the conqueror; he tore
out the feathers from his head-dress, and took flight with such of those
wretched Libyans as escaped the massacre, but the officers who had the
care of His Majestys team of horses followed in their steps and put
most of them to the sword. Mâraîû succeeded, however, in escaping in the
darkness, and regained his own country without water or provisions, and
almost without escort. The conquering troops returned to the camp laden
with booty, and driving before them asses carrying, as bloody tokens of
victory, quantities of hands and phalli cut from the dead bodies of the
slain. The bodies of six generals and of 6359 Libyan soldiers were found
upon the field of battle, together with 222 Shagalasha, 724 Tursha, and
some hundreds of Shardana and Achæans: several thousands of prisoners
passed in procession before the Pharaoh, and were distributed among such
of his soldiers as had distinguished themselves. These numbers show the
gravity of the danger from which Egypt had escaped: the announcement
of the victory filled the country with enthusiasm, all the more sincere
because of the reality of the panic which had preceded it. The fellahîn,
intoxicated with joy, addressed each other: Come, and let us go a long
distance on the road, for there is now no fear in the hearts of
men.The fortified posts may at last be left; the citadels are now open;
messengers stand at the foot of the walls and wait in the shade for the
guard to awake after their siesta, to give them entrance. The military
police sleep on their accustomed rounds, and the people of the marshes
once more drive their herds to pasture without fear of raids, for there
are no longer marauders near at hand to cross the river; the cry of the
sentinels is heard no more in the night: Halt, thou that comest, thou
that comest under a name which is not thine own--sheer off! and men no
longer exclaim on the following morning: Such or such a thing has been
stolen; but the towns fall once more into their usual daily routine,
and he who works in the hope of the harvest, will nourish himself upon
that which he shall have reaped. The return from Memphis to Thebes was
a triumphal march.
[Illustration: 260.jpg STATUE OF MÎNEPHTAH]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dévéria.
He is very strong, Binrî Mînephtah, sang the court poets, very
wise are his projects--his words have as beneficial effect as those of
Thot--everything which he does is completed to the end.--When he is like
a guide at the head of his armies--his voice penetrates the fortress
walls.--Very friendly to those who bow their backs--before Mîamun--his
valiant soldiers spare him who humbles himself--before his courage
and before his strength;--they fall upon the Libyans--they consume the
Syrian;--the Shardana whom thou hast brought back by thy
sword--make prisoners of their own tribes.--Very happy thy return to
Thebes--victorious! Thy chariot is drawn by hand--the conquered chiefs
march backwards before thee--whilst thou leadest them to thy venerable
father--Amon, husband of his mother. And the poets amuse themselves
with summoning Mâraîû to appear in Egypt, pursued as he was by his own
people and obliged to hide himself from them. He is nothing any longer
but a beaten man, and has become a proverb among the Labû, and his
chiefs repeat to themselves: Nothing of the kind has occurred since the
time of Râ. The old men say each one to his children: Misfortune
to the Labû! it is all over with them! No one can any longer pass
peacefully across the country; but the power of going out of our
land has been taken from us in a single day, and the Tihonu have been
withered up in a single year; Sûtkhû has ceased to be their chief, and
he devastates their duars; there is nothing left but to conceal ones
self, and one feels nowhere secure except in a fortress. The news of
the victory was carried throughout Asia, and served to discourage the
tendencies to revolt which were beginning to make themselves manifest
there. The chiefs gave there their salutations of peace, and none among
the nomads raised his head after the crushing defeat of the Libyans;
Khâti is at peace, Canaan is a prisoner as far as the disaffected are
concerned, the inhabitant of Ascalon is led away, Gezer is carried into
captivity, Ianuâmîm is brought to nothing, the Israîlû are destroyed and
have no longer seed, Kharu is like a widow of the land of Egypt. *
* This passage is taken from a stele discovered by Petrie in
1896, on the site of the Amenophium at Thebes. The mention
of the Israîlû immediately calls to mind the place-names
Yushaph-îlu, Yakob-îlu, on lists of Thûtmosis III. which
have been compared with the names Jacob and Joseph.
Mînephtah ought to have followed up his opportunity to the end, but he
had no such intention, and his inaction gave Mâraîû time to breathe.
Perhaps the effort which he had made had exhausted his resources,
perhaps old age prevented him from prosecuting his success; he was
content, in any case, to station bodies of pickets on the frontier,
and to fortify a few new positions to the east of the Delta. The Libyan
kingdom was now in the same position as that in which the Hittite had
been after the campaign of Seti I.: its power had been checked for the
moment, but it remained intact on the Egyptian frontier, awaiting its
opportunity.
Mînephtah lived for some time after this memorable year* and the number
of monuments which belong to this period show that he reigned in peace.
We can see that he carried out works in the same places as his father
before him; at Tanis as well as Thebes, in Nubia as well as in the
Delta. He worked the sandstone quarries for his building materials,
and continued the custom of celebrating the feasts of the inundation at
Silsileh. One at least of the stelae which he set up on the occasion of
these feasts is really a chapel, with its architraves and columns, and
still, excites the admiration of the traveller on account both of its
form and of its picturesque appearance.
* The last known year of his reign is the year VIII. The
lists of Manetho assign to him a reign of from twenty to
forty years; Brugsch makes it out to have been thirty-four
years, from 1300 to 1266 B.C., which is evidently too much,
but we may attribute to him without risk of serious error a
reign of about twenty years.
The last years of his life were troubled by the intrigues of princes who
aspired to the throne, and by the ambition of the ministers to whom he
was obliged to delegate his authority.
[Illustration: 263.jpg THE CHAPELS OF RAMSES II. AND MINEPHTAH AT
SISILEH]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato.
One of the latter, a man of Semite origin, named Ben-Azana, of
Zor-bisana, who had assumed the appellation of his first patron,
ramsesûpirnirî, appears to have acted for him as regent. Mînephtah
was succeeded, apparently, by one of his sons, called Seti, after his
great-grandfather.* Seti II. had doubtless reached middle age at the
time of his accession, but his portraits represent him, nevertheless,
with the face and figure of a young man.** The expression in these is
gentle, refined, haughty, and somewhat melancholic. MU It is the type
of Seti I. and Ramses II., but enfeebled and, as it were, saddened. An
inscription of his second year attributes to him victories in Asia,***
but others of the same period indicate the existence of disturbances
similar to those which had troubled the last years of his father.
* E. de Rougé introduced Amenmeses and Siphtah between
Mînephtah and Seti II., and I had up to the present followed
his example; I have come back to the position of Chabas,
making Seti II. the immediate successor of Mînephtah, which
is also the view of Brugsch, Wiedemann, and Ed. Meyer. The
succession as it is now given does not seem to me to be free
from difficulties; the solution generally adopted has only
the merit of being preferable to that of E. de Rougé, which
I previously supported.
** The last date known of his reign is the year II. which is
found at Silsilis; Chabas was, nevertheless, of the opinion
that he reigned a considerable time.
*** The expressions employed in this document do not vary
much from the usual protocol of all kings of this period.
The triumphal chant of Seti II. preserved in the _Anastasi
Papyrus IV_. is a copy of the triumphal chant of Mînephtah,
which is in the same Papyrus.
[Illustration: 264.jpg STATUE OF SETI II.]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
These were occasioned by a certain Aiari, who was high priest of Phtah,
and who had usurped titles belonged ordinarily to the Pharaoh or his
eldest son, in the house of Sibû, heir and hereditary prince of the two
lands. Seti died, it would seem, without having had time to finish his
tomb. We do not know whether he left any legitimate children, but two
sovereigns succeeded him who were not directly connected with him, but
were probably the grandsons of the Amenmesis and the Siphtah, whom we
meet with among the children of Ramses. The first of these was also
called Amenmesis,* and he held sway for several years over the whole of
Egypt, and over its foreign possessions.
* Graffiti of this sovereign have been found at the second
cataract. Certain expressions have induced E. de Rougé to
believe that he, as well as Siphtah, came originally from
Khibît in the Aphroditopolite nome. This was an allusion, as
Chabas had seen, to the myth of Horus, similar to that
relating to Thûtmosis III., and which we more usually meet
with in the cases of those kings who were not marked out
from their birth onwards for the throne.
[Illustration: 265.jpg SETI II.]
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Émil Brugsch-Bey.
The second, who was named Siphtah-Mînephtah, ascended the throne of his
father thanks to the devotion of his minister Baî,* but in a greater
degree to his marriage with a certain princess called Tausirît. He
maintained himself in this position for at least six years, during which
he made an expedition into Ethiopia, and received in audience at
Thebes messengers from all foreign nations. He kept up so zealously the
appearance of universal dominion, that to judge from his inscriptions
he must have been the equal of the most powerful of his predecessors at
Thebes.
Egypt, nevertheless, was proceeding at a quick pace towards its
downfall. No sooner had this monarch disappeared than it began to break
up.** There were no doubt many claimants for the crown, but none of them
succeeded in disposing of the claims of his rivals, and anarchy reigned
supreme from one end of the Nile valley to the other. The land of Qîmît
began to drift away, and the people within it had no longer a sovereign,
and this, too, for many years, until other times came; for the land of
Qîmît was in the hands of the princes ruling over the nomes, and they
put each other to death, both great and small.
* Baî has left two inscriptions behind him, one at Silsilis
and the other at Sehêl, and the titles he assumes on both
monuments show the position he occupied at the Theban court
during the reign of Siphtah-Mînephtah. Chabas thought that
Baî had succeeded in maintaining his rights to the crown
against the claims of Amenmesis.
** The little that we know about this period of anarchy has
been obtained from the _Harris Papyrus_.
Other times came afterwards, during years of nothingness, in which
Arisu, a Syrian,* was chief among them, and the whole country paid
tribute before him; every one plotted with his neighbour to steal the
goods of others, and it was the same with regard to the gods as with
regard to men, offerings were no longer made in the temples.
* The name of this individual was deciphered by Chabas;
Lauth, and after him Krall, were inclined to read it as Ket,
Ketesh, in order to identify it with the Ketes of Diodorus
Siculus. A form of the name Arisai in the Bible may be its
original, or that of Arish which is found in Phoenician,
especially Punic, inscriptions.
This was in truth the revenge of the feudal system upon Pharaoh. The
barons, kept in check by Ahmosis and Amenôthes I., restricted by the
successors of these sovereigns to the position of simple officers of the
king, profited by the general laxity to recover as many as possible of
their ancient privileges. For half a century and more, fortune had given
them as masters only aged princes, not capable of maintaining continuous
vigilance and firmness. The invasions of the peoples of the sea, the
rivalry of the claimants to the throne, and the intrigues of ministers
had, one after the other, served to break the bonds which fettered them,
and in one generation they were able to regain that liberty of action
of which they had been deprived for centuries. To this state of
things Egypt had been drifting from the earliest times. Unity could be
maintained only by a continuous effort, and once this became relaxed,
the ties which bound the whole country together were soon broken. There
was another danger threatening the country beside that arising from
the weakening of the hands of the sovereign, and the turbulence of the
barons. For some three centuries the Theban Pharaohs were accustomed to
bring into the country after each victorious campaign many thousands of
captives. The number of foreigners around them had, therefore, increased
in a striking manner. The majority of these strangers either died
without issue, or their posterity became assimilated to the indigenous
inhabitants. In many places, however, they had accumulated in such
proportions that they were able to retain among themselves the
remembrance of their origin, their religion, and their customs, and with
these the natural desire to leave the country of their exile for their
former fatherland. As long as a strict watch was kept over them they
remained peaceful subjects, but as soon as this vigilance was relaxed
rebellion was likely to break out, especially amongst those who worked
in the quarries. Traditions of the Greek period contain certain romantic
episodes in the history of these captives. Some Babylonian prisoners
brought back by Sesostris, these traditions tell us, unable to endure
any longer the fatiguing work to which they were condemned, broke out
into open revolt.
[Illustration: 268.jpg AMENMESIS]
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a picture in Rosellini.
They made themselves masters of a position almost opposite Memphis, and
commanding the river, and held their ground there with such obstinacy
that it was found necessary to give up to them the province which they
occupied: they built here a town, which they afterwards called Babylon.
A similar legend attributes the building of the neighbouring village of
Troîû to captives from Troy.*
The scattered barbarian tribes of the Delta, whether Hebrews or the
remnant of the ïïyksôs, had endured there a miserable lot ever since the
accession of the Ramessides. The rebuilding of the cities which had
been destroyed there during the wars with the Hyksôs had restricted the
extent of territory on which they could pasture their herds. Ramses II.
treated them as slaves of the treasury,** and the Hebrews were not long
under his rule before they began to look back with regret on the time of
the monarchs who knew Joseph. **
* The name Babylon comes probably from _Banbonu, Barbonu,
Babonu_--a term which, under the form _Hât-Banbonu,_ served
to designate a quarter of Heliopolis, or rather a suburban
village of that city. Troja was, as we have seen, the
ancient city of Troîû, now Tûrah, celebrated for its
quarries of fine limestone. The narratives collected by the
historians whom Diodorus consulted were products of the
Saite period, and intended to explain to Greeks the
existence on Egyptian territory of names recalling those of
Babylon in Chaldæa and of Homeric Troy.
** A very ancient tradition identifies Ramses II. with the
Pharaoh who knew not Joseph (_Exod._ i. 8). Recent
excavations showing that the great works in the east of the
Delta began under this king, or under Seti II. at the
earliest, confirm in a general way the accuracy of the
traditional view: I have, therefore, accepted it in part,
and placed the Exodus after the death of Ramses II. Other
authorities place it further back, and Lieblein in 1863 was
inclined to put it under Amenôthes III.
The Egyptians set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their
burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses.
But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.
And they were grieved because of the children of Israel. * A secondary
version of the same narrative gives a more detailed account of their
condition: They made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar
and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field. ** The
unfortunate slaves awaited only an opportunity to escape from the
cruelty of their persecutors.
* _Exod_. i. 11, 12. Excavations made by Naville have
brought to light near Tel el-Maskhutah the ruins of one of
the towns which the Hebrews of the Alexandrine period
identified with the cities constructed by their ancestors in
Egypt: the town excavated by Naville is Pitûmû, and
consequently the Pithom of the Biblical account, and at the
same time also the Succoth of Exod. xii. 37, xiii. 20, the
first station of the Bnê-Israel after leaving Ramses.
** _Exod,_ i. 13, 14.
The national traditions of the Hebrews inform us that the king, in
displeasure at seeing them increase so mightily notwithstanding his
repression, commanded the midwives to strangle henceforward their male
children at their birth. A woman of the house of Levi, after having
concealed her infant for three months, put him in an ark of bulrushes
and consigned him to the Nile, at a place where the daughter of Pharaoh
was accustomed to bathe. The princess on perceiving the child had
compassion on him, adopted him, called him Moses--saved from the
waters--and had him instructed in all the knowledge of the Egyptians.
Moses had already attained forty years of age, when he one day
encountered an Egyptian smiting a Hebrew, and slew him in his anger,
shortly afterwards fleeing into the land of Midian. Here he found an
asylum, and Jethro the priest gave him one of his daughters in marriage.
After forty years of exile, God, appearing to him in a burning bush,
sent him to deliver His people. The old Pharaoh was dead, but Moses and
his brother Aaron betook themselves to the court of the new Pharaoh, and
demanded from him permission for the Hebrews to sacrifice in the desert
of Arabia. They obtained it, as we know, only after the infliction
of the ten plagues, and after the firstborn of the Egyptians had been
stricken.* The emigrants started from Ramses; as they were pursued by a
body of troops, the Sea parted its waters to give them passage over the
dry ground, and closing up afterwards on the Egyptian hosts, overwhelmed
them to a man. Thereupon Moses and the children of Israel sang this song
unto Jahveh, saying: Jahveh is my strength and song--and He has become
my salvation.--This is my God, and I will praise Him,--my fathers God,
and I will exalt Him.--The Lord is a man of war,--and Jahveh is His
name.--Pharaohs chariots and his hosts hath He cast into the sea,
--and his chosen captains are sunk in the sea of weeds.--The deeps cover
them--they went down into the depths like a stone.... The enemy said: I
will pursue, I will overtake--I will divide the spoil--my lust shall
be satiated upon them--I will draw my sword--my hand shall destroy
them.--Thou didst blow with Thy wind--the sea covered them--they sank
as lead in the mighty waters. **
* _Exod._ ii.-xiii. I have limited myself here to a summary
of the Biblical narrative, without entering into a criticism
of the text, which I leave to others.
** _Exod._ xv. 1-10 (R.V.)
From this narrative we see that the Hebrews, or at least those of them
who dwelt in the Delta, made their escape from their oppressors, and
took refuge in the solitudes of Arabia. According to the opinion of
accredited historians, this Exodus took place in the reign of Mînephtah,
and the evidence of the triumphal inscription, lately discovered by
Prof. Petrie, seems to confirm this view, in relating that the people of
Israîlû were destroyed, and had no longer a seed. The context indicates
pretty clearly that these ill-treated Israîlû were then somewhere south
of Syria, possibly in the neighbourhood of Ascalon and Glezer. If it is
the Biblical Israelites who are here mentioned for the first time on an
Egyptian monument, one might suppose that they had just quitted the land
of slavery to begin their wanderings through the desert. Although the
peoples of the sea and the Libyans did not succeed in reaching their
settlements in the land of Goshen, the Israelites must have profited
both by the disorder into which the Egyptians were thrown by the
invaders, and by the consequent withdrawal to Memphis of the troops
previously stationed on the east of the Delta, to break away from their
servitude and cross the frontier. If, on the other hand, the Israîlû of
Mînephtah are regarded as a tribe still dwelling among the mountains of
Canaan, while the greater part of the race had emigrated to the banks
of the Nile, there is no need to seek long after Mînephtah for a date
suiting the circumstances of the Exodus. The years following the reign
of Seti II. offer favourable conditions for such a dangerous enterprise:
the break-up of the monarchy, the discords of the barons, the revolts
among the captives, and the supremacy of a Semite over the other chiefs,
must have minimised the risk. We can readily understand how, in the
midst of national disorders, a tribe of foreigners weary of its lot
might escape from its settlements and betake itself towards Asia without
meeting with strenous opposition from the Pharaoh, who would naturally
be too much preoccupied with his own pressing necessities to trouble
himself much over the escape of a band of serfs.
Having crossed the Red Sea, the Israelites pursued their course to
the north-east on the usual road leading into Syria, and then turning
towards the south, at length arrived at Sinai. It was a moment when
the nations of Asia were stirring. To proceed straight to Canaan by
the beaten track would have been to run the risk of encountering their
moving hordes, or of jostling against the Egyptian troops, who still
garrisoned the strongholds of the She-phelah. The fugitives had,
therefore, to shun the great military roads if they were to avoid coming
into murderous conflict with the barbarians, or running into the teeth
of Pharaohs pursuing army. The desert offered an appropriate asylum to
people of nomadic inclinations like themselves; they betook themselves
to it as if by instinct, and spent there a wandering life for several
generations.*
* This explanation of the wanderings of the Israelites has
been doubted by most historians: it has a cogency, once we
admit the reality of the sojourn in Egypt and the Exodus.
The traditions collected in their sacred books described at length their
marches and their halting-places, the great sufferings they endured, and
the striking miracles which God performed on their behalf.*
* The itinerary of the Hebrew people through the desert
contains a very small number of names which were not
actually in use. They represent possibly either the stations
at which the caravans of the merchants put up, or the
localities where the Bedawin and their herds were accustomed
to sojourn. The majority of them cannot be identified, but
enough can still be made out to give us a general idea of
the march of the emigrants.
Moses conducted them through all these experiences, continually troubled
by their murmurings and seditions, but always ready to help them out of
the difficulties into which they were led, on every occasion, by their
want of faith. He taught them, under Gods direction, how to correct the
bitterness of brackish waters by applying to them the wood of a certain
tree.* When they began to look back with regret to the flesh-pots
of Egypt and the abundance of food there, another signal miracle was
performed for them. At even the quails came up and covered the camp,
and in the morning the dew lay round about the host; and when the dew
that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay
a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when
the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, What is it?
for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, It is the
bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.**
* _Exod._ xv. 23-25. The station Marah, the bitter waters,
is identified by modern tradition with Ain Howarah. There is
a similar way of rendering waters potable still in use among
the Bedawin of these regions.
** _Exod._ xvi. 13-15.
And the house of Israel called the name thereof manna: and it was
like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made
with honey. * And the children of Israel did eat the manna forty years,
until they came to a land inhabited; they did eat the manna until they
came unto the borders of the land of Canaan. ** Further on, at Eephidim,
the water failed: Moses struck the rocks at Horeb, and a spring gushed
out.*** The Amalekites, in the meantime, began to oppose their
passage; and one might naturally doubt the power of a rabble of slaves,
unaccustomed to war, to break through such an obstacle. Joshua was made
their general, and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the
hill: and it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel
prevailed, and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed. But
Moses hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and
he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the
one side, and the other on the other side, and his hands were steady
until the going down of the sun. And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his
people with the edge of the sword. ****
* _Exod._ xvi. 31. Prom early times the manna of the Hebrews
had been identified with the mann-es-sama, the gift of
heaven, of the Arabs, which exudes in small quantities from
the leaves of the tamarisk after being pricked by insects:
the question, however, is still under discussion whether
another species of vegetable manna may not be meant.
** _Exod._ xvi. 35.
*** _Exod._ xvii. 1-7. There is a general agreement as to
the identification of Rephidim with the Wady Peîrân, the
village of Pharan of the Græco-Roman geographers.
**** Exod. xvii. 8-13.
Three months after the departure of the Israelites from Egypt they
encamped at the foot of Sinai, and the Lord called unto Moses out of
the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and
tell the children of Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians,
and how I bare you on eagles wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now
therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then
ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me from among all peoples: for all
the earth is Mine: and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an
holy nation. The people answered together and said, All that the Lord
hath spoken we will do. And the Lord said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto
thee in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee,
and may also believe thee for ever. On the third day, when it was
morning, there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the
mount, and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud; and all the people
that were in the camp trembled. And Moses brought forth the people
out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the nether part of the
mountain. And Mount Sinai was altogether on smoke, because the Lord
descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke
of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of
the trumpet waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him
by a voice. *
* _Exod._ xix. 3-6, 9, 16-19.
Then followed the giving of the supreme law, the conditions of the
covenant which the Lord Himself deigned to promulgate directly to His
people. It was engraved on two tables of stone, and contained, in ten
concise statements, the commandments which the Creator of the Universe
imposed upon the people of His choice.
I. I am Jahveh, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt
have none other gods before Me.
II. Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, etc.
III. Thou shalt not take the name of Jahveh thy God in vain.
IV. Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy.
V. Honour thy father and thy mother.
VI. Thou shalt do no murder.
VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
X. Thou shalt not covet. *
* We have two forms of the Decalogue--one in _Exod._ xx. 2-
17, and the other in _Deut._ v. 6-18.
And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the
voice of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw
it, they trembled, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, Speak
thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest
we die.* God gave His commandments to Moses in instalments as the
circumstances required them: on one occasion the rites of sacrifice,
the details of the sacerdotal vestments, the mode of consecrating the
priests, the composition of the oil and the incense for the altar; later
on, the observance of the three annual festivals, and the orders as to
absolute rest on the seventh day, as to the distinctions between clean
and unclean animals, as to drink, as to the purification of women, and
lawful and unlawful marriages.**
* _Exod._ xx. 18, 19.
** This legislation and the history of the circumstances on
which it was promulgated are contained in four of the books
of the Pentateuch, viz. _Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and
Deuteronomy_. Any one of the numerous text-books published
in Germany will be found to contain an analysis of these
books, and the prevalent opinions as to the date of the
documents which it [the Hexateuch] contains. I confine
myself here and afterwards only to such results as may fitly
be used in a general history.
The people waited from week to week until Jahveh had completed the
revelation of His commands, and in their impatience broke the new law
more than once. On one occasion, when Moses delayed to come out of the
mount, they believed themselves abandoned by heaven, and obliged Aaron,
the high priest, to make for them a golden calf, before which they
offered burnt offerings. The sojourn of the people at the foot of Sinai
lasted eleven months. At the end of this period they set out once more
on their slow marches to the Promised Land, guided during the day by
a cloud, and during the night by a pillar of fire, which moved before
them. This is a general summary of what we find in the sacred writings.
The Israelites, when they set out from Egypt, were not yet a nation.
They were but a confused horde, flying with their herds from their
pursuers; with no resources, badly armed, and unfit to sustain the
attack of regular troops. After leaving Sinai, they wandered for some
time among the solitudes of Arabia Petraea in search of some uninhabited
country where they could fix their tents, and at length settled on
the borders of Idumaea, in the mountainous region surrounding
Kadesh-Barnea.* Kadesh had from ancient times a reputation for sanctity
among the Bedawin of the neighbourhood: it rejoiced in the possession
of a wonderful well--the Well of Judgment--to which visits were made
for the purpose of worship, and for obtaining the judgment of God. The
country is a poor one, arid and burnt up, but it contains wells which
never fail, and wadys suitable for the culture of wheat and for the
rearing of cattle. The tribe which became possessed of a region in
which there was a perennial supply of water was fortunate indeed, and
a fragment of the psalmody of Israel at the time of their sojourn here
still echoes in a measure the transports of joy which the people gave
way to at the discovery of a new spring: Spring up, O well; sing ye
unto it: the well which the princes digged, which the nobles of the
people delved with the sceptre and with their staves. **
* The site of Kadesh-Barnea appears to have been fixed with
certainty at Ain-Qadis by C. Trumbull.
** _Numb._ xxi. 17, 18. The context makes it certain that
this song was sung at Beer, beyond the Arnon, in the land of
Moab. It has long been recognised that it had a special
reference, and that it refers to an incident in the
wanderings of the people through the desert.
The wanderers took possession of this region after some successful
brushes with the enemy, and settled there, without being further
troubled by their neighbours or by their former masters. The Egyptians,
indeed, absorbed in their civil discords, or in wars with foreign
nations, soon forgot their escaped slaves, and never troubled themselves
for centuries over what had become of the poor wretches, until in the
reign of the Ptolemies, when they had learned from the Bible something
of the people of God, they began to seek in their own annals for traces
of their sojourn in Egypt and of their departure from the country. A
new version of the Exodus was the result, in which Hebrew tradition was
clumsily blended with the materials of a semi-historical romance, of
which Amenôthes III. was the hero. His minister and namesake, Amenôthes,
son of Hâpû, left ineffaceable impressions on the minds of the
inhabitants of Thebes: he not only erected the colossal figures in the
Amenophium, but he constructed the chapel at Deîr el-Medineh, which was
afterwards restored in Ptolemaic times, and where he continued to be
worshipped as long as the Egyptian religion lasted. Profound knowledge
of the mysteries of magic were attributed to him, as in later times to
Prince Khâmoîsît, son of Ramses II. On this subject he wrote certain
works which maintained their reputation for more than a thousand years
after his death,* and all that was known about him marked him out for
the important part he came to play in those romantic stories so popular
among the Egyptians.
* One of these books, which is mentioned in several
religious texts, is preserved in the _Louvre Papyrus_.
The Pharaoh in whose good graces he lived had a desire, we are informed,
to behold the gods, after the example of his ancestor Horus. The son of
Hâpû, or Pa-Apis, informed him that he could not succeed in his design
until he had expelled from the country all the lepers and unclean
persons who contaminated it. Acting on this information, he brought
together all those who suffered from physical defects, and confined
them, to the number of eighty thousand, in the quarries of Tûrah. There
were priests among them, and the gods became wrathful at the treatment
to which their servants were exposed; the soothsayer, therefore, fearing
the divine anger, predicted that certain people would shortly arise who,
forming an alliance with the Unclean, would, together with them, hold
sway in Egypt for thirteen years. He then committed suicide, but the
king nevertheless had compassion on the outcasts, and granted to them,
for their exclusive use, the town of Avaris, which had been deserted
since the time of Ahmosis. The outcasts formed themselves into a nation
under the rule of a Heliopolitan priest called Osarsyph, or Moses,
who gave them laws, mobilised them, and joined his forces with the
descendants of the Shepherds at Jerusalem. The Pharaoh Amenôphis, taken
by surprise at this revolt, and remembering the words of his minister
Amenôthes, took flight into Ethiopia. The shepherds, in league with the
Unclean, burned the towns, sacked the temples, and broke in pieces the
statues of the gods: they forced the Egyptian priests to slaughter even
their sacred animals, to cut them up and cook them for their foes, who
ate them derisively in their accustomed feasts. Amenôphis returned from
Ethiopia, together with his son Ramses, at the end of thirteen years,
defeated the enemy, driving them back into Syria, where the remainder of
them became later on the Jewish nation.*
* A list of the Pharaohs after Aï, as far as it is possible
to make them out, is here given:
[Illustration: 281.jpg Table]
This is but a romance, in which a very little history is mingled with a
great deal of fable: the scribes as well as the people were acquainted
with the fact that Egypt had been in danger of dissolution at the time
when the Hebrews left the banks of the Nile, but they were ignorant
of the details, of the precise date and of the name of the reigning
Pharaoh. A certain similarity in sound suggested to them the idea
of assimilating the prince whom the Chroniclers called Menepthes or
Amenepthes with Amen-ôthes, i.e. Amenophis III.; and they gave to the
Pharaoh of the XIXth dynasty the minister who had served under a king of
the XVIIIth: they metamorphosed at the same time the Hebrews into lepers
allied with the Shepherds. From this strange combination there resulted
a narrative which at once fell in with the tastes of the lovers of the
marvellous, and was a sufficient substitute for the truth which had
long since been forgotten. As in the case of the Egyptians of the Greek
period, we can see only through a fog what took place after the deaths
of Mînephtah and Seti II. We know only for certain that the chiefs of
the nomes were in perpetual strife with each other, and that a foreign
power was dominant in the country as in the time of Apôphis. The days of
the empire would have Harmhabî himself belonged to the XVIIIth dynasty,
for he modelled the form of his cartouches on those of the Ahmesside
Pharaohs: the XIXth dynasty began only, in all probability, with Ramses
I., but the course of the history has compelled me to separate Harmhabî
from his predecessors. Not knowing the length of the reigns, we cannot
determine the total duration of the dynasty: we shall not, however, be
far wrong in assigning to it a length of 130 years or thereabouts, i.e.
from 1350 to somewhere near 1220 B.C. been numbered if a deliverer had
not promptly made his appearance. The direct line of Ramses II. was
extinct, but his innumerable sons by innumerable concubines had left a
posterity out of which some at least might have the requisite ability
and zeal, if not to save the empire, at least to lengthen its duration,
and once more give to Thebes days of glorious prosperity. Egypt had set
out some five centuries before this for the conquest of the world, and
fortune had at first smiled upon her enterprise. Thûtmosis I., Thûtmosis
III., and the several Pharaohs bearing the name of Amenôthes had marched
with their armies from the upper waters of the Nile to the banks of the
Euphrates, and no power had been able to withstand them. New nations,
however, soon rose up to oppose her, and the Hittites in Asia and the
Libyans of the Sudan together curbed her ambition. Neither the triumphs
of Ramses II. nor the victory of Mînephtah had been able to restore her
prestige, or the lands of which her rivals had robbed her beyond her
ancient frontier. Now her own territory itself was threatened, and her
own well-being was in question; she was compelled to consider, not
how to rule other tribes, great or small, but how to keep her own
possessions intact and independent: in short, her very existence was at
stake.