History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery Part 18

The Graeco-Egyptian doc.u.ments are of all kinds, consisting of letters, lists, deeds, notices, tax-a.s.sessments, receipts, accounts, and business records of every sort and kind, besides new fragments of cla.s.sical authors and the important "Sayings of Jesus," discovered at Behnesa, which have been published in a special popular form by the Egypt Exploration Fund.*

* Aoyla 'Itjffov, 1897, and New Sayings of Jesus, 1904.

These last fragments of the oldest Christian literature, which are of such great importance and interest to all Christians, cannot be described or discussed here. The other doc.u.ments are no less important to the student of ancient literature, the historian, and the sociologist. The cla.s.sical fragments include many texts of lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and doc.u.ments, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention.

They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ancestors or even the Elizabethans.

This is a boy's letter to his father, who would not take him up to town with him to see the sights: "Theon to his father Theon, greeting. It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to the city! If you won't take me with you to Alexandria, I won't write you a letter, or speak to you, or say good-bye to you; and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand or ever greet you again. That is what will happen if you won't take me. Mother said to Archelaus, 'It quite upsets him to be left behind.' It was good of you to send me presents on the 12th, the day you sailed. Send me a lyre, I implore you. If you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink: there now!'" Is not this more like the letter of a spoiled child of to-day than are the solemnly dutiful epistles of even our grandfathers and grandmothers when young? The touch about "Mother said to Archelaus, 'It quite upsets him to be left behind'" is delightfully like the modern small boy, and the final request and threat are also eminently characteristic.

Here is a letter asking somebody to redeem the writer's property from the p.a.w.nshop: "Now please redeem my property from Sarapion. It is pledged for two minas. I have paid the interest up to the month Epeiph, at the rate of a stater per mina. There is a casket of incense-wood, and another of onyx, a tunic, a white veil with a real purple border, a handkerchief, a tunic with a Laconian stripe, a garment of purple linen, two armlets, a necklace, a coverlet, a figure of Aphrodite, a cup, a big tin flask, and a wine-jar. From Onetor get the two bracelets. They have been pledged since the month Tybi of last year for eight... at the rate of a stater per mina. If the cash is insufficient owing to the carelessness of Theagenis, if, I say, it is insufficient, sell the bracelets and make up the money." Here is an affectionate letter of invitation: "Greeting, my dear Serenia, from Petosiris. Be sure, dear, to come up on the 20th for the birthday festival of the G.o.d, and let me know whether you are coming by boat or by donkey, that we may send for you accordingly. Take care not to forget."

Here is an advertis.e.m.e.nt of a gymnastic display:

"The a.s.sault-at-arms by the youths will take place to-morrow, the 24th.

Tradition, no less than the distinguished character of the festival, requires that they should do their utmost in the gymnastic display. Two performances." Signed by Dioskourides, magistrate of Oxyrrhynchus.

Here is a report from a public physician to a magistrate: "To Claudia.n.u.s, the mayor, from Dionysos, public physician. I was to-day instructed by you, through Herakleides your a.s.sistant, to inspect the body of a man who had been found hanged, named Hierax, and to report to you my opinion of it. I therefore inspected the body in the presence of the aforesaid Herakleides at the house of Epagathus in the Broadway ward, and found it hanged by a noose, which fact I accordingly report."

Dated in the twelfth year of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 173).

The above translations are taken, slightly modified, from those in The Oxyrrhynchus Papyri, vol. i. The next specimen, a quaint letter, is translated from the text in Mr. Grenfell's Greek Papyri (Oxford, 1896), p. 69: "To Noumen, police captain and mayor, from Pokas son of Onos, unpaid policeman. I have been maltreated by Peadius the priest of the temple of Sebek in Crocodilopolis. On the first epagomenal day of the eleventh year, after having abused me about... in the aforesaid temple, the person complained against sprang upon me and in the presence of witnesses struck me many blows with a stick which he had. And as part of my body was not covered, he tore my shirt, and this fact I called upon the bystanders to bear witness to. Wherefore I request that if it seems proper you will write to Klearchos the headman to send him to you, in order that, if what I have written is true, I may obtain justice at your hands."

A will of Hadrian's reign, taken from the Oxyrrhynchus Papyri (i, p.

173), may also be of interest: "This is the last will and testament, made in the street (i.e. at a street notary's stand), of Pekysis, son of Hermes and Didyme, an inhabitant of Oxyrrhynchus, being sane and in his right mind. So long as I live, I am to have powers over my property, to alter my will as I please. But if I die with this will unchanged, I devise my daughter Ammonous whose mother is Ptolema, if she survive me, but if not then her children, heir to my shares in the common house, court, and rooms situate in the Cretan ward. All the furniture, movables, and household stock and other property whatever that I shall leave, I bequeath to the mother of my children and my wife Ptolema, the freedwoman of Demetrius, son of Hermippus, with the condition that she shall have for her lifetime the right of using, dwelling in, and building in the said house, court, and rooms. If Ammonous should die without children and intestate, the share of the fixtures shall belong to her half-brother on the mother's side, Anatas, if he survive, but if not, to... No one shall violate the terms of this my will under pain of paying to my daughter and heir Ammonous a fine of 1,000 drachmae and to the treasury an equal sum." Here follow the signatures of testator and witnesses, who are described, as in a pa.s.sport, one of them as follows: "I, Dionysios, son of Dionysios of the same city, witness the will of Pekysis. I am forty-six years of age, have a curl over my right temple, and this is my seal of Dionysoplaton."

During the Roman period, which we have now reached in our survey, the temple building of the Ptolemies was carried on with like energy. One of the best-known temples of the Roman period is that at Philse, which is known as the "Kiosk," or "Pharaoh's Bed." Owing to the great picturesqueness of its situation, this small temple, which was built in the reign of Trajan, has been a favourite subject for the painters of the last fifty years, and next to the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and Karnak, it is probably the most widely known of all Egyptian buildings. Recently it has come very much to the front for an additional reason. Like all the other temples of Philse, it had been archaeologically surveyed and cleared by Col. H. Gr. Lyons and Dr. Borchardt, but further work of a far-reaching character was rendered necessary by the building of the great Aswan dam, below the island of Philse, one of the results of which has been the partial submergence of the island and its temples, including the picturesque Kiosk. The following account, taken from the new edition (1906) of Murray's _Guide to Egypt and the Sudan_, will suffice better than any other description to explain what the dam is, how it has affected Philse, and what work has been done to obviate the possibility of serious damage to the Kiosk and other buildings.

"In 1898 the Egyptian government signed a contract with Messrs. John Aird & Co. for the construction of the great reservoir and dam at Sh.e.l.lal, which serves for the storage of water at the time of the flood Nile. The river is 'held up' here sixty-five feet above its old normal level. A great masonry d.y.k.e, 150 feet high in places, has been carried across the Bab el-Kebir of the First Cataract, and a ca.n.a.l and four locks, two hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, allow for the pa.s.sage of traffic up and down the river.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 447.jpg The Great Dam Of Aswan]

Showing Water Rushing Through The Sluices

The dam is 2,185 yards long and over ninety feet thick at the base; in places it rises one hundred feet above the bed of the river. It is built of the local red granite, and at each end the granite dam is built into the granite hillside. Seven hundred and eight thousand cubic yards of masonry were used. The sluices are 180 in number, and are arranged at four different levels. The sight of the great volume of water pouring through them is a very fine one. The Nile begins to rise in July, and at the end of November it is necessary to begin closing the sluice-gates to hold up the water. By the end of February the reservoir is usually filled and Philae partially submerged, so that boats can sail in and out of the colonnades and Pharaoh's Bed. By the beginning of July the water has been distributed, and it then falls to its normal level.

"It is of course regrettable that the engineers were unable to find another site for the dam, as it seemed inevitable that some damage would result to the temples of Philae from their partial submergence. Korosko was proposed as a site, but was rejected for cogent reasons, and apparently Sh.e.l.lal was the only possible place. Further, no serious person, who places the greatest good of the greatest number above considerations of the picturesque and the 'interesting,' will deny that if it is necessary to sacrifice Philae to the good of the people of Egypt, Philae must go. 'Let the dead bury their dead.' The concern of the rulers of Egypt must be with the living people of Egypt rather than with the dead bones of the past; and they would not be doing their duty did they for a moment allow artistic and archaeological considerations to outweigh in their minds the practical necessities of the country. This does not in the least imply that they do not owe a lesser duty to the monuments of Egypt, which are among the most precious relics of the past history of mankind. They do owe this lesser duty, and with regard to Philae it has been conscientiously fulfilled. The whole temple, in order that its stability may be preserved under the stress of submersion, has been braced up and underpinned, under the superintendence of Mr. Ball, of the Survey Department, who has most efficiently carried out this important work, at a cost of 22,000.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 449.jpg THE KIOSK AT PHILAE IN PROCESS OF UNDERPINNING AND RESTORATION, JANUARY, 1902.]

Steel girders have been fixed across the island from quay to quay, and these have been surrounded by cement masonry, made water-tight by forcing in cement grout. Pharaoh's Bed and the colonnade have been firmly underpinned in cement masonry, and there is little doubt that the actual stability of Philae is now more certain than that of any other temple in Egypt. The only possible damage that can accrue to it is the partial discolouration of the lower courses of the stonework of Pharaoh's Bed, etc., which already bear a distinct high-water mark. Some surface disintegration from the formation of salt crystals is perhaps inevitable here, but the effects of this can always be neutralized by careful washing, which it should be an important charge of the Antiquities Department to regularly carry out."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 450.jpg THE ANCIENT QUAY OP PHILae, NOVEMBER, 1904.]

This is entirely covered when the reservoir is full, and the palm-trees are farther submerged.

The photographs accompanying the present chapter show the dam, the Kiosk in process of conservation and underpinning (1902), and the sh.o.r.es of the island as they now appear in the month of November, with the water nearly up to the level of the quays. A view is also given of the island of Konosso, with its inscriptions, as it is now. The island is simply a huge granite boulder of the kind characteristic of the neighbourhood of Sh.e.l.lal (Phila?) and Aswan.

On the island of Elephantine, opposite Aswan, an interesting discovery has lately been made by Mr. Howard Carter. This is a remarkable well, which was supposed by the ancients to lie immediately on the tropic. It formed the basis of Eratosthenes' calculations of the measurement of the earth. Important finds of doc.u.ments written in Aramaic have also been made here; they show that there was on the island in Ptolemaic times a regular colony of Syrian merchants.

South of Aswan and Philse begins Nubia. The Nubian language, which is quite different from Arabic, is spoken by everybody on the island of Elephantine, and its various dialects are used as far south as Dongola, where Arabic again is generally spoken till we reach the land of the negroes, south of Khartum. In Ptolemaic and Roman days the Nubians were a powerful people, and the whole of Nubia and the modern North Sudan formed an independent kingdom, ruled by queens who bore the t.i.tle or name of Candace. It was the eunuch of a Candace who was converted to Christianity as he was returning from a mission to Jerusalem to salute Jehovah. "Go and join thyself unto his chariot" was the command to Philip, and when the Ethiopian had heard the gospel from his lips he went on his way rejoicing. The capital of this Candace was at Meroe, the modern Bagarawiya, near Shendi. Here, and at Naga not far off, are the remains of the temples of the Can-daces, great buildings of semi-barbaric Egyptian style. For the civilization of the Nubians, such as it was, was of Egyptian origin. Ever since Egyptian rule had been extended southwards to Jebel Barkal, beyond Dongola, in the time of Amenhetep II, Egyptian culture had influenced the Nubians. Amenhetep III built a temple to Amen at Napata, the capital of Nubia, which lay under the shadow of Mount Barkal; Akhunaten erected a sanctuary of the Sun-Disk there; and Ramses II also built there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 452.jpg THE ROOK OF KONOSSO IN JANUARY, 1902, BEFORE THE BUILDING OF THE DAM AND FORMATION OF THE RESERVOIR.]

The place in fact was a sort of appanage of the priests of Amen at Thebes, and when the last priest-king evacuated Thebes, leaving it to the Bubast.i.tes of the XXIId Dynasty, it was to distant Napata that he retired. Here a priestly dynasty continued to reign until, two centuries later, the troubles and misfortunes of Egypt seemed to afford an opportunity for the rea.s.sertion of the exiled Theban power. Piankhi Mera-men returned to Egypt in triumph as its rightful sovereign, but his successors, Shabak, Shabatak, and Tirha-kah, had to contend constantly with the a.s.syrians. Finally ITrdamaneh, Tirhakah's successor, returned to Nubia, leaving Egypt, in the decadence of the a.s.syrian might, free to lead a quiet existence under Psametik I and the succeeding monarchs of the XXVIth Dynasty. When Cambyses conquered Egypt he aspired to conquer Nubia also, but his army was routed and destroyed by the Napatan king, who tells us in an inscription how he defeated "the man Kambasauden,"

who had attacked him. At Napata the Nubian monarchs, one of the greatest of whom in Ptolemaic times was Ergam-enes, a contemporary of Ptolemy Philopator, continued to reign. But the first Roman governor of Egypt, aelius Gallus, destroyed Napata, and the Nubians removed their capital to Meroe, where the Candaces reigned.

The monuments of this Nubian kingdom, the temples of Jebel Barkal, the pyramids of Nure close by, the pyramids of Bagarawiya, the temples of Wadi Ben Naga, Mesawwarat en-Naga, and Mesawwarat es-Sufra ("Mesawwarat"

proper), were originally investigated by Cailliaud and afterwards by Lepsius. During the last few years they and the pyramids excavated by Dr. E. A. Wallis-Budge, of the British Museum, for the Sudan government, have been again explored. As the results of his work are not yet fully published, it is possible at present only to quote the following description from Cook's _Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan_ (by Dr.

Budge), p. 6, of work on the pyramids of Jebel Barkal: "the writer excavated the shafts of one of the pyramids here in 1897, and at the depth of about twenty-five cubits found a group of three chambers, in one of which were a number of bones of the sheep which was sacrificed there about two thousand years ago, and also portions of a broken amphora which had held Rho-dian wine. A second shaft, which led to the mummy-chamber, was partly emptied, but at a further depth of twenty cubits water was found. The high-water mark of the reservoir when full is ------ and, as there were no visible means for pumping it out, the mummy-chamber could not be entered." With regard to the Bagarawiya pyramids, Dr. Budge writes, on p. 700 of the same work, a propos of the story of the Italian Ferlini that he found Roman jewelry in one of these pyramids: "In 1903 the writer excavated a number of the pyramids of Meroe for the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir F. R. Wingate, and he is convinced that the statements made by Ferlini are the result of misapprehension on his part. The pyramids are solid throughout, and the bodies are buried under them. When the details are complete the proofs for this will be published." Dr. Budge has also written upon the subject of the orientation of the Jebel Barkal and Nure pyramids.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 454.jpg THE ISLE OF KONOSSO, WITH ITS INSCRIPTIONS]

It is very curious to find the pyramids reappearing in Egyptian tomb-architecture in the very latest period of Egyptian history. We find them when Egyptian civilization was just entering upon its vigorous manhood, then they gradually disappear, only to revive in its decadent and exiled old age. The Ethiopian pyramids are all of much more elongated form than the old Egyptian ones. It is possible that they may be a survival of the archaistic movement of the XXVIth Dynasty, to which we have already referred.

These are not the latest Egyptian monuments in the Sudan, nor are the temples of Naga and Mesawwarat the most ancient, though they belong to the Roman period and are decidedly barbarian as to their style and, especially, as to their decoration. The southernmost as well as latest relic of Egypt in the Sudan is the Christian church of Soba, on the Blue Mie, a few miles above Khartum. In it was found a stone ram, an emblem of Amen-Ra, which had formerly stood in the temple of Naga and had been brought to Soba perhaps under the impression that it was the Christian Lamb. It was removed to the garden of the governor-general's palace at Khartum, where it now stands.

The church at Soba is a relic of the Christian kingdom of Alua, which succeeded the realm of the Candaces. One of its chief seats was at Dongola, and all Nubia is covered with the ruins of its churches. It was, of course, an offshoot of the Christianity of Egypt, but a late one, since Isis was still worshipped at Philse in the sixth century, long after the Edict of Theodosius had officially abolished paganism throughout the Roman world, and the Nubians were at first zealous votaries of the G.o.ddess of Philo. So also when Egypt fell beneath the sway of the Moslem in the seventh century, Nubia remained an independent Christian state, and continued so down to the twelfth century, when the soldiers of Islam conquered the country.

Of late pagan and early Christian Egypt very much that is new has been discovered during the last few years. The period of the Lower Empire has yielded much to the explorers of Oxyrrhynchus, and many papyri of interest belonging to this period have been published by Mr. Kenyon in his _Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the British Museum_, especially the letters of Flavius Abinaeus, a military officer of the fourth century. The papyri of this period are full of the high-flown t.i.tles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes.

"Glorious Dukes of the Thebad," "most magnificent counts and lieutenants," "all-praiseworthy secretaries," and the like strut across the pages of the letters and doc.u.ments which begin "In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the G.o.d and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the eternal Augustus and Auto-krator, month x, year x of the In diction." It is an extraordinary period, this of the sixth and seventh centuries, which we have now entered, with its bizarre combination of the official t.i.tulary of the divine and eternal Caesars Imperatores Augusti with the initial invocation of Christ and the Trinity. It is the transition from the ancient to the modern world, and as such has an interest all its own.

In Egypt the struggle between the adherents of Chalcedon, the "Melkites"

or Imperialists of the orthodox Greek rite, and the Eutychians or Mono-physites, the followers of the patriarch Dioskoros, who rejected Chalcedon, was going on with unabated fury, and was hardly stopped even by the invasion of the pagan Persians. The last effort of the party of Constantinople to stamp out the Monophysite heresy was made when Cyril was patriarch and governor of Egypt. According to an ingenious theory put forward by Mr. Butler, in his _Arab Conquest of Egypt_, it is Cyril the patriarch who was the mysterious Mukaukas, the [Greek word], or "Great and Magnificent One," who played so doubtful a part in the epoch-making events of the Arab conquest by Amr in A.D. 639-41. Usually this Mukaukas has been regarded as a "n.o.ble Copt," and the Copts have generally been credited with having a.s.sisted the Islamites against the power of Constantinople. This was a very natural and probable conclusion, but Mr. Butler will have it that the Copts resisted the Arabs valiantly, and that the treacherous Mukaukas was none other than the Constantinopolitan patriarch himself.

In the papyri it is interesting to note the gradual increase of Arab names after the conquest, more especially in those of the Archduke Rainer 's collection from the Fayym, which was so near the new capital city, Fustat. In Upper Egypt the change was not noticeable for a long time, and in the great collection of Coptic _ostraka_ (inscriptions on slips of limestone and sherds of pottery, used as a subst.i.tute for paper or parchment), found in the ruins of the Coptic monastery established, on the temple site of Der el-Bahari, we find no Arab names. These doc.u.ments, part of which have been published by Mr. W. E. Crum for the Egypt Exploration Fund, while another part will shortly be issued for the trustees of the British Museum by Mr. Hall, date to the seventh and eighth centuries. Their contents resemble those of the earlier papyri from Oxyrrhynchus, though they are not of so varied a nature and are generally written by persons of less intelligence, i.e. the monks and peasants of the monasteries and villages of Tjeme, or Western Thebes.

During the late excavation of the XIth Dynasty temple of Der el-Bahari, more of these _ostraka_ were found, which will be published for the Egypt Exploration Fund by Messrs. Naville and Hall. Of actual buildings of the Coptic period the most important excavations have been those of the French School of Cairo at Bawit, north of Asyt. This work, which was carried on by M. Jean Cledat, has resulted in the discovery of very important frescoes and funerary inscriptions, belonging to the monastery of a famous martyr, St. Apollo. With these new discoveries of Christian Egypt our work reaches its fitting close. The frontier which divides the ancient from the modern world has almost been crossed. We look back from the monastery of Bawit down a long vista of new discoveries until, four thousand years before, we see again the Great Heads coming to the Tomb of Den, Narmer inspecting the bodies of the dead Northerners, and, far away in Babylonia, Naram-Sin crossing the mountains of the East to conquer Elam, or leading his allies against the prince of Sinai.

THE END.