The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos Part 11

Half-a-century later a similar event happened in a.s.syria itself. Its king, a.s.sur-bani-pal, surrounded by insurgent enemies, was suddenly attacked by Te-umman of Elam. While he was keeping the festival of the G.o.ddess Istar at Arbela, a message was brought to him from the Elamite monarch that he was on his march to destroy a.s.syria and its G.o.ds. Thereupon a.s.sur-bani-pal went into the temple of the G.o.ddess, and, bowing to the ground before her, with tears implored her help. Istar listened to the prayer, and that night a seer dreamed a dream wherein she appeared and bade him announce to the king that Istar of Arbela, with quivers behind her shoulders and the bow and mace in her hand, would fight in front of him and overthrow his foes.

The prophecy was fulfilled, and before long the Elamite army was crushed, and the head of Te-umman sent in triumph to Nineveh.

In Judah and a.s.syria we are dealing with history, in the story of Sethos with a folk-tale, and it is impossible therefore not to believe that the conduct of the priest of Ptah has been modelled upon that of Hezekiah and a.s.sur-bani-pal. The basis of it is Semitic rather than Egyptian; it would have been told more appropriately of Sennacherib than of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Perhaps it had its source among the Phnicians of the Tyrian camp at Memphis, or even among the Egyptianised Jews who carried Jeremiah into Egypt. Whatever may have been its origin, it does not belong to the realm of history.

Even with the appearance of Psammetikhos upon the stage, the Egyptian history of Herodotos does not yet commence. Before it can do so, he has to finish his wanderings and his sight-seeing, to be quit of his dragomen and of the topographical chronology that he built upon their stories. Through Herakleopolis lay the entrance to the Fayyum, and the Fayyum united the folk-lore of the guides with the sober history of the Greek epoch in Egypt.

Herodotos knows that Psammetikhos was king of Sais and that his father's name had been Necho. But when he goes on to say that Necho had been slain by the Ethiopian Sabako, and that Psammetikhos himself had been driven in consequence into Syria, he takes us into the domain of fiction and not of fact. Necho had been one of twenty Egyptian satraps under Esar-haddon and a.s.sur-bani-pal, and though he had once been carried in chains to a.s.syria on a charge of treason, he had returned to his government loaded with honours. Sabako had been dead long before, and Tirhakah was vainly endeavouring to drive the a.s.syrians and their va.s.sal-satraps out of Egypt.

Still further from the truth was the legend which a.s.sociated Psammetikhos with the Fayyum. When the Egyptians had been "freed," we are told, after the reign of the priest of Ptah, there arose twelve kings who divided the country between them. They married into each other's families and swore an oath ever to remain friends. By way of leaving a monument of themselves they built the Labyrinth, with its twelve courts, each court for a king, six of them being on the north side and six on the south. But an oracle had announced that this friendly intercourse would be broken if ever one of them at their annual gathering in the temple of Ptah should pour a libation to the G.o.d from a bronze helmet. The prince who did so would become king of all Egypt. This untoward accident eventually occurred.

Psammetikhos on one occasion accidentally used his helmet in place of the proper libation-bowl, and he was thereupon chased away by his colleagues, first into the marshes and then into Syria. An oracle, however, again came to his help. It declared that he would be avenged when men of bronze came from the sea, and, taking the hint, he hired some Ionian and Karian pirates, armed with bronze, who had landed for the sake of plunder, and with their a.s.sistance became undisputed master of Egypt. With this story of the foundation of the twenty-sixth dynasty, the Egyptian folk-lore of Herodotos came fitly to an end.

The twelve kings owe their origin to the twelve courts of the Labyrinth.

They are a reminiscence of the twenty va.s.sal-kings or satraps whom the a.s.syrians appointed to govern the country, and among whom Psammetikhos and his father had been included. But even the twelve courts are not altogether correct. We learn from Strabo that there were many more than twelve-as many, in fact, as were the nomes of Egypt. This makes us distrustful of the further statement of Herodotos that the halls contained one thousand five hundred chambers above the ground, and one thousand five hundred below. The information must have come from the guides, and it is not likely that he verified it. To count three thousand chambers would have occupied at least a day.

In the time of Strabo it was known that the real builder of the Labyrinth was Maindes, that is to say, Ma(t)-n-Ra, or Amon-em-hat III. of the twelfth dynasty. The excavations of Professor Petrie at Howara in 1888 have proved the fact. He succeeded in penetrating into the central chamber of the brick pyramid which formed part of the building, and there, deep in water, he found the sarcophagus and the shattered fragments of some of the funerary vases of the dead Pharaoh. They were all that had been left by the spoilers of a long-past age, but they were sufficient to show who the Pharaoh was. He had not been buried alone. In another chamber of the pyramid was the sarcophagus of his daughter Neferu-Ptah, who must have died before the pyramid was finally closed. The labyrinth itself has been used as a quarry or burnt into lime long ago. On its floor of hard plaster lie the chippings of the stones which composed it, six feet in thickness, and covering a far larger area than that of any other Egyptian temple of which we know. There was none other which could vie with it in size.

Amon-em-hat III. seems to have left another memorial of himself further north-at least, such is the natural interpretation of Mr. de Morgan's recent discoveries at Dahshur. Though the pyramid did not repay his engineering skill with even a sc.r.a.p of inscription, he found tombs on its northern side which prove that here also was a burial-place of the twelfth dynasty. Two long corridors had been cut out of the rock, one above the other, and at intervals along their northern walls square chambers had been excavated, in which were placed the sarcophagi of the dead.

Inscriptions show for whom they were intended. Nofer-hont, Sont-Senebt, Sit-Hathor and Menit, were the royal princesses who had been entombed within them in the time of Amon-em-hat III. Their jewels had been hidden in two natural hollows in the stone floor of the corridors, and had thus escaped the eye of the ancient treasure-hunter. We can see them now in the Gizeh Museum, and thus learn to what an exquisite state of perfection the art of the goldsmith had already been brought.

Among them we may notice large sea-sh.e.l.ls of solid gold, enamelled lotus-flowers and necklaces of amethyst, carnelian and agate beads. Of beautifully-worked gold ornaments there is a marvellous profusion. But nothing surpa.s.ses the golden pectorals inlaid with precious stones. The work is so perfect as to make it difficult to believe that we have before us a mosaic and not enamel. On one of the pectorals the cartouche of Usertesen III. is supported on the paws of two hawk-headed lions, crowned with the royal feathers, and trampling under their feet the bodies of the foe. On another Amon-em-hat III. is represented smiting the wild tribes of the Sinaitic Peninsula. By the side of this jewellery of the twelfth dynasty, that of Queen Ah-hotep of the seventeenth, found by Mariette at Thebes, looks formal and degenerate. In jewellery, as in all things else in ancient Egypt, the earlier art is the best.

From Amon-em-hat III. of the twelfth dynasty to the founder of the twenty-sixth, two thousand years later, is a far cry, and how the Labyrinth came to be connected with the latter by the guides of Herodotos it is hard to say. The bronze helmet of Psammetikhos indicates that the story is of Greek origin. That was a Greek head-dress; no Egyptian, much less an Egyptian Pharaoh, would ever have worn it. The head-dress of the Egyptian monarch was of linen, coloured red for Lower Egypt, white for the south.

Herodotos seems to have visited Howara from the capital of the Fayyum, much as a traveller would do to-day. At least, such is the inference which we may draw from his words. Its position is defined as being "a little above Lake Mris, near the city of the Crocodiles." But we must remember that the Lake Mris of the Greek tourist included not only the actual lake, but also the inundation, which covered at the time the cultivated land of the Fayyum. Nor was it, as he supposed, an artificial piece of water excavated in a district which was "terribly waterless," the excavators of which were wasteful enough to fling all the earth they had extracted into the Nile twenty miles away. It was, on the contrary, an oasis reclaimed from marsh and water by the wise engineering labours of the kings of the twelfth dynasty and the embankments which they caused to be erected. So far from destroying the precious cultivable ground by turning it into a lake, they drained the lake so far as was possible, and thereby created a new Egypt for the cultivators of the soil.

From the walls of the city of the Crocodiles Herodotos looked out over a vast expanse of water, which he thought was the creation of the Pharaohs, but which was really the result of man's neglect. The d.y.k.es were broken which should have kept back the flood and prevented it from swamping the summer crops. It was with this view of almost boundless waters that the journey of Herodotos up the Nile came to an end. He returned to Memphis, and from thence pursued the way along which we have followed him to Pelusium and the sea. His note-book was filled with memoranda of all the wonders he had seen; of the strange customs he had observed among the Egyptian people; above all, with the folk-tales which his guides had poured into his ear. At a later day, when his eastern travels were over, and he had leisure for the work, he combined all this with the accounts written by his predecessors, and added a new book to the libraries of ancient Greece. From the outset it was a success, and though malicious critics endeavoured to condemn and supersede it, though Thukydides contradicted its statements in regard to Athens, though Ktesias declared that its oriental history was a romance and Plutarch discoursed on the "malignity" of its author, the book survived all attacks. We have lost the work of Hekataeos of Miletos, we have lost also-what is a more serious misfortune-that of the careful and well-informed Hekataeos of Abdera, but we still have Herodotos with us. And in spite of our own knowledge and his ignorance, in spite even of his innocent vanity and appropriation of the words of others, it is a pleasure to travel with him in our hand and visit with him the scenes he saw. Nowhere else can we find the folk-lore which grew and flourished in the meeting-place of East and West more than two thousand years ago, and in which lay the germs of much of the folk-lore of our own childhood. It may even be that some of the stories which the modern dragoman relates to the modern traveller on the Nile have no better parentage than the guides of Herodotos. Cairo is the successor of Memphis, and 'the caste' of the dragomen is not yet extinct.