Chapter III: The Legendary History of Egypt (4)

*** The Royal Canon of Turin, which dates from the
Ramesside period, gives, indeed, the names of these early
kings without a break, until the list reaches Unas; at this
point it sums up the number of Pharaohs and the aggregate
years of their reigns, thus indicating the end of a dynasty.
In the intervals between the dynasties rubrics are placed,
pointing out the changes which took place in the order of
direct succession. The division of the same group of
sovereigns into five dynasties has been preserved to us by
Manetho.

Manetho of Sebennytos, who wrote a history of Europe for the use of Alexandrine Greeks, had adopted, on some unknown authority, a division of thirty-one dynasties from Menés to the Macedonian Conquest, and his system has prevailed--not, indeed, on account of its excellence, but because it is the only complete one which has come down to us.[*] All the families inscribed in his lists ruled in succession.[**]

* The best restoration of the system of Manetho is that by
Lepsius, _Das Konigsbuch der Alten Ægypter_, which should be
completed and corrected from the memoirs of Lauth, Lieblein,
Krall, and Unger. A common fault attaches to all these
memoirs, so remarkable in many respects. They regard the
work of Manetho, not as representing a more or less
ingenious system applied to Egyptian history, but as
furnishing an authentic scheme of this history, in which it
is necessary to enclose all the royal names which the
monuments have revealed, and are still daily revealing to
us.

** E. de Rougé triumphantly demonstrated, in opposition to
Bunsen, now nearly fifty years ago, that all Manetho's
dynasties are successive, and the monuments discovered from
year to year in Egypt have confirmed his demonstration in
every detail.

The country was no doubt frequently broken up into a dozen or more independent states, each possessing its own kings during several generations; but the annalists had from the outset discarded these collateral lines, and recognized only one legitimate dynasty, of which the rest were but vassals. Their theory of legitimacy does not always agree with actual history, and the particular line of princes which they rejected as usurpers represented at times the only family possessing true rights to the crown.[*]

* It is enough to give two striking examples of this. The
royal lists of the time of the Ramessides suppress, at the
end of the XVIIIth dynasty, Amenôthes IV. and several of his
successors, and give the following sequence--Amenôthes
III., Harmhabît, Ramses I., without any apparent hiatus;
Manetho, on the contrary, replaces the kings who were
omitted, and keeps approximately to the real order between
Horos (Amenôthes III.) and Armais (Harmhabît). Again, the
official tradition of the XXth dynasty gives, between Ramses
II. and Ramses III., the sequence--Mînephtah, Seti IL,
Nakht-Seti; Manetho, on the other hand, gives Amenemes
followed by Thûôris, who appear to correspond to the
Amenmeses and Siphtah of contemporary monuments, but, after
Mînephtah, he omits Seti II. and Nakhîtou-Seti, the father
of Ramses III.

In Egypt, as elsewhere, the official chroniclers were often obliged to accommodate the past to the exigencies of the present, and to manipulate the annals to suit the reigning party; while obeying their orders the chroniclers deceived posterity, and it is only by a rare chance that we can succeed in detecting them in the act of falsification, and can re-establish the truth.

The system of Manetho, in the state in which it has been handed down to us by epitomizers, has rendered, and continues to render, service to science; if it is not the actual history of Egypt, it is a sufficiently faithful substitute to warrant our not neglecting it when we wish to understand and reconstruct the sequence of events. His dynasties furnish the necessary framework for most of the events and revolutions, of which the monuments have preserved us a record. At the outset, the centre to which the affairs of the country gravitated was in the extreme north of the valley. The principality which extended from the entrance of the Fayûm to the apex of the Delta, and subsequently the town of Memphis itself, imposed their sovereigns upon the remaining nomes, served as an emporium for commerce and national industries, and received homage and tribute from neighbouring peoples. About the time of the VIth dynasty this centre of gravity was displaced, and tended towards the interior; it was arrested for a short time at Heracleo-polis (IXth and Xth dynasties), and ended by fixing itself at Thebes (XIth dynasty). From henceforth Thebes became the capital, and furnished Egypt with her rulers. With the exception of the XIVth Xoïte dynasty, all the families occupying the throne from the XIth to the XXth dynasty were Theban. When the barbarian shepherds invaded Africa from Asia, the Thebaïd became the last refuge and bulwark of Egyptian nationality; its chiefs struggled for many centuries against the conquerors before they were able to deliver the rest of the valley. It was a Theban dynasty, the XVIIIth, which inaugurated the era of foreign conquest; but after the XIXth, a movement, the reverse of that which had taken place towards the end of the first period, brought back the centre of gravity, little by little, towards the north of the country. From the time of the XXIst dynasty, Thebes ceased to hold the position of capital: Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all, Sais, disputed the supremacy with each other, and political life was concentrated in the maritime provinces. Those of the interior, ruined by Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence and gradually dwindled away. Thebes became impoverished and depopulated; it fell into ruins, and soon was nothing more than a resort for devotees or travellers. The history of Egypt is, therefore, divided into three periods, each corresponding to the suzerainty of a town or a principality:--

I.--Memphite Period, usually called the "Ancient Empire," from the Ist to the Xth dynasty: kings of Memphite origin ruled over the whole of Egypt during the greater part of this epoch.

II.--Theban Period, from the XIth to the XXth dynasty. It is divided into two parts by the invasion of the Shepherds (XVIth dynasty):

a. The first Theban Empire (Middle Empire), from the XIth to the XIVth dynasty.

b. The new Theban Empire, from the XVIIth to the XXth dynasty.

III.--Saïte Period, from the XXIst to the XXXth dynasty, divided into two unequal parts by the Persian Conquest:

a. The first Saïte period, from the XXIst to the XXVIth dynasty.

b. The second Saïte period, from the XXVIIIth to the XXXth dynasty.

The Memphites had created the monarchy. The Thebans extended the rule of Egypt far and wide, and made of her a conquering state: for nearly six centuries she ruled over the Upper Nile and over Western Asia. Under the Saïtes she retired gradually within her natural frontiers, and from having been aggressive became assailed, and suffered herself to be crushed in turn by all the nations she had once oppressed.[*]

* The division into Ancient, Middle, and New Empire,
proposed by Lepsius, has the disadvantage of not taking into
account the influence which the removal of the seat of the
dynasties exercised on the history of the country. The
arrangement which I have here adopted was first put forward
in the _Revue critique_, 1873, vol. i. pp. 82, 83.

The monuments have as yet yielded no account of the events which tended to unite the country under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the rich plains and the marshes of the Delta. Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the principal myths of the local religions; the Ennead to which it gave conception would never have obtained the popularity which we must acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty over the neighbouring plains. It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of Lower Egypt was organized; everything there bore traces of Heliopolitan theories--the protocol of the kings, their supposed descent from Râ, and the enthusiastic worship which they offered to the sun. The Delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely united, its religion was less systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city to serve as a political and sacerdotal centre. Hermopolis contained schools of theologians who certainly played an important part in the development of myths and dogmas; but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt. In the south, Siût disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting authority over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a particular character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down to its latest days. The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menés of Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honour of having fused the two Egypts into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human dynasties. Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian cities. It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile, if not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short distance from it.[*]

* The site of Thinis is not yet satisfactorily identified.
It is neither at Kom-es-Sultân, as Mariette thought, nor,
according to the hypothesis of A. Schmidt, at El-Kherbeh.
Brugsch has proposed to fix the site at the village of
Tineh, near Berdis, and is followed in this by Dumichen. The
present tendency is to identify it either with Girgeh
itself, or with one of the small neighbouring towns--for
example, Birbeh--where there are some ancient ruins; this
was also the opinion of Champollion and of Nester L'hôte. I
may mention that, in a frequently quoted passage of
Hellanicos, Zoèga corrects the reading [Greek phrase], which
would once more give us the name of Thinis: the mention of
this town as being "situated on the river," would be a fresh
reason for its identification with Girgeh.

The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain range to the other, and gradually extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban Oasis. Its inhabitants worshipped a sky-god, Anhûri, or rather two twin gods, Anhûri-Shû, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities and became a warlike personification of Râ. Anhûri-Shû, like all the other solar manifestations, came to be associated with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness--a Sokhît, who took for the occasion the epithet of Mîhît, the northern one. Some of the dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the modern village of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose steep cliffs here approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos. It would appear that, at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country, for the entire nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed. In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The city occupied a long and narrow strip of land between the canal and the first slopes of the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the dead reared its naked walls. Here, Anhûri, having passed from life to death, was worshipped under the name of Khontamentît, the chief of that western region whither souls repair on quitting this earth. It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what political combinations this Sun of the Night came to be identified with Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote antiquity; it had become an established fact long before the most ancient sacred books were compiled. Osiris Khontamentît grew rapidly in popular favour, and his temple attracted annually an increasing number of pilgrims. The Great Oasis had been considered at first as a sort of mysterious paradise, whither the dead went in search of peace and happiness. It was called Uîfc, the Sepulchre; this name clung to it after it had become an actual Egyptian province, and the remembrance of its ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people, so that the "cleft," or gorge in the mountain through which the doubles journeyed towards it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the other world. At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all parts of the valley; they there awaited the coming of the dying sun, in order to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Khontamentît. Abydos, even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god the only god, whose worship, practised by all Egyptians, inspired them all with an equal devotion. The excavations of the last few years have brought to light some, at all events, of the oldest Pharaohs known to the Egyptian annalists, namely, those whom they placed in their first human dynasties; and the locality where the monuments of these princes were discovered, shows us that these writers were correct in representing Thinis as playing an important part in the history of the early ages of their country. If the tomb of Menés--that sovereign whom we are inclined to look upon as the first king of the official lists--lies near the village of Nagadeh, not far from Thebes,[*] those of his immediate successors are close to Thinis, in the cemeteries of Abydos.[**] They stand at the very foot of the Libyan hills, near the entrance to the ravine--the "Cleft"--through which the mysterious oasis was reached, and thither the souls flocked in order that they might enter by a safe way the land beyond the grave.[***]

* The objects found during these excavations are now in the
Gîzeh Museum.

** The credit of having discovered this important
necropolis, and of having brought to light the earliest
known monuments of the first dynasties, is entirely due to
Amélineau. He carried on important work there during four
years, from 1895 to 1899: unfortunately its success was
impaired by the theories which he elaborated with regard to
the new monuments, and by the delay in publishing an account
of the objects which remained in his possession.

*** For the "Cleft," cf. supra, pp. 281, 282, 334.

The mass of pottery, whole and broken, which has accumulated on this site from the offerings of centuries has obtained for it among the Fellahin the name of Omm-el-G-aâb--"the mother of pots." The tombs there lie in serried ranks. They present for the most part a rough model of the pyramids of the Memphite period--rectangular structures of bricks without mortar rising slightly above the level of the plain. The funeral chamber occupies the centre of each, and is partly hollowed out of the soil, like a shallow well, the sides being bricked. It had a flat timber roof, covered by a layer of about three feet of sand; the floor also was of wood, and in several cases the remains of the beams of both ceiling and pavement have been brought to light. The body of the royal inmate was laid in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by its funeral furniture and by a part of the offerings. The remainder was placed in the little rooms which opened out of the principal vault, sometimes on the same level, sometimes on one higher than itself; after their contents had been laid within them, the entrance to these rooms was generally walled up. Human bodies have been found inside them, probably those of slaves killed at the funeral that they might wait upon the dead in his life beyond the grave.[*] The objects placed in these chambers were mostly offerings, but besides these were coarse stelae bearing the name of a person, and dictated to "the double of his luminary."[**] Some of them mention a dwarf[***] or a favourite dog of the sovereign, who accompanied his master into the tomb. Tablets of ivory or bone skilfully incised furnish us with scenes representing some of the ceremonies of the deification of the king in his lifetime and the sacrifices offered at the time of his burial;[****] in rarer instances they record his exploits.

* El. Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, part i.
p. 14.

** The "luminous double" or the "double of his luminary" is
doubtless that luminous spectre which haunted the tombs and
even the houses of the living during the night, and which I
have mentioned, supra, p. 160.

*** Petrie found the skeletons of two dwarfs, probably the
very two to whom the two stelae (Nos. 36, 37) in the tomb of
Semempses were raised. Was one of these dwarfs one of the
_Danga_ of Puanît who were sought after by the Pharaohs of
the Memphite dynasties?

**** This was the ceremony called by the Egyptians "The
Festival of the Foundation "--_habu sadu_.

The offerings themselves were such as we meet with in burials of a subsequent age--bread, cakes, meat, and poultry of various sorts--indeed, everything we find mentioned in the lists inscribed in the tombs of the later dynasties, particularly the jars of wine and liquors, on the clay bungs of which are still legible the impression of the signet bearing the name of the sovereign for whose use they were sealed. Besides stuffs and mats, the furniture comprised chairs, beds, stools, an enormous number of vases, some in coarse pottery for common use, others in choice stone such as diorite, granite, or rock crystal very finely worked, on the fragments of all of which may be read cut in outline the names and preamble of the Pharaoh to whom the object belonged. The ceremonial of the funerary offering and its significance was already fully developed at this early period; this can be gathered by the very nature of the objects buried with the deceased, by their number, quantity, and by the manner in which they were arranged. Like their successors in the Egypt of later times, these ancient kings expected to continue their material existence within the tomb, and they took precautions that life there should be as comfortable as circumstances should permit. Access to the tomb was sometimes gained by a sloping passage or staircase; this made it possible to see if everything within was in a satisfactory condition. After the dead had been enclosed in his chamber, and five or six feet of sand had been spread over the beams which formed its roof, the position of the tomb was shown merely by a scarcely perceptible rise in the soil of the necropolis, and its site would soon have been forgotten, if its easternmost limits had not been marked by two large stelae on which were carefully engraved one of the appellations of the king--that of his double, or his Horus name.[*]

* For the Horus name of the Pharaohs, see vol. ïi., pp. 23-
25.

It was on this spot, upon an altar placed between the two stelæ, that the commemorative ceremonies were celebrated, and the provisions renewed on certain days fixed by the religious law. Groups of private tombs were scattered around,--the resting-places of the chief officers of the sovereign, the departed Pharaoh being thus surrounded in death by the same courtiers as those who had attended him during his earthly existence.

The princes, whose names and titles have been revealed to us by the inscriptions on these tombs, have not by any means been all classified as yet, the prevailing custom at that period having been to designate them by their Horus names, but rarely by their proper names, which latter is the only one which figures in the official lists which we possess of the Egyptian kings. A few texts, more explicit than the rest, enable us to identify three of them with the Usaphais, the Miebis, and the Semempses of Manetho--the fifth, sixth, and seventh kings of the Ist dynasty.[*] The fact that they are buried in the necropolis of Abydos apparently justifies the opinion of the Egyptian chroniclers that they were natives of Thinis. Is the Menés who usually figures at their head[**] also a Thinite prince?

* The credit is due to Sethe of having attributed their
ordinary names to several of the kings of the Ist dynasty
with Horus names only which were found by Amélineau, and
these identifications have been accepted by all
Egyptologists. Pétrie discovered quite recently on some
fragments of vases the Horus names of these same princes,
together with their ordinary names. The Usaphais, the
Miebis, and the Semempses of Manetho are now satisfactorily
identified with three of the Pharaohs discovered by
Amélineau and by Pétrie.

** In the time of Seti I. and Ramses II. he heads the list
of the Table of Abydos. Under Ramses II. his statue was
carried in procession, preceding all the other royal
statues. Finally, the "Royal Papyrus" of Turin,
written in the time of Ramses I., begins the entire series
of the human Pharaohs with his name.

Several scholars believe that his ordinary name, Mini, is to be read on an ivory tablet engraved for a sovereign whose Horus name--Ahauîti, the warlike--is known to us from several documents, and whose tomb also has been discovered, but at Nagadeh. It is a great rectangular structure of bricks 165 feet long and 84 broad, the external walls of which were originally ornamented by deep polygonal grooves, resembling those which score the façade of Chaldæan buildings, but the Nagadeh tomjb has a second brick wall which fills up all the hollows left in the first one, and thus hides the primitive decoration of the monument. The building contains twenty-one chambers, five of which in the centre apparently constituted the dwelling of the deceased, while the others, grouped around these, serve as storehouses from whence he could draw his provisions at will. Did the king buried within indeed bear the name of Menés,[*] and if such was the case, how are we to reconcile the tradition of his Thinite origin with the existence of his far-off tomb in the neighbourhood of Thebes?

* The sign _Manu_, which appears on the ivory tablet found
in this tomb, has been interpreted as a king's name, and
consequently inferred to be Menés. This reading has been
disputed on various sides, and the point remains, therefore,
a contested one until further discovery.

Objects bearing his Horus name have been found at Omm-el-Gaâb, and it is evident that he belonged to the same age as the sovereigns interred in this necropolis. If, indeed, Menés was really his personal name, there is no reason against his being the Menés of tradition, he whom the Pharaohs of the glorious Theban dynasties regarded as the earliest of their purely human ancestors. Whether he was really the first king who reigned over the whole of Egypt, or whether he had been preceded by other sovereigns whose monuments we may find in some site still unexplored, is a matter for conjecture. That princes had exercised authority in various parts of the country is still uncertain, but that the Egyptian historians did not know them, seems to prove that they had left no written records of their names. At any rate, a Menés lived who reigned at the outset of history, and doubtless before long the Nile valley, when more carefully explored, will yield us monuments recording his actions and determining his date. The civilization of the Egypt of his time was ruder than that with which we have hitherto been familiar on its soil, but even at that early period it was almost as complete. It had its industries and its arts, of which the cemeteries furnish us daily with the most varied examples: weaving, modelling in clay, wood-carving, the incising of ivory, gold, and the hardest stone were all carried on; the ground was cultivated with hoe and plough; tombs were built showing us the model of what the houses and palaces must have been; the country had its army, its administrators, its priests, its nobles, its writing, and its system of epigraphy differs so little from that to which we are accustomed in later ages, that we can decipher it with no great difficulty. Frankly speaking, all that we know at present of the first of the Pharaohs beyond the mere fact of his existence is practically _nil_, and the stories related of him by the writers of classical times are mere legends arranged to suit the fancy of the compiler. "This Menés, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with dykes. For the river formerly followed the sandhills for some distance on the Libyan side. Menés, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to the south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the river through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain ranges. Then Menés, the first who was king, having enclosed a firm space of ground with dykes, there founded that town which is still called Memphis; he then made a lake round it, to the north and west, fed by the river, the city being bounded on the east by the Nile."[*]

* The dyke supposed to have been made by Menés is evidently
that of Qosheîsh, which now protects the province of Gîzeh,
and regulates the inundation in its neighbourhood.

The history of Memphis, such as it can be gathered from the monuments, differs considerably from the tradition current in Egypt at the time of Herodotus. It appears, indeed, that at the outset, the site on which it subsequently arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbû-hazû--the white wall--which was dependent on Heliopolis, and in which Phtah possessed a sanctuary. After the "white wall" was separated from the Heliopolitan principality to form a nome by itself, it assumed a certain importance, and furnished, so it was said, the dynasties which succeeded the Thinite. Its prosperity dates only, however, from the time when the sovereigns of the Vth and VIth dynasties fixed on it for their residence; one of them, Papi L, there founded for himself and for his "double" after him, a new town, which he called Minnofîrû, from his tomb. Minnofîrû, which is the correct pronunciation and the origin of Memphis, probably signified "the good refuge," the haven of the good, the burying-place where the blessed dead came to rest beside Osiris. The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably it did not fall in with their taste for romantic tales. They were rather disposed, as a rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the countries or cities with which they were familiar took their names: if no tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any scruple in inventing one. The Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies, who were guided in their philological speculations by the pronunciation in vogue around them, attributed the patronship of their city to a Princess Memphis, a daughter of its founder, the fabulous Uchoreus; those of preceding ages before the name had become altered, thought to find in Minnofîrû a "Mini Nofir," or "Menés the Good," the reputed founder of the capital of the Delta. Menés the Good, divested of his epithet, is none other than Menés, the first king, and he owes this episode in his life to a popular attempt at etymology. The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the construction of the city, must have originated at the time when Memphis was still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at latest about the end of the Memphite period. It must have been an old tradition in the time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted unhesitatingly the authenticity of the statements which ascribed to the northern city so marked a superiority over their own country.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin after Prisse d'Avenues. The gold
medallions engraved with the name of Menés are ancient, and
perhaps go back to the XXth dynasty; the setting is entirely
modern, with the exception of the three oblong pendants of
cornelian.

When once this half-mythical Menés was firmly established in his position, there was little difficulty in inventing a story which would portray him as an ideal sovereign. He was represented as architect, warrior, and statesman; he had begun the temple of Phtah, written laws and regulated the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hâpis, and he had conducted expeditions against the Libyans. When he lost his only son in the flower of his age, the people improvised a hymn of mourning to console him--the "Maneros"--both the words and the tune of which were handed down from generation to generation. He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining posture. One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or other, fell upon him to devour him. He escaped with difficulty, and, pursued by them, fled to the shore of Lake Moeris, and was there brought to bay; he was on the point of succumbing to them, when a crocodile took him on his back and carried him across to the other side.[*] In gratitude he built a new town, which he called Crocodilopolis, and assigned to it for its god the crocodile which had saved him; he then erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a pyramid for his tomb. Other traditions show him in a less favourable light. They accuse him of having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and allege that after a reign of sixty to sixty-two years, he was killed by a hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile.[**]

* This is an episode from the legend of Osiris: at Phihe,
in the little building of the Antonines, may be seen a
representation of a crocodile crossing the Nile, carrying on
his back the mummy of the god. The same episode is also
found in the tale of Onus el Ujûd and of Uard f'il-Ikmâm,
where the crocodile leads the hero to his beautiful prisoner
in the Island of Philæ. Ebers, _Ægypte_, French trans., vol.
ii. pp. 415, 416, has shown how this episode in the Arab
story must have been inspired by the bas-relief at Philæ and
by the scene which it portrays: the temple is still called
"Kasr," and the island "Geziret Onus el-Ujûd."

** In popular romances, this was the usual end of criminals
of every kind; we shall see that another king, Akhthoes the
founder of the IXth dynasty, after committing horrible
misdeeds, was killed, in the same way as Menés, by a
hippopotamus.

They also related that the Saïte Tafnakhti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of royal life, had solemnly cursed him, and had caused his imprecations to be inscribed upon a stele set up in the temple of Amon at Thebes. Nevertheless, in the memory that Egypt preserved of its first Pharaoh, the good outweighed the evil. He was worshipped in Memphis side by side with Phtah and Ramses II.; his name figured at the head of the royal lists, and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies.

His immediate successors had an actual existence, and their tombs are there in proof of it. We know where Usaphais, Miebis, and Semempses[*] were laid to rest, besides more than a dozen other princes whose real names and whose position in the official lists are still uncertain. The order of their succession was often a matter of doubt to the Egyptians themselves, but perhaps the discoveries of the next few years will enable us to clear up and settle definitely matters which were shrouded in mystery in the time of the Theban Pharaohs. As a fact, the forms of such of their names as have been handed down to us by later tradition, are curt and rugged, indicative of an early state of society, and harmonizing with the more primitive civilization to which they belong: Ati the Wrestler, Teti the Runner, Qenqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for a people, the first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.[**]

* Flinders Pétrie, _The 'Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty_,
vol. i. p. 56.

** The Egyptians were accustomed to explain the meaning of
the names of their kings to strangers, and the Canon of
Eratosthenes has preserved several of their derivations, of
which a certain number, as, for instance, that of Menés from
aùovioç, the "lasting," are tolerably correct. M. Krall is,
to my knowledge, the only Egyptologist who has attempted to
glean from the meaning of these names indications of the
methods by which the national historians of Egypt
endeavoured to make up the lists of the earliest dynasties.

Some of the monuments they have left us, seem to show that their reigns were as much devoted to war as those of the later Pharaohs. The king whose Horus name was Nârumîr, is seen on a contemporary object which has come down to us, standing before a heap of beheaded foes; the bodies are all stretched out on the ground, each with his head placed neatly between his legs: the king had overcome, apparently in some important engagement, several thousands of his enemies, and was inspecting the execution of their leaders. That the foes with whom these early kings contended were in most cases Egyptian princes of the nomes, is proved by the list of city names which are inscribed on the fragments of another document of the same nature, and we gather from them that Dobu (Edfu), Hasutonu (Cynopolis), Habonu (Hipponon), Hakau (Memphis) and others were successively taken and dismantled.[*]

* Palette resembling the preceding one, and with it
deposited in the Gîzeh Museum; reproduced by Steindokff, and
by J. de Morgan. The names of the towns were enclosed within
the embattled line which was used later on to designate
foreign countries. The animals which surmount them represent
the gods of Egypt, the king's protectors; and the king
himself, identified with these gods, is making a breach in
the wall with a pick-axe. The names of the towns have not
been satisfactorily identified: Hat-kau, for instance, may
not be Memphis, but it appears that there is no doubt with
regard to Habonu. Cf. Sayce, The Beginnings of the Egyptian
Monarchy in the Proceedings of the Biblical Archæological
Society, 1898, vol. xx. pp, 99-101.

On this fragment King Den is represented standing over a prostrate chief of the Bedouin, striking him with his mace. Sondi, who is classed in the IInd dynasty, received a continuous worship towards the end of the IIIrd dynasty. But did all those whose names preceded or followed his on the lists, really exist as he did? and if they existed, to what extent do the order and the relation assigned to them agree with the actual truth? The different lists do not contain the same names in the same positions; certain Pharaohs are added or suppressed without appreciable reason. Where Manetho inscribes Kenkenes and Ouenephes, the tables of the time of Seti I. gave us Ati and Ata; Manetho reckons nine kings to the IInd dynasty, while they register only five.[*]

* The impossibility of reconciling the names of the Greek
with those of the Pharaonic lists has been admitted by most
of the savants who have discussed the matter, viz. Mariette,
E. de Rouge, Lieblein, Wiedemann; most of them explain the
differences by the supposition that, in many cases, one of
the lists gives the cartouche name, and the other the
cartouche prenomen of the same king.

The monuments, indeed, show us that Egypt in the past obeyed princes whom her annalists were unable to classify: for instance, they associate with Sondi a Pirsenû, who is not mentioned in the annals. We must, therefore, take the record of all this opening period of history for what it is--namely, a system invented at a much later date, by means of various artifices and combinations--to be partially accepted in default of a better, but without according to it that excessive confidence which it has hitherto received. The two Thinite dynasties, in direct descent from the first human king Menés, furnish, like this hero himself, only a tissue of romantic tales and miraculous legends in the place of history. A double-headed stork, which had appeared in the first year of Teti, son of Menés, had foreshadowed to Egypt a long prosperity, but a famine under Ouenephes, and a terrible plague under Semempses, had depopulated the country: the laws had been relaxed, great crimes had been committed, and revolts had broken out. During the reign of Boêthos, a gulf had opened near Bubastis, and swallowed up many people, then the Nile had flowed with honey for fifteen days in the time of Nephercheres, and Sesochris was supposed to have been a giant in stature. A few details about royal edifices were mixed up with these prodigies. Teti had laid the foundation of the great palace of Memphis, Ouenephes had built the pyramids of Ko-komè near Saqqara. Several of the ancient Pharaohs had published books on theology, or had written treatises on anatomy and medicine; several had made laws which lasted down to the beginning of the Christian era. One of them was called Kakôû, the male of males, or the bull of bulls. They explained his name by the statement that he had concerned himself about the sacred animals; he had proclaimed as gods, Hâpis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the goat of Mendes. After him, Binôthris had conferred the right of succession upon all the women of the blood-royal. The accession of the IIIrd dynasty, a Memphite one according to Manetho, did not at first change the miraculous character of this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necherophes, and the two armies were encamped before each other, when one night the disk of the moon became immeasurably enlarged, to the great alarm of the rebels, who recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven, and yielded without fighting. Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes, brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection. He composed, as Teti did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be identified with the healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these things seriously, and the Greek writers took them down from their lips with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the wise men of Egypt.

What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see, than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination, but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the monuments. Towards the middle of the third century before our era, the Greek troops stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract, developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philæ. Their devotion spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the whole population of the Thebàid, and finally reached the court of the Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a common sanctuary, and united in one cult the two races over which they ruled. They pulled down the meagre building of the Sa'ite period which had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from private individuals, made the goddess the richest landowner in Southern Egypt. Khnûmû and his two wives, Anûkit and Satît, who, before Isis, had been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy their neighbour's prosperity: the civil wars and invasions of the centuries immediately preceding had ruined their temples, and their poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the new-comer.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the bas-reliefs of the
temple of Khnûmû, at Elephantine. This bas-relief is now
destroyed.

The priests resolved to lay this sad state of affairs before King Ptolemy, to represent to him the services which they had rendered and still continued to render to Egypt, and above all to remind him of the generosity of the ancient Pharaohs, whose example, owing to the poverty of the times, the recent Pharaohs had been unable to follow.

Doubtless authentic documents were wanting in their archives to support their pretensions: they therefore inscribed upon a rock, in the island of Sehel, a long inscription which they attributed to Zosiri of the IIIrd dynasty. This sovereign had left behind him a vague reputation for greatness. As early as the XIIth dynasty Usirtasen III. had claimed him as "his father"--his ancestor--and had erected a statue to him; the priests knew that, by invoking him, they had a chance of obtaining a hearing. The inscription which they fabricated, set forth that in the eighteenth year of Zosiri's reign he had sent to Madîr, lord of Elephantine, a message couched in these terms: "I am overcome with sorrow for the throne, and for those who reside in the palace, and my heart is afflicted and suffers greatly because the Nile has not risen in my time, for the space of eight years. Corn is scarce, there is a lack of herbage, and nothing is left to eat: when any one calls upon his neighbours for help, they take pains not to go. The child weeps, the young man is uneasy, the hearts of the old men are in despair, their limbs are bent."

Ptolemies admit the claims which the local priests attempted to deduce from this romantic tale? and did the god regain possession of the domains and dues which they declared had been his right? The stele shows us with what ease the scribes could forge official documents, when the exigencies of they crouch on the earth, they fold their hands; the courtiers have no further resources; the shops formerly furnished with rich wares are now filled only with air, all that was in them has disappeared.

"My spirit also, mindful of the beginning of things, seeks to call upon the Saviour who was here where I am, during the centuries of the gods, upon Thot-Ibis, that great wise one, upon Imhotpû, son of Phtah of Memphis. Where is the place in which the Nile is born? Who is the god or goddess concealed there? What is his likeness?"

1 Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Dévèria (1864); in
the foreground, the tomb of Ti.

The lord of Elephantine brought his reply in person. He described to the king, who was evidently ignorant of it, the situation of the island and the rocks of the cataract, the phenomena of the inundation, the gods who presided over it, and who alone could relieve Egypt from her disastrous plight. Zosiri repaired to the temple of the principality and offered the prescribed sacrifices; the god arose, opened his eyes, panted and cried aloud, "I am Khnûmû who created thee!" and promised him a speedy return of a high Nile and the cessation of the famine. Pharaoh was touched by the benevolence which his divine father had shown him; he forthwith made a decree by which he ceded to the temple all his rights of suzerainty over the neighbouring nomes within a radius of twenty miles. Henceforward the entire population, tillers and vinedressers, fishermen and hunters, had to yield the tithe of their incomes to the priests; the quarries could not be worked without the consent of Khnûmû, and the payment of a suitable indemnity into his coffers, and finally, all metals and precious woods shipped thence for Egypt had to submit to a toll on behalf of the temple. Did the daily life forced the necessity upon them; it teaches us at the same time how that fabulous chronicle was elaborated, whose remains have been preserved for us by classical writers. Every prodigy, every fact related by Manetho, was taken from some document analogous to the supposed inscription of Zosiri.[*]

* The legend of the yawning gulf at Bubastis must be
connected with the gifts supposed to have been offered by
King Boêthos to the temple of that town, to repair the
losses sustained by the goddess on that occasion; the legend
of the pestilence and famine is traceable to some relief
given by a local god, and for which Semempses and Ùenephes
might have shown their gratitude in the same way as Zosiri.
The tradition of the successive restorations of Denderah
accounts for the constructions attributed to Teti I. and to
Tosorthros; finally, the prête tided discoveries of sacred
books, dealt with elsewhere, show how Manetho was enabled to
attribute to his Pharaohs the authorship of works on
medicine or theology.

The real history of the early centuries, therefore, eludes our researches, and no contemporary record traces for us those vicissitudes which Egypt passed through before being consolidated into a single kingdom, under the rule of one man. Many names, apparently of powerful and illustrious princes, had survived in the memory of the people; these were collected, classified, and grouped in a regular manner into dynasties, but the people were ignorant of any exact facts connected with the names, and the historians, on their own account, were reduced to collect apocryphal traditions for their sacred archives. The monuments of these remote ages, however, cannot have entirely disappeared: they exist in places where we have not as yet thought of applying the pick, and chance excavations will some day most certainly bring them to light. The few which we do possess barely go back beyond the IIIrd dynasty: namely, the hypogeum of Shiri, priest of Sondi and Pirsenû; possibly the tomb of Khûîthotpû at Saqqâra; the Great Sphinx of Gîzeh; a short inscription on the rocks of the Wady Maghâra, which represents Zosiri (the same king of whom the priests of Khnûmû in the Greek period made a precedent) working the turquoise or copper mines of Sinai; and finally the Step-Pyramid where this same Pharaoh rests.[*]

* The stele of Sehêl has enabled us to verify the fact that
the preamble [a string of titles] to the inscription of the
king, buried in the Step-Pyramid, is identical with that of
King Zosiri: it was, therefore, Zosiri who constructed, or
arranged for the construction of this monument as his tomb.
The Step-Pyramid of Saqqâra was opened in 1819, at the
expense of the Prussian General Minutoli, who was the first
to give a brief description of the interior, illustrated by
plans and drawings.

It forms a rectangular mass, incorrectly orientated, with a variation from the true north of 4° 35', 393 ft. 8 in. long from east to west, and 352 ft. deep, with a height of 159 ft. 9 in. It is composed of six cubes, with sloping sides, each being about 13 ft. less in width than the one below it; that nearest to the ground measures 37 ft. 8 in. in height, and the uppermost one 29 ft. 9 in. It was entirely constructed of limestone from the neighbouring mountains. The blocks are small, and badly cut, the stone courses being concave to offer a better resistance to downward thrust and to shocks of earthquake. When breaches in the masonry are examined, it can be seen that the external surface of the steps has, as it were, a double stone facing, each facing being carefully dressed. The body of the pyramid is solid, the chambers being cut in the rock beneath. These chambers have been often enlarged, restored, and reworked in the course of centuries, and the passages which connect them form a perfect labyrinth into which it is dangerous to venture without a guide. The columned porch, the galleries and halls, all lead to a sort of enormous shaft, at the bottom of which the architect had contrived a hiding-place, destined, no doubt, to contain the more precious objects of the funerary furniture. Until the beginning of this century, the vault had preserved its original lining of glazed pottery. Three quarters of the wall surface were covered with green tiles, oblong and slightly convex on the outer side, but flat on the inner: a square projection pierced with a hole, served to fix them at the back in a horizontal line by means of flexible wooden rods.

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the coloured sketch by
Sogato. M. Stern attributes the decoration of glazed pottery
to the XXVI '' dynasty, which opinion is shared by
Borchardt. The yellow and green glazed tiles hearing the
cartouche of Papi I., show that the Egyptians of the
Memphite dynasties used glazed facings at that early date;
we may, therefore, believe, if the tiles of the vault of
Zosiri are really of the Saïte period, that they replaced a
decoration of the same kind, which belonged to the time of
its construction, and of which some fragments still exist
among the tiles of more recent date.

The three bands which frame one of the doors are inscribed with the titles of the Pharaoh: the hieroglyphs are raised in either blue, red, green, or yellow, on a fawn-coloured ground. Other kings had built temples, palaces, and towns,--as, for instance, King Khâsakhimu, of whose constructions some traces exist at Hieracônpolis, opposite to El-Kab, or King Khâsakhmui, who preceded by a few years the Pharaohs of the IVth dynasty--but the monuments which they raised to be witnesses of their power or piety to future generations, have, in the course of ages, disappeared under the tramplings and before the triumphal blasts of many invading hosts: the pyramid alone has survived, and the most ancient of the historic monuments of Egypt is a tomb.

END OF VOL. I.