Chapter III: The Close of the Theban Empire (2)

It makes ones flesh creep to look at it: the hands and feet are tied by strong bands, and are curled up as if under an intolerable pain; the abdomen is drawn up, the stomach projects like a ball, the chest is contracted, the head is thrown back, the face is contorted in a hideous grimace, the retracted lips expose the teeth, and the mouth is open as if to give utterance to a last despairing cry. The conviction is borne in upon us that the man was invested while still alive with the wrappings of the dead. Is this the mummy of Pentaûîrît, or of some other prince as culpable as he was, and condemned to this frightful punishment? In order to prevent the recurrence of such wicked plots, Pharaoh resolved to share his throne with that one of his sons who had most right to it. In the XXXIInd year of his reign he called together his military and civil chiefs, the generals of the foreign mercenaries, the Shardana, the priests, and the nobles of the court, and presented to them, according to custom, his heir-designate, who was also called Ramses. He placed the double crown upon his brow, and seated him beside himself upon the throne of Horus. This was an occasion for the Pharaoh to bring to remembrance all the great exploits he had performed during his reign--his triumphs over the Libyans and over the peoples of the sea, and the riches he had lavished upon the gods: at the end of the enumeration he exhorted those who were present to observe the same fidelity towards the son which they had observed towards the father, and to serve the new sovereign as valiantly as they had served himself.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a, photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey.

The joint reign lasted for only four years. Ramses III. was not much over sixty years of age when he died. He was still vigorous and muscular, but he had become stout and heavy. The fatty matter of the body having been dissolved by the natron in the process of embalming, the skin distended during life has gathered up into enormous loose folds, especially about the nape of the neck, under the chin, on the hips, and at the articulations of the limbs. The closely shaven head and cheeks present no trace of hair or beard. The forehead, although neither broad nor high, is better proportioned than that of Ramses II.; the supra-orbital ridges are less accentuated than his, the cheek-bones not so prominent, the nose not so arched, and the chin and jaw less massive. The eyes were perhaps larger, but no opinion can be offered on this point, for the eyelids have been cut away, and the cleared-out cavities have been filled with rags. The ears do not stand out so far from the head as those of Ramses II., but they have been pierced for ear-rings. The mouth, large by nature, has been still further widened in the process of embalming, owing to the awkwardness of the operator, who has cut into the cheeks at the side. The thin lips allow the white and regular teeth to be seen; the first molar on the right has been either broken in half, or has worn away more rapidly than the rest. Ramses III. seems, on the whole, to have been a sort of reduced copy, a little more delicate in make, of Ramses II.; his face shows more subtlety of expression and intelligence, though less nobility than that of the latter, while his figure is not so upright, his shoulders not so broad, and his general muscular vigour less. What has been said of his personality may be extended to his reign; it was evidently and designedly an imitation of the reign of Ramses IL, but fell short of its model owing to the insufficiency of his resources in men and money. If Ramses III. did not succeed in becoming one of the most powerful of the Theban Pharaohs, it was not for lack of energy or ability; the depressed condition of Egypt at the time limited the success of his endeavours and caused them to fall short of his intentions. The work accomplished by him was not on this account less glorious. At his accession Egypt was in a wretched state, invaded on the west, threatened by a flood of barbarians on the east, without an army or a fleet, and with no resources in the treasury. In fifteen years he had disposed of his inconvenient neighbours, organised an army, constructed a fleet, re-established his authority abroad, and settled the administration at home on so firm a basis, that the country owed the peace which it enjoyed for several centuries to the institutions and prestige which he had given it. His associate in the government, Ramses IV., barely survived him. Then followed a series of _rois fainéants_ bearing the name of Ramses, but in an order not yet clearly determined. It is generally assumed that Ramses V., brother of Ramses III., succeeded Ramses IV. by supplanting his nephews--who, however, appear to have soon re-established their claim to the throne, and to have followed each other in rapid succession as Ramses VI., Ramses VIL, Ramses VIII., and Maritûmû.* Others endeavour to make out that Ramses V. was the son of Ramses IV., and that the prince called Ramses VI. never succeeded to the throne at all. At any rate, his son, who is styled Ramses VIL, but who is asserted by some to have been a son of Ramses III., is considered to have succeeded Ramses V., and to have become the ancestor from whom the later Ramessides traced their descent.**

* The order of the Ramessides was first made out by
Champollion the younger and by Rosellini. Bunsen and Lepsius
reckon in it thirteen kings; E. de Rougé puts the number at
fifteen or sixteen; Maspero makes the number to be twelve,
which was reduced still further by Setho. Erman thinks that
Ramses IX. and Ramses X. were also possibly sons of Ramses
III.; he consequently declines to recognise King Maritûmû as
a son of that sovereign, as Brugsch would make out.

* The monuments of these later Ramessides are so rare and so
doubtful that I cannot yet see my way to a solution of the
questions which they raise.

The short reigns of these Pharaohs were marked by no events which would cast lustre on their names; one might say that they had nothing else to do than to enjoy peacefully the riches accumulated by their forefather. Ramses IV. was anxious to profit by the commercial relations which had been again established between Egypt and Puanît, and, in order to facilitate the transit between Coptos and Kosseir, founded a station, and a temple dedicated to Isis, in the mountain of Bakhni; by this route, we learn, more than eight thousand men had passed under the auspices of the high priest of Amon, Nakh-tû-ramses. This is the only undertaking of public utility which we can attribute to any of these kings. As we see them in their statues and portraits, they are heavy and squat and without refinement, with protruding eyes, thick lips, flattened and commonplace noses, round and expressionless faces. Their work was confined to the engraving of their cartouches on the blank spaces of the temples at Karnak and Medinet-Habu, and the addition of a few stones to the buildings at Memphis, Abydos, and Heliopolis. Whatever energy and means they possessed were expended on the construction of their magnificent tombs.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-
Bey. This is the Ramses VI. of the series now generally
adopted.

These may still be seen in the Biban el-Moluk, and no visitor can refrain from admiring them for their magnitude and decoration. As to funerary chapels, owing to the shortness of the reigns of these kings, there was not time to construct them, and they therefore made up for this want by appropriating the chapel of their father, which was at Medinet-Habu, and it was here consequently that their worship was maintained. The last of the sons of Ramses III. was succeeded by another and equally ephemeral Ramses; after whom came Ramses X. and Ramses XI., who re-established the tradition of more lasting reigns. There was now no need of expeditions against Kharu or Libya, for these enfeebled countries no longer disputed, from the force of custom, the authority of Egypt. From time to time an embassy from these countries would arrive at Thebes, bringing presents, which were pompously recorded as representing so much tribute.* If it is true that a people which has no history is happy, then Egypt ought to be reckoned as more fortunate under the feebler descendants of Ramses III. than it had ever been under the most famous Pharaohs.

* The mention of a tribute, for instance, in the time of
Ramses IV. from the Lotanu.

Thebes continued to be the favourite royal residence. Here in its temple the kings were crowned, and in its palaces they passed the greater part of their lives, and here in its valley of sepulchres they were laid to rest when their reigns and lives were ended. The small city of the beginning of the XVIIIth dynasty had long encroached upon the plain, and was now transformed into an immense town, with magnificent monuments, and a motley population, having absorbed in its extension the villages of Ashirû,* and Madit, and even the southern Apît, which we now call Luxor. But their walls could still be seen, rising up in the middle of modern constructions, a memorial of the heroic ages, when the power of the Theban princes was trembling in the balance, and when conflicts with the neighbouring barons or with the legitimate king were on the point of breaking out at every moment.**

* The village of Ashirû was situated to the south of the
temple of Karnak, close to the temple of Mût. Its ruins,
containing the statues of Sokhît collected by Amenôthes III.,
extend around the remains marked X in Mariettes plan.

* These are the walls which are generally regarded as
marking the sacred enclosure of the temples: an examination
of the ruins of Thebes shows us that, during the XXth and
XXIst dynasties, brick-built houses lay against these walls
both on the inner and outer sides, so that they must have
been half hidden by buildings, as are the ancient walls of
Paris at the present day.

The inhabitants of Apît retained their walls, which coincided almost exactly with the boundary of Nsîttauî, the great sanctuary of Amon; Ashirû sheltered behind its ramparts the temple of Mût, while Apît-rîsît clustered around a building consecrated by Amenôthes III. to his divine father, the lord of Thebes. Within the boundary walls of Thebes extended whole suburbs, more or less densely populated and prosperous, through which ran avenues of sphinxes connecting together the three chief boroughs of which the sovereign city was composed. On every side might have been seen the same collections of low grey huts, separated from each other by some muddy pool where the cattle were wont to drink and the women to draw water; long streets lined with high houses, irregularly shaped open spaces, bazaars, gardens, courtyards, and shabby-looking palaces which, while presenting a plain and unadorned exterior, contained within them the refinements of luxury and the comforts of wealth. The population did not exceed a hundred thousand souls,* reckoning a large proportion of foreigners attracted hither by commerce or held as slaves.

* Letronne, after having shown that we have no authentic
ancient document giving us the population, fixes it at
200,000 souls. My estimate, which is, if anything,
exaggerated, is based on the comparison of the area of
ancient Thebes and that of such modern towns as Shit, Girgeh
and Qina, whose populations are known for the last fifty
years from the census.

The court of the Pharaoh drew to the city numerous provincials, who, coming thither to seek their fortune, took up their abode there, planting in the capital of Southern Egypt types from the north and the centre of the country, as well as from Nubia and the Oases; such a continuous infusion of foreign material into the ancient Theban stock gave rise to families of a highly mixed character, in which all the various races of Egypt were blended in the most capricious fashion. In every twenty officers, and in the same number of ordinary officials, about half would be either Syrians, or recently naturalised Nubians, or the descendants of both, and among the citizens such names as Pakhari the Syrian, Palamnanî the native of the Lebanon, Pinahsî the negro, Palasiaî the Alasian, preserved the indications of foreign origin.* A similar mixture of races was found in other cities, and Memphis, Bubastis, Tanis, and Siût must have presented as striking an aspect in this respect as Thebes.** At Memphis there were regular colonies of Phoenician, Canaanite, and Amorite merchants sufficiently prosperous to have temples there to their national gods, and influential enough to gain adherents to their religion from the indigenous inhabitants. They worshipped Baal, Anîti. Baal-Zaphuna, and Ashtoreth, side by side with Phtah, Nofîrtûmû, and Sokhit,*** and this condition of things at Memphis was possibly paralleled elsewhere--as at Tanis and Bubastis.

* Among the forty-three individuals compromised in the
conspiracy against Ramses III. whose names have been
examined by Dévéria, nine are foreigners, chiefly Semites,
and were so recognised by the Egyptians themselves--Adiram,
Balmahara, Garapusa, lunîni the Libyan, Paiarisalama,
possibly the Jerusalemite, Nanaiu, possibly the Ninevite,
Palulca the Lycian, Qadendena, and Uarana or Naramu.

** An examination of the stelæ of Abydos shows the extent of
foreign influence in this city in the middle of the
XVIIIth dynasty.

*** These gods are mentioned in the preamble of a letter
written on the _verso_ of the _Sallier Papyrus_. From the
mode in which they are introduced we may rightly infer that
they had, like the Egyptian gods who are mentioned with
them, their chapels at Memphis. A place in Memphis is called
the district called the district of the Khâtiû is an
inscription of the IIIth year of Aï, and shows that Hittites
were there by the side of Canaanites.

This blending of races was probably not so extensive in the country districts, except in places where mercenaries were employed as garrisons; but Sudanese or Hittite slaves, brought back by the soldiers of the ranks, had introduced Ethiopian and Asiatic elements into many a family of the fellahîn.*

* One of the letters in the Great Bologna Papyrus treats of
a Syrian slave, employed as a cultivator at Hermopolis, who
had run away from his master.

We have only to examine in any of our museums the statues of the Memphite and Theban periods respectively, to see the contrast between the individuals represented in them as far as regards stature and appearance. Some members of the courts of the Ramessides stand out as genuine Semites notwithstanding the disguise of their Egyptian names; and in the times of Kheops and Ûsirtasen they would have been regarded as barbarians. Many of them exhibit on their faces a blending of the distinctive features of one or other of the predominant Oriental races of the time. Additional evidence of a mixture of races is forthcoming when we examine with an unbiased mind the mummies of the period, and the complexity of the new elements introduced among the people by the political movements of the later centuries is thus strongly confirmed. The new-comers had all been absorbed and assimilated by the country, but the generations which arose from this continual cross-breeding, while representing externally the Egyptians of older epochs, in manners, language, and religion, were at bottom something different, and the difference became the more accentuated as the foreign elements increased. The people were thus gradually divested of the character which had distinguished them before the conquest of Syria; the dispositions and defects imported from without counteracted to such an extent their own native dispositions and defects that all marks of individuality were effaced and nullified. The race tended to become more and more what it long continued to be afterwards,--a lifeless and inert mass, without individual energy--endowed, it is true, with patience, endurance, cheerfulness of temperament, and good nature, but with little power of self-government, and thus forced to submit to foreign masters who made use of it and oppressed it without pity.

The upper classes had degenerated as much as the masses. The feudal nobles who had expelled the Shepherds, and carried the frontiers of the empire to the banks of the Euphrates, seemed to have expended their energies in the effort, and to have almost ceased to exist. As long as Egypt was restricted to the Nile valley, there was no such disproportion between the power of the Pharaoh and that of his feudatories as to prevent the latter from maintaining their privileges beside, and, when occasion arose, even against the monarch. The conquest of Asia, while it compelled them either to take up arms themselves or to send their troops to a distance, accustomed them and their soldiers to a passive obedience. The maintenance of a strict discipline in the army was the first condition of successful campaigning at great distances from the mother country and in the midst of hostile people, and the unquestioning respect which they had to pay to the orders of their general prepared them for abject submission to the will of their sovereign. To their bravery, moveover, they owed not only money and slaves, but also necklaces and bracelets of honour, and distinctions and offices in the Pharaonic administration. The king, in addition, neglected no opportunity for securing their devotion to himself. He gave to them in marriage his sisters, his daughters, his cousins, and any of the princesses whom he was not compelled by law to make his own wives. He selected from their harems nursing-mothers for his own sons, and this choice established between him and them a foster relationship, which was as binding among the Egyptians and other Oriental peoples as one of blood. It was not even necessary for the establishment of this relation that the foster-mothers connexion with the Pharaohs son should be durable or even effective: the woman had only to offer her breast to the child for a moment, and this symbol was quite enough to make her his nurse--his true _monâît_. This fictitious fosterage was carried so far, that it was even made use of in the case of youths and persons of mature age. When an Egyptian woman wished to adopt an adult, the law prescribed that she should offer him the breast, and from that moment he became her son. A similar ceremony was prescribed in the case of men who wished to assume the quality of male nurse--_monâî_--or even, indeed, of female nurse--_monâît_--like that of their wives; according to which they were to place, it would seem, the end of one of their fingers in the mouth of the child.* Once this affinity was established, the fidelity of these feudal lords was established beyond question; and their official duties to the sovereign were not considered as accomplished when they had fulfilled their military obligations, for they continued to serve him in the palace as they had served him on the field. Wherever the necessities of the government called them--at Memphis, at Ramses, or elsewhere--they assembled around the Pharaoh; like him they had their palaces at Thebes, and when they died they were anxious to be buried there beside him.**

* These symbolical modes of adoption were first pointed out
by Maspero. Legend has given examples of them: as, for
instance, where Isis fosters the child of Malkander, King of
Byblos, by inserting the tip of her finger in its mouth.

** The tomb of a prince of Tobûî, the lesser Aphroditopolis,
was discovered at Thebes by Maspero. The rock-out tombs of
two Thinite princes were noted in the same necropolis. These
two were of the time of Thûtmosis III. I have remarked in
tombs not yet made public the mention of princes of El-Kab,
who played an important part about the person of the
Pharaohs down to the beginning of the XXth dynasty.

Many of the old houses had become extinct, while others, owing to marriages, were absorbed into the royal family; the fiefs conceded to the relations or favourites of the Pharaoh continued to exist, indeed, as of old, but the ancient distrustful and turbulent feudality had given place to an aristocracy of courtiers, who lived oftener in attendance on the monarch than on their own estates, and whose authority continued to diminish to the profit of the absolute rule of the king. There would be nothing astonishing in the count becoming nothing more than a governor, hereditary or otherwise, in Thebes itself; he could hardly be anything higher in the capital of the empire.* But the same restriction of authority was evidenced in all the provinces: the recruiting of soldiers, the receipt of taxes, most of the offices associated with the civil or military administration, became more and more affairs of the State, and passed from the hands of the feudal lord into those of the functionaries of the Crown. The few barons who still lived on their estates, while they were thus dispossessed of the greater part of their prerogatives, obtained some compensation, on the other hand, on the side of religion. From early times they had been by birth the heads of the local cults, and their protocol had contained, together with those titles which justified their possession of the temporalities of the nome, others which attributed to them spiritual supremacy. The sacred character with which they were invested became more and more prominent in proportion as their political influence became curtailed, and we find scions of the old warlike families or representatives of a new lineage at Thinis, at Akhmîm,** in the nome of Baalû, at Hierâconpolis,*** at El-Kab,**** and in every place where we have information from the monuments as to their position, bestowing more concern upon their sacerdotal than on their other duties.

* Rakhmirî and his son Manakhpirsonbû were both counts of
Thebes under Thûtmosis III., and there is nothing to show
that there was any other person among them invested with the
same functions and belonging to a different family.

** For example, the tomb of Anhûrimôsû, high priest of
Anhuri-Shû and prince of Thinis, under Mînephtah, where the
sacerdotal character is almost exclusively prominent. The
same is the case with the tombs of the princes of Akhmîm in
the time of Khûniatonû and his successors: the few still
existing in 1884-5 have not been published. The stelæ
belonging to them are at Paris and Berlin.

*** Horimôsû, Prince of Hierâconpolis under Thûtmosis III.,
is, above everything else, a prophet of the local Horus.

**** The princes of El-Kab during the XIXth and XXth
dynasties were, before everything, priests of Nekhabit, as
appears from an examination of their tombs, which, lying in
a side valley, far away from the tomb of Pihirî, are rarely
visited.

This transfiguration of the functions of the barons, which had been completed under the XIXth and XXth dynasties, corresponded with a more general movement by which the Pharaohs themselves were driven to accentuate their official position as high priests, and to assign to their sons sacerdotal functions in relation to the principal deities. This rekindling of religious fervour would not, doubtless, have restrained military zeal in case of war;* but if it did not tend to suppress entirely individual bravery, it discouraged the taste for arms and for the bold adventures which had characterised the old feudality.

* The sons of Ramses II., Khâmoîsît and Marîtùmû, were bravo
warriors in spite of their being high priests of Phtah at
Memphis, and of Râ at Heliopolis.

The duties of sacrificing, of offering prayer, of celebrating the sacred rites according to the prescribed forms, and rendering due homage to the gods in the manner they demanded, were of such an exactingly scrupulous and complex character that the Pharaohs and the lords of earlier times had to assign them to men specially fitted for, and appointed to, the task; now that they had assumed these absorbing functions themselves, they were obliged to delegate to others an increasingly greater proportion of their civil and military duties. Thus, while the king and his great vassals were devoutly occupying themselves in matters of worship and theology, generals by profession were relieving them of the care of commanding their armies; and as these individuals were frequently the chiefs of Ethiopian, Asiatic, and especially of Libyan bands, military authority, and, with it, predominant influence in the State were quickly passing into the hands of the barbarians. A sort of aristocracy of veterans, notably of Shardana or Mashauasha, entirely devoted to arms, grew up and increased gradually side by side with the ancient noble families, now by preference devoted to the priesthood.*

* This military aristocracy was fully developed in the XXIst
and XXIInd dynasties, but it began to take shape after
Ramses III. had planted the Shardana and Qahaka in certain
towns as garrisons.

The barons, whether of ancient or modern lineage, were possessed of immense wealth, especially those of priestly families. The tribute and spoil of Asia and Africa, when once it had reached Egypt, hardly ever left it: they were distributed among the population in proportion to the position occupied by the recipients in the social scale. The commanders of the troops, the attendants on the king, the administrators of the palace and temples, absorbed the greater part, but the distribution was carried down to the private soldier and his relations in town or country, who received some of the crumbs. When we remember for a moment the four centuries and more during which Egypt had been reaping the fruits of her foreign conquest, we cannot think without amazement of the quantities of gold and other precious metals which must have been brought in divers forms into the valley of the Nile.* Every fresh expedition made additions to these riches, and one is at a loss to know whence in the intervals between two defeats the conquered could procure so much wealth, and why the sources were never exhausted nor became impoverished. This flow of metals had an influence upon commercial transactions, for although trade was still mainly carried on by barter, the mode of operation was becoming changed appreciably. In exchanging commodities, frequent use was now made of rings and ingots of a certain prescribed weight in _tabonû_; and it became more and more the custom to pay for goods by a certain number of _tabonû_ of gold, silver, or copper, rather than by other commodities: it was the practice even to note down in invoices or in the official receipts, alongside the products or manufactured articles with which payments were made, the value of the same in weighed metal.**

* The quantity of gold in ingots or rings, mentioned in the
_Annals of Tkutmosis III._, represents altogether a weight
of nearly a ton and a quarter, or in value some £140,000 of
our money. And this is far from being the whole of the metal
obtained from the enemy, for a large portion of the
inscription has disappeared, and the unrecorded amount might
be taken, without much risk of error, at as much as that of
which we have evidence--say, some two and a half tons,
which Thûtmosis had received or brought back between the
years XXIII. and XLII. of his reign--an estimation rather
under than over the reality. These figures, moreover, take
no account of the vessels and statues, or of the furniture
and arms plated with gold. Silver was not received in such
large quantities, but it was of great value, and the like
may be said of copper and lead.

* The facts justifying this position were observed and put
together for the first time by Chabas: a translation is
given in his memoir of a register of the XXth or XXIst
dynasty, which gives the price of butchers meat, both in
gold and silver, at this date. Fresh examples have been
since collected by Spiegelberg, who has succeeded in drawing
up a kind of tariff for the period between the XVIIIth and
XXth dynasties.

This custom, although not yet widely extended, placed at the disposal of trade enormous masses of metal, which were preserved in the form of ingots or bricks, except the portion which went to the manufacture of rings, jewellery, or valuable vessels.*

* There are depicted on the monuments bags or heaps of gold
dust, ingots in the shape of bricks, rings, and vases,
arranged alongside each other.

The general prosperity encouraged a passion for goldsmiths work, and the use of bracelets, necklaces, and chains became common among classes of the people who were not previously accustomed to wear them. There was henceforward no scribe or merchant, however poor he might be, who had not his seal made of gold or silver, or at any rate of copper gilt. The stone was sometimes fixed, but frequently arranged so as to turn round on a pivot; while among people of superior rank it had some emblem or device upon it, such as a scorpion, a sparrow-hawk, a lion, or a cynocephalous monkey. Chains occupied the same position among the ornaments of Egyptian women as rings among men; they were indispensable decorations. Examples of silver chains are known of some five feet in length, while others do not exceed two to three inches. There are specimens in gold of all sizes, single, double, and triple, with large or small links, some thick and heavy, while others are as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace. The poorest peasant woman, alike with the lady of the court, could boast of the possession of a chain, and she must have been in dire poverty who had not some other ornament in her jewel-case. The jewellery of Queen Âhhotpû shows to what degree of excellence the work of the Egyptian goldsmiths had attained at the time of the expulsion of the Nyksôs: they had not only preserved the good traditions of the best workmen of the XIIth dynasty, but they had perfected the technical details, and had learned to combine form and colour with a greater skill. The pectorals of Prince Khâmoîsît and the Lord Psaru,now in the Louvre, but which were originally placed in the tomb of the Apis in the time of Ramses II., are splendid examples.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the jewel in the Louvre.

The most common form of these represents in miniature the front of a temple with a moulded or flat border, surmounted by a curved cornice. In one of them, which was doubtless a present from the king himself, the cartouche, containing the first name of the Pharaoh-Usirmari, appears just below the frieze, and serves as a centre for the design within the frame. The wings of the ram-headed sparrow-hawk, the emblem of Amonrâ, are so displayed as to support it, while a large urseus and a vulture beneath embracing both the sparrow-hawk and the cartouche with outspread wings give the idea of divine protection. Two _didû_, each of them filling one of the lower corners, symbolise duration. The framework of the design is made up of divisions marked out in gold, and filled either with coloured enamels or pieces of polished stone. The general effect is one of elegance, refinement, and harmony, the three principal elements of the design becoming enlarged from the top downwards in a deftly adjusted gradation. The dead-gold of the cartouche in the upper centre is set off below by the brightly variegated and slightly undulating band of colours of the sparrow-hawk, while the urseus and vulture, associated together with one pair of wings, envelope the upper portions in a half-circle of enamels, of which the shades pass from red through green to a dull blue, with a freedom of handling and a skill in the manipulation of colour which do honour to the artist. It was not his fault if there is still an element of stiffness in the appearance of the pectoral as a whole, for the form which religious tradition had imposed upon the jewel was so rigid that no artifice could completely get over this defect. It is a type which arose out of the same mental concepts as had given birth to Egyptian architecture and sculpture--monumental in character, and appearing often as if designed for colossal rather than ordinary beings. The dimensions, too overpowering for the decoration of normal men or women, would find an appropriate place only on the breasts of gigantic statues: the enormous size of the stone figures to which alone they are adapted would relieve them, and show them in their proper proportions. The artists of the second Theban empire tried all they could, however, to get rid of the square framework in which the sacred bird is enclosed, and we find examples among the pectorals in the Louvre of the sparrow-hawk only with curved wings, or of the ram-headed hawk with the wings extended; but in both of them there is displayed the same brilliancy, the same purity of line, as in the square-shaped jewels, while the design, freed from the trammels of the hampering enamelled frame, takes on a more graceful form, and becomes more suitable for personal decoration.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a jewel in the Louvre.

The rams head in the second case excels in the beauty of its workmanship anything to be found elsewhere in the museums of Europe or Egypt. It is of the finest gold, but its value does not depend upon the precious material: the ancient engraver knew how to model it with a bold and free hand, and he has managed to invest it with as much dignity as if he had been carving his subject in heroic size out of a block of granite or limestone. It is not an example of pure industrial art, but of an art for which a designation is lacking. Other examples, although more carefully executed and of more costly materials, do not approach it in value: such, for instance, are the earrings of Ramses XII. at Gîzeh, which are made up of an ostentatious combination of disks, filigree-work, chains, beads, and hanging figures of the urseus.

To get an idea of the character of the plate on the royal sideboards, we must have recourse to the sculptures in the temples, or to the paintings on the tombs: the engraved gold or silver centrepieces, dishes, bowls, cups, and amphoras, if valued by weight only, were too precious to escape the avarice of the impoverished generations which followed the era of Theban prosperity. In the fabrication of these we can trace foreign influences, but not to the extent of a predominance over native art: even if the subject to be dealt with by the artist happened to be a Phoenician god or an Asiatic prisoner, he was not content with slavishly copying his model; he translated it and interpreted it, so as to give it an Egyptian character.

The household furniture was in keeping with these precious objects. Beds and armchairs in valuable woods, inlaid with ivory, carved, gilt, painted in subdued and bright colours, upholstered with mattresses and cushions of many-hued Asiatic stuffs, or of home-made materials, fashioned after Chaldæan patterns, were in use among the well-to-do, while people of moderate means had to be content with old-fashioned furniture of the ancient regime.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of these objects in the
tomb of Ramses III.

The Theban dwelling-house was indeed more sumptuously furnished than the earliest Memphite, but we find the same general arrangements in both, which provided, in addition to quarters for the masters, a similar number of rooms intended for the slaves, for granaries, storehouses, and stables. While the outward decoration of life was subject to change, the inward element remained unaltered. Costume was a more complex matter than in former times: the dresses and lower garments were more gauffered, had more embroidery and stripes; the wigs were larger and longer, and rose up in capricious arrangements of curls and plaits.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by M. de Mertens.

The use of the chariot had now become a matter of daily custom, and the number of domestics, already formidable, was increased by fresh additions in the shape of coachmen, grooms, and _saises_, who ran before their master to clear a way for the horses through the crowded streets of the city.*

* The pictures at Tel el-Amarna exhibit the king, queen, and
princesses driving in their chariots with escorts of
soldiers and runners. We often find in the tomb-paintings
the chariot and coachman of some dignitary, waiting while
their master inspects a field or a workshop, or while he is
making a visit to the palace for some reward.

As material, existence became more complex, intellectual life partook of the same movement, and, without deviating much from the lines prescribed for it by the learned and the scribes of the Memphite age, literature had become in the mean time larger, more complicated, more exacting, and more difficult to grapple with and to master. It had its classical authors, whose writings were committed to memory and taught in the schools. These were truly masterpieces, for if some felt that they understood and enjoyed them, others found them almost beyond their comprehension, and complained bitterly of their obscurity. The later writers followed them pretty closely, in taking pains, on the one hand to express fresh ideas in the forms consecrated by approved and ancient usage, or when they failed to find adequate vehicles to convey new thoughts, resorting in their lack of imagination to the foreigner for the requisite expressions. The necessity of knowing at least superficially, something of the dialect and writings of Asia compelled the Egyptian scribes to study to some degree the literature of Phonecia and of Chaldæa.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from photographs of the objects in
the Museums of Berlin and Gîzeh.

From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation, medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and especially Astartê played the chief part. They appropriated in this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it polite to call a door no longer by the word _ro_, but the term _tira_, and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp _bordt_, but with the same instrument under its new name _kinnôr_, and to make the _salâm_ in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, _aaû_. They were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly. This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors, but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents.

* There are found in the rubrics of many religious books,
for example that dealing with the unseen world, promises of
health and prosperity to the soul which, while still on
earth, had read and learned them. A similar formula appears
at the end of several important chapters of the _Book of the
Dead._

It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of an Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was written would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more easily, and been more sustained and better balanced.

* The composition of these libraries may be gathered from
the collections of papyri which have turned up from time to
time, and have been sold by the Arabs to Europeans buyers;
e.g. the Sallier Collection, the Anastasi Collections, and
that of Harris. They have found their way eventually into
the British Museum or the Museum at Leyden, and have been
published in the _Select Papyri_ of the former, or in the
_Monuments Égyptiens_ of the latter.

The great odes to the deities which we find in the Theban _papyri_ are better fitted, perhaps, than the profane compositions of the period, to give us an idea of the advance which Egyptian genius had made in the width and richness of its modes of expression, while still maintaining almost the same dead-level of idea which had characterised it from the outset. Among these, one dedicated to Harmakhis, the sovereign sun, is no longer restricted to a bare enumeration of the acts and virtues of the Disk, but ventures to treat of his daily course and his final triumphs in terms which might have been used in describing the victorious campaigns or the apotheosis of a Pharaoh. It begins with his awakening, at the moment when he has torn himself away from the embraces of night. Standing upright in the cabin of the divine bark, the fair boat of millions of years, with the coils of the serpent Mihni around him, he glides in silence on the eternal current of the celestial waters, guided and protected by those battalions of secondary deities with whose odd forms the monuments have made us familiar. Heaven is in delight, the earth is in joy, gods and men are making festival, to render glory to Phrâ-Harmakhis, when they see him arise in his bark, having overturned his enemies in his own time! They accompany him from hour to hour, they fight the good fight with him against Apopi, they shout aloud as he inflicts each fresh wound upon the monster: they do not even abandon him when the west has swallowed him up in its darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind us, in the definiteness of the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of a portion of the poem of Pentaûîrît, or one of those inscriptions of Ramses III. wherein he celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or Libyans.

* The remains of Egyptian romantic literature have been
collected and translated into French by Maspero, and
subsequently into English by Flinders Petrie.

The Egyptians took a delight in listening to stories. They preferred tales which dealt with the marvellous and excited their imagination, introducing speaking animals, gods in disguise, ghosts and magic. One of them tells of a king who was distressed because he had no heir, and had no sooner obtained the favour he desired from the gods, than the Seven Hathors, the mistresses of Fate, destroyed his happiness by predicting that the child would meet with his death by a serpent, a dog, or a crocodile. Efforts were made to provide against such a fatality by shutting him up in a tower; but no sooner had he grown to mans estate, than he procured himself a dog, went off to wander through the world, and married the daughter of the Prince of Naharaim. His fate meets him first under the form of a serpent, which is killed by his wife; he is next assailed by a crocodile, and the dog kills the crocodile, but as the oracles must be fulfilled, the brute turns and despatches his master without further consideration. Another story describes two brothers, Anûpû and Bitiû, who live happily together on their farm till the wife of the elder falls in love with the younger, and on his repulsing her advances, she accuses him to her husband of having offered her violence. The virtue of the younger brother would not have availed him much, had not his animals warned him of danger, and had not Phrâ-Harmakhis surrounded him at the critical moment with a stream teeming with crocodiles. He mutilates himself to prove his innocence, and announces that henceforth he will lead a mysterious existence far from mankind; he will retire to the Valley of the Acacia, place his heart on the topmost flower of the tree, and no one will be able with impunity to steal it from him. The gods, however, who frequent this earth take pity on his loneliness, and create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her hair, which is carried by its waters down into Egypt. Pharaoh finds the lock, and, intoxicated by its scent, commands his people to go in quest of the owner. Having discovered the lady, Pharaoh marries her, and ascertaining from her who she is, he sends men to cut down the Acacia, but no sooner has the flower touched the earth, than Bitiû droops and dies. The elder brother is made immediately acquainted with the fact by means of various prodigies. The wine poured out to him becomes troubled, his beer leaves a deposit. He seizes his shoes and staff and sets out to find the heart.

After a search of seven years he discovers it, and reviving it in a vase of water, he puts it into the mouth of the corpse, which at once returns to life. Bitiû, from this moment, seeks only to be revenged. He changes himself into the bull Apis, and, on being led to court, he reproaches the queen with the crime she has committed against him. The queen causes his throat to be cut; two drops of his blood fall in front of the gate of the palace, and produce in the night two splendid Persea trees, which renew the accusation in a loud voice. The queen has them cut down, but a chip from one of them flies into her mouth, and ere long she gives birth to a child who is none other than a reincarnation of Bitiû. When the child succeeds to the Pharaoh, he assembles his council, reveals himself to them, and punishes with death her who was first his wife and subsequently his mother. The hero moves throughout the tale without exhibiting any surprise at the strange incidents in which he takes part, and, as a matter of fact, they did not seriously outrage the probabilities of contemporary life. In every town sorcerers could be found who knew how to transform themselves into animals or raise the dead to life: we have seen how the accomplices of Pentaûîrît had recourse to spells in order to gain admission to the royal palace when they desired to rid themselves of Ramses III. The most extravagant romances differed from real life merely in collecting within a dozen pages more miracles than were customarily supposed to take place in the same number of years; it was merely the multiplicity of events, and not the events themselves, that gave to the narrative its romantic and improbable character. The rank of the heroes alone raised the tale out of the region of ordinary life; they are always the sons of kings, Syrian princes, or Pharaohs; sometimes we come across a vague and undefined Pharaoh, who figures under the title of Pîrûîâûi or Prûîti, but more often it is a well-known and illustrious Pharaoh who is mentioned by name. It is related how, one day, Kheops, suffering from _ennui_ within his palace, assembled his sons in the hope of learning from them something which he did not already know. They described to him one after another the prodigies performed by celebrated magicians under Kanibri and Snofrûi; and at length Mykerinos assured him that there was a certain Didi, living then not far from Meîdum, who was capable of repeating all the marvels done by former wizards. Most of the Egyptian sovereigns were, in the same way, subjects of more or less wonderful legends--Sesostris, Amenôthes III., Thûfcmosis III., Amenemhâît I., Khîti, Sahûrî, Usirkaf, and Kakiû. These stories were put into literary shape by the learned, recited by public story-tellers, and received by the people as authentic history; they finally filtered into the writings of the chroniclers, who, in introducing them into the annals, filled up with their extraordinary details the lacunæ of authentic tradition. Sometimes the narrative assumed a briefer form, and became an apologue. In one of them the members of the body were supposed to have combined against the head, and disputed its supremacy before a jury; the parties all pleaded their cause in turn, and judgment was given in due form.*

* This version of the _Fable of the Members and the Stomach_
was discovered upon a schoolboys tablet at Turin.

Animals also had their place in this universal comedy. The passions or the weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of whose existence he little dreamed.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

As La Fontaine found an illustrator in Granville, so, too, in Egypt the draughtsman brought his reed to the aid of the fabulist, and by his cleverly executed sketches gave greater point to the sarcasm of story than mere words could have conveyed. Where the author had briefly mentioned that the jackal and the cat had cunningly forced their services on the animals whom they wished to devour at their leisure, the artist would depict the jackal and the cat equipped as peasants, with wallets on their backs, and sticks over their shoulders, marching behind a troup of gazelles or a flock of fat geese: it was easy to foretell the fate of their unfortunate charges. Elsewhere it is an ox who brings up before his master a cat who has cheated him, and his proverbial stupidity would incline us to think that he will end by being punished himself for the misdeeds of which he had accused the other. Pusss sly and artful expression, the ass-headed and important-looking judge, with the wand and costume of a high and mighty dignitary, give pungency to the story, and recall the daily scenes at the judgment-seat of the lord of Thebes. In another place we see a donkey, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey giving an instrumental and vocal concert.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

A lion and a gazelle play a game of chess. A cat of fashion, with a flower in her hair, has a disagreement with a goose: they have come to blows, and the excitable puss, who fears she will come off worst in the struggle, falls backwards in a fright. The draughtsmen having once found vent for their satire, stopped at nothing, and even royalty itself did not escape their attacks. While the writers of the day made fun of the military calling, both in prose and verse, the caricaturists parodied the combats and triumphal scenes of the Ramses or Thutmosis of the day depicted on the walls of the pylons. The Pharaoh of all the rats, perched upon a chariot drawn by dogs, bravely charges an army of cats; standing in the heroic attitude of a conqueror, he pierces them with his darts, while his horses tread the fallen underfoot; his legions meanwhile in advance of him attack a fort defended by tomcats, with the same ardour that the Egyptian battalions would display in assaulting a Syrian stronghold.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

This treatment of ethics did not prevent the Egyptian writers from giving way to their natural inclinations, and composing large volumes on this subject after the manner of Kaqîmni or Phtahhotpû. One of their books, in which the aged Ani inscribes his Instructions to his son, Khonshotpû, is compiled in the form of a dialogue, and contains the usual commonplaces upon virtue, temperance, piety, the respect due to parents from children, or to the great ones of this world from their inferiors. The language in which it is written is ingenious, picturesque, and at times eloquent; the work explains much that is obscure in Egyptian life, and upon which the monuments have thrown no light. Beware of the woman who goes out surreptitiously in her town, do not follow her or any like her, do not expose thyself to the experience of what it costs a man to face an Ocean of which the bounds are unknown.* The wife whose husband is far from home sends thee letters, and invites thee to come to her daily when she has no witnesses; if she succeeds in entangling thee in her net, it is a crime which is punishable by death as soon as it is known, even if no wicked act has taken place, for men will commit every sort of crime when under this temptation alone.

* I have been obliged to paraphrase the sentence
considerably to render it intelligible to the modern reader.
The Egyptian text says briefly: Do not know the man who
braves the water of the Ocean whose bounds are unknown._To
know the man_ means here _know the state of the man_ who
does an action.