Chapter XII: Egypt (2)

The Antiochenes and Alexandrians stood on an equal footing in insubordination and eagerness to oppose the government; we may add also in this, that the two cities, and Alexandria more particularly, flourished precisely under and through the Roman government, and had much more reason to thank it than to play the Fronde. The attitude of the Alexandrians to their Hellenic rulers is attested by the long series of nicknames, in part still used at the present day, for which the royal Ptolemies without exception were indebted to the public of their capital. The Emperor Vespasian received from the Alexandrians for the introducing of a tax on salt fish the title of the “sardine-dealer” (Κυβιοσάκτης); the Syrian Severus Alexander that of the “chief Rabbin;” but the emperors came rarely to Egypt, and the distant and foreign rulers offered no genuine butt for this ridicule. In their absence the public bestowed at least on the viceroys the same attention with persevering zeal; even the prospect of inevitable chastisement was not able to put to silence the often witty and always saucy tongue of these townsmen.[237] Vespasian contented himself in return for that attention shown to him with raising the poll-tax about six farthings, and got for doing so the further name of the “sixfarthing-man;” but their sayings about Severus Antoninus, the petty ape of Alexander the Great and the favourite of Mother Jocasta, were to cost them more dearly. The spiteful ruler appeared in all friendliness, and allowed the people to keep holiday for him, but then ordered his soldiers to charge into the festal multitude, so that for days the squares and streets of the great city ran with blood; in fact, he enjoined the dissolution of the Academy and the transfer of the legion into the city itself--neither of which, it is true, was carried into effect.

[Sidenote: Alexandrian tumults.]

But while in Antioch, as a rule, the matter did not go beyond sarcasm, the Alexandrian rabble took on the slightest pretext to stones and to cudgels. In street uproar, says an authority, himself Alexandrian, the Egyptians are before all others; the smallest spark suffices here to kindle a tumult. On account of neglected visits, on account of the confiscation of spoiled provisions, on account of exclusion from a bathing establishment, on account of a dispute between the slave of an Alexandrian of rank and a Roman foot-soldier as to the value or non-value of their respective slippers, the legions were under the necessity of charging among the citizens of Alexandria. It here became apparent that the lower stratum of the Alexandrian population consisted in greater part of natives; in these riots the Greeks no doubt acted as instigators, as indeed the rhetors, that is, in this case the inciting orators, are expressly mentioned;[238] but in the further course of the matter the spite and the savageness of the Egyptian proper came into the conflict. The Syrians were cowardly, and as soldiers the Egyptians were so too; but in a street tumult they were able to develop a courage worthy of a better cause.[239] The Antiochenes delighted in race-horses like the Alexandrians; but among the latter no chariot race ended without stone-throwing and stabbing. Both cities were affected by the persecution of the Jews under the emperor Gaius; but in Antioch an earnest word of the authorities sufficed to put an end to it, while thousands of human lives fell a sacrifice to the Alexandrian outbreak instigated by some clowns with a puppet-show. The Alexandrians, it was said, when a riot arose, gave themselves no peace till they had seen blood. The Roman officers and soldiers had a difficult position there. “Alexandria,” says a reporter of the fourth century, “is entered by the governors with trembling and despair, for they fear the justice of the people; where a governor perpetrates a wrong, there follows at once the setting of the palace on fire and stoning.” The naive trust in the rectitude of this procedure marks the standpoint of the writer, who belonged to this “people.” The continuation of this Lynch-system, dishonouring alike to the government and to the nation, is furnished by what is called Church-history, in the murder of the bishop Georgius, alike obnoxious to the heathen and to the orthodox, and of his associates under Julian, and that of the fair freethinker Hypatia by the pious community of Bishop Cyril under Theodosius II. These Alexandrian tumults were more malicious, more incalculable, more violent than the Antiochene, but just like these, not dangerous either for the stability of the empire or even for the individual government. Mischievous and ill-disposed lads are very inconvenient, but not more than inconvenient, in the household as in the commonwealth.

[Sidenote: Alexandrian worship.]

In religious matters also the two cities had an analogous position. To the worship of the land, as the native population retained it in Syria as in Egypt, the Alexandrians as well as the Antiochenes were disinclined in its original shape. But the Lagids, as well as the Seleucids, were careful of disturbing the foundations of the old religion of the country; and, merely amalgamating the older national views and sacred rites with the pliant forms of the Greek Olympus, they Hellenised these outwardly in some measure; they introduced, _e.g._ the Greek god of the lower world Pluto into the native worship, under the hitherto little mentioned name of the Egyptian god Sarapis, and then gradually transferred to this the old Osiris worship.[240] Thus the genuinely Egyptian Isis and the pseudo-Egyptian Sarapis played in Alexandria nearly the same part as Belus and Elagabalus in Syria, and made their way in a similar manner with these, although less strongly and with more vehement opposition, by degrees into the Occidental worship of the imperial period. As regards the immorality developed on occasion of these religious usages and festivals, and the unchastity approved and stimulated by priestly blessing, neither city was in a position to upbraid the other.

Down to a late time the old cultus retained its firmest stronghold in the pious land of Egypt.[241] The restoration of the old faith, as well scientifically in the philosophy annexed to it as practically in the repelling of the attacks directed by the Christians against Polytheism, and in the revival of the heathen temple-worship and the heathen divination, had its true centre in Alexandria. Then, when the new faith conquered this stronghold also, the character of the country remained nevertheless true to itself; Syria was the cradle of Christianity, Egypt was the cradle of monachism. Of the significance and the position of the Jewish body, in which the two cities likewise resembled each other, we have already spoken in another connection (p. 163). Immigrants called by the government into the land like the Hellenes, the Jews were doubtless inferior to these and were liable to poll-tax like the Egyptians, but accounted themselves, and were accounted, more than these. Their number amounted under Vespasian to a million, about the eighth part of the whole population of Egypt, and, like the Hellenes, they dwelt chiefly in the capital, of the five wards of which two were Jewish. In acknowledged independence, in repute, culture, and wealth, the body of Alexandrian Jews was even before the destruction of Jerusalem the first in the world; and in consequence of this a good part of the last act of the Jewish tragedy, as has been already set forth, was played out on Egyptian soil.

[Sidenote: The learned world of Alexandria.]

Alexandria and Antioch were pre-eminently seats of wealthy merchants and manufacturers; but in Antioch there was wanting the seaport and its belongings, and, however stirring matters were on the streets there, they bore no comparison with the life and doings of the Alexandrian artisans and sailors. On the other hand, for enjoyment of life, dramatic spectacles, dining, pleasures of love, Antioch had more to offer than the city in which “no one went idle.” Literary amusements, linking themselves especially with the rhetorical exhibitions--such as we sketched in the description of Asia Minor--fell into the background in Egypt,[242] doubtless more amidst the pressure of the affairs of the day than through the influence of the numerous and well-paid _savants_ living in Alexandria, and in great part natives of it. These men of the Museum, of whom we shall have to speak further on, did not prominently affect the character of the town as a whole, especially if they did their duty in diligent work. But the Alexandrian physicians were regarded as the best in the whole empire; it is true that Egypt was no less the genuine home of quacks and of secret remedies, and of that strange civilised form of the “shepherd-medicine,” in which pious simplicity and speculating deceit draped themselves in the mantle of science. Of the thrice-greatest Hermes we have already made mention (p. 261); the Alexandrian Sarapis, too, wrought more marvellous cures in antiquity than any one of his colleagues, and he infected even the practical emperor Vespasian, so that he too healed the blind and lame, but only in Alexandria.

[Sidenote: Scholar-life in Alexandria.]

Although the place which Alexandria occupies, or seems to occupy, in the intellectual and literary development of the later Greece and of Occidental culture generally cannot be fitly estimated in a description of the local circumstances of Egypt, but only in the delineation of this development itself, the Alexandrian scholarship and its continuation under the Roman government are too remarkable a phenomenon not to have its general position touched on in this connection. We have already observed (p. 126) that the blending of the Oriental and the Hellenic intellectual world was accomplished pre-eminently in Egypt alongside of Syria; and if the new faith which was to conquer the West issued from Syria, the science homogeneous with it--that philosophy which, alongside of and beyond the human mind, acknowledges and proclaims the supra-mundane God and the divine revelation--came pre-eminently from Egypt: probably already the new Pythagoreanism, certainly the philosophic Neo-Judaism--of which we have formerly spoken (p. 170)--as well as the new Platonism, whose founder, the Egyptian Plotinus, was likewise already mentioned (p. 126). Upon this interpenetration of Hellenic and Oriental elements, that was carried out especially in Alexandria, mainly depends the fact, that--as falls to be set forth more fully in surveying the state of things in Italy--the Hellenism there in the earlier imperial period bears pre-eminently an Egyptian form. As the old-new wisdoms associated with Pythagoras, Moses, Plato, penetrated from Alexandria into Italy, so Isis and her belongings played the first part in the easy, fashionable piety, which the Roman poets of the Augustan age and the Pompeian temples from that of Claudius exhibit to us. Art as practised in Egypt prevails in the Campanian frescoes of the same epoch, as in the Tiburtine villa of Hadrian. In keeping with this is the position which Alexandrian erudition occupies in the intellectual life of the imperial period. Outwardly it is based on the care of the state for intellectual interests, and would with more warrant link itself to the name of Alexander than to that of Alexandria; it is the realisation of the thought that in a certain stage of civilisation art and science must be supported and promoted by the authority and the resources of the state, the consistent sequel of the brilliant moment in the world’s history which placed Alexander and Aristotle side by side. It is not our intention here to inquire how in this mighty conception truth and error, the injuring and elevating of the intellectual life, became mingled, nor is the scanty after-bloom of the divine singing and of the high thinking of the free Hellenes to be once more placed side by side with the rank and yet also noble produce of the later collecting, investigating, and arranging. If the institutions which sprang from this thought could not, or, what was worse, could only apparently, renew to the Greek nation what was irrecoverably lost, they granted to it on the still free arena of the intellectual world the only possible compensation, and that, too, a glorious one. For us the local circumstances are above all to be taken into account. Artificial gardens are in some measure independent of the soil, and it is not otherwise with these scientific institutions; only that they from their nature are directed towards the courts. Material support may be imparted to them otherwise; but more important than this is the favour of the highest circles, which swells their sails, and the connections, which, meeting together in the great centres, replenish and extend these circles of science. In the better time of the monarchies of Alexander there were as many such centres as there were states, and that of the Lagid court was only the most highly-esteemed among them. The Roman republic had brought the others one after another into its power, and had set aside with the courts also the scientific institutes and circles belonging to them. The fact that the future Augustus, when he did away with the last of these courts, allowed the learned institutes connected with it to subsist, is a genuine, and not the worst, indication of the changed times. The more energetic and higher Philhellenism of the government of the Caesars was distinguished to its advantage from that of the republic by the fact that it not merely allowed Greek literati to earn money in Rome, but viewed and treated the great guardianship of Greek science as a part of the sovereignty of Alexander. No doubt, as in this regeneration of the empire as a whole, the building-plan was grander than the building. The royally patented and pensioned Muses, whom the Lagids had called to Alexandria, did not disdain to accept the like payments also from the Romans; and the imperial munificence was not inferior to the earlier regal. The fund for the library of Alexandria and the fund for free places for philosophers, poets, physicians, and scholars of all sorts,[243] as well as the immunities granted to these, were not diminished by Augustus, and were increased by the emperor Claudius--with the injunction, indeed, that the new Claudian academicians should have the Greek historical works of the singular founder publicly read year by year in their sittings. With the first library in the world Alexandria retained at the same time, through the whole imperial period, a certain primacy of scientific work, until Islam burnt the library and killed the ancient civilisation. It was not merely the opportunity thus offered, but at the same time the old tradition and turn of mind of these Hellenes, which preserved for the city that precedence, as indeed among the scholars the native Alexandrians are prominent in number and importance. In this epoch numerous and respectable labours of erudition, particularly philological and physical, proceeded from the circle of the _savants_ “of the Museum,” as they entitled themselves, like the Parisians “of the Institute”; but the literary importance, which the Alexandrian and the Pergamene court-science and court-art had in the better epoch of Hellenism for the whole Hellenic and Hellenising world, was never even remotely attached to the Romano-Alexandrian. The cause lay not in the want of talents or in other accidents, least of all in the fact that places in the Museum were bestowed by the emperor sometimes according to gifts and always according to favour, and the government dealt with them quite as with the horse of the knight and the posts of officials of the household; the case was not otherwise at the older courts. Court-philosophers and court-poets remained in Alexandria, but not the court; it was here very clearly apparent that the main matter was not pensions and rewards, but the contact--quickening for both sides--of great political and great scientific work. The latter doubtless presented itself for the new monarchy and brought its consequences with it; but the place for it was not Alexandria: this bloom of political development justly belonged to the Latins and to the Latin capital. The Augustan poetry and Augustan science attained, under similar circumstances, to a similar important and pleasing development with that attained by the Hellenistic at the court of the Pergamenes and the earlier Ptolemies. Even in the Greek circle, so far as the Roman government operated upon it in the sense of the Lagids, this development was linked more with Rome than with Alexandria. It is true that the Greek libraries of the capital were not equal to the Alexandrian, and there was no institute in Rome comparable to the Alexandrian Museum. But a position at the Roman libraries opened up relations to the court. The professorship of Greek rhetoric in the capital, instituted by Vespasian, filled up and paid for by the government, gave to its holder, although he was not an officer of the household in the same sense as the imperial librarian, a similar position, and was regarded, doubtless on that account, as the chief professorial chair of the empire.[244] But, above all, the office of imperial cabinet secretary in its Greek division was the most esteemed and the most influential position to which a Greek man of letters could at all attain. Transference from the Alexandrian academy to such an office in the capital was demonstrably promotion.[245] Even apart from all which the Greek literati otherwise found in Rome alone, the court-positions and the court-offices were enough to draw the most distinguished of them thither rather than to the Egyptian “free table.” The learned Alexandria of this time became a sort of “jointure” of Greek science, worthy of respect and useful, but of no pervading influence on the great movement of culture or mis-culture of the imperial period; the places in the Museum were, as was reasonable, not seldom bestowed on scholars of note from abroad, and for the institution itself the books of the library were of more account than the burgesses of the great commercial and manufacturing city.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Egyptian army.]

The military circumstances of Egypt laid down, just as in Syria, a double task for the troops there; the protection of the south frontier and of the east coast, which indeed may not be remotely compared with that required for the line of the Euphrates, and the maintenance of internal order in the country as in the capital. The Roman garrison consisted, apart from the ships stationed at Alexandria and on the Nile, which seem chiefly to have served for the control of the customs, under Augustus of three legions, along with the not numerous auxiliary troops belonging to them, about 20,000 men. This was about half as many as he destined for all the Asiatic provinces--which was in keeping with the importance of this province for the new monarchy. But the occupying force was probably even under Augustus himself diminished about a third, and then under Domitian by about a further third. At first two legions were stationed outside of the capital; but the main camp, and soon the only one, lay before its gates, where Caesar the younger had fought out the last battle with Antonius, in the suburb called accordingly Nicopolis. The suburb had its own amphitheatre and its own imperial popular festival, and was quite independently organised; so that for a time the public amusements of Alexandria were thrown into the shade by those of Nicopolis. The immediate watching of the frontier fell to the auxiliaries. The same causes therefore which relaxed discipline in Syria--the police-character of their primary task and their immediate contact with the great capital--came into play also for the Egyptian troops; to which fell to be added, that the bad custom of allowing to the soldiers with the standards a married life or at any rate a substitute for it, and of filling up the troop from their camp-children, had for long been naturalised among the Macedonian soldiers of the Ptolemies, and soon prevailed also among the Romans, at least up to a certain degree. Accordingly, the Egyptian corps, in which the Occidentals served still more rarely than in the other armies of the East, and which was recruited in great part from the citizens and the camp of Alexandria, appears to have been among all the sections of the army the least esteemed; as indeed also the officers of this legion, as was already observed, were inferior in rank to those of the rest.

The properly military task of the Egyptian troops was closely connected with the measures for the elevation of Egyptian commerce. It will be convenient to take the two together, and to set forth in connection, in the first instance, the relations to the continental neighbours in the south, and then those to Arabia and India.

[Sidenote: Aethiopia.]

[Sidenote: War with queen Candace.]

Egypt reaches on the south, as was already remarked, as far as the barrier which the last cataract, not far from Syene (Assouan), opposes to navigation. Beyond Syene begins the stock of the Kesch, as the Egyptians call them, or, as the Greeks translated it, the dark-coloured, the Aethiopians, probably akin to the Axomites to be afterwards mentioned, and, although perhaps sprung from the same root as the Egyptians, at any rate confronting them in historical development as a foreign people. Further to the south follow the Nahsiu of the Egyptians, that is, the Blacks, the Nubians of the Greek, the modern Negroes. The kings of Egypt had in better times extended their rule far into the interior, or at least emigrant Egyptians had established for themselves here dominions of their own; the written monuments of the Pharaonic government go as far as above the third cataract to Dongola, where Nabata (near Nûri) seems to have been the centre of their settlements; and considerably further up the stream, some six days’ journey to the north of Khartoum, near Shendy, in Sennaar, in the neighbourhood of the long forgotten Aethiopian town Meroe, are found groups of temples and pyramids, although destitute of writing. When Egypt became Roman, all this development of power was long a matter of the past; and beyond Syene there ruled an Aethiopian stock under queens, who regularly bore the name or the title Candace,[246] and resided in that once Egyptian Nabata in Dongola; a people at a low stage of civilisation, predominantly shepherds, in a position to bring into the field an army of 30,000, but equipped with shields of ox-hides, armed mostly not with swords, but with axes or lances and iron-mounted clubs, predatory neighbours, not a match for the Romans in combat. In the year 730 or 731 {24, 23. B.C.} these invaded the Roman territory--as they asserted, because the presidents of the nearest nomes had injured them--as the Romans thought, because the Egyptian troops were then to a large extent occupied in Arabia, and they hoped to be able to plunder with immunity. In reality they overcame the three cohorts who covered the frontier, and dragged away the inhabitants from the nearest Egyptian districts--Philae, Elephantine, Syene--as slaves, and the statues of the emperor, which they found there, as tokens of victory. But the governor, who just then took up the administration of the province, Gaius Petronius, speedily requited the attack; with 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry he not merely drove them out, but followed them along the Nile into their own land, defeated them emphatically at Pselchis (Dekkeh), and stormed their stronghold Premis (Ibrim), as well as the capital itself, which he destroyed. It is true that the queen, a brave woman, renewed the attack next year and attempted to storm Premis, where a Roman garrison had been left; but Petronius brought seasonable relief, and so the Aethiopian queen determined to send envoys and to sue for peace. The emperor not merely granted it, but gave orders to evacuate the subject territory, and rejected the proposal of his governor to make the vanquished tributary. This event, otherwise not important, is remarkable in so far as just then the definite resolution of the Roman government became apparent, to maintain absolutely the Nile valley as far as the river was navigable, but not at all to contemplate taking possession of the wide districts on the upper Nile. Only the tract from Syene, where under Augustus the frontier-troops were stationed, as far as Hiera Sycaminos (Maharraka), the so-called Twelve-mile-land (Δωδεκάσχοινος), while never organised as a nome and never viewed as a part of Egypt, was yet regarded as belonging to the empire; and at least under Domitian the posts were even advanced as far as Hiera Sycaminos.[247] On that footing substantially the matter remained. The Oriental expedition planned by Nero (p. 61) was certainly intended to embrace Aethiopia; but it did not go beyond the preliminary reconnoitring of the country by Roman officers as far as Meroe. The relations with the neighbours on the Egyptian southern frontier down to the middle of the third century must have been on the whole of a peaceful kind, although there were not wanting minor quarrels with that Candace and with her successors, who appear to have maintained their position for a considerable time, and subsequently perhaps with other tribes, that attained to ascendency beyond the imperial bounds.

[Sidenote: The Blemyes.]

It was not till the empire was unhinged in the period of Valerian and Gallienus, that the neighbours broke over this boundary. We have already mentioned (p. 250) that the Blemyes settled in the mountains on the south-east frontier, formerly obeying the Aethiopians, a barbarous people of revolting savageness, who even centuries later had not abandoned human sacrifices, advanced at this epoch independently against Egypt, and by an understanding with the Palmyrenes occupied a good part of upper Egypt, and held it for a series of years. The vigorous emperor Probus drove them out; but the inroads once begun did not cease,[248] and the emperor Diocletian resolved to draw back the frontier. The narrow “Twelve-mile-land” demanded a strong garrison, and brought in little to the state. The Nubians, who roamed in the Libyan desert, and were constantly visiting in particular the great Oasis, agreed to give up their old abodes and to settle in this region, which was formally ceded to them; at the same time fixed annual payments were made to them as well as to their eastern neighbours the Blemyes, nominally in order to compensate them for guarding the frontier, in reality beyond doubt to buy off their plundering expeditions, which nevertheless of course did not cease. It was a retrograde step--the first, since Egypt became Roman.

[Sidenote: Aethiopian commercial traffic.]

Of the mercantile intercourse on this frontier little is reported from antiquity. As the cataracts of the upper Nile closed the direct route by water, the traffic between the interior of Africa and the Egyptians, particularly the trade in ivory, was carried on in the Roman period more by way of the Abyssinian ports than along the Nile; but it was not wanting also in this direction.[249] The Aethiopians who dwelt in numbers beside the Egyptians on the island of Philae were evidently mostly merchants, and the border-peace that here prevailed must have contributed its part to the prosperity of the frontier-towns of upper Egypt and of Egyptian trade generally.

[Sidenote: The Egyptian east coast and general commerce.]

[Sidenote: The sea route to India.]

The east coast of Egypt presented to the development of general traffic a problem difficult of solution. The thoroughly desolate and rocky shore was incapable of culture proper, and in ancient as in later times a desert.[250] On the other hand the two seas, eminently important for the development of culture in the ancient world, the Mediterranean and the Red or Indian, approach each other most closely at the two most northern extremities of the latter, the Persian and the Arabian gulfs; the former receives into it the Euphrates, which in the middle of its course comes near to the Mediterranean; the latter is only a few days’ march distant from the Nile, which flows into the same sea. Hence in ancient times the commercial intercourse between the East and the West took preponderantly either the direction along the Euphrates to the Syrian and Arabian coast, or it made its way from the east coast of Egypt to the Nile. The traffic routes from the Euphrates were older than those by way of the Nile; but the latter had the advantage of the stream being better for navigation and of the shorter land-transport; the getting rid of the latter by preparing an artificial water-route was in the case of the Euphrates excluded, in that of Egypt found in ancient as in modern times difficult doubtless, but not impossible. Accordingly nature itself prescribed to the land of Egypt to connect the east coast with the course of the Nile and the northern coast by land or water routes; and the beginnings of such structures go back to the time of those native rulers who first opened up Egypt to foreign countries and to traffic on a great scale. Following in the traces apparently of older structures of the great rulers of Egypt, Sethi I. and Rhamses II., king Necho, the son of Psammetichus (610-594 B.C.) began the building of a canal, which, branching off from the Nile in the neighbourhood of Cairo, was to furnish a water-communication with the bitter lakes near Ismailia, and through these with the Red Sea, without being able, however, to complete the work. That in this he had in view not merely the control of the Arabian Gulf and the commercial traffic with the Arabians, but already brought within his horizon the Persian and the Indian seas, and the more remote East, is probable, for this reason, that the same ruler suggested the only circumnavigation of Africa executed in antiquity. Beyond doubt thus thought king Darius I., the lord of Persia as well as of Egypt; he completed the canal, but, as his memorial-stones found on the spot mention, he caused it to be filled up again, probably because his engineers feared that the water of the sea, admitted into the canal, would overflow the fields of Egypt.

[Sidenote: The Egyptian eastern ports.]

The rivalry of the Lagids and the Seleucids, which dominated the policy of the post-Alexandrine period generally, was at the same time a contest between the Euphrates and the Nile. The former was in possession, the latter the pretender; and in the better time of the Lagids the peaceful offensive was pursued with great energy. Not only was that canal undertaken by Necho and Darius, now named the “river of Ptolemaeus,” opened for the first time to navigation by the second Ptolemy Philadelphus († 247 B.C.); but comprehensive harbour-structures were carried out at the points of the difficult east coast that were best fitted for the security of the ships and for the connection with the Nile. Above all, this was done at the mouth of the canal leading to the Nile, at the townships of Arsinoe, Cleopatris, Clysma, all three in the region of the present Suez. Further downward, besides several minor structures, arose the two important emporia, Myos Hormos, somewhat above the present Kosêr, and Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, nearly in the same latitude with Syene on the Nile as well as with the Arabian port Leuce Come, the former distant six or seven, the latter eleven days’ march from the town Coptos, near which the Nile bends farthest to the eastward, and connected with this chief emporium on the Nile by roads constructed across the desert and provided with large cisterns. The goods traffic of the time of the Ptolemies probably went less through the canal than by these land routes to Coptos.

[Sidenote: Abyssinia.]

Beyond that Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, the Egypt proper of the Lagids did not extend. The settlements lying farther to the south, Ptolemais “for the chase” below Suâkim, and the southmost township of the Lagid kingdom, the subsequent Adulis, at that time perhaps named “Berenice the Golden” or “near Saba,” Zula not far from the present Massowah, by far the best harbour on all this coast, were not more than coast-forts and had no communication by land with Egypt. These remote settlements were beyond doubt either lost or voluntarily abandoned under the later Lagids, and at the epoch when the Roman rule began, the Trogodytic Berenice was on the coast, like Syene in the interior, the limit of the empire.

[Sidenote: The kingdom of the Axomites.]

In this region, never occupied or early evacuated by the Egyptians, there was formed--whether at the end of the Lagid epoch or in the first age of the empire--an independent state of some extent and importance, that of the Axomites,[251] corresponding to the modern Habesh. It derives its name from the town Axômis, the modern Axum, situated in the heart of this Alpine country eight days’ journey from the sea, in the modern country of Tigre; the already-mentioned best emporium on this coast, Adulis in the bay of Massowah, served it as a port. The original population of the kingdom of Axômis, of which tolerably pure remnants still maintain themselves at the present day in individual tracts of the interior, belonged from its language, the Agau, to the same Hamitic cycle with the modern Bego, Sali, Dankali, Somali, Galla; to the Egyptian population this linguistic circle seems related in a similar way as the Greeks to the Celts and Slaves, so that here doubtless for research an affinity may subsist, but for their historical existence rather nothing but contrast. But before our knowledge of this country so much as begins, superior Semitic immigrants belonging to the Himyaritic stocks of southern Arabia must have crossed the narrow gulf of the sea and rendered their language as well as their writing at home there. The old written language of Habesh, extinct in popular use since the seventeenth century, the Ge’ez, or as it is for the most part erroneously termed, the Aethiopic,[252] is purely Semitic,[253] and the still living dialects, the Amhara and the Tigriña, are so also in the main, only disturbed by the influence of the older Agau.

[Sidenote: Its extent and development.]

As to the beginnings of this commonwealth no tradition has been preserved. At the end of Nero’s time, and perhaps already long before, the king of the Axomites ruled on the African coast nearly from Suâkim to the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. Some time afterwards--the epoch cannot be more precisely defined--we find him as a frontier-neighbour of the Romans on the southern border of Egypt, and on the other coast of the Arabian Gulf in warlike activity in the territory intervening between the Roman possession and that of the Sabaeans, and so coming into immediate contact towards the north with the Roman territory also in Arabia; commanding, moreover, the African coast outside of the Gulf perhaps as far as Cape Guardafui. How far his territory of Axômis extended inland is not clear; Aethiopia, that is, Sennaar and Dongola, at least in the earlier imperial period, hardly belonged to it; perhaps at this time the kingdom of Nabata may have subsisted alongside of the Axomitic. Where the Axomites meet us, we find them at a comparatively advanced stage of development. Under Augustus the Egyptian commercial traffic increased not less with these African harbours than with India. The king had the command not merely of an army, but, as his very relations to Arabia presuppose, also of a fleet. A Greek merchant, who was present in Adulis, terms king Zoskales, who ruled in Vespasian’s time in Axômis, an upright man and acquainted with Greek writing; one of his successors has set up on the spot a memorial-writing composed in current Greek which told his deeds to the foreigners; he even names himself in it a son of Ares--which title the kings of the Axomites retained down to the fourth century--and dedicates the throne, which bears that memorial inscription, to Zeus, to Ares, and to Poseidon. Already in Zoskales’s time that foreigner names Adulis a well organised emporium; his successors compelled the roving tribes of the Arabian coast to keep peace by land and by sea, and restored a land communication from their capital to the Roman frontier, which, considering the nature of this district primarily left dependent on communication by sea, was not to be esteemed of slight account. Under Vespasian brass pieces, which were divided according to need, served the natives instead of money, and Roman coin circulated only among the strangers settled in Adulis; in the later imperial period the kings themselves coined. The Axomite ruler withal calls himself king of kings, and no trace points to Roman clientship; he practises coining in gold, which the Romans did not allow, not merely in their own territory but even within the range of their power. There was hardly another land in the imperial period beyond the Romano-Hellenic bounds which had appropriated to itself Hellenic habits with equal independence and to an equal extent as the state of Habesh. That in the course of time the popular language, indigenous or rather naturalised from Arabia, gained the upper hand and dispossessed the Greek, is probably traceable partly to Arabian influence, partly to that of Christianity and the revival connected with it of the popular dialects, such as we found also in Syria and Egypt; and it does not exclude the view that the Greek language in Axomis and Adulis in the first and second centuries of our era had a similar position to what it had in Syria and Egypt, so far as it is allowable to compare small and great.

[Sidenote: Rome and the Axomites.]

Of political relations of the Romans to the state of Axomis hardly anything is mentioned from the first three centuries of our era, to which our narrative is confined. With the rest of Egypt they took possession also of the ports of the east coast down to the remote Trogodytic Berenice, which on account of that remoteness was in the Roman period placed under a commandant of its own.[254] Of extending their territory into the inhospitable and worthless mountains along the coast there was never any thought; nor can the sparse population, standing at the lowest stage of development, in the immediately adjoining region have ever given serious trouble to the Romans. As little did the Caesars attempt, as the early Lagids had done, to possess themselves of the emporia of the Axomitic coast. There is express mention only of the fact that envoys of the Axomite kings negotiated with the emperor Aurelian. But this very silence, as well as the formerly indicated independent position of the ruler,[255] leads to the inference that here the recognised frontier was permanently respected on both sides, and that a relation of good neighbourhood subsisted, which proved advantageous to the interests of peace and especially of Egyptian commerce. That the latter, especially the important traffic in ivory, in which Adulis was the chief entrepôt for the interior of Africa, was carried on predominantly from Egypt and in Egyptian vessels, cannot--considering the superior civilisation of Egypt--be subject to any doubt even as regards the Lagid period; and in Roman times this traffic probably only increased in amount, without undergoing further change.

[Sidenote: The west coast of Arabia.]

Far more important for Egypt and the Roman empire generally than the traffic with the African south was that which subsisted with Arabia and the coasts situated farther to the east. The Arabian peninsula remained aloof from the sphere of Hellenic culture. It would possibly have been otherwise had king Alexander lived a year longer; death swept him away amidst the preparations for sailing round and occupying the already-explored south coast of Arabia, setting out from the Persian Gulf. But the voyage which the great king had not been able to enter on was never undertaken by any Greek after him. From the most remote times, on the other hand, a lively intercourse had taken place between the two coasts of the Arabian Gulf over its moderately broad waters. In the Egyptian accounts from the time of the Pharaohs the voyages to the land of Punt, and the spoils thence brought home in frankincense, ebony, emeralds, leopards’ skins, play an important part. It has been already (p. 148) mentioned that subsequently the northern portion of the Arabian west coast belonged to the territory of the Nabataeans, and with this came into the power of the Romans. This was a desolate beach;[256] only the emporium Leuce Come, the last town of the Nabataeans and so far also of the Roman empire, was not merely in maritime intercourse with Berenice lying opposite, but was also the starting-point of the caravan-route leading to Petra and thence to the ports of southern Syria, and in so far, one of the centres of the traffic between the East and the West (p. 151). The adjoining regions on the south, northward and southward of the modern Mecca, corresponded in their natural character to the opposite Trogodyte country, and were, like this, neither politically nor commercially of importance, nor yet apparently united under one sceptre, but occupied by roving tribes. But at the south end of this gulf was the home of the only Arabic stock, which attained to greater importance in the pre-Islamic period. The Greeks and the Romans name these Arabs in the earlier period after the people most prominent at that time Sabaeans, in later times after another tribe usually Homerites, as, according to the new Arabic form of the latter name, now for the most part Himjarites.

[Sidenote: The state of the Homerites.]

The development of this remarkable people had reached a considerable stage long before the beginning of the Roman rule over Egypt.[257] Its native seat, the Arabia Felix of the ancients, the region of Mocha and Aden, is surrounded by a narrow plain along the shore intensely hot and desolate, but the healthy and temperate interior of Yemen and Hadramaut produces on the mountain-slopes and in the valleys a luxuriant vegetation, and the numerous mountain-waters permit in many respects with careful management a garden-like cultivation. We have even at the present day an expressive testimony to the rich and peculiar civilisation of this region in the remains of city-walls and towers, of useful buildings, particularly aqueducts, and temples covered with inscriptions, which completely confirm the description of ancient authors as to the magnificence and luxury of this region; the Arabian geographers have written books concerning the strongholds and castles of the numerous petty princes of Yemen. Famous are the ruins of the mighty embankment which once in the valley of Mariaba dammed up the river Dana and rendered it possible to water the fields upwards,[258] and from the bursting of which, and the migration alleged to have been thereby occasioned of the inhabitants of Yemen to the north, the Arabs for long counted their years. But above all this district was one of the original seats of wholesale traffic by land and by sea, not merely because its productions, frankincense, precious stones, gum, cassia, aloes, senna, myrrh, and numerous other drugs called for export, but also because this Semitic stock was, just like that of the Phoenicians, formed by its whole character for commerce; Strabo says, just like the more recent travellers, that the Arabs are all traders and merchants. The coining of silver is here old and peculiar; the coins were at first modelled after Athenian dies, and later after Roman coins of Augustus, but on an independent, probably Babylonian basis.[259] From the land of these Arabians the original frankincense-routes led across the desert to the marts on the Arabian gulf, Aelana and the already-mentioned Leuce Come, and the emporia of Syria, Petra and Gaza;[260] these routes of the land-traffic, which along with those of the Euphrates and the Nile, furnish the means of intercourse between East and West from the earliest times, may be conjectured to be the proper basis of the prosperity of Yemen. But the sea-traffic likewise soon became associated with them; the great mart for this was Adane, the modern Aden. From this the goods went by water, certainly in the main in Arabian ships, either to those same marts on the Arabian gulf and so to the Syrian ports, or to Berenice and Myos Hormos, and from thence to Coptos and Alexandria. We have already stated that the same Arabs likewise at a very early time possessed themselves of the opposite coast, and transplanted their language, their writing and their civilisation to Habesh. If Coptos, the Nile-emporium for the eastern traffic, had just as many Arab as Egyptian inhabitants, if even the emerald-mines above Berenice (near Jebel Zebâra) were worked by the Arabs, this shows that in the Lagid state itself they had the trade up to a certain degree in their hands; and its passive attitude in respect to the traffic on the Arabian Sea, whither at most an expedition against the pirates was once undertaken,[261] is the more readily intelligible, if a state well organised and powerful at sea ruled these waters. We meet the Arabs of Yemen even beyond their own sea. Adane remained down to the Roman imperial times a mart of traffic on the one hand with India, on the other with Egypt, and, in spite of its own unfavourable position on the treeless shore, rose to such prosperity that the name of “Arabia Felix” had primary reference to this town. The dominion, which in our days the Imam of Muscat in the south-east of the peninsula has exercised over the islands of Socotra and Zanzibar and the African east coast from Cape Guardafui southward, pertained in Vespasian’s time “from of old” to the princes of Arabia; the island of Dioscorides, that same Socotra, belonged then to the king of Hadramaut, Azania, that is, the coast of Somal and further southward, to one of the viceroys of his western neighbour, the king of the Homerites. The southernmost station on the east African coast which the Egyptian merchants knew of, Rhapta in the region of Zanzibar, was leased from this sheikh by the merchants of Muza, that is nearly the modern Mocha, “and they send thither their trading-ships, mostly manned by Arabian captains and sailors, who are accustomed to deal and are often connected by marriage with the natives, and are acquainted with the localities and the languages of the country.” The cultivation of the soil and industry went hand in hand with commerce; in the houses of rank in India, Arabian wine was drunk alongside of the Falernian from Italy and the Laodicene from Syria; and the lances and shoemakers’ awls, which the natives of the coast of Malabar purchased from the foreign traders were manufactured at Muza. Thus this region, which moreover sold much and bought little, became one of the richest in the world.

How far its political development kept pace with the economic, cannot be determined for the pre-Roman and earlier imperial period; only this much seems to result both from the accounts of the Occidentals and from the native inscriptions, that this south-west point of Arabia was divided among several independent rulers with territories of moderate size. There subsisted in that quarter, alongside of the more prominent Sabaeans and Homerites, the already-mentioned Chatramotitae in the Hadramaut, and northward in the interior the Minaeans, all under princes of their own.

With reference to the Arabians of Yemen the Romans pursued the very opposite policy to that adopted towards the Axomites. Augustus, for whom the non-enlargement of the empire was the starting-point of the imperial government, and who allowed almost all the plans of conquest of his father and master to drop, made an exception of the south-west coast of Arabia, and here took aggressive measures of his own free will. This was done on account of the position which this group of peoples occupied at that time in Indo-Egyptian commercial intercourse. In order to bring the province of his dominions, which was politically and financially the most important, up, in an economic aspect, to the level which his predecessors in rule had neglected to establish or had allowed to decline, he needed above all to obtain inter-communication between Arabia and India on the one hand and Europe on the other. The Nile-route for long competed successfully with the Arabian and the Euphrates routes; but Egypt played in this respect, as we saw, a subordinate part at least under the later Lagids. A trading rivalry subsisted not with the Axomites, but doubtless with the Arabians; if the Egyptian traffic was to be converted from a passive into an active, from indirect into direct, the Arabs had to be overthrown; and this it was that Augustus desired and the Roman government in some measure achieved.

[Sidenote: Expedition of Gallus.]

In the sixth year of his reign in Egypt (end of 729) {25 B.C.} Augustus despatched a fleet, fitted out expressly for this expedition, of 80 warships and 130 transports, and the half of the Egyptian army, a corps of 10,000 men, without reckoning the contingents of the two nearest client kings, the Nabataean Obodas and the Jew Herod, against the states of Yemen, in order either to subjugate or at least to ruin them,[262] while at the same time the treasures there accumulated were certainly taken into account. But the enterprise completely miscarried, and that from the incapacity of the leader, the governor of Egypt at the time, Gaius Aelius Gallus.[263] Since the occupation and the possession of the desolate coast from Leuce Come downwards to the frontier of the enemy’s territory was of no consequence at all, it was necessary that the expedition should be directed immediately against the latter, and that the army should be conducted from the most southern Egyptian port at once into Arabia Felix.[264] Instead of this the fleet was got ready at the most northerly, that of Arsinoe (Suez), and the army was landed at Leuce Come, just as if it were the object to prolong as much as possible the voyage of the fleet and the march of the troops. Besides, the war-vessels were superfluous, since the Arabians possessed no war-fleet, the Roman sailors were unacquainted with the navigation on the Arabian coast, and the transports, although specially built for this expedition, were unsuited for their purpose. The pilots had difficulty in finding their way between the shallows and the rocks, and even the voyage in Roman waters from Arsinoe to Leuce Come cost many vessels and men. Here the winter was passed; in the spring of 730 the campaign in the enemy’s country began. The Arabians offered no hindrance, but Arabia undoubtedly did so. Wherever the double axes and the slings and bows came into collision with the pilum and the sword, the natives dispersed like chaff before the wind; but the diseases, which are endemic in the country, scurvy, leprosy, palsy, decimated the soldiers worse than the most bloody battle, and all the more as the general did not know how to move rapidly forward the unwieldy mass of his army. Nevertheless the Roman army arrived in front of the walls of Mariaba, the capital of the Sabaeans first affected by the attack. But, as the inhabitants closed the gates of their powerful walls still standing,[265] and offered energetic resistance, the Roman general despaired of solving the problem proposed to him; and, after he had lain six days in front of the town, he entered on his retreat, which the Arabians hardly disturbed in earnest, and which was accomplished with comparative rapidity under the pressure of need, although with a severe loss in men.

[Sidenote: Further enterprises against the Arabs.]

It was a bad miscarriage; but Augustus did not abandon the conquest of Arabia. It has already been related (p. 39) that the journey to the East, which the crown-prince Gaius entered upon in the year 753 {1 B.C.}, was to terminate at Arabia; it was this time contemplated after the subjugation of Armenia to reach, in concert with the Parthian government or in case of need after the overthrow of their armies, the mouth of the Euphrates, and from thence to take the sea-route which the admiral Nearchus had once explored for Alexander, towards Arabia Felix.[266] These hopes ended in another but not less unfortunate way, through the Parthian arrow which struck the crown-prince before the walls of Artageira. With him was buried the plan of Arabian conquest for all the future. The great peninsula remained through the whole imperial period--apart from the stripes of coast on the north and north-west--in possession of that freedom from which Islam, the executioner of Hellenism, was in its own time to issue.

[Sidenote: Injury to Arabian commerce.]

But the Arabian commerce was at all events broken down partly by the measures, to be explained further on, of the Roman government for protecting the Egyptian navigation, partly by a blow struck by the Romans against the chief mart of Indo-Arabian traffic. Whether under Augustus himself, possibly among the preparations for the invasion to be carried out by Gaius, or under one of his immediate successors, a Roman fleet appeared before Adane and destroyed the place; in Vespasian’s time it was a village, and its prosperity was gone. We know only the naked fact,[267] but it speaks for itself. A counterpart to the destruction of Corinth and of Carthage by the republic, it, like these, attained its end, and secured for the Romano-Egyptian trade the supremacy in the Arabian gulf and in the Indian Sea.

[Sidenote: Later fortunes of the Homerites.]