History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 26 - Vol. 01, Ch. 03: The Legendary History of Egypt, pt. 10

Extracts from it were inscribed in the temples, or even in the tombs of private persons; and three of these abridged catalogues are still extant, two coming from the temples of Seti I. and Ramses II.

at Abydos,[*] while the other was discovered in the tomb of a person of rank named Tunari, at Saqqâra.

[**] They divided this interminable succession of often problematical personages into dynasties, following in this division, rules of which we are ignorant, and which varied in the course of ages.

In the time of the Ramessides, names in the list which subsequently under the Lagides formed five groups were made to constitute one single dynasty.

[***] * The first table of Abydos, unfortunately incomplete, was discovered in the temple of Ramses II.

by Banks, in 1818;

the copy published by Caillaud and by Salt served as a foundation for Champollion's first investigations on the history of Egypt.

The original, brought to France by Mimaut, was acquired by England, and is now in the British Museum.

The second table, which is complete, all but a few signs, was brought to light by Mariette in 1864, in the excavations at Abydos, and was immediately noticed and published by Dùmichen.

The text of it is to be found in Mariette, _La Nouvelle Table d'Abydos (Revue Archéologique_, 2nd series, vol. xiii.

), and _Abydos_, vol. i.

pl.

43. ** The table of Saqqâra, discovered in 1863, has been published by Mariette, _La Table de Saqqâra (Revue Archéologique_, 2nd series, vol. x.

p. 169, et seq.

), and reproduced in the _Monuments Divers_, pl.

58. *** The Royal Canon of Turin, which dates from the Ramesside period, gives, indeed, the names of these early kings without a break, until the list reaches Unas; at this point it sums up the number of Pharaohs and the aggregate years of their reigns, thus indicating the end of a dynasty.

In the intervals between the dynasties rubrics are placed, pointing out the changes which took place in the order of direct succession.

The division of the same group of sovereigns into five dynasties has been preserved to us by Manetho.

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

[*] All the families inscribed in his lists ruled in succession.

[**] * The best restoration of the system of Manetho is that by Lepsius, _Das Konigsbuch der Alten Ægypter_, which should be completed and corrected from the memoirs of Lauth, Lieblein, Krall, and Unger.

A common fault attaches to all these memoirs, so remarkable in many respects.

They regard the work of Manetho, not as representing a more or less ingenious system applied to Egyptian history, but as furnishing an authentic scheme of this history, in which it is necessary to enclose all the royal names which the monuments have revealed, and are still daily revealing to us.

** E.

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

The country was no doubt frequently broken up into a dozen or more independent states, each possessing its own kings during several generations; but the annalists had from the outset discarded these collateral lines, and recognized only one legitimate dynasty, of which the rest were but vassals.

Their theory of legitimacy does not always agree with actual history, and the particular line of princes which they rejected as usurpers represented at times the only family possessing true rights to the crown.

[*] * It is enough to give two striking examples of this.

The royal lists of the time of the Ramessides suppress, at the end of the XVIIIth dynasty, Amenôthes IV.

and several of his successors, and give the following sequence--Amenôthes III.

, Harmhabît, Ramses I. , without any apparent hiatus;

Manetho, on the contrary, replaces the kings who were omitted, and keeps approximately to the real order between Horos (Amenôthes III.

) and Armais (Harmhabît).

Again, the official tradition of the XXth dynasty gives, between Ramses II.

and Ramses III.

, the sequence--Mînephtah, Seti IL, Nakht-Seti; Manetho, on the other hand, gives Amenemes followed by Thûôris, who appear to correspond to the Amenmeses and Siphtah of contemporary monuments, but, after Mînephtah, he omits Seti II.

and Nakhîtou-Seti, the father of Ramses III.

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

[Illustration: 325. jpg TABLE OF THE KINGS] The system of Manetho, in the state in which it has been handed down to us by epitomizers, has rendered, and continues to render, service to science; if it is not the actual history of Egypt, it is a sufficiently faithful substitute to warrant our not neglecting it when we wish to understand and reconstruct the sequence of events.

His dynasties furnish the necessary framework for most of the events and revolutions, of which the monuments have preserved us a record.

At the outset, the centre to which the affairs of the country gravitated was in the extreme north of the valley.

The principality which extended from the entrance of the Fayûm to the apex of the Delta, and subsequently the town of Memphis itself, imposed their sovereigns upon the remaining nomes, served as an emporium for commerce and national industries, and received homage and tribute from neighbouring peoples.

About the time of the VIth dynasty this centre of gravity was displaced, and tended towards the interior;

it was arrested for a short time at Heracleo-polis (IXth and Xth dynasties), and ended by fixing itself at Thebes (XIth dynasty).

From henceforth Thebes became the capital, and furnished Egypt with her rulers.

With the exception of the XIVth Xoïte dynasty, all the families occupying the throne from the XIth to the XXth dynasty were Theban.

When the barbarian shepherds invaded Africa from Asia, the Thebaïd became the last refuge and bulwark of Egyptian nationality; its chiefs struggled for many centuries against the conquerors before they were able to deliver the rest of the valley.

It was a Theban dynasty, the XVIIIth, which inaugurated the era of foreign conquest; but after the XIXth, a movement, the reverse of that which had taken place towards the end of the first period, brought back the centre of gravity, little by little, towards the north of the country.

From the time of the XXIst dynasty, Thebes ceased to hold the position of capital: Tanis, Bubastis, Mendes, Sebennytos, and above all, Sais, disputed the supremacy with each other, and political life was concentrated in the maritime provinces.

Those of the interior, ruined by Ethiopian and Assyrian invasions, lost their influence and gradually dwindled away.

Thebes became impoverished and depopulated; it fell into ruins, and soon was nothing more than a resort for devotees or travellers.

The history of Egypt is, therefore, divided into three periods, each corresponding to the suzerainty of a town or a principality:-- I.

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

II.

--Theban Period, from the XIth to the XXth dynasty.

It is divided into two parts by the invasion of the Shepherds (XVIth dynasty): a. The first Theban Empire (Middle Empire), from the XIth to the XIVth dynasty.

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

III.

--Saïte Period, from the XXIst to the XXXth dynasty, divided into two unequal parts by the Persian Conquest: a. The first Saïte period, from the XXIst to the XXVIth dynasty.

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

The Memphites had created the monarchy.

The Thebans extended the rule of Egypt far and wide, and made of her a conquering state: for nearly six centuries she ruled over the Upper Nile and over Western Asia.

Under the Saïtes she retired gradually within her natural frontiers, and from having been aggressive became assailed, and suffered herself to be crushed in turn by all the nations she had once oppressed.

[*] * The division into Ancient, Middle, and New Empire, proposed by Lepsius, has the disadvantage of not taking into account the influence which the removal of the seat of the dynasties exercised on the history of the country.

The arrangement which I have here adopted was first put forward in the _Revue critique_, 1873, vol. i.

pp. 82, 83. The monuments have as yet yielded no account of the events which tended to unite the country under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups, each of which formed a separate kingdom.

Heliopolis became the chief focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the rich plains and the marshes of the Delta.

Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the principal myths of the local religions; the Ennead to which it gave conception would never have obtained the popularity which we must acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some period, an actual suzerainty over the neighbouring plains.

It was around Heliopolis that the kingdom of Lower Egypt was organized; everything there bore traces of Heliopolitan theories--the protocol of the kings, their supposed descent from Râ, and the enthusiastic worship which they offered to the sun.

The Delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow, tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river, did not lend itself to so complete a unity.

It, too, represented a single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its component parts were more loosely united, its religion was less systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city to serve as a political and sacerdotal centre.

Hermopolis contained schools of theologians who certainly played an important part in the development of myths and dogmas; but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt.

In the south, Siût disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped their road to the north.

These three cities thwarted and neutralized one another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting authority over Upper Egypt.

Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a particular character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down to its latest days.

The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful, richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and enterprising rulers.

It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menés of Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honour of having fused the two Egypts into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human dynasties.

Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian cities.

It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile, if not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short distance from it.

[*] * The site of Thinis is not yet satisfactorily identified.

It is neither at Kom-es-Sultân, as Mariette thought, nor, according to the hypothesis of A. Schmidt, at El-Kherbeh.

Brugsch has proposed to fix the site at the village of Tineh, near Berdis, and is followed in this by Dumichen.

The present tendency is to identify it either with Girgeh itself, or with one of the small neighbouring towns--for example, Birbeh--where there are some ancient ruins; this was also the opinion of Champollion and of Nester L'hôte.

I

may mention that, in a frequently quoted passage of Hellanicos, Zoèga corrects the reading [Greek phrase], which would once more give us the name of Thinis: the mention of this town as being "situated on the river," would be a fresh reason for its identification with Girgeh.

[Illustration: 332. jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF ABYDOS, MADE BY MARIETTE IN 1865 AND 1875.

] The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain range to the other, and gradually extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban Oasis.

Its inhabitants worshipped a sky-god, Anhûri, or rather two twin gods, Anhûri-Shû, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities and became a warlike personification of Râ.

Anhûri-Shû, like all the other solar manifestations, came to be associated with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness--a Sokhît, who took for the occasion the epithet of Mîhît, the northern one.

Some of the dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the modern village of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose steep cliffs here approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos.

It would appear that, at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country, for the entire nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed.

In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired.

The city occupied a long and narrow strip of land between the canal and the first slopes of the Libyan mountains.

A brick fortress defended it from the incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the dead reared its naked walls.

Here, Anhûri, having passed from life to death, was worshipped under the name of Khontamentît, the chief of that western region whither souls repair on quitting this earth.

It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what political combinations this Sun of the Night came to be identified with Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote antiquity; it had become an established fact long before the most ancient sacred books were compiled.

Osiris Khontamentît grew rapidly in popular favour, and his temple attracted annually an increasing number of pilgrims.

The Great Oasis had been considered at first as a sort of mysterious paradise, whither the dead went in search of peace and happiness.

It was called Uîfc, the Sepulchre; this name clung to it after it had become an actual Egyptian province, and the remembrance of its ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people, so that the "cleft," or gorge in the mountain through which the doubles journeyed towards it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the other world.

At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all parts of the valley; they there awaited the coming of the dying sun, in order to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Khontamentît. Abydos, even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god the only god, whose worship, practised by all Egyptians, inspired them all with an equal devotion.

The excavations of the last few years have brought to light some, at all events, of the oldest Pharaohs known to the Egyptian annalists, namely, those whom they placed in their first human dynasties; and the locality where the monuments of these princes were discovered, shows us that these writers were correct in representing Thinis as playing an important part in the history of the early ages of their country.

If the tomb of Menés--that sovereign whom we are inclined to look upon as the first king of the official lists--lies near the village of Nagadeh, not far from Thebes,[*] those of his immediate successors are close to Thinis, in the cemeteries of Abydos.

[**] They stand at the very foot of the Libyan hills, near the entrance to the ravine--the "Cleft"--through which the mysterious oasis was reached, and thither the souls flocked in order that they might enter by a safe way the land beyond the grave.

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

** The credit of having discovered this important necropolis, and of having brought to light the earliest known monuments of the first dynasties, is entirely due to Amélineau.

He carried on important work there during four years, from 1895 to 1899: unfortunately its success was impaired by the theories which he elaborated with regard to the new monuments, and by the delay in publishing an account of the objects which remained in his possession.

*** For the "Cleft," cf.

supra, pp. 281, 282, 334. The mass of pottery, whole and broken, which has accumulated on this site from the offerings of centuries has obtained for it among the Fellahin the name of Omm-el-G-aâb--"the mother of pots."

The tombs there lie in serried ranks.

They present for the most part a rough model of the pyramids of the Memphite period--rectangular structures of bricks without mortar rising slightly above the level of the plain.

The funeral chamber occupies the centre of each, and is partly hollowed out of the soil, like a shallow well, the sides being bricked.

It had a flat timber roof, covered by a layer of about three feet of sand; the floor also was of wood, and in several cases the remains of the beams of both ceiling and pavement have been brought to light.

The body of the royal inmate was laid in the middle of the chamber, surrounded by its funeral furniture and by a part of the offerings.

The remainder was placed in the little rooms which opened out of the principal vault, sometimes on the same level, sometimes on one higher than itself; after their contents had been laid within them, the entrance to these rooms was generally walled up.

Human bodies have been found inside them, probably those of slaves killed at the funeral that they might wait upon the dead in his life beyond the grave.

[*] The objects placed in these chambers were mostly offerings, but besides these were coarse stelae bearing the name of a person, and dictated to "the double of his luminary."

[**] Some of them mention a dwarf[***] or a favourite dog of the sovereign, who accompanied his master into the tomb.

Tablets of ivory or bone skilfully incised furnish us with scenes representing some of the ceremonies of the deification of the king in his lifetime and the sacrifices offered at the time of his burial;[****] in rarer instances they record his exploits.

* El.

Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, part i. p. 14. ** The "luminous double" or the "double of his luminary" is doubtless that luminous spectre which haunted the tombs and even the houses of the living during the night, and which I have mentioned, supra, p. 160. *** Petrie found the skeletons of two dwarfs, probably the very two to whom the two stelae (Nos.

36, 37) in the tomb of Semempses were raised.

Was one of these dwarfs one of the _Danga_ of Puanît who were sought after by the Pharaohs of the Memphite dynasties?