History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 27 - Vol. 01, Ch. 03: The Legendary History of Egypt, pt. 11

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

The offerings themselves were such as we meet with in burials of a subsequent age--bread, cakes, meat, and poultry of various sorts--indeed, everything we find mentioned in the lists inscribed in the tombs of the later dynasties, particularly the jars of wine and liquors, on the clay bungs of which are still legible the impression of the signet bearing the name of the sovereign for whose use they were sealed.

Besides stuffs and mats, the furniture comprised chairs, beds, stools, an enormous number of vases, some in coarse pottery for common use, others in choice stone such as diorite, granite, or rock crystal very finely worked, on the fragments of all of which may be read cut in outline the names and preamble of the Pharaoh to whom the object belonged.

The ceremonial of the funerary offering and its significance was already fully developed at this early period; this can be gathered by the very nature of the objects buried with the deceased, by their number, quantity, and by the manner in which they were arranged.

Like their successors in the Egypt of later times, these ancient kings expected to continue their material existence within the tomb, and they took precautions that life there should be as comfortable as circumstances should permit.

Access to the tomb was sometimes gained by a sloping passage or staircase; this made it possible to see if everything within was in a satisfactory condition.

After the dead had been enclosed in his chamber, and five or six feet of sand had been spread over the beams which formed its roof, the position of the tomb was shown merely by a scarcely perceptible rise in the soil of the necropolis, and its site would soon have been forgotten, if its easternmost limits had not been marked by two large stelae on which were carefully engraved one of the appellations of the king--that of his double, or his Horus name.

[*] * For the Horus name of the Pharaohs, see vol. ïi. , pp. 23- 25. It was on this spot, upon an altar placed between the two stelæ, that the commemorative ceremonies were celebrated, and the provisions renewed on certain days fixed by the religious law.

Groups of private tombs were scattered around,--the resting-places of the chief officers of the sovereign, the departed Pharaoh being thus surrounded in death by the same courtiers as those who had attended him during his earthly existence.

The princes, whose names and titles have been revealed to us by the inscriptions on these tombs, have not by any means been all classified as yet, the prevailing custom at that period having been to designate them by their Horus names, but rarely by their proper names, which latter is the only one which figures in the official lists which we possess of the Egyptian kings.

A few texts, more explicit than the rest, enable us to identify three of them with the Usaphais, the Miebis, and the Semempses of Manetho--the fifth, sixth, and seventh kings of the Ist dynasty.

[*] The fact that they are buried in the necropolis of Abydos apparently justifies the opinion of the Egyptian chroniclers that they were natives of Thinis.

Is the Menés who usually figures at their head[**] also a Thinite prince?

* The credit is due to Sethe of having attributed their ordinary names to several of the kings of the Ist dynasty with Horus names only which were found by Amélineau, and these identifications have been accepted by all Egyptologists.

Pétrie discovered quite recently on some fragments of vases the Horus names of these same princes, together with their ordinary names.

The Usaphais, the Miebis, and the Semempses of Manetho are now satisfactorily identified with three of the Pharaohs discovered by Amélineau and by Pétrie.

** In the time of Seti I. and Ramses II.

he heads the list of the Table of Abydos.

Under Ramses II.

his statue was carried in procession, preceding all the other royal statues.

Finally, the "Royal Papyrus" of Turin, written in the time of Ramses I. , begins the entire series of the human Pharaohs with his name.

Several scholars believe that his ordinary name, Mini, is to be read on an ivory tablet engraved for a sovereign whose Horus name--Ahauîti, the warlike--is known to us from several documents, and whose tomb also has been discovered, but at Nagadeh.

It is a great rectangular structure of bricks 165 feet long and 84 broad, the external walls of which were originally ornamented by deep polygonal grooves, resembling those which score the façade of Chaldæan buildings, but the Nagadeh tomjb has a second brick wall which fills up all the hollows left in the first one, and thus hides the primitive decoration of the monument.

The building contains twenty-one chambers, five of which in the centre apparently constituted the dwelling of the deceased, while the others, grouped around these, serve as storehouses from whence he could draw his provisions at will.

Did the king buried within indeed bear the name of Menés,[*] and if such was the case, how are we to reconcile the tradition of his Thinite origin with the existence of his far-off tomb in the neighbourhood of Thebes?

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

Objects bearing his Horus name have been found at Omm-el-Gaâb, and it is evident that he belonged to the same age as the sovereigns interred in this necropolis.

If, indeed, Menés was really his personal name, there is no reason against his being the Menés of tradition, he whom the Pharaohs of the glorious Theban dynasties regarded as the earliest of their purely human ancestors.

Whether he was really the first king who reigned over the whole of Egypt, or whether he had been preceded by other sovereigns whose monuments we may find in some site still unexplored, is a matter for conjecture.

That princes had exercised authority in various parts of the country is still uncertain, but that the Egyptian historians did not know them, seems to prove that they had left no written records of their names.

At any rate, a Menés lived who reigned at the outset of history, and doubtless before long the Nile valley, when more carefully explored, will yield us monuments recording his actions and determining his date.

The civilization of the Egypt of his time was ruder than that with which we have hitherto been familiar on its soil, but even at that early period it was almost as complete.

It had its industries and its arts, of which the cemeteries furnish us daily with the most varied examples: weaving, modelling in clay, wood-carving, the incising of ivory, gold, and the hardest stone were all carried on; the ground was cultivated with hoe and plough; tombs were built showing us the model of what the houses and palaces must have been; the country had its army, its administrators, its priests, its nobles, its writing, and its system of epigraphy differs so little from that to which we are accustomed in later ages, that we can decipher it with no great difficulty.

Frankly speaking, all that we know at present of the first of the Pharaohs beyond the mere fact of his existence is practically _nil_, and the stories related of him by the writers of classical times are mere legends arranged to suit the fancy of the compiler.

"This Menés, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with dykes.

For the river formerly followed the sandhills for some distance on the Libyan side.

Menés, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to the south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the river through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain ranges.

Then Menés, the first who was king, having enclosed a firm space of ground with dykes, there founded that town which is still called Memphis; he then made a lake round it, to the north and west, fed by the river, the city being bounded on the east by the Nile."

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

The history of Memphis, such as it can be gathered from the monuments, differs considerably from the tradition current in Egypt at the time of Herodotus.

It appears, indeed, that at the outset, the site on which it subsequently arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbû-hazû--the white wall--which was dependent on Heliopolis, and in which Phtah possessed a sanctuary.

After the "white wall" was separated from the Heliopolitan principality to form a nome by itself, it assumed a certain importance, and furnished, so it was said, the dynasties which succeeded the Thinite.

Its prosperity dates only, however, from the time when the sovereigns of the Vth and VIth dynasties fixed on it for their residence; one of them, Papi L, there founded for himself and for his "double" after him, a new town, which he called Minnofîrû, from his tomb.

Minnofîrû, which is the correct pronunciation and the origin of Memphis, probably signified "the good refuge," the haven of the good, the burying-place where the blessed dead came to rest beside Osiris.

The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably it did not fall in with their taste for romantic tales.

They were rather disposed, as a rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the countries or cities with which they were familiar took their names: if no tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any scruple in inventing one.

The Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies, who were guided in their philological speculations by the pronunciation in vogue around them, attributed the patronship of their city to a Princess Memphis, a daughter of its founder, the fabulous Uchoreus;

those of preceding ages before the name had become altered, thought to find in Minnofîrû a "Mini Nofir," or "Menés the Good," the reputed founder of the capital of the Delta.

Menés the Good, divested of his epithet, is none other than Menés, the first king, and he owes this episode in his life to a popular attempt at etymology.

The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the construction of the city, must have originated at the time when Memphis was still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at latest about the end of the Memphite period.

It must have been an old tradition in the time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted unhesitatingly the authenticity of the statements which ascribed to the northern city so marked a superiority over their own country.

[Illustration: 343. jpg NECKLACE, BEARING NAME OF MENES.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin after Prisse d'Avenues.

The gold medallions engraved with the name of Menés are ancient, and perhaps go back to the XXth dynasty; the setting is entirely modern, with the exception of the three oblong pendants of cornelian.

When once this half-mythical Menés was firmly established in his position, there was little difficulty in inventing a story which would portray him as an ideal sovereign.

He was represented as architect, warrior, and statesman; he had begun the temple of Phtah, written laws and regulated the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hâpis, and he had conducted expeditions against the Libyans.

When he lost his only son in the flower of his age, the people improvised a hymn of mourning to console him--the "Maneros"--both the words and the tune of which were handed down from generation to generation.

He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining posture.

One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or other, fell upon him to devour him.

He escaped with difficulty, and, pursued by them, fled to the shore of Lake Moeris, and was there brought to bay; he was on the point of succumbing to them, when a crocodile took him on his back and carried him across to the other side.

[*] In gratitude he built a new town, which he called Crocodilopolis, and assigned to it for its god the crocodile which had saved him; he then erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a pyramid for his tomb.

Other traditions show him in a less favourable light.

They accuse him of having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods, and allege that after a reign of sixty to sixty-two years, he was killed by a hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile.

[**] * This is an episode from the legend of Osiris: at Phihe, in the little building of the Antonines, may be seen a representation of a crocodile crossing the Nile, carrying on his back the mummy of the god.

The same episode is also found in the tale of Onus el Ujûd and of Uard f'il-Ikmâm, where the crocodile leads the hero to his beautiful prisoner in the Island of Philæ.

Ebers, _Ægypte_, French trans.

, vol. ii.

pp. 415, 416, has shown how this episode in the Arab story must have been inspired by the bas-relief at Philæ and by the scene which it portrays: the temple is still called "Kasr," and the island "Geziret Onus el-Ujûd." ** In popular romances, this was the usual end of criminals of every kind; we shall see that another king, Akhthoes the founder of the IXth dynasty, after committing horrible misdeeds, was killed, in the same way as Menés, by a hippopotamus.

They also related that the Saïte Tafnakhti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of royal life, had solemnly cursed him, and had caused his imprecations to be inscribed upon a stele set up in the temple of Amon at Thebes.

Nevertheless, in the memory that Egypt preserved of its first Pharaoh, the good outweighed the evil.

He was worshipped in Memphis side by side with Phtah and Ramses II.

; his name figured at the head of the royal lists, and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies.

His immediate successors had an actual existence, and their tombs are there in proof of it.

We know where Usaphais, Miebis, and Semempses[*] were laid to rest, besides more than a dozen other princes whose real names and whose position in the official lists are still uncertain.

The order of their succession was often a matter of doubt to the Egyptians themselves, but perhaps the discoveries of the next few years will enable us to clear up and settle definitely matters which were shrouded in mystery in the time of the Theban Pharaohs.

As a fact, the forms of such of their names as have been handed down to us by later tradition, are curt and rugged, indicative of an early state of society, and harmonizing with the more primitive civilization to which they belong: Ati the Wrestler, Teti the Runner, Qenqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for a people, the first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.

[**] * Flinders Pétrie, _The 'Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty_, vol. i.

p. 56. ** The Egyptians were accustomed to explain the meaning of the names of their kings to strangers, and the Canon of Eratosthenes has preserved several of their derivations, of which a certain number, as, for instance, that of Menés from aùovioç, the "lasting," are tolerably correct.

M.

Krall is, to my knowledge, the only Egyptologist who has attempted to glean from the meaning of these names indications of the methods by which the national historians of Egypt endeavoured to make up the lists of the earliest dynasties.