History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 05 - Vol. 01, Ch. 01: The Nile and Egypt, pt. 5

[Illustration: 055. jpg Libyan Mountains] The word Nile is of uncertain origin.

We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Khîti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor.

When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hâpi, they called it the sea, or the great river.

They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile.

The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, Hâikûphtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea.

The Egyptians called themselves Bomitû, Botû, and their country Qîmit, the black land.

Whence came they?

How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival?

The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them.

It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture.

Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era.

Their earliest horizon was a very limited one.

Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bâkhû, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.

Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nûtri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.

[*] * The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine Land were celebrated in Egypt.

A traveller or hunter, crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of the penetrating scent of the _robul (Puliciaria undulata_, Schwbine.

), which once followed us throughout a day and two nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever."

(Golenischeff).

Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death.

As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared.

The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konûsit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract.

Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points.

Bâkhû and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West.

Nekhabit and Bûto, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North.

It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel.

What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown.

The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa.

* The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch, Ebers,--Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in the train of E. de Rougé; but the most extreme position has been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the Babylonian.

After having summarily announced this thesis in his _Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens_, p. 12, et seq.

, he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, _Der Babylonische Ursprung der àgyptischen Kultur_, 1892, wherein he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the cults of Eridû, and would make the name of the Egyptian city Onû, or Anû, identical with that of _Nûn-H, Nûn_, which is borne by the Chaldean.

Some think that the people took the shortest road across the Isthmus of Suez, others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated itinerary.

They would have them cross the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and then the Abyssinian mountains, and, spreading northward and keeping along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of to-day.

A more minute examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult to maintain.

The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the characteristics of those white races which have been found established from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent;

this population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the West or South-West.

In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race which it drove back or destroyed; and there, perhaps, too, it afterwards received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the isthmus and the marshes of the Delta.

But whatever may be the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians, they were scarcely settled upon the banks of the Nile before the country conquered, and assimilated them to itself, as it has never ceased to do in the case of strangers who have occupied it.

At the time when their history begins for us, all the inhabitants had long formed but one people, with but one language.

This language seems to be connected with the Semitic tongues by many of its roots.

It forms its personal pronouns, whether isolated or suffixed, in a similar way.

One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes.

Without insisting upon resemblances which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian.

One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same group, had separated very early, at a time when the vocabulary and the grammatical system of the group had not as yet taken definite shape.

Subject to different influences, the two families would treat in diverse fashion the elements common to both.

The Semitic dialects continued to develop for centuries, while the Egyptian language, although earlier cultivated, stopped short in its growth.

"If it is obvious that there was an original connexion between the language of Egypt and that of Asia, this connexion is nevertheless sufficiently remote to leave to the Egyptian race a distinct physiognomy."

We recognize it in sculptured and painted portraits, as well as in thousands of mummied bodies out of subterranean tombs.

The highest type of Egyptian was tall and slender, with a proud and imperious air in the carriage of his head and in his whole bearing.

He had wide and full shoulders, well-marked and vigorous pectoral muscles, muscular arms, a long, fine hand, slightly developed hips, and sinewy legs.

The detail of the knee-joint and the muscles of the calf are strongly marked beneath the skin; the long, thin, and low-arched feet are flattened out at the extremities owing to the custom of going barefoot.

The head is rather short, the face oval, the forehead somewhat retreating.

The eyes are wide and fully opened, the cheekbones not too marked, the nose fairly prominent, and either straight or aquiline.

The mouth is long, the lips full, and lightly ridged along their outline;

the teeth small, even, well-set, and remarkably sound; the ears are set high on the head.

At birth the skin is white, but darkens in proportion to its exposure to the sun.

Men are generally painted red in the pictures, though, as a matter of fact, there must already have been all the shades which we see among the present population^ from a most delicate, rose-tinted complexion to that of a smoke-coloured bronze.

Women, who were less exposed to the sun, are generally painted yellow, the tint paler in proportion as they rise in the social scale.

The hair was inclined to be wavy, and even to curl into little ringlets, but without ever turning into the wool of the negro.

[Illustration: 059. jpg THE NOBLE TYPE OF EGYPTIAN.

1] 1 Statue of Rânofir in the Gîzeh Museum (Vth dynasty), after a photograph by Émil Brugsch-Bey.

[Illustration: 060. jpg HEAD OF A TILEBAN MUMMY.

] The beard was scanty, thick only upon the chin.

Such was the highest type; the commoner was squat, dumpy, and heavy.

Chest and shoulders seem to be enlarged at the expense of the pelvis and the hips, to such an extent as to make the want of proportion between the upper and lower parts of the body startling and ungraceful.

The skull is long, somewhat retreating, and slightly flattened on the top; the features are coarse, and as though carved in flesh by great strokes of the blocking-out chisel.

Small frseuated eyes, a short nose, flanked by widely distended nostrils, round cheeks, a square chin, thick, but not curling lips--this unattractive and ludicrous physiognomy, sometimes animated by an expression of cunning which recalls the shrewd face of an old French peasant, is often lighted up by gleams of gentleness and of melancholy good-nature.

The external characteristics of these two principal types in the ancient monuments, in all varieties of modifications, may still be seen among the living.

The profile copied from a Theban mummy taken at hazard from a necropolis of the XVIIIth dynasty, and compared with the likeness of a modern Luxor peasant, would almost pass for a family portrait.

Wandering Bisharîn have inherited the type of face of a great noble, the contemporary of Kheops; and any peasant woman of the Delta may bear upon her shoulders che head of a twelfth-dynasty king.

A

citizen of Cairo, gazing with wonder at the statues of Khafra or of Seti I.

in the Gîzeh Museum, is himself, feature for feature, the very image of those ancient Pharaohs, though removed from them by fifty centuries.

[Illustration: 062. jpg A FELLAH WOMAN WITH THE FEATURES OF AN ANCIENT KING.

1] 1 The face of the woman here given was taken separately, and was subsequently attached to the figure of an Egyptian woman whom Naville had photographed sitting beside a colossal head.

The nose of the statue has been restored.

Until quite recently nothing, or all but nothing, had been discovered which could be attributed to the primitive races of Egypt: even the flint weapons and implements which had been found in various places could not be ascribed to them with any degree of certainty, for the Egyptians continued to use stone long after metal was known to them.

They made stone arrowheads, hammers, and knives, not only in the time of the Pharaohs, but under the Romans, and during the whole period of the Middle Ages, and the manufacture of them has not yet entirely died out.

[**] ** An entire collection of flint tools--axes, adzes, knives, and sickles--mostly with wooden handles, were found by Prof. Pétrie in the ruins of Kahun, at the entrance to the Fayûm: these go back to the time of the twelfth dynasty, more than three thousand years before our era.

Mariette had previously pointed out to the learned world the fact that a Coptic _Reis_, Salîb of Abydos, in charge of the excavations, shaved his head with a flint knife, according to the custom of his youth (1820-35).

I knew the man, who died at over eighty years of age in 1887; he was still faithful to his flint implement, while his sons and the whole population of El Kharbeh were using nothing but steel razors.

As his scalp was scraped nearly raw by the operation, he used to cover his head with fresh leaves to cool the inflamed skin.

These objects, and the workshops where they were made, might therefore be less ancient than the greater part of the inscribed monuments.

But if so far we had found no examples of any work belonging to the first ages, we met in historic times with certain customs which were out of harmony with the general civilization of the period.

A comparison of these customs with analogous practices of barbarous nations threw light upon the former, completed their meaning, and showed us at the same time the successive stages through which the Egyptian people had to pass before reaching their highest civilization.

We knew, for example, that even as late as the Cæsars, girls belonging to noble families at Thebes were consecrated to the service of Amon, and were thus licensed to a life of immorality, which, however, did not prevent them from making rich marriages when age obliged them to retire from office.

Theban women were not the only people in the world to whom such licence was granted or imposed upon them by law; wherever in a civilized country we see a similar practice, we may recognize in it an ancient custom which in the course of centuries has degenerated into a religious observance.

The institution of the women of Amon is a legacy from a time when the practice of polyandry obtained, and marriage did not yet exist.

Age and maternity relieved them from this obligation, and preserved them from those incestuous connections of which we find examples in other races.

A union of father and daughter, however, was perhaps not wholly forbidden,[*] and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural; the words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us.

* E.

de Rouge held that Rameses II.

married at least two of his daughters, Bint Anati and Honittui; Wiedemann admits that Psammetichus I. had in the same way taken to wife Nitocris, who had been born to him by the Theban princess Shapenuapit.

The Achæmenidan kings did the same: Artaxerxes married two of his own daughters.

Paternity was necessarily doubtful in a community of this kind, and hence the tie between fathers and children was slight; there being no family, in the sense in which we understand the word, except as it centred around the mother.

Maternal descent was, therefore, the only one openly acknowledged, and the affiliation of the child was indicated by the name of the mother alone.

When the woman ceased to belong to all, and confined herself to one husband, the man reserved to himself the privilege of taking as many wives as he wished, or as he was able to keep, beginning with his own sisters.

All wives did not enjoy identical rights: those born of the same parents as the man, or those of equal rank with himself, preserved their independence.

If the law pronounced him the master, _nibû_, to whom they owed obedience and fidelity, they were mistresses of the house, _nîbît pirû_, as well as wives, _himitû_, and the two words of the title express their condition.

Each of them occupied, in fact, her own house, _pirû_, which she had from her parents or her husband, and of which she was absolute mistress, _nîbît_.

She lived in it and performed in it without constraint all a woman's duties; feeding the fire, grinding the corn, occupying herself in cooking and weaving, making clothing and perfumes, nursing and teaching her children.

When her husband visited her, he was a guest whom she received on an equal footing.

It appears that at the outset these various wives were placed under the authority of an older woman, whom they looked on as their mother, and who defended their rights and interests against the master;

but this custom gradually disappeared, and in historic times we read of it as existing only in the families of the gods.

The female singers consecrated to Amon and other deities, owed obedience to several superiors, of whom the principal (generally the widow of a king or high priest) was called _chief-superior of the ladies of the harem of Amon_.

Besides these wives, there were concubines, slaves purchased or born in the house, prisoners of war, Egyptians of inferior class, who were the chattels of the man and of whom he could dispose as he wished.

All the children of one father were legitimate, whether their mother were a wife or merely a concubine, but they did not all enjoy the same advantages;

those among them who were born of a brother or sister united in legitimate marriage, took precedence of those whose mother was a wife of inferior rank or a slave.

In the family thus constituted, the woman, to all appearances, played the principal part.

Children recognized the parental relationship in the mother alone.

The husband appears to have entered the house of his wives, rather than the wives to have entered his, and this appearance of inferiority was so marked that the Greeks were deceived by it.

They affirmed that the woman was supreme in Egypt;

the man at the time of marriage promised obedience to her and entered into a contract not to raise any objection to her commands.