History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 08 - Vol. 01, Ch. 01: The Nile and Egypt, pt. 8

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dûmichen, _Resultate_, vol. ii.

pl.

vit The country was divided among communities, whose members were supposed to be descended from the same seed (_paît_) and to belong to the same family (_pâîtû_): the chiefs of them were called _ropâîtû_, the guardians, or pastors of the family, and in later times their name became a title applicable to the nobility in general.

Families combined and formed groups of various importance under the authority of a head chief--_ropâîtû-hâ_.

They were, in fact, hereditary lords, dispensing justice, levying taxes in kind on their subordinates, reserving to themselves the redistribution of land, leading their men to, battle, and sacrificing to the gods.

[*] The territories over which they exercised authority formed small states, whose boundaries even now, in some places, can be pointed out with certainty.

The principality of the Terebinth[**] occupied the very heart of Egypt, where the valley is widest, and the course of the Nile most advantageously disposed by nature--a country well suited to be the cradle of an infant civilization.

Siaût (Siût), the capital, is built almost at the foot of the Libyan range, on a strip of land barely a mile in width, which separates the river from the hills.

A canal surrounds it on three sides, and makes, as it were, a natural ditch about its walls; during the inundation it is connected with the mainland only by narrow causeways--shaded with mimosas--and looking like a raft of verdure aground in the current.

[***] * These prerogatives were still exercised by the princes of the nomes under the Middle and New Empires; they only enjoyed them then by the good will of the reigning sovereign.

** The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to this principality is _atf, iatf, iôtf_: it is only by a process of elimination that I have come to identify it with the _Pistacia Terebinthus_, L. , which furnished the Egyptians with the scented resin _snûtir_.

*** Boudier's drawing, reproduced on p. 31, and taken from a photograph by Beato, gives most faithfully the aspect presented by the plain and the modern town of Siout during the inundation.

[Illustration: 094. jpg NOMES OF MIDDLE EGYPT] The site is as happy as it is picturesque; not only does the town command the two arms of the river, opening or closing the waterway at will, but from time immemorial the most frequented of the routes into Central Africa has terminated at its gates, bringing to it the commerce of the Soudan.

It held sway, at the outset, over both banks, from range to range, northward as far as Deyrût, where the true Bahr Yusuf leaves the Nile, and southward to the neighbourhood of Gebel Sheikh Haridi.

The extent and original number of the other principalities is not so easily determined.

The most important, to the north of Siût, were those of the Hare and the Oleander.

The principality of the Hare never reached the dimensions of that of its neighbour the Terebinth, but its chief town was Khmûnû, whose antiquity was so remote, that a universally accepted tradition made it the scene of the most important acts of creation.

[*] That of the Oleander, on the contrary, was even larger than that of the Terebinth, and from Hininsû, its chief governor ruled alike over the marshes of the Fayûm and the plains of Beni-Suef.

[**] To the south, Apû on the right bank governed a district so closely shut in between a bend of the Nile and two spurs of the range, that its limits have never varied much since ancient times.

Its inhabitants were divided in their employment between weaving and the culture of cereals.

From early times they possessed the privilege of furnishing clothing to a large part of Egypt, and their looms, at the present day, still make those checked or striped "melayahs" which the fellah women wear over their long blue tunics.

[***] * Khmûnû, the present Ashmûneîn, is the Hermopolis of the Greeks, the town of the god Thot.

** Hininsû is the _Heraecleopolis Magna_ of the Greeks, the present Henassieh, called also Ahnas-el-Medineh.

The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to this principality, is Nârît. Loret has shown that this tree, _Nârît_, is the oleander.

*** Apû was the Panopolis or Chemmis of the Greeks, the town of the god Mîn or ithyphallic Khimû.

Its manufactures of linen are mentioned by Strabo; the majority of the beautiful Coptic woven fabrics and embroideries which have been brought to Europe lately, come from the necropolis of the Arab period at Apû.

Beyond Apû, Thinis, the Girgeh of the Arabs, situate on both banks of the river, rivalled Khmûnû in antiquity and Siût in wealth: its plains still produce the richest harvests and feed the most numerous herds of sheep and oxen in the Said.

[Illustration: 096. jpg NOMES OF UPPER EGYPT] As we approach the cataract, information becomes scarcer.

Qûbti and Aûnû of the South, the Coptos and Hermonthis of the Greeks, shared peaceably the plain occupied later on by Thebes and its temples, and Nekhabît and Zobû watched over the safety of Egypt.

Nekhabît soon lost its position as a frontier town, and that portion of Nubia lying between Gebel Silsileh and the rapids of Syene formed a kind of border province, of which Nubît-Ombos was the principal sanctuary and Abu-Elephantine the fortress: beyond this were the barbarians, and those inaccessible regions whence the Nile descended upon our earth.

The organization of the Delta, it would appear, was more slowly brought about.

It must have greatly resembled that of the lowlands of Equatorial Africa, towards the confluence of the Bahr el Abiad and the Bahr el Ghazâl. Great tracts of mud, difficult to describe as either solid or liquid, marshes dotted here and there with sandy islets, bristling with papyrus reeds, water-lilies, and enormous plants through which the arms of the Nile sluggishly pushed their ever-shifting course, low-lying wastes intersected with streams and pools, unfit for cultivation and scarcely available for pasturing cattle.

The population of such districts, engaged in a ceaseless struggle with nature, always preserved relatively ruder manners, and a more rugged and savage character, impatient of all authority.

The conquest of this region began from the outer edge only.

A few principalities were established at the apex of the Delta in localities where the soil had earliest been won from the river.

It appears that one of these divisions embraced the country south of and between the bifurcation of the Nile: Aûnû of the North, the Heliopolis of the Greeks, was its capital.

In very early times the principality was divided, and formed three new states, independent of each other.

Those of Aûnû and the Haunch were opposite to each other, the first on the Arabian, the latter on the Libyan bank of the Nile.

The district of the White Wall marched with that of the Haunch on the north, and on the south touched the territory of the Oleander.

Further down the river, between the more important branches, the governors of Sai's and of Bubastis, of Athribis and of Busiris, shared among themselves the primitive Delta.

Two frontier provinces of unequal size, the Arabian on the east in the Wady Tumilat, and the Libyan on the west to the south of Lake Mareotis, defended the approaches of the country from the attacks of Asiatic Bedâwins and of African nomads.

The marshes of the interior and the dunes of the littoral, were not conducive to the development of any great industry or civilization.

They only comprised tracts of thinly populated country, like the principalities of the Harpoon and of the Cow, and others whose limits varied from century to century with the changing course of the river.

The work of rendering the marshes salubrious and of digging canals, which had been so successful in the Nile Valley, was less efficacious in the Delta, and proceeded more slowly.

Here the embankments were not supported by a mountain chain: they were continued at random across the marshes, cut at every turn to admit the waters of a canal or of an arm of the river.

The waters left their usual bed at the least disturbing influence, and made a fresh course for themselves across country.

If the inundation were delayed, the soft and badly drained soil again became a slough: should it last but a few weeks longer than usual, the work of several generations was for a long time undone.

The Delta of one epoch rarely presented the same aspect as that of previous periods, and Northern Egypt never became as fully mistress of her soil as the Egypt of the south.

[Illustration: 099. jpg NOMES OF LOWER EGYPT] These first principalities, however small they appear to us, were yet too large to remain undivided.

In those times of slow communication, the strong attraction which a capital exercised over the provinces under its authority did not extend over a wide radius.

That part of the population of the Terebinth, living sufficiently near to Siût to come into the town for a few hours in the morning, returning in the evening to the villages when business was done, would not feel any desire to withdraw from the rule of the prince who governed there.

On the other hand, those who lived outside that restricted circle were forced to seek elsewhere some places of assembly to attend the administration of justice, to sacrifice in common to the national gods, and to exchange the produce of the fields and of local manufactures.

Those towns which had the good fortune to become such rallying-points naturally played the part of rivals to the capital, and their chiefs, with the district whose population, so to speak, gravitated around them, tended to become independent of the prince.

When they succeeded in doing this, they often preserved for the new state thus created, the old name, slightly modified by the addition of an epithet.

The primitive territory of Siût was in this way divided into three distinct communities; two, which remained faithful to the old emblem of the tree--the Upper Terebinth, with Siût itself in the centre, and the Lower Terebinth, with Kûsit to the north; the third, in the south and east, took as their totem the immortal serpent which dwelt in their mountains, and called themselves the Serpent Mountain, whose chief town was that of the Sparrow Hawk.

The territory of the Oleander produced by its dismemberment the principality of the Upper Oleander, that of the Lower Oleander, and that of the Knife.

The territory of the Harpoon in the Delta divided itself into the Western and Eastern Harpoon.

The fission in most cases could not have been accomplished without struggles; but it did take place, and all the principalities having a domain of any considerable extent had to submit to it, however they may have striven to avoid it.

This parcelling out was continued as circumstances afforded opportunity, until the whole of Egypt, except the half desert districts about the cataract, became but an agglomeration of petty states nearly equal in power and population.

[*] * Examples of the subdivision of ancient nomes and the creation of fresh nomes are met with long after primitive times.

We find, for example, the nome of the Western Harpoon divided under the Greeks and Romans into two districts--that of the Harpoon proper, of which the chief town was Sonti- nofir; and that of Ranûnr, with the Onûphis of classical geographers for its capital.

The Greeks called them nomes, and we have borrowed the word from them;

the natives named them in several ways, the most ancient term being "nûît," which may be translated _domain_, and the most common appellation in recent times being "hospû," which signifies _district_.

The number of the nomes varied considerably in the course of centuries: the hieroglyphic monuments and classical authors fixed them sometimes at thirty-six, sometimes at forty, sometimes at forty-four, or even fifty.

The little that we know of their history, up to the present time, explains the reason of this variation.

Ceaselessly quarrelled over by the princely families who possessed them, the nomes were alternately humbled and exalted by civil wars, marriages, and conquest, which caused them continually to pass into fresh hands, either entire or divided.

The Egyptians, whom we are accustomed to consider as a people respecting the established order of things, and conservative of ancient tradition, showed themselves as restless and as prone to modify or destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations.

The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been characteristic of most other Oriental nations.

One thing alone remained stable among them in the midst of so many revolutions, and which prevented them from losing their individuality and from coalescing in a common unity.

This was the belief in and the worship of one particular deity.

If the little capitals of the petty states whose origin is lost in a remote past--Edfû and Denderah, Nekhabît and Bûto, Siûfc, Thinis, Khmûnû, Sais, Bubastis, Athribis--had only possessed that importance which resulted from the presence of an ambitious petty prince, or from the wealth of their inhabitants, they would never have passed safe and sound through the long centuries of existence which they enjoyed from the opening to the close of Egyptian history.

Fortune raised their chiefs, some even to the rank of rulers of the world, and in turn abased them: side by side with the earthly ruler, whose glory was but too often eclipsed, there was enthroned in each nome a divine ruler, a deity, a god of the domain, "nûtir nûiti," whose greatness never perished.

The princely families might be exiled or become extinct, the extent of the territory might diminish or increase, the town might be doubled in size and population or fall in ruins: the god lived on through all these vicissitudes, and his presence alone preserved intact the rights of the state over which he reigned as sovereign.

If any disaster befell his worshippers, his temple was the spot where the survivors of the catastrophe rallied around him, their religion preventing them from mixing with the inhabitants of neighbouring towns and from becoming lost among them.

The survivors multiplied with that extraordinary rapidity which is the characteristic of the Egyptian fellah, and a few years of peace sufficed to repair losses which apparently were irreparable.

Local religion was the tie which bound together those divers elements of which each principality was composed, and as long as it remained, the nomes remained; when it vanished, they disappeared with it.

[Illustration: 105. jpg PAGE IMAGE] [Illustration: 106. jpg PAGE IMAGE] CHAPTER II. --THE GODS OF EGYPT

_THEIR NUMBER AND NATURE--THE FEUDAL GODS, LIVING AND DEAD--TRIADS---- THE TEMPLES AND PRIESTHOOD--THE COSMOGONIES OF THE DELTA----THE ENNEADS OF HELIOPOLIS AND HERMOPOLIS.

_ _Multiplicity of the Egyptian gods: the commonalty of the gods, its varieties, human, animal, and intermediate between man and beast; gods of foreign origin, indigenous gods, and the contradictory forms with which they were invested in accordance with various conceptions of their nature.

The Star-gods--The Sun-god as the Eye of the Shy; as a bird, as a calf, and as a man; its barks, voyages round the world, and encounters with the serpent Apopi--The Moon-god and its enemies--The Star-gods: the Haunch of the Ox, the Hippopotamus, the Lion, the five Horus-planets;

Sothis Sirius, and Sahû Orion.

The feudal gods and their classes: the Nile-gods, the earth-gods, the sky-gods and the sun-god, the Horus-gods--The equality of feudal gods and goddesses; their persons, alliances, and marriages: their children--The triads and their various developments.

The nature of the gods: the double, the soul, the body, death of men and gods, and their fate after death--The necessity for preserving the body, mummification--Dead gods the gods of the dead--The living gods, their temples and images--The gods of the people, trees, serpents, family fetiches--The theory of prayer and sacrifice: the servants of the temples, the property of the gods, the sacerdotal colleges.

The cosmogonies of the Delta: Sibu and Naît, Osiris and Isis, SU and Nephthys--Heliopolis and its theological schools: Ra, his identification with Horus, his dual nature, and the conception of Atûmû--The Heliopolitan Enneads: formation of the Great Ennead--Thot and the Hermopolitan Ennead: creation by articulate words and by voice alone--Diffusion of the Enneads: their connection with the local triads, the god One and the god Eight--The one and only gods.

_ [Illustration: 107. jpg PAGE IMAGE]