History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 2 — 24 - Vol. 02, Ch. 02: The Memphite Empire, pt. 12

These repeated expeditions produced in course of time more important and permanent results than the capture of an accomplished dwarf, or the acquisition of a fortune by an adventurous nobleman.

The nations which these merchants visited were accustomed to hear so much of Egypt, its industries, and its military force, that they came at last to entertain an admiration and respect for her, not unmingled with fear: they learned to look upon her as a power superior to all others, and upon her king as a god whom none might resist.

They adopted Egyptian worship, yielded to Egypt their homage, and sent the Egyptians presents: they were won over by civilization before being subdued by arms.

We are not acquainted with the manner in which Nofirkiri-Papi II.

turned these friendly dispositions to good account in extending his empire to the south.

The expeditions did not all prove so successful as that of Hirkhûf, and one at least of the princes of Elephantine, Papinakhîti, met with his death in the course of one of them.

Papi II.

had sent him on a mission, after several others, “to make profit out of the Ûaûaiû and the Iritît. ” He killed considerable numbers in this raid, and brought back great spoil, which he shared with Pharaoh; “for he was at the head of many warriors, chosen from among the bravest,” which was the cause of his success in the enterprise with which his Holiness had deigned to entrust him.

Once, however, the king employed him in regions which were not so familiar to him as those of Nubia, and fate was against him.

He had received orders to visit the Amu, the Asiatic tribes inhabiting the Sinaitic Peninsula, and to repeat on a smaller scale in the south the expedition which Uni had led against them in the north; he proceeded thither, and his sojourn having come to an end, he chose to return by sea.

To sail towards Pûanît, to coast up as far as the “Head of Nekhabît,” to land there and make straight for Elephantine by the shortest route, presented no unusual difficulties, and doubtless more than one traveller or general of those times had safely accomplished it; Papinakhîti failed miserably.

As he was engaged in constructing his vessel, the Hirû-Shâîtû fell upon him and massacred him, as well as the detachment of troops who accompanied him: the remaining soldiers brought home his body, which was buried by the side of the other princes in the mountain opposite Syene.

Papi II.

had ample leisure to avenge the death of his vassal and to send fresh expeditions to Iritît, among the Amamît and even beyond, if, indeed, as the author of the chronological Canon of Turin asserts,* he really reigned for more than ninety years; but the monuments are almost silent with regard to him, and give us no information about his possible exploits in Nubia.

An inscription of his second year proves that he continued to work the Sinaitic mines, and that he protected them from the Bedouin.

* The fragments of Manetho and the Canon of Eratosthenes agree in assigning to him a reign of a hundred years--a fact which seems to indicate that the missing unit in the Turin list was nine: Papi II.

would have thus died in the hundreth year of his reign.

A reign of a hundred years is impossible: Mihtimsaûf I. having reigned fourteen years, it would be necessary to assume that Papi II.

, son of Papi I. , should have lived a hundred and fourteen years at the least, even on the supposition that he was a posthumous child.

The simplest solution is to suppose (1) that Papi II.

lived a hundred years, as Ramses II.

did in later times, and that the years of his life were confounded with the years of his reign; or (2) that, being the brother of Mihtimsaûf I. , he was considered as associated with him on the throne, and that the hundred years of his reign, including the fourteen of the latter prince, were identified with the years of his life.

We may, moreover, believe that the chronologists, for.

lack of information on the VIth dynasty, have filled the blanks in their annals by lengthening the reign of Papi II.

, which in any case must have been very long.

On the other hand, the number and beauty of the tombs in which mention is made of him, bear witness to the fact that Egypt enjoyed continued prosperity.

Recent discoveries have done much to surround this king and his immediate predecessors with an air of reality which is lacking in many of the later Pharaohs.

[Illustration: 282. jpg HEAD OF THE MUMMY OF METESOUPHIS I] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

The mummy is now in the Gîzeh Museum (cf.

Maspero, _Guide au Musée de Boulaq_, pp. 347, 348, No. 5250).

Their pyramids, whose familiar designations we have deciphered in the texts, have been uncovered at Saqqâra, and the inscriptions which they contain, reveal to us the names of the sovereigns who reposed within.

Unas, Teti III.

, Papi I. , Mete-souphis I. , and Papi II.

now have as clearly defined a personality for us as Ramses II.

or Seti I. ; even the mummy of Metesouphis has been discovered near his sarcophagus, and can be seen under glass in the Gîzeh Museum.

The body is thin and slender;

the head refined, and ornamented with the thick side-lock of boyhood;

the features can be easily distinguished, although the lower jaw has disappeared and the pressure of the bandages has flattened the nose.

All the pyramids of the dynasty are of a uniform-type, the model being furnished by that of Unas.

The entrance is in the centre of the northern façade, underneath the lowest course, and on the ground-level.

An inclined passage, obstructed by enormous stones, leads to an antechamber, whose walls are partly bare, and partly covered with long columns of hieroglyphs: a level passage, blocked towards the middle by three granite barrier, ends in a nearly square chamber; on the left are three low cells devoid of ornament, and on the right an oblong chamber containing the sarcophagus.

[Illustration: 283. jpg PLAN OF THE PYRAMID OF UNAS] From drawings by Maspero, _La Pyramide d’Ounas_, in the _Recueil de Travaux_, vol. iv.

p. 177. These two principal rooms had high-pitched roofs.

They were composed of large slabs of limestone, the upper edges of which leaned one against the other, while the lower edges rested on a continuous ledge which ran round the chamber: the first row of slabs was surmounted by a second, and that again by a third, and the three together effectively protected the apartments of the dead against the thrust of the superincumbent mass, or from the attacks of robbers.

The wall-surfaces close to the sarcophagus in the pyramid of Unas are decorated with many-coloured ornaments and sculptured and painted doors representing the front of a house: this was, in fact, the dwelling of the double, in which he resided with the dead body.

[Illustration: 284. jpg THE SEPULCHRAL CHAMBER IN THE PYRAMID OF UNAS, AND HIS SARCOPHAOUS]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph, taken in 1881, by Émil Brugsch-Bey.

The inscriptions, like the pictures in the tombs, were meant to furnish the sovereign with provisions, to dispel serpents and malevolent divinities, to keep his soul from death, and to lead him into the bark of the sun or into the Paradise of Osiris.

They constitute a portion of a vast book, whose chapters are found scattered over the monuments of subsequent periods.

They are the means of restoring to us, not only the religion but the most ancient language of Egypt: the majority of the formulas contained in them were drawn up in the time of the earliest human kings, perhaps even before Menés. The history of the VIth dynasty loses itself in legend and fable.

Two more kings are supposed to have succeeded Papi Nofirkeri, Mirnirî Mihtimsaût (Metesouphis II.

) and Nîtaûqrît (Nitokris).

Metesouphis II.

was killed, so runs the tale, in a riot, a year after his accession.

* * Manetho does not mention this fact, but the legend given by Herodotus says that Nitokris wished to avenge the king, her brother and predecessor, who was killed in a revolution;

and it follows from the narrative of the facts that this anonymous brother was the Metesouphis of Manetho.

The Turin Papyrus assigns a reign of a year and a month to Mihtimsaul- Metesouphis II.

His sister, Nitokris, the “rosy-cheeked,” to whom, as was the custom, he was married, succeeded him and avenged his death.

She built an immense subterranean hall; under pretext of inaugurating its completion, but in reality with a totally different aim, she then invited to a great feast, and received in this hall, a considerable number of Egyptians from among those whom she knew to have been instigators of the crime.

During the entertainment, she diverted the waters of the Nile into the hall by means of a canal which she had kept concealed.

This is what is related of her.

They add, that “after this, the queen, of her own will, threw herself into a great chamber filled with ashes, in order to escape punishment.

” She completed the pyramid of Mykerinos, by adding to it that costly casing of Syenite which excited the admiration of travellers; she reposed in a sarcophagus of blue basalt, in the very centre of the monument, above the secret chamber where the pious Pharaoh had hidden his mummy.

* * The legend which ascribes the building of the third pyramid to a woman has been preserved by Herodotus: E. de Bunsen, comparing it with the observations of Vyse, was inclined to attribute to Nitokris the enlarging of the monument, which appears to me to have been the work of Mykerinos himself.

The Greeks, who had heard from their dragomans the story of the “Rosy-cheeked Beauty,” metamorphosed the princess into a courtesan, and for the name of Nitokris, substituted the more harmonious one of Rhodopis, which was the exact translation of the characteristic epithet of the Egyptian queen.

One day while she was bathing in the river, an eagle stole one of her gilded sandals, carried it off in the direction of Memphis, and let it drop in the lap of the king, who was administering justice in the open air.

The king, astonished at the singular occurrence, and at the beauty of the tiny shoe, caused a search to be made throughout the country for the woman to whom it belonged: Rhodopis thus became Queen of Egypt, and could build herself a pyramid.

Even Christianity and the Arab conquest did not entirely efface the remembrance of the courtesan-princess.

[Illustration: 286. jpg THE ENTRANCE TO THE PYRAMID OF UNAS AT SAQQÀRA] Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

It is said that the spirit of the Southern Pyramid never appears abroad, except in the form of a naked woman, who is very beautiful, but whose manner of acting is such, that when she desires to make people fall in love with her, and lose their wits, she smiles upon them, and immediately they draw near to her, and she attracts them towards her, and makes them infatuated with love; so that they at once lose their wits, and wander aimlessly about the country.

Many have seen her moving round the pyramid about midday and towards sunset.

It is Nitokris still haunting the monument of her shame and her magnificence.

* * The lists of the VIth dynasty, with the approximate dates of the kings, are as follows:-- [Illustration: 289. jpg TABLE OF THE DATES OF THE KINGS VITH DYNASTY] After her, even tradition is silent, and the history of Egypt remains a mere blank for several centuries.

Manetho admits the existence of two other Memphite dynasties, of which the first contains seventy kings during as many days.

Akhthoës, the most cruel of tyrants, followed next, and oppressed his subjects for a long period: he was at last the victim of raving madness, and met with his death from the jaws of a crocodile.

It is related that he was of Heracleopolite extraction, and the two dynasties which succeeded him, the IXth and the Xth, were also Heracleopolitan.

The table of Abydos is incomplete, and the Turin Papyrus, in the absence of other documents, too mutilated to furnish us with any exact information; the contemporaries of the Ptolemies were almost entirely ignorant of what took place between the end of the VIth and the beginning of the XIIth dynasty; and Egyptologists, not finding any monuments which they could attribute to this period, thereupon concluded that Egypt had passed through some formidable crisis out of which she with difficulty extricated herself.

* * Marsham (_Canon Chronicus_, edition, of Leipzig, 1676, p. 29) had already declared in the seventeenth century that he felt no hesitation in considering the Heracleopolites as identical with the successors of Menes-Misraîm, who reigned over the Mestraea, that is, over the Delta only.

The idea of an Asiatic invasion, analogous to that of the Hyksos, which was put forward by Mariette, and accepted by Fr.

Lenormant, has found its chief supporters in Germany.

Bunsen made of the Heracleopolitan two subordinate dynasties reigning simultaneously in Lower Egypt, and originating at Heracleopolis in the Delta: they were supposed to have been contemporaries of the last Memphite and first Theban dynasties.

Lepsius accepted and recognized in the Heracleopolitans of the Delta the predecessors of the Hyksos, an idea defended by Ebers, and developed by Krall in his identification of the unknown invaders with the Hirû- Shâîtû: it has been adopted by Ed.

Meyer, and by Petrie.

The so-called Heracleopolites of Manetho were assumed to have been the chiefs of a barbaric people of Asiatic origin, those same “Lords of the Sands” so roughly handled by Uni, but who are considered to have invaded the Delta soon after, settled themselves in Heracleopolis Parva as their capital, and from thence held sway over the whole valley.

They appeared to have destroyed much and built nothing; the state of barbarism into which they sank, and to which they reduced the vanquished, explaining the absence of any monuments to mark their occupation.

This hypothesis, however, is unsupported by any direct proof: even the dearth of monuments which has been cited as an argument in favour of the theory, is no longer a fact.

The sequence of reigns and details of the revolutions are wanting; but many of the kings and certain facts in their history are known, and we are able to catch a glimpse of the general course of events.

The VIIth and VIIIth dynasties are Memphite, and the names of the kings themselves would be evidence in favour of their genuineness, even if we had not the direct testimony of Manetho: the one recurring most frequently is that of Nofirkerî, the prenomen of Papi II.

, and a third Papi figures in them, who calls himself Papi-Sonbû to distinguish himself from his namesakes.

The little recorded of them in Ptolemaic times, even the legend of the seventy Pharaohs reigning seventy days, betrays a troublous period and a rapid change of rulers.

* * The explanation of Prof. Lauth, according to which Manetho is supposed to have made an independent dynasty of the five Memphite priests who filled the interregnum of seventy days during the embalming of Nitokris, is certainly very ingenious, but that is all that can be said for it.

The legendary source from which Manetho took his information distinctly recorded seventy successive kings, who reigned in all seventy days, a king a day.

We know as a fact that the successors of Nitokris, in the Royal Turin Papyrus, scarcely did more than appear upon the throne.

Nofirkerî reigned a year, a month, and a day; Nofîrûs, four years, two months, and a day; Abu, two years, one month, and a day.

Each of them hoped, no doubt, to enjoy the royal power for a longer period than his predecessors, and, like the Ati of the VIth dynasty, ordered a pyramid to be designed for him without delay: not one of them had time to complete the building, nor even to carry it sufficiently far to leave any trace behind.

As none of them had any tomb to hand his name down to posterity, the remembrance of them perished with their contemporaries.

By dint of such frequent changes in the succession, the royal authority became enfeebled, and its weakness favoured the growing influence of the feudal families and encouraged their ambition.

The descendants of those great lords, who under Papi I. and II.

made such magnificent tombs for themselves, were only nominally subject to the supremacy of the reigning sovereign; many of them were, indeed, grandchildren of princesses of the blood, and possessed, or imagined that they possessed, as good a right to the crown as the family on the throne.

Memphis declined, became impoverished, and dwindled in population.

Its inhabitants ceased to build those immense stone mastabas in which they had proudly displayed their wealth, and erected them merely of brick, in which the decoration was almost entirely confined to one narrow niche near the sarcophagus.

Soon the mastaba itself was given up, and the necropolis of the city was reduced to the meagre proportions of a small provincial cemetery.

The centre of that government, which had weighed so long and so heavily upon Egypt, was removed to the south, and fixed itself at Heracleopolis the Great.

Volume II.

, Part .

_THE FIRST THEBAN EMPIRE_

_THE TWO HERACLEOPOLITAN DYNASTIES AND THE TWELFTH DYNASTY--THE CONQUEST OF ETHIOPIA, AND THE MAKING OF GREATER EGYPT BY THE THEBAN KINGS.

_ _The principality of Heracleopolis: Achthoës-Khîti and the Heracleopolitan dynasties--Supremacy of the great barons: the feudal fortresses, El-Kab and Abydos; ceaseless warfare, the army--Origin of the Theban principality: the principality of Sidt, and the struggles of its lords against the princes of Thebes--The kings of the XIth dynasty and their buildings: the brick pyramids of Abydos and Thebes, and the rude character of early Theban art.

_ _The XIIth dynasty: Amenemdidît I. , his accession, his wars; he shares his throne with his son Usirtasen I. , and the practice of a coregnancy prevails among his immediate successors--The relations of Egypt with Asia: the Amû in Egypt and the Egyptians among the Bedouin; the Adventures of Sinûhît--The mining settlements in the Sinaitic peninsula: Sarbût-el-Khddim and its chapel to Hâthor.

_ _Egyptian policy in the Nile Valley--Nubia becomes part of Egypt: works of the Pharaohs, the gold-mines and citadel of Kubân--Defensive measures at the second cataract: the two fortresses and the Nilometer of Semnêh--The vile Kush and its inhabitants: the wars against Kûsh and their consequences; the gold-mines--Expeditions to Pûanît, and navigation along the coasts of the Bed Sea: the Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor.

_ _Public works and new buildings--The restoration of the temples of the Delta: Tanis and the sphinxes of Amenemhâît III.

, Bubastis, Heliopolis, and the temple of Usirtasen I. --The increasing importance of Thebes and Abydos--Heracleopolis and the Fayûm: the monuments of Begig and of Biahmil, the fields and water-system of the Fayûm; preference shown by the Pharaohs for this province--The royal pyramids of Dashdr, Lisht, Ulahûn, and Haiodra.

_ _The part played by the feudal lords under the XIIth dynasty--History of the princes of Mondît-Khûfûi: Khnûmhotpil, Khîti, Amoni-Amenemhâît--The lords of Thébes, and the accession of the XIIIth dynasty: the Sovkhotpûs and the Nfirhotpûs--Completion of the conquest of Nubia; the XIVth dynasty_.

[Illustration: 295. jpg PAGE IMAGE] CHAPTER III--THE FIRST THEBAN EMPIRE