History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 2 — 30 - Vol. 02, Ch. 03: The First Theban Empire, pt. 6

[Illustration: 346. jpg THE SECOND CATARACT AT LOW NILE] He selected the little Nubian town of Bohani, which lay exactly opposite to the present village of Wady Haifa, and transformed it into a strong frontier fortress.

Besides the usual citadel, he built there a temple dedicated to the Theban god Amon and to the local Horus; he then set up a stele commemorating his victories over the peoples beyond the cataract.

[Illustration: 349. jpg THE TRIUMPHAL STELE OF USIRTASEN I. ] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph of the original in the museum at Florence.

Ten of their principal chiefs had passed before Amon as prisoners, their arms tied behind their backs, and had been sacrificed at the foot of the altar by the sovereign himself: he represented them on the stele by enclosing their names in battlemented cartouches, each surmounted by the bust of a man bound by a long cord which is held by the conqueror.

Nearly a century later Ûsirtasen III.

enlarged the fortress, and finding doubtless that it was not sufficiently strong to protect the passage of the cataract, he stationed outposts at various points, at Matûga, Fakus, and Kassa.

They served as mooring-places where the vessels which went up and down stream with merchandise might be made fast to the bank at sunset.

The bands of Bedouin, lurking in the neighbourhood, would have rejoiced to surprise them, and by their depredations to stop the commerce between the Said and the Upper Nile, during the few weeks in which it could be carried on with a minimum of danger.

A narrow gorge crossed by a bed of granite, through which the Nile passes at Semneh, afforded another most favourable site for the completion of this system of defence.

On cliffs rising sheer above the current, the king constructed two fortresses, one on each bank of the river, which completely commanded the approaches by land and water.

On the right bank at Kummeh, where the position was naturally a strong one, the engineers described an irregular square, measuring about two hundred feet each side; two projecting bastions flanked the entrance, the one to the north covering the approaching pathways, the southern one commanding the river-bank.

A road with a ditch runs at about thirteen feet from the walls round the building, closely following its contour, except at the north-west and south-east angles, where there are two projections which formed bastions.

The town on the other bank, Samninû-Kharp-Khâkerî, occupied a less favourable position: its eastern flank was protected by a zone of rocks and by the river, but the three other sides were of easy approach.

They were provided with ramparts which rose to the height of eighty-two feet above the plain, and were strengthened at unequal distances by enormous buttresses.

These resembled towers without parapets, overlooking every part of the encircling road, and from them the defenders could take the attacking sappers in flank.

[Illustration: 351. jpg THE RAPIDS OF THE NILE AT SEMNEH, AND THE TWO FORTRESSES BUILT BY USIRTASEN III]

Map drawn up by Thuillier from the somewhat obsolete survey of Cailliaud The intervals between them had been so calculated as to enable the archers to sweep the intervening space with their arrows.

The main building is of crude brick, with beams laid horizontally between; the base of the external rampart is nearly vertical, while the upper part forms an angle of some seventy degrees with the horizon, making the scaling of it, if not impossible, at least very difficult.

Each of the enclosing walls of the two fortresses surrounded a town complete in itself, with temples dedicated to their founders and to the Nubian deities, as well as numerous habitations, now in ruins.

The sudden widening of the river immediately to the south of the rapids made a kind of natural roadstead, where the Egyptian squadron could lie without danger on the eve of a campaign against Ethiopia; the galiots of the negroes there awaited permission to sail below the rapids, and to enter Egypt with their cargoes.

At once a military station and a river custom-house, Semneh was the necessary bulwark of the new Egypt, and Usirtasen III.

emphatically proclaimed the fact, in two decrees, which he set up there for the edification of posterity.

“Here is,” so runs the first, “the southern boundary fixed in the year VIII.

under his Holiness of Khâkerî, Usirtasen, who gives life always and for ever, in order that none of the black peoples may cross it from above, except only for the transport of animals, oxen, goats, and sheep belonging to them.

” The edict of the year XVI.

reiterates the prohibition of the year VIII.

, and adds that “His Majesty caused his own statue to be erected at the landmarks which he himself had set up.

” The beds of the first and second cataracts were then less worn away than they are now; they are therefore more efficacious in keeping back the water and forcing it to rise to a higher level above.

The cataracts acted as indicators of the inundation, and if their daily rise and fall were studied, it was possible to announce to the dwellers on the banks lower down the river the progress and probable results of the flood.

[Illustration: 353. jpg THE CHANNEL OF THE NILE BETWEEN THE TWO FORTRESSES OF SEMNEH AND KUMMEH]

Reproduction by Faucher-Gudin of a sketch published by Cailliaud, _Voyage à Méroe, Atlas_, vol. ii.

pl.

xxx.

As long as the dominion of the Pharaohs reached no further than Philæ, observations of the Nile were always taken at the first cataract; and it was from Elephantine that Egypt received the news of the first appearance and progress of the inundation.

Amenemhâît III.

set up a new nilometer at the new frontier, and gave orders to his officers to observe the course of the flood.

They obeyed him scrupulously, and every time that the inundation appeared to them to differ from the average of ordinary years, they marked its height on the rocks of Semneh and Kummeh, engraving side by side with the figure the name of the king and the date of the year.

The custom was continued there under the XIIIth dynasty; afterwards, when the frontier was pushed further south, the nilometer accompanied it.

The country beyond Semneh was virgin territory, almost untouched and quite uninjured by previous wars.

Its name now appears for the first time upon the monuments, in the form of Kaûshû--the humbled Kûsh.

It comprised the districts situated to the south within the immense loop described by the river between Dongola and Khartoum, those vast plains intersected by the windings of the White and Blue Niles, known as the regions of Kordofan and Darfur; it was bounded by the mountains of Abyssinia, the marshes of Lake Nû, and all those semi-fabulous countries to which were relegated the “Isles of the Manes” and the “Lands of Spirits.

” It was separated from the Red Sea by the land of Pûanît; and to the west, between it and the confines of the world, lay the Timihû.

Scores of tribes, white, copper-coloured, and black, bearing strange names, wrangled over the possession of this vaguely defined territory;

some of them were still savage or emerging from barbarism, while others had attained to a pitch of material civilization almost comparable with that of Egypt.

The same diversity of types, the same instability and the same want of intelligence which characterized the tribes of those days, still distinguish the medley of peoples who now frequent the upper valley of the Nile.

They led the same sort of animal life, guided by impulse, and disturbed, owing to the caprices of their petty chiefs, by bloody wars which often issued in slavery or in emigration to distant regions.

[Illustration: 355. jpg KÛSHITE PRISONERS BROUGHT TO EGYPT] Drawn by Faucher-Guclin, from the water-colour drawing by Mr. Blackden.

With such shifting and unstable conditions, it would be difficult to build up a permanent State.

From time to time some kinglet, more daring, cunning, tenacious, or better fitted to govern than the rest, extended his dominion over his neighbours, and advanced step by step, till he united immense tracts under his single rule.

As by degrees his kingdom enlarged, he made no efforts to organize it on any regular system, to introduce any uniformity in the administration of its affairs, or to gain the adherence of its incongruous elements by just laws which would be equally for the good of all: when the massacres which accompanied his first victories were over, when he had incorporated into his own army what was left of the vanquished troops, when their children were led into servitude and he had filled his treasury with their spoil and his harem with their women, it never occurred to him that there was anything more to be done.

If he had acted otherwise, it would not probably have been to his advantage.

Both his former and present subjects were too divergent in language and origin, too widely separated by manners and customs, and too long in a state of hostility to each other, to draw together and to become easily welded into a single nation.

As soon as the hand which held them together relaxed its hold for a moment, discord crept in everywhere, among individuals as well as among the tribes, and the empire of yesterday resolved itself into its original elements even more rapidly than it had been formed.

The clash of arms which had inaugurated its brief existence died quickly away, the remembrance of its short-lived glory was lost after two or three generations in the horrors of a fresh invasion: its name vanished without leaving a trace behind.

The occupation of Nubia brought Egypt into contact with this horde of incongruous peoples, and the contact soon entailed a struggle.

It is futile for a civilized state to think of dwelling peacefully with any barbarous nation with which it is in close proximity.

Should it decide to check its own advances, and impose limits upon itself which it shall not pass over, its moderation is mistaken for feebleness and impotence; the vanquished again take up the offensive, and either force the civilized power to retire, or compel it to cross its former boundary.

The Pharaohs did not escape this inevitable consequence of conquest: their southern frontier advanced continually higher and higher up the Nile, without ever becoming fixed in a position sufficiently strong to defy the attacks of the Barbarians.

Usirtasen I. had subdued the countries of Hahû, of Khonthanunofir, and Shaad, and had beaten in battle the Shemîk, the Khasa, the Sus, the Aqîn, the Anu, the Sabiri, and the people of Akîti and Makisa.

Amenemhâît II.

, Usirtasen II.

, and Usirtasen III.

never hesitated to “strike the humbled Kush” whenever the opportunity presented itself.

The last-mentioned king in particular chastised them severely in his VIIIth, XIIth, XVIth, and XIXth years, and his victories made him so popular, that the Egyptians of the Greek period, identifying him with the Sesostris of Herodotus, attributed to him the possession of the universe.

On the base of a colossal statue of rose granite which he erected in the temple of Tanis, we find preserved a list of the tribes which he conquered: the names of them appear to us most outlandish--Alaka, Matakaraû, Tûrasû, Pamaîka, Uarakî, Paramakâ--and we have no clue as to their position on the map.

We know merely that they lived in the desert, on both sides of the Nile, in the latitude of Berber or thereabouts.

Similar expeditions were sent after Ûsirtasen’s time, and Amenem-hâît III.

regarded both banks of the Nile, between Semneh and Dongola, as forming part of the territory of Egypt proper.

Little by little, and by the force of circumstances, the making of Greater Egypt was realized; she approached nearer and nearer towards the limit which had been prescribed for her by nature, to that point where the Nile receives its last tributaries, and where its peerless valley takes its origin in the convergence of many others.