History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 2 — 31 - Vol. 02, Ch. 03: The First Theban Empire, pt. 7

The conquest of Nubia was on the whole an easy one, and so much personal advantage accrued from these wars, that the troops and generals entered on them without the least repugnance.

A single fragment has come down to us which contains a detailed account of one of these campaigns, probably that conducted by Usirtasen III.

in the XVIth year of his reign.

The Pharaoh had received information that the tribes of the district of Hûâ, on the Tacazze, were harassing his vassals, and possibly also those Egyptians who were attracted by commerce to that neighbourhood.

He resolved to set out and chastise them severely, and embarked with his fleet.

It was an expedition almost entirely devoid of danger: the invaders landed only at favourable spots, carried off any of the inhabitants who came in their way, and seized on their cattle--on one occasion as many as a hundred and twenty-three oxen and eleven asses, on others less.

Two small parties marched along the banks, and foraging to the right and left, drove the booty down to the river.

The tactics of invasion have scarcely undergone any change in these countries;

the account given by Cailliaud of the first conquest of Fazogl by Ismail-Pasha, in 1822, might well serve to complete the fragments of the inscription of Usirtasen III.

, and restore for us, almost in every detail, a faithful picture of the campaigns carried on in these regions by the kings of the XIIth dynasty.

The people are hunted down in the same fashion; the country is similarly ravaged by a handful of well-armed, fairly disciplined men attacking naked and disconnected hordes, the young men are massacred after a short resistance or forced to escape into the woods, the women are carried off as slaves, the huts pillaged, villages burnt, whole tribes exterminated in a few hours.

Sometimes a detachment, having imprudently ventured into some thorny thicket to attack a village perched on a rocky summit, would experience a reverse, and would with great difficulty regain the main body of troops, after having lost three-fourths of its men.

In most cases there was no prolonged resistance, and the attacking party carried the place with the loss of merely two or three men killed or wounded.

The spoil was never very considerable in any one locality, but its total amount increased as the raid was carried afield, and it soon became so bulky that the party had to stop and retrace their steps, in order to place it for safety in the nearest fortress.

The booty consisted for the most part of herds of oxen and of cumbrous heaps of grain, as well as wood for building purposes.

But it also comprised objects of small size but of great value, such as ivory, precious stones, and particularly gold.

The natives collected the latter in the alluvial tracts watered by the Tacazze, the Blue Nile and its tributaries.

The women were employed in searching for nuggets, which were often of considerable size; they enclosed them in little leather cases, and offered them to the merchants in exchange for products of Egyptian industry, or they handed them over to the goldsmiths to be made into bracelets, ear, nose, or finger rings, of fairly fine workmanship.

Gold was found in combination with several other metals, from which they did not know how to separate it: the purest gold had a pale yellow tint, which was valued above all others, but electrum, that is to say, gold alloyed with silver in the proportion of eighty per cent.

, was also much in demand, while greyish-coloured gold, mixed with platinum, served for making common jewellery.

* * Cailliaud has briefly described the auriferous sand of the Qamâmyl, and the way in which it is worked: it is from him that I have borrowed the details given in the text.

From analyses which I caused to be made at the Bûlaq Museum of Egyptian jewellery of the time of the XVIIIth dynasty, which had been broken and were without value, from an archeo- logical or artistic point of view, I have demonstrated the presence of the platinum and silver mentioned by Cailliaud as being found in the nuggets from the Blue Nile.

None of these expeditions produced any lasting results, and the Pharaohs established no colonies in any of these countries.

Their Egyptian subjects could not have lived there for any length of time without deteriorating by intermarriage with the natives or from the effects of the climate; they would have degenerated into a half-bred race, having all the vices and none of the good qualities of the aborigines.

The Pharaohs, therefore, continued their hostilities without further scruples, and only sought to gain as much as possible from their victories.

They cared little if nothing remained after they had passed through some district, or if the passage of their armies was marked only by ruins.

They seized upon everything which came across their path--men, chattels, or animals--and carried them back to Egypt; they recklessly destroyed everything for which they had no use, and made a desert of fertile districts which but yesterday had been covered with crops and studded with populous villages.

The neighbouring inhabitants, realizing their incapacity to resist regular troops, endeavoured to buy off the invaders by yielding up all they possessed in the way of slaves, flocks, wood, or precious metals.

The generals in command, however, had to reckon with the approaching low Nile, which forced them to beat a retreat; they were obliged to halt at the first appearance of it, and they turned homewards “in peace,” their only anxiety being to lose the smallest possible number of men or captured animals on their return journey.

As in earlier times, adventurous merchants penetrated into districts not reached by the troops, and prepared the way for conquest.

The princes of Elephantine still sent caravans to distant parts, and one of them, Siranpîtû, who lived under Ûsirtasen I. and Amenemhâit II.

, recorded his explorations on his tomb, after the fashion of his ancestors: the king at several different times had sent him on expeditions to the Soudan, but the inscription in which he gives an account of them is so mutilated, that we cannot be sure which tribes he visited.

We learn merely that he collected from them skins, ivory, ostrich feathers--everything, in fact, which Central Africa has furnished as articles of commerce from time immemorial.

It was not, however, by land only that Egyptian merchants travelled to seek fortune in foreign countries: the Red Sea attracted them, and served as a quick route for reaching the land of Pûanît, whose treasures in perfumes and rarities of all kinds had formed the theme of ancient traditions and navigators’ tales.

Relations with it had been infrequent, or had ceased altogether, during the wars of the Heracleo-politan period: on their renewal it was necessary to open up afresh routes which had been forgotten for centuries.

[Illustration: 362. jpg THE ROUTES LEADING FROM THE NILE TO THE RED SEA, BETWEEN KOPTOS AND KOSSEIR.

] Traffic was confined almost entirely to two or three out of the many,--one which ran from Elephantine or from Nekhabît to the “Head of Nekhabît,” the Berenice of the Greeks; others which started from Thebes or Koptos, and struck the coast at the same place or at Saû, the present Kosseir.

The latter, which was the shortest as well as the favourite route, passed through Wady Hammamât, from whence the Pharaohs drew the blocks of granite for their sarcophagi.

The officers who were sent to quarry the stone often took advantage of the opportunity to visit the coast, and to penetrate as far as the Spice Regions.

As early as the year VIII.

of Sônkherî, the predecessor of Amenemhâît I. , the “sole friend” Hûnû had been sent by this road, “in order to take the command of a squadron to Pûanît, and to collect a tribute of fresh incense from the princes of the desert.

” He got together three thousand men, distributed to each one a goatskin bottle, a crook for carrying it, and ten loaves, and set out from Koptos with this little army.

No water was met with on the way: Hûnû bored several wells and cisterns in the rock, one at a halting-place called Bait, two in the district of Adahaît, and finally one in the valleys of Adabehaît. Having reached the seaboard, he quickly constructed a great barge, freighted it with merchandise for barter, as well as with provisions, oxen, cows, and goats, and set sail for a cruise along the coast: it is not known how far he went, but he came back with a large cargo of all the products of the “Divine Land,” especially of incense.

On his return, he struck off into the Uagai valley, and thence reached that of Rohanû, where he chose out splendid blocks of stone for a temple which the king was building: “Never had ‘Royal Cousin’ sent on an expedition done as much since the time of the god Râ!

” Numbers of royal officers and adventurers followed in his footsteps, but no record of them has been preserved for us.

Two or three names only have escaped oblivion--that of Khnûmhotpû, who in the first year of Ûsirtasen I. erected a stele in the Wady Gasûs in the very heart of the “Divine Land;” and that of Khentkhîtioîrû, who in the XXVIIIth year of Amenemhâît II.

entered the haven of Saû after a fortunate cruise to Pûanît, without having lost a vessel or even a single man.

Navigation is difficult in the Red Sea.

The coast as a rule is precipitous, bristling with reefs and islets, and almost entirely without strand or haven.

No river or stream runs into it; it is bordered by no fertile or wooded tract, but by high cliffs, half disintegrated by the burning sun, or by steep mountains, which appear sometimes a dull red, sometimes a dingy grey colour, according to the material--granite or sandstone--which predominates in their composition.

The few tribes who inhabit this desolate region maintain a miserable existence by fishing and hunting: they were considered, during the Greek period, to be the most unfortunate of mortals, and if they appeared to be so to the mariners of the Ptolemies, doubtless they enjoyed the same reputation in the more remote time of the Pharaohs.

A few fishing villages, however, are mentioned as scattered along the littoral; watering-places, at some distance apart, frequented on account of their wells of brackish water by the desert tribes: such were Nahasît, Tap-Nekhabît, Saû, and Tâû: these the Egyptian merchant-vessels used as victualling stations, and took away as cargo the products of the country--mother-of-pearl, amethysts, emeralds, a little lapis-lazuli, a little gold, gums, and sweet-smelling resins.

If the weather was favourable, and the intake of merchandise had been scanty, the vessel, braving numerous risks of shipwreck, continued its course as far as the latitude of Sûakîn and Massowah, which was the beginning of Pûanît properly so called.

Here riches poured down to the coast from the interior, and selection became a difficulty: it was hard to decide which would make the best cargo, ivory or ebony, panthers’ skins or rings of gold, myrrh, incense, or a score of other sweet-smelling gums.

So many of these odoriferous resins were used for religious purposes, that it was always to the advantage of the merchant to procure as much of them as possible: incense, fresh or dried, was the staple and characteristic merchandise of the Red Sea, and the good people of Egypt pictured Pûanît as a land of perfumes, which attracted the sailor from afar by the delicious odours which were wafted from it.