History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 2 — 07 - Vol. 02, Ch. 01: The Political Constitution of Egypt, pt. 7

The number of persons of obscure origin, who in this manner had risen in a few years to the highest honours, and died governors of provinces or ministers of Pharaoh, must have been considerable.

Their descendants followed in their fathers’ footsteps, until the day came when royal favour or an advantageous marriage secured them the possession of an hereditary fief, and transformed the son or grandson of a prosperous scribe into a feudal lord.

It was from people of this class, and from the children of the Pharaoh, that the nobility was mostly recruited.

In the Delta, where the authority of the Pharaoh was almost everywhere directly felt, the power of the nobility was weakened and much curtailed; in Middle Egypt it gained ground, and became stronger and stronger in proportion as one advanced southward.

The nobles held the principalities of the Gazelle, of the Hare, of the Serpent Mountain, of Akhmîm, of Thinis, of Qasr-es-Sayad, of El-Kab, of Aswan, and doubtless others of which we shall some day discover the monuments.

[Illustration: 077. jpg HUNTING WITH THE BOOMERANG AND FISHING WITH THE DOUBLE HARPOON IN A MARSH OR POOL]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Gayet.

They accepted without difficulty the fiction according to which Pharaoh claimed to be absolute master of the soil, and ceded to his subjects only the usufruct of their fiefs; but apart from the admission of the principle, each lord proclaimed himself sovereign in his own domain, and exercised in it, on a small scale, complete royal authority.

[Illustration: 078. jpg PRINCE API, BORNE IN A PALANQUIN, INSPECTS HIS FUNERARY DOMAIN]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch- Bey.

The tomb of Api was discovered at Saqqâra in 1884. It had been pulled down in ancient times, and a new tomb built on its ruins, about the time of the XIIth dynasty; all that remains of it is now in the museum at Gîzeh.

Everything within the limits of this petty state belonged to him--woods, canals, fields, even the desert-sand: after the example of the Pharaoh, he farmed a part himself, and let out the remainder, either in farms or as fiefs, to those of his followers who had gained his confidence or his friendship.

After the example of Pharaoh, also, he was a priest, and exercised priestly functions in relation to all the gods--that is, not of all Egypt, but of all the deities of the nome.

He was an administrator of civil and criminal law, received the complaints of his vassals and serfs at the gate of his palace, and against his decisions there was no appeal.

He kept up a flotilla, and raised on his estate a small army, of which he was commander-in-chief by hereditary right.

He inhabited a fortified mansion, situated sometimes within the capital of the principality itself, sometimes in its neighbourhood, and in which the arrangements of the royal city were reproduced on a smaller scale.

[Illustration: 079. jpg A DWARF PLAYING WITH CYNOCEPHALI AND A TAME IBIS] Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a chromolithograph in Flinders Petrie’s _Medûm,_ pl.

xxiv.

Side by side with the reception halls was the harem, where the legitimate wife, often a princess of solar rank, played the rôle of queen, surrounded by concubines, dancers, and slaves.

The offices of the various departments were crowded into the enclosure, with their directors, governors, scribes of all ranks, custodians, and workmen, who bore the same titles as the corresponding employés in the departments of the State: their White Storehouse, their Gold Storehouse, their Granary, were at times called the Double White Storehouse, the Double Gold Storehouse, the Double Granary, as were those of the Pharaoh.

Amusements at the court of the vassal did not differ from those at that of the sovereign: hunting in the desert and the marshes, fishing, inspection of agricultural works, military exercises, games, songs, dancing, doubtless the recital of long stories, and exhibitions of magic, even down to the contortions of the court buffoon and the grimaces of the dwarfs.

[Illustration: 080. jpg IN A NILE BOAT] It amused the prince to see one of these wretched favourites leading to him by the paw a cynocephalus larger than himself, while a mischievous monkey slyly pulled a tame and stately ibis by the tail.

From time to time the great lord proceeded to inspect his domain: on these occasions he travelled in a kind of sedan chair, supported by two mules yoked together; or he was borne in a palanquin by some thirty men, while fanned by large flabella; or possibly he went up the Nile and the canals in his beautiful painted barge.

The life of the Egyptian lords may be aptly described as in every respect an exact reproduction of the life of the Pharaoh on a smaller scale.

Inheritance in a direct or indirect line was the rule, but in every case of transmission the new lord had to receive the investiture of the sovereign either by letter or in person.

The duties enforced by the feudal state do not appear to have been onerous.

In the first place, there was the regular payment of a tribute, proportionate to the extent and resources of the fief.

In the next place, there was military service: the vassal agreed to supply, when called upon, a fixed number of armed men, whom he himself commanded, unless he could offer a reasonable excuse such as illness or senile incapacity.

* * Prince Amoni, of the Gazelle nome, led a body of four hundred men and another body of six hundred, levied in his principality, into Ethiopia under these conditions; the first that he served in the royal army, was as a substitute for his father, who had grown too old.

Similarly, under the XVIIIth dynasty, Âhmosis of El-Kab commanded the war-ship, the Calf, in place of his father.

The Uni inscription furnishes us with an instance of a general levy of the feudal contingents in the time of the VIth dynasty (1. 14, et seq.

).

Attendance at court was not obligatory: we notice, however, many nobles about the person of Pharaoh, and there are numerous examples of princes, with whose lives we are familiar, filling offices which appear to have demanded at least a temporary residence in the palace, as, for instance, the charge of the royal wardrobe.

When the king travelled, the great vassals were compelled to entertain him and his suite, and to escort him to the frontier of their domain.

On the occasion of such visits, the king would often take away with him one of their sons to be brought up with his own children: an act which they on their part considered a great honour, while the king on his had a guarantee of their fidelity in the person of these hostages.

Such of these young people as returned to their fathers’ roof when their education was finished, were usually most loyal to the reigning dynasty.

They often brought back with them some maiden born in the purple, who consented to share their little provincial sovereignty, while in exchange one or more of their sisters entered the harem of the Pharaoh.

Marriages made and marred in their turn the fortunes of the great feudal houses.

Whether she were a princess or not, each woman received as her dowry a portion of territory, and enlarged by that amount her husband’s little state;

but the property she brought might, in a few years, be taken by her daughters as portions and enrich other houses.

The fief seldom could bear up against such dismemberment; it fell away piecemeal, and by the third or fourth generation had disappeared.

Sometimes, however, it gained more than it lost in this matrimonial game, and extended its borders till they encroached on neighbouring nomes or else completely absorbed them.

There were always in the course of each reign several great principalities formed, or in the process of formation, whose chiefs might be said to hold in their hands the destinies of the country.

Pharaoh himself was obliged to treat them with deference, and he purchased their allegiance by renewed and ever-increasing concessions.

Their ambition was never satisfied; when they were loaded with favours, and did not venture to ask for more for themselves, they impudently demanded them for such of their children as they thought were poorly provided for.

Their eldest son “knew not the high favours which came from the king.

Other princes were his privy counsellers, his chosen friends, or foremost among his friends!

” he had no share in all this.

Pharaoh took good care not to reject a petition presented so humbly: he proceeded to lavish appointments, titles, and estates on the son in question; if necessity required it, he would even seek out a wife for him, who might give him, together with her hand, a property equal to that of his father.

The majority of these great vassals secretly aspired to the crown: they frequently had reason to believe that they had some right to it, either through their mother or one of their ancestors.

Had they combined against the reigning house, they could easily have gained the upper hand, but their mutual jealousies prevented this, and the overthrow of a dynasty to which they owed so much would, for the most part, have profited them but little: as soon as one of them revolted, the remainder took arms in Pharaoh’s defence, led his armies and fought his battles.

If at times their ambition and greed harassed their suzerain, at least their power was at his service, and their self-interested allegiance was often the means of delaying the downfall of his house.

Two things were specially needful both for them and for Pharaoh in order to maintain or increase their authority--the protection of the gods, and a military organization which enabled them to mobilize the whole of their forces at the first signal.

The celestial world was the faithful image of our own; it had its empires and its feudal organization, the arrangement of which corresponded to that of the terrestrial world.

The gods who inhabited it were dependent upon the gifts of mortals, and the resources of each individual deity, and consequently his power, depended on the wealth and number of his worshippers; anything influencing one had an immediate effect on the other.

The gods dispensed happiness, health, and vigour;* to those who made them large offerings and instituted pious foundations, they lent their own weapons, and inspired them with needful strength to overcome their enemies.

They even came down to assist in battle, and every great encounter of armies involved an invisible struggle among the immortals.

The gods of the side which was victorious shared with it in the triumph, and received a tithe of the spoil as the price of their help; the gods of the vanquished were so much the poorer, their priests and their statues were reduced to slavery, and the destruction of their people entailed their own downfall.

* I may here remind my readers of the numberless bas-reliefs and stelae on which the king is represented as making an offering to a god, who replies in some such formula as the following: “I give thee health and strength;” or, “I give thee joy and life for millions of years.

” It was, therefore, to the special interest of every one in Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the humblest of his vassals, to maintain the good will and power of the gods, so that their protection might be effectively ensured in the hour of danger.

Pains were taken to embellish their temples with obelisks, colossi, altars, and bas-reliefs; new buildings were added to the old; the parts threatened with ruin were restored or entirely rebuilt; daily gifts were brought of every kind--animals which were sacrificed on the spot, bread, flowers, fruit, drinks, as well as perfumes, stuffs, vases, jewels, bricks or bars of gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, which were all heaped up in the treasury within the recesses of the crypts.

* If a dignitary of high rank wished to perpetuate the remembrance of his honours or his services, and at the same time to procure for his double the benefit of endless prayers and sacrifices, he placed “by special permission” ** a statue of himself on a votive stele in the part of the temple reserved for this purpose,--in a courtyard, chamber, encircling passage, as at Karnak,*** or on the staircase of Osiris as in that leading up to the terrace in the sanctuary of Abydos; he then sealed a formal agreement with the priests, by which the latter engaged to perform a service in his name, in front of this commemorative monument, a stated number of times in the year, on the days fixed by universal observance or by local custom.

* See the “Poem of Pentaûîrît” for the grounds on which Ramses II.

bases his imperative appeal to Araon for help: “Have I not made thee numerous offerings?

I have filled thy temple with my prisoners.

I have built thee an everlasting temple, and have not spared my wealth in endowing it for thee; I lay the whole world under contribution in order to stock thy domain....

I have built thee whole pylons in stone, and have myself reared the flagstaffs which adorn them; I have brought thee obelisks from Elephantine.

” ** The majority of the votive statues were lodged in a temple “by special favour of a king “--em HOSÎtû nti KUÎr sûton--as a recompense for services rendered.

Some only of the stelae bear an inscription to the above effect, no authorization from the king was required for the consecration of a stele in a temple.

*** It was in the encircling passage of the limestone temple built by the kings of the XIIth dynasty, and now completely destroyed, that all the Karnak votive statues were discovered.

Some of them still rest on the stone ledge on which they were placed by the priests of the god at the moment of consecration.

For this purpose he assigned to them annuities in kind, charges on his patrimonial estates, or in some cases, if he were a great lord, on the revenues of his fief,--such as a fixed quantity of loaves and drinks for each of the celebrants, a fourth part of the sacrificial victim, a garment, frequently also lands with their cattle, serfs, existing buildings, farming implements and produce, along with the conditions of service with which the lands were burdened.

These gifts to the god--“notir hotpûû”--were, it appears, effected by agreements analogous to those dealing with property in mortmain in modern Egypt; in each nome they constituted, in addition to the original temporalities of the temple, a considerable domain, constantly enlarged by fresh endowments.

The gods had no daughters for whom to provide, nor sons among whom to divide their inheritance; all that fell to them remained theirs for ever, and in the contracts were inserted imprecations threatening with terrible ills, in this world and the next, those who should abstract the smallest portion from them.

Such menaces did not always prevent the king or the lords from laying hands on the temple revenues: had this not been the case, Egypt would soon have become a sacerdotal country from one end to the other.

Even when reduced by periodic usurpations, the domain of the gods formed, at all periods, about one-third of the whole country.

* * The tradition handed down by Diodorus tells us that the goddess Isis assigned a third of the country to the priests;

the whole of Egypt is said to have been divided into three equal parts, the first of which belonged to the priests, the second to the kings, and the third to the warrior class.

When we read, in the great Harris Papyrus, the list of the property possessed by the temple of the Theban Amon alone, all over Egypt, under Ramses III.

, we can readily believe that the tradition of the Greek epoch in no way exaggerated matters.

Its administration was not vested in a single body of Priests, representing the whole of Egypt and recruited or ruled everywhere in the same fashion.

There were as many bodies of priests as there were temples, and every temple preserved its independent constitution with which the clergy of the neighbouring temples had nothing to do: the only master they acknowledged was the lord of the territory on which the temple was built, either Pharaoh or one of his nobles.

The tradition which made Pharaoh the head of the different worships in Egypt* prevailed everywhere, but Pharaoh soared too far above this world to confine himself to the functions of any one particular order of priests: he officiated before all the gods without being specially the minister of any, and only exerted his supremacy in order to make appointments to important sacerdotal posts in his domain.

** * The only exception to this rule was in the case of the Theban kings of the XXIst dynasty, and even here the exception is more apparent than real.

As a matter of fact, these kings, Hrihor and Pinozmû, began by being high priests of Amon before ascending the throne; they were pontiffs who became Pharaohs, not Pharaohs who created themselves pontiffs.

Possibly we ought to place Smonkharî of the XIVth dynasty in the same category, if, as Brugsch assures us, his name, Mîr-mâshâù, is identical with the title of the high priest of Osiris at Mendes, thus proving that he was pontiff of Osiris in that town before he became king.

** Among other instances, we have that of the king of the XXIst Tanite dynasty, who appointed Mankhopirrî, high priest of the Theban Amon, and that of the last king of the same dynasty, Psûsennes IL, who conferred the same office on prince Aûpûti, son of Sheshonqû.

The king’s right of nomination harmonized very well with the hereditary transmission of the priestly office through members of the same family, as we shall have occasion to show later on.

He reserved the high priesthood of the Memphite Phtah and that of Râ of Heliopolis either for the princes of his own family or more often for his most faithful servants; they were the docile instruments of his will, through whom he exerted the influence of the gods, and disposed of their property without having the trouble of administrating it.

The feudal lords, less removed from mortal affairs than the Pharaoh, did not disdain to combine the priesthood of the temples dependent on them with the general supervision of the different worships practised on their lands.

The princes of the Gazelle nome, for instance, bore the title of “Directors of the Prophets of all the Gods,” but were, correctly speaking, prophets of Horus, of Khnûmû master of Haoîrît, and of Pakhît mistress of the Speos-Artemidos.

The religious suzerainty of such princes was the complement of their civil and military power, and their ordinary income was augmented by some portion at least of the revenues which the lands in mortmain furnished annually.

The subordinate sacerdotal functions were filled by professional priests whose status varied according to the gods they served and the provinces in which they were located.

Although between the mere priest and the chief prophet there were a number of grades to which the majority never attained, still the temples attracted many people from divers sources, who, once established in this calling of life, not only never left it, but never rested until they had introduced into it the members of their families.

The offices they filled were not necessarily hereditary, but the children, born and bred in the shelter of the sanctuary, almost always succeeded to the positions of their fathers, and certain families thus continuing in the same occupation for generations, at last came to be established as a sort of sacerdotal nobility.

* * We possess the coffins of the priests of the Theban Montû for nearly thirty generations, viz.

from the XXVth dynasty to the time of the Ptolemies.

The inscriptions give us their genealogies, as well as their intermarriages, and show us that they belonged almost exclusively to two or three important families who intermarried with one another or took their wives from the families of the priests of Amon.