SHEPHERDS.
Till very recently our knowledge of the Shepherd kings was almost entirely derived from what was said of them by Manetho, in the extracts from his writings so fortunately preserved by Josephus, in his answer to Apion. Recent explorations have however raised a hope that even their monuments may be so far recovered as to enable us to realise to some extent at least who they were and what their aspirations.
Manetho tells us they came from the East, but fearing the then rising power of the Assyrians, they fortified Avaris as a bulwark against them, and used it during their sojourn in Egypt to keep up their communications with their original seat. Recent explorations have enabled M. Mariette to identify San, Zoan, or Tanis, a well-known site on the Bubastite branch of the Nile, with this Avaris. And already he has disinterred a sphinx and two seated statues which certainly belong to the reign of the Shepherd king Apophis.[[53]]
The character of these differs widely from anything hitherto found in Egypt. They present a physiognomy strongly marked with an Asiatic type—an arched nose, rude bushy hair, and great muscular development; altogether something wholly different from everything else found in Egypt either before or afterwards.
This is not much, but it is an earnest that more remains to be discovered, and adds another to the proofs that are daily accumulating, how implicitly Manetho may be relied upon when we only read him correctly, and how satisfactory it is to find that every discovery that is made confirms the conclusions we had hesitatingly been adopting.
It appears from such fragmentary evidence as has hitherto been gleaned from the monuments, that the Shepherds’ invasion was neither sudden nor at once completely successful, if indeed it ever was so, for it is certain that Theban and Xoite dynasties co-existed with the Shepherds during the whole period of their stay, either from policy, like the protected princes under our sway in India, or because their conquest was not so complete as to enable them to suppress the national dynasties altogether.
Like the Tartars in China they seem to have governed the country by means of the original inhabitants, but for their own purposes; tolerating their religion and institutions, but ruling by the superior energy of their race the peace-loving semi-Semitic inhabitants of the Delta, till they were in their turn overthrown and expelled by the more warlike but more purely African races of the southern division of the Egyptian valley.
CHAPTER IV.
PHARAONIC KINGDOM.
PRINCIPAL KINGS OF THE GREAT THEBAN PERIOD.
| XVIIIth Dynasty. | B.C. 1830 | |||
| Amenhotep I. | reigned | 25 | years. | |
| Thothmes I. | reigned | 13 | years. | |
| Amenhotep II. | reigned | 20 | years. | |
| Hatshepsu (Queen) | reigned | 21 | years. | |
| Thothmes II. | reigned | 12 | years. | |
| Thothmes III. | reigned | 26 | years. | |
| Thothmes IV. | reigned | 10 | years. | |
| Amenhotep III. | reigned | 21 | years. | |
| Interregnum of Sun-worshipping Kings. | ||||
| Horemheb (Horus) | reigned | 36 | years. | |
| XIXth Dynasty. | ||||
| Rameses I. | reigned | 12 | years. | |
| Meneptah I. | reigned | 32 | years. | |
| Rameses II. | reigned | 68 | years. | |
| Meneptah II. | reigned | 5 | years. | |
| Exode | B.C. 1312 | |||
| XXth Dynasty. | ||||
| Rhampsinitus-Rameses | reigned | 55 | years. | |
| Ramessidæ | reigned | 66 | years. | |
| Amenophis | reigned | 20 | years. | |
The five centuries[[54]] which elapsed between the expulsion of the Shepherds and Exode of the Jews comprise the culminating period of the greatness and greatest artistic development of the Egyptians. It is practically within this period that all the great buildings of the “Hundred pyloned city of Thebes” were erected. Memphis was adorned within its limits with buildings as magnificent as those of the southern capital, though subsequently less fortunate in escaping the hand of the spoiler; and in every city of the Delta wherever an obelisk or sculptured stone is found, there we find almost invariably the name of one of the kings of the 18th or 19th dynasties. In Arabia, too, and above the cataracts of the far-off Meroë, everywhere their works and names are found. At Arban,[[55]] on the Khabour, we find the name of the third Thothmes; and there seems little doubt but that the Naharaina or Mesopotamia was one of the provinces conquered by them, and that all Western Asia was more or less subject to their sway.
Whoever the conquering Thebans may have been, their buildings are sufficient to prove, as above mentioned, that they belonged to a race differing in many essential respects from that of the Memphite kingdom they had superseded.
The pyramid has disappeared as a form of royal sepulchre, to be replaced by a long gloomy corridor cut in the rock; its walls covered with wild and fetish pictures of death and judgment: a sort of magic hall, crowded with mysterious symbols the most monstrous and complicated that any system of human superstition has yet invented.
Instead of the precise orientation and careful masonry of the old kingdom, the buildings of the new race are placed anywhere, facing in any direction, and generally affected with a symmetriphobia that it is difficult to understand. The pylons are seldom in the axis of the temples; the courts seldom square; the angles frequently not right angles, and one court succeeding another without the least reference to symmetry.
The masonry, too, is frequently of the rudest and clumsiest sort, and would long ago have perished but for its massiveness: and there is in all their works an appearance of haste and want of care that sometimes goes far to mar the value of their grandest conceptions.
In their manners, too, there seems an almost equal degree of discrepancy. War was the occupation of the kings, and foreign conquest seems to have been the passion of the people. The pylons and the walls of the temples are covered with battle-scenes, or with the enumeration of the conquests made, or the tribute brought by the subjected races. While not engaged in this, the monarch’s time seems to have been devoted to practising the rites of the most complicated and least rational form of idolatry that has yet been known to exist among any body of men in the slightest degree civilised.
If the monuments of Memphis had come down to our times as perfect as those of Thebes, some of these differences might be found less striking. On the other hand, others might be still more apparent; but judging from such data as we possess—and they are tolerably extensive and complete—we are justified in assuming a most marked distinction; and it is indispensably necessary to bear it in mind in attempting to understand the architecture of the valley of the Nile, and equally important in any attempt to trace the affinities of the Egyptian with any other races of mankind. So far as we can now see, it may be possible to trace some affinities with the pyramid builders in Assyria or in Western Asia; but if any can be dimly predicated of the southern Egyptian race, it is in India and the farther east; and the line of communication was not the Isthmus of Suez, but the Straits of Babelmandeb and the Indian Ocean.