Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations

by A. H. Sayce

For many centuries the Semites and the people of the north contended for the possession of the Syrian plains. Horde after horde descended from the northern mountains, capturing the Aramæan cities and setting up kingdoms in their midst. At one time it seemed as if the Semites of the east and west were to be permanently sundered from one another. The decay of Babylonia and Egypt enabled the Mitannians and Hittites to establish themselves in Mesopotamia and Syria, and to gain possession of the fords of the Euphrates and the great lines of trade. But the northerner was not suited by nature for the hot and enervating climate of the south. His force diminished, his numbers lessened, and the subjugated Semite increased in strength. Mitanni perished like the Hittite empire, and with the rise of the second Assyrian empire the intruding nations of the north found themselves compelled to struggle for bare existence. Ararat had become the leader among them, and in the latter days of the older Assyrian dynasty had wrested territory from the Assyrians themselves, and had imposed its dominion from the borders of Cappadocia to the shores of Lake Urumiyeh. But on a sudden all was changed. Tiglath-pileser swept the land of Ararat to the very gates of its capital, destroying and plundering as he went, and a war began between north and south which ended in the triumph of Assyria. Ararat indeed remained, though reduced to its original dimensions in the neighbourhood of Lake Van; but its allies in Comagênê and Cappadocia, in Cilicia and among the Hittites, were subjugated and dispersed. The tribes of Meshech and Tubal retreated to the coasts of the Black Sea, and Ararat and its sister-kingdom of Minni were too exhausted to withstand the invasion of a new race from new quarters of the world. The Aryan Kimmerians from Russia poured through them, settling on their way in Minni; while other Aryans from Phrygia made themselves masters of Ararat, which henceforth took the name of Armenia. The Aramæan was avenged: the invaders who in days before the Exodus had already robbed him of his lands were themselves pursued to their northern retreats. The south proved to them a land of decay and destruction; Gog and his host were given, "on the mountains of Israel," to the vulture and the beast of prey.

[CHAPTER V]

EGYPT

Egypt had been the bondhouse of Israel. It was there that Israel had grown from a family into a people, which the desert was to transform into a nation. The Exodus out of Egypt was the beginning of Israelitish history, the era from which it dated. Down to the last the kingdom of the Pharaohs exercised upon it an influence more or less profound; the extravagant splendour of Solomon was modelled after that of the Egyptian monarchs, his merchants found their best market on the banks of the Nile, and the last Canaanitish city which passed into Israelitish hands was the gift to him of the Pharaoh. The invasion of the Egyptian king prevented Rehoboam from attempting to reconquer the revolted tribes, and in the days of Assyrian ascendancy it was Egypt that was played off against the Assyrian invader by the princes and statesmen of the west. The defeat of Necho at Carchemish handed Palestine over to the Babylonians, and indirectly brought about the destruction of Jerusalem; even in the age of the Ptolemies Egypt still influenced the history of Israel, and the Jews of Alexandria prepared the way for the Christian Church. For centuries Palestine was the battle-ground of the nations; but it was so because it lay between the two great powers of the ancient East, between Egypt on the one side and Assyria and Babylonia on the other.

Egypt is the creation of the Nile. Outside the Delta and the strip of land which can be watered from the river there is only desert. When the annual inundation covers the fields the land of Egypt exists no more; it becomes a watery plain, out of which emerge the villages and towns and the raised banks which serve as roads. For more than 1600 miles the Nile flows without an affluent; in the spring it falls so low that its channel becomes almost unnavigable; but in the late summer, its waters, swollen by the rains and melted snows of Central Africa, and laden with the fertilising silt of the Abyssinian mountains, spread over the cultivated country, and bring fertility wherever they go.

The waters of the inundation must have been confined by dykes, and made to flow where the cultivator needed them, at a very remote date. Recent discoveries have thrown light on the early history of the country. We find it inhabited by at least one race, possibly of Libyan origin, which for the present we must term pre-historic. Its burial-places are met with in various localities in Upper Egypt. The members of the race were not acquainted with the use of metals, but they were expert artificers in stone and clay. Stone was skilfully carved into vessels of different forms, and vases of clay were fashioned, with brightly polished surfaces. Sometimes the vases were simply coloured red and black, or adorned with patterns and pictures in incised white lines; at other times, and more especially in the later tombs, they were artistically decorated with representations of men and animals, boats, and geometrical patterns in red upon a pale drab ground.

The pre-historic race or races had already reached a fair level of civilisation—neolithic in type though it may have been—when a new people appeared upon the scene, bringing with them the elements of a high culture and a knowledge of working in metals. These were the Pharaonic Egyptians, who seem to have come from Babylonia and the coasts of southern Arabia. Cities were built and kingdoms were founded on the banks of the Nile, and the older population was forced to become the serfs of the new-comers, to cultivate their fields, to confine the Nile within artificial boundaries, and to carry out those engineering works which have made the valley of the Nile what it is to-day.

The Pharaonic Egyptians are the Egyptians of history. They were acquainted with the art of writing, they mummified their dead, and they possessed to a high degree the faculty of organisation. The gods they worshipped were beneficent deities, forms of the Sun-god from whom their kings derived their descent. It was a religion which easily passed into a sort of pantheistic monotheism in the more cultivated minds, and it was associated with a morality which is almost Christian in its character. A belief in a future world and a resurrection of the flesh formed an integral part of it; hence came the practice of embalming the body that it might be preserved to the day of resurrection; hence too the doctrine of the dead man's justification, not only through his own good works, but through the intercession of the Sun-god Horus as well. Horus was addressed as "the Redeemer;" he had avenged the death of his father Osiris upon his enemy Set, the lord of evil, and through faith in him his followers were delivered from the powers of darkness. Horus, however, and Osiris were but forms of the same deity. Horus was the Sun-god when he rises in the morning; Osiris the Sun-god as he journeys at night through a world of darkness; and both were identical with Tum, the Sun-god of the evening. The gods who watched over the great cities of Egypt, some of which had been the capitals of principalities, were identified with the Sun-god in these his various forms. Thus Ptah of Memphis became one with Osiris; so also did Ra, the Sun-god of Heliopolis, while in those later days when Thebes rose to sovereign power its local god Amon was united with Ra.

Along with this higher and spiritual religion went—at least in historical times—a worship of sacred animals. The anomaly can be explained only by that mixture of races of which archaeology has assured us. Beast-worship must have been the religion of the pre-historic inhabitants of Egypt, and just as Brahmanism has thrown its protection over the superstitions of the aboriginal tribes of India and identified the idols of the populace with its own gods, so too in ancient Egypt a fusion of race must have brought about a fusion of ideas. The sacred animals of the older cult were associated with the deities of the new-comers; in the eyes of the upper classes they were but symbols; the lower classes continued to see in them what their fathers had seen, the gods themselves. While the Pharaonic Egyptian adored Horus, the older race knew of Horus only as a hawk. If we may trust Manetho, the Egyptian historian, it was not till the beginning of the Second historical dynasty that the sacred animals of popular worship were received into the official cult.