The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Chronologically, therefore, the Biblical narrative [pg 041] fits in with the requirements of Egyptian history, and allows us to see in the Hebrew captive the powerful minister of a race of kings who, like himself, had come from the highlands of Asia. But it must be remembered that it was only in the north of Egypt that Hyksos rule made itself actually visible to the eyes of the people. Southern Egypt was nominally governed by its native princes, though they did not assume the title of king or Pharaoh. They were hiqu, “hereditary chieftains,” the last representatives of the royal families of earlier days. They acknowledged the supremacy of the Hyksos Pharaoh, and tribute was sent to him from Thebes and El-Kab.

Though Memphis, the ancient capital of the country, was in the hands of the strangers, Zoan, the Tanis of classical geography, was rather the seat of Hyksos power. Protected by the marshes which surrounded it, Zoan, the modern Sân, lay on the eastern side of the Delta at no great distance from the frontier of Asia and the great Hyksos fortress of Avaris. From Zoan, the “road of the Philistines,” as it is called in the Pentateuch, ran almost in a straight line to Pelusium and the south of Palestine, skirting on one side the Mediterranean Sea, and leaving to the right the lofty fortress-rock of El-Arîsh on the waterless “river of Egypt.” [pg 042] Tanis had existed in the days of the Old Empire, but either the Hyksos conquest or earlier invasions had caused it to decay, and when the Hyksos court was established there its ancient temple was already in ruins. The restoration of the city was due to the Hyksos kings, who have left in it memorials of themselves. The Hyksos sphinxes in the Museum of Gizeh, on one of which the name of Apopi is engraved, were found there by Mariette, as well as a curious group of two persons with enormous wigs holding fish and water-fowl in their laps. When it is stated in the book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that “Hebron was built seven years before Zoan,” it is probable that the building of Zoan by the Shepherd kings is meant.

In journeying from southern Palestine to Zoan, Jacob and his sons had no very long distance to traverse. Nor had they to pass through a long tract of Egyptian territory. From the desert, with its roving bands of kindred Bedouin, to the Pharaoh's court at Zoan, was hardly more than a day's journey. There was little fear that the Semitic traveller would meet with insult or opposition from the Egyptian fellahin on the way. The fellahin themselves were doubtless then, as now, mixed with Semitic elements; it was needful to go westward of Zoan in order to find Egyptians of pure blood.

Nor was the land of Goshen, the modern Wadi Tumilât, far from the Hyksos capital. It lay to the south of Zoan, on the banks of a canal whose course is now marked by the Freshwater Canal of Lesseps. The tourist who takes the train from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig traverses the whole length of the land of Goshen. The tradition that here was the territory assigned by Joseph to his brethren lingered long into the Christian centuries, and had been revived by more than one Egyptologist in later years. But the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville, and the excavations he undertook for the Egypt Exploration Fund. In 1883 he disinterred the remains of Pa-Tum, or Pithom, one of the two “store-cities” which the children of Israel were forced to build. The ruins are now known as Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the mound of the Statue,” about twelve miles to the south-east of Ismailîyeh, and the monuments discovered there show that the Pharaoh for whom the city was built was Ramses ii. There was more than one Pa-Tum, or temple-city of the Sun-god of the evening, and the Pa-Tum of the eastern Delta is referred to in papyri of the nineteenth dynasty. Thus, in the eighth year of Meneptah ii., an official report speaks of the passage of certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom through the frontier-fortress of Thukut or Succoth, to “the pools of the city of [pg 044] Pa-Tum of Meneptah-hotep-hir-ma, in the district of Thukut.”

In 1884 Dr. Naville excavated, at Saft el-Henneh, an ancient mound close to the railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. His excavations resulted in the discovery that Saft el-Henneh marks the site of the ancient Qesem or Qos (Pha-kussa in the Greek geographers), the capital of the nome of the Egyptian Arabia. Qesem corresponds exactly with Geshem, which represents in the Septuagint the Hebrew Goshen, and points to the fact that the Egyptian Jews, to whom the Greek translation of the Old Testament was due, recognised in the Biblical Goshen the Qeshem of Egyptian geography.

The district immediately around Saft el-Henneh is fertile, but the name of the Egyptian Arabia which it once bore shows unmistakably who its cultivators must have been. They were the Semitic nomads from the East who, like their descendants to-day, occasionally settled on the frontier-lands of Egypt, and became more or less unwilling agriculturists. But the larger part of them remained shepherds, leading a nomad life with their flocks and camels, and pitching their tents wherever the monotony of the desert was broken by water and vegetation. The Wadi Tumilât, into which the district of Saft el-Henneh opened, was thus eminently suited for [pg 045] the residence of the Hebrew Bedouin. Here they had food for their flocks, plenty of space for their camping-grounds, and freedom from interference on the part of the Egyptians, while in the background was a fertile district, in close connection with the capital, where those of them who cared to exchange a pastoral for an agricultural life could find rich soil to sow and cultivate.

Hard by Zagazig are the mounds of the ancient Bubastis, and here the excavations carried on by the Egypt Exploration Fund have brought to light remains of the Hyksos Pharaohs, including one of Apopi. Bubastis, therefore, must have been a Hyksos residence, and its temple was adorned by the Hyksos kings. Between Bubastis and Heliopolis stood Pa-Bailos, and of this town Meneptah ii. says at Thebes that “the country around was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers, having been abandoned since the times of old.” What better proof can we have that the Arabian nome was in truth what the land of Goshen is represented to be?

By a curious coincidence, the Wadi Tumilât, the old land of Goshen, has, in the present century, again been handed over to Bedouin and Syrians, and again been the scene of an Exodus. Mohammed Ali was anxious to establish the culture of the silk-worm in Egypt, and accordingly planted mulberry-trees in [pg 046] the Wadi Tumilât, and settled there a large colony of Syrians and Bedouin. The Bedouin were induced to remain there, partly by the pasturage provided for their flocks, partly by a promise of exemption from taxes and military conscription. When Abbas Pasha became Khedive, however, the promise was forgotten; orders were issued that the free Bedouin of the Wadi Tumilât should be treated like the enslaved fellahin, compelled to pay the tax-gatherer, and to see their children driven in handcuffs and with the courbash to serve in the army. But the orders were never carried out. Suddenly, in a single night, without noise or warning, the whole Bedouin population deserted their huts, and with their flocks and other possessions disappeared into the eastern desert. The Pasha lost his slaves, the culture of the silk-worm ceased, and when the Freshwater Canal was cut not a single mulberry-tree remained.

In the land of Goshen, the Israelitish settlers throve and multiplied. But a time came when a new king arose “which knew not Joseph,” and when the descendants of Jacob seemed to the Egyptians a source of danger. Like Abbas Pasha in a later century, the Pharaoh determined to reduce the free-born Israelites into the condition of public slaves, and by every means in his power to diminish [pg 047] their number. The male children were destroyed, the adults compelled to labour at the cities the Egyptian monarch was building in their neighbourhood, and the land in which they lived was surrounded by Egyptian garrisons and controlled by Egyptian officers.

The slaves, however, succeeded in escaping from their “house of bondage.” Under the leadership of Moses they made their way into the eastern desert, and received, at Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea, the laws which were henceforth to govern them. The army sent to pursue them was swallowed up in the waters of the sea, and the district they had occupied was left desolate.