The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Among the remnant which still retained the faith of their forefathers the Roman conquest and the profanation of the temple gave new strength to the conviction that the Messiah and saviour of Israel must surely soon appear. The conviction finds expression in the so-called Psalms of Solomon, of which only a Greek copy survives. The high hopes raised by the successes of the Maccabean family were dashed for ever, and the temporal power of Judah had vanished away. Henceforth it existed as a nation only on sufferance.

In Egypt it was not long before the Jews discovered how grievous had been the change in their fortunes. They ceased to be feared, and therefore respected: the mob and rulers of Alexandria had for them now only hatred and contempt. Their citizenship [pg 165] was taken away, with its right to the enjoyment of their own magistrates and courts of justice, and they were degraded to the rank of the native Egyptians, whom the lowest Greek vagabond in the streets of Alexandria could maltreat with impunity. They did not recover their old privileges until Augustus had reorganised his Egyptian province, and though they were again deprived of them by Caligula, when Philo went in vain to plead for his countrymen before the emperor, they were restored by Claudius, and even Vespasian after the Jewish war did not interfere with them.

The house of Ptolemy fell ignobly. But it fell amid the convulsions of a civil war which rent the empire of its conquerors to the foundation, and among the ruins of the Roman republic. Cleopatra, its last representative, bewitched not only the coarser Mark Antony but even the master mind of Julius Cæsar. Her charms were fatal to the life and reputation of the one; they nearly proved equally fatal to the life of the other. Besieged with her in the palace of the Ptolemies by the Alexandrine mob, Cæsar's life trembled for a while in the balance. But the Library of Alexandria was given in its stead; he saved himself by firing the docks and shipping, and the flames spread from the harbour to the halls of the Museum. The precious papyri perished in the flames, and the [pg 166] rooms in which the learning and talent of the Greek world had been gathered together were a heap of blackened ruins. It is true that Cleopatra subsequently obtained from Mark Antony the library of Pergamos, with its 200,000 volumes, which she placed in the temple of Serapis, but the new library never equalled the old, either in its extent or in the value of its books.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony died by their own hands, and Augustus was left master of Egypt and the Roman world (b.c. 30). Cæsarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar, was put to death, and Egypt was annexed to the emperor's privy purse. It never, therefore, became a province of the Roman empire: unhappily for its inhabitants, it remained the emperor's private domain. Its prefect was never allowed to be of higher rank than the equestrian order, and a senator was forbidden to set foot in it. Its cities could not govern themselves, and the old Greek law, which restricted the rights of citizenship to the Greeks and Jews and prevented any native Egyptians from sharing them, was left in force. Egypt was the granary of Rome, and the riches of its soil and the industry of its inhabitants made it needful that no rival to the reigning sovereign should establish himself in it. History had shown with what ease the country could be invaded and occupied and [pg 167] with what difficulty the occupier could be driven out. And the master of Egypt commanded the trade between East and West; he commanded also the Roman mob whose mouths were filled with Egyptian corn. It was dangerous to allow a possible rival even to visit the valley of the Nile.

The history of Alexandria under the Romans is the history of Alexandria rather than of the Egyptians. The fellahin laboured for others, not for themselves, and the burdens which weighed upon them became ever greater and more intolerable. Now and again there were outbreaks in Upper Egypt, which were, however, quickly repressed, and in the third century the barbarian Blemmyes made Coptos and Ptolemais their capitals. The reconquest of the Thebaid by Probus (a.d. 280) was judged worthy of a triumph. About eight years later the whole country was once more in rebellion, and proclaimed their leader Akhilleus emperor. The war lasted for nine years, and the whole force of the empire was required to finish it. The emperor Diocletian marched in person into Upper Egypt and besieged Coptos, the centre of the revolt. After a long siege the city was taken and razed to the ground. But the war had ruined the people. The embankments were broken, the canals choked up, the fields untilled and overrun by the barbarians from the Sûdan or the Bedouin of [pg 168] the eastern desert. Diocletian, when the struggle was over, found himself obliged to withdraw the Roman garrisons south of the First Cataract, and to fix the frontier of the empire at Assuan.

The war was followed by the great persecution of the Christians, the last expiring effort of Roman paganism against the invasion of the new faith. Christianity had become a mighty power in the Roman world, which threatened soon to absorb all that was left of the Rome of the past, with its patriotism, its devotion to the emperor, its law and its administration. The struggle between it and the empire of Augustus could no longer be delayed. The edict of Diocletian was signed, and the empire put forth its whole strength to crush its rival and root Christianity out of its midst.

But the attempt came too late. The new power was stronger than the old one, and the persecution only proved how utterly the old Rome had passed away. The empire bowed its head and became Christian; the bishops took the place of the prefects and senators of the past, and theological disputations raged in the halls of philosophy. Nowhere had the persecution been fiercer than in Egypt; nowhere had the martyrs and confessors of the Church been more heroic or more numerous.

The result was one which we should hardly have [pg 169] expected. Hitherto Christianity in Egypt had been Greek. It was associated with Alexandria and the Greek language, not with the villages and tongue of the people. Its bishops and theologians were Greeks, and the school of Christian Platonism which flourished in Alexandria had little in common with Egyptian ideas. With the Diocletian persecution, however, came a change. Even while it was still at its height, martyrs and confessors come forward who bear Egyptian and not Greek names. Hardly is it over before the native population joins in one great body the new religion. Osiris and Isis make way for Christ and the Blessed Virgin, the Coptic alphabet replaces the demotic script of heathenism, and the bodies of the dead cease to be embalmed. It is difficult to account for the suddenness and completeness of the change. The decay of the Roman power, and therewith the barriers between Greek and Egyptian, may have had something to do with it. So too may the revolt in Upper Egypt, which united in one common feeling of nationality all the elements of the population. Perhaps a still more potent cause was the spectacle of the heroism and constancy of those who suffered for the Christian faith. The Egyptian has always been deeply religious, and his very enjoyment of life makes him admire and revere the ascetic. But whatever may [pg 170] have been the reason, the fact remains: before the persecution of Diocletian Egyptian Christianity had been Greek; when the persecution was over it had become Copt. The pagans who still survived were not Egyptians but the rich and highly-educated Greeks, like the poet Nonnus, who was tortured to death by St. Shnûdi, or the gifted Hypatia, whose flesh was torn from her bones with oyster-shells by the monks of St. Cyril.

The literature of Coptic Christianity was almost wholly religious. Little else had an interest for the devoted adherents of the new faith. The romances which had delighted their forefathers were replaced by legends of the saints and martyrs, and Christian hymns succeeded to the poems of the past. We owe to this passion for theology the preservation of productions of the Jewish and Christian Churches which would otherwise have been lost. The Book of Enoch, quoted though it is by St. Jude, would have perished irrevocably had it not been for Coptic Christianity. The Church of Abyssinia, a daughter of that of Egypt, has preserved it in an Ethiopic translation, and portions of the Greek original from which the translation was made have been found in a tomb at Ekhmîm, which was excavated in 1886. It has long been known that the text used by the Abyssinian translator must have differed considerably [pg 171] from that of which extracts have been preserved for us in the Epistle of St. Jude and the writings of the Byzantine historians Kedrenos and George the Syncellus; the newly-discovered fragments now enable us to see what this text actually was like. If the original book was written in Aramaic it would seem that at least two authorised Greek versions of it existed, one of which was used in Europe and Syria, the other in Egypt. Which was the older and more faithful we have yet to learn.

The excavations at Ekhmîm have brought to light fragments of two other works, both belonging to the early days of Christianity and long since lost. One of these is supposed by its first editor, M. Bouriant, to be the Apocalypse of St. Peter; it opens with an account of the Transfiguration, which is followed by a vision of heaven and hell. The book appears to have been composed or interpolated by a Gnostic, as there is a reference in it to “the Æon” in which Moses and Elias dwelt in glory. The other work is of more importance. It is the Gospel known to the early Church as that of St. Peter, and the portion which is preserved contains the narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Throughout the narrative the responsibility for the death of our Lord is transferred from Pilate to the Jews; when the [pg 172] guard who watched the tomb under the centurion Petronius ran to tell Pilate of the resurrection they had witnessed, “grieving greatly and saying: Truly he was the son of God”: he answered: “I am clean of the blood of the son of God: I too thought he was so.” Docetic tendencies, however, are observable in the Gospel: at all events the cry of Christ on the cross is rendered, “My power, (my) power, thou hast forsaken me!”