The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Paprêmis was visited by Herodotos, and he saw there the sham fight between the priests at the door of the temple on the occasion of their chief festival. He also went to the site of the battle-field, and there beheld “a great marvel.” The skeletons of the combatants lay on separate sides of the field just as they had fallen, and whereas the skulls of the Persians were so thin that they could be shattered by a pebble, those of the Egyptians were thick and strong enough to resist being battered with a stone. The cause of this difference was explained to him by the dragoman: the Egyptians shaved their heads from childhood and so hardened the bones of it against the sun, while the Persians shaded their heads by constantly wearing caps of thick felt.

Not many years could have elapsed since the battle had occurred. The visit of the Greek traveller to the scene of it may therefore be laid between b.c. 455 and 450. The patriots of Egypt must have been still struggling for their liberty among the marshes of the northern Delta.

But the rebellion must have been practically crushed. No Greek could have ventured into Persian territory while his countrymen were fighting against [pg 181] its Persian masters. The army of Megabyzos must have done its work, and the Athenian fleet been utterly destroyed. Moreover, it is evident that when Herodotos entered the valley of the Nile the country was at peace. His references to the war are to a past event, and when he speaks of Inarôs and Amyrtæos it is of men who have ceased to be a danger to the foreign government. The passage, indeed, in which he notices the peaceable appointment of their sons to the principalities of their fathers may have been inserted after his return to Greek lands, but this makes no difference as to the main fact. When he came to Egypt it had again lapsed into tranquil submission to the Persian power.

In b.c. 450, Kimon, the son of Miltiades, had destroyed the naval power of Persia, and in the following year Megabyzos was overthrown at Salamis. It was then that the “peace of Kimon” is said to have been concluded between Athens and the Persian king, which put an end to the long Persian war, freed the Greek cities of Asia, and made the Mediterranean a Greek sea. The reality of the peace has been doubted, because there is no allusion to it in the pages of Thucydides, and it may be that it was never formally drawn up. But the fact embodied by the story remains: for many years to come there was truce between Greece and Persia, and the independence [pg 182] of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor was acknowledged at the Persian court. The year 449 marks the final triumph of Athens and the beginning of Persian decline.

Had Herodotos travelled in Egypt a year or two later, the ease and security with which he did so would be readily explained. But in this case we should be brought too near the time when his history was finished and he himself was a resident in Italy. We must therefore believe that he was there before the final blow had been struck at Persian supremacy in the Mediterranean, but when the Athenian invasion of Egypt was already a thing of the past, and the unarmed trader and tourist were once more able to move freely about.

For more than half a century Egypt had been closed to Greek curiosity. There had been an earlier period, when the Delta at least had been well-known to the Hellenic world. The Pharos of the future Alexandria is already mentioned by Homer (Od. iv. 355); it was there, “in front of Egypt,” that Menelaos moored his ships and forced “Egyptian Prôteus” to declare to him his homeward road. Even “Egyptian Thebes,” with its hundred temple-gates, is known both to the Iliad (ix. 381) and to the Odyssey (iv. 126), and the Pharaoh Polybos dwelt there when Alkandra, his wife, loaded Menelaos with gifts. Greek mercenaries [pg 183] enabled Psammetikhos to shake off the yoke of Assyria, and Greek traders made Naukratis and Daphnæ wealthy centres of commerce. Solon visited Egypt while Athens was putting into practice the laws he had promulgated, and there he heard from the priest of Sais that, by the side of the unnumbered centuries of Egyptian culture, the Greeks were but children and their wisdom but the growth of to-day. Before the Ionic revolt had broken out, while Ionia and Egypt were still sister provinces of the same Persian empire, Hekatæos of Miletus had travelled through the valley of the Nile, enjoying advantages for information which no Greek could possess again till Egypt had become a Macedonian conquest, and embodying his knowledge and experiences in a lengthy book.

But the Persian wars had put an end to all this peaceful intercourse between Greece and the old land of the Pharaohs, and the Karian dragomen who had made their living by acting as interpreters between the Greeks and the Egyptians were forced to turn to other work. At length, however, Egypt was once more open to visitors, and once more, therefore, visitors came from Greece. Anaxagoras, the philosopher and friend of Periklês, was among the first to arrive and to investigate the causes of the rise and fall of the Nile. Hellanikos the historian, too, the [pg 184] older contemporary of Herodotos, seems to have travelled in Egypt, though doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the works in which he is supposed to have recorded his experiences of Egyptian travel. At any rate, Herodotos found a public fresh and eager to hear what he had to tell them about the dwellers on the Nile.

Herodotos must have reached Egypt in the summer. When he arrived, the whole of the Delta was under water. He describes with the vividness of an eye-witness how its towns appeared above the surface of the water, like the islands in the Ægean, and how the traveller could sail, not along the river, but across the plain. At the time of the inundation, he says, all Egypt “becomes a sea, above which the villages alone show themselves.” The voyage from Naukratis to Memphis was direct and rapid, and the tourists in making it passed by the pyramids instead of the apex of the Delta.

In northern Egypt the rise of the Nile begins to be perceptible during the first few days of July. Criers go about the streets of Cairo announcing each day how high it has risen, and in the first or second week of August the ceremony of cutting the Khalîg or Canal of Cairo, and therewith declaring that the Nile was once more flooding its banks, used to be observed with great rejoicings. It is, in fact, in [pg 185] August that the land is first covered with the flood. For another month the height of the water continues to increase, and then for a short while to remain stationary. But towards the end of October, when the canals of Upper Egypt are emptied, there is again another rise, soon followed by a rapid fall. If the Delta was like a sea when Herodotos saw it, he must have been there between the beginning of July and the end of October.

These are the limits of the time which he could have spent in the country. That he did not remain till after the fall of the river and the drying up of the land is evident from incidental statements in his work. Thus when he visited the Fayyûm it was like the Delta, a sea of waters, and the pyramids of Biahmu, which Professor Petrie's excavations have shown to have always stood on dry land, as they still do to-day, were seen by him in the middle of a vast lake. Nowhere, indeed, is there any hint of his having seen the country in its normal condition. Even his reference to Kerkosôros, at the apex of the Delta, which every traveller to Memphis had to pass except at the period of high Nile, is derived from “the Ionian” writers of a previous generation, not from his own experience. Neither in going nor in returning was his boat obliged to pass that way. We need not be surprised, therefore, at finding [pg 186] that the festivals he witnessed in the Egyptian towns were those which took place in the summer.