The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Herodotos had not the time to imitate the example of his predecessor Hekatæos and visit Upper Egypt, nor, indeed, was the summer a fitting season for doing so. Consequently, while he lavishes his admiration on the temples and pyramids of the Delta, of Memphis and of the Fayyûm, he has nothing to say about the still more striking temples of the south. “Hundred-gated Thebes,” whose fame had already penetrated to the Homeric Greeks, and whose tombs and colossi led the Greek tourists of the Macedonian age to scribble upon them their expressions of admiration and awe, is known to him only by name. The extravagance of his praise is reserved for the Labyrinth; about the nobler and more majestic buildings of the capital of Upper Egypt he is absolutely silent. Against the statues of the Egyptian kings which Hekatæos saw at Thebes, Herodotos can bring only a smaller number which he saw at Memphis.

The monuments even now contain evidence that, after the age of Hekatæos, Greek sightseers did not make their way into southern Egypt until the Macedonian conquest had made travel there easy and safe. At Abu-Simbel in Nubia and Abydos in Upper Egypt are the records of the Greek mercenaries [pg 187] of Psammetikhos and their Greek and Karian contemporaries who visited the oracle of Abydos. But then comes a long blank in the history of Greek writing in Egypt. With the foundation of Alexander's empire a new epoch in it begins. From that time forward the walls of the tombs and temples were covered with the scrawls of innumerable Greek visitors. At Thebes the royal tombs were especial objects of attention, and ciceroni led the inquisitive stranger round them just as they do to-day.

But among all the mass of Greek names that have been collected from the monuments of Upper Egypt we find neither that of Herodotos nor of any other of his countrymen of the same age. In fact, it was not a time for sightseeing in the southern valley of the Nile. The population were in only half-repressed rebellion against their Persian rulers, and the whole country swarmed with bandits. Persian authority was necessarily weaker than in the north, and the people were more combative and had near allies in the desert, the Bedouin and the Ethiopians. A voyage up the river was even more dangerous than in the anarchical days of the last century: pirates abounded, and out of reach of the Persian garrison at Memphis the traveller carried his life in his hand. As in the time of Norden no Egyptian bey could or would allow the traveller in Nubia to [pg 188] go south of Dirr, so in the time of Herodotos the southern limit of the foreigner's travels was the Fayyûm. The “Egypt into which Greeks sail” was, as he himself declares, the Egypt which lay north of the Theban nome and Lake Mœris.

Even a visit to the Fayyûm was doubtless a bold and unusual undertaking, and on this account Herodotos describes what he saw there at more than ordinary length, and extols the wonders of the district at the expense of the better-known monuments of Memphis and the Delta. But the Oasis had suffered much from the civil troubles which had afflicted Egypt. The dykes which kept out the inundation had been neglected, and the fertile nome was transformed into a stagnant lake. Herodotos saw it as the French savans saw it at the beginning of the present century; the embankments were broken, and fields and roads were alike submerged.

From the walls of the capital of the province, whose mounds now lie outside Medînet el-Fayyûm, Herodotos looked northward over a vast expanse of water. “Nearly in the middle of it,” he tells us, “stand two pyramids, each of them rising 304 feet above the water ... and both surmounted by colossal stone figures seated upon a throne.” The shattered fragments of the colossi were found by Professor Petrie in 1888, scattered round the pyramidal [pg 189] pedestals, twenty-one feet high, on which they had been placed. Cut out of hard quartzite sandstone, they represented Amon-em-hat iii., the creator of the Fayyûm, and their discoverer calculates that they were each thirty-five feet in height. The fragments are now at Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum. The statues faced northward, and the court within which they stood was surrounded by a wall with a gateway of red granite. The pedestals still remain fairly intact, and the road by the side of which they had been erected is still used to-day. The monuments, in fact, were erected high above the inundation, and that Herodotos should have seen them in the midst of the water is but a further proof of the condition of the country at the time. The Lake Mœris he describes was not the true Mœris of Egyptian geography; it was the Fayyûm itself buried beneath the flood.

The total height of the colossi from the ground, according to Professor Petrie, was about sixty feet. Between this and the 304 feet assigned to them by the Greek traveller there is indeed a wide difference. But Herodotos could not have seen them close at hand, and the measurement he gives must have been a mere guess. It warns us, however, not to put overmuch faith in his statements, even when they are the results of personal observation. He was but a tourist, not a man of science, and he cared more for the tales [pg 190] of his dragoman and novel sights than for scientific surveying and exactitude.

Hence comes the assertion that before the time of Menes the whole country between the sea and Lake Mœris was a marsh. Such a statement is intelligible only if we remember that, when Herodotos sailed up the Nile, its banks were inundated on either side. Had he seen the country south of Memphis as the modern traveller sees it when the water is subsiding and green fields begin to line the course of the river, he could never have entertained the belief. But all distinction between the Delta and the rest of Egypt was hidden from him by the waters of the inundation. That he should have made the Fayyûm the limit of the marsh is indeed natural; it was the limit of his exploration of Upper Egypt, and consequently he did not know that from Memphis southward to Edfu the valley of the Nile presents the same features.

The strange error he twice commits in imagining that there were vaults under the pyramid of Kheops in an island formed by a canal which the builder had introduced from the Nile is due to the same cause. Doubtless his dragoman had told him something of the kind. A subterraneous chamber in the rock actually exists under the great pyramid, as was discovered by Caviglia, and there are pyramids into [pg 191] whose lower chambers the Nile has long since infiltrated. Professor Maspero found his exploration of the pyramids of Lisht, south of Dahshûr, stopped by the water which had filled them, and Professor Petrie had the same experience in the brick pyramid of Howâra, though here the infiltration of the water seems to have been caused by a canal dug in Arab times. But the pyramids of Gizeh stand on a plateau of limestone rock secure against the approach of water, and the story reported by Herodotos is more probably the result of misapprehension on his own part than of intentional falsehood on the part of his guides. His ready credence of it, however, can be explained only by the condition of the country at the time of his visit. The whole land was covered with water, and in going to Memphis he had to sail by the pyramids themselves. It was in a boat that his visit to them must have been made; and it was easy, therefore, to believe that a canal ran from the water on which he sailed through the tunnelled rock whereon they stood. He did not know that the lowest chamber of the pyramid was high above the utmost level of the flood.

Surprise has often been expressed that Herodotos should make no mention of the Sphinx, which to Arabs and modern Europeans alike has appeared one of most noteworthy monuments of Gizeh. But [pg 192] in sailing along the canal which led from Memphis to the pyramids he would have passed by it without notice. As his boat made its way to the rocky edge on which the huge sepulchres of Kheops and Khephren are built, it would have been concealed from his view; and buried as it was in sand his guides did not think it an object of such surpassing importance as to lead him to it over the burning sand. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great pyramid he was surrounded by monuments more interesting and more striking, which were quite enough to occupy his day and satisfy his curiosity.

South of the Fayyûm and the adjoining city of Herakleopolis, whose ruins are now known as Ahnas el-Medîneh, all that Herodotos has to tell us is derived from older authors. Now and then, it is true, the first person is used, and we think for a moment that he is describing his own adventures. But he is merely quoting from others, and there are no marks of quotation in the manuscript to show us that such is the case. His book is thus like that of another and later Egyptian traveller, Mr. J. A. St. John, whose Egypt and Nubia was published in English only fifty years ago. He too embodies the narratives of his predecessors in the record of his own journey up the Nile without any notice or signs that he is doing so, and it is not until we suddenly light on the name of an earlier writer at [pg 193] the bottom of the page that we become aware of the fact. Herodotos has not given us even this help; and we need not wonder, therefore, that commentators who have never been in Egypt have been deceived by his method of work. But he has preserved fragments of older writers which would otherwise have been lost, and if he has mingled them with the stories he heard from the dragomen of Memphis and Sais, or the answers he received to his questions about Greek legends, we must not feel ungrateful.