The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Upper Egypt is mentioned only incidentally in his narrative, and, as might be expected in a writer who had to depend upon others for his information, what he tells us about it is very frequently incorrect. Thus he asserts that the hippopotamus was “sacred in the nome of Paprêmis, but nowhere else in Egypt,” although it was also worshipped in Thebes, and he fancies that all the cats in the country were embalmed and buried at Bubastis, all the hawks and mice at Buto, and all the ibises at Hermopolis or Damanhur. But this was because he had visited these places and had not travelled in the south. Had he done so, he would never have imagined that the body of every cat or hawk that died was carried to a distant place in the Delta. Indeed, in the hot weather of the summer months, anything of the kind would have been impossible. Cemeteries, however, [pg 194] of these sacred animals are found all up and down the Nile. The mummies of the sacred cats are to be met with in the cliffs of Gebel Abu Foda, at Thebes, and above all at Beni Hassan, where a little to the south of the Speos Artemidos such quantities of them were recently discovered as to suggest that a commercial profit might be made out of their bones. Tons of them were accordingly shipped to Liverpool, there to be converted into manure; but as it was found that the mummified bones refused to yield to the process, the exportation ceased. Mummies of the sacred hawks were disinterred in equal numbers when the ancient cemeteries of Ekhmîm were excavated a few years ago, and the construction of the canal on the eastern bank opposite Abutîg has lately brought to light another of their burial-places, thus fixing the site of Hierakon, “the city of the Hawk,” the capital of the twelfth nome.

In his geography of the river above the Fayyûm Herodotos was similarly misinformed. Thus, he avers that “the country above the Fayyûm for the distance of a three days' voyage resembles the country below it.” A three days' voyage would mean about eighty miles, since he reckons it a voyage of seven days from the sea to the Fayyûm, a distance of about 190 miles. Dahabîyeh travellers will willingly assent to the calculation. With a fair wind, a day's voyage [pg 195] is about thirty miles, more or less, so that 190 miles could be easily traversed in seven days. Now eighty miles would bring the visitor from the Fayyûm to Qolosaneh and the Gebel et-Têr. For many miles before reaching the Gebel the banks of the Nile wear a very different aspect from that which they present lower down. In place of a dull monotony of sand-banks and level plains, there are picturesque lines of cliff, amphitheatres of desert and rugged headlands. It is only as far as Feshn, twenty miles to the south of Herakleopolis, that the description of Herodotos is correct. It is, in fact, merely based on what he could see from the southernmost point to which he attained.

The view which he had from thence over the flat desert reaches of Libya led him to make another statement equally wide of the truth. It is that for four days after leaving Heliopolis the valley of the Nile is narrow, but that then it once more becomes broad. But such was the case only where the Fayyûm and the province of Beni-Suef spread towards the west, and there too only when they are covered with the waters of the inundation. Elsewhere the cultivated valley is for the most part narrower even than in the neighbourhood of Memphis, where it seemed to the Greek traveller to be so confined; here and there, indeed, as at Abydos and [pg 196] Thebes, it broadens out for a space, but otherwise the wilderness encroaches upon it ever more and more until at Silsilis the barren rocks obliterate it altogether.

Herodotos knows nothing of the great monuments of Thebes, and the Pharaohs accordingly whose names he records have no connection with the ancient capital of the empire. They belong to Memphis, to the Fayyûm, and to the Delta—none of them to Thebes. Even Sesostris, in whom some of the features of Ramses ii. may be detected, reigns in the north rather than in the south. Of all the multitudinous monuments that he has left, two only are known to the Greek traveller, and these are the two statues of himself which stood before the temple of Ptah in Memphis.

Of Thothmes and Amenôphis and the other great monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty whose memorials were to be found chiefly in the south, Herodotos had never heard. All that he knew of the kings of Egypt before the age of Psammetikhos was derived from the stories which his guides attached to the monuments which he actually saw. Had he visited the temples and tombs of Thebes and Abydos and Assuan we should have been told how Memnon led his troops to Troy or how Osymandyas conquered the world. But we have to turn to others for the [pg 197] dragoman's tales of Upper Egypt; Herodotos could not record them, for he was never there. The Fayyûm is the southernmost limit of his historical knowledge, because it is also the southernmost limit of his geographical knowledge.

And yet here and there we come across notices of Upper Egypt, some of which have been written by an eye-witness. But the eye-witness was not Herodotos himself, and in giving them he generally gives an indication of the fact. Thus he describes Khemmis or Ekhmîm as “near Neapolis,” the modern Qeneh, although the distance between the two towns is really ninety-five miles, a voyage of at least three days, and Neapolis was but an insignificant city by the side of Khemmis itself, or of other towns like This and Abydos that were nearer to it. Even Tentyris or Denderah, with its ancient temple of Hathor opposite Neapolis, was more important and better-known, while Thebes itself was only forty-five miles higher up the river.

But the account given by Herodotos of Khemmis and its temple is a mere product of the imagination. Indeed, he implies that he received it from certain “people of Khemmis” whom he had questioned, probably through his interpreter. They told him that the temple, of which a few remains are still visible, and which was really dedicated to Min or Amon-Khem, [pg 198] was that of the Greek hero Perseus—a name suggested, it may be, by its likeness to that of the sacred persea tree. Each year, it was further alleged, gymnastic games in the Greek fashion were celebrated in honour of the foreign deity, who at times appeared to his worshippers, leaving behind him his sandal famous in Greek mythology. But the inventive powers of the informants of the Greek traveller did not stop here. He further assures us that the pylon of the temple bore on the summits of its two towers two images of the deity. The statement is of itself sufficient to discredit the whole story and to prove that Herodotos could never have seen the temple with his own eyes. The watch-towers that guarded the entrance of an Egyptian temple never had, and never could have, images on their roofs. They were needed for other purposes, and the very idea of their supporting statues was contrary to the first principles of Egyptian architecture and religion. It was a conception wholly Greek.

Equally wide of the truth is what Herodotos has to tell us about the First Cataract. Like other travellers to Egypt before and since he was anxious to learn something about the sources of the Nile. But neither “the Egyptians nor the Libyans nor the Greeks” whom he met could give him any information. Perhaps had he sailed as far as Assuan some of the [pg 199] Ethiopians who lived there might have been more communicative. At last, however, he was introduced to one of the sacred scribes in the temple of Neit at Sais—the only Egyptian priest, in fact, of higher rank, whom he seems to have conversed with—and the scribe humoured the curiosity of the traveller to the utmost of his desires, though even Herodotos suspected that he was being made fun of. However, as in duty bound, he gravely writes down what he was told. “Two mountains are there with pointed tops, between Syênê, a city of the Thebais, and Elephantinê, which are called Krôphi and Môphi. Out of the heart of these mountains flow the sources of the Nile, which are bottomless, half the water running towards Egypt and the north, while the other half goes to Ethiopia and the south. That the sources are bottomless was proved by Psammetikhos, the king of Egypt, for after letting down into them a rope several hundred thousand fathoms in length, he did not find the bottom.” Herodotos adds that this was probably because there were violent eddies in the water which carried the rope away.

Egyptian priests did not, as a rule, know Greek, and they avoided any kind of intercourse with the “unclean” foreigner. Even to have conversed with him would have caused pollution. Consequently “the priests” to whom Herodotos so frequently [pg 200] alludes were merely the “beadles” of the day, who took the tourist over the temples and showed him the principal objects of interest. The sacred scribe of Sais was an exception to the general rule. Since the days of Psammetikhos, Sais had been accustomed to Greek visitors, and the prejudices against them were less strong there than in other Egyptian towns. It is quite possible, therefore, that the scribe whom Herodotos met was acquainted with the Greek language, and that no dragoman was required to interpret his words.

There is a reason for thinking that such was the case. The story of Krôphi and Môphi, in spite of the suspicions of Herodotos, is remarkably correct; even the name of Krôphi has not undergone a greater amount of transformation than it might have done if Herodotos had written it down himself from the scribe's mouth. It is the Egyptian Qerti or Qoriti, “the two holes” out of which Egyptian mythology supposed Hâpi, the Nile-god, to emerge at the period of the inundation. The Qerti were at the foot of the granite peaks of Senem, the island of Bigeh, and of the opposite cliff on the southern side of the First Cataract. We can almost fix the exact spot where one of these Qerti was believed to have been. On the western bank of Philæ, immediately facing Bigeh, is a portal built in the reign of Hadrian, on the inner [pg 201] north wall of which is a picture of it. We see the granite blocks of Bigeh piled one upon the other up to the summit of the island where Mut the divine mother, and Horus the saviour, sit and keep watch over the waters of the southern Nile. Below is the cavern, encircled by a guardian serpent, within which the Nile-god is crouched, pouring from a vase in either hand the waters of the river. Though in certain points Herodotos has misunderstood his informant, on the whole the story of Krôphi and Môphi is a fairly accurate page from the volume of Egyptian mythology. Even the jingling Môphi may be derived from the Egyptian moniti or “mountains” between which the river ran, though Lauth may be right in holding that Krôphi is Qer-Hâpi, “the hollow of the Nile,” and Môphi Mu-Hâpi, “the waters of the Nile.”