The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

When Egypt was at last opened to Greek trade and enterprise in the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty it was still the Kanôpic arm of the Nile towards which their vessels had to steer. Nowhere else were they allowed to land their goods or sail up the sacred stream of the Nile. If stress of weather drove them to some other part of the coast, they [pg 207] were forced to remain there till the wind permitted them to sail to Kanôpos or to send their goods in native boats by the same route. From time immemorial the coast of the Delta had been carefully guarded against the piratical attacks of the barbarians of the north. Watch-towers and garrisons were established at fitting intervals along it, which were under the charge of a special officer. The mouth of the Kanôpic branch of the river was guarded with more than usual care, and here was the custom-house through which all foreign goods had to pass.

Kanôpos, from which the arm of the river took its name, was a small but wealthy city. It was called in Egyptian Peguath, sometimes also Kah-n-Nub, “the soil of gold” from the yellow sand on which it was built, though Greek vanity believed that this name had been given to it from Kanôbos, the pilot of Menelaos, whose tomb was of course discovered there. In later days, when Alexandria had absorbed its commerce and industry, it became, along with the outlying Zephyrion, a fashionable Alexandrine suburb. It was filled with drinking-shops and chapels, to which the pleasure-loving crowds of Alexandria used to make their way by the canal that united the two cities. The sick came also to seek healing in the temple of Serapis, or to ask the god to tell them the means of cure. The rich, too, had their [pg 208] villas close to the shrine of Aphroditê Arsinoê, on the breezy promontory of Zephyrion, while the rocks on the shore were cut into luxuriously-fitted baths for those who wished to bathe in the sea.

The site of Zephyrion is now occupied by the little village of Abukîr, memorable in the annals of England and France. In 1891 Daninos Pasha made some excavations there which brought to light a few scanty remains of the temple of Aphroditê. The foundations of its walls were found, as well as two limestone sphinxes inscribed with the name of Amon-em-hat iv., and three great statues of red granite, one of them upright, the others seated. The upright figure was that of Ramses ii. with a roll of papyrus in his hand; while the other two were female, one of them being a representation of Hont-mâ-Ra, the Pharaoh's wife. The sphinxes and statues must have been brought from some older building to decorate the shrine of the Alexandrine goddess, and their discoverer believes that the figure of Ramses ii. is older even than the age of that monarch, who has usurped it, and that it goes back to the epoch of the twelfth dynasty. Other relics of the temple—fragments of red granite from some gigantic naos, portions of statues, broken sphinxes, and a colossal human foot—strew the rocks at the foot of the promontory whereon Zephyrion stood and bear [pg 209] witness to the intensity of Christian zeal when paganism was abolished in Egypt.

The Kanôpic arm of the Nile has long since been filled up, and the fellah ploughs his field or the water-fowl congregate in the stagnant marsh where Greek trading ships once sailed. But a large part of the marsh is now in process of being reclaimed, and the engineers who have been draining and washing it have come across many traces of the ancient Kanôpos. It lay to the east of Zephyrion, between the shore and the marshy lake.

Though the journey from Alexandria to Abukîr must now be undertaken in a railway carriage and not in a barge, it is still pleasant in the early autumn. We pass through fertile gardens and forests of fig-trees, past groves of palm with rich clusters of red dates hanging from them, while the cool sea-breeze blows in at the window, and the clear blue sky shines overhead. But instead of temples and taverns we find at the end of our journey nothing but sand and sea-shells, broken monuments, and a deserted shore.

The vessel in which Herodotos must have gone from Kanôpos to Naukratis was probably native rather than Greek. It would have differed in one important respect from the Nile-boats of to-day. Its sail was square, not triangular like the modern lateen sails which have been introduced from the Levant. [pg 210] But in other respects it resembled the vessels which are still used on the Nile. Part of the deck was covered with the house in which the traveller lived, and which was divided into rooms, and fitted up in accordance with the ideas of the day. Awnings protected it from the sun, and the sides of the boat as well as the rudder were brilliantly painted.

On the way to Naukratis the voyager passed Hermopolis, the modern Damanhur, a name which is merely the old Egyptian Dema n Hor, or “City of Horus.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Herodotos refers to the city, though the statement he makes in regard to it is not altogether correct. All the dead ibises of Egypt, he says, were carried to Hermopolis to be embalmed and buried. Such might have been the case on the western side of the Delta, but it was true only of that limited district. There was another Hermopolis in the east of the Delta, called Bah in ancient Egyptian, Tel el-Baqlîyeh in modern times, where a large burial-place of the sacred ibises was discovered by the fellahin six or seven years ago. Tel el-Baqlîyeh is the second station on the line of railway from Mansurah to Abu Kebîr, and from it have come the bronze ibises and ibis-heads which have filled the shops of the Cairene dealers in antiquities. The bronzes were found among the multitudinous mummies of the sacred [pg 211] bird, like the bronze cats in the cemetery of the sacred cat at Bubastis. Bah was, in fact, the holy city of the “nome of the Ibis.” The mound of the old city has now been almost demolished by the hunter for antikas, but Dr. Naville noticed some fragments of inscribed stone in the neighbouring village which led him to believe that Nektanebo ii. once intended to erect a temple here to Thoth.

From Hermopolis to Naukratis was a short distance. Naukratis was the capital of the Egyptian Greeks, and its site, which had been lost for centuries, was discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1884, when he was working for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Fund had been formed with the primary intention of finding the sites of Pithom and Naukratis, and it had been hardly two years in existence before that intention was fulfilled.

If we leave the train at Teh el-Barûd, the junction of the Upper Egyptian line of railway with that from Alexandria to Cairo, and turn our faces westward, we shall have a pleasant walk of about five miles, part of it under an avenue of trees, to a mound of potsherds which covers several acres in extent and is known to the natives as Kôm Qa'if. This mound represents all that is left of Naukratis. To the west of it runs a canal, the modern successor of the ancient Kanôpic branch of the Nile.

When Professor Petrie first visited the spot, the diggers for sebah had already been busily at work. Sebah is the nitrous earth from the sites of old cities, which is used as manure, and to the search for it we owe the discovery of many memorials of the past. At Kôm Qa'if the larger part of the earth had been removed, and all that remained were the fragments of pottery which had been sifted from it. But the fragments were sufficient to reveal the history of the place. Most of them belonged to the archaic period of the Greek vase-maker's art, and were such as had never before been found in the land of Egypt. It was evident that the great city whose site they covered must have been the Naukratis of the Greeks.