The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

As soon as Professor Petrie had settled down to the excavation of the mound, a few months after his discovery, the evidence of inscriptions was added to the evidence of potsherds. An inscribed stone from the mound was standing at the entrance of the country-house in which he lived, and on turning it over he found it was engraved with Greek letters which recorded the honours paid by “the city of the Naukratians” to Heliodôros the priest of Athêna and the keeper of its archives. For two winters first Mr. Petrie and then Mr. Ernest Gardner worked at the ruins, and though more excavations are needed before they can be exhaustively explored, [pg 213] the plan of the old city has been mapped out, the history of its growth and decline has been traced, and a vast number of archaic Greek inscriptions from the dedicated vases of its temples have been secured.

To the south of the town were the fortress and camp of the Greek mercenaries, who were probably settled there by Psammetikhos. The camp was surrounded by a wall, and within it stood the Hellênion, the common altar of the Ionians from Khios, Teos, Phokæa and Klazomenæ, of the Dorians from Rhodes, Knidos, Halikarnassos and Phasêlis, and of the Æolians of Mytilênê. The great enclosure still remains, as well as the lower chambers of the fort, and Mr. Petrie found that in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, when it was no longer needed for purposes of defence, it was provided with a stately entrance, to which an avenue of ruins led from the west.

The traders and settlers built their houses north of the camp. Here too the Greek sailors and merchants, who had taken no part in the erection of the great altar, and who perhaps had no relations among the soldiers of the fort, built special temples for themselves. If we walk across the level ground which separates the fort from the old city, the first heap of rubbish we come to marks the site of the [pg 214] temple and sacred enclosure of Castor and Pollux. A little to the north was the still larger temple and temenos or sacred enclosure of Apollo, and adjoining it, still on the north side, was the temple of Hêrê, whose temenos was the largest of all. The temple of Apollo had been erected by the Milesians, and that it was the oldest in the city may be gathered from the archaic character of the inscriptions on the potsherds discovered in the trench into which the broken vases of the temple were thrown. The Samians were the builders of the temple of Hêrê, and Herodotos tells us that there was another dedicated to Zeus by the Æginetans. The ruins of this, however, have not yet been found, but far away towards the northern end of the ruin a small temple and temenos of Aphroditê have been brought to light. Here Rhodôpis worshipped, who had been freed from slavery by the brother of Sappho, and whose charms were still celebrated at Naukratis in the days of Herodotos.

Among the potsherds disinterred from the rubbish-trench of the temple of Apollo were portions of a large and beautiful bowl dedicated to “Phanês, the son of Glaukos.” Mr. Gardner is probably right in believing that this is the very Phanês who deserted to Kambyses, and, according to the Greek story, instructed him how to march [pg 215] across the desert into Egypt. It may be that Herodotos saw the bowl when it was still intact, and that the story of the deserter was told him over it; in any case, it was doubtless at Naukratis, and possibly from the priests of Apollo, that he heard it.

To the west of the temple of Apollo and divided from it only by a street, Mr. Petrie found what had been a manufactory of scarabs. They were of the blue and white kind that was fashionable in the Greek world in the sixth century before our era, and the earliest of them bear the name of Amasis. From Naukratis they were exported to the shores of Europe and Asia along with the pottery for which the Greek city was famous.

On his way to Naukratis Herodotos had passed two other Greek settlements, Anthylla and Arkhandropolis. But we do not yet know where they stood. Nor do we know the position of that “Fort of the Milesians” which, according to Strabo, was occupied by Milesian soldiers near Rosetta in the time of Psammetikhos, before they sailed upon the river into “the nome of Sais” and there founded Naukratis.

The city of Sais was one of the objects of Herodotos's journey. In the period of the inundation it was within an easy distance of Naukratis, so that an excursion to it did not require much time. Sais was [pg 216] the birthplace and capital of the Pharaohs of the twenty-sixth dynasty; it was here that Psammetikhos raised the standard of rebellion against his Assyrian suzerain with the help of the Greek mercenaries, and his successors adorned it with splendid and costly buildings. When Herodotos visited it, it had lost none of its architectural magnificence. He saw there the palace from which Apries had gone forth to attack Amasis, and to which he returned a prisoner; the great temple of Neit, with its rows of sphinxes and its sacred lake; and the huge naos of granite which two thousand men spent three whole years in bringing from Assuan. It had been left just outside the enclosure within which the temple stood, as well as the tombs of Apries and Amasis, and even of the god Osiris himself. True, there was a rival sepulchre of Osiris at Abydos, venerated by the inhabitants of Upper Egypt since the days of the Old Empire, but Abydos was far distant from Sais, and when the latter city became the capital of the kingdom there was none bold enough to deny its claim. Herodotos, at all events, who never reached Abydos, was naturally never informed of the rival tomb.

He was told, however, of the mystery-play acted at night on the sacred lake of Sais in memory of the death and resurrection of Osiris, and he was told also of the shameful insult inflicted by Kambyses on [pg 217] the dead Amasis. It was said that the Pharaoh's mummy had been dragged from its resting-place, and after being scourged was burnt to ashes. The Egyptian priests bore no good-will to Kambyses, and it may be, therefore, that the story is not true.

Sais was under the protection of the goddess Neit, the unbegotten mother of the sun. When the Greeks first came there, they identified the goddess with their own Athêna, led thereto by the similarity of the names. But this identification led to further results. As Athêna was the patron goddess of Athens, so it was supposed that there was a special connection between Sais and Athens. While Athêna was fabled to have come from Libya, Kekrops, the mythic founder of Athens, was transformed into an Egyptian of Sais. It was from a priest of Sais, moreover, that Solon, the Athenian legislator, learned the wisdom of the Egyptians.

The squalid village of Sa el-Hagar, “Sais of the stone,” is the modern representative of the capital of Psammetikhos. In these days of railways it is difficult of access, as there is no station in its neighbourhood. In the earlier part of the century, however, when the traveller had to go from Alexandria to Cairo in a dahabîyeh, he was compelled to pass it, and it was consequently well-known to the tourist. But little is left of the populous city and its stately [pg 218] monuments except mounds of disintegrated brick, a large enclosure surrounded by a crude brick wall seventy feet thick, and the sacred lake. The lake, however, is sacred no longer; shrunken in size and choked with rubbish, it is a stagnant pool in the winter, and an expanse of half-dried mud in the late spring. It is situated within the great wall, which is that of the temenos of Neit. Stone is valuable in the Delta, and hardly a fragment of granite or limestone survives from all the buildings and colossal monuments that Herodotos saw. But in 1891 a great number of bronze figures of Neit, some of them inlaid with silver, were found there by the fellahin. They are of the careful and finished workmanship that marks the age of the twenty-sixth dynasty, and on one of the largest of them is a two-fold inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs and the letters and language of the Karians. It was dedicated to the goddess of Sais in the reign of Psammetikhos by a son of a Karian mother and an Egyptian father who bore both an Egyptian and a Karian name. It is an interesting proof of the readiness of some at least among the natives of Sais to mingle with the foreigner, and it shows further that the Karian mercenaries, like the Greeks, brought their wives and daughters along with them.