The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

As the festival was held in honour of Bast, it was probably an annual commemoration of the great “Shed-festival” of thirty years celebrated by Osorkon II. in his twenty-second year, and depicted on the walls of the hall which Dr. Naville has discovered. The “Shed-festival” took place during the month of August—in the time of the sixth dynasty on the 27th of Epiphi. It was probably, therefore, at the end of August or the beginning of September that Herodotos found himself in the city of Bast.

The description Herodotos gives of the position of the temple is still true to-day. The temple, which he pronounced to be the prettiest in Egypt, is now in ruins, like the houses and streets that encircled it. But the visitor to Tel-Bast still looks down upon its site from the rubbish-mounds of the ruined habitations, and can still trace the beds of the canals which were carried round it. Even the street which led to the market-place is still visible, and Dr. Naville has found the remains of the little temple which [pg 227] Herodotos supposed to be that of Hermês, the Egyptian Thoth. In this, however, he was wrong. Like the larger edifice, it was dedicated to Bast, and seems to have been used as a treasury. It was, therefore, under the protection of Thoth, whose figure decorated its walls, and Dr. Naville is doubtless right in believing that this has led to the mistake of Herodotos or his guides. Osorkon i. consecrated in it large quantities of precious things, including about £130,300 in gold and £13,000 in silver—an evident proof that the internal condition of his kingdom was flourishing.

Dr. Naville's excavations were undertaken for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1887-89, and were chiefly made among the broken columns and dislocated stones of the larger temple. They have given us the outlines of its history. Like most of the great temples of Egypt, its foundation went back to the very beginning of Egyptian civilisation. The Pharaohs of the Old Empire repaired or enlarged it, and the names of Kheops and Khephren, as well as of Pepi i., have been found upon its blocks. The kings of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties embellished it, and even the Hyksos princes did the same. In the days when they had adopted the culture and customs of Egypt and were holding royal state at Zoan, two of them at least restored and beautified the temple of [pg 228] Bubastis and called themselves the sons of Ra. One of them, Apophis, may have been the Apophis whose demand that the vassal-king of Thebes should worship Sutekh instead of Amon brought about the war of independence; the other, Khian User-n-Set-Ra, the Iannas of Manetho, has engraved his name on a colossal lion which was carried to Babylon by some Chaldæan conqueror.

The monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty continued the pious work of the Hyksos whom they had expelled. But the civil disturbances which attended the fall of the dynasty caused injury to the temple, and we find Seti i. and Ramses ii. once more restoring it. The kings of the twentieth dynasty have also left memorials in it, but it was under the twenty-second dynasty—the successors of Shishak—that Bubastis reached the highest point of its prosperity. The princes who followed Shishak made the city their capital and its temple their royal chapel. The great festival hall was built by Osorkon ii. between the entrance hall and the main court, and the worship of Bast was exclusively installed in it. Temple and city alike underwent but little change down to the days of Herodotos. It was after his visit that the last addition was made to the sacred buildings. With the recovery of Egyptian independence after the successful revolt from Persia [pg 229] came a new era of architectural activity, and Nektanebo i., the first king of the thirtieth dynasty, erected a great hall in the rear of the shrine. After this the history of the temple fades out of view.

Herodotos was told that the height of the mound on which the city of Bubastis stood was an indication of the evil deeds of its inhabitants. Sabako, the Ethiopian conqueror, it was said, had caused the sites of the Egyptian cities to be raised by convict labour, just as they had been previously raised by those who cut the canals under Sesostris. But the whole story was an invention of the dragomen. The disintegration of the crude brick of which the houses of Egypt are built makes them quickly decay and give place to other buildings, which are erected on the mound they have formed. As the city grows in age, so does the tel or mound whereon it stands grow in height, and had Herodotos travelled in Upper Egypt he would have seen the process going on under his eyes. In the Delta, moreover, there was a special cause for the great height of the city-mounds. The water of the inundation percolated through the ground, and in order that the lower floor of a house should be dry, it was necessary to build it on a series of vaults or cellars. A few years ago these vaults were very visible in some of the old houses of Tel-Bast. They had no outlet, either [pg 230] by door or window, and were consequently never employed as store-rooms. Their sole use was to keep the rest of the house dry.

The cemetery of the sacred cats was on the western side of the town. But the cats do not appear to have been embalmed, as elsewhere in Egypt; they were either buried or burned. Among the bones which have been sent to England naturalists have found none of our modern domestic cat. Several, however, of the bronze cats of the Ptolemaic age which have been discovered with the bones unmistakably represent the domestic animal. Generally they have the small head of the modern Egyptian puss.

“A little below Bubastis” Herodotos passed the deserted “camp” and fortress of the Ionian and Karian mercenaries of Psammetikhos, and saw the slips for their vessels and the ruins of their houses still standing on the shore. Amasis had transferred them to Memphis, in the belief that it was rather from his Egyptian subjects that he needed protection than from his neighbours in Asia. The site of the camp was discovered and partially excavated by Professor Petrie for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886, and one of the results of his discoveries was to show that it was also the site of the frontier fortress called by the Greeks Daphnæ. What its [pg 231] Egyptian name was we do not know with certainty, though it is probable that Professor Petrie is right in holding it to be the Tahpanhes of the prophet Jeremiah. It is now known as Tel ed-Deffeneh.

The drying up of the Pelusiac arm of the Nile has brought the desolation of the desert to Tel ed-Deffeneh. The canal which has replaced it is brackish; Lake Menzaleh, which bounds the Tel to the east, is more brackish still. The land is impregnated with salt, and covered in places with drifts of sand. There is no cultivated soil nearer than Salahîyeh, twelve miles away; no water-way less distant than Kantara on the Suez Canal.

The greater part of the ancient site lies between Lake Menzaleh on the east and a swamp out of which the canal flows on the west, and it covers a large acreage of ground. Northward are the canal, a marsh, and mounds of sand, and beyond the canal lies the cemetery of the ancient fortress, as well as a suburb which was probably the Karian quarter. In the centre of the site rises the Tel proper, a great mound of disintegrated brickwork called “the palace of the Jew's daughter.” Excavation soon made it clear that it represented the fortress of Daphnæ, and that it was built by Psammetikhos when he settled his Greek garrison there. For a frontier fortress no place could have been better chosen. It guarded [pg 232] the eastern branch of the Nile, while from its summit we look across the desert, on one side along the high-road which once led to Syria, and on the other as far as the mounds of Tanis. The fort itself has crumbled into dust, but the vaulted chambers on which it was erected still exist, as well as the “pavement” at its entrance.

The pottery found at Tel ed-Deffeneh is early Greek, but of a different type from that of Naukratis. Like the latter, it would seem to have been manufactured on the spot and exported from thence to all parts of the Greek world. Jewellery, too, appears to have been made there by the Greek or Karian artisans who lived under the protection of their military kinsmen. But the manufacture of both pottery and jewellery came to a sudden end. When Amasis removed the mercenaries to Memphis in the middle of the sixth century before Christ the civilian population departed with them. Between that date and a new and unimportant settlement in the Ptolemaic period the site seems to have been deserted. When Herodotos passed it by, it had no inhabitants.