The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

From Daphnæ to Pelusium the voyage was short. Pelusium, once the key of Egypt, has shared the fate of Daphnæ. The channel of the river that flowed by it has become a dreary reach of black salt mud, and the fields which once supplied the city with food are [pg 233] wastes of sterile soil or mountains of yellow sand. Not even a solitary Bedouin disturbs the solitude of the spot at most seasons of the year. All that reminds the traveller of human life as he encamps on the edge of the sand-dunes is the electric light which flashes through the night from Port Said far away on the horizon.

In the midst of the desolate waste of poisonous mud rise the two large mounds which alone are left of Pelusium. On the larger of these, to the westward, lie the granite columns and other relics of the Roman temple, beneath which, and below the present level of the water, are the ruins of the temple of the Pharaonic age. The ground is strewn with broken glass and pottery, some Roman, some Saracenic.

The Egyptian name of Pelusium is still unknown, and before we can discover it excavations upon its site will be necessary. Ezekiel calls it Sin (xxx. 15, 16)—at least, if the commentators are to be trusted—and when the Greeks sought an etymology for the name they gave it in their own word for “mud.” But it was a famous spot in the records of Egyptian history. Avaris, the Hyksos stronghold, must have been in its neighbourhood, and it was outside its walls that the Persian conquest of Egypt was decided. The battle-field where the army of Kambyses, led by the Greek deserter Phanês, overthrew the Greek [pg 234] mercenaries of the Pharaoh, was near enough for Herodotos to walk over it and compare the skulls of the Egyptian and Persian combatants, as he had already done at Paprêmis. Here, too, he was shown the spot where the Greek and Karian soldiers of Psammetikhos iii. had slaughtered the sons of Phanês over a huge bowl in the sight of their father, and after mixing the blood of the boys with wine and water, had savagely drunk it and then rushed to the battle.

Not far from Pelusium another tragedy took place four centuries after Herodotos had been there. The fugitive Pompey was welcomed to the shore by Septimius, the general of the Roman forces in Egypt, and Akhillas, the commander of the Egyptian army, and murdered by them as he touched the land. Akhillas then hastened to Alexandria, to besiege Cæsar in the royal palace, and the burning of the great library was the atonement for Pompey's death.

Down even to the middle ages Pelusium was still the seaport of the eastern Delta. It held the place now occupied by Port Said. It was from its quays that the vessels started for the Syrian coast. In one that was bound for Tyre, Herodotos took his passage and ended his Egyptian tour.

But he had visited certain cities in the Delta into which we have been unable to follow him, owing to [pg 235] the uncertainty that still hangs over their exact position. Besides the places already described, we know that he saw Butô, which is coupled with Khemmis, as well as Paprêmis and Prosôpitis, and probably also Busiris.

Khemmis—which must be carefully distinguished from the other Khemmis, the modern Ekhmîm—was, he tells us, a floating island “in a deep broad lake by the side of the temple at Butô,” where Lêtô, the Egyptian Uaz, was worshipped. Brugsch identifies this island of Khemmis with the town and marshes of Kheb, where the young Horus was hidden by his mother Isis out of the reach of Set. Kheb was in the nome called that of Menelaos by the Greeks, the capital of which seems to have been Pa-Uaz, “the temple of Uaz,” transformed by Greek tongues into Butô, and of which another city was Kanôpos. Butô, or at least the twin-city where the great temple of the goddess stood, is probably now represented by Tel Fera'în, not far to the west of Fuah, at the extremity of the Mahmudîyeh canal. It was thus within easy distance of Kanôpos on the one side and of Sais on the other, and Herodotos might have visited it from either one of them.

But after all it is not certain that he did so. Butô is mentioned again by him in a passage which shows that it could not have been Pa-Uaz, but must [pg 236] have rather lain on the eastern side of the Delta, in the land of Goshen, where the desert adjoined the “Arabian nome.” It is where he tells us about “the winged serpents” which fly in the spring-time from Arabia to Egypt, on the confines of which they are met and slain by the sacred ibises. Anxious to learn something about them, he visited the spot where the yearly encounter took place, and there saw the ground strewn with the bones and spines of the slaughtered snakes. This spot, he further informs us, is in the Arabian desert, where it borders on “the Egyptian plain,” “hard by the city of Buto.”

Thanks to the excavations made by Mr. Griffith for the Egypt Exploration Fund at Tel en-Nebêsheh, near Salahîyeh, we now know where this eastern city of Buto stood. Its Egyptian name was Am, and it was the capital of the nineteenth nome of Am-pehu, but it was consecrated to the worship of the goddess Uaz, who was symbolised by a winged snake. The great temple of the goddess was built on the western side of the town, and the Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty, as well as Ramses ii. and his successors, and the Saites of the twenty-sixth dynasty, had all helped to endow and embellish it. When the Greek garrison was established in the neighbourhood at Daphnæ, a colony of Cyprian potters settled at Am. But in the age of the [pg 237] Ptolemies it fell into decay, and by the beginning of the Roman era its magnificence belonged to the past.

Just beyond the precincts of the town was the Arabian desert, the realm of Set. The legend of Isis and Horus was accordingly transferred to it, and its patron goddess became Uaz of Butô, who, under the form of Isis, concealed Horus in its marshes. Was it here, therefore, in the Pa-Uaz of Am, that the Butô of Herodotos has to be looked for, rather than in the Menelaite nome?