The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

To the visitor the interest of Memphis centred in its temple of Ptah. It was round the temple that the city had grown up, and as the city had been the capital of the older dynasties, so the temple had been their royal chapel. When the supremacy passed from Memphis to Thebes, it passed also from Ptah the god of Memphis to Amon the god of Thebes.

It is the great temple of Ptah, accordingly, about which Herodotos has most to tell us. Other localities in Memphis, such as the citadel and the palace, the Karian quarter, or “the Tyrian Camp” with its shrine of Ashtoreth, are noticed only incidentally. [pg 243] But the great temple and its monuments are described as fully as was possible for an “impure” foreigner, who was not permitted to enter its inner courts and who was unacquainted with the Egyptian language.

The history of Egypt known to Herodotos before the age when Greek mercenaries and traders were settled in the country by Psammetikhos is almost wholly connected with the monuments of the temple which were shown to him. And a very curious history it is—a collection of folk-tales, partly Egyptian, but mainly Karian or Greek in origin, and not always of a seemly character, which the dragomen attached to the various objects the visitor saw. Even the royal names round which they revolved were sometimes indiscoverable in the authentic annals of Egypt. But the stories were all gravely noted down by the traveller, and though they have lost nothing in the telling, it is probable that they have not always been reported by him correctly.

In one respect, at all events, this mythical history of Egypt is the creation of Herodotos himself and not of his guides. This is the order in which he has arranged the kings. It is the order in which he visited the monuments to which the dragomen attached their names, and it thus throws a welcome light on the course of his movements. With this clue in our hands we can follow him from one part of [pg 244] the temple of Ptah to another, and can trace his footsteps as far as the Fayyûm.

It is true he asserts that his list of kings was given on the authority of “the Egyptians and the priests,” and that it was they who reckoned three hundred and forty-one generations from Menes, the founder of the kingdom, to Sethos, the antagonist of Sennacherib, the number of kings and high-priests during the period being exactly equal to the number of generations. But it can easily be shown that the calculation was made by Herodotos himself, and that neither the “Egyptians,” whose language he did not understand, nor the sacristans, whom he dignifies with the title of priests, are in any way responsible for the absurd statement that a generation and a reign are equivalent terms. The number of kings whose names he heard from his dragoman is exactly eleven; in addition to these, he tells us, the names of three hundred and thirty kings were read to him from a papyrus roll by one of the temple scribes; so that the number three hundred and forty-one is obtained by adding the three hundred and thirty names to the eleven which were furnished him by his guides. Among the three hundred and thirty must have been included some of the latter, though the Greek traveller did not know it.

At Memphis Herodotos learned that Menes was [pg 245] the first king of united Egypt, though the further statements he records in regard to him are not easily reconcilable one with the other. On the one hand he was informed that in his time all Egypt was a marsh except the Thebaic nome—a piece of information which seemed to Herodotos consonant with fact—on the other hand, that the land on which Memphis was built was a sort of huge embankment reclaimed from the Nile by Menes, who forced the river to leave its old channel under the plateau of Gizeh and to run in its present bed. Mariette believed that the dyke by means of which the first of the Pharaohs effected this change in the course of the river still exists near Kafr el-Ayyât, and it is geologically clear that the Nile once ran along the edge of the Libyan desert, and that the rock out of which the Sphinx was carved must have been one of those which jutted out into the stream.

But it was not on account of his engineering works that the name of Menes has been preserved in the histories of Herodotos. It was because he was the founder of the temple of Ptah and the city of Memphis. The temple which was the object of the tourist's visit owed its origin to him, and the traveller's sight-seeing naturally began with the mention of his name.

Before Herodotos could be shown round such [pg 246] parts of the sanctuary as were accessible to strangers, it was necessary that he should be introduced to the authorities and receive their permission to visit it. Accordingly he was ushered into what was perhaps the library of the temple, and there a scribe read to him out of a roll the names of the three hundred and thirty kings, beginning with Menes and ending with Mœris. To three only does a story seem to have been attached, either by the scribe or by the interpreter, and only three names therefore did Herodotos enter in his note-book. The first of these was that of Menes, the second that of Nitôkris, the third that of Mœris. Nitôkris was celebrated not only because she was the one native woman who had ruled the country, but also because she had treacherously avenged the death of her brother and then flung herself into the flames. Neit-aker, as she was called in Egyptian, was actually an historical personage; she was the last sovereign of the sixth dynasty, but was very far from being the only queen who had reigned over Egypt. As regards Mœris the statements of Herodotos are only partially correct. He is said to have built the propylæa on the north side of the temple of Ptah, to have dug the great lake of the Fayyûm, and to have erected the pyramids which Herodotos believed he had seen standing in the middle of it. Mœris, however, was not the name of [pg 247] a king, but the Egyptian words Mi ur or “great lake”; the Fayyûm was not created by the excavation of an artificial reservoir, but by banking out the water which had filled the oasis from geological times; and the monuments seen by Herodotos were not pyramids, but statues on pyramidal bases erected by Amon-em-hat iii. of the twelfth dynasty in front of an ancient temple. Nor could any educated Egyptian have alleged that a king of the twelfth dynasty, who was not even the last monarch of that dynasty itself, closed the line of the Pharaohs. The whole account must rest on a combination of the Greek historian's own erroneous conclusions with the misinterpreted statements of the Egyptian “priest.”

Mœris, in the topographical chronology of Herodotos, was followed by Sesostris, but this was because the tourist, after leaving the scribe's chamber, first visited the northern side of the temple. Here stood the two colossal figures of Ramses ii. in front of the entrance, which, after centuries of neglect and concealment, have again become objects of interest. The larger one, forty-two feet in length, was discovered in 1820 and presented by Mohammed Ali to the British Government, but, as might have been expected, was never claimed. For years it lay on its face in the mud and water, but in 1883 Major Bagnold turned it round and raised it, and finally [pg 248] placed it in the shed, where it is now safe from further injury. The son and daughter of the Pharaoh were originally represented standing beside him. Major Bagnold also brought to light the companion statue, of lesser height and of a different stone. This is in a better state of preservation, and has been set up on a hillock by the side of a stêlê which was discovered at the same time. Fragments of papyri inscribed with Greek and demotic have been found at the north-eastern foot of the hillock, and it may be that they mark the site of the chamber where Herodotos listened to the words of the roll.

Northward of the colossi was the sacred lake, said to have been formed by Menes, and now a stagnant pond. At its south-eastern corner the foundations have recently been laid bare of small square rooms, the walls of which have been adorned with sculptures. But the waters of the inundation have followed the excavators, and the walls are fast perishing under the influence of moisture and nitrous salt.