The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

About Sesostris the guides of Herodotos had a good deal to say. But nothing of it was history—not even his conquests in Europe and Scythia, his excavation of the canals which rendered Egypt unfit for horses and chariots, his equal division of the land among his subjects, or his having been the sole [pg 249] Egyptian monarch who governed Ethiopia. How even a dragoman of Memphis could have imagined that it had ever been possible to cultivate the Egyptian soil without canals it is difficult to understand, and still more difficult to imagine how a traveller who had seen the Delta could have believed a statement of the kind. The only explanation can be that Herodotos never saw the Delta in its normal condition when the inundation had ceased to cover the land. That Sesostris should have been supposed to have been the only Pharaoh who established his power in Ethiopia is but a proof how little was known of the real history of Egypt by either Herodotos or his informants.

The origin of the name given to this Pharaoh of the dragoman's imagination is still a puzzle. The statues in front of the temple of Ptah, to which the name was attached, were set up by Ramses ii., and in a papyrus we find the name Sesetsu given as the popular title of the same monarch. Perhaps it means “the son of Set is he.” We know that Set, the ancient god of the Delta, was a special object of worship in the family of Ramses ii., and his father Seti was named after the god. Sesetsu would correspond with fair exactitude to the Sesoôsis of Diodoros; for Sesostris we should have to presuppose the form Sesetsu-Ra.

The son and successor of Sesostris, according to Herodotos, was Pherôn. The name is merely a mispronounced Pharaoh, the Egyptian Per-âa or “Great House.” Pherôn undertook no military expedition, being blind in consequence of his impiety in hurling his spear at too high a Nile. After ten years of blindness an oracle came to him from Butô that he would be cured if he would wash his eyes in the urine of a woman who had been true to her husband. Trial after trial was made in vain, and when at last the king recovered his sight he collected all the women in whose case he had failed into “a city now called the Red Mound,” and there burnt them, city and all. He then erected the two obelisks which stood in front of the temple of Ra at Heliopolis.

There are many “Red Mounds” in Egypt, and the name Kom el-Ahmar or “Red Mound” is accordingly very plentiful in a modern map of the country. Wherever kiln-baked bricks have been used in the construction of a building, or where the wall or houses of a city have been burnt, the mound of ruins to which they give rise is of a reddish colour. Such a mound must have existed in the neighbourhood of Heliopolis in the days of Herodotos. There is still a Kom el-Ahmar close to Tel el-Yehudîyeh, where the Jewish temple of Onias was built. But “the Red Mound” of the guides was probably one that was [pg 251] visible from the pylon of the great temple of Heliopolis, where the obelisks stood with which the story of it was associated. The obelisks had indeed been erected by a “Pharaoh,” but it was not a son of Ramses ii. They had been set up by Usertesen i. of the twelfth dynasty nearly fifteen centuries before Ramses ii. was born.

As Pherôn was the son of Sesostris it was necessary for Herodotos to introduce him into his list immediately after his father, even though he had left no monument behind him in the temple of Memphis. But after Pherôn he returns to his series of “Memphite” kings. This time it is “a Memphite whose Greek name is Prôteus,” and whose shrine was situated in the midst of “the Tyrian Camp” or settlement on the “south side of the temple of Ptah.” The tourist, therefore, walked round the eastern wall of the great temple from north to south, and as the pylon on this side of the sanctuary was connected with the name of a king who was the builder of a brick pyramid seen on the way to the Fayyûm, an account of it is deferred till later. The next monument Herodotos came to was accordingly of Phœnician and not of Egyptian origin.

Prôteus in fact was a Phœnician god, worshipped, Herodotos tells us, along with the foreign Aphroditê, whom he suspects to be the Greek Helen in disguise. [pg 252] The Phœnician Aphroditê, however, was really Ashtoreth, which the Greeks pronounced Astartê, the Istar of the Babylonians and Assyrians. But the “priests,” or rather the guides of the traveller, were equal to the occasion, and on his asking them concerning Helen they at once gave him a long story about her arrival and adventures in Egypt. Prôteus was at the time the king in Memphis, and not the sea-god of ships and prophetic insight, as Homer had imagined, and he very properly took Helen away from Paris and kept her safely till Menelaos arrived after the Trojan war to claim his wife. Accordingly Prôteus, the Phœnician “old man of the sea,” has gone down among the three hundred and forty-one Pharaohs of Egypt whose names were recounted to Herodotos by the “priests.” There could not be a better illustration of the real character of his “priestly” informants, or of the worthlessness of the information which they gave him.

When, however, Herodotos goes on to assert that “they said” that Rhampsinitos succeeded Prôteus in the kingdom, he is dealing with them unjustly. The supposed fact must have come from his own note-book. After visiting the Tyrian Camp, on the south side of the great temple, the traveller was taken to its western entrance, where he was told that the propylæa had been erected by Rhampsinitos, as well as two [pg 253] colossal statues in front of them. The order in which he saw the monuments determined the order in which the names of Prôteus and Rhampsinitos occurred in his note-book, and the order in his note-book determined the order of their succession.

Rhampsinitos represents a real Egyptian king. He is Ramses iii. of the twentieth dynasty, the last of the conquering Pharaohs, and the builder of Medînet Habu at Thebes. But Herodotos was never at Thebes, and had consequently never heard of the superb temple and palace Ramses had built there. All that he knows of the architectural works of the Pharaoh are the insignificant additions he made to the temple of Memphis. Of the real Pharaoh he is equally ignorant. In place of the vanquisher of the hordes of the north, the monarch who annihilated the invaders from the Ægean and captured or sunk their ships, the conqueror who carried his arms into Palestine and Syria, we have the hero of a folk-tale. Rhampsinitos and his treasury have become the subject of the story of the master-thief, a story which in various forms is found all over the world, and perhaps goes back to the infancy of mankind. Why this story should have been attached to Ramses iii. it is just as impossible for us to know as it is to understand why the name of Neit, the goddess of Sais and the twenty-sixth dynasty, should have been [pg 254] combined with that of the Theban Pharaoh of the twentieth. Rhampsinitos, Ramessu-n-Neit or “Ramses of Neit,” indicates the period in which alone the name could have been formed. It must have been the invention of the Karian dragomen who came into existence under the Saitic dynasty.

Ramses iii. was, however, as we learn from the great Harris papyrus, one of the wealthiest of Egyptian princes. The gifts he made to the temples of the gods, more especially to that of Amon of Thebes, are almost fabulous in amount. His trading ships brought him the wares of the south and north; and the gold-mines of the eastern desert, as well as the copper and malachite mines of the province of Mafkat, the Sinaitic Peninsula of our modern maps, were actively worked in his reign. The chambers of one of his treasuries still exist at Medînet Habu, and we can still see depicted on their walls the vases of precious metal which he deposited in them.

The Rhampsinitos of folk-lore was similarly rich. He built a treasury for his wealth beside his palace, which should secure it against all attempts at robbery. But the architect left in it a stone which could be easily removed by any one who knew its secret, and before he died the secret was communicated to his two sons. To the amazement of the king, [pg 255] therefore, the gold began to disappear, though his seals remained unbroken and the doors fast locked. He set a trap, accordingly, by the side of the chests of gold; and one of the thieves was caught in it. He thereupon induced his brother to cut off his head, so that his body might not be recognised, and to decamp with it. Next morning Rhampsinitos found the headless corpse, which was thereupon exposed to public view under the protection of armed guards, who were ordered to arrest whoever showed any signs of recognising it. The mother of the dead man, frantic at the treatment of his body, which would deprive him of all hope in the next world, threatened to disclose the whole story unless her surviving son could secure his brother's corpse and give it honourable burial. Loading several asses with wine-skins, therefore, he drove them past the place where the guards sat over the corpse. There he allowed some of the wine to escape, accidentally as it were, and when the guards began eagerly to drink it he craftily encouraged them to do so until they had all fallen into a drunken sleep. He then seized the body and carried it to his mother. The king was now more than ever desirous of discovering such a master-thief, and ordered his daughter to adopt the Babylonian custom of sitting in public and admitting the attentions of any one who passed [pg 256] on condition that he told her the cleverest trick he had ever performed. The thief provided himself with the arm of a mummy, which he concealed under his cloak, and thus prepared presented himself to the princess and disclosed to her all he had done. As she tried to seize him, he left the dead man's arm in her hand and escaped. The king, struck with admiration, determined that so exceedingly clever a youth should be his own son-in-law, and issued a proclamation not only pardoning him but allowing him to marry his daughter. Such was the way in which Egyptian history was constructed by the combined efforts of the popular imagination, the foreign dragomen, and Herodotos!