The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

After all, however, the master-thief did not succeed Rhampsinitos on the throne. After passing the western entrance of the temple of Ptah, Herodotos arrived again at the northern side, from which he had started, and, as he was not allowed to enter the sanctuary, there was nothing further for him to see. His next visit, accordingly, was to the pyramids of Gizeh, and the pyramidal builders—Kheops, Khephren, and Mykerinos of the fourth dynasty—are made to follow Ramses iii. of the twentieth, who lived more than two thousand years after them. It does not say much for the judgment of our classical scholars that before the decipherment of the [pg 257] hieroglyphs they should have preferred the chronology of Herodotos to that of Manetho.

Herodotos, like a true sight-seer, found nothing in Memphis to interest him except the temple. About the city itself he has nothing to say, not even about the stuccoed city-wall which gave to it its name of “the White Wall.” Portions of this wall are still standing at the northern end of the mounds which cover the site of Memphis. Like all the other city-walls of ancient Egypt, it is built of sun-dried bricks, bound together with the stems of palm-trees, and was once of great thickness. At the southern end of the mounds are the remains of the kilns in which the potters of the Roman and Byzantine age baked their vases of blue porcelain. Some of their failures still lie on the surface of the ground.

Herodotos went to the pyramids of Gizeh by water, across the lake on the western side of the city, which he states had been made by Menes, and then along a canal. At Gizeh his love of the marvellous was fully satisfied. He inspected the pyramids and the causeway along which the stones had been brought from the quarries of Turah for building them, and listened reverentially to all the stories which his guides told him about them and their builders. The measurements he gives were in most cases probably made by himself. But in saying that [pg 258] there were hieroglyphic inscriptions “in the pyramid” he has made a mistake. There were no inscriptions either in it or outside it, unless it were a few hieratic records left by visitors on the lower casing-stones of the monument. At the same time it is certain that Herodotos saw the hieroglyphs, and that his guide pretended to translate them, since they contained, according to him, an account of the quantity of radishes, onions, and leeks eaten by the workmen when building the great pyramid, as well as the amount of money which it cost. But the vegetables represented Egyptian characters—the radish, for instance, being probably rod, “fruit” or “seed,” and the mention of them is a proof that it really was a hieroglyphic text which the dragoman proposed to interpret. It is even possible that the guide knew the hieroglyphic symbols for the numerals; if so, it would explain his finding in them the number of talents spent by Kheops upon his sepulchre, and it would also show that the inscriptions were engraved, not “in the pyramid,” but in an adjoining tomb. In fact, this seems the simplest explanation of what Herodotos says about them; like many another traveller, he forgot to note where exactly the inscriptions were inscribed, and when he came to write his book assumed that they were in the pyramid itself.

According to the dragoman's legend, Kheops and [pg 259] Khephren were cruel and impious tyrants, while their successor Mykerinos (Men-ka-Ra) was a good and merciful ruler. The key to this description of them is probably to be found in the statement of Diodorus Siculus that the people threatened to drag their bodies from their tombs after death and tear them in pieces, so that through fear of such a fate the Pharaohs took care to have themselves buried in a secret place. This secret place is the subterranean island, with its chambers, which Herodotos says was made under the great pyramid by means of a canal in order that the king might be entombed there. The myth must have originated in the fact that in the days of Herodotos the mummies of Kheops and Khephren were not to be found in their pyramids, which had been rifled centuries before, and the story of the cruelty and impiety of the two kings accordingly grew up to account for the fact.

The righteousness of Mykerinos was visited with the anger and punishment of the gods, since it had been destined that the Egyptians should be evil-entreated for one hundred and fifty years, and his piety and justice had averted from them part of their doom. This view of destiny and the action of the gods was as essentially Greek as it was foreign to the Egyptian mind, and it is not surprising therefore [pg 260] that the decree of heaven was announced to the unhappy Pharaoh through that thoroughly Greek institution, an oracle. We are reading in the story a Greek tragedy rather than a history of Egypt.

It was part of the punishment of Mykerinos that he should lose his daughter, and the dragomen thus managed to connect the pyramid at Gizeh with a gilded wooden image of a cow in the palace at Sais, which, since the reign of Psammetikhos, must have been well-known to them. The cow, which was really a symbol of Neit in the form of Hathor, with what Herodotos supposed to be the disk of the sun between its horns, though it was really the moon, was imagined to be hollow, and to be the coffin of the daughter of the Pharaoh. The wooden figures which stood beside it were further imagined to represent the concubines of the king. There were, however, other stories about both the figures and the cow, less reputable to the royal character, but equally showing how entirely ignorant Herodotos's informants were of Egyptian religion and custom. Though they knew that at the festival of Osiris the cow was carried out into the open air, they said this was because the daughter of Mykerinos when dying had asked her father that she might once a year see the sun. Can there be a stronger proof of the gulf that existed between the native [pg 261] Egyptian and the “impure” stranger, even when the latter belonged to the caste of dragomen? To us the representation of Hathor under the form of a cow with the lunar orb between its horns seems an elementary fact of ancient Egyptian religion; the modern tourist sees it depicted time after time on the walls of temples and tombs, and the modern dragoman has begun to learn something about its meaning. But in the fifth century before our era the dragoman and the tourist were alike foreigners, who were not permitted to penetrate within the temples, and there were neither books nor teachers to instruct them in the doctrines of the Egyptian faith.

Herodotos must have returned to Memphis after his visit to the pyramids, before setting forth on his voyage to the south. Had he gone straight from Gizeh to the Fayyûm along the edge of the desert, he would have passed the step-pyramid and the Serapeum at Saqqâra. It is difficult to believe that, had he done so, he would have told us nothing about the burial-place of the sacred bulls and the huge sarcophagi of granite in which they were entombed. The subterranean gallery begun by Psammetikhos was still open, and each Apis as he died was buried in it down to the end of the Ptolemaic period. At a later date, when the Persian empire had been overthrown, the Serapeum became a favourite place [pg 262] of pilgrimage for Greek visitors to Memphis. A Greek temple was built over the sepulchres of the bulls, Greek recluses took up their abode in its chambers, and Greek tourists inscribed their names on the sphinxes which lined the approach to the sanctuary.

Herodotos knew all about the living Apis, and the marks on the body of the bull which proved his divinity, as well as about the court in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, which Psammetikhos had built for the accommodation of the incarnate god. He was well acquainted also with the legend which made Kambyses slay the sacred bull and scourge its priests, and he tells us how the latter buried the body of their slaughtered deity in secret. But neither he nor his guides knew where the burial took place, or where the mummies of the bulls had been entombed from time immemorial. Had they done so we should have heard something about it. But, instead of this, we are told that the dead oxen were buried in the suburbs of the town where they had died, their horns being allowed to protrude above the ground in order to mark the spot. When the flesh was decayed the bones were conveyed in boats to a city in the island of Prosôpitis, called Atarbêkhis, and there deposited in their last resting-place.

It is evident, therefore, that the great cemetery of Memphis was not visited by travellers, and that the guides accordingly knew nothing about it. The Egyptians probably had the same feeling in regard to it as their Moslem descendants; the graves would be profaned if the “impure” foreigner walked over them. The “impure” foreigner, moreover, was usually satisfied with the three pyramids of Gizeh; he did not care to make another long expedition in the sun to the western desert in order to see there another pyramid. And, apart from the pyramid, there was little for him to visit. It is doubtful whether he would have been permitted to descend into the burying-place of the bulls, and the buildings above it were probably of no great size.

But whatever might have been the reason, Saqqâra and its Serapeum were unknown to the dragomen, and consequently to Herodotos as well. He must have started for the Fayyûm from Memphis and have sailed up the channel of the Nile itself. If he noticed the pyramids of Dahshûr and Mêdûm, they would have been in the far distance, and have appeared unworthy of attention after what he had seen at Gizeh. Soon after passing Mêdûm, however, it would have been necessary for him to leave the river and make his way inland by the canal which joined the Bahr Yûsuf at Illahûn. Here he would [pg 264] have been close to the great brick pyramid whose secret has been wrested from it by Professor Petrie, and here too he would have seen, a little to the south, the city of Herakleopolis, the Ahnas el-Medîneh of to-day, standing on the rubbish-mounds of the past on the eastern bank of the Bahr Yûsuf.