The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Anysis or Hanes was the extreme limit of Herodotos's voyage. As afterwards in the days of Strabo, it was the entrance to the Fayyûm, and the traveller who wished to visit the Fayyûm had first to pass through the city which the Greeks called Herakleopolis. The patron-god of the city was Hershef, whose name was the subject of various unsuccessful attempts at an etymology on the part of the Egyptians. But, like the names of several other deities, its true origin was lost in the night of antiquity. In Plutarch it appears in a Greek dress as Arsaphes. The god was invested with warlike attributes, and hence it was that he was identified by the Greeks with their own Hêraklês. His temple stood in the middle of the mounds of the old city, which the fellahin call Umm el-Kimân, “the mother of mounds.” In 1891 they were partially excavated by Dr. Naville for the Egypt Exploration Fund, but little was found to repay the expense and labour of the work. The site of the temple was discovered somewhat to the north-east of the four columns which are alone left of an early Coptic church. But hardly more than the site can be said still to exist. A few blocks of stone inscribed with the names of Ramses ii. and Meneptah, and a fragment of a temple built by [pg 271] Usertesen ii., are almost all that survive of its past. Even the necropolis failed to produce monuments of antiquity. Its tombs had been ransacked by treasure-hunters and used again as places of burial in the Roman era, and Dr. Naville found in it only a few traces of the eighteenth dynasty.

And yet there had been a time when Herakleopolis was the capital of Egypt. The ninth and tenth dynasties sprang from it, and the authority of the tenth dynasty, at all events, was, as we now know, acknowledged as far as the Cataract. Professor Maspero and Mr. Griffith have shown that three of the tombs in the hill behind Assiout (Nos. iii., iv., and v.) belong to that age. Hollowed out of the rock, high up in the cliff above the tombs of the twelfth dynasty, their mutilated inscriptions tell us of the ancient feudal lords of the nome, Tef-aba and his son Khiti, the latter of whom won battles for his master, the Pharaoh Mer-ka-Ra. Thebes was in open rebellion; so also was Herakleopolis itself, the home of the Pharaoh's family, and Khiti provided ships and soldiers in abundance for him. The fleet filled the Nile from Gebel Abu Foda on the north to Shotb on the south, and the forces of the rebels were annihilated. For awhile the authority of the Pharaoh was restored; but the power of the Theban princes remained unshaken, and a time came when the [pg 272] Thebans of the eleventh dynasty succeeded to the heritage of the Herakleopolites of the tenth.

Who the “blind” king of Anysis may have been we do not know. But he was certainly not the legitimate Pharaoh, although Herakleopolite vanity may have wished him to be thought so. According to Manetho, the Tanites of the twenty-third dynasty were followed by the twenty-fourth dynasty, consisting of a single Saite, Bokkhoris, whom the monuments call Bak-n-ran-f. Bokkhoris is said to have been burnt alive by his conqueror Sabako. In making the latter reign for fifty years, Herodotos has confused the founder of the dynasty with the dynasty itself. The length of his reign is variously given by the two copyists of Manetho—Africanus and Eusebius—as eight and twelve years; the last cypher can alone be the right one, as an inscription at the gold mines of Hammamât mentions his twelfth year. He was followed by two other Ethiopian kings, the second of whom was Tirhakah, and the whole length of the dynasty seems to have been fifty-two years. The Christian copyists, indeed, with their customary endeavour to reduce the chronology of the Egyptian historian, make it only forty and forty-four years; but the monuments show that Herodotos, with his round half century, is nearer the truth.

From a topographical point of view the [pg 273] introduction of Sabako and the Ethiopian between Ahnas and the Fayyûm is out of place. But the story told to Herodotos prevented him from doing otherwise. The blind king is said to have fled to the marshes of the Delta, and there to have remained in concealment until the end of the Ethiopian rule, when he was once more acknowledged as Pharaoh. The legend of Sabako is thus only an episode in the history of the Herakleopolite prince.

From the blind Anysis we ought to pass to the kings of the twelfth dynasty who created the Fayyûm and erected the monuments which the Greek traveller saw there. We do not do so for two reasons. Herodotos had already mentioned king Mœris and the lake and pyramids he made when describing the list of kings which the sacred scribe had read to him in Memphis. He could not count the Egyptian monarch twice, at the beginning as well as the end of his eleven topographical Pharaohs. Then, again, the story told him about the Labyrinth connected its origin with Psammetikhos, with whom the Greek history of Egypt began. From this point forward Herodotos no longer derived his information from “the Egyptians themselves,” that is to say, from his guides and dragomen, but “from the rest of the world.” By “the rest of the world” he means the Greeks. The story of the Labyrinth is accordingly [pg 274] relegated to what may be termed the second division of his Egyptian history, and forms part of his account of the rise of the twenty-sixth dynasty.

Between the blind king of Ahnas, therefore, and the supposed builder of the Labyrinth, a folk-tale is interposed which once more takes us back to the temple of Ptah at Memphis. It is attached to an image in the temple, which represents a man with a mouse in his hand, and it is evident that Herodotos heard it after his return from the Fayyûm. Had he heard of it when he was previously in Memphis, it would have been recorded in an earlier part of his book. Moreover, the statue stood within the temple, which the tourist was not allowed to enter, so that he would not have seen it at the time of his visit to the great Egyptian sanctuary. Whether he ever saw it at all is doubtful; perhaps he may have caught a glimpse of it through the open gate of the temple like the glimpses of sculptured columns in Mohammedan mosques which the older travellers in the East have boasted of securing. But more probably he heard about it from others, more especially from the dragoman he employed.

The story is a curious mixture of Egyptian and Semitic elements, while the inscription which the dragomen pretended to read upon the statue is a Greek invention. A priest of Ptah, so it ran, whose [pg 275] name was Sethos, became king of Egypt. His priestly instincts led him to neglect and ill-treat the army, even to the extent of robbing them of the twelve acres of land which each soldier possessed of right. Then Sennacherib, “king of the Arabians and Assyrians,” marched against him, and the army refused to fight. In his extremity the priest-king entered the shrine of his god and implored him with tears to save his worshipper. Sleep fell upon the suppliant, and he beheld the god standing over him and bidding him be of good courage, for no harm should happen to him. Thereupon Sethos proceeded to Pelusium with such volunteers as he could find—pedlars, artisans, and tradesmen—and there found the enemy encamped. In the night, however, field-mice entered the camp of the Assyrians and gnawed their bowstrings and the thongs of their shields, so that in the morning they found themselves defenceless, and the Egyptians gained an easy victory. In memory of the event the stone image of the king was erected in the temple of Ptah with a field-mouse in his hand.

The statue must have been that of Horus, to whom alone, along with Uaz, the field-mouse was sacred. But it was apparently only in a few localities that such was the case. The figure of the animal is found on coins of Ekhmîm, and a bronze [pg 276] image of it discovered at Thebes, and now in the British Museum, is dedicated to “Horus, the lord of Sekhem,” or Esneh. At “Buto,” where the two deities were worshipped together, we may expect to find a cemetery of field-mice like that of the cats at Bubastis, and the Liverpool Museum possesses two bronze mice, both on the same stand, which were discovered in the mounds of Athribis near Benha. Horus was the god of Athribis, where he was adored under the name of Kheti-ti.

The priest-king of the folk-tale has taken the place of the historical Tirhakah. The name of his enemy, Sennacherib, however, has been remembered, though he is called king of “the Arabians” as well as of the Assyrians. But the title must be of Egyptian origin. The “Arabians” of the Greek writer are the Shasu, the Bedouin “plunderers” of the Egyptian monuments, and none but an Egyptian would have described an Asiatic invader by such a name.

It was in b.c. 701, during his campaign against Hezekiah of Judah, that the Assyrian monarch met the forces of Tirhakah. The Ethiopian lord of Egypt had marched to the help of his Jewish ally, and at the little village of Eltekeh the battle took place. Tirhakah was defeated and driven back into Egypt, while Sennacherib was left to continue his campaign [pg 277] and reduce his rebellious vassal to obedience. In the insolence of victory he sent Hezekiah a letter declaring that, in spite of the promises of his God, Jerusalem should be delivered into the hands of its foes. Then it was that Hezekiah entered the sanctuary of the temple, and, spreading out the letter before the Lord, besought Him to save himself and the city from the Assyrian invader. The prayer was heard: Isaiah was commissioned to declare that the Assyrian king should never come into Jerusalem; and the Assyrian host perished mysteriously in a single night.