The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

Half-a-century later a similar event happened in Assyria itself. Its king, Assur-bani-pal, surrounded by insurgent enemies, was suddenly attacked by Te-umman of Elam. While he was keeping the festival of the goddess Istar at Arbela, a message was brought to him from the Elamite monarch that he was on his march to destroy Assyria and its gods. Thereupon Assur-bani-pal went into the temple of the goddess, and, bowing to the ground before her, with tears implored her help. Istar listened to the prayer, and that night a seer dreamed a dream wherein she appeared and bade him announce to the king that Istar of Arbela, with quivers behind her shoulders and the bow and mace in her hand, would fight in front of him and overthrow his foes. The [pg 278] prophecy was fulfilled, and before long the Elamite army was crushed, and the head of Te-umman sent in triumph to Nineveh.

In Judah and Assyria we are dealing with history, in the story of Sethos with a folk-tale, and it is impossible therefore not to believe that the conduct of the priest of Ptah has been modelled upon that of Hezekiah and Assur-bani-pal. The basis of it is Semitic rather than Egyptian; it would have been told more appropriately of Sennacherib than of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Perhaps it had its source among the Phœnicians of the Tyrian camp at Memphis, or even among the Egyptianised Jews who carried Jeremiah into Egypt. Whatever may have been its origin, it does not belong to the realm of history.

Even with the appearance of Psammetikhos upon the stage, the Egyptian history of Herodotos does not yet commence. Before it can do so, he has to finish his wanderings and his sight-seeing, to be quit of his dragomen and of the topographical chronology that he built upon their stories. Through Herakleopolis lay the entrance to the Fayyûm, and the Fayyûm united the folk-lore of the guides with the sober history of the Greek epoch in Egypt.

Herodotos knows that Psammetikhos was king of Sais and that his father's name had been Necho. [pg 279] But when he goes on to say that Necho had been slain by the Ethiopian Sabako, and that Psammetikhos himself had been driven in consequence into Syria, he takes us into the domain of fiction and not of fact. Necho had been one of twenty Egyptian satraps under Esar-haddon and Assur-bani-pal, and though he had once been carried in chains to Assyria on a charge of treason, he had returned to his government loaded with honours. Sabako had been dead long before, and Tirhakah was vainly endeavouring to drive the Assyrians and their vassal-satraps out of Egypt.

Still further from the truth was the legend which associated Psammetikhos with the Fayyûm. When the Egyptians had been “freed,” we are told, after the reign of the priest of Ptah, there arose twelve kings who divided the country between them. They married into each other's families and swore an oath ever to remain friends. By way of leaving a monument of themselves they built the Labyrinth, with its twelve courts, each court for a king, six of them being on the north side and six on the south. But an oracle had announced that this friendly intercourse would be broken if ever one of them at their annual gathering in the temple of Ptah should pour a libation to the god from a bronze helmet. The prince who did so would become king of all Egypt. This [pg 280] untoward accident eventually occurred. Psammetikhos on one occasion accidentally used his helmet in place of the proper libation-bowl, and he was thereupon chased away by his colleagues, first into the marshes and then into Syria. An oracle, however, again came to his help. It declared that he would be avenged when men of bronze came from the sea, and, taking the hint, he hired some Ionian and Karian pirates, armed with bronze, who had landed for the sake of plunder, and with their assistance became undisputed master of Egypt. With this story of the foundation of the twenty-sixth dynasty, the Egyptian folk-lore of Herodotos came fitly to an end.

The twelve kings owe their origin to the twelve courts of the Labyrinth. They are a reminiscence of the twenty vassal-kings or satraps whom the Assyrians appointed to govern the country, and among whom Psammetikhos and his father had been included. But even the twelve courts are not altogether correct. We learn from Strabo that there were many more than twelve—as many, in fact, as were the nomes of Egypt. This makes us distrustful of the further statement of Herodotos that the halls contained one thousand five hundred chambers above the ground, and one thousand five hundred below. The information must have come from the guides, and it is not likely that he verified [pg 281] it. To count three thousand chambers would have occupied at least a day.

In the time of Strabo it was known that the real builder of the Labyrinth was Maindês, that is to say, Mâ(t)-n-Ra, or Amon-em-hat iii. of the twelfth dynasty. The excavations of Professor Petrie at Howâra in 1888 have proved the fact. He succeeded in penetrating into the central chamber of the brick pyramid which formed part of the building, and there, deep in water, he found the sarcophagus and the shattered fragments of some of the funerary vases of the dead Pharaoh. They were all that had been left by the spoilers of a long-past age, but they were sufficient to show who the Pharaoh was. He had not been buried alone. In another chamber of the pyramid was the sarcophagus of his daughter Neferu-Ptah, who must have died before the pyramid was finally closed. The labyrinth itself has been used as a quarry or burnt into lime long ago. On its floor of hard plaster lie the chippings of the stones which composed it, six feet in thickness, and covering a far larger area than that of any other Egyptian temple of which we know. There was none other which could vie with it in size.

Amon-em-hat iii. seems to have left another memorial of himself further north—at least, such is the natural interpretation of Mr. de Morgan's [pg 282] recent discoveries at Dahshûr. Though the pyramid did not repay his engineering skill with even a scrap of inscription, he found tombs on its northern side which prove that here also was a burial-place of the twelfth dynasty. Two long corridors had been cut out of the rock, one above the other, and at intervals along their northern walls square chambers had been excavated, in which were placed the sarcophagi of the dead. Inscriptions show for whom they were intended. Nofer-hont, Sont-Senebt, Sit-Hathor and Menit, were the royal princesses who had been entombed within them in the time of Amon-em-hat iii. Their jewels had been hidden in two natural hollows in the stone floor of the corridors, and had thus escaped the eye of the ancient treasure-hunter. We can see them now in the Gizeh Museum, and thus learn to what an exquisite state of perfection the art of the goldsmith had already been brought.

Among them we may notice large sea-shells of solid gold, enamelled lotus-flowers and necklaces of amethyst, carnelian and agate beads. Of beautifully-worked gold ornaments there is a marvellous profusion. But nothing surpasses the golden pectorals inlaid with precious stones. The work is so perfect as to make it difficult to believe that we have before us a mosaic and not enamel. On one of the pectorals the cartouche of Usertesen iii. is supported [pg 283] on the paws of two hawk-headed lions, crowned with the royal feathers, and trampling under their feet the bodies of the foe. On another Amon-em-hat iii. is represented smiting the wild tribes of the Sinaitic Peninsula. By the side of this jewellery of the twelfth dynasty, that of Queen Ah-hotep of the seventeenth, found by Mariette at Thebes, looks formal and degenerate. In jewellery, as in all things else in ancient Egypt, the earlier art is the best.

From Amon-em-hat iii. of the twelfth dynasty to the founder of the twenty-sixth, two thousand years later, is a far cry, and how the Labyrinth came to be connected with the latter by the guides of Herodotos it is hard to say. The bronze helmet of Psammetikhos indicates that the story is of Greek origin. That was a Greek head-dress; no Egyptian, much less an Egyptian Pharaoh, would ever have worn it. The head-dress of the Egyptian monarch was of linen, coloured red for Lower Egypt, white for the south.