The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

After the Hyksos conquest Asiatic migration must naturally have largely increased. Between northern Egypt and Palestine there must have been a constant passage to and fro. The rulers of the land of the Nile were now themselves of Asiatic extraction, and it may be that the language of Palestine was spoken in the court of the Pharaoh. At all events, the emigrant from Canaan no longer found himself an alien and a stranger in “the land of Ham.” His own kin were now supreme there, and a welcome was assured to him whenever he might choose to come. The subject population tilled their fields for the benefit of their foreign lords, and the benefit was shared by the inhabitants of Canaan. In case of famine, Palestine could now look to the never-failing soil of Egypt for its supply of corn.

If, therefore, Abraham lived in the age when northern Egypt was subject to the rule of the Hyksos Pharaohs, nothing was more natural than for him, an Asiatic emigrant into Canaan, to wander into Egypt when the corn of Palestine had failed. He would but be following in the wake of that larger Asiatic migration which led to the rise of the Hyksos dynasties themselves.

There is, however, a statement connected with his residence at the court of the Pharaoh which does not seem compatible with the evidence of the monuments. We are told that among the gifts showered upon him by the king were not only sheep and oxen and asses, but camels as well. The camel was the constant companion of the Asiatic nomad. As far back as we can trace the history of the Bedouin, he has been accompanied by the animal which the old Sumerian population of Babylonia called the beast which came from the Persian Gulf. Indeed, it would appear that to the Bedouin belongs the credit of taming the camel, in so far as it has been tamed at all. But to the Egyptians it was practically unknown. Neither in the hieroglyphics, nor on the sculptured and painted walls of the temples and tombs, do we anywhere find it represented. The earliest mention of it yet met with in an Egyptian document is in a papyrus of the age of the Exodus, and there it bears the Semitic name of kamail, the Hebrew gamal.[3] Naturalists have shown that it was not introduced into the northern coast of Africa until after the beginning of the Christian era.

Nevertheless it does not follow that because the camel was never used in Egypt by the natives of the country, it was not at times brought there by [pg 022] nomad visitors from Arabia and Palestine. It is difficult to conceive of an Arab family on the march without a train of camels. And that camels actually found their way into the valley of the Nile has been proved by excavation. When Hekekyan Bey, in 1851-54, was sinking shafts in the Nile mud at Memphis for the Geological Society of London, he found, among other animal remains, the bones of dromedaries.[4]

The name of the Pharaoh visited by Abraham is not told to us. As elsewhere in Genesis, the king of Egypt is referred to only by his official title. This title of “Pharaoh” was one which went back to the early days of the monarchy. It represents the Egyptian Per-âa, or “Great House,” and is of repeated occurrence in the inscriptions. All power and government emanated from the royal palace, and accordingly, just as we speak of the “Sublime Porte” or “Lofty Gate” when we mean the Sultan of Turkey, so the Egyptians spoke of their own sovereign as the Pharaoh or “Great House.” To this day the king of Japan is called the Mi-kado, or “Lofty Gate.”

That the Hyksos princes should have assumed the title of their predecessors on the throne of Egypt [pg 023] is not surprising. The monuments have shown us how thoroughly Egyptianised they soon became. The court of the Hyksos Pharaoh differed but little, if at all, from that of the native Pharaoh. The invaders rapidly adopted the culture of the conquered people, and with it their manners, customs, and even language. The most famous mathematical treatise which Egypt has bequeathed to us was written for a Hyksos king. It may be that the old language of Asia was retained, at all events for a time, by the side of the language of the subject population; but if so, its position must have been like that of Turkish by the side of Arabic in Egypt during the reign of Mohammed Ali. For several centuries the Hyksos could be described as Egyptians, and the dynasties of the Hyksos Pharaohs are counted by the Egyptian historian among the legitimate dynasties of his country.

It was only in the matter of religion that the Hyksos court kept itself distinct from its native subjects. The supreme god of the Hyksos princes was Sutekh, in whom we must see a form of the Semitic Baal. As has already been stated, Egyptian legend ascribed the origin of the war of independence to a demand on the part of the Hyksos Pharaoh Apopi that the prince and the god of Thebes should acknowledge the supremacy of the [pg 024] Hyksos deity. But even in the matter of religion the Hyksos princes could not help submitting to the influence of the old Egyptian civilisation. Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis, was identified with Sutekh, and even Apopi added to his name the title of Ra, and so claimed to be an incarnation of the Egyptian sun-god, like the native Pharaohs who had gone before him.

When next we hear of Egypt in the Old Testament, it is when Israel is about to become a nation. Joseph was sold by his brethren to merchants from Arabia, who carried him into Egypt. There he became the slave of Potiphar, “the eunuch of Pharaoh and chief of the executioners,” or royal body-guard. The name of Potiphar, like that of Potipherah, the priest of On, corresponds with the Egyptian Pa-tu-pa-Ra, “the Gift of the Sun-god.” It has been asserted by Egyptologists that names of this description are not older than the age of the twenty-second dynasty, to which Shishak, the contemporary of Rehoboam, belonged; but because no similar name of an earlier date has hitherto been found, it does not follow that such do not exist. As long as our materials are imperfect, we cannot draw positive conclusions merely from an absence of evidence.

That Potiphar should have been an eunuch and yet been married seems a greater obstacle to our [pg 025] acceptance of the story. This, however, it need not be. Eunuchs in the modern East, who have risen to positions of power and importance, have possessed their harems like other men. In ancient Babylonia it was only the service of religion which the eunuch was forbidden to enter. Such was doubtless the case in Egypt also.

Egyptian research has brought to light a curious parallel to the history of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. It is found in one of the many tales, the equivalents of the modern novel, in which the ancient Egyptians delighted. The tale, which is usually known as that of “The Two Brothers,” was written by the scribe Enna for Seti ii. of the nineteenth dynasty when he was still crown-prince, and it embodies the folk-lore of his native land. Enna lived under Meneptah, the probable Pharaoh of the Exodus, and his work was thus contemporaneous with the events which brought about the release of the Israelites from their “house of bondage.” How old the stories may be upon which it is based it is impossible for us to tell.