The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

How a Babylonian word like abrek came to be used in Egypt it is idle for us to inquire. Those who believe in the late origin and fictitious character of the story of Joseph would find an easy explanation of it. But easy explanations are not necessarily true, either in archæology or in anything else. And since we now know that Canaan, long before the time of Joseph, had fallen under Babylonian influence, that the Babylonian language and writing were employed there, and that Babylonian words had made their way into the native idiom, it does not require much stretch of the imagination to suppose that such words may have also penetrated to the court of the Asiatic rulers of northern Egypt. Up to the era of the Exodus, Egypt and Canaan were for several centuries as closely connected with each [pg 034] other as were England and the north of France in the age of the Normans and Plantagenets.

The prosperity of Egypt depends upon the Nile. If the river rises to too great a height during the period of inundation, the autumn crops are damaged or destroyed. If, on the other hand, its rise is insufficient to fill the canals and basins, or to reach the higher ground, the land remains unwatered, and nothing will grow. Egypt, in fact, is the gift of the Nile; let the channel of the great river be diverted elsewhere, and the whole country would at once become an uninhabited desert.

A low Nile consequently brings with it a scarcity of food. When provisions cannot be imported from abroad, famine is the necessary result, and the population perishes in thousands. Such was the case in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era, when the inundation was deficient for several successive years. The Arabic writers, El-Makrîzî and Abd-el-Latîf, describe the famines that ensued in terrible terms. Abd-el-Latîf was a witness of that which lasted from a.d. 1200 to 1202, and of the horrors which it caused. After eating grass, corpses, and even excrement, the wretched inhabitants of the country began to devour one another. Mothers were arrested in the act of cooking their own children, and it was unsafe to walk in the streets for fear of being murdered for food.

The famine described by El-Makrîzî lasted, like that of Joseph, for seven years, from a.d. 1064 to 1071, and was similarly occasioned by a deficient Nile. A hieroglyphic inscription, discovered in 1888 by Mr. Wilbour in the island of Sehêl, contains a notice of another famine of seven years, which occurred at an earlier date. The island of Sehêl lies in the Cataract, midway between Assouan and Philæ, and the inscription is carved on a block of granite and looks towards the south. It is dated in the eighteenth year of a king, who was probably one of the Ethiopian princes that reigned over southern Egypt in the troublous age of the fourth and fifth Ptolemies. According to Dr. Brugsch's translation, it states that the king sent to the governor of Nubia saying: “I am sorrowing upon my high throne over those who belong to the palace. In sorrow is my heart for the vast misfortune, because the Nile flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain; there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food. Each man has become a thief to his neighbour. They desire to hasten and cannot walk; the child cries, the youth creeps along and the old man; their souls are bowed down. Their legs are bent together and drag along the ground, and their hands rest in their bosoms. The counsel of the great ones of the court is but emptiness. Torn open are the chests of [pg 036] provisions, but instead of contents there is air. Everything is exhausted.” The text then goes on to declare how Khnum the Creator came to the help of the Pharaoh, and caused the Nile once more to inundate the lands. In return for this the king gave the priests of Khnum at Elephantinê twenty miles of river bank on either side of the island, together with tithes of all the produce of the country.

Dr. Brugsch has brought to light yet another record of a famine in Upper Egypt which belongs to an older period. Among the rock-cut tombs of El-Kab, where the princes of Thebes held their court in the days of the Hyksos, is one which commemorates the name of a certain Baba. The name occurs elsewhere at El-Kab, and was that of the father of “Captain Ahmes,” whose tomb is one of the most interesting there, and who, in his youthful days, assisted Ahmes of the eighteenth dynasty in driving the Hyksos from their last fortress in Egypt. Baba enumerates his wealth and many good deeds, and adds: “When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the city.”

It may be that the famine here referred to is the famine of Joseph. All we know about the date of Baba is that he lived in the age of the Hyksos. If he flourished before the war of independence and in [pg 037] days when the authority of the Hyksos Pharaoh was still paramount in Upper Egypt, we should have good reason for believing that the famine of which he speaks was the same as that described in Genesis. One of the results of the latter was that the Egyptians parted with their lands and stock to Joseph, so that henceforth they became the tenants of the Pharaoh, to whom they paid a fifth of all their produce. If this statement is historical, the administration of Joseph must have extended from one end of Egypt to the other. His Hyksos master must have been like Apopi, of whom the Sallier Papyrus tells us that “the entire country paid him tribute, together with its manufactured products, and so loaded him with all the good things of Egypt.”

The account of Joseph's famine, however, betrays in one respect a sign of later date. The famine is said to have extended to Canaan. But a famine in Egypt and a famine in Canaan were not due to the same cause, and the failure of the waters of the Nile would have no effect upon the crops of Palestine. In Canaan it was the want of rain, not of the inundation of the Nile, which produced a failure of corn. We hear from time to time, in the inscriptions, of corn being sent from Egypt to Syria, but it was when there was plenty on the banks of the Nile and a scarcity of rain on the Syrian coast. The Hebrew [pg 038] writer has regarded the history of the past from a purely Asiatic rather than an Egyptian point of view.

Joseph must have entered Egypt when it was still under Hyksos domination. The promise made to Abraham (Gen. xv. 13) is very explicit: “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.” Equally explicit is the statement of the book of Exodus (xii. 40, 41): “The sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the self-same day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” Here thirty years—the length of a generation—are added to the four hundred during which the Israelites were to be afflicted in the land of the foreigner. If the Exodus took place in the latter years of the nineteenth dynasty—-and, as we shall see, the Egyptian monuments forbid our placing it elsewhere—the four hundred and thirty years of the Biblical narrative bring us to the beginning of the last Hyksos dynasty.

It is a curious fact that Egyptian history also knows of an epoch of four hundred years which covers almost the same period as the four hundred years of Genesis. Mariette Pasha, when excavating [pg 039] at Sân, the ancient Zoan, found a stela which had been erected in the reign of Ramses ii. by one of his officers, the governor of the Asiatic frontier. The stela commemorates a visit to Sân made by the governor, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, in the four hundredth year of “the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the Sun who loved him, also named Set-Nubti.” Since Set or Sutekh was the god of the Hyksos, while Sân was the Hyksos capital, it is clear that Set-âa-pehti or Set-Nubti was a Hyksos prince who claimed rule over the whole of Egypt, and with whom a Hyksos era commenced. Professor Maspero and Dr. de Cara consider the prince in question to have been really the god Sutekh himself; this, however, is not the natural interpretation of the titles assigned to him, and it is not improbable that Professor Wiedemann is right in identifying him with a certain Hyksos Pharaoh, Set-[Nub?]ti, mentioned on a monument discovered by Mariette at Tel-Mokdam. This latter Pharaoh is entitled “the good god, the star of Upper and Lower Egypt, the son of the Sun, beloved by Sutekh, the lord of Avaris.”

But whether or not the Hyksos Pharaoh of Tel-Mokdam is the same as Set-Nubti of Sân, it would seem probable that the era connected with his name marked the rise of the last Hyksos dynasty. According [pg 040] to Eusebius, the leader of this dynasty was Saitês, a name which reminds us of Set-âa-[pehti]. Eusebius makes the length of the dynasty 103 years, but Africanus, a more trustworthy authority, gives it as 151 years. This would assign the rise of the seventeenth dynasty, the last of Hyksos rule, to about b.c. 1720, a date which agrees very well with that of the monument of Sân.[6] The Exodus of the Israelites, if it took place in the reign of Meneptah, would have happened about b.c. 1270 (or b.c. 1250, if it occurred in the reign of Seti ii., as Professor Maspero maintains); in this case the 430 years of sojourning in the land of Egypt brings us to b.c. 1700 (or 1680). This would be about twenty years after the establishment of the last Hyksos line of Pharaohs, and one hundred and thirty years before the foundation of the eighteenth dynasty. Joseph would thus have been vizier of the country long before the war of independence broke out, and there would have been time in abundance for him to have lived and died before his friends and protectors were driven from the land they had so long occupied.