It was under Ælius Gallus, the third prefect, that Egypt was visited by Strabo, the most careful and judicious of all the ancient travellers. He had come to study mathematics, astronomy, and geography in the museum, under the successors of Euclid, Eratosthenes, and Hipparchus. He accompanied the prefect in a march to Syênê (Aswan), the border town, and he has left us a valuable account of the state of the country at that time. Alexandria was the chief object that engaged his attention. Its two harbours held more ships than were to be seen in any other port in the world, and its export trade was thought greater than that of all Italy. The docks on each side of the causeway, and the ship canal, from the harbour of Eunostus to the Mareotic Lake, were full of bustle and activity. The palace or citadel on the promontory of Lochias on one side of the great harbour was as striking an object as the lighthouse on the other. The temples and palaces covered a space of ground equal to more than one-fourth part of the city, and the suburbs reached even beyond the Mareotic Lake. Among the chief buildings were the Soma, which held the bodies of Alexander and of the Ptolemies; the court of justice; the museum of philosophy, which had been rebuilt since the burning by Cæsar’s soldiers; the exchange, crowded with merchants, the temple of Neptune, and Mark Antony’s fortress, called the Timonium, on a point of land which jutted into the harbour; the Cæsarium, or new palace; and the great temple of Serapis, which was on the western side of the city, and was the largest and most ornamented of all these buildings. Farther off was the beautiful gymnasium for wrestlers and boxers, with its porticoes of a stadium in length, where the citizens used to meet in public assembly. From the top of the temple of Pan, which rose like a sugar-loaf in the middle of the city, and was mounted by a winding staircase, the whole of this remarkable capital might be seen spread out before the eye. On the east of the city was the circus, for chariot races, and on the west lay the public gardens and pale green palm-groves, and the Necropolis ornamenting the roadside with tombs for miles along the seashore. Other tombs were in the catacombs underground on the same side of the city. The banks of the Mareotic Lake were fringed with vineyards, which bore the famed wine of the same name, and which formed a pleasant contrast with the burning whiteness of the desert beyond. The canal from the lake to the Nile marked its course through the plain by the greater freshness of the green along its banks. In the distance were the new buildings of Augustus’ city of Nicopolis. The arts of Greece and the wealth of Egypt had united to adorn the capital of the Ptolemies. Heliopolis, the ancient seat of Egyptian learning, had never been wholly repaired since its siege by Cambyses, and was then almost a deserted city. Its schools were empty, its teachers silent; but the houses in which Plato and his friend Eudoxus were said to have dwelt and studied were pointed out to the traveller, to warm his love of knowledge and encourage him in the pursuit of virtue. Memphis was the second city in Egypt, while Thebes and Abydos, the former capitals, had fallen to the size and rank of villages. At Memphis Strabo saw the bull-fights in the circus, and was allowed to look at the bull Apis through a window of his stable. At Crocodilopolis he saw the sacred crocodile caught on the banks of the lake and fed with cakes and wine. Ptolemais, which was at first only an encampment of Greek soldiers, had risen under the sovereigns to whom it owed its name to be the largest city in the Thebaid, and scarcely less than Memphis. It was built wholly by the Greeks, and, like Alexandria, it was under Greek laws, while the other cities in Egypt were under Egyptian laws and magistrates. It was situated between Panopolis and Abydos; but, while the temples of Thebes, which were built so many centuries earlier, are still standing in awful grandeur, scarcely a trace of this Greek city can be found in the villages of El Menshieh and Girgeh (Cerkasoros), which now stand on the spot. Strabo and the Roman generals did not forget to visit the broken colossal statue of Amenhôthes, near Thebes, which sent forth its musical sounds every morning, as the sun, rising over the Arabian hills, first shone upon its face; but this inquiring traveller could not make up his mind whether the music came from the statue, or the base, or the people around it. He ended his tour with watching the sunshine at the bottom of the astronomical well at Syênê, which, on the longest day, is exactly under the sun’s northern edge, and with admiring the skill of the boatmen who shot down the cataracts in their wicker boats, for the amusement of the Roman generals.
In the earlier periods of Egyptian history Ethiopia was peopled, or, at least, governed, by a race of men, whom, as they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods as their neighbours of Upper Egypt, we must call the Kopts. But the Arabs, under the name of Troglodyte, and other tribes, had made an early settlement on the African side of the Red Sea. So numerous were they in Upper Egypt that in the time of Strabo half the population of the city of Koptos were Arabs; they were the camel-drivers and carriers for the Theban merchants in the trade across the desert. Some of the conquests of Ramses had been over that nation in southern Ethiopia, and the Arab power must have further risen after the defeat of the Ethiopians by Euergetes I. Ethiopia in the time of Augustus was held by Arabs; a race who thought peace a state of disgraceful idleness, and war the only employment worthy of men; and who made frequent hasty inroads into Nubia, and sometimes into Egypt. They fought for plunder, not for conquest, and usually retreated as quickly as they came, with such booty as they laid their hands on. To use words which were proverbial while the Nile swarmed with crocodiles, “They did as the dogs do, they drank and ran away;” and the Romans found it necessary to place a body of troops near the cataracts of Syênê to stop their marching northward and laying waste the Thebaid. While the larger part of the Roman legions was withdrawn into Arabia on an unsuccessful quest for treasure, a body of thirty thousand of these men, whom we may call either Arabs, from their blood and language, or Ethiopians, from their country, marched northward into Egypt, and overpowered the three Roman cohorts at Elephantine, Syênê, and Philas. Badly armed and badly trained, they were led on by the generals of Candace, Queen of Napata, to the fourth cataract. They were, however, easily driven back when Gallus led against them an army of ten thousand men, and drove them to Ethiopian Pselchis, now remaining as the modern village of Dakkeh. There he defeated them again, and took the city by storm. From Pselchis he marched across the Nubian desert two hundred and fifty miles to Premnis, on the northerly bend of the river, and then made himself master of Napata, the capital. A guard was at the moment left in the country to check any future inroads; but the Romans made no attempts to hold it.
Of the state of the Ethiopie Arabs under Queen Candace we learn but little from this hasty inroad; but some of the tribes must have been very far from the barbarians that, from their ignorance of the arts of war, the Romans judged them to be. Those nearest to the Egyptian frontiers, the Troglodyte and Blemmyes, were unsettled, wandering, and plundering; but the inhabitants of Meroë were of a more civilised race. The Jews had settled in southern Ethiopia in large numbers, and for a long time; Solomon’s trade had made them acquainted with Adule and Auxum; some of them were employed in the highest offices, and must have brought with them the arts of civilised life. A few years later (Acts VIII. 27) we meet with a Jewish eunuch, the treasurer of Queen Candace, travelling with some pomp from Ethiopia to the religious festivals at Jerusalem. The Egyptian coins of Augustus and his successors are all Greek; the conquest of the country by the Romans made no change in its language. Though the chief part of the population spoke Koptic, it was still a Greek province of the Roman empire; the decrees of the prefects of Alexandria and of the upper provinces were written in Greek; and every Roman traveller, who, like a schoolboy, has scratched his name upon the foot of the musical statue of Amenhôthes, to let the world know the extent of his travels, has helped to prove that the Roman government of the country was carried on in the Greek language. The coins often bear the eagle and thunderbolt on one side, while on the other is the emperor’s head, with his name and titles; and, after a few years, they are all dated with the year of the emperor’s reign. In the earliest he is styled a Son of God, in imitation of the Egyptian title of Son of the Sun. After Egypt lost its liberty, we no longer find any gold coinage in the country; that metal, with everything else that was most costly, was carried away to pay the Roman tribute. This was chiefly taken in money, except, indeed, the tax on grain, which the Egyptian kings had always received in kind, and which was still gathered in the same way, and each year shipped to Rome, to be distributed among the idle poor of that great city. At this time it amounted to twenty millions of bushels, which was four times what was levied in the reign of Philadelphus. The trade to the east was increasing, but as yet not large. About one hundred and twenty small vessels sailed every year to India from MyosHormos, which was now the chief port on the Red Sea.
No change was made in the Egyptian religion by this change of masters; and, though the means of the priests were lessened, they still carried forward the buildings which were in progress, and even began new ones. The small temple of Isis, at Tentyra, behind the great temple of Hâthor, was either built or finished in this reign, and it was dedicated to the goddess, and to the honour of the emperor as Jupiter Liberator, in a Greek inscription on the cornice, in the thirty-first year of the reign, when Publius Octavius was prefect of the province.
The large temple at Talmis, in Nubia, was also then built, though not wholly finished; and we find the name of Augustus at Philæ, on some of the additions to the temple of Isis, which had been built in the reign of Philadelphus. In the hieroglyphical inscriptions on these temples, Augustus is called Autocrator Cæsar, and is styled Son of the Sun, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the other titles which had always been given by the priests to the Ptolemies and their own native sovereigns for so many centuries. These claims were evidently unknown in Rome, where the modesty of Augustus was almost proverbial.