[43] i. e. Per Amen, or Pa-Amen; one of the ancient names of Thebes, which was the city especially dedicated to Amen. Also Apt, or Abot, or Apetou, by some ascribed to an Indo-Germanic root signifying abode. Another name for Thebes, and probably the one most in use, was Uas.
[44] Knum was one of the primordial gods of the Egyptian cosmogony; the divine potter; he who fashioned man from the clay and breathed into him the breath of life. He is sometimes represented in the act of fashioning the first man, or that mysterious egg from which not only man but the universe proceeded, by means of the ordinary potter’s wheel. Sometimes also he is depicted in his boat, moving upon the face of the waters at the dawn of creation. About the time of the twentieth dynasty, Knum became identified with Ra. He also was identified with Amen, and was worshiped in the great oasis in the Greek period as Amen-Knum. He is likewise known as “The Soul of the Gods,” and in this character, as well as in his solar character, he is represented with the head of a ram, or in the form of a ram. Another of his titles is “The Maker of Gods and Men.” Knum was also one of the gods of the cataract, and chief of the Triad worshipped at Elephantine. An inscription at Philæ styles him “Maker of all that is, Creator of all beings, First existent, the Father of fathers, the Mother of mothers.”
[45] Bes. “La culte de Bes parait être une importation Asiatique. Quelquefois le dieu est armé d’une épée qu’il brandit au-dessus de sa tête; dans ce rôle, il semble le dieu des combats. Plus souvent c’est le dieu ce la danse, de la musique, des plaisirs.”—Mariette Bey.
[46] “At the cataracts of the great rivers Orinoco, Nile and Congo, the syenitic rocks are coated by a black substance, appearing as if they had been polished with plumbago. The layer is of extreme thinness; and on analysis by Berzelius it was found to consist of the oxides of manganese and iron.... The origin, however, of these coatings of metallic oxides, which seem as if cemented to the rocks, is not understood; and no reason, I believe, can be assigned for their thickness remaining the same.”—“Journal of Researches,” by Charles Darwin, chap. i, p. 12, ed. 1845.
[47] Keffiyeh: A square head-shawl, made of silk or wollen. European travelers wear them as puggarees.
[48] Mudîr: Chief magistrate.
[49] Kadi: Judge.
[50] The results of Dr. Birch’s labors were given to the public in his “Guide to the First and Second Egyptian Rooms,” published by order of the trustees of the British Museum in May, 1874. Of the contents of case ninety-nine in the “second room,” he says: “The use of potsherds for documents received a great extension at the time of the Roman empire, when receipts for the taxes were given on these fragments by the collectors of revenue at Elephantine or Syene, on the frontier of Egypt. These receipts commenced in the reign of Vespasian, A.D. 77, and are found as late as M. Aurelius and L. Verus, A.D. 165. It appears from them that the capitation and trades tax, which was sixteen drams in A.D. 77, rose to twenty in A.D. 165, having steadily increased. The dues were paid in installments called merismoi, at three periods of the year. The taxes were farmed out to publicans (misthotai), who appear from their names to have been Greeks. At Elephantine the taxes were received by tax-gatherers (prakteres), who seem to have been appointed as early as the Ptolemies. Their clerks were Egyptians, and they had a chest and treasure (phylax).” See p. 109, as above; also Birch’s “History of Ancient Pottery,” chap. 1, p. 45.
These barren memoranda are not the only literary curiosities found at Elephantine. Among the Egyptian manuscripts of the Louvre may be seen some fragments of the eighteenth book of the “Iliad,” discovered in a tomb upon the island. How they came to be buried there no one knows. A lover of poetry would like to think, however, that some Greek or Roman officer, dying at his post upon this distant station, desired, perhaps, to have his Homer laid with him in his grave.
Note to Second Edition.—Other fragments of “Iliad” have been found from time to time in various parts of Egypt; some (now in the Louvre) being scrawled, like the above-mentioned tax-receipts, on mere potsherds. The finest specimen ever found in Egypt or elsewhere, and the earliest, has, however, been discovered this year, 1888, by Mr. Flinders Petrie in the grave of a woman at Hawara, in the Fayûm.