[244] Totleh: sweet jelly, incrusted with blanched almonds.
[245] The kemengeh is a kind of small two-stringed fiddle, the body of which is made of half a cocoanut shell. It has a very long neck, and a long foot that rests upon the ground, like the foot of a violoncello; and it is played with a bow about a yard in length. The strings are of twisted horsehair.
[246] “The Copts are Christians of the sect called Jacobites, Eutychians, Monophysites and Monothelites, whose creed was condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in the reign of the Emperor Marcian. They received the appellation of ‘Jacobites,’ by which they are generally known, from Jacobus Baradæus, a Syrian, who was a chief propagator of the Eutychian doctrines.... The religious orders of the Coptic church consist of a patriarch, a metropolitan of the Abyssinians, bishops, arch-priests, priests, deacons and monks. In Abyssinia, Jacobite Christianity is still the prevailing religion.” See “The Modern Egyptians,” by E. W. Lane. Supplement 1, p. 531, London: 1860.
[247] The bishop was for the most part right. The Coptic is the ancient Egyptian language (that is to say, it is late and somewhat corrupt Egyptian) written in Greek characters instead of in hieroglyphs. For the abolition of the ancient writing was, next to the abolition of the images of the gods, one of the first great objects of the early church in Egypt. Unable to uproot and destroy the language of a great nation, the Christian fathers took care so to reclothe it that every trace of the old symbolism should disappear and be forgotten. Already, in the time of Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 211), the hieroglyphic style had become obsolete. The secret of reading hieroglyphs, however, was not lost till the time of the fall of the Eastern empire. How the lost key was recovered by Champollion is told in a quotation from Mariette Bey, in the foot note to p. 191, chapter xii, of this book. Of the relation of Coptic to Egyptian, Champollion says: “La Lange Égyptienne antique ne différait en rien de la langue appelée vulgairement Copte ou Cophte.... Les mots Égyptiens écrits en caractères hieroglyphiques sur les monuments les plus anciens de Thèbes, et en caractères Grecs dans les livres Coptes, ne différent en général que par l’absence de certaines voyelles médiales omises, selon la méthode orientale, dans l’orthographe primitive.”—“Grammaire Égyptiene,” p. 18.
The bishop, though perfectly right in stating that Coptic and Egyptian were one, and that the Coptic was a distinct language having no affinity with the Greek, was, however, entirely wrong in that part of his explanation which related to the alphabet. So far from eight Greek letters having been added to the Coptic alphabet upon the introduction of Christianity into Egypt, there was no such thing as a Coptic alphabet previous to that time. The Coptic alphabet is the Greek alphabet as imposed upon Egypt by the fathers of the early Greek church; and that alphabet being found insufficient to convey all the sounds of the Egyptian tongue, eight new characters were borrowed from the demotic to supplement the deficiency.
[248] This machine is called the Nóreg.
[249] The number of pigeons kept by the Egyptian fellahin is incredible. Mr. Zincke says on this subject that “the number of domestic pigeons in Egypt must be several times as great as the population,” and suggests that if the people kept pigs they would keep less pigeons. But it is not as food chiefly that the pigeons are encouraged. They are bred and let live in such ruinous numbers for the sake of the manure they deposit on the land. M. About has forcibly demonstrated the error of this calculation. He shows that the pigeons do thirty million francs’ worth of damage to the crop in excess of any benefit they may confer upon the soil.
[250] The Arabic name of the modern village, Arabát-el-Madfûneh, means literally Arabat the Buried.
[251] Teni, or more probably Tini, called by the Greeks This or Thinis. It was the capital of the Eighth Nome. “Quoique nous ayons très-peu de chose à rapporter sur l’histoire de la ville de Teni qui à la basse époque sous la domination romaine, n’était connue que parses teinturiers en pourpre, elle doit avoir jouri d’une très grande renommée chez les anciens Égyptiens. Encore an temps du XIX dynastie les plus hauts fonctionnaires de sang royal étaient distingués par le titre de ‘Princes de Teni.’”—“Hist. d’Égypte. Brugsch, vol. i. chap. v, p. 29; Leipzig, 1874.
Note to Second Edition.—“Des monuments trouvés il y a deux ans, me portent a croire que Thini était située assez loin a l’Est au village actuel de Aoulad-Yahia.” Letter of Prof. G. Maspero to the author, April, 1878.