A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

According to the last clause of this curious document, the contracting parties enter also into an agreement to deliver up to each other the political fugitives of both countries; providing at the same time for the personal safety of the offenders. “Whosoever shall be so delivered up,” says the treaty, “himself, his wives, his children, let him not be smitten to death; moreover, let him not suffer in his eyes, in his mouth, in his feet; moreover, let not any crime be set up against him.”[81] This is the earliest instance of an extradition treaty upon record; and it is chiefly remarkable as an illustration of the clemency with which international law was at that time administered.

Finally the convention between the sovereigns is placed under the joint protection of the gods of both countries: “Sutekh of Kheta, Amen of Egypt and all the thousand gods; the gods, male and female; the gods of the hills, of the rivers, of the great sea, of the winds and the clouds, of the land of Kheta and of the land of Egypt.”

The peace now concluded would seem to have remained unbroken throughout the rest of the long reign of Rameses II. We hear, at all events, of no more wars; and we find the king married presently to a Khetan princess, who, in deference to the gods of her adopted country, takes the official name of Ma-at-iri-neferu-Ra, or “Contemplating the beauties of Ra.” The names of two other queens—Nefer-t-ari and Ast-nefert—are also found upon the monuments.

These three were probably the only legitimate wives of Rameses II, though he must also have been the lord of an extensive hareem. His family, at all events, as recorded upon the walls of the Temple at Wady Sabooah, amounted to no less than one hundred and seventy children, of whom one hundred and eleven were princes. This may have been a small family for a great king three thousand years ago. It was but the other day, comparatively speaking, that Lepsius saw and talked with old Hasan, Kashef of Derr—the same petty ruler who gave so much trouble to Belzoni, Burckhardt, and other early travelers—and he, like a patriarch of old, had in his day been the husband of sixty-four wives and the father of something like two hundred children.

For forty-six years after the making of the Khetan treaty, Rameses the Great lived at peace with his neighbors and tributaries. The evening of his life was long and splendid. It became his passion and his pride to found new cities, to raise dikes, to dig canals, to build fortresses, to multiply statues, obelisks, and inscriptions, and to erect the most gorgeous and costly temples in which man ever worshiped. To the monuments founded by his predecessors he made additions so magnificent that they dwarfed the designs they were intended to complete. He caused artesian wells to be pierced in the stony bed of the desert. He carried on the canal begun by his father and opened a water-way between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.[82] No enterprise was too difficult, no project too vast, for his ambition. “As a child,” says the stela of Dakkeh, “he superintended the public works and his hands laid their foundations.” As a man, he became the supreme builder. Of his gigantic structures, only certain colossal fragments have survived the ravages of time; yet those fragments are the wonder of the world.

To estimate the cost at which these things were done is now impossible. Every temple, every palace, represented a hecatomb of human lives. Slaves from Ethiopia, captives taken in war, Syrian immigrants settled in the delta, were alike pressed into the service of the state. We know how the Hebrews suffered, and to what extremity of despair they were reduced by the tasks imposed upon them. Yet even the Hebrews were less cruelly used than some who were kidnaped beyond the frontiers. Torn from their homes, without hope of return, driven in herds to the mines, the quarries, and the brick-fields, these hapless victims were so dealt with that not even the chances of desertion were open to them. The negroes from the south were systematically drafted to the north; the Asiatic captives were transported to Ethiopia. Those who labored underground were goaded on without rest or respite, till they fell down in the mines and died.

That Rameses II was the Pharaoh of the captivity,[83] and that Meneptah, his son and successor, was the Pharaoh of the exodus,[84] are now among the accepted presumptions of Egyptological science. The Bible and the monuments confirm each other upon these points, while both are again corroborated by the results of recent geographical and philological research. The “treasure-cities Pithom and Raamses” which the Israelites built for Pharaoh with bricks of their own making, are the Pa-Tum and Pa-Rameses, of the inscriptions, and both have recently been identified by M. Naville, in the course of his excavations conducted in 1883 and 1886 for the Egypt Exploration Fund.

The discovery of Pithom, the ancient biblical “treasure-city” of the first chapter of Exodus, has probably attracted more public attention and been more widely discussed by European savants than any archæological event since the discovery of Nineveh. It was in February, 1883, that M. Naville opened the well-known mound of Tel-el-Maskhutah, on the south bank of the new sweet-water canal in the Wady Tûmilât, and there discovered the foundations and other remains of a fortified city of the kind known in Egyptian as a bekhen, or store-fort. This bekhen, which was surrounded by a wall thirty feet in thickness, proved to be about twelve acres in extent. In one corner of the inclosure were found the ruins of a temple built by Rameses II. The rest of the area consisted of a labyrinth of subterraneous rectangular cellars, or store-chambers, constructed of sun-dried bricks of large size and divided by walls varying from eight to ten feet in thickness. In the ruins of the temple were discovered several statues more or less broken, a colossal hawk inscribed with the royal ovals of Rameses II, and other works of art dating from the reigns of Osorkon II, Nectanebo and Ptolemy Philadelphus. The hieroglyphic legends engraved upon the statues established the true value of the discovery by giving both the name of the city and the name of the district in which the city was situated; the first being Pa-Tum (Pithom), the “Abode of Tum,” and the second being Thuku-t (Succoth); so identifying “Pa-Tum, in the district of Thuku-t,” with Pithom, the treasure-city built by the forced labor of the Hebrews and Succoth, the region in which they made their first halt on going forth from the land of bondage. Even the bricks with which the great wall and the walls of the store-chambers are built bear eloquent testimony to the toil of the suffering colonists and confirm in its minutest details the record of their oppression; some being duly kneaded with straw; others, when the straw was no longer forthcoming, being mixed with the leafage of a reed common to the marsh lands of the delta; and the remainder, when even this substitute ran short, being literally “bricks without straw,” molded of mere clay crudely dried in the sun. The researches of M. Naville further showed that the temple to Tum, founded by Rameses II, was restored, or rebuilt, by Osorkon II, of the twenty-second dynasty; while at a still higher level were discovered the remains of a Roman fortress. That Pithom was still an important place in the time of the Ptolemies is proved by a large and historically important tablet found by M. Naville in one of the store-chambers, where it had been thrown in with other sculptures and rubbish of various kinds. This tablet records repairs done to the canal, an expedition to Ethiopia and the foundation of the city of Arsinoë. Not less important from a geographical point of view was the finding of a Roman milestone which identifies Pithom with Hero (Heroöpolis), where, according to the Septuagint, Joseph went forth to meet Jacob. This milestone gives nine Roman miles as the distance from Heroöpolis to Clysma. A very curious manuscript lately discovered by Sig. Gamurrini in the library of Arezzo, shows that even so late as the fourth century of the Christian era this ancient walled inclosure—the camp, or “Ero Castra,” of the Roman period, the “Pithom” of the Bible—was still known to pious pilgrims as “the Pithom built by the children of Israel;” that the adjoining town, external to the camp, at that time established within the old Pithom boundaries, was known as “Heroöpolis;” and that the town of Rameses was distant from Pithom about twenty Roman miles.[85]

As regards Pa-Rameses, the other “treasure-city” of Exodus, it is conjecturally, but not positively, identified by M. Naville with the mound of Saft-el-Henneh, the scene of his explorations in 1886. That Saft-el-Henneh was identical with “Kes,” or Goshen, the capital town of the “Land of Goshen,” has been unequivocally demonstrated by the discoverer; and that it was also known in the time of Rameses II as “Pa-Rameses” is shown to be highly probable.[86] There are remains of a temple built of black basalt, with pillars, fragments of statues and the like, all inscribed with the cartouches of Rameses II; and the distance from Pithom is just twenty Roman miles.

It was from Pa-Rameses that Rameses II set out with his army to attack the confederate princes of Asia Minor then lying in ambush near Kadesh;[87] and it was hither that he returned in triumph after the great victory. A contemporary letter written by one Panbesa, a scribe, narrates in glowing terms the beauty and abundance of the royal city, and tells how the damsels stood at their doors in holiday apparel, with nosegays in their hands and sweet oil upon their locks, “on the day of the arrival of the war-god of the world.” This letter is in the British Museum.[88]