A thousand miles up the Nile

by Amelia B. Edwards

Other letters written during the reign of Rameses II have by some been supposed to make direct mention of the Israelites.

“I have obeyed the orders of my master,” writes the scribe Kauiser to his superior Bak-en-Ptah, “being bidden to serve out the rations to the soldiers, and also to the Aperiu [Hebrews?], who quarry stone for the palace of King Rameses Mer-Amen.” A similar document written by a scribe named Keniamon and couched in almost the same words shows these Aperiu on another occasion to have been quarrying for a building on the southern side of Memphis; in which case Turra would be the scene of their labors.

These invaluable letters, written on papyrus in the hieratic character, are in good preservation. They were found in the ruins of Memphis and now form part of the treasures of the Museum of Leyden.[89] They bring home to us with startling nearness the events and actors of the Bible narrative. We see the toilers at their task and the overseers reporting them to the directors of public works. They extract from the quarry those huge blocks which are our wonder to this day. Harnessed to rude sledges, they drag them to the river side and embark them for transport to the opposite bank.[90] Some are so large and so heavy that it takes a month to get them down from the mountain to the landing-place.[91] Other laborers are elsewhere making bricks, digging canals, helping to build the great wall which reached from Pelusium to Heliopolis, and strengthening the defenses not only of Pithom and Rameses but of all the cities and forts between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Their lot is hard; but not harder than the lot of other workmen. They are well fed. They intermarry. They increase and multiply. The season of their great oppression is not yet come. They make bricks, it is true, and those who are so employed must supply a certain number daily;[92] but the straw is not yet withheld, and the task, though perhaps excessive, is not impossible. For we are here on the reign of Rameses II, and the time when Meneptah shall succeed him is yet far distant. It is not till the king dies that the children of Israel sigh, “by reason of the bondage.”

There are in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, some much older papyri than these two letters of the Leyden collection—some as old, indeed, as the time of Joseph, but none, perhaps, of such peculiar interest. In these, the scribes Kauiser and Keniamon seem still to live and speak. What would we not give for a few more of their letters! These men knew Memphis in its glory and had looked upon the face of Rameses the Great. They might even have seen Moses in his youth while yet he lived under the protection of his adopted mother, a prince among princes. Kauiser and Keniamon lived, and died, and were mummied between three and four thousand years ago; yet these frail fragments of papyrus have survived the wreck of ages, and the quaint writing with which they are covered is as intelligible to ourselves as to the functionaries to whom it was addressed. The Egyptians were eminently business-like, and kept accurate entries of the keep and labor of their workmen and captives. From the earliest epoch of which the monuments furnish record, we find an elaborate bureaucratic system in full operation throughout the country. Even in the time of the pyramid-builders, there are ministers of public works; inspectors of lands, lakes, and quarries; secretaries, clerks, and overseers innumerable.[93] From all these, we may be sure, were required strict accounts of their expenditure, as well as reports of the work done under their supervision. Specimens of Egyptian book-keeping are by no means rare. The Louvre is rich in memoranda of the kind; some relating to the date-tax; others to the transport and taxation of corn, the payment of wages, the sale and purchase of land for burial, and the like. If any definite and quite unmistakable news of the Hebrews should ever reach us from Egyptian sources it will almost certainly be through the medium of documents such as these.

An unusually long reign, the last forty-six years of which would seem to have been spent in peace and outward prosperity, enabled Rameses II to indulge his ruling passion without interruption. To draw up anything like an exhaustive catalogue of his known architectural works would be equivalent to writing an itinerary of Egypt and Ethiopia under the nineteenth dynasty. His designs were as vast as his means appear to have been unlimited. From the delta to Gebel Barkal, he filled the land with monuments dedicated to his own glory and the worship of the gods. Upon Thebes, Abydos, and Tanis he lavished structures of surpassing magnificence. In Nubia, at the places now known as Gerf Hossayn, Wady Sabooyah, Derr, and Abou Simbel, he was the author of temples and the founder of cities. These cities, which would probably be better described as provincial towns, have disappeared; and but for the mention of them in various inscriptions we should not even know that they had existed. Who shall say how many more have vanished, leaving neither trace nor record? A dozen cities of Rameses[94] may yet lie buried under some of these nameless mounds which follow each other in such quick succession along the banks of the Nile in Middle and Lower Egypt. Only yesterday, as it were, the remains of what would seem to have been a magnificent structure decorated in a style absolutely unique, were accidentally discovered under the mounds of Tel-el-Yahoodeh,[95] about twelve miles to the northeast of Cairo. There are probably fifty such mounds, none of which have been opened, in the delta alone; and it is no exaggeration to say that there must be some hundreds between the Mediterranean and the first cataract.

An inscription found of late years at Abydos shows that Rameses II reigned over his great kingdom for the space of sixty-seven years. “It is thou,” says Ramses IV, addressing himself to Osiris, “it is thou who wilt rejoice me with such length of reign as Ramses II, the great god, in his sixty-seven years. It is thou who wilt give me the long duration of this great reign.”[96]

If only we knew at what age Ramses II succeeded to the throne, we should, by help of this inscription, know also the age at which he died. No such record has, however, transpired, but a careful comparison of the length of time occupied by the various events of his reign, and above all the evidence of ago afforded by the mummy of this great Pharaoh, discovered in 1886, show that he must have been very nearly, if not quite, a centenarian.

“Thou madest designs while yet in the age of infancy,” says the stela of Dakkeh. “Thou wert a boy wearing the sidelock, and no monument was erected and no order was given without thee. Thou wert a youth aged ten years, and all the public works were in thy hands, laying their foundations.” These lines, translated literally, cannot, however, be said to prove much. They certainly contain nothing to show that this youth of ten was, at the time alluded to, sole king and ruler of Egypt. That he was titular king, in the hereditary sense, from his birth[97] and during the lifetime of his father, is now quite certain. That he should, as a boy, have designed public buildings and superintended their construction is extremely probable. The office was one which might well have been discharged by a crown prince who delighted in architecture and made it his peculiar study. It was, in fact, a very noble office—an office which from the earliest days of the ancient empire had constantly been confided to princes of the royal blood;[98] but it carried with it no evidence of sovereignty. The presumption, therefore, would be that the stela of Dakkeh (dating as it does from the third year of the sole reign of Rameses II) alludes to a time long since past, when the king as a boy held office under his father.

The same inscription, as we have already seen, makes reference to the victorious campaign in the south. Rameses is addressed as “the bull powerful against Ethiopia; the griffin furious against the negroes;” and that the events hereby alluded to must have taken place during the first three years of his sole reign is proved by the date of the tablet. The great dedicatory inscription of Abydos shows, in fact, that Rameses II was prosecuting a campaign in Ethiopia at the time when he received intelligence of the death of his father and that he came down the Nile, northward, in order, probably, to be crowned at Thebes.[99]

Now the famous sculptures of the commemorative chapel at Bayt-el-Welly relate expressly to the events of this expedition; and as they are executed in that refined and delicate style which especially characterizes the bas-relief work of Gourmah, of Adydos, of all those buildings which were either erected by Seti I or begun by Seti and finished during the early years of Rameses II, I venture to think we may regard them as contemporary, or very nearly contemporary, with the scenes they represent. In any case, it is reasonable to conclude that the artists employed on the work would know something about the events and persons delineated and that they would be guilty of no glaring inaccuracies.