How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

7. XXXIV—The Roman Rule: Egypt a Province of the Roman Empire; 31 B.C. to 395 A.D. At the latter date it became a part of the Eastern Roman Empire.

In 389 the emperor, Theodosius, issued an edict proclaiming that Christianity was to be recognised as the religion of Egypt. In consequence of this change all knowledge of the old form of writing gradually disappeared and the antiquities of Egypt remained a sealed book for some fourteen centuries.

The commencement of the modern interest in Egypt, as a mine of historical, archæological, and artistic lore, dates from Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion, for he took with him a body of savants to explore the topography and nature of the country and its antiquities. The results of their labours were published in 1809-13 in twenty-five volumes, illustrated with 900 engravings.

Meanwhile, in 1799, Captain Boussard, an engineer under Bonaparte, had discovered in the trenches a tablet of black basalt, inscribed with three kinds of writing, one of which was Greek. From the name of the village near which it was found it is called the Rosetta Stone and is now in the British Museum. Various attempts were made to decipher through the Greek the other two scripts, which were, respectively, hieroglyphic and the demotic or popular writing-form of ancient Egypt.

Finally, the clue was discovered by the French scholar, Champollion. He found there had been three kinds of characters which represented successive developments of one system of writing: that in the hieroglyphic each letter was represented by a picture-form; that in the hieratic or priestly writing, these forms were represented in a freer and more fluent way, which was further simplified in the demotic characters, used generally by the scribes. Two of these had been repeated as nearly as possible in the Greek text. It is out of this discovery that Egyptology, or the science which concerns itself with the writing, language, literature, monuments, and history of ancient Egypt, is being gradually developed. Yet the subject is still involved in great uncertainty, owing to the difficulty in discovering principles of grammar, so that the translations of one scholar vary from those of others and all reach only the general sense, without assurance of accuracy.

The civilisation of a country is always largely determined by its geographical character and the latter, in the case of Egypt, is of exceptional significance. Herodotus called Egypt the “Gift of the Nile.” The great river created it and has continued to preserve it. For the country comprises a narrow strip of soil varying from 4 to 16 miles in width, bordering the two sides of the stream, and extending in ancient times, as far as the second cataract, a distance of some 900 miles; approximating, that is to say, the distance from New York to Chicago or from London to Florence. It is bounded by rocky hills, and, as it reaches the Mediterranean, fans out into a delta of flat lands, the various streams being kept in place by dykes. The only thing that has saved this country from being swallowed up in the desert is the annual rise of the river, succeeding the tropical rains in the interior and the melting of the snow in the mountains of Abyssinia. This floods the lowlands and leaves behind an alluvial deposit, so richly fertile that the soil, warmed by constant sunshine, yields three harvests annually. Meanwhile, it is a remarkable fact that the records of ancient times tally with those of to-day, both showing that the amount of the rise varies but little from year to year.

Before considering how these natural features of the country affected the civilisation of its inhabitants, a fact is to be noted. At the point of time when Manetho commenced his history of the Egyptians, variously estimated from about 4000 to about 6000 years before the Christian Era, they appear as a people already possessed of a high degree of civilisation, surrounded by inferior races. An immense interval of progress separates them from the earliest conditions that we considered in the previous chapter. By what stages did they reach this footing of superiority and through what length of time; moreover, what was the origin of their race? To these questions of profound interest there is no answer forthcoming. Some recent scholars are disposed to believe that the civilisation of Egypt, as we first meet with it, had been preceded by a still more remote civilisation in Babylonia; but as yet they have not shaken the accepted view that priority in civilisation belongs to the Land of the Nile. So far as knowledge exists, civilisation appeared first in Egypt and by a wonderful combination of circumstances, continued up to historic times.

The tenacity of the civilisation of the Egyptians is a counterpart of the tenacity of character of the people, as a result primarily of their natural surroundings. Within the limits of Upper and Lower, that is to say of Southern and Northern Egypt, the Nile has no tributaries. Consequently, there was at first no urge to the inhabitants to push outward; and every inducement to cling to their own strip of territory. Moreover, since the periodic river floods were constant, there was every inducement, nay almost necessity, that they should cling to the methods by which they had learned to utilise them. Hence, conservatism was forced upon them and became ingrained in their character and institutions. It was further encouraged by their isolation; for the adjoining country was desert, meagrely occupied by nomad tribes. Accordingly, that tendency of every nation to consider itself the salt of the earth and especially favoured of the gods seemed justified abundantly in their case.

Again, their dependence on the Nile early taught them the habit of noting the seasons, while the necessity of husbanding the water in reservoirs and by irrigation made them skilled in engineering and generally resourceful. And these characteristics of method and constructiveness were reflected in the social organisation.