Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

THE EXPLANATION OF THE COVER-PLATE.

I have been given to understand that the [cover-plate] of this volume needs some explanation: if so, it can now only be inserted on an additional fly-leaf.

At the top is the familiar, winged, serpent-supported globe of the old Egyptians. This, as every body knows, is generally found over the main entrances of the temples, and on the heads of mummy cases. In speaking on such subjects we must not press words too far. But I believe it may be taken for what we may almost call a pantheistic emblem, compounded of symbols of three of the attributes of Deity, as then imagined. The central globe, the sun, represents the source of light and warmth, and, therefore, of life. The serpents represent maternity. The wings, beneath which the hen gathers her chickens, represent protection. This is one interpretation.

There might have been, and doubtless were, contained in the emblem other ideas, irrecoverable now by the aid of the ideas that exist in our minds. At all events, theological emblems, like theological terms, must vary in their import from time to time, in accordance with the varying knowledge of those who use them: for they can be read only by the light of what is in the mind of the reader. This emblem, therefore, may not always have stood to the minds of the old Egyptians for precisely the same conceptions. The above interpretation, however, probably contained for them, for some millenniums, its main and most obvious suggestions; suggestions which were for those early days a profound, though easily read, exposition of the relations of nature to man, and which are very far from being devoid of, at all events, historical interest to the modern traveller in Egypt.

For the lower division of the plate, the author of the volume is responsible. It is meant to illustrate the statement on [page 15], that the agricultural wealth of Egypt that is to say its history, results in a great measure from the fact of its having a winter as well as a summer harvest. The sun is represented on the right, at its winter altitude, maturing the wheat crop, which stands for the varied produce of the temperate zone; on the left, at its summer altitude, maturing the cotton crop, which stands for the varied produce of the tropical, or almost tropical, zone. Both have been grown beneath the same Palm tree, which symbolizes the region itself. The unusually erect Palm tree in the plate, was cut from a photographic portrait of one which we may trust is still yielding fruit, and casting on the rock-strewn ground the shade of its lofty tuft of wavy leaves, in the Wady Feiran, to the north-east of Mount Sinai. The black diagonal line gives the equator of the sky at the latitude of Cairo, which is taken, for the purposes of the illustration, as the mean latitude of Egypt. This is also indicated by the Pyramid.

The pathway of the sun is given as it is represented on one of the finest and most precious monuments of old Egypt in its proudest days—the wonderfully instructive monolithic alabaster sarcophagus of the great Sethos, Joseph’s Pharaoh, at all events the grandfather of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. It is now in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields ([page 138]). This firmamental road way of the great luminary (the contemporary explanation of the “firmament,” in our English version, of the first chapter of the Pentateuch, the “stereõma” of the Septuagint) is so sculptured on the sarcophagus, originally it was also so coloured, as to indicate granite. The granite—this I regret—cannot be brought out distinctly on the plate.

The beneficent action of the mysterious river, which made, and maintains Egypt, is suggested by the three wavy lines, the old hieroglyphic for water.

The star-sown azure, which suggests the supernal expanse, the most glorious, and the most instructive scene the eye and the mind of man are permitted to contemplate, is taken from the vaulted ceiling of the temple of Sethos and Rameses at primæval This ([page 100]).