Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The mental activity of the Alexandrians was all connected with their libraries and schools. The work they did belongs to a condition of mind which can use libraries and schools, but which really originates nothing. It was all work upon other people’s work. They never produced anything of their own. They never could have had an Æschylus, or an Aristophanes; a Thucydides, or an Aristotle. The genius that can originate implies vigour, freedom, individuality, irrepressible impulse—in two words, expansive humanity. Nothing of this kind could have been the growth of Alexandria. The possession it was of these qualities which made the Greeks original, and great in everything they undertook: in art, in war, in government, in colonization, in philosophy, in poetry, in history. The genius which showed itself in their literature was only the same genius which showed itself in other forms and directions, as needs required: which showed itself in everything Greek. Alexandria could not have produced a Pericles, or a Phidias, or an Alexander, any more than a great writer. It would have taken the same mental stuff to make one of these, as to make a poet, an historian, or a philosopher. They all work with the same motive power. The main conditions, too, are the same in all. It is the object only to which the work is directed that varies. The Greeks were, emphatically, men. It was this that made them creative. Humanity was the soul of everything they created; the stamp upon everything they did; and this it is that gives to their work its eternal value.

The mind of Alexandria was a parasitical plant. It fastened itself on the work of others; and endeavoured to extract from it what they had already assimilated, and which its own limited capacities disqualified it from extracting, first hand, for itself from the rich store-house of Nature. It could live upon their work, and turn it to its own narrowly-bounded purposes. For instance, the Greek language had been perfected by the long series of generations who had used it, and who had known nothing of grammars and dictionaries: but at Alexandria it was studied for the sake of the grammar and of the dictionary. Homer had been loved in the Greek world, because he spoke, as a man, to men’s hearts and imaginations. He was valued at Alexandria, not for his poetry—the men and women he had created—but because he supplied a text to comment on. So with the divine dreams of Plato: their use, at Alexandria, was that they supplied some materials for the construction of systems.

It was exactly in this spirit that the Gospel was laid on the dissecting tables of Alexandria. The object proposed was to set up a skeleton to be called Christian Theology; and to inject and arrange certain preparations, to be called Christian doctrines. Here was a strange perversion. Never were the uses to which a thing had been ingeniously turned so thoroughly alien to its real nature and design. The objects of the Gospel were moral and religious. Its appeals were addressed to the ordinary conscience, and to the ordinary understanding: in them its philosophy is to be found. But the systematizers of Alexandria had no taste for dealing with such materials. The Christian religion, as presented to us in their theology, has not one particle of the Gospel in it: no heart, no soul; no human duties, no human motives—nothing human, nothing divine. It is something as hard, and as dry, as a mummy; and would be as dead, were it not for its savage, truculent spirit. It is an attempt to construct a material god, mechanically, of body, parts, and passions—the Egyptian passions of the day; such as burnt, volcanically, in the hearts of the crocodile haters, and crocodile worshippers, of Ombos and Tentyra, and impelled them to eat each other’s still quivering flesh, and drink each other’s blood hot. The watch-word, the source, the main-spring, of Christ’s religion, the one word that fulfils it, is absent from this travesty of it.

This anatomical Christianity, in which there is no Gospel, this systematic divinity, in which there is nothing divine, this mechanical theology, which contradicts the idea of God, Alexandria had the chief hand in inflicting on the world, and a grievous infliction they were. Christendom is still suffering from it. It is the anatomy of a body from which the heart, the blood, the flesh, the muscles, all that rendered it a living power, and made it beautiful and beneficent, have been removed. It is the systematization of a Hortus Siccus. It is a theology that kills religion, in order that it may examine it. The religion that is fixed and formulated; a matter of definitions, and quantitive proportions; that can be handled, and measured, and weighed; that can be taken to pieces, and put together again by a monk in his cell, just as if it were a Chinese puzzle; cannot be the living growth of minds whose knowledge is ever being extended, and of consciences that are ever becoming more sensitive. It cannot indeed, as far as these things go, be a religion at all. A religion, though burdened with them, and perpetually dragged by them into the sphere of formalism, controversy, and passion, may, and will, live on in spite of them; for nothing can kill religion: still the two are antagonistic and incompatible.

The Alexandrian theologians interpreted Christianity in accordance with the criticism, the knowledge, the ignorance, the mind, and the conscience of their day. They could hardly have done otherwise. They came from caves in the desert, and from old tombs, and they returned to them for fresh inspiration. They had a right to interpret things according to the light that was in them. So have we. Our light, however, is somewhat different from theirs. ‘The New Commandment’ was not one that at all commended itself to their sepulchral, troglodytic minds. It finds no place in their creeds. We, however, give it the first place in ours. The perfect law of liberty was unintelligible to them: their only thought about it was to make it impossible: to us it is as necessary as the air we breathe. They held that man is for the creed: we that the creed is for man. Which is right makes much difference.

For the traveller who is desirous of seeing the present in connexion with the past, Alexandria has many other reminiscences. Homer mentions the Isle of Pharos, which formed the harbour. On this classic rock Ptolemy Philadelphus built a magnificent lighthouse of white marble. This was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world. Its name, which was borrowed from the rock on which it had been placed, has passed into most of the languages of Europe, as the appellative of these useful structures. We, however, who employ them more largely than any other people, and who have in our Eddystone the finest and most interesting structure of this kind in the world, built under widely different conditions from those of the tideless middle sea, very properly give to them a name of our own.

The causeway, three-quarters of a mile in length, which was formed for the purpose of connecting Ptolemy’s Pharos with the mainland, having been enormously expanded, in the course of two thousand years, by the same process, which, in the same period, has raised the present to more than twenty feet above the original level of Rome, is now the Frank quarter of the city. The whole of this space must, therefore, in the time of Homer, and down to the time of Alexander, have been under water.

The city, having become the capital of Egypt, grew rapidly in population, wealth, and splendour. The Ptolemies disposed of the revenue of Egypt, which had now become the chief entrepôt of the commerce of the world; and they spent it with no niggard hand in embellishing their capital. Few great cities have had so large a proportion of their space occupied by magnificent public buildings. Nothing, however, need be said here of its palaces, theatres, and temples, except that they were worthy of the city which filled the first place in the cities of the Greek world, and in the universal empire of the Cæsars was second only to Rome.

Pompey’s Pillar, as the inscription upon it informs us, was erected in honour of Diocletian.