Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

But as to particulars: that which is most on the surface of what Egypt may teach the English traveller is the variety of Nature. It has not the aspects of the tropics, in which the dark primæval forest, and tangly jungle, are the predominant features; yet its green palmtufted plain, and drab life-repelling desert, are a great contrast to our still hedge-divided corn-fields, and meadows; to our downs, and heaths, and hills, and streams; and so are its clear sky, and dry atmosphere to our clouds and humidity. To see, and understand something about such things ought, in these days, to be part of the education of all who can afford the time and money requisite for making themselves acquainted with the riches of Nature; which is the truest, indeed the only, way to make them our own. In saying this, I do not at all wish to suggest the idea that in variety, and picturesqueness of natural beauty, the scene in Egypt is superior to what we have at home. The reverse is, emphatically, the case. Every day I look upon pleasanter scenes than any Egypt can show: scenes that please the eye, and touch the heart more. Nature’s form and garb are both better here. So, too, is even the colour of her garb. To have become familiar, then, with the outer aspects of Egypt, is not only good in itself, as an addition to our mental gallery of the scenes of Nature, but it is good also in the particular consequence of enabling us to appreciate more highly the variety and the beauty of our own sea-girt home.

Of course, however, the source of deepest interest in any scene is not to be found in its outer aspect, but in its connexion with man. If we regard it with the thought of the way in which man has used, modified, and shaped it, and of how, reversely, it has modified, and shaped man, how it has ministered to his wants, and affected the form, and character of his life; or if we can in any way associate it with man, then we contemplate it from quite another point of view, and with quite different feelings. Indeed it would almost seem as if this was the real source of the interest we take even in what we call the sublime and beautiful in nature. Man was only repelled from snow-capped mountains, and stormy oceans, till he had learnt to look upon them as the works of Intelligent Mind akin to his own. Conscious of intelligence within himself, he began to regard as grand and beautiful, what he had at length come to believe Supreme Intelligence had designed should possess these characteristics. This is, perhaps, the source of the sentiments of awe, and admiration, instead of the old horror, and repugnance, with which we now contemplate cold and inaccessible barrier Alps, and angry dividing Seas. To Homer’s contemporaries, who believed not that the gods had created the visible scene, but that, contrariwise, they were posterior to it, and in some sort an emanation from it, the ocean was only noisy, pitiless, and barren. And the modern feeling on these subjects has, of late, been greatly intensified, and become almost a kind of religion, since men have come to think that they have discovered that these grand objects were brought into being by the slow and unfailing operation of certain general laws which they have themselves ascertained. So that now, to some extent, they have begun to feel as though they had themselves assisted at their creation: they stood by, in imagination, as spectators, knowing, beforehand, the whole process by which Alps and Oceans were being formed. That they were able to discover the laws and the steps by which Omnipotent Intelligence had brought it all about, alone and sufficiently demonstrates the kindredness of their own intelligence. It is the association of these ideas with natural objects that causes the present enthusiastic feeling—almost a kind of devotion—they awaken within us, and which would have been incomprehensible to the ancients, and even, in a great measure, to our forefathers. They seem like our own works. They were formed by what is, in human degree and fashion, within ourselves. We know all about them; almost as if we had made them ourselves.

Regarded, then, in this way, it is not the object itself merely that interests, but the associations connected with it. Not so much what is seen, as what is suggested by what is seen. The object itself affects us little, and in one way; the interpretation the mind puts upon it affects us much, and in quite a different way. In this view there are reasons why the general landscape here, at home, should be more pleasing to us than it is in Egypt. It is associated with hope, and with the incidents and pictures of a better life than there is, or ever has been, in Egypt. I have already said that the natural features are not so varied and attractive there as here; their value to us, in this respect, consisting in their difference. But what I now have in my mind is the thought of the landscape as associated with man; and in this other respect also I think the inferiority of Egypt great.

The two pre-eminently grand and interesting scenes on this kind in Egypt, where our Egyptian associations with man’s history culminate, I have already endeavoured to present to the imagination of the reader. They are the scene that is before the traveller when he stands somewhere to the south-east of the Great Pyramid, looking towards Memphis, and commanding the Necropolis in which the old Primæval Monarchy is buried, the green valley, the river, and the two bounding ranges; or, to take it reversely, as it appears when looked at from the Citadel of Cairo; and the scene, for this is the other one, which is presented to the eye, again acting in combination with the historical imagination, from the Temple-Palace of the great Rameses at Thebes, where you have around and before you the Necropolis, and the glories of the New Monarchy.

What, then, are the thoughts that arise in the mind at the contemplation of these scenes? That is precisely the question I have been endeavouring to answer throughout the greater part of the preceding pages. My object now, as I bring them to a close, is somewhat different; it is to look at what we have found is to be seen in Egypt from an English point of view; with the hope that we may thus be brought to a better understanding, in some matters, both of old Egypt and of the England of to-day. This will best be done by comparing with the Egyptian scenes, which are now familiar to us, the English scene which in its historical character, and the elements of human interest it contains, occupies, at this day, a position analogous to that which they held formerly. These are subjects that are made interesting, and we may say intelligible, more readily and completely by comparisons of this kind than by any other method. Anatomical and philological comparisons do this for anatomy and philology, and historical comparisons will do the same for history. We shall come to understand Egypt not by looking at Egypt singly and alone, but by having in our minds, at the time we are looking at it, a knowledge of Israel, Greece, Rome, and of the modern world. Each must be set by the side of Egypt.

We will come to ourselves presently. We will take Israel first. It proposed to itself the same object as Egypt, that of building up the State on moral foundations, only it had to do its work under enormous disadvantages. Considering, however, the circumstances, it attained its aims with astonishing success. We must bear in mind how in the two the methods of procedure differed. So did their respective circumstances. Egypt had the security which enabled it freely and fully to develop and mature its ideas and its system. This precious period of quiet was no part of the lot which fell to Israel. It had to maintain itself and grow up to maturity under such crushing disadvantages as would have extinguished the vitality of any other people, except perhaps of the Greeks, the periods, however, of whose adolescence and manhood were also very different from those of Israel. At those epochs of their national life they had freedom, sunshine, and success. Israel, on the contrary, had then, and almost uninterruptedly throughout, storm and tempest; overthrows and scatterings. The people never were long without feeling the foot of the oppressor on their necks. Still they held on without bating one jot of hope or heart; and by so doing made the world their debtors, just as did the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Regarding the point historically, we cannot say that one did this more than another; for, where all are necessary, it would be illogical to affirm that one is greater or less than another. Neither the seeing nor the hearing, we are told, can boast that it is of more importance than the other; for, were it not for the seeing, where would be the hearing? and, were it not for the hearing, where would be the seeing? In the progress of man the ideas, and principles, and experience contributed by each of these constituent peoples of humanity were necessary: and if the contribution of any one had been wanting, we should not be what actually we are; and that something that we should be then would be very inferior to what we are now. We could not dispense with the gift of any one of the four. Egypt gave letters, and the demonstration of the fact that morality can, within certain limits, be deliberately and designedly shaped and made instinctive. Greece taught the value of the free development of the intellect. Rome contributed the idea of the brotherhood of mankind, not designedly, it is true, but only incidentally, though yet with a glimmering that this was its mission. Without Rome we might not yet have reached this point. Israel taught us that, if the aims of a State are distinctly moral, morality may then be able to maintain itself, no matter how great the disadvantages, both from within and from without, under which the community has to labour; and even when morality is unsustained by the thought of future rewards and punishments: a lesson which has thrown more light on the power the moral sentiments have over man’s heart than perhaps any other fact in the history of our race.

I bow down before the memory of the old Israelite with every feeling of the deepest respect, when I remember that he abstained from evil from no fear of future punishment, and that he laid down his life for truth and justice without any calculation of a future heaven. In this view the history of the world can show no such single-minded, self-devoted, heroic teachers as the long line of Hebrew Prophets. They stand in an order quite by themselves. Socrates believed that it would be well with him hereafter. They did not touch that question. Sufficient unto them was the consciousness that they were denouncing what was false and wrong, and that they were proclaiming and doing what was true and right.

We will now turn to the Greeks. The interest with which they contemplated the antique, massive, foursquare wisdom of Egypt is well worthy of consideration. It is true they did not get much from Egypt, either in the sphere of speculation or of practice: still for them it always possessed a powerful attraction. The reason why it was so is not far to seek. The Egyptians had done great things; and they had a doctrine, a philosophy of human life. This was that philosopher’s stone the Greek mind was in search of. And they inferred from the great things done by the Egyptians (and this was not a paralogism) that there must be something in their doctrine. In fact, however, they learnt little from Egypt: for if it was the cradle, Greece itself was the Holy Land of Mind. Nor was it possible that they could learn much from it, for the two peoples looked upon society and the world from quite different points of view. Greece acted on the idea that in political organization, and in the well-being of the individual, man is the arbiter and the architect of his own fortune. Egypt acted on the supposition that these things rested on an once-for-all heaven-ordained system. Greece believed that truth was to be discovered by man himself, and that it would, when discovered, set all things right; and that freedom, investigation, and discussion were the means for enabling men to make the needed discovery. Egypt thought that truth had been already communicated; and that freedom, investigation, and discussion could only issue in its overthrow. What Greece regarded as constructive, Egypt regarded as destructive. It could not therefore learn much from Egypt.

Rome we will now set by the side of Egypt. It will bring the two into one view sufficiently for our purpose, if we endeavour to make out what Germanicus must have thought of old Egypt, when he was at Thebes. He must often have compared it with Rome; in doing which he could, of course, only view it with the eyes of a Roman. And the time for such a comparison had arrived, for the work of Rome, and the form and pressure of that work upon the world, were then manifesting themselves with sufficient distinctness. What he was in search of was light that would aid him in governing the Roman world. Probably he came to the conclusion that the wisdom of Egypt could be but of very little use to him. The aim of Egypt had been all-embracing social order, maintained by morality, compacting the whole community into a single organism, in which every individual had his allotted place and work, neither of which he could see any possibility of his ever abandoning, or even feel any desire to abandon. Egyptian society had thus been brought, through every class and member, to do its work with the regularity, the smoothness, the ease, the combined action of all its parts, and the singleness of purpose of a machine. I need hardly repeat that they had understood that the morality by which their social order was to be maintained must be instinctive, and that they had made it so. The difference between them and other people in this matter was, that they had understood distinctly both what they wanted for their purpose, and how to create what they had wanted. Germanicus must have been aware, if he had seen this point clearly, that no government could frame the general morality of the Roman Empire; and that the single moral instinct upon which he would have to depend, if he could create it, must be the base and degrading one of obedience and submission brought about by fear. No attempt could be made, in the world he expected to be called to govern, to cultivate an all-embracing scheme of noble and generous, or even of serviceable, morality. Much, indeed, of what was best would have to be repressed, and stamped out, as hostile and subversive; as, for instance, the sentiment of freedom, and the consciousness that the free and full development of a mans inner being (in a sense the Athenian and the Christian idea) is the highest duty. He would have to provide not for what would encourage his future subjects to think for themselves, and to make themselves men, but for what would indispose them to think for themselves, and would make them only submissive subjects. He had to consider how many abundant and virulent elements of disorder, discontent, and corruption could be kept down: under such a system an impossible task. These evil growths of society had, each of them, been reduced to a manageable minimum, spontaneously, by the working of the Egyptian system; but, under the circumstances of the Roman world, they were inevitably fostered and developed. The application, however, of the Egyptian system to that world was out of the question and inconceivable. So, here, Egypt could give him no help. It could not show him how he could eliminate or regulate these evils. He would not be able to get rid of the elements of discord and discontent in the Egyptian fashion, by creating such instincts of order and submission as would dispose every man to accept the position in which he found himself as the irreversible appointment of Nature. Nor, again, would he be able to counteract social corruption, in the Egyptian fashion, by making virtue the aim of the state, of religion, and of human life.

There were also two other problems to the solution of which he would have to attend. How was the ring of barbarians that beleaguered the Empire to be kept in check? and how was the enormous military force that must be maintained for the internal, as well as the external, defence of the Empire to be prevented from knowing, at all events from using for its own purposes, its irresistible, unbalanceable power? For doing every thing of every kind he had to do, he had but one instrument, and that was force, law being degraded into the machinery through which that force was to act; and being also itself at discord with much that was becoming the conscience of mankind, that is, at discord with its own proper object. He could make no use of the Egyptian instruments, those, namely, of general morality, of religion, and of fixed social order. The task, therefore, that was before him, however strong the hand and clear the head might be which would have to carry it out, was ultimately hopeless. For one of two things must happen: either men must rebel against the order he would have to maintain, and overthrow it, or it must corrupt and degrade men. For, in the long run, nothing but law and religion, both in conformity with right reason, and aiming at moral growth, can govern men; that is to say, government must aim at human objects, to be attained by human means. Men, of course, can be controlled otherwise, as, for instance, by armed force, the only means that would be at the disposal of Germanicus; but then the product is worthless. Egypt, therefore, could give him no assistance. It could only tell him that the task before him was to him an unattainable one. It was not the one the Egyptians had taken in hand, nor could it be carried out by Egyptian means. A great fight had to be fought out in the bosom of Roman society, and under such conditions that its progress and issue would be the ruin and overthrow of society, as then constituted.