Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was written in 1871. It was in the following year, that is, in the interval between the first and the second edition of this work, that the Livingstone-search Commissioner of the ‘New York Herald’ found the great African explorer.

[2] Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of this Chapter by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The following appear to be the steps in the process, by which they endeavour to reach this conclusion. There was, in remote times, on the banks of the Euphrates, a Priest Class, which, on the supposition that in its sacred and literary language, there are some traces of the early Turanian form of speech, might have had a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is rather an eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.) This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably, have had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of Egypt. (There is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its antiquity was as great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.) Therefore the Egyptians might have had a Turanian origin. To put the argument abstractedly: We may imagine two presumable possibilities; the first of which possesses little probability, and the second still less; and then by the juxta-position of the two reach a desired conclusion. In other words, some degree of probability will be the product of the multiplication of the non-probability of a first assumption by the improbability of a second. This is the form of argument by which probability is inferred from the accumulation of improbabilities.

Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may have in store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an unlikely supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and Religion were, aboriginally, Turanian.

[3] It is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the Lake-villages of Switzerland cultivated, in the prehistoric period, as may be seen in the Zurich collection of objects from the sites of these villages, the same variety of wheat—that which we call Mummy, or hen-and-chickens wheat—as the old Egyptians. Did the first immigrants into Europe, of whom we may suppose that we have some historical traces, for the Etruscans may have been, and the Laps, Finns, and Basques may still be, surviving fragments of their settlements, bring with them this variety of wheat at the same time that another swarm from the same Central Asian hive were taking it with them to the Valley of the Nile.

[4] I am led to propound this conjecture from a desire to render intelligible what Herodotus says of their hair and skin; for we know, both from the old paintings and from the existing mummies, that the true Egyptian’s skin was not black, and that there was no kink in his hair. It is impossible then to take his statement as it stands; and I can imagine no other way of correcting it.

The difficulty here I conceive to be of just the reverse kind to that which meets us in his statement, that the circumference of Lake Mœris was 450 miles; and which, therefore, in the chapter on the Faioum, I endeavoured to render intelligible by just the reverse process, that is to say, by suggesting that, while we suppose he is speaking of the Lake only, he is really speaking of the whole of a vast system of artificial irrigation, of which the lake was the main part. Here he is speaking of a part of the Egyptian population, only he puts what he says in such a way that we suppose that he is speaking of the whole of it.

I will take the opportunity of this note to propound an explanation of Homer’s having sent Jupiter, and all the gods, to Oceanus, to feast, for twelve days, with the irreproachable Ethiopians. We immediately ask, Why with the Ethiopians? Why are they irreproachable? What have they got to do with Oceanus? Why to feast? Why for so long a period? Why all the gods? The light, in which things are viewed in this book enables us to see an answer to each of these questions.

Homer, we know, was acquainted with the magnificence of Thebes. In his time, and for many centuries before, the Phœnicians had, through commercial intercourse, been closely connected with the Greeks; having, during the whole of that time, been an autonomous dependency, or dependent ally, of the Egyptians, who, in going to and from their head-quarters on the Euphrates, had kept open a line of communication through Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt, the chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes. There was plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over. Sethos and Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded Homer’s day by four or five centuries. And, as such things never lose in telling, Homer’s contemporaries must have had no very inadequate—we now know that they could hardly have had exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth of Thebes. He mentions the great amount of its military population; its hundred gates, which, as no traces of walls of fortification for the city have been found, meant, probably, the propylons of the temples; and its vast wealth. He knew probably that Egypt consisted of an Upper and of a Lower Egypt, and that the inhabitants of the Upper country were darker, and that in the extreme south, as then understood, the complexion became quite black; and so, to distinguish them from the maritime Egyptians, he calls them Ethiopians. He uses the same word as an epithet of dark objects, as of wine and bronze. And here among these Ethiopians was the wondrous Thebes. When the Phœnicians had told the inquisitive Greeks of its mighty temples, and of its incalculable wealth, they must have described its commerce, the source, to a very considerable extent, of its greatness. For centuries it had been the emporium of the trade of India, Arabia, and Africa. This, and its position in the supposed extreme south, to Homer’s mind, connected it with the outer, world-surrounding ocean. What was told to him, and to his contemporaries, of the tides and monsoons of the Indian Ocean, suggested to them, and most aptly, only the idea of a stream. They heard of tides on the Atlantic also; hence his mighty stream of circum-ambient ocean. As to the trade of Thebes, all international wholesale trade in those times, and in that part of the world, was carried on in the courts and sacred enclosures of temples. The greatness of the temples was, in some measure, an indication of the greatness of the trade. The great festivals were, in substance, only great fairs. Trade was then under the guardianship of Religion. Society was not yet sufficiently organized for the protection of trade: for such a purpose the civil power could hardly as yet be said to exist. Religion alone had either the wisdom, or the power, to enforce fair dealing, or to ward off violence. At the season, therefore, that the great annual caravans arrived from the interior, and the easterly monsoons wafted the merchandise and products of Arabia and India to Egypt, to be bartered for those of Africa (and the caravans were doubtless so arranged as that their arrival synchronized with that of the ocean-borne traffic), there were great processions and feasts at the temples. Religion then put on its most imposing aspect. We have now only to recall the number of temples in the sacred enclosure at Thebes (this enclosure itself meant order and protection), and then we shall have all the materials requisite for enabling us to understand every particular of Homer’s statement. Jupiter goes to the Ethiopians, because he was the chief god of Thebes. But there are temples enough for all the gods, and so they all accompany him. Here they meet, we see why, Oceanus. It is a great festival of many days. This is intelligible. We see why these Ethiopians are irreproachable. In an age of piracy and violence they enforce, with all the authority of Religion, the order, fair dealing, and abstinence from all kinds of violence, and ensure the security, necessary for trade; and which had made the trade they were protecting and fostering the greatest, at that time, in the world. Their singular irreproachableness might be measured by their unparalleled prosperity, and their unparalleled prosperity accounted for by their singular irreproachableness; and both might be explained by their profound and all-embracing piety. This made them irreproachable. This made them prosperous. This ensured the presence of all the gods at their twelve days’ Feast.

[5] Throughout this chapter I distinguish between the idea, and the doctrine, of a future life. There may be some traces of the idea in the Old Testament; though I believe that they are not so numerous, or so distinct, as many suppose. And what there may be of this kind is certainly counterbalanced by the general tenor of the documents with respect to this subject, and by some distinct statements in the opposite sense. What I affirm is, that there is no trace of a doctrine of a future life. A doctrine on such a subject is a categorical averment of it, unmistakably announced, and unmistakably used as a motive for shaping the whole life. Of such an averment, so used, I assert, and endeavour to account for, the absence.