Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

But in the time of Cheops nothing of this kind was done, nor could it have been. It is true that the nation could then produce a great deal more food than it needed for consumption, but, at the end of the year, it was none the richer. Its surplus labour had not been fixed and preserved in a reconvertible form for future needs. Its surplus production had not been thus stored up for future uses. To repeat ourselves there were, speaking generally, no ways open to them for bottling up this surplusage either in the temporarily barren, or in the continuously fruitful fashion. But there were ways open to them by which they might squander, or consume, their imperfect chances. They might, for instance, throw away their surplus food, and capacity for surplus labour, by doing no productive work for a portion of the year. They were engaged in this way in the long and numerous festivals of their gods, in their funeral processions, and other matters of this kind. The effect was the same when they made military raids on their neighbours. To this method also of using up their surplus labour and food they had frequent recourse. To these matters they were disposed more than ourselves, because, unlike ourselves, they could not save what they were thus squandering. Or they might spend much of it in excavating, sculpturing, and painting acres of tombs; or in piling up Pyramids; or in building incredible numbers of magnificent temples. This explains the magnitude and costliness of many of the works, and undertakings, of the old world elsewhere, as well as in Egypt. The point which it is essential to see is, that they could not bottle up their surplus labour of any kind in the time of Cheops; while with us every form of surplus labour, even every odd half-hour of every form of it, may be bottled up, and the interest on what has been secured in this way may itself also be secured in like manner. The only approach to this among them was made by the king when he built a treasury, which we know was sometimes done by the Pharaohs, and locked up in it his ingots of silver, and what gold, precious stones, and costly stuffs he had acquired.

But this form of bottling up labour, and which only one man in the kingdom could practise, had two objections. It was of the utterly barren sort: it paid no dividends. He had no enjoyment of any kind from it. This was the first objection; and the other was, that if it was continued too long—and this might be the result at any moment—the man who was thus hoarding up his treasures would prove to have been hoarding them up for others, and not for himself; and so he would get no particle of advantage from them.

What, then, was he to do? How was what he had to be spent in such a manner as that he might himself get something from it? How was he to have himself the spending of it? A Pyramid is utterly unproductive, and all but utterly useless. It is a building that does not give shelter to any living thing, in which nothing can be stored up, excepting a corpse, and that cannot even be entered. Still it was of as much benefit to the man who built it as leaving the surplus labour, and food he had at his disposal, and the valuables he had in his treasury, unused would be. And those who built Pyramids had at their absolute command any amount of labour, and any amount of food. Here, then, was a great temptation to raise monuments of this kind to themselves. What treasure they had might as well be sunk in stones, as remain bottled up barrenly. They would, at all events, spend it themselves, and get for it an eternal monument. They would have the pleasure of raising themselves their own monuments. They would have the satisfaction of providing a safe and magnificent abode for their own mummies.

If they had had at home Egyptian Three per Cent. Government Consols, or could have bought Chinese, Hindoo, or Assyrian Five per Cent. Stocks; or if the thought had occurred to them, which not long afterwards did occur to their successors, of reclaiming from the Desert, by irrigation, the district of the Faioum; or if they had foreseen that in times to come the Hyksos and the Persians might invade Egypt, and that possibly a rampart from Pelusium to the metropolis, such as was afterwards constructed, might assist in keeping them in check in the Desert, where there would be a chance of their perishing from thirst; or if Egypt had been, like Ceylon, a country in which mountain streams could be dammed up in the wet season for irrigating the land in the dry; or, like Yucatan, where enormous tanks for the storage of the rainfall are indispensable; then it is evident that the surplus labour and food, and the silver ingots in the King’s treasury, would have been spent in some one or other of these ways. But some of these things were not possible in Egypt, and the time for thinking of the others had not yet come. There was, therefore, no alternative. It must be something as unproductive as a Pyramid, or a temple. The intense selfishness of man, such as he was in those early days, prevented his having any repugnance to the idea of a Pyramid all for himself: it rather, on the contrary, commended the idea to his mind. And so it came about that the Pyramids were built. The whole process is as clear to us as it would be, had we ourselves, in some well-remembered stage of a previous existence, been the builders, and not Cheops and Chephren. We see the conditions under which they acted, and the mental process by which they were brought to the only conclusion possible to them.

The question may be propounded—Why was there given to these structures that particular form which from them has been called the pyramidal? Mathematics and astronomy have been summoned to answer the question; and lately the Astronomer Royal for Scotland has, in a large and learned work, endeavoured to prove that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh was intended to perpetuate for ever a knowledge of scientifically-ascertained natural standards of weight, measure, and capacity. If this was the purpose of the Great Pyramid, will he allow an old friend to ask him—what, then, was the purpose of each one of those scores of other Pyramids that were constructed before and after it? No two, probably, of the whole series were precisely of the same dimensions, except, perhaps, accidentally. All suppositions of this kind have their origin in the unhistorical, or rather anti-historical practice of attributing to early ages the ideas of our own times. The first requirement for enabling one to answer this question rightly is the power of, in some degree, thinking with the thoughts of the men who themselves built the Pyramids. Though, of course, there is no more reason for doubting that every Pyramid in Egypt was intended for a tomb and sepulchral monument, just for that and for nothing else, than there is for doubting that the Coliseum was built for the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and London Bridge for enabling people to cross the Thames.

Sir John Mandeville, the greatest English traveller of the Middle Ages, and who, during his thirty-three years of wandering in the East, had served in the armies both of the Sultan of Egypt and of the Emperor of China, writing between 1360-70, of what he had seen about twenty-five years previously, tells us the Pyramids were the granaries Joseph built for the storage of the corn of the years of plenty. This is instructive: it shows how readily in ages of ignorance—the same cause still has, where it remains, the same effect—men connect old traditions, particularly if there be anything of religion about them, with existing objects: being prompted to do this by a craving to give distinctness, and a local habitation, to such traditions.

He anticipates and bars the objection that neither he, nor anyone else, had inspected the interior of the Pyramids, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they were adapted for granaries, by telling us that they were full of serpents. This is set down apparently without any other design than that of recording a curious fact, which it would be as well to mention. And, doubtless, as far as the knight knew himself, he had no other object. But in matters of this kind, experience teaches us that such people do not know themselves.

Here, then, we have an instance of the way in which extremes meet. The old knight accepts his theory without one jot or tittle of evidence in its favour, and directly in the teeth of all that had ever been recorded of the Pyramids. It is a theory which allows at most seven years for their construction; and which supposes them to have been designed for a purpose which is flatly contradicted by their form, and by all that is seen of their exterior, and known of their interior; and, too, by the history itself. One grain of science of any kind in the old knight would have lost us the lesson to be drawn from his theory.

What he did was to yield to what was to him a temptation. And this, and I say it with all due deference, is precisely what the Astronomer Royal for Scotland appears to have done. He, too, has yielded to a temptation. The old knight, five centuries and an half back, was tempted to find in these mighty monuments the Biblical narrative; and he found it. The modern Astronomer is tempted to find in them most unexpected and surprising indications, facts, and conclusions of profoundest science; and he finds them. Each was tempted after his kind.