Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Our Saxon forefathers used stone largely in building. One thousand years only have passed: and now there is not a building in the country we can point to, and say with certainty, that it was raised by their hands. There are a few doubtful exceptions in the form of church towers. But these, if authentic, are exceptions of the kind which prove the rule: for when everything else disappeared, they could have been preserved only by a combination of chances so rare that it did not occur in one out of ten thousand cases. It was much the same after five hundred years had passed.

The Roman world was covered, in the time of Constantine, with magnificent cities and villas. But how many of the houses that were then inhabited are now standing?

The reasons of this are evident. First, there is the ever-acting disintegration of natural causes. Whatever man erects upon the surface of the earth, nature is ever afterwards busy in reducing to the common level. Then comes fire, the best of servants, but the worst of masters, which no dwelling-house can be expected to escape for a thousand years. Earthquakes, too, and war have, in any long series of years, to be credited with much destructive work. These are all in the end complete undoers of man’s handiwork. But I am disposed to assign the greatest amount of obliteration to the ever-changing fashions and wants of man himself. The houses of one generation are not suited to the tastes and requirements of the generations that succeed. They must therefore be pulled down to make way for what men wish to have. Perhaps, they become quarries to supply the materials needed for the new buildings. Those who act in this way are only doing what their predecessors did, and what their successors will do. Palaces, and the chief public buildings, in a city are, from a variety of causes, transferred to new sites; and the cities, of which they must be the centres, must correlate themselves to the sites of the new buildings. Or the capital, or city, itself, may, from, again, a variety of causes, be transferred to an entirely new site. In either case more or less of the old city is no longer inhabited. Sometimes the old materials are wanted, sometimes the ground upon which the deserted buildings are standing is needed for cultivation.

If we sum up the effects of these causes, we cannot expect that the contemporaries of the Ptolemies should have found in Egypt any buildings dating from the first period of the Old Monarchy, that is nearly four thousand years old. They had before them the Pyramids, which were then certainly more than three thousand years old, and which, it is evident, had defied all the destructive causes we have enumerated, simply on account of their exceptional form and mass, and because the enormous stones of which they were constructed had been so nicely fitted together as to exclude moisture and air; and so, because they found no earlier buildings, and because the stones of these had been so carefully and truly wrought, they assigned, as the commencement of the practice of building with wrought-stone, the reign of Sesortosis, that is, they carried it back two hundred years beyond the date of the commencement of the Great Pyramid.

This is altogether inadmissible. Men could not pass in two hundred years from the first essays in cutting stone to the grandest stone structure, and, in nicety of workmanship, one of the most perfect instances of stone joinery that has ever been erected. There were great builders long anterior to this date of two hundred years before the commencement of the Great Pyramid. Some of the Pyramids themselves, and many of the tombs, are older than the Pyramids of Gizeh, and even than the time of Sesortosis. A Pyramid had been built in the Faioum as far back as the first dynasty of all, that of Menes himself. Their system of religion, and their system of writing, had both arrived at their perfected condition in the time of Menes; and each of these two facts imply considerable advance in the art of building, of course building with stone, of which there were such ample materials everywhere throughout the valley of Egypt. They could not have had a perfected religion, such as was theirs, without temples. Nor is it possible that they could have advanced to the art of writing without having advanced previously as far as the art of cutting and dressing stone. And this is more obvious when we consider that the very peculiarity of Egyptian writing grew partly out of the idea that its characters were to be sculptured and incised on stone: this is what is implied in its very name of hieroglyphics.

I do not imagine that the date we are considering was a mere fiction. To invent history was not an Egyptian custom. What might have been rightfully assigned to the time of Sesortosis might not have been rightly understood, and so came to be wrongly described. They had hewn and built with stone centuries before his time. But there was an architectural improvement which must have commenced somewhere about his reign, which we see perfected in the Pyramids, and which the Egyptians ever afterwards retained, and that was the practice of building with enormous blocks of stone, cut and fitted together with the utmost care and precision. We can accept Manetho’s statement, when interpreted to mean this.

The Egyptians had already had a long national existence. They were a very observant and thoughtful people. Of all people of whom we know anything, they had the strongest craving to leave behind them grand, and, if possible, everlasting historical monuments. But they observed that all buildings constructed with small stones, sooner or later, but at all events, in a few centuries, passed away without leaving a record. They fell to the ground, or they were taken down to supply materials for new buildings, or the stone they were built of was burnt for lime. The consumption of lime has always been great in Egypt; and although the limestone mountains are not far from the river, and throughout the greater part of the country seldom more than two or three miles from it, old buildings have always been made to supply much material for this purpose. Mehemet Ali, notwithstanding that the limestone ridges of Thebes were close by, threw down one of the magnificent propylæa of Karnak to get lime for some paltry nitre-works he was setting up in the neighbourhood. To secure, then, as far as possible, their great monuments and tombs against these causes of decay and overthrow, they, at about the time of the date we are discussing, changed their method of building, and began to use such large stones, that it would generally be less troublesome and costly to get new stone at the quarries for building and for lime, than to overthrow an enormous structure, which could not be done without some machinery, and much tackle and labour. But their ideas, and the knowledge and the skill shown in these great buildings agree with other considerations in obliging us to carry back the art of building with hewn stone to a very remote epoch, far beyond any contemporary monuments, and far beyond Menes, whose name is the first to appear in the annals of Egypt, and who must have reigned not far from six thousand years ago. At this period, we cannot now entertain any doubts on the subject, civilization in Egypt was in a very advanced state; not very different, indeed, from what we find it at the date of the oldest of the still existing monuments. Upon the earliest of these we see the public and private life of the Egyptians sculptured and painted by their own hands. This, of course, must have required long antecedent periods of slow advance, for in this matter it is the first, and not the later, steps which require most time.

No inference, in respect of the point before us, can be drawn from the preservation of buildings standing on such sites as those of Pæstum and Palmyra. As soon as those cities began to decay, all temptation to use the stones of old structures in the erection of new ones, or to burn them for lime, completely ceased. They became useless and valueless, and this it was that saved them. During the four thousand years that had elapsed between Menes and Manetho, Egypt had been a populous country, generally in a state of prosperity, and, during the whole of the time, building, which often implies pulling down, had been actively going on: every stone, therefore, in every old disused building of the early dynasties was likely, in one way or another, to have been reused. No one can suppose that in such a country as ancient Egypt the pressure of this temptation would be long resisted.

The object of these pages is to present to the reader the thoughts on Egypt, as it was and as it is, which arose in the author’s mind during a tour he made last winter through the country. Among these thoughts, as I intimated at the beginning of this chapter, a prominent place is occupied by chronological questions, for the dates of early Egyptian history do not accord with those of the popularly-received system. It therefore becomes necessary to revert to the grounds of that system, as well as to examine and ascertain the particulars of the chronology of Egypt.