Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

We had the day before despatched a telegram to the Governor of Bellianéh to request him to have donkeys in readiness for our party. The telegram, however, had not arrived; we, therefore, sent into the town to collect the beasts our party would require. Before long they came; but most of them were ill able to carry even their own wasted weight. Few had bridles, or anything that could have been mistaken for a saddle: a piece of ragged cloth or matting, merely intended to hide their distressing sores, was all that was on most of them. The first I mounted sank to the ground under the weight of ten stone ten. At last, the three most impetuous of our party selected the three least emaciated, and started for Abydos. Later in the day our telegram arrived, and the Governor immediately sent down to the landing a dozen fairly-conditioned animals; but it was then too late in the day for the rest of the party to undertake so long a ride.

It was the 3rd of January. The wheat was about two feet high, and the beans were in flower. The word field would mislead. As we rode on, mile after mile, there appeared to be no divisions of the land, except the limits of the different kinds of grain growing upon it. We crossed two or three large canals by earthen bars, which had been thrown across them. The use of these bars is, as soon as the river begins to sink, to retain the water with which the canals are then full. We also passed several villages. At the first of these our dragoman engaged the services of a stout young fellow, who came to accompany us, provided with a heavy staff, about two inches or a little more in diameter, and five feet in length. The villagers about Abydos have a bad character, and are occasionally troublesome, and this young fellow was to be our escort and guide. We did not ride through any of the villages on our way, for the road was always made to skirt the outside of the walls. At the gate of one we passed, we saw a woman and a lad seated on the ground, playing at a game resembling draughts. The board was marked out on the road, which had also supplied the men, in the form of pieces of camel dirt. The sight gave one a little shock. These poor women, however, spend no small portion of their lives in converting the raw material of this natural product into manufactured fuel, and the whole of their lives in the odour of its smoke.

In the open, by the roadside, we saw some rectangular enclosures of about six yards by four. In each of them a family was residing. I supposed they were engaged in watching the crops. As these enclosures consist of nothing but four thin screens, about seven feet high, of wattled reeds, their inmates, if that is an appropriate term, must sleep, wrapped in their burnouses, beneath the stars. The reed fence can only be intended to keep out the wind, the jackals, and the eyes of curious passers-by; but Arabs do not mind exposure at night as long as their heads are wrapped up. I saw, at Assouan and Miniéh, several sleeping in this way, in the open market-place, on their goods. At Suez, being out at dawn, I saw in the Arab town the men sleeping outside their huts on a morning when the mercury had sunk to freezing point. With us Europeans, the first thought is to keep the feet warm. About this extremity of his personal domain the Arab is heedless. His care, like the nigger’s, is for his head—-just as the Esquimaux dog, when sleeping, covers his nostrils with his bushy tail, or the pig buries his snout in the straw, so does the Arab, when he makes himself up for the night, envelope his whole head in some thick wrapper. Is this a consequence of his practice of never having his head uncovered during the day? I suppose they are none the worse for breathing and rebreathing the same air all night, with the exception of the little that may filter through the wrapper.

The rubbish mounds of Abydos are, by their height, and the extent of ground they cover, infallible witnesses to the importance of the old primæval city. From among these mounds two grand structures of the days of Sethos and Rameses have been disinterred. One is a palace, the joint work of father and son. That the genius of Egypt was, as might have been expected at this culminating era of its glory, advancing, and full of invention, is seen in the ceilings of the halls of this palace: they are vaulted. These vaulted roofs, however, are not arches of construction, but formed by placing the enormous slabs of sandstone, of which the roof is made, not with their broad, but with their narrow, faces on the plane of the ceiling. This gave a roof of vast thickness, from which the vault of the roof was excavated. The colouring of these roofs, as of all the decorations of these two grand buildings at Abydos, is remarkably good and well preserved.

The other building, which was dedicated to Osiris, who was supposed to have been buried here, was once his most sacred and frequented temple. It was much enlarged and embellished by the great Rameses. The inner walls of the sanctuary were encrusted with alabaster, which still remains. I saw nowhere else Egyptian work in purer taste, nor sculptures so well preserved, both in form and colour. One might have supposed that some of them had been chiselled and coloured last week. I observed a figure of the great king so absolutely untouched by time, that the colour of every bead in his necklace, or collar, is quite fresh.

It was here that was found the celebrated tablet of Abydos, which Rameses put up in the temple of Osiris, inscribed with the names of all the kings who had preceded him. This and its fellow tablet, placed at Karnak by Tuthmosis III., about two hundred years before the time of Rameses, are invaluable, as they show that the records preserved by the priests in writing, of which we have transcripts in the dynasties of the priest Manetho, and in the Turin papyrus, are in accord with the monuments. The monumental evidence, it may be observed, is of two kinds. Speaking generally, it is absolutely contemporary—the record having been sculptured in the lifetime of the man, the memory of whose actions, possessions, and thoughts it preserved. There are, however, in these two tablets of Karnak and Abydos, most precious exceptions to the contemporaneousness of the monumental history. How strong and clear was the historical sentiment in the mind of these old Egyptians! We not only find each generation endeavouring to perpetuate a knowledge of its own day, but, in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries before the Christian era, we find Egyptian kings endeavouring to transmit to posterity the names, and the order of their predecessors. This tablet of Abydos is one of the glories of our National Museum.

The cemeteries of Abydos were very extensive. Their extent grew out of the wish, very generally felt among well-to-do and educated Egyptians, to be laid themselves where Osiris, the judge of all, had once been laid.

As I have intimated, the site of This may, perhaps, cast some faint ray of light on the question of how, and where, the first ancestors of the Egyptians had entered Egypt. It throws, however, a flood of light on the question of the antiquity of Egyptian civilization. We have seen that in Egypt, in consequence of the absence, or scantiness of rain, there are no springs, and that another consequence of this want of rain is that the nitre, which the soil collects from the air, is not dissolved and washed away, but accumulates to such a degree as to render the water of the wells, which has percolated from the river through the soil, brackish, and unfit for drinking. Now the distance of This, in a direct line from the river, is seven miles and a half; if, then, we put these points together, we shall see in them another argument for the extreme antiquity of Egyptian civilization, besides those drawn from the use of writing, the mythology, and from the absence of anything like a beginning in the history of the useful arts, and of their social arrangements. The combined force of these arguments amounts to a demonstration that civilization was not in its infancy six thousand years ago, at the era of the Thinite dynasties.

Here is the form of this contributory to the demonstration. An uncivilized people would undoubtedly have placed their town on the banks of the river, close to the water. But a people among whom labour is organized, and who will be willing because they are civilized, to go to a great deal of trouble and expense for an adequate object, instead of giving up much good land for a large city, and on a site, too, where it would be troubled by inundations, would prefer to build it at a distance from the river, where the land was not suitable for cultivation, and where it would be safe from inundations. But in order to do this they must cut a canal seven and a half miles long at the least, and so bring the water of the river to the city. These thoughts the Egyptians had, and this work they accomplished, in the ages which preceded Menes. No savage, or semi-savage people would have entertained this scheme of the canal, or would have carried it out. The site of This is thus alone strong evidence of a very advanced contemporary civilization, no one can tell how many centuries before the time of Menes; but at least for a sufficient tract of time to allow of the growth of a powerful state, capable at last in his time of imposing a dynasty on Egypt. The first cities in Egypt must have been on the banks of the river; or in places where the háger was near the bank. The first comers did not cut canals seven and a half miles long at least; and none but a people already powerful could protect such a canal, upon which their existence depended. The people, then, were already civilized and powerful who placed their city on such a site as that of This.

There were kings in Egypt, we may be sure, before Menes. The Egyptians themselves spoke of his predecessors as ‘the deceased,’ that is, those human rulers whose names had been lost. It was in the time of these prehistoric, we may even say premythical kings, that this This Canal, and indeed, probably, that the great Bahr Jusuf Canal itself, which is throughout Egypt a second Nile, were constructed. There were, therefore, at that day, men who were as great in hydraulic engineering as any who came after them, but who yet lived at so remote a time, that no trace of them could be found even in the far-reaching and tenacious traditions of Egypt. If the Bahr Jusuf, which passed by This, was older than the city, so much the better for our argument.