Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

Sais was placed on the Canopic, the most westerly branch of the river, at a distance of about forty miles from the sea; between which and it was Naucratis, where the Greeks had been allowed to establish a factory and emporium. In the city also of Sais itself a quarter was assigned to them, where they were governed by their own laws, administered by magistrates selected from among their own body. As Psammetichus, the founder of the Saite Dynasty, had been raised to the throne, and was maintained upon it, mainly by the aid of Greek mercenaries, we can hardly suppose that this contiguity of the city he made his Capital to the source from which so much of his support was derived, was accidental. It was in accordance with his policy towards the Greeks that he granted a Factory to every other nation which was desirous of maintaining one, giving to all equal liberty to trade in the land. From the same motive he had his children taught Greek.

Facts of this kind imply the complete reversal of the old national policy of seclusion. The Government, and it must have been seconded by the general approval of the people, saw that seclusion could no longer be maintained, while at the same time the opposite system was offering to the country very great advantages; and so, just as is the case at the present day with the Japanese, the requirements of the new conditions were speedily and unreservedly accepted. The military caste, however, whose susceptibility was offended at the employment of, and still more at the preference which was shown to, a large body of Greek mercenaries, was an exception to the general acquiescence. To the number of 240,000 they seceded from Egypt; and, having been well received in the now rival country of Ethiopia, were settled in a fertile tract of land which was bestowed upon them in the neighbourhood of Meroé.

Necho, the son and successor of Psammetichus, was desirous of pushing the new commercial policy of his Father to its utmost limits. With this view, he undertook to adapt for navigation, and to prolong to the head of the Arabian Gulf, an old canal, that had for many centuries connected Bubastis with Lake Timsah, in order that every impediment to the traffic of the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean might be removed. He had carried this great work as far as the Bitter Lakes, when, from some military, or perhaps for an agricultural, reason, he abandoned the work, after having expended upon it the lives of 120,000 of the Fellahs of those times. Herodotus saw the Docks which, as a part of this plan, he had constructed on the Red Sea.

The only incident in the History of Geographical Discovery which can be set by the side of the great achievement of Columbus, is this Necho’s circumnavigation of Africa. These two enterprises resemble each other not only in hardihood, grandeur, and success, but also in being equally instances of the happy way in which the scientific, and even the semi-scientific, imagination at times divines the truth, or the real nature of things. The truth, indeed, appears to possess not only some power of suggesting itself, but also of compelling the mind, to which it has suggested itself, to undertake the demonstration of its being the truth.

It would be unfair to the Father of History to make mention of this famous undertaking in any words but his. “Libya itself,” he says, “enables us to ascertain that it is everywhere surrounded by water, except so far as it is conterminous with Asia. The Egyptian King, Necho, was the first we know of who demonstrated this. He did it in this wise: when he had abandoned the attempt to dig the Canal from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, he despatched a squadron manned by Phœnicians, with instructions to sail on till they got back into the Northern (Mediterranean) Sea, through the Pillars of Hercules; and in this way to return to Egypt. These Phœnicians, then, having set sail from the Erythrœan (Red) Sea, entered on the navigation of the Southern Sea (the Indian Ocean). When the autumn came, they would draw up their vessels on the beach, and sow what land was required, wherever they might happen to be at that point of the voyage. They would then wait for the harvest, and when they had got it in, would again set sail. In this way two years were spent; and, in the third year, having doubled the Pillars of Hercules, they returned to Egypt. They said what I cannot believe, though some, perhaps, may, that while they were sailing round Libya, they had the sun on their right hand. So was first acquired a knowledge of the contour of Libya.”

Necho also pursued the policy of his Father in attempting to recover for the Double Crown of the then reunited Upper and Lower Egypt, the Asiatic dependencies, of which the Assyrians had despoiled it. For nine and twenty years had Psammetichus been barred in the first step of this enterprise by the obstinate resistance of Ashdod, which had thus sustained, as Herodotus observes, the longest siege then known to History. At last, however, it had succumbed; and being now, again, in the hands of the Egyptians, the old line of march into, and through, Syria was open, and Necho set out for the re-conquest of the old provinces. He could not deem that his Egypt was the Egypt of Tuthmosis and Rameses, unless what they had held along the maritime plain of Syria, and back to Carchemish on the Euphrates, and which had been—more or less completely—in subjection to Egypt during the intervening nine centuries, with the exception of the short period of Assyrian supremacy, had been recovered. As might have been expected, he could not see that, though Nineveh had fallen, its power had only been transferred to Babylon; and that behind Babylon was being organized the Empire of the still more energetic Persians, which was soon to overshadow all that part of the world. It was, in truth, only wasting his resources to retake Carchemish: he should have attacked Babylon itself. Nothing was gained if its power was not destroyed. But, however, as he advanced along the maritime plain, with which the Egyptians had been familiar from time out of mind, Josiah, we know, attempted to stop him at Megiddo, where he was defeated and slain.

The Hebrew Prophets of these times saw as clearly, as we do now, that the course of events had transferred the constituents of power from the Nile to the Euphrates; and so they became the uncompromising instigators of this anti-Egyptian policy. Of course it would have been wise in Josiah to have remained quiet: his best policy would have been that of “masterly inactivity.” Necho, however, as it happened, having easily crushed him, did not allow himself to be diverted from his main object by the tempting facility thus offered to him for at once taking possession of the Kingdom of Judah, but continued, as rapidly as he could, his advance to the Euphrates. Having reached Carchemish, and provided sufficiently, as he thought, for the permanent re-occupation of all that had thereabouts “pertained to Egypt,” he returned home; and, by the way, settled, without any resistance having been offered to him, the conditions of the subjection of the Kingdom of Judah.

At this juncture Egypt must have deemed that all was recovered, and that everything was again, and would continue to be, as of old. Isaiah, however, and Jeremiah, and the other Prophets of the time were right; for the Babylonians were not long in expelling the Egyptians from Asia.

Necho was succeeded by his son Psammis; and he by the Apries of Herodotus, the Pharaoh Hophra of the Hebrew Scriptures. Egypt is still very rich and prosperous, and so he makes another attempt for the recovery of the dominion of Western Asia. In this effort he attacked Phœnicia both by sea and land. Still no change, or vacillation, is perceptible in the utterances of the Hebrew Prophets. They at all events are not misled, or dazzled, by the riches and greatness of Egypt. Ezekiel sees, just as Isaiah and Jeremiah had seen, that the valley of the Nile can no longer be the seat of Empire; and that the capacity for acquiring it had passed into the hands of their North-Eastern neighbours.

In the reign of Amasis, the successor of Apries, “Egypt,” as Herodotus tells us, “reached the very acmé of its prosperity. Never before had the river been more bountiful to the land, or the land to those who dwelt in it. It contained 20,000 inhabited cities.” Such was the Egypt Amasis marshalled against this invading host of Persia. But to no purpose: the single and signal defeat his son sustained at Pelusium, the very threshold of the land, gave to Cambyses the whole country. From that day to this Power has continued the Northward course it had then commenced; and, consequently, there has been no resurrection for the first-born of civilization, the inventress of Letters, and of Political Organization, and of so many of the arts that better man’s Estate, and embellish life. This, to some extent, hides from our view the fact that we are, greatly, what we are at this day, because Egypt had been what she was in the prehistoric times.