Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER XXXIV.
PERSISTENCY OF CUSTOM IN THE EAST.

Meddle not with them that are given to change.—Book of Proverbs.

Every traveller in the East is struck with the obstinate persistency of forms of expression even, as well as of customs, he meets with. In bargaining in the Khan Khaleel Bazaar, at Cairo, for an amber mouthpiece for a pipe, I had to go through the very dialogue which passed between Ephron and Abraham. I objected to the price. ‘Nay, then,’ replied the modern Hittite, ‘I give it thee. Take it, I give it thee.’ At last the price was agreed upon, and he took his money. Some time afterwards, at Jaffa, I noticed that a roguish hanger-on for odd jobs at the hotel was using precisely the same words, in an attempt he was making to get a friend I was with to give him for a box of oranges ten times the price they were selling at in the market, only a couple of hundred yards off. I was struck with the coincidence, and, on mentioning the matter to one familiar with the ways of the East, I learnt that this pretended gratuitous offer of the article represented a regular recognized stage in the form of bargaining. For three thousand years, at all events, it has been in stereotype.

Marriages are arranged now, as was that of Isaac and Rebekah, without the principals having seen each other.

Women in the East to-day wear the veil just as they did in the time of the Patriarchs.

The shoes are still taken off on entering holy places. The worshipper, in praying, still turns his face in the direction of the great sanctuary of his religion.

“Jezebel stimmied her eyes.” So the Septuagint version has it. This translation was made at Alexandria by Jews. Their own wives and daughters had made them familiar with the practice, and with the word technically used to express it; and they very naturally and properly adopted the technical term in their translation. They again used it in the parallel passage of Ezekiel. The rendering in our English Bible of this incident in Jezebel’s last toilet is misleading. It makes her “paint her face.” This suggests the rouge-pot and the cheeks, instead of the kohl-stick and the eyes. On the monuments we see that the ladies of old Egypt had the same practice. In the streets of the Cairo of to-day you find that the ladies of modern Egypt have retained it. The object of the practice is two-fold—to give prominency to the eyes, the most expressive feature, and to make the complexion of the face, by the effect of the contrast with the thus deepened darkness of the eyes, appear somewhat fairer.

The history of Joseph, I might almost call it the Josephead, the more distinctly to indicate my meaning, wears very much the appearance of an episode in a great national epic cycle, which had been handed down from the legendary age, and which must have been, as is still the case with oriental romances, in form prose, though in style and spirit full of dramatic force and poetry. I can imagine the men and children sitting at the tent-door, and the women within, to hear its recital. Just such histories are now recited daily throughout the East. While their incidents interest and entrance the imagination, they teach history, morality, and religion. How pleasingly do the high moral aims of this story of Joseph, so simple and natural, so true and profound, contrast with the frivolous, mawkish, false, sensational sentimentality of the modern novel! Its ideas, style, form, and colouring supply almost a collective illustration of the obstinate persistency we are noticing in everything oriental. With the exception of slavery, which, in deference to the ideas and feelings of the Christian world, has lately been abolished by law in Egypt—though I understand the law is very imperfectly observed—this history may be read to-day just as if its object were to give a picture of the thought, feelings, and practices of modern Egyptian life. If its dialogue, and all its minutiæ of detail, were heard for the first time at the date of the Exodus, it would still possess a very remote antiquity. It is, however, curious that we have every particular of Joseph’s adventure with Potiphar’s wife in the story of the ‘Two Brothers,’ the only Egyptian romance we have recovered, and the papyrus manuscript of which is somewhat older, at least, than the Exodus; for it was written, or edited, by Kagabu, one of the nine literati attached to the household of Rameses the Great, for the instruction of the crown-prince, Meneptha, in whose reign the Exodus took place.

Jusuf, by the way, is one of the commonest names in Egypt. Among others of this name I met with was a lad, the most beautiful boy I saw in the East, who had been, I was told, donkey-boy to the Prince of Wales at Thebes, and who served me in that capacity on one of my visits to Karnak. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, of course in their Arabic forms, are all very common names. They must have been introduced at the time of the Mahomedan invasion, unless the Christian invasion had brought them in some centuries earlier.