"X.—Establisher of true riches, desire of men,—here are seductive words in order that thou mayest reply;—if thou dost answer mankind by waves of the heavenly Ocean,—Napri, the grain-god, presents his offering,—all the gods adore (thee),—the birds no longer descend upon the hills;—though that which thy hand formeth were of gold—or in the shape of a brick of silver,—it is not lapis-lazuli that we eat,—but wheat is of more worth than precious stones.
"XI.—They have begun to sing unto thee upon the harp,—they sing unto thee keeping time with their hands,—and the generations of thy children rejoice in thee, and they have filled thee with salutations of praise;—for it is the god of Riches who adorneth the earth,—who maketh barks to prosper in the sight of man—who rejoiceth the heart of women with child—who loveth the increase of the flocks.
"XII.—When thou art risen in the city of the Prince,—then is the rich man filled—the small man (the poor) disdaineth the lotus,—all is solid and of good quality,—all herbage is for his children.—Doth he forget to give food?—prosperity forsaketh the dwellings,—and earth falleth into a wasting sickness."
The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Khîti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hâpi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, Hâikûphtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomitû, Botû, and their country Qîmit, the black land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bâkhû, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.
Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nûtri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.[*]
* The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine
Land were celebrated in Egypt. A traveller or hunter,
crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by
suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of
the penetrating scent of the robul (Puliciaria undulata,
Schwbine.), which once followed us throughout a day and two
nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish
whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing
tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever."
(Golenischeff).
Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konûsit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. Bâkhû and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and Bûto, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa.
* The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch,
Ebers,—Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in
the train of E. de Rougé; but the most extreme position has
been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined
to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the
Babylonian. After having summarily announced this thesis in
his Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 12, et seq.,
he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, Der
Babylonische Ursprung der àgyptischen Kultur, 1892, wherein
he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and
hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the
cults of Eridû, and would make the name of the Egyptian city
Onû, or Anû, identical with that of Nûn-H, Nûn, which is
borne by the Chaldean.