But the true spirit of invention, of which they had given proof, abandoned them here as elsewhere: if the merit of a discovery was often their due, they were rarely able to bring their invention to perfection. They kept the ideographic and syllabic signs which they had used at the outset, and, with the residue of their successive notations, made for themselves a most complicated system, in which syllables and ideograms were mingled with letters properly so called. There is a little of everything in an Egyptian phrase, sometimes even in a word; as, for instance, in [ ] maszirû, the ear, or [ ] kherôû, the voice; there are the syllables [ ] kher, the ordinary letters [ ], which complete the phonetic pronunciation, and finally the ideograms, namely, [ ], which gives the picture of the ear by the side of the written word for it, and [ ] which proves that the letters represent a term designating an action of the mouth. This medley had its advantages; it enabled the Egyptians to make clear, by the picture of the object, the sense of words which letters alone might sometimes insufficiently explain. The system demanded a serious effort of memory and long years of study; indeed, many people never completely mastered it. The picturesque appearance of the sentences, in which we see representations of men, animals, furniture, weapons, and tools grouped together in successive little pictures, rendered hieroglyphic writing specially suitable for the decoration of the temples of the gods or the palaces of kings. Mingled with scenes of worship, sacrifice, battle, or private life, the inscriptions frame or separate groups of personages, and occupy the vacant spaces which the sculptor or painter was at a loss to fill; hieroglyphic writing is pre-eminently a monumental script. For the ordinary purposes of life it was traced in black or red ink on fragments of limestone or pottery, or on wooden tablets covered with stucco, and specially on the fibres of papyrus. The exigencies of haste and the unskilfulness of scribes soon changed both its appearance and its elements; the characters when contracted, superimposed and united to one another with connecting strokes, preserved only the most distant resemblance to the persons or things which they had originally represented. This cursive writing, which was somewhat incorrectly termed hieratic, was used only for public or private documents, for administrative correspondence, or for the propagation of literary, scientific, and religious works.
It was thus that tradition was pleased to ascribe to the gods, and among them to Thot—the doubly great—the invention of all the arts and sciences which gave to Egypt its glory and prosperity. It was clear, not only to the vulgar, but to the wisest of the nation, that, had their ancestors been left merely to their own resources, they would never have succeeded in raising themselves much above the level of the brutes. The idea that a discovery of importance to the country could have risen in a human brain, and, once made known, could have been spread and developed by the efforts of successive generations, appeared to them impossible to accept. They believed that every art, every trade, had remained unaltered from the outset, and if some novelty in its aspect tended to show them their error, they preferred to imagine a divine intervention, rather than be undeceived. The mystic writing, inserted as chapter sixty-four in the Book of the Dead, and which subsequently was supposed to be of decisive moment to the future life of man, was, as they knew, posterior in date to the other formulas of which this book was composed; they did not, however, regard it any the less as being of divine origin. It had been found one day, without any one knowing whence it came, traced in blue characters on a plaque of alabaster, at the foot of the statue of Thot, in the sanctuary of Hermopolis. A prince, Hardiduf, had discovered it in his travels, and regarding it as a miraculous object, had brought it to his sovereign. This king, according to some, was Hûsaphaîti of the first dynasty, but by others was believed to be the pious Mykerinos. In the same way, the book on medicine, dealing with the diseases of women, was held not to be the work of a practitioner; it had revealed itself to a priest watching at night before the Holy of Holies in the temple of Isis at Coptos. "Although the earth was plunged into darkness, the moon shone upon it and enveloped it with light. It was sent as a great wonder to the holiness of King Kheops, the just of speech." The gods had thus exercised a direct influence upon men until they became entirely civilized, and this work of culture was apportioned among the three divine dynasties according to the strength of each. The first, which comprised the most vigorous divinities, had accomplished the more difficult task of establishing the world on a solid basis; the second had carried on the education of the Egyptians; and the third had regulated, in all its minutiae, the religious constitution of the country. When there was nothing more demanding supernatural strength or intelligence to establish it, the gods returned to heaven, and were succeeded on the throne by mortal men. One tradition maintained dogmatically that the first human king whose memory it preserved, followed immediately after the last of the gods, who, in quitting the palace, had made over the crown to man as his heir, and that the change of nature had not entailed any interruption in the line of sovereigns. Another tradition would not allow that the contact between the human and divine series had been so close. Between the Ennead and Menés, it intercalated one or more lines of Theban or Thinite kings; but these were of so formless, shadowy, and undefined an aspect, that they were called Manes, and there was attributed to them at most only a passive existence, as of persons who had always been in the condition of the dead, and had never been subjected to the trouble of passing through life. Menés was the first in order of those who were actually living. From his time, the Egyptians claimed to possess an uninterrupted list of the Pharaohs who had ruled over the Nile valley. As far back as the XVIIIth dynasty this list was written upon papyrus, and furnished the number of years that each prince occupied the throne, or the length of his life.[*]
* The only one of these lists which we possess, the "Turin
Royal Papyrus," was bought, nearly intact, at Thebes, by
Drovetti, about 1818, but was accidentally injured by him in
bringing home. The fragments of it were acquired, together
with the rest of the collection, by the Piedmontese
Government in 1820, and placed in the Turin Museum, where
Champollion saw and drew attention to them in 1824.
Seyffarth carefully collected and arranged them in the order
in which they now are; subsequently Lepsius gave a facsimile
of them in 1840, in his Auswahl der wichtigsten Urhunden,
pls. i.-vi., but this did not include the verso;
Champollion-Figeac edited in 1847, in the Revue
Archéologique, 1st series, vol. vi., the tracings taken by
the younger Champollion before Seyffarth's arrangement;
lastly, Wilkinson published the whole in detail in 1851.
Since then, the document has been the subject of continuous
investigation: E. de Rougé has reconstructed, in an almost
conclusive manner, the pages containing the first six
dynasties, and Lauth, with less certainty, those which deal
with the eight following dynasties.
Extracts from it were inscribed in the temples, or even in the tombs of private persons; and three of these abridged catalogues are still extant, two coming from the temples of Seti I. and Ramses II. at Abydos,[*] while the other was discovered in the tomb of a person of rank named Tunari, at Saqqâra.[**] They divided this interminable succession of often problematical personages into dynasties, following in this division, rules of which we are ignorant, and which varied in the course of ages. In the time of the Ramessides, names in the list which subsequently under the Lagides formed five groups were made to constitute one single dynasty.[***]
* The first table of Abydos, unfortunately incomplete, was
discovered in the temple of Ramses II. by Banks, in 1818;
the copy published by Caillaud and by Salt served as a
foundation for Champollion's first investigations on the
history of Egypt. The original, brought to France by Mimaut,
was acquired by England, and is now in the British Museum.
The second table, which is complete, all but a few signs,
was brought to light by Mariette in 1864, in the excavations
at Abydos, and was immediately noticed and published by
Dùmichen. The text of it is to be found in Mariette, La
Nouvelle Table d'Abydos (Revue Archéologique, 2nd series,
vol. xiii.), and Abydos, vol. i. pl. 43.
** The table of Saqqâra, discovered in 1863, has been
published by Mariette, La Table de Saqqâra (Revue
Archéologique, 2nd series, vol. x. p. 169, et seq.), and
reproduced in the Monuments Divers, pl. 58.
*** The Royal Canon of Turin, which dates from the
Ramesside period, gives, indeed, the names of these early
kings without a break, until the list reaches Unas; at this
point it sums up the number of Pharaohs and the aggregate
years of their reigns, thus indicating the end of a dynasty.
In the intervals between the dynasties rubrics are placed,
pointing out the changes which took place in the order of
direct succession. The division of the same group of
sovereigns into five dynasties has been preserved to us by
Manetho.
Manetho of Sebennytos, who wrote a history of Europe for the use of Alexandrine Greeks, had adopted, on some unknown authority, a division of thirty-one dynasties from Menés to the Macedonian Conquest, and his system has prevailed—not, indeed, on account of its excellence, but because it is the only complete one which has come down to us.[*] All the families inscribed in his lists ruled in succession.[**]
* The best restoration of the system of Manetho is that by
Lepsius, Das Konigsbuch der Alten Ægypter, which should be
completed and corrected from the memoirs of Lauth, Lieblein,
Krall, and Unger. A common fault attaches to all these
memoirs, so remarkable in many respects. They regard the
work of Manetho, not as representing a more or less
ingenious system applied to Egyptian history, but as
furnishing an authentic scheme of this history, in which it
is necessary to enclose all the royal names which the
monuments have revealed, and are still daily revealing to
us.
** E. de Rougé triumphantly demonstrated, in opposition to
Bunsen, now nearly fifty years ago, that all Manetho's
dynasties are successive, and the monuments discovered from
year to year in Egypt have confirmed his demonstration in
every detail.
The country was no doubt frequently broken up into a dozen or more independent states, each possessing its own kings during several generations; but the annalists had from the outset discarded these collateral lines, and recognized only one legitimate dynasty, of which the rest were but vassals. Their theory of legitimacy does not always agree with actual history, and the particular line of princes which they rejected as usurpers represented at times the only family possessing true rights to the crown.[*]
* It is enough to give two striking examples of this. The
royal lists of the time of the Ramessides suppress, at the
end of the XVIIIth dynasty, Amenôthes IV. and several of his
successors, and give the following sequence—Amenôthes
III., Harmhabît, Ramses I., without any apparent hiatus;
Manetho, on the contrary, replaces the kings who were
omitted, and keeps approximately to the real order between
Horos (Amenôthes III.) and Armais (Harmhabît). Again, the
official tradition of the XXth dynasty gives, between Ramses
II. and Ramses III., the sequence—Mînephtah, Seti IL,
Nakht-Seti; Manetho, on the other hand, gives Amenemes
followed by Thûôris, who appear to correspond to the
Amenmeses and Siphtah of contemporary monuments, but, after
Mînephtah, he omits Seti II. and Nakhîtou-Seti, the father
of Ramses III.