* The only known instance of an execution by hanging is that
of Pharaoh’s chief baker, in Gen. xl. 19, 22, xli. 13; but
in a tomb at Thebes we see two human victims executed by
strangulation. The Egyptian hell contains men who have been
decapitated, and the block on which the damned were beheaded
is frequently mentioned in the texts.
Criminals of high rank obtained permission to carry out on themselves the sentence passed upon them, and thus avoided by suicide the shame of public execution. Before tribunals thus constituted, the fellah who came to appeal against the exactions of which he was the victim had little chance of obtaining a hearing: had not the scribe who had overtaxed him, or who had imposed a fresh corvée upon him, the right to appear among the Judges to whom he addressed himself? Nothing, indeed, prevented him from appealing from the latter to his feudal lord, and from him to Pharaoh, but such an appeal would be for him a mere delusion. When he had left his village and presented his petition, he had many delays to encounter before a solution could be arrived at; and if the adverse party were at all in favour at court, or could command any influence, the sovereign decision would confirm, even if it did not aggravate, the sentence of the previous judges. In the mean while the peasants’ land remained uncultivated, his wife and children bewailed their wretchedness, and the last resources of the family were consumed in proceedings and delays: it would have been better for him at the outset to have made up his mind to submit without resistance to a fate from which he could not escape.
In spite of taxes, requisitions, and forced labour, the fellahîn came off fairly well, when the chief to whom they belonged proved a kind master, and did not add the exactions of his own personal caprice to those of the State. The inscriptions which princes caused to be devoted to their own glorification, are so many enthusiastic panegyrics dealing only with their uprightness and kindness towards the poor and lowly. Every one of them represents himself as faultless: “the staff of support to the aged, the foster father of the children, the counsellor of the unfortunate, the refuge in which those who suffer from the cold in Thebes may warm themselves, the bread of the afflicted which never failed in the city of the South.” Their solicitude embraced everybody and everything: “I have caused no child of tender age to mourn; I have despoiled no widow; I have driven away no tiller of the soil; I have taken no workmen away from their foreman for the public works; none have been unfortunate about me, nor starving in my time. When years of scarcity arose, as I had cultivated all the lands of the nome of the Gazelle to its northern and southern boundaries, causing its inhabitants to live, and creating provisions, none who were hungry were found there, for I gave to the widow as well as to the woman who had a husband, and I made no distinction between high and low in all that I gave. If, on the contrary, there were high Niles, the possessors of lands became rich in all things, for I did not raise the rate of the tax upon the fields.” The canals engrossed all the prince’s attention; he cleaned them out, enlarged them, and dug fresh ones, which were the means of bringing fertility and plenty into the most remote corners of his property. His serfs had a constant supply of clean water at their door, and were no longer content with such food as durra; they ate wheaten bread daily. His vigilance and severity were such that the brigands dared no longer appear within reach of his arm, and his soldiers kept strict discipline: “When night fell, whoever slept by the roadside blessed me, and was [in safety] as a man in his own house; the fear of my police protected him, the cattle remained in the fields as in the stable; the thief was as the abomination of the god, and he no more fell upon the vassal, so that the latter no more complained, but paid exactly the dues of his domain, for love” of the master who had procured for him this freedom from care. This theme might be pursued at length, for the composers of epitaphs varied it with remarkable cleverness and versatility of imagination. The very zeal which they display in describing the lord’s virtues betrays how precarious was the condition of his subjects. There was nothing to hinder the unjust prince or the prevaricating officer from ruining and ill-treating as he chose the people who were under his authority. He had only to give an order, and the corvée fell upon the proprietors of a village, carried off their slaves and obliged them to leave their lands uncultivated; should they declare that they were incapable of paying the contributions laid on them, the prison opened for them and their families. If a dyke were cut, or the course of a channel altered, the nome was deprived of water: prompt and inevitable ruin came upon the unfortunate inhabitants, and their property, confiscated by the treasury in payment of the tax, passed for a small consideration into the hands of the scribe or of the dishonest administrator. Two or three years of neglect were almost enough to destroy a system of irrigation: the canals became filled with mud, the banks crumbled, the inundation either failed to reach the ground, or spread over it too quickly and lay upon it too long. Famine soon followed with its attendant sicknesses: men and animals died by the hundred, and it was the work of nearly a whole generation to restore prosperity to the district.
The lot of the fellah of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that of the fellah of to-day. He himself felt the bitterness of it, and complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his. He had to toil the whole year round,—digging, sowing, working the shadouf from morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the corvée, paying a heavy and cruel tax,—all without even the certainty of enjoying what remained to him in peace, or of seeing his wife and children profit by it. So great, however, was the elasticity of his temperament that his misery was not sufficient to depress him: those monuments upon which his life is portrayed in all its minutias, represent him as animated with inexhaustible cheerfulness. The summer months ended, the ground again becomes visible, the river retires into its bed, the time of sowing is at hand: the peasant takes his team and his implements with him and goes off to the fields. In many places, the soil, softened by the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily turns it up; elsewhere it is hard, and only yields to the plough. While one of the farm-servants, almost bent double, leans his whole weight on the handles to force the ploughshare deep into the soil, his comrade drives the oxen and encourages them by his songs: these are only two or three short sentences, set to an unvarying chant, and with the time beaten on the back of the nearest animal. Now and again he turns round towards his comrade and encourages him: “Lean hard!”—“Hold fast!”
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.
The sower follows behind and throws handfuls of grain into the furrow: a flock of sheep or goats brings up the rear, and as they walk, they tread the seed into the ground. The herdsmen crack their whips and sing some country song at the top of their voices,—based on the complaint of some fellah seized by the corvée to clean out a canal. “The digger is in the water with the fish,—he talks to the silurus, and exchanges greetings with the oxyrrhynchus:—West! your digger is a digger from the West!”*
* The silurus is the electrical fish of the Nile. The text
ironically hints that the digger, up to his waist in water,
engaged in dredging the dykes or repairing a bank swept away
by an inundation, is liable at any moment to salute, i.e. to
meet with a silurus or an oxyrrhynchus ready to attack him;
he is doomed to death, and this fact the couplet expresses
by the words, “West! your digger is a digger from the West.”
The West was the region of the tombs; and the digger, owing
to the dangers of his calling, was on his way thither.