Sinûhît, the hero of one of these stories, was a son of Amenemhâît I., and had the misfortune involuntarily to overhear a state secret. He happened to be near the royal tent when news of his father’s sudden death was brought to Usirtasen. Fearing summary execution, he fled across the Delta north of Memphis, avoided the frontier-posts, and struck into the desert. “I pursued my way by night; at dawn I had reached Pûteni, and set out for the lake of Kîmoîrî. Then thirst fell upon me, and the death-rattle was in my throat, my throat cleaved together, and I said, ‘It is the taste of death!’ when suddenly I lifted up my heart and gathered my strength together: I heard the lowing of the herds. I perceived some Asiatics; their chief, who had been in Egypt, knew me; he gave me water, and caused milk to be boiled for me, and I went with him and joined his tribe.” But still Sinûhît did not feel himself in safety, and fled into Kadûma, to a prince who had provided an asylum for other Egyptian exiles, and where he “could hear men speak the language of Egypt.” Here he soon gained honours and fortune. “The chief preferred me before his children, giving me his eldest daughter in marriage, and he granted me that I should choose for myself the best of his land near the frontier of a neighbouring country. It is an excellent land, Aîa is its name. Figs are there and grapes; wine is more plentiful than water; honey abounds in it; numerous are its olives and all the produce of its trees; there are corn and flour without end, and cattle of all kinds. Great, indeed, was that which was bestowed upon me when the prince came to invest me, installing me as prince of a tribe in the best of his land. I had daily rations of bread and wine, day by day; cooked meat and roasted fowl, besides the mountain game which I took, or which was placed before me in addition to that which was brought me by my hunting dogs. Much butter was made for me, and milk prepared in every kind of way. There I passed many years, and the children which were born to me became strong men, each ruling his own tribe. When a messenger was going to the interior or returning from it, he turned aside from his way to come to me, for I did kindness to all: I gave water to the thirsty, I set again upon his way the traveller who had been stopped on it, I chastised the brigand. The Pitaîtiû, who went on distant campaigns to fight and repel the princes of foreign lands, I commanded them and they marched forth; for the prince of Tonû made me the general of his soldiers for long years. When I went forth to war, all countries towards which I set out trembled in their pastures by their wells. I seized their cattle, I took away their vassals and carried off their slaves, I slew the inhabitants, the land was at the mercy of my sword, of my bow, of my marches, of my well-conceived plans glorious to the heart of my prince. Thus, when he knew my valour, he loved me, making me chief among his children when he saw the strength of my arms.
“A valiant man of Tonu came to defy me in my tent; he was a hero beside whom there was none other, for he had overthrown all his adversaries. He said: ‘Let Sinûhît fight with me, for he has not yet conquered me!’ and he thought to seize my cattle and therewith to enrich his tribe. The prince talked of the matter with me. I said: ‘I know him not. Verily, I am not his brother. I keep myself far from his dwelling; have I ever opened his door, or crossed his enclosures? Doubtless he is some jealous fellow envious at seeing me, and who believes himself fated to rob me of my cats, my goats, my kine, and to fall on my bulls, my rams, and my oxen, to take them.... If he has indeed the courage to fight, let him declare the intention of his heart! Shall the god forget him whom he has heretofore favoured? This man who has challenged me to fight is as one of those who lie upon the funeral couch. I bent my bow, I took out my arrows, I loosened my poignard, I furbished my arms. At dawn all the land of Tonu ran forth; its tribes were gathered together, and all the foreign lands which were its dependencies, for they were impatient to see this duel. Each heart was on live coals because of me; men and women cried ‘Ah!’ for every heart was disquieted for my sake, and they said: ‘Is there, indeed, any valiant man who will stand up against him? Lo! the enemy has buckler, battle-axe, and an armful of javelins.’ When he had come forth and I appeared, I turned aside his shafts from me. When not one of them touched me, he fell upon me, and then I drew my bow against him. When my arrow pierced his neck, he cried out and fell to the earth upon his nose; I snatched his lance from him, I shouted my cry of victory upon his back. While the country people rejoiced, I made his vassals whom he had oppressed to give thanks to Montu. This prince, Ammiânshi, bestowed upon me all the possessions of the vanquished, and I took away his goods, I carried off his cattle. All that he had desired to do unto me that did I unto him; I took possession of all that was in his tent, I despoiled his dwelling; therewith was the abundance of my treasure and the number of my cattle increased.” In later times, in Arab romances such as that of Antar or that of Abû-Zeît, we find the incidents and customs described in this Egyptian tale; there we have the exile arriving at the court of a great sheikh whose daughter he ultimately marries, the challenge, the fight, and the raids of one people against another. Even in our own day things go on in much the same way. Seen from afar, these adventures have an air of poetry and of grandeur which fascinates the reader, and in imagination transports him into a world more heroic and more noble than our own. He who cares to preserve this impression would do well not to look too closely at the men and manners of the desert. Certainly the hero is brave, but he is still more brutal and treacherous; fighting is one object of his existence, but pillage is a far more important one. How, indeed, should it be otherwise? the soil is poor, life hard and precarious, and from remotest antiquity the conditions of that life have remained unchanged; apart from firearms and Islam, the Bedouin of to-day are the same as the Bedouin of the days of Sinûhît.
There are no known documents from which we can derive any certain information as to what became of the mining colonies in Sinai after the reign of Papi II. Unless entirely abandoned, they must have lingered on in comparative idleness; for the last of the Memphites, the Heracleopohtans, and the early Thebans were compelled to neglect them, nor was their active life resumed until the accession of the XIIth dynasty. The veins in the Wady Maghara were much exhausted, but a series of fortunate explorations revealed the existence of untouched deposits in the Sarbût-el-Khâdîm, north of the original workings. From the time of Amenemhâît II. these new veins were worked, and absorbed attention during several generations. Expeditions to the mines were sent out every three or four years, sometimes annually, under the command of such high functionaries as “Acquaintances of the King,” “Chief Lectors,” and Captains of the Archers. As each mine was rapidly worked out, the delegates of the Pharaohs were obliged to find new veins in order to meet industrial demands. The task was often arduous, and the commissioners generally took care to inform posterity very fully as to the anxieties which they had felt, the pains which they had taken, and the quantities of turquoise or of oxide of copper which they had brought into Egypt. Thus the Captain Haroëris tells us that, on arriving at Sarbût in the month Pha-menoth of an unknown year of Amenemhâît III., he made a bad beginning in his work of exploration. Wearied of fruitless efforts, the workmen were quite ready to desert him if he had not put a good face on the business and stoutly promised them the support of the local Hâthor.
And, as a matter of fact, fortune did change. When he began to despair, “the desert burned like summer, the mountain was on fire, and the vein exhausted; one morning the overseer who was there questioned the miners, the skilled workers who were used to the mine, and they said: ‘There is turquoise for eternity in the mountain.’ At that very moment the vein appeared.” And, indeed, the wealth of the deposit which he found so completely indemnified Haroëris for his first disappointments, that in the month Pachons, three months after the opening of these workings, he had finished his task and prepared to leave the country, carrying his spoils with him. From time to time Pharaoh sent convoys of cattle and provisions—corn, sixteen oxen, thirty geese, fresh vegetables, live poultry—to his vassals at the mines.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph in the Ordnance Survey,
Photo-graphs, vol. iii. pl. 8.
The mining population increased so fast that two chapels were built, dedicated to Hâthor, and served by volunteer priests. One of these chapels, presumably the oldest, consists of a single rock-cut chamber, upheld by one large square pillar, walls and pillar having been covered with finely sculptured scenes and inscriptions which are now almost effaced. The second chapel included a beautifully proportioned rectangular court, once entered by a portico supported on pillars with Hâthor-head capitals, and beyond the court a narrow building divided into many small irregular chambers. The edifice was altered and rebuilt, and half destroyed; it is now nothing by a confused heap of ruins, of which the original plan cannot be traced. Votive stehe of all shapes and sizes, in granite, sandstone, or limestone, were erected here and there at random in the two chambers and in the courts between the columns, and flush with the walls. Some are still in situ, others lie scattered in the midst of the ruins. Towards the middle of the reign of Amenemhâît III., the industrial demand for turquoise and for copper ore became so great that the mines of Sarbût-el-Khâdîm could no longer meet it, and those in the Wady Maghara were re-opened. The workings of both sets of mines were carried on with unabated vigour under Amenemhâîfc IV., and were still in full activity when the XIIIth dynasty succeeded the XIIth on the Egyptian throne. Tranquillity prevailed in the recesses of the mountains of Sinai as well as in the valley of the Nile, and a small garrison sufficed to keep watch over the Bedouin of the neighbourhood. Sometimes the latter ventured to attack the miners, and then fled in haste, carrying off their meagre booty; but they were vigorously pursued under the command of one of the officers on the spot, and generally caught and compelled to disgorge their plunder before they had reached the shelter of their “douars.” The old Memphite kings prided themselves on these armed pursuits as though they were real victories, and had them recorded in triumphal bas-reliefs; but under the XIIth dynasty they were treated as unimportant frontier incidents, almost beneath the notice of the Pharaoh, and the glory of them—such as it was—he left to his captains then in command of those districts.