What the proportion of historical items may be, included in this aggregate, we have no means of testing, nor are the monuments in Egyptian temples in themselves a proof of the reality of the persons or events which they are placed to commemorate, any more than the Centauromachia or Amazonomachia on the frieze of a Grecian temple proves that there really existed Centaurs or Amazons. But it is interesting to penetrate, so far as we are enabled, into the scheme upon which the Egyptians themselves conceived and constructed their own past history, of which the gods form quite as essential an element as the human kings; for we depart from the Egyptian point of view when we treat the gods as belonging to Egyptian religion and the human kings to Egyptian history,—both are parts of the same series.
It is difficult to trace the information which Herodotus received from the Egyptian priests to any intelligible scheme of chronology; but this may be done in regard to Manetho with much plausibility, as the recent valuable and elaborate analysis of Boeckh (Manetho und die Hundssternperiode, Berlin, 1845) has shown. He gives good reason for believing that the dynasties of Manetho have been so arranged as to fill up an exact number of Sothiac cycles (or periods of the star Sirius, each comprehending 1460 Julian years = 1461 Egyptian years). The Egyptian calender recognized a year of 365 days exactly, taking no note of the six hours additional which go to make up the solar year: they had twelve months of thirty days, with five epagomens or additional days, and their year always began with the first of the month Thoth (Soth, Sothis). Their year being thus six hours shorter (or one day for every four years) than the Julian year with its recurrent leap-year, the first of the Egyptian month Thoth fell back every four years one day in the Julian calender, and in the course of 1460 years it fell successively on every day of the Julian year, coming back again to the same day from which it had started. This period of 1460 years was called a Sothiac period, and was reckoned from the year in which the first of the Egyptian month Thoth coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius in Egypt; that is, (for an interval from 2700 B. C. down to the Christian era) on the 20th July of the Julian year. We know from Censorinus that the particular revolution of the Sothiac period, in which both Herodotus and Manetho were included, ended in the year 139 after the Christian era, in which year the first of the Egyptian month Thoth fell on the 20th July, or coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius in Egypt: knowing in what year this period ended, we also know that it must have begun in 1322 B. C., and that the period immediately preceding it must have begun in 2782 B. C. (Censorinus, De Die Natali, c. 21; Ideler, Handbuch der Chronologie, vol. i, Abschn. 1, pp. 125-138.) The name Sothis, or Thoth, was the Egyptian name for Sirius or the Dog-star, the heliacal rising of which was an important phenomenon in that country, as coinciding nearly with the commencement of the overflowing of the Nile.
Boeckh has analyzed, with great care and ability, the fragmentary, partial, and in many particulars conflicting, versions of the dynasties of Manetho which have come down to us: after all, we know them very imperfectly, and it is clear that they have been much falsified and interpolated. He prefers, for the most part, the version reported as that of Africanus. The number of years included in the Egyptian chronology has been always a difficulty with critics, some of whom have eluded it by the supposition that the dynasties mentioned as successive were really simultaneous,—while others have supposed that the years enumerated were not full years, but years of one month or three months; nor have there been wanting other efforts of ingenuity to reconcile Manetho with the biblical chronology.
Manetho constructs his history of the past upon views purely Egyptian, applying to past time the measure of the Sothiac period or 1460 Julian years (= 1461 Egyptian years), and beginning both the divine history of Egypt, and the human history which succeeds it, each at the beginning of one of these Sothiac periods. Knowing as we do from Censorinus that a Sothiac period ended in 139 A. D., and, of course, began in 1322 B. C.—we also know that the third preceding Sothiac period must have begun in 5702 B. C. (1322 + 1460 + 1460 + 1460 = 5702). Now the year 5702 B. C. coincides with that in which Manetho places Menês, the first human king of Egypt; for his thirty-one dynasties end with the first year of Alexander the Great, 332 B. C., and include 5366 years in the aggregate, giving for the beginning of the series of dynasties, or accession of Menês, the date 5702 B. C. Prior to Menês he gives a long series of years as the time of the government of gods and demigods; this long time comprehends 24,837 years, or seventeen Sothiac periods of 1461 Egyptian years each. We see, therefore, that Manetho (or perhaps the sacerdotal ἀναγραφαὶ which he followed) constructed a system of Egyptian history and chronology out of twenty full Sothiac periods, in addition to that fraction of the twenty-first which had elapsed down to the time of Alexander,—about three-quarters of a century anterior to Manetho himself, if we suppose him to have lived during the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, which, though not certain, is yet probable (Boeckh, p. 11). These results have not been brought out without some corrections of Manetho’s figures,—corrections which are, for the most part, justified on reasonable grounds, and, where not so justified, are unimportant in amount; so that the approximation is quite sufficient to give a high degree of plausibility to Boeckh’s hypothesis: see pp. 142-145.
Though there is no doubt that in the time of Manetho the Sothiac period was familiar to the Egyptian priests, yet as to the time at which it first became known we have no certain information: we do not know the time at which they first began to take notice of the fact that their year of 365 days was six hours too short. According to the statement of Herodotus (ii, 4), the priests of Heliopolis represented the year of 365 days (which they said that the Egyptians had first discovered) as if it were an exact recurrence of the seasons, without any reference to the remaining six hours. This passage of Herodotus, our oldest informant, is perplexing. Geminus (Isagogê in Arati Phænomena, c. 6) says that the Egyptians intentionally refrained from putting in the six hours by any intercalation, because they preferred that their months, and the religious ceremonies connected with them, should from time to time come round at different seasons,—which has much more the air of an ingenious after-thought, than of a determining reason.
Respecting the principle on which the Egyptian chronology of Herodotus is put together, see the remarks of M. Bunsen, Ægyptens Stellung in der Welt-geschichte, vol. i, p. 145.
CHAPTER XXI.
DECLINE OF THE PHENICIANS. — GROWTH OF CARTHAGE.
The preceding sketch of that important system of foreign nations,—Phenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians,—who occupied the south-eastern portion of the (οἰκουμένη) inhabited world of an early Greek, brings them down nearly to the time at which they were all absorbed into the mighty Persian empire. In tracing the series of events which intervened between 700 B. C., and 530 B. C., we observe a material increase of power both in the Chaldæans and Egyptians, and an immense extension of Grecian maritime activity and commerce,—but we at the same time notice the decline of Tyre and Sidon, both in power and traffic. The arms of Nebuchadnezzar reduced the Phenician cities to the same state of dependence as that which the Ionian cities underwent half a century later from Crœsus and Cyrus, while the ships of Milêtus, Phôkæa, and Samos gradually spread over all those waters of the Levant which had once been exclusively Phenician. In the year 704 B. C., the Samians did not yet possess a single trireme,[639] down to the year 630 B. C. not a single Greek vessel had yet visited Libya; but when we reach 550 B. C., we find the Ionic ships predominant in the Ægean, and those of Corinth and Korkyra in force to the west of Peloponnesus,—we see the flourishing cities of Kyrênê and Barka already rooted in Libya, and the port of Naukratis a busy emporium of Grecian commerce with Egypt. The trade by land, which is all that Egypt had enjoyed prior to Psammetichus, and which was exclusively conducted by Phenicians, is exchanged for a trade by sea, of which the Phenicians have only a share, and seemingly a smaller share than the Greeks; and the conquest by Amasis of the island of Cyprus, half-filled with Phenician settlements and once the tributary dependence of Tyre, affords one mark of the comparative decline of that great city. In her commerce with the Red sea and the Persian gulf she still remained without a competitor, the schemes of the Egyptian king Nekôs having proved abortive; and even in the time of Herodotus, the spices and frankincense of Arabia were still brought and distributed only by the Phenician merchant.[640] But on the whole, both her political and industrial development are now cramped by impediments, and kept down by rivals, not before in operation; and the part which she will be found to play in the Mediterranean, throughout the whole course of this history, is one subordinate and of reduced importance.
The course of Grecian history is not directly affected by these countries, yet their effect upon the Greek mind was very considerable, and the opening of the Nile by Psammetichus constitutes an epoch in Hellenic thought. It supplied their observation with a large and diversified field of present reality, while it was at the same time one great source of those mysticizing tendencies which corrupted so many of their speculative minds. But to Phenicia and Assyria, the Greeks owe two acquisitions well deserving special mention,—the alphabet, and the first standard and scale of weight, as well as coined money. Of neither of these acquisitions can we trace the precise date. That the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phenician, the analogy of the two proves beyond dispute, though we know not how or where the inestimable present was handed over, of which no traces are to be found in the Homeric poems.[641] The Latin alphabet, which is nearly identical with the most ancient Doric variety of the Greek, was derived from the same source,—also the Etruscan alphabet, though—if O. Müller is correct in his conjecture—only at second-hand, through the intervention of the Greek.[642] If we cannot make out at what time the Phenicians made this valuable communication to the Greeks, much less can we determine when or how they acquired it themselves,—whether it be of Semitic invention, or derived from improvement upon the phonetic hieroglyphics of the Egyptians.[643]