Fig. 336.—Hathoric capital. Louvre.
§ 5. The Commerce of Egypt.
When, under the great Theban Pharaohs, Egypt found herself impelled, either by force or by inclination, to emerge from her long isolation, her vast internal commerce and her industrial development must have had a greater effect over the foreigners with whom she came into contact than her gigantic buildings, or the colossal statues, bas-reliefs, and paintings with which they were adorned. During the Middle Empire she opened her gates to some extent to certain tribes of Semites and Kushites, who dwelt close to her frontier. After her conquest by the Hyksos, and the establishment, some centuries later, of her own supremacy in Syria, she never ceased to hold intercourse with her neighbours.
Her foreign relations were, however, peculiar in character. During many centuries it never occurred to the worshipper of Osiris that it was possible to live and die out of the sacred valley of the Nile. Thrown by some accident outside those limits which for him coincided with the frontiers of the habitable world, he would have felt as helpless as a Parisian stranded upon some cannibal island. In later years, after about the seventeenth century B.C. the separation between the Egyptians and the people of Western Asia became less complete. The time arrived when Babylon and Greece were in advance of Egypt; but even then the Egyptians shrank from changing their ancient habits. Their well-being in the valley watered by their sacred river was too complete, their pride of race was too great, to allow of their mingling readily with those whom they looked upon as barbarians. Still more effectual was their unwillingness, their fear, to confide their mortal bodies to any other soil but that of Egypt. There alone could they count with certainty upon the care and skill which would preserve it from final destruction. Nowhere but in the Western Mountain could they be sure of receiving the necessary offerings and homage. The gods who watched over the mummy, who guided the soul in its subterranean voyage and shielded it during the tests to which it was exposed after death, dwelt in Egypt alone. Military expeditions were pushed into Syria, and even as far as the Euphrates, but no Egyptian crossed the Isthmus of Suez without longing for the day of his return. He brought back the plunder of his successful combats to the crowded cities of his own country, with their countless monuments and their memories of a glorious past; he could enjoy life only where the tombs of his ancestors and his own happy dwelling marked the spot where he should repose when that life had ceased.
By taste, then, the Egyptian was no traveller. But in time the men of other nations came to seek him; they came to buy from him the countless wonders which had been created by his skilful and patient industry. The Phœnician, especially after the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, took upon himself the useful office of middle-man; in later days, under the Psemetheks and their successors, the Greek came to dispute that office with him. Like the Portuguese and the Dutch in China and Japan, first the Phœnicians and afterwards the Ionians had their factories at Memphis and in the cities of the Delta. Thanks to these adroit and enterprising middle-men, Egypt had a large foreign trade without either ships, sailors, or merchant-adventurers. Upon this point much valuable information has been obtained from the texts, but the discoveries of modern archæology have been still more efficient in enabling us to form a true and vivid conception of the trade carried on by the inhabitants of the Nile Valley.
Ever since attention was first drawn to the wide distribution of such objects, not a year has passed without articles of Egyptian manufacture being discovered at some distant point. Syria and Phœnicia are full of them; they have been found in Babylonia and in Assyria, upon the coasts of Asia Minor, in Cyprus, in the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, in Greece itself, in Etruria, in Latium, in Corsica and Sardinia, in the neighbourhood of Carthage; they are, in fact, spread over all Western Asia and the whole basin of the Mediterranean. At the moment when the Phœnicians began to secure the monopoly of this trade the Egyptian workshops had no rivals in the world; and when, after many centuries, other nations began to pour their manufactures into the same markets, they had long to compete in vain against a prestige which had been built up by ages of good work and well earned notoriety.