A similar custom would seem to have prevailed with the rulers of ancient Egypt. Sneferu, a king of the fourth dynasty, greatest among the very early names of the Old Empire (say, about 4000 B.C.), went down as a conqueror into the Peninsula of Sinai, and left there inscribed a mammoth figure of himself, on the granite hills above the famous copper and turquoise mines of Wady Magharah. He is styled in the accompanying inscription the “vanquisher of a foreign people.”[[495]]
As early as the twelfth dynasty of ancient Egypt, before the days of Abraham, stone thresholds marked the upper border of that mighty empire. “Two huge pillars of stone, covered with long inscriptions, served formerly as boundary marks between the Egyptian empire and the negro-land called Heh.”[[496]] King Usurtasen III., who set up these landmarks, says in an inscription on the second of them: “Every one of my sons who maintains this boundary which I have fixed, he shall be called my son who was born of me. My son is like the protector of his father (that is Horus), like the preserver of the boundary of his father (that is Osiris.) But if he abandons it, so that he does not fight upon it, he is not my son, he is not then born of me. I have caused my own image to be set up, on this boundary which I have fixed, not that ye may (only) worship it (the image of the founder), but that ye may fight upon it.”
On the oldest map in the world, a map of the gold districts in Nubia, in the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt, there is a mention of the “memorial stone of King Mineptah I. Seti I.” And that memorial stone, of this new threshold of domain, marked the boundary line of empire in that direction.[[497]]
Rameses II. had it recorded on the walls of the rock grotto of Bayt-el-Walli concerning his threshold extensions: “The deeds of victory are inscribed a hundred thousand times on the glorious Persea. As the chastiser of the foreigners, who has placed his boundary-marks according to his pleasure in the land of the Ruthennu, he is in truth the son of Ra, and his very image.”[[498]]
On the eastern border of Lower Egypt, the main passage way from the Delta into Arabia, the great gateway of the empire toward the north and the east, is still known as El Gisr, or “The Threshold.”[[499]] This point is near Lake Timsah, on the line of the modern Suez Canal.
In ancient Greece, Theseus “set up a pillar,” as a threshold stone between Peloponnesus and Attica,–then called Ionia,–“writing upon it an epigram in two trimeters, bounding the land. Of these [inscriptions] the one toward the east side said, ‘This is not Pelopennesus, but Ionia,’ and that toward the west, ‘This is Pelopennesus, not Ionia.’”[[500]]
Even the term, the “Pillars of Hercules,” as the boundaries of the Grecian empire and the then known world, is an indication of this idea in the classic age, as well as in the primitive mind. Calpë and Abyla were the door-posts of the great outer passage way, and the threshold between those pillars was founded upon the seas, and established upon the floods.[[501]]
As showing that the term “threshold” is not applied to these boundary stones merely by accommodation, it is sufficient to quote from Justinian in the case. He declares specifically that “as the threshold makes a certain boundary in a house, so also the ancients designed that the boundary of the empire should be its threshold; hence it is called the ‘threshold,’ as if it were a certain bound and term.”[[502]] Speaking of one who has been in foreign captivity, and who desires a resumption, or a restoration, of his civil rights, on his coming back to his country, Justinian says that such a return “is called postliminium [[503]]
When the old Portuguese navigators started out on their voyages of discovery, they were accustomed to take with them stone pillars to set up in a prominent place at the farthest limits of their newly claimed territory as the national door-posts or threshold in that direction. Such a pillar was erected at the mouth of the Congo River, at the time of its discovery by Diego Cão, or Cam, in 1484–85. On this account, the river was known for a time as the “Rio de Padrão,” or “Pillar River.”[[504]] It might, indeed, have been called the “River of the Threshold.”
This custom of setting up stone pillars as boundary marks along the borders of countries, nations, and states, has been continued down to the present day. Such landmarks are still to be seen along the borders of the great divisions of Europe, and they are on the lines of the several states of the United States of America. The line between the English grants in America, originally made to the Duke of York and to Lord Baltimore, was, after much dispute, run by two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, in 1763–67, and marked by stone pillars at intervals of five miles. This was generally known as “Mason and Dixon’s line;” it separated Pennsylvania from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, and was the dividing line between the free and the slave states before the Civil War of 1861–65. One of those early stone landmarks on that line is still to be seen near Oxford, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, as an illustration of a practice beginning in Babylonia as far back as 4000 B.C., and continued in America down to A.D. 1895.[[505]]