We must not, however, say too much in dispraise of the Ptolemaic Egyptians and their works. We have to be grateful to them indeed for the building of the temples of Edfu and Dendera, which, owing to their later date, are still in good preservation, while the best preserved of the old Pharaonic fanes, such as Medinet Habû, have suffered considerably from the ravages of time. Eor these temples show us to-day what an old Egyptian temple, when perfect, really looked like. They are, so to speak, perfect mummies of temples, while of the old buildings we have nothing but the disjointed and damaged skeletons.
A good deal of repairing has been done to these buildings, especially to that at Edfu, of late years. But the main archaeological interest of Ptolemaic and Roman times has been found in the field of epigraphy and the study of papyri, with which the names of Messrs. Kenyon, Grenfell, and Hunt are chiefly connected. The treasures which have lately been obtained by the British Museum in the shape of the manuscripts of Aristotle’s “Constitution of Athens,” the lost poems of Bacchylides, and the Mimes of Herondas, all of which have been published for the trustees of that institution by Mr. Kenyon, are known to those who are interested in these subjects. The long series of publications of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, issued at the expense of the Egypt Exploration Fund (Graeco-Roman branch), with the exception of the volume of discoveries at Teb-tunis, which was issued by the University of California, is also well known.
The two places with which Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt’s work has been chiefly connected are the Fayyûm and Behnesâ, the site of the ancient Permje or Oxyr-rhynchus. The lake-province of the Fayyûm, which attained such prominence in the days of the XIIth Dynasty, seems to have had little or no history during the whole period of the New Empire, but in Ptolemaic times it revived and again became one of the richest and most important provinces of Egypt. The town of Arsinoë was founded at Crocodilopolis, where are now the mounds of Kom el-Fâris (The Mound of the Horseman), near Medinet el-Payyum, and became the capital of the province. At Illahûn, just outside the entrance to the Fayyûm, was the great Nile harbour and entrepôt of the lake-district, called Ptolemaïs Hormos.
The explorations of Messrs. Hogarth, Grenfell, and Hunt in the years of 1895-6 and 1898-9 resulted in the identification of the sites of the ancient cities of Karanis (Kom Ushîm), Bacchias (Omm el-’Atl), Euhemeria (Kasr el-Banât), Theadelphia (Harît), and Philoteris (Wadfa). The work for the University of California in 18991900 at Umm el-Baragat showed that this place was Tebtunis. Dime, on the northern coast of the Birket Karûn, the modern representative of the ancient Lake Moeris, is now known to be the ancient Sokno-paiou Nesos (the Isle of Soknopaios), a local form of Sebek, the crocodile-god of the Fayyûm. At Karanis this god was worshipped under the name of Petesuchos (“He whom Sebek has given”), in conjunction with Osiris Pnepherôs (P-nefer-ho, “the beautiful of face”); at Tebtunis he became Seknebtunis., i.e. Sebek-neb-Teb-tunis (Sebek, lord of Tebtunis). This is a typical example of the portmanteau pronunciations of the latter-day Egyptians.
Many very interesting discoveries were made during the course of the excavations of these places (besides Mr. Hogarth’s find of the temple of Petesuchos and Pnepherôs at Karanis), consisting of Roman pottery of varied form and Roman agricultural implements, including a perfect plough.[[1]] The main interest of all, however, lies, both here and at Behnesâ, in the papyri. They consist of Greek and Latin documents of all ages from the early Ptolemaic to the Christian. In fact, Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt have been unearthing and sifting the contents of the waste-paper baskets of the ancient Ptolemaic and Roman Egyptians, which had been thrown out on to dust-heaps near the towns. Nothing perishes in,, the dry climate and soil of Egypt, so the contents of the ancient dust-heaps have been preserved intact until our own day, and have been found by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, just as the contents of the houses of the ancient Indian rulers of Chinese Turkestan, at Niya and Khotan, with their store of Kha-roshthi documents, have been preserved intact in the dry Tibetan desert climate and have been found by Dr. Stein.[[2]] There is much analogy between the discoveries of Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt and those of Dr. Stein in Turkestan.
[1] Illustrated on Plate IX of Fayûm Towns and Their Papyri.
[2] See Dr. Stein’s Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan, London, 1903.
The Græco-Egyptian documents are of all kinds, consisting of letters, lists, deeds, notices, tax-assessments, receipts, accounts, and business records of every sort and kind, besides new fragments of classical authors and the important “Sayings of Jesus,” discovered at Behnesâ, which have been published in a special popular form by the Egypt Exploration Fund.[[3]]
[3] * Aoyla ‘Itjffov, 1897, and New Sayings of Jesus, 1904.
These last fragments of the oldest Christian literature, which are of such great importance and interest to all Christians, cannot be described or discussed here. The other documents are no less important to the student of ancient literature, the historian, and the sociologist. The classical fragments include many texts of lost authors, including Menander. We will give a few specimens of the private letters and documents, which will show how extremely modern the ancient Egyptians were, and how little difference there actually is between our civilization and theirs, except in the-matter of mechanical invention. They had no locomotives and telephones; otherwise they were the same. We resemble them much more than we resemble our mediaeval ancestors or even the Elizabethans.