After my return I employed myself continually on the pyramids and their inscriptions, had several chambers excavated, and drew out a careful description of each pyramid. Altogether I had found nearly thirty different names of Ethiopian kings and queens. I have not as yet brought them into any chronological order, but have in the comparison of the inscriptions learned much on the kind of succession and the form of government. The King of Meroë[83] (which is written Meru or Merua in one of the southernmost pyramids) was at the same time High Priest of Ammon: if his wife outlived him she followed him in the government, and the male heir of the crown only occupied a second place by her; under other circumstances, it seems, the son succeeded to the crown, having already, during his father’s lifetime, borne the royal cartouche and title, and held the post of second priest of Ammon. Thus we see here the priest government of which Diodorus and Strabo speak, and the precedence of the worship of Ammon already mentioned by Herodotus.
The inscriptions on the pyramids show that at the time of their erection the hieroglyphic system of writing was no longer perfectly understood, and that the hieroglyphical signs were often put there for ornament, without any intended meaning. Even the royal names are rendered doubtful by this, and this prevented my recognizing for a long time the pyramids of the three royal personages who had built the principal temples in Naga, Ben Naga and in Wadi Temêd, and belonged, no doubt, to the most shining period of the Meroitic Empire. I am now sure, that the pyramid, with antechamber arched in the Roman style, in the wall of which Ferlini found the treasure concealed, notwithstanding the slight change in the name, belonged to the same mighty and warlike queen who appears in Naga with her rich dress and her nails almost an inch long. Ferlini’s jewellery, by the circumstance that they belonged to a known, and, it seems to me, the greatest of all Meroitic queens, who built almost all the preserved temples of the island, acquired a far greater importance for the history of the Ethiopian art in which they now take a certain position. The purchase of that remarkable treasure is a considerable gain for our Museum. At that time an Ethiopian demotic character, resembling the Egyptian demotic in its letters, although with a very limited alphabet of twenty-five to thirty signs, was more generally employed and understood than the hieroglyphics. The writing is read from right to left as there, but always with a distinct division of the words by two strong points. I have already found twenty-six such demotic inscriptions, some on steles and libatory slabs, some in the antechambers of the pyramids over the figures in the processions (which are generally proceeding towards the deceased king with palm-branches), some outside on the smooth surfaces of the pyramids, and always plainly of the same date as the representations, and not added at a subsequent period. The decipherment of this writing will perhaps not be difficult on a narrower examination, and would then give us the first certain sounds of the Ethiopian language spoken here at that time, and decide its relation to the Egyptian; while the almost perfect identity of the Ethiopian and Egyptian hieroglyphics would till now give decidedly no sanction to any conclusion as to a similar identity between the two languages. On the contrary, it seems, and may be safely asserted for the later Meroitic period, that the Egyptian hieroglyphics were taken from Egypt as the sacred monumental writing, without change, but also without a full comprehension of their signification. The few continually recurring signs prove that the Ethiopian-demotic writing is purely alphabetic, which must very much lighten the labour of decipherment. The partition of the words is perhaps taken from the Roman writing. The analogy with the development of writing in Egypt, however, proceeded still farther; for next to this Ethiopian-demotic there occurs at a later period, an Ethiopian-Greek, which may be fairly compared with the Koptic, and indeed has borrowed several letters from it. It is found in the inscriptions of Soba and in some others on the walls of the temple ruins of Wadi e’ Sofra. We have now therefore, as in Egypt, two doubtless successive systems of writing, which contain the actual Ethiopian popular dialect. It is customary now to call the old Abyssinian-Geez language the Ethiopic, which has no right to this denomination in an ethnographical point of view, as a Semetic language brought from Arabia, but only as a local term. A Geez inscription, which I have found in the chamber of a pyramid, has evidently been added at a later period.
I hope that by the study of the native inscriptions, and the yet living languages, some important results may be obtained. The name Ethiopian with the ancients comprehended much of very various import. The ancient population of the whole Nile valley to Chartûm, and perhaps along the Blue River, as also the tribes in the desert east of the Nile, and the Abyssinians, then probably were more broadly distinguished from the negroes than at present, and belonged to the Caucasian race; the Ethiopians of Meroë (according to Herodotus, the mother state of all the Ethiopians) were reddish-brown people, like the Egyptians, only darker, as at the present day. This is also proved by the monuments, on which I have more than once found the red skin of the kings and queens preserved.[84] In Egypt the women were always painted yellow, particularly during the Old Empire, before the Ethiopian mixture, at the time of the Hyksos; and the Egyptian women of the present day, who have grown pale in the harems, incline to the same colour.[85] After the eighteenth dynasty, however, red women appear, and so it is certain the Ethiopian women were always represented. It seems that the so-called Barâbra nation has much Ethiopian blood mixed with it, and perhaps this may be more fully shown at some time by their language.[86] It is no doubt the ancient Nubian, and has continued under that name in somewhat distant south-westerly regions; for the languages of the Nubians in and about Kordofan are, to some extent, evidently related to the Berber language. That this last, which is now only spoken from Assuan to Dar Shaiqîeh, south of Dongola, in the Nile valley, ruled for a time in the province of Berber, and still higher up, I have found enough proof in the names of the localities.
Next to the ruins of Meroë are situated, along the river, from south to north, the villages of Marûga, Danqêleh and e’ Sûr, which are comprehended in the name Begerauîeh, so that one almost always only hears the last name. Five minutes to the north of e’ Sûr, lies the village of Qala, and ten minutes farther, el Guês, which are both included in the name Ghabîne. An hour down the stream are two villages, called Marûga, already deserted before the conquest of the country, but a little distant from each other, and still more northward, near the Omarâb mountains, running to the river from the east, is a third village, called Gebel (Mount village), only inhabited by Fukara. Cailliaud was only acquainted with the southernmost of the three Marûgas, lying by the great temple ruins. The name attracted his attention by its similarity to Meroë. The similarity is still greater when one knows that the actual name is Maru, as—ga is only the general noun termination, which is added or omitted according to the grammar, and does not belong to the root. In the dialect of Kenus and Dongola this ending is—gi; in the dialect of Mahass and Sukkôt—ga. When I went through the different names of the upper countries with one of our Berber servants, I learned that maro, or marôgi, in the one dialect, maru, or marûga, in the other, signifies “ruined mound, ruined temple;” thus are the ruins of ancient Syene, or those of the island Philæ, called Marôgi. Quite different from it is another Berber word, Mérua, which is also pronounced Méraui, by which all white rocks, white stones, are distinguished; for instance, a rock near Assuan, on the east side of the Nile, by the village of el Gezîret. By this it is clear that the name Marûga has nothing to do with the name Meroë, as it is not usual to call a city “Ruin-town,” immediately on its foundation. On the other hand, the name Merua, Méraui (in English “white rock”), would be a very good name for a city, if the position of the place were favourable, as it is at Mount Barkal, although not here.
LETTER XXI.
Keli, opposite Meroe.
April 29, 1844.
Franke did not return from his expedition at Ben Naga until the 23rd. He brought the altar hither in sixteen blocks, on a bark. The stones which we shall have to take hence, a wearisome journey of six or seven days through the wilderness, are a load for about twenty camels, so that our train will be considerably greater than before. Unfortunately, we have been unable to bring away anything from Naga, in the desert, on account of the difficulty of transportation, except the already mentioned Roman inscription, and another large peculiarly carved work. There are on it some particularly curious representations; among others, a sitting figure in front, a nimbus round the hair, the left arm raised in a right angle, and the first and middle fingers of the hand pointing upward, as the old Byzantine figures of Christ are represented. The right hand holds a long staff resting on the ground, like that of John the Baptist. This figure is wholly strange to the Egyptian representation, and is doubtlessly derived from another source, as also another often-represented deity, also represented in full front, with a richly curling beard, which one would be inclined to compare with a Jupiter or Serapis in posture and appearance. The mixture of religions at that evidently late era had obtained exceedingly, and I should not be astonished if later researches were to show that the Ethiopian kings included Christ and Jupiter among their widely different classes of gods. The god with the three or four lions’ heads is probably not of ancient origin, but taken from somewhere else.
On the 24th, we crossed the Nile in our bark, in order to take our way to Gebel Barkal by the desert. Camels again seemed to be difficult to procure, but the threat that I should not call the Sheîkh, but the government to account, by virtue of my firman, if he would not manage to obtain the necessary animals, worked so fast, that we could already depart to the desert from Gôs Burri with eighty camels.
Here, at Keli, I had again opportunity to witness a funeral, this time for a deceased Fellah, at which nearly two hundred people were assembled, the men parted from the women. The men sat down opposite each other in pairs, embraced each other, laid their heads on their shoulders, raised them again, beat themselves, clapped their hands, and cried as much as they could. The women lamented, sang songs of misery, strewed themselves with ashes, went about in procession, and threw themselves on the ground, in a similar way to Wed Médineh, only their dance resembled rather the violent motions of the derwishes. The rest of the inhabitants of Keli sat around in groups, under the shadow of the trees, their heads down, sighing and complaining.
While we were obliged to wait for the camels, I crossed to Begerauîeh again, to seek some ruins, said to lie more to the north. From El Guês, I got to the two villages of Marûga, lying not very far from one another, in three-quarters of an hour. A great number of grave mounds lie to the east of the first of these, on the low heights, looking like a group of pyramids in the distance. The elevation runs along in a crescent-like form, and is covered with these round hillocks of black desert-stones, which were fifty-six in number, on my counting them from a large one in the centre.