[330] This word is tortured by non-Orientalists into various ill-forms. The Arabs write it جيزة (Jízeh), and the Egyptians pronounce it Gízeh, not Ghizeh.
[331] A full-sized drawing appeared in vol. vii. of Proceedings of the Phil. Soc. Glasgow; and was repeated by Mr. Day in his book, Pl. II. he also gives Belzoni’s sickle, Pl. I.
[332] When visiting the ‘Tombs of the Soldans,’ Cairo, I found a slab of blue basalt bearing the cartouche of Khufu, used as a threshold for one of the buildings. The characters had been partly erased; but the material was too hard for the barbarians who had misused it.
[333] I have elsewhere noticed (chap. iv.) the colours of metals in the painted tombs of Thebes, and the blue (cyanus-colour) of the butcher’s steel. The history of this homely article is instructive. For hundreds of years it retained, in England and elsewhere, its original shape, an elongated cone. At last some ‘cute citizen had the idea of breaking the surface into four edges, and of hardening it with nickel. The simple improvement now fits it for sharpening everything from a needle to a razor: it thus frees us from the ‘needy knife-grinder,’ who right well deserved to be needy, as he disadorned everything he touched.
[334] Antiquity of the Use of Metals, especially Iron, among the Egyptians, p. 18 (London, 1868). Also Ueber die Priorität des Eisens oder der Bronze in Ostasien, by Dr. M. Müller (Trans. Vienna Anthrop. Soc. vol. ix.).
[335] I assume this date because it marks when the spring equinox (vernal colure) occurred in the Taurus-sign. The earliest of the six epochs proposed by Egyptologists is b.c. 5702 (Böckh), and the latest is b.c. 3623 (Bunsen); the mean being b.c. 4573, and the difference a matter of 2079 years (Brugsch, i. 30).
[336] The Table of Sakkarah (Memphis), found about the end of 1864 by the late Mariette Pasha, dates from Ramses the Great (thirteenth century b.c.), and makes Mibampes the first of his fifty-six ancestors. No. 2 is the new tablet of Abydos, discovered, also in 1864, by Herr Dümmichen; it enabled scholars to supply the illegible name in No. 3, the priceless Turin Papyrus, the hieratic Canon of the Ptolemies. Mirbampes, Mirbapen, or Mi-ba of the monuments is, called in Manetho ‘Miebides, son of Usarphædus’ (Cory’s Fragments, p. 112).
[337] Of Ramses II., who, with his father Seti, represents the Greek Sesostris, the Sesesu-Ra of the monuments. (Brugsch, Hist. ii. 53–62: see my chap. viii.) Prof. G. Ebers has made this Egyptian proto-Homerid the hero of his romance, Uarda (i.e. Wardah, ‘the Rose’).
[338] De Iside et Osiride. He quotes Manetho the Priest, who wrote during the reign of the first Ptolemy, and who told unpleasant truths concerning Moses, the Hebrews, and the Exodus.
[339] The limestones of Carniola produce heaps of pisoliths, which require only smelting; and hence, probably, the early Iron Age of Noricum and its neighbourhood.