The Egyptian army.The military circumstances of Egypt laid down, just as in Syria, a double task for the troops there; the protection of the south frontier and of the east coast, which indeed may not be remotely compared with that required for the line of the Euphrates, and the maintenance of internal order in the country as in the capital. The Roman garrison consisted, apart from the ships stationed at Alexandria and on the Nile, which seem chiefly to have served for the control of the customs, under Augustus of three legions, along with the not numerous auxiliary troops belonging to them, about 20,000 men. This was about half as many as he destined for all the Asiatic provinces—which was in keeping with the importance of this province for the new monarchy. But the occupying force was probably even under Augustus himself diminished about a third, and then under Domitian by about a further third. At first two legions were stationed outside of the capital; but the main camp, and soon the only one, lay before its gates, where Caesar the younger had fought out the last battle with Antonius, in the suburb called accordingly Nicopolis. The suburb had its own amphitheatre and its own imperial popular festival, and was quite independently organised; so that for a time the public amusements of Alexandria were thrown into the shade by those of Nicopolis. The immediate watching of the frontier fell to the auxiliaries. The same causes therefore which relaxed discipline in Syria—the police-character of their primary task and their immediate contact with the great capital—came into play also for the Egyptian troops; to which fell to be added, that the bad custom of allowing to the soldiers with the standards a married life or at any rate a substitute for it, and of filling up the troop from their camp-children, had for long been naturalised among the Macedonian soldiers of the Ptolemies, and soon prevailed also among the Romans, at least up to a certain degree. Accordingly, the Egyptian corps, in which the Occidentals served still more rarely than in the other armies of the East, and which was recruited in great part from the citizens and the camp of Alexandria, appears to have been among all the sections of the army the least esteemed; as indeed also the officers of this legion, as was already observed, were inferior in rank to those of the rest.
The properly military task of the Egyptian troops was closely connected with the measures for the elevation of Egyptian commerce. It will be convenient to take the two together, and to set forth in connection, in the first instance, the relations to the continental neighbours in the south, and then those to Arabia and India.
Aethiopia.
Egypt reaches on the south, as was already remarked, as far as the barrier which the last cataract, not far from Syene (Assouan), opposes to navigation. Beyond Syene begins the stock of the Kesch, as the Egyptians call them, or, as the Greeks translated it, the dark-coloured, the Aethiopians, probably akin to the Axomites to be afterwards mentioned, and, although perhaps sprung from the same root as the Egyptians, at any rate confronting them in historical development as a foreign people. Further to the south follow the Nahsiu of the Egyptians, that is, the Blacks, the Nubians of the Greek, the modern Negroes. The kings of Egypt had in better times extended their rule far into the interior, or at least emigrant Egyptians had established for themselves here dominions of their own; the written monuments of the Pharaonic government go as far as above the third cataract to Dongola, where Nabata (near Nûri) seems to have been the centre of their settlements; and considerably further up the stream, some six days’ journey to the north of Khartoum, near Shendy, in Sennaar, in the neighbourhood of the long forgotten Aethiopian town Meroe, are found groups of temples and pyramids, although destitute of writing. When Egypt became Roman, all this development of power was long a matter of the past; and beyond Syene there ruled an Aethiopian stock under queens, who regularly bore the name or the title Candace,[246] and resided in that once Egyptian Nabata in Dongola; a people at a low stage of civilisation, predominantly shepherds, in a position to bring into the field an army of 30,000, but equipped with shields of ox-hides, armed mostly not with swords, but with axes or lances and iron-mounted clubs, predatory neighbours, not a match for the Romans in combat. In the year 730 or 731 24, 23 B.C. these invaded the Roman territory—as they asserted, because the presidents of the nearest nomes had injured them—as the Romans thought, because the Egyptian troops were then to a large extent occupied in Arabia, and they hoped to be able to plunder with immunity. War with queen Candace.In reality they overcame the three cohorts who covered the frontier, and dragged away the inhabitants from the nearest Egyptian districts—Philae, Elephantine, Syene—as slaves, and the statues of the emperor, which they found there, as tokens of victory. But the governor, who just then took up the administration of the province, Gaius Petronius, speedily requited the attack; with 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry he not merely drove them out, but followed them along the Nile into their own land, defeated them emphatically at Pselchis (Dekkeh), and stormed their stronghold Premis (Ibrim), as well as the capital itself, which he destroyed. It is true that the queen, a brave woman, renewed the attack next year and attempted to storm Premis, where a Roman garrison had been left; but Petronius brought seasonable relief, and so the Aethiopian queen determined to send envoys and to sue for peace. The emperor not merely granted it, but gave orders to evacuate the subject territory, and rejected the proposal of his governor to make the vanquished tributary. This event, otherwise not important, is remarkable in so far as just then the definite resolution of the Roman government became apparent, to maintain absolutely the Nile valley as far as the river was navigable, but not at all to contemplate taking possession of the wide districts on the upper Nile. Only the tract from Syene, where under Augustus the frontier-troops were stationed, as far as Hiera Sycaminos (Maharraka), the so-called Twelve-mile-land (Δωδεκάσχοινος), while never organised as a nome and never viewed as a part of Egypt, was yet regarded as belonging to the empire; and at least under Domitian the posts were even advanced as far as Hiera Sycaminos.[247] On that footing substantially the matter remained. The Oriental expedition planned by Nero ([p. 61]) was certainly intended to embrace Aethiopia; but it did not go beyond the preliminary reconnoitring of the country by Roman officers as far as Meroe. The relations with the neighbours on the Egyptian southern frontier down to the middle of the third century must have been on the whole of a peaceful kind, although there were not wanting minor quarrels with that Candace and with her successors, who appear to have maintained their position for a considerable time, and subsequently perhaps with other tribes, that attained to ascendency beyond the imperial bounds.
The Blemyes.It was not till the empire was unhinged in the period of Valerian and Gallienus, that the neighbours broke over this boundary. We have already mentioned ([p. 250]) that the Blemyes settled in the mountains on the south-east frontier, formerly obeying the Aethiopians, a barbarous people of revolting savageness, who even centuries later had not abandoned human sacrifices, advanced at this epoch independently against Egypt, and by an understanding with the Palmyrenes occupied a good part of upper Egypt, and held it for a series of years. The vigorous emperor Probus drove them out; but the inroads once begun did not cease,[248] and the emperor Diocletian resolved to draw back the frontier. The narrow “Twelve-mile-land” demanded a strong garrison, and brought in little to the state. The Nubians, who roamed in the Libyan desert, and were constantly visiting in particular the great Oasis, agreed to give up their old abodes and to settle in this region, which was formally ceded to them; at the same time fixed annual payments were made to them as well as to their eastern neighbours the Blemyes, nominally in order to compensate them for guarding the frontier, in reality beyond doubt to buy off their plundering expeditions, which nevertheless of course did not cease. It was a retrograde step—the first, since Egypt became Roman.
Aethiopian commercial traffic.Of the mercantile intercourse on this frontier little is reported from antiquity. As the cataracts of the upper Nile closed the direct route by water, the traffic between the interior of Africa and the Egyptians, particularly the trade in ivory, was carried on in the Roman period more by way of the Abyssinian ports than along the Nile; but it was not wanting also in this direction.[249] The Aethiopians who dwelt in numbers beside the Egyptians on the island of Philae were evidently mostly merchants, and the border-peace that here prevailed must have contributed its part to the prosperity of the frontier-towns of upper Egypt and of Egyptian trade generally.
The Egyptian east coast and general commerce.The east coast of Egypt presented to the development of general traffic a problem difficult of solution. The thoroughly desolate and rocky shore was incapable of culture proper, and in ancient as in later times a desert.[250] On the other hand the two seas, eminently important for the development of culture in the ancient world, the Mediterranean and the Red or Indian, approach each other most closely at the two most northern extremities of the latter, the Persian and the Arabian gulfs; the former receives into it the Euphrates, which in the middle of its course comes near to the Mediterranean; the latter is only a few days’ march distant from the Nile, which flows into the same sea. Hence in ancient times the commercial intercourse between the East and the West took preponderantly either the direction along the Euphrates to the Syrian and Arabian coast, or it made its way from the east coast of Egypt to the Nile. The traffic routes from the Euphrates were older than those by way of the Nile; but the latter had the advantage of the stream being better for navigation and of the shorter land-transport; the getting rid of the latter by preparing an artificial water-route was in the case of the Euphrates excluded, in that of Egypt found in ancient as in modern times difficult doubtless, but not impossible. Accordingly nature itself prescribed to the land of Egypt to connect the east coast with the course of the Nile and the northern coast by land or water routes; and the beginnings of such structures go back to the time of those native rulers who first opened up Egypt to foreign countries and to traffic on a great scale. The sea route to India.Following in the traces apparently of older structures of the great rulers of Egypt, Sethi I. and Rhamses II., king Necho, the son of Psammetichus (610–594 B.C.) began the building of a canal, which, branching off from the Nile in the neighbourhood of Cairo, was to furnish a water-communication with the bitter lakes near Ismailia, and through these with the Red Sea, without being able, however, to complete the work. That in this he had in view not merely the control of the Arabian Gulf and the commercial traffic with the Arabians, but already brought within his horizon the Persian and the Indian seas, and the more remote East, is probable, for this reason, that the same ruler suggested the only circumnavigation of Africa executed in antiquity. Beyond doubt thus thought king Darius I., the lord of Persia as well as of Egypt; he completed the canal, but, as his memorial-stones found on the spot mention, he caused it to be filled up again, probably because his engineers feared that the water of the sea, admitted into the canal, would overflow the fields of Egypt.
The Egyptian eastern ports.The rivalry of the Lagids and the Seleucids, which dominated the policy of the post-Alexandrine period generally, was at the same time a contest between the Euphrates and the Nile. The former was in possession, the latter the pretender; and in the better time of the Lagids the peaceful offensive was pursued with great energy. Not only was that canal undertaken by Necho and Darius, now named the “river of Ptolemaeus,” opened for the first time to navigation by the second Ptolemy Philadelphus († 247 B.C.); but comprehensive harbour-structures were carried out at the points of the difficult east coast that were best fitted for the security of the ships and for the connection with the Nile. Above all, this was done at the mouth of the canal leading to the Nile, at the townships of Arsinoe, Cleopatris, Clysma, all three in the region of the present Suez. Further downward, besides several minor structures, arose the two important emporia, Myos Hormos, somewhat above the present Kosêr, and Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, nearly in the same latitude with Syene on the Nile as well as with the Arabian port Leuce Come, the former distant six or seven, the latter eleven days’ march from the town Coptos, near which the Nile bends farthest to the eastward, and connected with this chief emporium on the Nile by roads constructed across the desert and provided with large cisterns. The goods traffic of the time of the Ptolemies probably went less through the canal than by these land routes to Coptos.
Abyssinia.Beyond that Berenice, in the land of the Trogodytes, the Egypt proper of the Lagids did not extend. The settlements lying farther to the south, Ptolemais “for the chase” below Suâkim, and the southmost township of the Lagid kingdom, the subsequent Adulis, at that time perhaps named “Berenice the Golden” or “near Saba,” Zula not far from the present Massowah, by far the best harbour on all this coast, were not more than coast-forts and had no communication by land with Egypt. These remote settlements were beyond doubt either lost or voluntarily abandoned under the later Lagids, and at the epoch when the Roman rule began, the Trogodytic Berenice was on the coast, like Syene in the interior, the limit of the empire.