TERRITORIAL DIVISIONS OF ANCIENT EGYPT.
According to Dr. Wallis Budge, the ancient Egyptians called their land Bak or Baket, Ta-Mera and Khem or Kamt, also Ta-Nehat, “the land of the sycamore” and the land of “the eye of Horus.” It was divided into two parts: Upper Egypt, Ta-res or Ta-kema=“the southern land,” symbolized by the vulture; and Lower Egypt, Ta-Meh, Mah-Ti or Meh-Ta, literally, “North-land,” symbolized by the serpent. Two great ancient cities or capitals were respectively known as Annu Meht, “Annu of the North,” and Annu Qemat, “Annu of the South.” The kings of Egypt styled themselves Suten-Net, “King of the North and South” and Nebtaui, “lord of the two earths.” As such the king wore the double crown made up of the tesher or net, the red crown of Northern or Lower Egypt and the hetet or het, the white crown of Southern or Upper Egypt (The Nile, p. 27).
It will be shown further on that the high white and low red crowns were respectively worn by the king and the queen at a certain period of Egyptian history. It is well known that, in numerous pictorial representations, the Egyptian men are painted with red, but the women with white skins. The above facts show that there [pg 369] existed a curious association of red with the north and the male sex, and of white with the south and the female sex.[106]
It is a familiar fact that the Egyptian hieroglyph and determinative sign for town, city or village consisted of a circle with four divisions. The usual form of this sign, the phonetic value of which is nu or nut, is shown as fig. [60], 1, a. On a bas-relief preserved at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, I noted the variant 1, b. It is interesting to collate these signs with the cross-symbols (2) which express the sound of uu, un, and ur, and to note that the sign for a capital in Egypt contains a division into four=un or ur, and that the latter word is actually the familiar name of the famous centre in Babylonia where cities laid out in the form of a square and “four-god cities” existed, and the kings were termed “lords of the four regions” and “kings of Sumer and Akkad,” the two ancient divisions of the Babylonian state.
It thus appears doubly significant that, in Egyptian, the word ur signifies “great, great one” and is also the name of a god, which is expressed in hieroglyphic writing by the cross, a mouth and a seated god, the determinative for divinity. What is more, ur-u=chiefs, ur-t=the name of a crown and ur-t=those who rest, all of which words show that the Egyptian ur was associated with the idea of divinity, greatness, crowned chieftainship, repose and the cross-symbol which is incorporated in nut, the sign for capital or city.
The fact that the symbols for the two great divisions of ancient Egypt, the red crown of Northern or Lower Egypt, and the white crown of Southern or Upper Egypt, are found surmounting the sign nut (3), sufficiently shows that this symbol also stood for an extended capital, a state, and that both “lands” constituted at one time separate units or reproductions of the identical plan. Returning to the ancient capitals known as the “Annu of [pg 370] the North” and the “Annu of the South:” according to Dr. Wallis Budge the first occupied the site of Heliopolis and was identical with the city of On mentioned in Genesis (xli: 45). The Annu Qemat was Hermonthis, the modern Menth, Armant or Erment, situated on the west bank of the Nile a little to the south of the ruins of Thebes. It is noteworthy that the name for Thebes, given in the cuneiform inscriptions and Hebrew scriptures, No (Ezek. xxx:4) and No-am-on (Nahum iii:8), is in one case the simple inversion of On, the Hebrew name of Heliopolis, the Northern Annu, while in the second instance the name of Thebes incorporates both forms.
The allusion to the “square of the city of Edfu,” and to buildings laid out on a square ground-plan, contained in inscriptions cited by Brugsch,[107] also furnishes an indication, which can doubtless be multiplied, that, as in Babylonia, Egyptian cities were sometimes built in the form of a square. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, the square (slightly elongated) is employed to express the consonant p. The sign appears to have been cryptic and to have constituted the symbol of the god Ptah, “The Opener,” considered as the most ancient of Egyptian gods. According to Dr. Wallis Budge, “the sign is the picture of a door made up of a number of boards fastened together by three cross-pieces at the back, and there can be no doubt that the word for door was connected with the verb pth=to open, and that it was pronounced something like ptah (compare the Hebrew pethah). The sound of the first letter of ptah being p, the phonetic value of the door became p” (First steps in Egyptian, p. 5). To the above I add the observation that the plain square or outline of the door, without indications of boards and cross-pieces, is usually employed in the published texts. The association of the square, representing a door with three cross-beams, and expressing the sound ptah is particularly interesting when connected with the word for earth or land=ta, and the method of expressing the word universe=taui, by the threefold repetition of the sign ta, which resembles a cross-beam (fig. [60], 5). An interesting association of the square with earth or land is seen in one of the signs for province or nome=sept or hesp, which consists of a series of squares, evidently representing theoretical territorial divisions and possibly a system of canal-irrigation. Other suggestive signs for sep consist of a circle containing two [pg 371] strokes; a circle enclosing four dots and a double circle (fig. [60], 4). It is interesting to find an isosceles triangle employed, with a slight addition, to express the word ta=land, as well as sept=province (fig. [60], 4 and 5), and to find on analyzing the circular sign for nut=sky, which is likewise the determinative for city, that it contains four triangles. These converge towards the centre, as do the triangular sides of the square pyramid, and thus the sign nut and the pyramid clearly appear to express a whole divided into four parts, the square form being connected with earth and the circle with the sky.
Figure 60.