The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

By

The Rev. A. H. Sayce

Professor of Assyriology at Oxford

London

Rivington, Percical & Co.

1895

Contents

[pg vii]

Preface

A few words of preface are needful to justify the addition of another contribution to the over-abundant mass of literature of which Egypt is the subject. It is intended to supplement the books already in the hands of tourists and students, and to put before them just that information which either is not readily accessible or else forms part of larger and cumbrous works. The travels of Herodotos in Egypt are followed for the first time in the light of recent discoveries, and the history of the intercourse between the Egyptians and the Jews is brought down to the age of the Roman Empire. As the ordinary histories of Egypt used by travellers end with the extinction of the native Pharaohs, I have further given a sketch of the Ptolemaic period. I have moreover specially noted the results of the recent excavations and discoveries made by the Egypt [pg viii] Exploration Fund and by Professor Flinders Petrie, at all events where they bear upon the subject-matter of the book. Those who have not the publications of the Fund or of Professor Petrie, or who do not care to carry them into Egypt, will, I believe, be glad to have the essence of them thus extracted in a convenient shape. Lastly, in the Appendices I have put together information which the visitor to the Nile often wishes to obtain, but which he can find in none of his guide-books. The Appendix on the nomes embodies the results of the latest researches, and the list will therefore be found to differ here and there from the lists which have been published elsewhere. Those who desire the assistance of maps should procure the very handy and complete Atlas of Ancient Egypt, published by the Egypt Exploration Fund (price 3s. 6d.). It makes the addition of maps to this or any future work on Ancient Egypt superfluous.

Discoveries follow so thickly one upon the other in these days of active exploration that [pg ix] it is impossible for an author to keep pace with them. Since my manuscript was ready for the press Dr. Naville, on behalf of the Egypt Exploration Fund, has practically cleared the magnificent temple of Queen Hatshepsu at Dêr el-Bâhari, and has discovered beneath it the unfinished sepulchre in which the queen fondly hoped that her body would be laid; Professor Petrie has excavated in the desert behind Zawêdeh and opposite Qoft the tombs of barbarous tribes, probably of Libyan origin, who settled in the valley of the Nile between the fall of the sixth and the rise of the eleventh dynasty; Mr. de Morgan has disinterred more jewellery of exquisite workmanship from the tombs of the princesses of the twelfth dynasty at Dahshûr; and Dr. Botti has discovered the site of the Serapeum at Alexandria, thus obtaining for the first time a point of importance for determining the topography of the ancient city.

The people whose remains have been found by Professor Petrie buried their dead in open [pg x] situated in the central court. But his most interesting discovery is that of long subterranean passages, once faced with masonry, and furnished with niches for lamps, where the mysteries of Serapis were celebrated. At the entrance of one of them pious visitors to the shrine have scratched their vows on the wall of rock. Those who are interested in the discovery should consult Dr. Botti's memoir on L'Acropole d'Alexandrie et le Sérapeum, presented to the Archæological Society of Alexandria, 17th August 1895.

Two or three other recent discoveries may also find mention here. A Babylonian seal-cylinder now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York has at last given me a clue to the native home of the Hyksos leaders. This was in the mountains of Elam, on the eastern frontier of Chaldæa. It was from these mountains that the Kassi descended upon Babylonia and founded a dynasty there which lasted for nearly 600 years, and the same movement which brought them into Babylonia may have [pg xi] sent other bands of them across Western Asia into Egypt. At all events, the inscription upon the seal shows that it belonged to a certain Uzi-Sutakh, “the son of the Kassite,” and “the servant of Burna-buryas,” who was the Kassite king of Babylonia in the age of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence. As the name of Sutakh is preceded by the determinative of divinity, it is clear that we have in it the name of the Hyksos deity Sutekh.

In a hieroglyphic stela lately discovered at Saqqârah, and now in the Gizeh Museum, we read of an earlier parallel to the Tyrian Camp at Memphis seen by Herodotos. We learn from the stela that, in the time of King Ai, in the closing days of the eighteenth dynasty, there was already a similar “Camp” or quarter at Memphis which was assigned to the Hittites. The inscription is further interesting as showing that the authority of Ai was acknowledged at Memphis, the capital of Northern Egypt, as well as in the Thebaid.

Lastly, Professor Hommel seems to have [pg xii] found the name of the Zakkur or Zakkal, the kinsfolk and associates of the Philistines, in a broken cuneiform text which relates to one of the Kassite kings of Babylonia not long before the epoch of Khu-n-Aten. Here mention is made not only of the city of Arka in Phœnicia, but also of the city of Zaqqalû. In Zaqqalû we must recognise the Zakkur of Egyptian history. I may add that Khar or Khal, the name given by the Egyptians to the southern portion of Palestine, is identified by Professor Maspero with the Horites of the Old Testament.

By way of conclusion, I have only to say that those who wish to read a detailed account of the manner in which the great colossus of Ramses ii. at Memphis was raised and its companion statue disinterred must refer to the Paper published by Major Arthur H. Bagnold himself in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology for June 1888.

A. H. Sayce.

October 1895.

Chapter I. The Patriarchal Age.

“Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there.” When he entered the country the civilisation and monarchy of Egypt were already very old. The pyramids had been built hundreds of years before, and the origin of the Sphinx was already a mystery. Even the great obelisk of Heliopolis, which is still the object of an afternoon drive to the tourist at Cairo, had long been standing in front of the temple of the Sun-god.

The monuments of Babylonia enable us to fix the age to which Abraham belongs. Arioch of Ellasar has left memorials of himself on the bricks of Chaldæa, and we now know when he and his Elamite allies were driven out of Babylonia and the [pg 002] Babylonian states were united into a single monarchy. This was 2350 b.c.

The united monarchy of Egypt went back to a far earlier date. Menes, its founder, had been king of This (or Girgeh) in Upper Egypt, and starting from his ancestral dominions had succeeded in bringing all Egypt under his rule. But the memory of an earlier time, when the valley of the Nile was divided into two separate sovereignties, survived to the latest age of the monarchy. Up to the last the Pharaohs of Egypt called themselves “kings of the two lands,” and wore on their heads the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. The crown of Upper Egypt was a tiara of white linen, that of Lower Egypt a throne-like head-dress of red. The double crown was a symbol of the imperial power.

To Menes is ascribed the building of Memphis, the capital of the united kingdom. He is said to have raised the great dyke which Linant de Bellefonds identifies with that of Kosheish near Kafr el-Ayyât, and thereby to have diverted the Nile from its ancient channel under the Libyan plain. On the ground that he thus added to the western bank of the river his new capital was erected.

Memphis is the Greek form of the old Egyptian Men-nefer or “Good Place.” The final r was dropped in Egyptian pronunciation at an early date, and [pg 003] thus arose the Hebrew forms of the name, Moph and Noph, which we find in the Old Testament,[1] while “Memphis” itself—Mimpi in the cuneiform inscriptions of Assyria—has the same origin. Another name by which it went in old Egyptian times was Anbu-hez, “the white wall,” from the great wall of brick, covered with white stucco, which surrounded it, and of which traces still remain on the northern side of the old site. Here a fragment of the ancient fortification still rises above the mounds of the city; the wall is many feet thick, and the sun-dried bricks of which it is formed are bonded together with the stems of palms.

In the midst of the mounds is a large and deep depression, which is filled with water during the greater part of the year. It marks the site of the sacred lake, which was attached to every Egyptian temple, and in which the priests bathed themselves and washed the vessels of the sanctuary. Here, not long ago, lay the huge colossus of limestone which represented Ramses ii. of the nineteenth dynasty, and had been presented by the Egyptian Khedive to the British Government. But it was too heavy and unwieldy for modern engineers to carry across the sea, and it was therefore left lying with its face prone in the mud and water of the ancient lake, a prey to [pg 004] the first comer who needed a quarry of stone. It was not until after the English occupation of Egypt that it was lifted out of its ignoble position by Major Bagnold and placed securely in a wooden shed. While it was being raised another colossus of the same Pharaoh, of smaller size but of better workmanship, was discovered, and lifted beyond the reach of the inundation.

The two statues once stood before the temple of the god Ptah, whom the Greeks identified with their own deity Hephæstos, for no better reason than the similarity of name. The temple of Ptah was coeval with the city of Memphis itself. When Menes founded Memphis, he founded the temple at the same time. It was the centre and glory of the city, which was placed under the protection of its god. Pharaoh after Pharaoh adorned and enlarged it, and its priests formed one of the most powerful organisations in the kingdom.

The temple of Ptah, the Creator, gave to Memphis its sacred name. This was Hâ-ka-Ptah, “the house of the double (or spiritual appearance) of Ptah,” in which Dr. Brugsch sees the original of the Greek Aigyptos.

But the glories of the temple of Ptah have long since passed away. The worship of its god ceased for ever when Theodosius, the Roman Emperor, [pg 005] closed its gates, and forbade any other religion save the Christian to be henceforth publicly professed in the empire. Soon afterwards came the Mohammedan conquest of Egypt. Memphis was deserted; and the sculptured stones of the ancient shrine served to build the palaces and mosques of the new lords of the country. Fostât and Cairo were built out of the spoils of the temple of Ptah. But the work of destruction took long to accomplish. As late as the twelfth century, the Arabic writer 'Abd el-Latîf describes the marvellous relics of the past which still existed on the site of Memphis. Colossal statues, the bases of gigantic columns, a chapel formed of a single block of stone and called “the green chamber”—such were some of the wonders of ancient art which the traveller was forced to admire.

The history of Egypt, as we have seen, begins with the record of an engineering feat of the highest magnitude. It is a fitting commencement for the history of a country which has been wrested by man from the waters of the Nile, and whose existence even now is dependent on the successful efforts of the engineer. Beyond this single record, the history of Menes and his immediate successors is virtually a blank. No dated monuments of the first dynasty have as yet been discovered. It may be, as many Egyptologists think, that the Sphinx is older than [pg 006] Menes himself; but if so, that strange image, carved out of a rock which may once have jutted into the stream of the Nile, still keeps the mystery of its origin locked up in its breast. We know that it was already there in the days of Khephrên of the fourth dynasty; but beyond that we know nothing.

Of the second dynasty a dated record still survives. Almost the first gift received by the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford was the lintel-stone of an ancient Egyptian tomb, brought from Saqqârah, the necropolis of Memphis, by Dr. Greaves at the end of the seventeenth century. When, more than a century later, the hieroglyphics upon it came to be read, it was found that it had belonged to the sepulchre of a certain Sheri who had been the “prophet” of the two Pharaohs Send and Per-ab-sen. Of Per-ab-sen no other record remains, but the name of Send had long been known as that of a king of the second dynasty.

The rest of Sheri's tomb, so far as it has been preserved, is now in the Gizeh Museum. Years after the inscription on the fragment at Oxford had been deciphered, the hinder portion of the tomb was discovered by Mariette. Like the lintel-stone in the Ashmolean Museum, it is adorned with sculptures and hieroglyphics. Already, we learn from it, the hieroglyphic system of writing was complete, the [pg 007] characters being used not only to denote ideas and express syllables, but alphabetically as well. The name of Send himself is spelt in the letters of the alphabet. The art of the monument, though not equal to that which prevailed a few generations later, is already advanced, while the texts show that the religion and organisation of the empire were already old. In the age of the second dynasty, at all events, we are far removed from the beginnings of Egyptian civilisation.

With Snefru, the first king of the fourth dynasty, or, according to another reckoning, the last king of the third, we enter upon the monumental history of Egypt. Snefru's monuments are to be found, not only in Egypt, but also in the deserts of Sinai. There the mines of copper and malachite were worked for him, and an Egyptian garrison kept guard upon the Bedouin tribes. In Egypt, as has now been definitely proved by Professor Petrie's excavations, he built the pyramid of Medûm, one of the largest and most striking of the pyramids. Around it were ranged the tombs of his nobles and priests, from which have come some of the most beautiful works of art in the Gizeh Museum.

The painted limestone statues of Ra-nefer and his wife Nefert, for instance, are among the finest existing specimens of ancient Egyptian workmanship. [pg 008] They are clearly life-like portraits, executed with a delicacy and finish which might well excite the envy of a modern artist. The character, and even the antecedents of the husband and wife, breathe through their features. While in the one we can see the strong will and solid common-sense of the self-made man, in the other can be traced the culture and refinement of a royal princess.

The pyramids of Gizeh are the imperishable record of the fourth dynasty. Khufu, Khaf-Ra and Men-ka-Ra, the Kheops, Khephrên and Mykerinos of Herodotos, were the builders of the three vast sepulchres which, by their size and nearness to Cairo, have so long been an object of pilgrimage to the traveller. The huge granite blocks of the Great Pyramid of Khufu have been cut and fitted together with a marvellous exactitude. Professor Petrie found that the joints of the casing-stones, with an area of some thirty-five square feet each, were not only worked with an accuracy equal to that of the modern optician, but were even cemented throughout. “Though the stones were brought as close as 1/500 inch, or, in fact, into contact, and the mean opening of the joint was 1/50 inch, yet the builders managed to fill the joint with cement, despite the great area of it and the weight of the stone to be moved—some sixteen tons. To merely place such [pg 009] stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work; but to do so with cement in the joints seems almost impossible.”[2]

Professor Petrie believes that the stones were cut with tubular drills fitted with jewel points—a mode of cutting stone which it was left to the nineteenth century to re-discover. The lines marked upon the stone by the drills can still be observed, and there is evidence that not only the tool but the stone also was rotated. The great pressure needed for driving the drills and saws with the requisite rapidity through the blocks of granite and diorite is indeed surprising. It brings before us the high mechanical knowledge attained by the Egyptians in the fourth millennium before our era even more forcibly than the heights to which the blocks were raised. The machinery, however, with which this latter work was effected is still unknown.

The sculptured and painted walls of the tombs which surround the pyramids of Gizeh tell us something about the life and civilisation of the period. The government was a highly organised bureaucracy, under a king who was already regarded as the representative of the Sun-god upon earth. The land was inhabited by an industrious people, mainly agricultural, who lived in peace and plenty. Arts [pg 010] and crafts of all kinds were cultivated, including that of making glass. The art of the sculptor had reached a high perfection. One of the most striking statues in the world is that of Khaf-Ra seated on his imperial throne, which is now in the Museum of Gizeh. The figure of the king is more than life-size; above his head the imperial hawk stretches forth its wings, and on the king's face, though the features bear the unmistakable impress of a portrait, there rests an aspect of divine calm. And yet this statue, with its living portraiture and exquisite finish, is carved out of a dioritic rock, the hardest of hard stone.

The fourth dynasty was peaceably succeeded by the fifth and the sixth. Culture and cultivation made yet further progress, and the art of the painter and sculptor reached its climax. Those whose knowledge of Egyptian art is derived from the museums of Europe have little idea of the perfection which it attained at this remote period. The hard and crystallised art of later ages differed essentially from that of the early dynasties. The wooden figure of the 'Sheikh el-Beled'—the sleek and well-to-do farmer, who gazes complacently on his fertile fields and well-stocked farm—is one of the noblest works of human genius. And yet it belongs to the age of the fifth or the sixth dynasty, like the pictures in low relief, resembling exquisite embroidery on stone, [pg 011] which cover the walls of the tombs of Ti and Ptah-hotep at Saqqârah.

The first six dynasties constitute what Egyptologists call the Old Empire. They ended with a queen, Nit-aqer (the Greek Nitôkris), and Egypt passed under sudden eclipse. For several centuries it lies concealed from the eye of history. A few royal names alone are preserved; other records there are as yet none. What befell the country and its rulers we do not know. Whether it was foreign invasion or civil war, or the internal decay of the government, certain it is that disaster overshadowed for a while the valley of the Nile. It may be that the barbarian tribes, whose tombs Professor Petrie has lately discovered in the desert opposite Qoft, and whom he believes to have been of Libyan origin, were the cause. With the tenth dynasty light begins again to dawn. Mr. Griffith has shown that some at least of the tombs cut out of the cliffs behind Siût belonged to that era, and that Ka-meri-Ra, whose name appears in one of them, was a king of the tenth dynasty. The fragmentary inscription, which can still be traced on the walls of the tomb, seems to allude to the successful suppression of a civil war.

The eleventh dynasty arose at Thebes, of which its founders were the hereditary chiefs. It introduces us to the so-called Middle Empire. But the Egypt [pg 012] of the Middle Empire was no longer the Egypt of the Old Empire. The age of the great pyramid-builders was past, and the tomb carved in the rock begins to take the place of the pyramid of the earlier age. Memphis has ceased to be the capital of the country; the centre of power has been transferred to Thebes and the south. The art which flourished at Memphis has been superseded by the art with which our museums have made us familiar. With the transfer of the government, moreover, from north to south, Egyptian religion has undergone a change. Ptah of Memphis and Ra of Heliopolis have had to yield to Amon, the god of Thebes. The god of the house of the new Pharaohs now takes his place at the head of the pantheon, and the older gods of the north fall more and more into the background.

The Egypt of the Middle Empire was divided among a number of great princes, who had received their power and property by inheritance, and resembled the great lords of the feudal age. The Pharaoh at first was little more than the chief among his peers. But when the sceptre passed into the vigorous hands of the kings of the twelfth dynasty, the influence and authority of the feudal princes was more and more encroached upon. A firm government at home and successful campaigns abroad restored the supreme rule of the Pharaoh and made [pg 013] him, perhaps more than had ever been the case before, a divinely-instituted autocrat.

The wars of the twelfth dynasty extended the Egyptian domination far to the south. The military organisation of the Middle Empire was indeed its most striking point of contrast to the Old Empire. The Egypt of the first six dynasties had been self-contained and pacific. A few raids were made from time to time against the negroes south of the First Cataract, but only for the sake of obtaining slaves. The idea of extending Egyptian power beyond the natural boundaries of Egypt has as yet never presented itself. The Pharaohs of the Old Empire did not need an army, and accordingly did not possess one. But with the Middle Empire all this was changed. Egypt ceases to be isolated: its history will be henceforth part of the history of the world. Foreign wars, however, and the organisation of a strong government at home, did not absorb the whole energies of the court. Temples and obelisks were erected, art was patronised, and the creation of the Fayyûm, whereby a large tract of fertile land was won for Egypt, not only proved the high engineering skill of the age of the twelfth dynasty, but constituted a solid claim for gratitude to its creator, Amon-em-hat iii., on the part of all succeeding generations.

The thirteenth dynasty followed in the footsteps of [pg 014] its predecessor. We possess the names of more than one hundred and fifty kings who belonged to it, and their monuments were scattered from one end of Egypt to the other. The fourteenth dynasty ended in disaster. Egypt was invaded by Asiatic hordes, and the line of native Pharaohs was for a time extinct.

The invaders were called by Manetho, the Egyptian historian, the Hyksos or Shepherd Princes: on the monuments they are known as the Aamu or “Asiatics.” At first, we are told, their progress was marked by massacre and destruction. The temples were profaned and overthrown, the cities burned with fire. But after a while the higher culture of the conquered people overcame the conquerors. A king arose among the invaders who soon adopted the prerogatives and state of the Pharaohs. The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth dynasties were Hyksos.

Recent discoveries have proved that at one time the dominion of the Hyksos extended, if not to the first cataract, at all events far to the south of Thebes. Their monuments have been found at Gebelên and El-Kab. Gradually, however, the native princes recovered their power in Upper Egypt. While the seventeenth Hyksos dynasty was reigning at Zoan, or Tanis, in the north, a seventeenth Egyptian dynasty was ruling at Thebes. But the princes of Thebes did not as yet venture to claim the imperial [pg 015] title. They still acknowledged the supremacy of the foreign Pharaoh.

The war of independence broke out in the reign of the Hyksos king Apopi. According to the Egyptian legend, Apopi had sent messengers to the prince of Thebes, bidding him worship none other god than Baal-Sutekh, the Hyksos divinity. But Amon-Ra of Thebes avenged the dishonour that had been done him, and stirred up his adorers to successful revolt. For five generations the war went on, and ended with the complete expulsion of the stranger. Southern Egypt first recovered its independence, then Memphis fell, and finally the Hyksos conquerors were driven out of Zoan, their capital, and confined to the fortress of Avaris, on the confines of Asia. But even here they were not safe from the avenging hand of the Egyptian. Ahmes I., the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, drove them from their last refuge and pursued them into Palestine.

The land which had sent forth its hordes to conquer Egypt was now in turn to be conquered by the Egyptians. The war was carried into Asia, and the struggle for independence became a struggle for empire. Under the Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty, Egypt, for the first time in its history, became a great military state. Army after army [pg 016] poured out of the gates of Thebes, and brought back to it the spoils of the known world. Ethiopia and Syria alike felt the tread of the Egyptian armies, and had alike to bow the neck to Egyptian rule. Canaan became an Egyptian province, Egyptian garrisons were established in the far north on the frontiers of the Hittite tribes, and the boundaries of the Pharaoh's empire were pushed to the banks of the Euphrates.

It is probable that Abraham did not enter Egypt until after the Hyksos conquest. But before the rise of the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian chronology is uncertain. We have to reckon it by dynasties rather than by years. According to Manetho, the Old Empire lasted 1478 years, and a considerable interval must be allowed for the troublous times which intervened between its fall and the beginning of the Middle Empire. We learn from the Turin papyrus—a list of the Egyptian kings and dynasties compiled in the time of Ramses ii., but now, alas! in tattered fragments—that the tenth dynasty lasted 355 years and 10 days, the eleventh dynasty 243 years. The duration of the twelfth dynasty is known from the monuments (165 years 2 months), that of the thirteenth, with its more than one hundred and fifty kings, cannot have been short. How long the Hyksos rule endured it is difficult to say. Africanus, [pg 017] quoting from Manetho, as Professor Erman has shown, makes it 953 years, with which the fragment quoted by Josephus from the Egyptian historian also agrees. In this case the Hyksos conquest of Egypt would have taken place about 2550 b.c.

Unfortunately the original work of Manetho is lost, and we are dependent for our knowledge of it on later writers, most of whom sought to harmonise its chronology with that of the Septuagint. When we further remember the corruptions undergone by numerical figures in passing through the hands of the copyists, it is clear that we cannot place implicit confidence in the Manethonian numbers as they have come down to us. Indeed, the writers who have recorded them do not always agree together, and we find the names of kings arbitrarily omitted or the length of their reigns shortened in order to force the chronology into agreement with that of the author. The twelfth dynasty reigned 134 years according to Eusebius, 160 years according to Africanus; its real duration was 165 years, 2 months, and 12 days.

With the help of certain astronomical data furnished by the monuments, Dr. Mahler, the Viennese astronomer, has succeeded in determining the exact date of the reigns of the two most famous monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, [pg 018] Thothmes iii. and Ramses ii. Thothmes iii. reigned from the 20th of March b.c. 1503 to the 14th of February b.c. 1449, while the reign of Ramses ii. lasted from b.c. 1348 to b.c. 1281. The date of Thothmes iii. enables us to fix the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty about b.c. 1570.

The dynasties of Manetho were successive and not contemporaneous. This fact was one of the main results of the excavations and discoveries of Mariette Pasha. The old attempts to form artificial schemes of chronology—which, however, satisfied no one but their authors—upon the supposition that some of the dynasties reigned together are now discredited for ever. Every fresh discovery made in Egypt, which adds to our knowledge of ancient Egyptian history, makes the fact still more certain. There were epochs, indeed, when more than one line of kings claimed sway in the valley of the Nile, but when such was the case, Manetho selected what he or his authorities considered the sole legitimate dynasty, and disregarded every other. Of the two rival twenty-first dynasties which the monuments have brought to light, the lists of Manetho recognise but one, and the Assyrian rule in Egypt at a subsequent date is ignored in favour of the princes of Sais who were reigning at the same time.

If, then, any reliance is to be placed on the length [pg 019] of time ascribed to the Hyksos dominion in the valley of the Nile, and if we are still to hold to the old belief of Christendom and see in the Hebrew wanderer into Egypt the Abram who contended against Chedor-laomer and the subject kings of Babylonia, it would have been about two centuries after the settlement of the Asiatic conquerors in the Delta that Abraham and Sarah arrived at their court. The court was doubtless held at Zoan, the modern Sân. Here was the Hyksos capital, and its proximity to the Asiatic frontier of Egypt made it easy of access to a traveller from Palestine. We are told in the Book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt; and it may be that the building here referred to was that which caused Zoan to become the seat of the Hyksos power.

Asiatic migration into Egypt was no new thing. On the walls of one of the tombs of Beni-Hassan there is pictured the arrival of thirty-seven Aamu or Asiatics “of Shu,” in the sixth year of Usertesen ii. of the twelfth dynasty. Under the conduct of their chief, Ab-sha, they came from the mountains of the desert, bringing with them gazelles as well as kohl for the ladies of the court. Four women in long bright-coloured robes walk between groups of bearded men, and two children are carried in a pannier on a donkey's back. The men are armed with bows, [pg 020] their feet are shod with sandals, and they wear the vari-coloured garments for which the people of Phœnicia were afterwards famed.

After the Hyksos conquest Asiatic migration must naturally have largely increased. Between northern Egypt and Palestine there must have been a constant passage to and fro. The rulers of the land of the Nile were now themselves of Asiatic extraction, and it may be that the language of Palestine was spoken in the court of the Pharaoh. At all events, the emigrant from Canaan no longer found himself an alien and a stranger in “the land of Ham.” His own kin were now supreme there, and a welcome was assured to him whenever he might choose to come. The subject population tilled their fields for the benefit of their foreign lords, and the benefit was shared by the inhabitants of Canaan. In case of famine, Palestine could now look to the never-failing soil of Egypt for its supply of corn.

If, therefore, Abraham lived in the age when northern Egypt was subject to the rule of the Hyksos Pharaohs, nothing was more natural than for him, an Asiatic emigrant into Canaan, to wander into Egypt when the corn of Palestine had failed. He would but be following in the wake of that larger Asiatic migration which led to the rise of the Hyksos dynasties themselves.

There is, however, a statement connected with his residence at the court of the Pharaoh which does not seem compatible with the evidence of the monuments. We are told that among the gifts showered upon him by the king were not only sheep and oxen and asses, but camels as well. The camel was the constant companion of the Asiatic nomad. As far back as we can trace the history of the Bedouin, he has been accompanied by the animal which the old Sumerian population of Babylonia called the beast which came from the Persian Gulf. Indeed, it would appear that to the Bedouin belongs the credit of taming the camel, in so far as it has been tamed at all. But to the Egyptians it was practically unknown. Neither in the hieroglyphics, nor on the sculptured and painted walls of the temples and tombs, do we anywhere find it represented. The earliest mention of it yet met with in an Egyptian document is in a papyrus of the age of the Exodus, and there it bears the Semitic name of kamail, the Hebrew gamal.[3] Naturalists have shown that it was not introduced into the northern coast of Africa until after the beginning of the Christian era.

Nevertheless it does not follow that because the camel was never used in Egypt by the natives of the country, it was not at times brought there by [pg 022] nomad visitors from Arabia and Palestine. It is difficult to conceive of an Arab family on the march without a train of camels. And that camels actually found their way into the valley of the Nile has been proved by excavation. When Hekekyan Bey, in 1851-54, was sinking shafts in the Nile mud at Memphis for the Geological Society of London, he found, among other animal remains, the bones of dromedaries.[4]

The name of the Pharaoh visited by Abraham is not told to us. As elsewhere in Genesis, the king of Egypt is referred to only by his official title. This title of “Pharaoh” was one which went back to the early days of the monarchy. It represents the Egyptian Per-âa, or “Great House,” and is of repeated occurrence in the inscriptions. All power and government emanated from the royal palace, and accordingly, just as we speak of the “Sublime Porte” or “Lofty Gate” when we mean the Sultan of Turkey, so the Egyptians spoke of their own sovereign as the Pharaoh or “Great House.” To this day the king of Japan is called the Mi-kado, or “Lofty Gate.”

That the Hyksos princes should have assumed the title of their predecessors on the throne of Egypt [pg 023] is not surprising. The monuments have shown us how thoroughly Egyptianised they soon became. The court of the Hyksos Pharaoh differed but little, if at all, from that of the native Pharaoh. The invaders rapidly adopted the culture of the conquered people, and with it their manners, customs, and even language. The most famous mathematical treatise which Egypt has bequeathed to us was written for a Hyksos king. It may be that the old language of Asia was retained, at all events for a time, by the side of the language of the subject population; but if so, its position must have been like that of Turkish by the side of Arabic in Egypt during the reign of Mohammed Ali. For several centuries the Hyksos could be described as Egyptians, and the dynasties of the Hyksos Pharaohs are counted by the Egyptian historian among the legitimate dynasties of his country.

It was only in the matter of religion that the Hyksos court kept itself distinct from its native subjects. The supreme god of the Hyksos princes was Sutekh, in whom we must see a form of the Semitic Baal. As has already been stated, Egyptian legend ascribed the origin of the war of independence to a demand on the part of the Hyksos Pharaoh Apopi that the prince and the god of Thebes should acknowledge the supremacy of the [pg 024] Hyksos deity. But even in the matter of religion the Hyksos princes could not help submitting to the influence of the old Egyptian civilisation. Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis, was identified with Sutekh, and even Apopi added to his name the title of Ra, and so claimed to be an incarnation of the Egyptian sun-god, like the native Pharaohs who had gone before him.

When next we hear of Egypt in the Old Testament, it is when Israel is about to become a nation. Joseph was sold by his brethren to merchants from Arabia, who carried him into Egypt. There he became the slave of Potiphar, “the eunuch of Pharaoh and chief of the executioners,” or royal body-guard. The name of Potiphar, like that of Potipherah, the priest of On, corresponds with the Egyptian Pa-tu-pa-Ra, “the Gift of the Sun-god.” It has been asserted by Egyptologists that names of this description are not older than the age of the twenty-second dynasty, to which Shishak, the contemporary of Rehoboam, belonged; but because no similar name of an earlier date has hitherto been found, it does not follow that such do not exist. As long as our materials are imperfect, we cannot draw positive conclusions merely from an absence of evidence.

That Potiphar should have been an eunuch and yet been married seems a greater obstacle to our [pg 025] acceptance of the story. This, however, it need not be. Eunuchs in the modern East, who have risen to positions of power and importance, have possessed their harems like other men. In ancient Babylonia it was only the service of religion which the eunuch was forbidden to enter. Such was doubtless the case in Egypt also.

Egyptian research has brought to light a curious parallel to the history of Joseph and Potiphar's wife. It is found in one of the many tales, the equivalents of the modern novel, in which the ancient Egyptians delighted. The tale, which is usually known as that of “The Two Brothers,” was written by the scribe Enna for Seti ii. of the nineteenth dynasty when he was still crown-prince, and it embodies the folk-lore of his native land. Enna lived under Meneptah, the probable Pharaoh of the Exodus, and his work was thus contemporaneous with the events which brought about the release of the Israelites from their “house of bondage.” How old the stories may be upon which it is based it is impossible for us to tell.

Here is Professor Erman's translation of the commencement of the tale:—

“Once upon a time there were two brothers, born of one mother and of one father; the elder was called Anup, the younger Bata. Now Anup possessed a house and had a wife, whilst his younger [pg 026] brother lived with him as a son. He it was who wove (?) for him, and drove his cattle to the fields, who ploughed and reaped; he it was who directed all the business of the farm for him. The younger brother was a good (farmer); the like of whom was not to be found throughout the country.” One day Anup sent Bata from the field to the house to fetch seed-corn. “And he sent his younger brother,[5] and said to him: Hasten and bring me seed-corn from the village. And his younger brother found the wife of his elder brother occupied in combing her hair. And he said to her: Rise up, give me seed-corn that I may return to the field, for thus has my elder brother enjoined me, to return without delaying. The woman said to him: Go in, open the chest, that thou mayst take what thine heart desires, for otherwise my locks will fall to the ground. And the youth went within into the stable, and took thereout a large vessel, for it was his will to carry out much seed-corn. And he loaded himself with wheat and dhurra and went out with it. Then she said to him: How great is the burden in thy arms? He said to her: Two measures of dhurra and three measures of wheat make together five measures which rest on my arms. Thus he spake to her. But she spake to [pg 027] the youth and said: How great is thy strength! Well have I remarked thy power many a time. And her heart knew him.... And she stood up and laid hold of him and said unto him: Come let us celebrate an hour's repose; the most beautiful things shall be thy portion, for I will prepare for thee festal garments. Then was the youth like unto the panther of the south for rage on account of the wicked word which she had spoken to him. But she was afraid beyond all measure. And he spoke to her and said: Thou, oh woman, hast been like a mother to me and thy husband like a father, for he is older than I, so that he might have been my begetter. Wherefore this great sin that thou hast spoken unto me? Say it not to me another time, then will I this time not tell it, and no word of it shall come out of my mouth to any man at all. And he loaded himself with his burden and went out into the field. And he went to his elder brother, and they completed their day's work. And when it was evening, the elder brother returned home to his house. And his younger brother followed behind his oxen, having laden himself with all the good things of the field, and he drove his oxen before him to bring them to the stable. And behold the wife of his elder brother was afraid because of the word which she had spoken, and she took a jar of fat [pg 028] and was like to one to whom an evil-doer had offered violence, since she wished to say to her husband: Thy younger brother has offered me violence. And her husband returned home at evening, according to his daily custom, and found his wife lying stretched out and suffering from injury. She poured no water over his hands, as was her custom; she had not lighted the lights for him, so that his house was in darkness, and she lay there ill. And her husband said to her: Who has had to do with thee? Lift thyself up! She said to him: No one has had to do with me except thy younger brother, since when he came to take seed-corn for thee, he found me sitting alone and said to me, ‘Come, let us make merry an hour and repose: let down thy hair!’ Thus he spake to me; but I did not listen to him (but said), ‘See! am I not thy mother, and is not thy elder brother like a father to thee?’ Thus I spoke to him, but he did not hearken to my speech, but used force with me that I might not tell thee. Now if thou allow him to live I will kill myself.

“Then the elder brother began to rage like a panther: he sharpened his knife and took it in his hand. And the elder brother stood behind the door of the stable in order to kill the youth when he came back in the evening to bring the oxen into the stable. Now when the sun was setting and he had laden [pg 029] himself with all the good things of the field, according to his custom, he returned (to the house). And his cow that first entered the stable said to him: Beware! there stands thy elder brother before thee with his knife in order to kill thee; run away from him! So he heard what the first cow said. Then the second entered and spake likewise. He looked under the door of the stable, and saw the feet of his brother, who was standing behind the door with his knife in his hand. He threw his burden on the ground and began to run away quickly. His elder brother ran after him with his knife in his hand.”

Ra, the sun-god, however, came to the help of the innocent youth, and interposed a river full of crocodiles between him and his pursuer. All night long the two brothers stood on either side of the water; in the morning Bata convinced his brother that he had done no wrong, and reproached him for having believed that he could be guilty. Then he added: “Go home now and see after thine oxen thyself, for I will no longer stay with thee, but will go to the acacia valley.” So Anup returned to his house, put his wife to death, and sat there in solitude and sadness.

Joseph, more fortunate than Bata, rose from his prison to the highest office of state. The dreams, through which this was accomplished, were in full [pg 030] keeping with the belief of the age. Dreams even to-day play an important part in the popular faith of Egypt. In the days of the Pharaohs it was the same. Thothmes iv. cleared away the sand that had overwhelmed the Sphinx, and built a temple between its paws, in consequence of a dream in which Ra-Harmakhis had appeared to him when, wearied with hunting, he had lain down to sleep under the shadow of the ancient monument. A thousand years later Nut-Amon of Ethiopia was summoned by a dream to march into Egypt. In Greek days, when the temple of Abydos had fallen into ruin, an oracle was established in one of its deserted chambers, and those who consulted it received their answers in the “true dreams” that came to them during the night. The dreams, however, needed at times an interpreter to explain them, and of such an interpreter mention is made in a Greek inscription from the Serapeum at Memphis. At other times the dreamer himself could interpret his vision by the help of the books in which the signification of dreams had been reduced to a science.

The dreams of Pharaoh and “his two eunuchs,” however, “the chief butler” and “the chief baker,” were of a strange and novel kind, and there were no books that could explain them. Even the “magicians” and “wise men” of Egypt failed to understand the dream [pg 031] of Pharaoh. And yet, when the Hebrew captive had pointed out its meaning, no doubt remained in the mind of Pharaoh and his servants that he was right. From time immemorial the Nile had been likened to a milch-cow, and the fertilising water which it spread over the soil to the milk that sustains human life. The cow-headed goddess Hathor or Isis watched over the fertility of Egypt. It was said of her that she “caused the Nile to overflow at his due time,” and the “seven great Hathors” were the seven forms under which she was worshipped. In the seven kine, accordingly, which stood “upon the bank of the river” the Egyptian readily saw the life-giving powers of the Nile.

It needed but the word of the Pharaoh to change the Hebrew slave into an Egyptian ruler, second only to the monarch itself. His very name ceased to be Semitic, and henceforth became Zaphnath-paaneah. He even allied himself with the exclusive priesthood of Heliopolis or On, marrying Asenath, the daughter of the priest of Ra. By name and marriage, as well as by position, he was thus adopted into the ranks of the native aristocracy.

Such changes of name are not unknown to the inscriptions. From time to time we meet with the records of foreigners who had settled down in the valley of the Nile and there received new names of [pg 032] Egyptian origin. Thus a monument found at Abydos tells us of a Canaanite from Bashan called Ben-Azan, who received in Egypt the new name of Yu-pa-â and was the father of a vizier of Meneptah, the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The Hittite wife of Ramses ii. similarly adopted an Egyptian name, and the tombstones of two Karians are preserved, in which the Karian names of the dead are written in the letters of the Karian alphabet, while a hieroglyphic text is attached which gives the Egyptian names they had borne in Egypt.

The exact transcription in hieroglyphics of the Egyptian name of Joseph is still doubtful. But it is plain that it contains the Egyptian words pa-ânkh, “the life,” or “the living one,” which seem to be preceded by the particle nti, “of.” The term pa-ânkh is sometimes applied to the Pharaoh, and since Kames, the last king of the seventeenth dynasty, assumed the title of Zaf-n-to, “nourisher of the land,” it is possible that in Zaphnath-paaneah we may see an Egyptian Zaf-nti-pa-ânkh, “nourisher of the Pharaoh.” But the final solution of the question must be left to future research.

It is now more easy to explain the cry which was raised before Joseph when he went forth from the presence of the Pharaoh with the golden chain around his neck and the royal signet upon his finger. [pg 033] “Abrêk!” they shouted before him, and an explanation of the word has been vainly sought in the Egyptian language. It really is of Babylonian origin. In the primitive non-Semitic language of Chaldæa abrik signified “a seer” or “soothsayer,” and the term was borrowed by the Semitic Babylonians under the two forms of abrikku and abarakku. Joseph was thus proclaimed a seer, and his exaltation was due to his power of foreseeing the future. It was as a divinely-inspired seer that the subjects of the Pharaoh were to reverence him.

How a Babylonian word like abrek came to be used in Egypt it is idle for us to inquire. Those who believe in the late origin and fictitious character of the story of Joseph would find an easy explanation of it. But easy explanations are not necessarily true, either in archæology or in anything else. And since we now know that Canaan, long before the time of Joseph, had fallen under Babylonian influence, that the Babylonian language and writing were employed there, and that Babylonian words had made their way into the native idiom, it does not require much stretch of the imagination to suppose that such words may have also penetrated to the court of the Asiatic rulers of northern Egypt. Up to the era of the Exodus, Egypt and Canaan were for several centuries as closely connected with each [pg 034] other as were England and the north of France in the age of the Normans and Plantagenets.

The prosperity of Egypt depends upon the Nile. If the river rises to too great a height during the period of inundation, the autumn crops are damaged or destroyed. If, on the other hand, its rise is insufficient to fill the canals and basins, or to reach the higher ground, the land remains unwatered, and nothing will grow. Egypt, in fact, is the gift of the Nile; let the channel of the great river be diverted elsewhere, and the whole country would at once become an uninhabited desert.

A low Nile consequently brings with it a scarcity of food. When provisions cannot be imported from abroad, famine is the necessary result, and the population perishes in thousands. Such was the case in the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era, when the inundation was deficient for several successive years. The Arabic writers, El-Makrîzî and Abd-el-Latîf, describe the famines that ensued in terrible terms. Abd-el-Latîf was a witness of that which lasted from a.d. 1200 to 1202, and of the horrors which it caused. After eating grass, corpses, and even excrement, the wretched inhabitants of the country began to devour one another. Mothers were arrested in the act of cooking their own children, and it was unsafe to walk in the streets for fear of being murdered for food.

The famine described by El-Makrîzî lasted, like that of Joseph, for seven years, from a.d. 1064 to 1071, and was similarly occasioned by a deficient Nile. A hieroglyphic inscription, discovered in 1888 by Mr. Wilbour in the island of Sehêl, contains a notice of another famine of seven years, which occurred at an earlier date. The island of Sehêl lies in the Cataract, midway between Assouan and Philæ, and the inscription is carved on a block of granite and looks towards the south. It is dated in the eighteenth year of a king, who was probably one of the Ethiopian princes that reigned over southern Egypt in the troublous age of the fourth and fifth Ptolemies. According to Dr. Brugsch's translation, it states that the king sent to the governor of Nubia saying: “I am sorrowing upon my high throne over those who belong to the palace. In sorrow is my heart for the vast misfortune, because the Nile flood in my time has not come for seven years. Light is the grain; there is lack of crops and of all kinds of food. Each man has become a thief to his neighbour. They desire to hasten and cannot walk; the child cries, the youth creeps along and the old man; their souls are bowed down. Their legs are bent together and drag along the ground, and their hands rest in their bosoms. The counsel of the great ones of the court is but emptiness. Torn open are the chests of [pg 036] provisions, but instead of contents there is air. Everything is exhausted.” The text then goes on to declare how Khnum the Creator came to the help of the Pharaoh, and caused the Nile once more to inundate the lands. In return for this the king gave the priests of Khnum at Elephantinê twenty miles of river bank on either side of the island, together with tithes of all the produce of the country.

Dr. Brugsch has brought to light yet another record of a famine in Upper Egypt which belongs to an older period. Among the rock-cut tombs of El-Kab, where the princes of Thebes held their court in the days of the Hyksos, is one which commemorates the name of a certain Baba. The name occurs elsewhere at El-Kab, and was that of the father of “Captain Ahmes,” whose tomb is one of the most interesting there, and who, in his youthful days, assisted Ahmes of the eighteenth dynasty in driving the Hyksos from their last fortress in Egypt. Baba enumerates his wealth and many good deeds, and adds: “When a famine arose, lasting many years, I issued out corn to the city.”

It may be that the famine here referred to is the famine of Joseph. All we know about the date of Baba is that he lived in the age of the Hyksos. If he flourished before the war of independence and in [pg 037] days when the authority of the Hyksos Pharaoh was still paramount in Upper Egypt, we should have good reason for believing that the famine of which he speaks was the same as that described in Genesis. One of the results of the latter was that the Egyptians parted with their lands and stock to Joseph, so that henceforth they became the tenants of the Pharaoh, to whom they paid a fifth of all their produce. If this statement is historical, the administration of Joseph must have extended from one end of Egypt to the other. His Hyksos master must have been like Apopi, of whom the Sallier Papyrus tells us that “the entire country paid him tribute, together with its manufactured products, and so loaded him with all the good things of Egypt.”

The account of Joseph's famine, however, betrays in one respect a sign of later date. The famine is said to have extended to Canaan. But a famine in Egypt and a famine in Canaan were not due to the same cause, and the failure of the waters of the Nile would have no effect upon the crops of Palestine. In Canaan it was the want of rain, not of the inundation of the Nile, which produced a failure of corn. We hear from time to time, in the inscriptions, of corn being sent from Egypt to Syria, but it was when there was plenty on the banks of the Nile and a scarcity of rain on the Syrian coast. The Hebrew [pg 038] writer has regarded the history of the past from a purely Asiatic rather than an Egyptian point of view.

Joseph must have entered Egypt when it was still under Hyksos domination. The promise made to Abraham (Gen. xv. 13) is very explicit: “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years.” Equally explicit is the statement of the book of Exodus (xii. 40, 41): “The sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty years, even the self-same day it came to pass, that all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.” Here thirty years—the length of a generation—are added to the four hundred during which the Israelites were to be afflicted in the land of the foreigner. If the Exodus took place in the latter years of the nineteenth dynasty—-and, as we shall see, the Egyptian monuments forbid our placing it elsewhere—the four hundred and thirty years of the Biblical narrative bring us to the beginning of the last Hyksos dynasty.

It is a curious fact that Egyptian history also knows of an epoch of four hundred years which covers almost the same period as the four hundred years of Genesis. Mariette Pasha, when excavating [pg 039] at Sân, the ancient Zoan, found a stela which had been erected in the reign of Ramses ii. by one of his officers, the governor of the Asiatic frontier. The stela commemorates a visit to Sân made by the governor, on the fourth day of the month Mesori, in the four hundredth year of “the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Set-âa-pehti, the son of the Sun who loved him, also named Set-Nubti.” Since Set or Sutekh was the god of the Hyksos, while Sân was the Hyksos capital, it is clear that Set-âa-pehti or Set-Nubti was a Hyksos prince who claimed rule over the whole of Egypt, and with whom a Hyksos era commenced. Professor Maspero and Dr. de Cara consider the prince in question to have been really the god Sutekh himself; this, however, is not the natural interpretation of the titles assigned to him, and it is not improbable that Professor Wiedemann is right in identifying him with a certain Hyksos Pharaoh, Set-[Nub?]ti, mentioned on a monument discovered by Mariette at Tel-Mokdam. This latter Pharaoh is entitled “the good god, the star of Upper and Lower Egypt, the son of the Sun, beloved by Sutekh, the lord of Avaris.”

But whether or not the Hyksos Pharaoh of Tel-Mokdam is the same as Set-Nubti of Sân, it would seem probable that the era connected with his name marked the rise of the last Hyksos dynasty. According [pg 040] to Eusebius, the leader of this dynasty was Saitês, a name which reminds us of Set-âa-[pehti]. Eusebius makes the length of the dynasty 103 years, but Africanus, a more trustworthy authority, gives it as 151 years. This would assign the rise of the seventeenth dynasty, the last of Hyksos rule, to about b.c. 1720, a date which agrees very well with that of the monument of Sân.[6] The Exodus of the Israelites, if it took place in the reign of Meneptah, would have happened about b.c. 1270 (or b.c. 1250, if it occurred in the reign of Seti ii., as Professor Maspero maintains); in this case the 430 years of sojourning in the land of Egypt brings us to b.c. 1700 (or 1680). This would be about twenty years after the establishment of the last Hyksos line of Pharaohs, and one hundred and thirty years before the foundation of the eighteenth dynasty. Joseph would thus have been vizier of the country long before the war of independence broke out, and there would have been time in abundance for him to have lived and died before his friends and protectors were driven from the land they had so long occupied.

Chronologically, therefore, the Biblical narrative [pg 041] fits in with the requirements of Egyptian history, and allows us to see in the Hebrew captive the powerful minister of a race of kings who, like himself, had come from the highlands of Asia. But it must be remembered that it was only in the north of Egypt that Hyksos rule made itself actually visible to the eyes of the people. Southern Egypt was nominally governed by its native princes, though they did not assume the title of king or Pharaoh. They were hiqu, “hereditary chieftains,” the last representatives of the royal families of earlier days. They acknowledged the supremacy of the Hyksos Pharaoh, and tribute was sent to him from Thebes and El-Kab.

Though Memphis, the ancient capital of the country, was in the hands of the strangers, Zoan, the Tanis of classical geography, was rather the seat of Hyksos power. Protected by the marshes which surrounded it, Zoan, the modern Sân, lay on the eastern side of the Delta at no great distance from the frontier of Asia and the great Hyksos fortress of Avaris. From Zoan, the “road of the Philistines,” as it is called in the Pentateuch, ran almost in a straight line to Pelusium and the south of Palestine, skirting on one side the Mediterranean Sea, and leaving to the right the lofty fortress-rock of El-Arîsh on the waterless “river of Egypt.” [pg 042] Tanis had existed in the days of the Old Empire, but either the Hyksos conquest or earlier invasions had caused it to decay, and when the Hyksos court was established there its ancient temple was already in ruins. The restoration of the city was due to the Hyksos kings, who have left in it memorials of themselves. The Hyksos sphinxes in the Museum of Gizeh, on one of which the name of Apopi is engraved, were found there by Mariette, as well as a curious group of two persons with enormous wigs holding fish and water-fowl in their laps. When it is stated in the book of Numbers (xiii. 22) that “Hebron was built seven years before Zoan,” it is probable that the building of Zoan by the Shepherd kings is meant.

In journeying from southern Palestine to Zoan, Jacob and his sons had no very long distance to traverse. Nor had they to pass through a long tract of Egyptian territory. From the desert, with its roving bands of kindred Bedouin, to the Pharaoh's court at Zoan, was hardly more than a day's journey. There was little fear that the Semitic traveller would meet with insult or opposition from the Egyptian fellahin on the way. The fellahin themselves were doubtless then, as now, mixed with Semitic elements; it was needful to go westward of Zoan in order to find Egyptians of pure blood.

Nor was the land of Goshen, the modern Wadi Tumilât, far from the Hyksos capital. It lay to the south of Zoan, on the banks of a canal whose course is now marked by the Freshwater Canal of Lesseps. The tourist who takes the train from Ismailîyeh to Zagazig traverses the whole length of the land of Goshen. The tradition that here was the territory assigned by Joseph to his brethren lingered long into the Christian centuries, and had been revived by more than one Egyptologist in later years. But the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville, and the excavations he undertook for the Egypt Exploration Fund. In 1883 he disinterred the remains of Pa-Tum, or Pithom, one of the two “store-cities” which the children of Israel were forced to build. The ruins are now known as Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the mound of the Statue,” about twelve miles to the south-east of Ismailîyeh, and the monuments discovered there show that the Pharaoh for whom the city was built was Ramses ii. There was more than one Pa-Tum, or temple-city of the Sun-god of the evening, and the Pa-Tum of the eastern Delta is referred to in papyri of the nineteenth dynasty. Thus, in the eighth year of Meneptah ii., an official report speaks of the passage of certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom through the frontier-fortress of Thukut or Succoth, to “the pools of the city of [pg 044] Pa-Tum of Meneptah-hotep-hir-ma, in the district of Thukut.”

In 1884 Dr. Naville excavated, at Saft el-Henneh, an ancient mound close to the railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebîr. His excavations resulted in the discovery that Saft el-Henneh marks the site of the ancient Qesem or Qos (Pha-kussa in the Greek geographers), the capital of the nome of the Egyptian Arabia. Qesem corresponds exactly with Geshem, which represents in the Septuagint the Hebrew Goshen, and points to the fact that the Egyptian Jews, to whom the Greek translation of the Old Testament was due, recognised in the Biblical Goshen the Qeshem of Egyptian geography.

The district immediately around Saft el-Henneh is fertile, but the name of the Egyptian Arabia which it once bore shows unmistakably who its cultivators must have been. They were the Semitic nomads from the East who, like their descendants to-day, occasionally settled on the frontier-lands of Egypt, and became more or less unwilling agriculturists. But the larger part of them remained shepherds, leading a nomad life with their flocks and camels, and pitching their tents wherever the monotony of the desert was broken by water and vegetation. The Wadi Tumilât, into which the district of Saft el-Henneh opened, was thus eminently suited for [pg 045] the residence of the Hebrew Bedouin. Here they had food for their flocks, plenty of space for their camping-grounds, and freedom from interference on the part of the Egyptians, while in the background was a fertile district, in close connection with the capital, where those of them who cared to exchange a pastoral for an agricultural life could find rich soil to sow and cultivate.

Hard by Zagazig are the mounds of the ancient Bubastis, and here the excavations carried on by the Egypt Exploration Fund have brought to light remains of the Hyksos Pharaohs, including one of Apopi. Bubastis, therefore, must have been a Hyksos residence, and its temple was adorned by the Hyksos kings. Between Bubastis and Heliopolis stood Pa-Bailos, and of this town Meneptah ii. says at Thebes that “the country around was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers, having been abandoned since the times of old.” What better proof can we have that the Arabian nome was in truth what the land of Goshen is represented to be?

By a curious coincidence, the Wadi Tumilât, the old land of Goshen, has, in the present century, again been handed over to Bedouin and Syrians, and again been the scene of an Exodus. Mohammed Ali was anxious to establish the culture of the silk-worm in Egypt, and accordingly planted mulberry-trees in [pg 046] the Wadi Tumilât, and settled there a large colony of Syrians and Bedouin. The Bedouin were induced to remain there, partly by the pasturage provided for their flocks, partly by a promise of exemption from taxes and military conscription. When Abbas Pasha became Khedive, however, the promise was forgotten; orders were issued that the free Bedouin of the Wadi Tumilât should be treated like the enslaved fellahin, compelled to pay the tax-gatherer, and to see their children driven in handcuffs and with the courbash to serve in the army. But the orders were never carried out. Suddenly, in a single night, without noise or warning, the whole Bedouin population deserted their huts, and with their flocks and other possessions disappeared into the eastern desert. The Pasha lost his slaves, the culture of the silk-worm ceased, and when the Freshwater Canal was cut not a single mulberry-tree remained.

In the land of Goshen, the Israelitish settlers throve and multiplied. But a time came when a new king arose “which knew not Joseph,” and when the descendants of Jacob seemed to the Egyptians a source of danger. Like Abbas Pasha in a later century, the Pharaoh determined to reduce the free-born Israelites into the condition of public slaves, and by every means in his power to diminish [pg 047] their number. The male children were destroyed, the adults compelled to labour at the cities the Egyptian monarch was building in their neighbourhood, and the land in which they lived was surrounded by Egyptian garrisons and controlled by Egyptian officers.

The slaves, however, succeeded in escaping from their “house of bondage.” Under the leadership of Moses they made their way into the eastern desert, and received, at Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea, the laws which were henceforth to govern them. The army sent to pursue them was swallowed up in the waters of the sea, and the district they had occupied was left desolate.

A variety of reasons had led Egyptologists to the belief that in the Pharaoh of the Oppression we were probably to see Ramses ii. Ramses ii., the Sesostris and Osymandyas of Greek story, was the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, and one of the most striking figures of Egyptian history. His long reign of sixty-seven years was the evening of Egyptian greatness. With his death the age of Egyptian conquests passed away, and the period of decay set in. Like Louis xiv. of France, the grand monarque of ancient Egypt exhausted in his wars the resources and fighting population of his country.

But it was as a builder rather than as a conqueror [pg 048] that Ramses ii. was famous. Go where we will in Egypt or Nubia, we find traces of his architectural activity. There is hardly a place where he has not left his name. His whole reign must have been occupied with the construction of cities and temples, or the restoration and enlargement of previously existing ones, and, in spite of its length, it is difficult to understand how so vast an amount of work could have been accomplished in the time. Much of the work, however, is poor and scamped; it bears, in fact, marks of the feverish haste with which it was carried through. Much of it, on the other hand, is grandiose and striking in its colossal proportions and boldness of design. The shattered granite colossus at the Ramesseum, once nearly sixty feet in height, the fragment of a standing figure of granite found by Professor Flinders Petrie at Sân, which must originally have been over a hundred feet high, the great hall of columns at Karnak, the temple of Abu-Simbel in Nubia, are all so many witnesses of vast conceptions successfully realised. Abu-Simbel, indeed, where a mountain has been hollowed into a temple, and a cliff carved into the likeness of four sitting figures, each with an unrivalled expression of divine calm upon its countenance, justly claims to be one of the wonders of the world.

Apart from the colossal proportions of so many of [pg 049] them, the buildings of Ramses ii. are distinguished by another trait. They were erected to the glory of the Pharaoh rather than of the gods. It is the name and titles of Ramses that everywhere force themselves upon our notice, and often constitute the chief decoration of the monument. He must have been vainglorious above all other kings of Egypt, filled with the pride of his own power and the determination that his name should never be forgotten upon the earth.

It is not strange, therefore, that Ramses ii. should be the most prominent figure in ancient Egyptian history. His name and the shattered relics of his architectural triumphs force themselves upon the attention of the traveller wherever he goes. His long reign, moreover, was a period of great literary activity, and a considerable portion of the literary papyri which have survived to us was written during his lifetime. He was, furthermore, the last of the conquering Pharaohs; the last of the Theban monarchs whose rule was obeyed from the mountains of Lebanon and the plateau of the Haurân to the southern frontiers of Ethiopia. With his death the empire, which had been founded by the military skill and energy of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, began to pass away. His son and successor, Meneptah, had to struggle for bare existence against an invasion of barbarian hordes, and the sceptre dropped from [pg 050] the feeble hands of Seti ii., who next followed, into those of rival kings. The nineteenth dynasty ended in the midst of civil war and foreign attack: for a while Egypt submitted to the rule of a Syrian stranger, and when Setnekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty, restored once more the native line of kings, he found a ruined and impoverished country, scarcely able to protect itself from hostile assault.

But the age of the twentieth dynasty was still distant when Jacob and his sons journeyed into Egypt, or even when his descendants, under the leadership of Moses, succeeded in escaping from the land of their slavery. Before that age arrived more than one revolution was destined to pass over the valley of the Nile, which had momentous consequences for the foreign settlers in Goshen. The Hyksos were driven back into Asia, and a united Egypt once more obeyed the rule of a native Pharaoh.

But the centre of power had been shifted from the north to the south. Memphis and Zoan had to make way for Thebes, and it is probable that the monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty, under whom Egypt recovered its independence, had Nubian blood in their veins. A new life was breathed into the ancient kingdom of Menes, and for the first time in its history Egypt became a great military power. The war was transferred from the Delta to Asia itself; [pg 051] Canaan and Syria were conquered, and an Egyptian empire established, which extended as far as the Euphrates. With this empire in Asia, however, came Asiatic influences, ideas, and beliefs. The Pharaohs intermarried with the royal families of Asia, and little by little their court became semi-Asiatic. Then followed reaction and counter-revolution. A new king arose—the founder of the nineteenth dynasty—“who knew not Joseph,” representing the national antagonism to the Asiatic foreigner and his religious faith. For a while the Asiatic was proscribed; and the expulsion of the stranger and his religion, which Arabi endeavoured to effect in our time, was successfully effected in the troublous days which saw the fall of the eighteenth dynasty. In this war against the hated Asiatic the Israelites were involved; their children were destroyed lest they should multiply, and they themselves were degraded into public slaves. We have now to trace the events which led to such a result, and to show how the political history of Egypt was the ultimate cause of the Israelitish Exodus.

Chapter II. The Age Of Moses.

On the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Assiout, the traveller from Cairo to Assouan passes a line of mounds which are known by the name of Tel el-Amarna. Tel is the name given to the artificial mounds which cover the remains of ancient cities, while el-Amarna denotes the Bedouin tribe of Beni-Amran whose descendants inhabit the district in which the line of mounds is found. Between the mounds and the Nile is a fertile strip of bank, green with corn in the winter and spring, and shaded with groves of lofty palms. On the other side of them is a tawny desert plain, shut in by an amphitheatre of hills. The limestone cliffs of the latter are broken in three places, where ravines lead through them to the Arabian plateau beyond. The central ravine is short and rugged; that to the north, however, though its lofty walls of rock seem at times almost to meet, eventually carries the explorer by a slow ascent into the heart of the Arabian [pg 053] desert. About three miles from its mouth, and in a side-valley, the tomb has lately been discovered of the founder of the city, of which the mounds of Tel el-Amarna are now the sole representatives. The tomb is worthy of the monarch for whom it was intended. In the distant solitude of the desert gorge, it is cut deep into the solid rock. Steps first convey the visitor downwards to the huge door of the sepulchre. Within is a broad sloping passage, to the right of which are the sculptured chambers in which the body of one of the Pharaoh's daughters once rested, while at the end of it is a vast columned hall, within which the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh himself was placed.

The Pharaoh had been named by his father, Amenôphis iii., after himself, but Amenôphis iv. had not long mounted the throne before he gave himself a new name, and was henceforth known as Khu-n-Aten, “the Glory of the Solar Disk.” The change of name was the outward sign and token of a religious revolution. The king publicly renounced the ancient religion of Egypt, of which he was the official representative, and declared himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith. The very name of Amon, the supreme god of Thebes and of the royal family to which Khu-n-Aten belonged, was proscribed, and erased from the monuments wherever it occurred. In the temples and tombs and [pg 054] quarries alike it was defaced; even the name of the king's own father, which contained it, was not spared. When the arm of the persecutor was thus extended to the written and sculptured monument, we cannot suppose that the adherents of the ancient cult would be treated with a gentle hand.

It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war. But the priesthood proved too strong for the king. He quitted the capital of his fathers and built himself a new city farther north. It is the site of this city which is now covered by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna.

Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. The walls and columns were inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before Christ.

The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it were the houses of the nobles [pg 055] and officers of the court. They too reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which the documents of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of foreign states.

In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk, the new object of the Pharaoh's adoration. Though the name was Egyptian, the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-god, whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-god who was not only supreme over all other gods; they were absorbed into him, and existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-god, is addressed by the Pharaoh's queen: “Thou disk of the Sun, thou living god, there is none other beside thee! Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all things!” One of Khu-n-Aten's officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in similar terms: “Thou, O god, who in truth art the [pg 056] living one, standest before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth.”

The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the worship of Baal with the philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the worship of the Egyptian Sun-god, Ra, at Heliopolis. The worship of Baal had lost its grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one god to whom adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the Aten worship of Egypt.

Along with the new religion came a new style of art. Asiatic artists and workmen manufactured the variegated glass and bright-coloured porcelain of Tel el-Amarna, or discarded the conventionalism of Egyptian art in their delineation of animal and vegetable life, while architecture branched out in new directions, and the sculptor exaggerated the peculiarities of the king's personal appearance. Every effort, in fact, was made to break away from the past, and from the mannerisms and traditions of Egyptian art. That art had been closely associated with the ancient religion of the country, and [pg 057] with the change of religion came a change in all things else.

The causes of the change can now in great measure be traced. To some extent it was due to the character of the king himself. A plaster cast of his face, taken immediately after death, has been found by Professor Petrie, and is an eloquent witness of what the man himself was like. It is the face of a philosopher and a mystic, of one whose interest lay rather in the problems of religious belief than in the affairs of state. In studying it we feel that the man to whom it belonged was destined to be a religious reformer.

But this destiny was assisted by the training and education which Khu-n-Aten had received. His mother, Teie, bore a foremost part in the introduction of the cult of Aten. She must have been a woman of strong character, and her influence over her son must also have been great. If, as is probable, Khu-n-Aten was very young when he ascended the throne, the religious reform he endeavoured to effect must have been in great measure his mother's work. That she had aroused deep feelings of hatred among the adherents of the older creed may be gathered from the condition of Khu-n-Aten's tomb. Though the body of the Pharaoh was despoiled, and the sarcophagus in which it rested shattered into [pg 058] fragments, they had nevertheless been deposited in the sepulchre that had been constructed to receive them. But no trace of the queen-mother's mummy has been met with, and the corridor in the royal tomb, which seems to have been excavated for her, has never been finished, any more than the two or three tombs which were cut in the immediate neighbourhood. After the death of her son, Queen Teie seems to have found no protector from the vengeance of her enemies.

It is probable that Teie was of Asiatic birth, though no certain proof of it has yet been found. Her husband, Amenôphis iii., was fond of connecting himself by marriage with the royal houses of Asia, and more than one of the wives who occupied a secondary rank in the Pharaoh's household were of Asiatic extraction. His own mother had been an Asiatic princess, the daughter of the king of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament. From Mitanni also had come two of his own wives, as well as the wife of his son and successor, Amenôphis iv. (Khu-n-Aten).

There is little room for wonder that, with their Asiatic proclivities and half-Asiatic descent, the later Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty should have surrounded themselves with Asiatic officials and courtiers. The conquest of Western Asia by Thothmes iii. had [pg 059] brought Asiatic fashions into Egypt. Thothmes himself, on the walls of his temple at Karnak, shows the spirit of an Asiatic rather than of an Egyptian conqueror. The inscriptions engraved upon them differ wholly from those which usually adorn the walls of an Egyptian temple. There are no praises or lists of the gods, no description of the offerings made to them, no interminable catalogue of the empty titles of the Pharaoh; we have, on the contrary, a business-like account of his campaigns, much of it copied from the memoranda of the scribes who accompanied the army on its march. It reads like an inscription on the walls of an Assyrian palace rather than one belonging to an Egyptian temple. It is, in fact, unique, the solitary example of a historical text which the great monuments of Egypt have bequeathed to us. It is, of itself, an eloquent testimony to the influence which Asia had already acquired in the valley of the Nile.

The conquests of Thothmes iii. placed the northern boundary of the Egyptian empire at the banks of the Euphrates. The kingdoms to the east, including Assyria, offered tribute to the Egyptian monarch, and those of northern Syria and eastern Asia Minor paid him homage. Farther south, Palestine, Phœnicia, and the land of the Amorites, which lay to the north of Palestine, became Egyptian [pg 060] provinces, garrisoned by Egyptian troops and administered by Egyptian officers. Even the country beyond the Jordan, Bashan and the Haurân, formed part of the Egyptian empire.

In many cases the native princes were left to manage the affairs of their several states, like the protected princes of modern India, but they were controlled by “commissioners” sent from the valley of the Nile. More frequently their place was taken by Egyptian governors, a very considerable number of whom, however, were of Canaanitish descent. This, indeed, is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the Egyptian empire in Asia; it was governed for the Pharaoh by natives rather than by Egyptians. But this was not all. Under Khu-n-Aten Egypt itself was invaded by the Asiatic stranger. The high places about the court were filled with foreigners whose names proclaim their Canaanitish origin; even the Vizier was called Dudu, the Biblical Dodo, to which the name of David is akin. The adherents of the cult of Aten who gathered round the Pharaoh at Tel el-Amarna seem largely to have belonged to Asia instead of Egypt.

Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of the same country. The Babylonian script and language [pg 061] were used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office.

The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script.

All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which adjoined the royal palace, the fellahin found a collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned out to be [pg 062] the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself received.

Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses 56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.

The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era. Letters passed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the [pg 063] Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal; the vassal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him against his personal enemies; the governors of Phœnicia and the land of the Amorites describe the threatening attitude of the Hittites in the north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his relationship to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of Assyria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it is as plentiful as “the dust,” or discuss questions of international policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much like our own;—a world in which education is widely spread, where schools and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist.

The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no assistance was afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely large, and each character not only represented more than one [pg 064] phonetic value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus the same character may not only represent the phonetic values kur, mat, nat, lat, sat, and gin; it may also denote the ideas of “country,” “mountain,” and “conquest.” But this was not all. The original picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldæa, from whom it had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors. Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in Sumerian—the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldæa—were taken over by the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course, with a totally different pronunciation. In Sumerian, for example, mer-sig signified “trousers,” but though the two characters mer and sig continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the word, the pronunciation attached to them was sarbillu, the modern Arabic shirwâl.

The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of Chaldæa. It was far more necessary in his case than a knowledge of Latin would be in our own. Moreover, it was necessary for him to learn the various forms which the same cuneiform character assumed in [pg 065] different countries or at different periods in the same country. These various forms were very numerous, and they often differed more than black letter differs from ordinary modern type.

The fact, then, that the cuneiform syllabary was studied and used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile, brings with it the further fact that throughout this area there must have been numerous schools and teachers. Time and persevering labour were needed for its acquisition, while a knowledge of the Babylonian language which accompanied its study could not have been obtained without the help of teachers. It is accordingly a matter of no small astonishment that the letters received at the Egyptian foreign office were written, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials and soldiers.

Naturally the study of the foreign syllabary and language was facilitated in every possible way. In his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, Professor Flinders Petrie has discovered fragments of lists of cuneiform characters, as well as of comparative dictionaries of Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian. Moreover, a Babylonian mythological text has been found, in which the words have been divided from one another by dots of red paint, in order to assist the learner in making his way through the legend.

This mythological text is not the only one which [pg 066] has been met with among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The existence of such texts is a proof that the literature of Babylonia, as well as its language and script, was carried to the West. From very remote times public libraries, consisting for the most part of clay-books, were to be found in the Babylonian and Assyrian cities, and when Babylonian culture made its way to the West, similar libraries must have sprung up there also. The revelations made to us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna show that these libraries, like those of Babylonia, were stocked with books written upon clay, many of which contained copies of Babylonian legends and myths.

One of the mythological tales discovered at Tel el-Amarna is the latter portion of a story which described the creation of the first man, Adapa or Adama, and the introduction of death into the world. Adapa had broken the wings of the south wind, and was accordingly ordered to appear before Anu, the lord of the sky. There he refused to touch the food and water of “death” that were offered him, and when subsequently the heart of Anu was “softened” towards him, he refused also the food and water of “life.” Whereupon “Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: ‘O Adapa, wherefore eatest thou not? wherefore drinkest thou not? The gift of life cannot now be thine.’ ”

The beginning of the story has been in the British Museum many years. It is a fragment of a copy of the myth which was made for the library of Nineveh some eight centuries after the rest of the story, which has now been disinterred on the banks of the Nile, had been buried under the ruins of Khu-n-Aten's city. I copied it nearly twenty years ago, but had to wait for the discovery of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna before ascertaining its true meaning and significance. Nineveh and Tel el-Amarna had to unite in the restoration of the old Babylonian myth.

Canaan was the country in which the two streams of Babylonian and Egyptian culture met together, and we now know that Canaan was the centre of that literary activity which the Tel el-Amarna tablets have revealed to us. Canaan, in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, was emphatically the land of scribes and letter-writers. If libraries existed anywhere in Western Asia, they would surely have done so in the cities of Canaan.

One of these cities, Kirjath-Sepher, or “Book-town,” is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was also called Kirjath-Sannah, or “City of Instruction,” doubtless from the school which was attached to its library. The site of it is unfortunately lost; should it ever be recovered, we may expect to find beneath it literary treasures similar to those which the [pg 068] mounds of Assyria and Babylonia have yielded. Perhaps some day the papyri of Egypt will tell us where exactly to look for it.

A reference to it has already been met with. In the time of Ramses ii., an Egyptian scribe composed an ironical account of the adventures of a military officer in Palestine. The officer in question was called a Mohar, a word borrowed from the Babylonians, in whose language it signified “an envoy.”

The Egyptian work is consequently usually known as The Travels of a Mohar, and it gives us an interesting picture of Canaan shortly before the Israelitish Exodus. The author was clearly very proud of his geographical knowledge, and has therefore introduced the names of a large number of places. In one passage he asks: “Hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab together with Beth-Sopher? Dost thou not know Adullam and Zidiputha?” Dr. W. Max Müller, to whom the correct reading of the passage is due, points out that the scribe has interchanged the words Kirjath, “city,” and Beth, “house,” and that he ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher. That he was acquainted, however, with the meaning of the Canaanitish word Sopher (in Egyptian Thupar) is shown by his adding to it the determinative of “writing.” Sopher, in fact, means “scribe,” just as sepher means “book,” and indicates the fact that [pg 069] Kirjath-Sepher was not only a town of books, but of book-writers as well. It will be remembered that Beth-Anab, “the house of grapes,” in the abbreviated form of Anab, is associated with Kirjath-Sepher in the Old Testament (Josh. xi. 21; xv. 49, 50), just as it is in the Egyptian papyrus.

In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we have a picture of Canaan in the century which preceded the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. As we have seen, it was at that time an Egyptian province. We can thus understand why, in the tenth chapter of Genesis, Canaan is made a brother of Mizraim, or Egypt. For a while it obeyed the same sovereign and was administered by the same laws; the natives of Canaan held office in the court of the Pharaoh, and Egyptian governors ruled in the Canaanitish cities. It was not until after the death of Ramses ii., of the nineteenth dynasty, and about the very time when the Israelites were escaping from their house of bondage, that Canaan ceased to be an Egyptian dependency. From that time forward it was politically and geographically severed from the valley of the Nile, and the geographer could never again couple it with the land of Egypt.

When Khu-n-Aten was Pharaoh, the cities of Canaan were numerous and wealthy. The people were highly cultured, and excelled especially as [pg 070] workers in gold and silver, as manufacturers of porcelain and vari-coloured glass, and as weavers of richly-dyed linen. Their merchants already traded to distant parts of the known world. The governors appointed by the Pharaoh were for the most part of native origin, and at times a representative of the old line of kings was left among them, though an Egyptian prefect was often placed at his side. The governors were controlled by the presence of Egyptian garrisons, as well as by the visits of an Egyptian “commissioner.” Their rivalries and quarrels form the subject of many of the letters which have been found at Tel el-Amarna, both sides appealing to the Pharaoh for protection and help, and alike protesting their loyalty to him. It seems to have been the part of Egyptian policy to encourage these quarrels, or at all events to hold an even balance between the rival governors.

As long as the power of Egypt remained intact, these quarrels, which sometimes resulted in open war, offered no cause for alarm. Egyptian troops could always be sent to the scene of disturbance before it could become dangerous. But in the troublous days of Khu-n-Aten's reign, when Egypt itself was restless and inclined for revolt, the position of affairs was changed. The Egyptian forces were needed at home, and the Pharaoh was compelled to turn a deaf ear [pg 071] to the piteous appeals that were made to him for assistance. The enemies of Egyptian rule began to multiply and grow powerful. In the south the Khabiri or “Confederates” threatened the Egyptian domination; in the north, Amorite rebels intrigued with the Hittites and with the kings of Naharaim and Babylonia, while in all parts of Palestine the Sute or Bedouin were perpetually on the watch to take advantage of the weakness of the government.

It was the vassal-king of Jerusalem, Ebed-tob by name, who was especially menaced by the Khabiri. In his letters he describes himself as unlike the other governors, in that he had been appointed to his office by the “arm” or “oracle” of “the Mighty King,” the supreme deity of his city. It was not from his father or his mother, consequently, that he had derived his royal dignity. He was, in fact, a priest-king, like his predecessor Melchizedek, to whom Abram had paid tithes. Ebed-tob, however, was unable to make head against his enemies the Khabiri. One by one the towns which were included in the territory of Jerusalem, from Keilah and Gath-Karmel to Rabbah, fell into their hands; the Pharaoh was unable to send him the help for which he so earnestly begged, and we finally hear of his having fallen into the hands of his Bedouin enemy, Labai, along with the cities of which he was in charge. Labai was in alliance with [pg 072] a certain Malchiel, who also writes letters to the Egyptian monarch, as well as with Tagi of Gath and the Khabiri. The latter seem to have given the name of Hebron, “the Confederacy,” to the old city of Kirjath-Arba.

Megiddo was the seat of an Egyptian governor, like Gaza, near Shechem. The name of Shechem has not been found in the Tel el-Amarna tablets, but a reference is made to its “mountain,” in the Travels of a Mohar. Either Mount Ebal or Mount Gerizim must consequently have been already well known in Egypt. Another Egyptian governor was in command of Phœnicia. Gebal, north of Beyrût, was his chief residence, but he had palaces also at Tyre and Zemar, in the mountains of the interior. In one of his letters he alludes to the wealth of Tyre, which must therefore have been already famous.

Phœnicia and Palestine are alike included under the name of “Canaan” in the cuneiform documents, though in the hieroglyphic records they are called Zahi and Khal (or Khar). North of Palestine came “the land of the Amorites,” of which Ebed-Asherah and his son, Aziru or Ezer, were governors, and to the east of the Jordan was “the field of Bashan.” The Egyptian supremacy was acknowledged as far south as the frontier of Edom; the latter country preserved its independence.

Such was the condition of Canaan when the cuneiform correspondence of Tel el-Amarna comes suddenly to an end. The death of Khu-n-Aten had been the signal for a revolt against the faith which he had endeavoured to impose upon Egypt, as well as against the Asiatic influences by which he had been surrounded. He left daughters only behind him. One of them was married to a prince who, in order to secure the throne, was forced to return to the old religion of the country, and to call himself by the name of Tutânkh-Amon. But his reign was short, like those of one or two other relations and followers of Khu-n-Aten who have left traces of themselves upon the monuments. A rival king, Ai by name, held possession of Egypt for a while, and after his death Hor-m-hib, the Armais of Manetho, ruled once more at Thebes over a united Egypt, and the worship of the solar disk was at end.

But the ruins of Tel el-Amarna show that the restoration of the old creed and the overthrow of Khu-n-Aten's adherents had not been without a struggle. Most of the tombs in the cliffs and sandhills which surround the old city have been unfinished: the followers of the new cult for whom they were intended have never been allowed to occupy them. The royal sepulchre itself, as we have seen, is in an equally unfinished condition, and [pg 074] the sarcophagus in which the body of the king rested was violated soon after his mummy had been placed in it. Indeed, it had never been deposited in the niche that had been cut to receive it; its shattered fragments were discovered far away on the floor of the great columned hall. The capital of the “heretic king” was destroyed by its enemies soon after his death, and never inhabited again. The ruins of its palace and houses were full of broken statues and other objects which their owners had no time to carry away. The city lasted only for about thirty years, and the sands of the desert then began to close over its fallen greatness. How sudden and complete must have been its overthrow is proved by the cuneiform tablets; not only were these imperial archives not carried elsewhere, the correspondence contained in them breaks off suddenly with a half-told tale of disaster and dismay. The Asiatic empire of Egypt is falling to pieces, its enemies are enclosing it on every side; the Hittites have robbed it of its northern provinces, and revolt is shaking it from within. The governors and vassals of the Pharaoh send more and more urgent requests for instant aid: “If troops come this year, then there will remain both provinces and governors to the king, my lord; but if no troops come, no provinces or governors will remain.” But no answer was returned to these [pg 075] pressing appeals, and the sudden cessation of the correspondence under the ruins of the Egyptian foreign office itself gives us the reason why.

One of the first acts of Hor-m-hib after the settlement of affairs at home was to chastise the Asiatics, who had doubtless taken advantage of the momentary weakness of Egypt. With the death of Hor-m-hib, after a reign of five years,[7] the eighteenth dynasty came to an end. Ramses i., the founder of the nineteenth dynasty, introduced a new type of royal name, and also, as we learn from the monuments, a new type of royal face. After a short reign of two years, he was succeeded by his son, Seti i., in whose name we have an evidence that the proscribed worship of the god Set—the god of the Delta—was again taken under royal patronage. It was an indication that the new dynasty traced its descent from northern Egypt.

Seti i. once more led the Egyptian armies to victory in Asia. With the spoils of conquest temples were built and decorated, and the names of conquered nations engraved upon their walls. One of these temples was at Abydos, the most beautiful of [pg 076] all those which have been left to us in Egypt. But Seti's fame as a builder was far eclipsed by that of his son and successor, Ramses ii., and even the temples which he had raised at Abydos and Qurnah were completed, and to a certain extent appropriated, by his better-known son.

We are told in the Book of Exodus that two of the “treasure cities” which the Israelites built for the Pharaoh of the Oppression were “Pithom and Raamses.” The discovery of Pithom was, as we have already seen, the inaugural work of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The discovery, as has been already stated, was made by Dr. Naville, who was led to the site by certain monuments of Ramses ii., which had been found there by the French engineers of M. de Lesseps. These monuments consisted of a great tablet and monolith of red granite, two sphinxes of exquisitely polished black granite, and a broken shrine of red sandstone which had been transported to Ismailîyeh, where they formed the chief ornament of the little public garden. As they all showed that Tum, the setting sun, was the supreme deity of the place from which they had come, Dr. Naville concluded that it would prove to be Pi-Tum, “the abode of Tum,” the Pithom of Scripture, and not the companion city of Raamses, as Lepsius had believed.

The mounds from which the monuments had been disinterred are about twelve miles to the west of Ismailîyeh, and are called Tel el-Maskhuteh, “the Mound of the Image.” In the last century, however, they were known as Abu Kêshêd, and were famous for a half-buried monolith of granite representing Ramses ii. seated between Tum and Râ, the hieroglyphic inscription on the back of which has been published by Sir Gardner Wilkinson. The canal made by the Pharaohs for uniting the Nile with the Red Sea, and afterwards cleared of the sand that choked it by Darius, by Trajan, and by the Arab conqueror 'Amru, skirted the southern side of the mounds. At present the modern Freshwater Canal runs along their northern edge, to the north of which again is the line of the railway from Cairo to Suez. The fortifications erected by Arabi, however, hide the site of the old city from the traveller in the train.

Dr. Naville's excavations proved him to have been right in identifying Tel el-Maskhuteh with Pithom. The inscriptions he found there showed that its ancient name was Pi-Tum, and that it stood in the district of Thukut, the Succoth of the Old Testament. The name of this district was already known from papyri of the age of the nineteenth dynasty, and Dr. Brugsch had pointed out its identity with the Biblical Succoth.

But the discovery of the ancient name was not the only result of the explorer's work. It turned out that the city had been built by Ramses ii., and that it contained a number of large brick buildings which seem to have been intended for magazines. Here, then, at last was a proof that the Egyptologists were correct in making Ramses ii. the Pharaoh of the Oppression.

The site of Raamses or Ramses, the companion city of Pithom, has still to be discovered. But it cannot be far distant from Tel el-Maskhuteh, and, like the latter, must have been in that land of Goshen in which the Israelites were settled. The discoveries which enabled Dr. Naville to determine the boundaries of the land of Goshen and to fix the site of its ancient capital have already been described. The site of Zoan, the modern Sân, had long been known, and the excavations, first of Mariette Pasha and then of Professor Flinders Petrie, have laid bare the foundations of its temple and brought to light the monuments of the kings who enriched and adorned it. Built originally in the age of the Old Empire, it was restored by the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt, and became under them a centre of influence and power.

Goshen, Zoan and Pithom, the sites around which the early history of Israel gathered, have thus been brought to light. The disputes which have raged [pg 079] about them are at last ended. Here and there a persistent sceptic, who has been reared in the traditions of the past, may still express doubts concerning the discoveries of recent years, but for the Egyptologist and the archæologist the question has been finally settled. We can visit “the field of Zoan” and explore the mounds of Pithom with no misgivings as to their identity. When the train carries us from Ismailîyeh to Cairo, we may feel assured that we are passing through the district in which Jacob and his family were settled, and where the kinsfolk of Moses had their homes. The Egypt of the patriarchs and the Exodus was an Egypt narrow in compass and easily traversed in these days of steam; it represented the western part of the Delta, more especially the strip of cultivable land which stretches along the banks of the Freshwater Canal from Zagazig to Ismailîyeh: that is all. The eastern and northern Delta, Upper Egypt—even the district in which Cairo now stands—lay outside it. The history which attaches itself to them is not the history of the early Israelites.

Chapter III. The Exodus And The Hebrew Settlement In Canaan.

Ramses ii. was the last of the conquering Pharaohs of native Egyptian history. The Asiatic empire of Thothmes iii. was in some measure restored by the victories of his father and himself. The cities of Palestine yielded him an unwilling obedience. Gaza, and the other towns in what was afterwards the territory of the Philistines, were garrisoned by Egyptian troops, and on the walls of the Ramesseum were depicted his conquest of Shalem or Jerusalem, Merom, Beth-Anath, and other Canaanite states, in his eighth year. Egyptian armies again marched northward into Syria along the highroad that led past the Phœnician cities, and on the banks of the Nahr el-Kelb, or Dog's River, near Beyrût, the Pharaoh erected a tablet in commemoration of his successes. On the eastern side of the Jordan also Egyptian authority once more prevailed. In front of the northern pylon of the temple of Luxor, Ramses [pg 081] erected six colossal figures of himself, and on their recently-uncovered bases are inscribed the names of the various nations he claimed to have subdued. Among them we find, for the first time in the Egyptian records, the name of Moab, following immediately upon that of Assar, the Asshurim of Genesis xxv. 3. That the insertion of the name was not an idle boast we learn from a discovery lately made by Dr. Schumacher. On the eastern side of the Jordan, but at no great distance from the Lake of Tiberias, is a monolith called the “Stone of Job.” On this the German explorer has found Egyptian sculptures and hieroglyphs. Above the figure of the Pharaoh are the cartouches of Ramses ii., and opposite the king, on the left, a local deity is represented with a full face and the crown of Osiris, over whom is written the name of Akna-zapn, or “Yakin of the North.” The monument is an evidence of a permanent occupation of the country by the Egyptians, as the name and figure of the god indicate that it was erected, not by the Egyptians themselves, but by the Egyptianised natives of the land.

Along the Syrian coast Seti i. had already carried his arms. His campaigns were followed by those of his son. Arvad, the shores of the Gulf of Antioch, and even Cilicia, are enumerated among the conquests of the Pharaoh. He even claims to have [pg 082] defeated the armies of Assyria, of Matena or Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of Scripture, and of Singar in Mesopotamia. At Luxor, on the western walls of the newly excavated court, we hear of his having been at Tunip (now Tennib), “in the land of Naharaim,” of his capture of a fortress of the Kati in the same district, and of how “the Pharaoh” had taken a city in “the land of Satuna.” Satuna was one of those countries in the far north whose name is never mentioned elsewhere in the Egyptian texts.

The Syrian conquests, however, could never have been long in the Pharaoh's possession. Between them and Palestine lay the southern outposts of the Hittite race. In the troublous times which followed the death of Khu-n-Aten, the Hittites had overrun “the land of the Amorites” to the north of Canaan, and fixed their southern capital in the holy city of Kadesh, on the Orontes. It was a stronghold against which the forces of Ramses were hurled in vain. For twenty years did the struggle continue between the Pharaoh of Egypt and “the great king of the Hittites,” and at last, exhausted by the long conflict, in which neither party had gained the advantage, the two enemies agreed upon peace. A treaty was signed on the twenty-first of the month Tybi, in the twenty-first year of the reign of Ramses (b.c. 1327), “in the city of Ramses,” to which the Hittite [pg 083] ambassadors had come. Ramses, on the one side, and Khita-sir, the son of Mul-sir, the Hittite prince, on the other, bound themselves in it to eternal friendship and alliance. In case of war they were to send troops to one another's help, and they agreed to put to death any criminals who might fly from the one country to the other. Political offenders, however, who had taken refuge in the territory of one or other of the two contracting parties, were not to be injured. It was of course the Canaanitish subjects of the Pharaoh, who adjoined the Hittite kingdom, that were principally affected by these stipulations. It was further determined that on no pretext whatever should any change be made in the boundaries of the two monarchies. The treaty was placed under the protection of the deities of Egypt and the Hittites, and a Hittite copy of it was engraved on a silver plate. The agreement was cemented by the marriage of Ramses to a daughter of the Hittite king, who thereupon assumed an Egyptian name.

Northern Syria was thus formally conceded to the powerful conquerors who had descended from the mountains of Kappadokia, while Palestine remained under Egyptian dominion. But it was not destined to do so long. Ramses was succeeded by Meneptah, the fourteenth of his many sons, who had reigned only four years when the very existence of [pg 084] his kingdom was threatened by a formidable invasion from the west and north. “The peoples of the north” swarmed out of their coasts and islands, and a great fleet descended upon Egypt, in conjunction with the Libyans and Maxyes of northern Africa. Aqaiush or Achæans, Shardana or Sardinians, Tursha or Tyrsenians appear among them, as well as Leku from Asia Minor, and Zakkur, who a little later are the colleagues and brethren of the Philistines. Part of the Delta was overrun and devastated before the Pharaoh could make head against his foes. But a decisive battle was at length fought at Pa-Alu-sheps, not far from Heliopolis, which ended in the complete overthrow of the invading hordes. Egypt was saved from the danger which had threatened it, but it seems never to have recovered from the shock. The power of the government was weakened in the valley of the Nile itself, and one by one the foreign conquests passed out of its grasp. The sceptre of Seti ii., who followed Meneptah, seems to have dropped into the hands of a usurper, Amon-messu by name: the history of the period is, however, involved in obscurity, and all that is certain is that the empire of Ramses ii. was lost, and that Egypt itself fell into a state of decadence. With Si-Ptah the nineteenth dynasty came to an inglorious end.

Its fall was the signal for internal confusion and civil war. A Syrian foreigner, Arisu by name, possessed himself of the throne of the Pharaohs, and Egypt for a while was compelled to submit to Canaanitish rule. Its leading nobles were in banishment, its gods were deprived of their customary offerings, and famine was added to the horrors of war. A deliverer came in the person of Set-nekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty. He drove the stranger out the country, and restored it again to peace and prosperity. Hardly had his task been completed when he died, and was succeeded by his son, Ramses iii. Under him a transient gleam of victory and conquest visited once more the valley of the Nile.

It was well for Egypt that she possessed an energetic general and king. The same hordes which had threatened her in the reign of Meneptah now again attacked her with increased numbers and greater chances of success. In the fifth year of Ramses iii., the fair-skinned tribes of the western desert poured into the Delta. The Maxyes, under their chieftains Mdidi, Mâshakanu, and Mâraiu, and the Libyans, under Ur-mâr and Zut-mâr, met the Pharaoh in battle at a place which ever afterwards bore a name commemorative of their defeat. The victory of the Egyptians was, in fact, decisive. As [pg 086] many as 12,535 slain were counted on the field of battle, and captives and spoil innumerable fell into the hands of the victors.

But Ramses was allowed only a short breathing-space. Three years after the Libyan invasion, and doubtless in connection with it, came a still more formidable invasion on the part of the barbarians of the north. This time they came partly by land, partly by sea. Vast hordes of them had marched out of Asia Minor, overrunning the kingdoms of the Hittites, of Naharaim, of Carchemish, and of Arvad, and carrying with them adventurers and recruits from the countries through which they passed. First they pitched their camp in “the land of the Amorites,” and then marched southward towards the frontiers of Egypt. The place of the Aqaiush was taken by the Daanau or Danaans, but the Zakkur again formed part of the invading host, this time accompanied by Pulsata or Philistines, and Shakalsh or Siculians. By the side of the land army moved a fleet of ships, and fleet and army arrived together at the mouths of the Nile. The cities in the extreme south of Palestine, once occupied by Egyptian garrisons, were captured by the Philistines, and became henceforward their assured possession.

But the main body of the invaders were not so fortunate. The Egyptian forces were ready to [pg 087] receive them, and their ships had scarcely entered the mouth of the Nile before they were attacked by the Egyptian fleet. The battle ended in the complete annihilation of the attacking host. A picture of it is sculptured on the walls of Medînet Habu at Thebes, the temple-palace which Ramses built to commemorate his victories, and we can there study the ships of the European barbarians and the features and dress of the barbarians themselves. In the expressive words of the Egyptian scribe, “they never reaped a harvest any more.”

Ramses, however, was even now not left at rest. Three years later the Maxyes again assailed Egypt under Mashashal, the son of Kapur, but once more unsuccessfully. Cattle, horses, asses, chariots and weapons of war in large quantities fell into the hands of the Egyptians, as well as 2052 captives, while 2175 men were slain. From this time forward Egypt was secure from attack on its western border.

Freed from the necessity of defending his own territories, Ramses now carried the war into Asia. What in later days was the land of Judah was overrun by his forces; Gaza and the districts round Hebron and Salem or Jerusalem were occupied, and the name of the Dead Sea appears on the walls of Medînet Habu for the first time in Egyptian history. The Egyptian army even crossed to the [pg 088] eastern side of the Jordan and captured the Moabite capital.

Another campaign led it along the Phœnician coast into northern Syria. Hamath was taken, and Ramses seems to have penetrated as far as the slopes of the Taurus. He even claims to have defeated the people of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The kings of the Hittites and the Amorites, like the chiefs of the Zakkur and the Philistines, were already prisoners in his hands.

But the northern campaigns of Ramses were intended to strike terror rather than to re-establish the Asiatic empire of Egypt. No attempt was made to hold the cities and districts which had been overrun. Though a temple was erected to Amon on the frontiers of the later Judæa, even Gaza was given up, and the fortress which had so long defended the road from Canaan into Egypt was allowed to pass into Philistine hands. It was the same with the campaign which the Pharaoh conducted at a later date against the “Shasu” or Bedouin of Edom. For the first time an Egyptian army succeeded in making its way into the fastnesses of Mount Seir, slaying the warriors of Edom, and plundering their “tents.” The Edomite chief himself was made a prisoner. The expedition [pg 089] had the effect of protecting the Egyptian mining establishments in the Sinaitic peninsula as well as the maritime trade with southern Arabia. Large quantities of malachite were brought year by year from the Egyptian province of Mafka or Sinai, and the merchant-vessels of Ramses coasted along the Red Sea, bringing back with them the precious spices of Yemen and Hadhramaut.

Ramses iii. died after a reign of more than thirty-two years, and the military renown of Egypt expired with him. His exact date is still a matter of doubt, but his accession must have fallen about b.c. 1200. The date is important, not only because it closes the history of Egypt as a conquering power, but also as it marks a great era of migration among the northern populations of the Mediterranean, as well as the permanent settlement of the Philistines in Palestine. It was, moreover, the period to which the Israelitish invasion of Canaan must belong.

When Ramses iii. overran the southern portion of Palestine, and built the temple of the Theban god at the spot now known as Khurbet Kan'an, not far from Hebron, the Israelites could not as yet have entered the Promised Land. There is no reference to the Egyptians in the Pentateuch, and there is no reference to the Israelites in the hieroglyphic texts of Medînet Habu. Hebron, Migdal, Karmel [pg 090] of Judah, Ir-Shemesh and Hadashah, all alike fell into the hands of the Egyptian invaders, but neither in the Egyptian nor in the Hebrew records is there any allusion to a struggle between Egypt and Israel. When Joshua entered Canaan all these cities belonged to the Canaanites, and when Ramses iii. attacked them this was also the case. The Palestinian campaign of Ramses must have prepared the way for the Israelitish conquest; it could not have followed after it.

Moreover, “the five lords of the Philistines” seem to have already been settled in the extreme south when the Israelitish invasion took place (Josh. xiii. 3). Yet it also seems clear from the Egyptian monuments that the settlement was not fully completed until after the Asiatic campaigns of the Pharaoh had occurred. The Philistines indeed formed part of the great invading host which poured through Syria and assailed Egypt in the early part of his reign, but Gaza was one of his conquests, and its possession enabled him to march into Canaan. Before Gaza could become a Philistine city it was needful that its Egyptian garrison should be withdrawn. Professor Prášek believes that the Philistine occupation of southern Canaan took place in the year b.c. 1209, since the Roman historian Justin tells us that in this year a king of Ashkelon stormed the city of [pg 091] Sidon, and that the Sidonians fled to a neighbouring part of the coast, and there founded Tyre. However this may be, the Philistine settlement in Canaan must be ascribed to the age of Ramses iii., and it was already with the Philistines that the Israelites came into conflict under almost the earliest of their judges.

But the date of the Israelitish conquest of Canaan is closely bound up with that of the Exodus out of Egypt. It is true that when we are told of the forty years' wandering in the desert, the word “forty” is used, as it is elsewhere in the Old Testament, as well as upon the Moabite Stone, to denote an indeterminate period of time. It was a period during which the greater part of the generation that had left Egypt had time to die. Joshua and Caleb indeed remained, and Othniel, the brother of Caleb, lived to deliver Israel from the king of Aram-Naharaim, and to be the first of the judges. But otherwise it was a new generation which was led to conquest by Joshua.

If Ramses ii. was the Pharaoh of the Oppression, the Pharaoh of the Exodus must have been one of his immediate successors. Egyptologists have hesitated between Meneptah, Seti ii., and Si-Ptah. There is much to be said in favour of each. None of them reigned long, and after the death of Meneptah the [pg 092] sceptre fell into feeble hands, and the Egyptian monarchy went rapidly to decay.

Native tradition, as reported by the historian Manetho, made Meneptah the Pharaoh under whom the children of Israel escaped from their house of bondage. Amenôphis or Meneptah, it was said, desired to see the gods. He was accordingly instructed by the seer Amenôphis, the son of Pa-apis, to clear the land of the leprous and impure. This he did, and 80,000 persons were collected from all parts of Egypt, and were then separated from the other inhabitants of the country and compelled to work in the quarries of Tûra, on the eastern side of the Nile. Among them there happened to be some priests, one of whom was Osarsiph, a priest of On, and the sacrilegious act of laying hands on them was destined to be avenged by the gods. The seer prophesied that the impure lepers would find allies, and with their help would govern Egypt for thirteen years, when a saviour should arise in the person of Amenôphis himself. Not daring to tell the king of this prediction, he put it in writing and then took away his own life. After a time the workers in the quarries were removed to Avaris, the deserted fortress of the Hyksos, on the Asiatic frontier of the Egyptian kingdom. Here they rose in rebellion under Osarsiph, who organised them into a [pg 093] community, and gave them new laws, forbidding them to revere the sacred animals, and ordering them to rebuild the walls of Avaris. He also sent to the descendants of the Hyksos at Jerusalem, begging for their assistance. A force of 200,000 men was accordingly despatched to Avaris, and the invasion of Egypt decided on. Amenôphis retired into Ethiopia without striking a blow, carrying with him his son Sethos, who was also called Ramesses after his grandfather, as well as the sacred bull Apis, and other holy animals. The images of the gods were concealed, lest they should be profaned by the invaders. Amenôphis remained in Ethiopia for thirteen years, while Osarsiph, who had taken the name of Moses, together with his allies from Jerusalem, committed innumerable atrocities. At last, however, Amenôphis and his son Sethos returned, each at the head of an army; the enemy were defeated and overthrown, and finally pursued to the borders of Syria.

The tradition is a curious mixture of fact and legend. Osarsiph is but an Egyptianised form of Joseph, the first syllable of which has been explained as representing the god of Israel (as in Ps. lxxxi. 5), and has accordingly been identified with Osar or Osiris. The ancient Egyptian habit of regarding the foreigner as impure has been interpreted to mean that the followers of Osarsiph were lepers. The [pg 094] Exodus of the Israelites has been confounded with the invasion of the northern barbarians in the reign of Meneptah, as well as with the troublous period that saw the fall of the nineteenth dynasty when the throne of Egypt was seized by the Syrian Arisu. And, lastly, the hated Hyksos have been introduced into the story; their fortress Avaris is made the rallying-place of the revolted lepers, and it is through the help they send from Jerusalem that the rule of Osarsiph or Moses is established in the valley of the Nile.

An interesting commentary on the legend has been furnished by a papyrus lately acquired by M. Golénischeff, and dating from the age of Thothmes iii. On the last page is a sort of Messianic prophecy, the hero of which has the name of Ameni, a shortened form of Amenôphis. “A king,” it says, “will come from the south, Ameni the truth-declaring by name. He will be the son of a woman of Nubia, and will be born in.... He will assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and will lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt. He will unite the double crown.... The people of the age of the son of man (sic) will rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They will be far from evil, and the wicked will humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics (Âmu) will fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his flame. The wicked will wait on his judgments, the rebels on his [pg 095] power. The royal serpent on his brow will pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even that of the prince, so that the Asiatics may no more enter into Egypt.” In this Ameni we should probably see the Amenôphis of the Manethonian story.

Against the identification of Meneptah with the Pharaoh of the Exodus it has, however, been urged that he seems on the whole to have been a successful prince. His kingdom passed safely through the shock of the Libyan and northern invasions, and notices which have survived to us show that, at all events in the earlier part of his reign, Gaza and the neighbouring towns still acknowledged his authority. At Zaru, on the Asiatic frontier of Egypt, a young scribe, Pa-ebpasa by name, was stationed, whose duty it was to keep a record of all those who entered or left the country by “the way of the Philistines.” Some of his notes, made in the third year of Meneptah, are entered on the back of his school copybook, which is now in the British Museum. One of them tells us that on the fifteenth of Pakhons Baal— ... the son of Zippor of Gaza, passed through with a letter to Baal-marom(?)-gau, the prince of Tyre; another that Thoth, the son of Zakarumu, and the policeman Duthau, the son of Shem-baal, as well as Sutekh-mes, the son of Epher-dagal, had come from Gaza with a message to the king.

A curious despatch, dated in Meneptah's eighth year, goes to show that at that time the kinsfolk of the Israelites still had liberty to pass from the desert into the land of Goshen and there find pasturage for their flocks. One of his officials informs him that certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom had been allowed to pass the Khetam or fortress of Meneptah Hotep-hima in the district of Succoth, and make their way to the lakes of the city of Pithom, in the district of Succoth, “in order to feed themselves and their herds on the possessions of Pharaoh, who is there a beneficent sun for all peoples.” The document may be interpreted in two ways. It may be taken as a proof that the Israelites had not yet fled from Egypt, and that there was consequently as yet no restraint placed by the Egyptians upon the entrance of the Asiatic nomads into their country, or it may be regarded as implying that the land of Goshen was already deserted, so that there was abundance of room for both shepherds and flocks. On behalf of this view a passage may be quoted from the great inscription of Meneptah at Karnak, in which we read that “the country around Pa-Bailos (the modern Belbeis) was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers. It was abandoned since the time of the ancestors.” More probably, however, this means that the land in [pg 097] question was not inhabited by Egyptian fellahin, but given over to the Hebrew shepherds and the “mixed multitude” of their Bedouin kinsmen.

A more serious objection to making Meneptah the Pharaoh of the Exodus is the fact that his son Seti ii. was already acknowledged as heir to the throne during his father's lifetime. The “tale of the two brothers,” to which we have already had to refer, was dedicated to him while he was still crown-prince. Indeed, it would even appear that he was associated with his father on the throne, since the cartouches of Meneptah and Seti ii. are found side by side in the rock-temple of Surarîyeh. It would seem, therefore, that the first-born of the Pharaoh, who was destroyed on the night of the Passover, could not have been a son of Meneptah—at all events, if his heir and future successor were his first-born son. That Meneptah should have been buried in one of the royal tombs of Bibân el-Molûk at Thebes, and received divine honours after his death, is of less consequence. As has often been remarked, no mention is made in the narrative of the Exodus that the Pharaoh himself was drowned, and though Meneptah's tomb (No. 8) is unfinished, the cult that was paid to his memory indicates that his mummy was deposited in it. It was plundered centuries ago, and the numerous Greek inscriptions on its [pg 098] walls make it clear that it was open to visitors in the Roman age.

Professor Maspero has suggested that the Pharaoh of the Bible was Seti ii. We know that Seti must have been a weak prince, and that his rule was disputed. A usurper, Amon-messu by name, seized the crown either during his lifetime or at his death, and governed at Thebes, while the authority of the lawful line of princes was still acknowledged in the north. We also know that he must have died suddenly, for his tomb at Thebes (No. 15), though begun magnificently, was never finished. Its galleries and halls were hewn out of the rock, but never adorned with sculptures and paintings, and, except at the entrance, we have merely outline sketches, which were never filled in. His cartouches, however, are found in another tomb, not far off (No. 13), and after his death worship was paid to him and his wife.

A despatch, written during his reign, relates to the escape of two fugitives who had travelled along the very road which the Israelites attempted to take. The scribe tells us that he set out in pursuit of them from the royal city of Ramses on the evening of the 9th of Epiphi, and had arrived at the Khetam or fortress of Succoth the following day. Two days later he reached another Khetam, and there learned that the slaves were already safe in the desert, having passed [pg 099] the lines of fortification to the north of the Migdol of King Seti. The account is an interesting illustration of the flight, on a far larger scale, that must have taken place about the same time. The geography of the despatch is in close harmony with that of the Book of Exodus, and bears witness to the contemporaneousness of the latter with the events it professes to record. It is a geography which ceased to be exact after the age of the nineteenth dynasty.

It is thus possible that Seti ii., instead of Meneptah, is the Pharaoh whose host perished in the waves of the Red Sea. But there is yet another claimant in Si-Ptah, with whom the nineteenth dynasty came to an end. Dr. Kellogg has argued ably on behalf of him, and it is possible that the views of this scholar are correct. Si-Ptah's right to the throne was derived from his wife, Ta-user, and he reigned at least six years. That he followed Seti ii. has long been admitted, on the authority of Manetho, though doubts have been cast on it in consequence of a statement of Champollion that he found the name of Seti written over that of Si-Ptah in the tomb of the latter at Bibân el-Molûk (No. 14). All doubts, however, are now set at rest by an inscription I copied at Wadi Halfa two years ago, in which the writer, Hora, the son of Kam, declares that he had formerly belonged to the palace of Seti ii., and had engraved [pg 100] the inscription in the third year of Si-Ptah. In another inscription in the same place, dated also in Si-Ptah's reign, the author states that he had been an ambassador to the land of Khal or Syria. Intercourse with Asia was therefore still maintained.

Si-Ptah's tomb at Thebes was usurped by Setnekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty. It is even doubtful whether the king for whom it was made was ever buried in it. In the second sepulchral hall the lid of his sarcophagus was discovered, but of the sarcophagus itself there was no trace. Perhaps it had been appropriated by Set-nekht. At any rate, those who believe that the Pharaoh of the Exodus perished in the Red Sea will find in Si-Ptah a better representative of him than in Meneptah or Seti. And the period of anarchy which followed upon his death may be regarded as the natural sequel of the disasters that befel Egypt before the children of Israel were permitted to go.

However this may be, the question of the date of the Exodus is reduced to narrow limits. The three successors of Ramses ii. reigned altogether but a short time. Manetho gives seven years only to Si-Ptah, five years to Amon-messu, and we know from the monuments that Meneptah and Seti ii. can have reigned but a very few years. Thirty or forty years at most will have covered the period that elapsed [pg 101] between the death of the great Ramses and the downfall of his dynasty. Then came a few years of confusion and anarchy, followed by the reign of Setnekht. If we place the accession of Ramses iii. in b.c. 1230, we cannot be far wrong.

When that happened, the Israelites were hidden out of the sight of the great nations of the world among the solitudes of the desert. They were pitching their tents on the frontiers of Mount Seir, in the near neighbourhood of their kinsmen in Edom and Midian. There, at Sinai and Kadesh-barnea, they were receiving a code of laws, and being fitted to become a nation and the conquerors of Canaan. Were they included among the Shasu of Mount Seir whose overthrow is commemorated by Ramses iii.?

For an answer we must turn to the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Numbers. There we read how it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord: “Waheb in Suphah and the brooks of Arnon, and the stream of the brook that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth upon the border of Moab.” Of the war against the Amorites on the banks of the Arnon we know something, but the Old Testament has preserved no record of the other war, which had its scene in Suphah. Where Suphah was we know from the opening of the Book of Deuteronomy, which tells us that the words of Moses were addressed to the people [pg 102] “in the plain over against Suph.” Suph, in fact, was the district which gave its name to the yâm Sûph or “Sea of Suph,” the Red Sea of the authorised version, the modern Gulf of Akabah. Here were the Edomite ports of Eloth and Ezion-geber, where Solomon built his fleet of merchantmen (1 Kings ix. 26), and here too was the region which faced “the plain” on the southern side of Moab.

The barren ranges of Mount Seir run down southward to Ezion-geber and Eloth, at the head of the Gulf of Akabah. And it was just in the ranges of Mount Seir that Ramses iii. tells us he smote the Shasu and plundered their tents. When he made this expedition, the Israelites were probably still encamped on the borders of Edom. They had not as yet entered Canaan when he marched through the later Judæa, and crossed the Jordan into Moab, and his campaign against the Shasu of the desert did not take place many years later. At Medînet Habu, the “chief of the Shasu” figures among his prisoners by the side of the kings of the Hittites and the Amorites.

Was “the war of the Lord” in Suphah waged against the Pharaoh of Egypt? Chronology is in favour of it, and if the enemies of the Israelites were not the Egyptian army, it is hard to say who else they could have been. We know from the [pg 103] Pentateuch that they were not the people of Edom; “meddle not with them,” the Israelites were enjoined; the children of Esau were their “brethren,” and God had “given Mount Seir unto Esau for a possession.”

But whether or not Ramses iii. and the tribes of Israel ever came into actual conflict, it must have been during his reign that the first Israelitish conquests in Canaan were made. The settlement of the twelve tribes in Palestine was coeval with the final decay of the Egyptian monarchy.

Chapter IV. The Age Of The Israelitish Monarchies.

Ramses iii. was the last of the great Pharaohs in whose veins ran native Egyptian blood. His successors all bore the same name as himself, but they possessed neither his energy nor his power to rule. He had saved Egypt from further attack from without, and it was well he had done so, for the feeble monarchs of the twentieth dynasty would have been unable to resist the foe. They ceased even to build or to erect the monuments which testified to the prosperity of the country and the progress of its art. The high-priests of Amon gradually usurped their authority, and a time came at length when the last of the Ramses fled into exile in Ethiopia, and a new dynasty governed in his stead. But the rule of the new monarchs was hardly acknowledged beyond the Delta; Thebes was practically independent under its priest-kings, and though they acknowledged the authority of the Tanite Pharaohs in name, they acted, in real fact, as if they were independent sovereigns. One of [pg 105] them, Ra-men-kheper, built fortresses not only at Gebelên in the south, but also at El-Hîbeh in the north, and thus blocked the river against the subjects of the Tanite princes, as well as against invaders from the south. At times, indeed, the Tanite Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty exercised an actual sovereignty over Upper Egypt, and Smendes, the first of them, quarried stone at Dababîyeh, opposite Gebelên, with which to repair the canal of Luxor; but, as a general rule, so far as the south was concerned, they were Pharaohs only in name. The rival dynasty of Theban high-priests was at once more powerful and more king-like. They it was who, in some moment of danger, concealed the mummies of the great monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties in the pit at Dêr el-Bahâri, and whose own mummies were entombed by the side of those of a Thothmes and a Ramses.

The Egyptian wife of Solomon was the daughter of one of the last Pharaohs of the twenty-first dynasty. She brought with her as a dowry the Canaanitish city of Gezer. Gezer had been one of the leading cities of Palestine in the days of the Tel el-Amarna correspondence, and through all the years of Israelitish conquest it had remained in Canaanitish hands. It was a Pharaoh of Tanis, and not an Israelite, into whose possession it was destined finally to fall.

The waning power of Solomon in Israel coincided with the waning power of the twenty-first dynasty. Long before the death of the Hebrew monarch, a new dynasty was reigning over Egypt. Shishak, its founder, was of Libyan origin. His immediate forefathers had commanded the Libyan mercenaries in the service of the Pharaoh, and inscriptions lately discovered in the Oasis of El-Khargeh write the name Shashaka. The Egyptians slightly changed its pronunciation and made it Shashanq, but in the Old Testament the true form is preserved.

Shishak brought new vigour into the decaying monarchy of the Nile. The priest-kings of Thebes went down before him, along with the effete Pharaohs of Tanis. It may be that Solomon attempted to assist his father-in-law; if he did so, the only result was to bring trouble upon himself. His rebel subject Jeroboam fled to Egypt, and found shelter and protection in Shishak's court.

Shishak must have looked on with satisfaction while the neighbouring empire of Israel fell to pieces, until eventually the central power itself was shattered in twain. The rebel he had so carefully nurtured at his own court was the instrument which relieved him of all further fear of danger on the side of Asia. So far from being a menace to Egypt, Jerusalem now lay at the mercy of the Egyptian armies, and in the fifth [pg 107] year of Rehoboam, Shishak led his forces against it. The strong walls Solomon had built were of no avail; its temple and palace were plundered, and the golden shields in its armoury were carried away. A record of the campaign was engraved by the conqueror on the southern wall of the temple of Amon at Karnak. There we read how he had overthrown the Amu or Asiatics, and the Fenkhu or people of Palestine, and underneath are the cartouches, each with the head of a captive above it, which contain the names of the conquered places. At the outset come the names of towns in the northern kingdom of Israel. But, as Professor Maspero remarks, this does not prove that they were actually among the conquests of Shishak. If Jeroboam had begged his aid against Judah, and thereby acknowledged himself the vassal of the Pharaoh, it would have been a sufficient pretext for inserting the names of his cities among the subject states of Egypt. But it may be that the campaign was directed quite as much against Israel as against Judah, and that Judah suffered most, simply because it had to bear the brunt of the attack.

In any case, the list of vanquished towns begins first with Gaza, the possession of which was necessary before the Egyptian army could force its way into Palestine; then come Rabbith of Issachar, Taanach, near Megiddo, Hapharaim and Beth-Horon, while [pg 108] Mahanaim, on the eastern side of the Jordan, is also included among them. But after this the list deals exclusively with the towns and villages of Judah, and of the Bedouin tribes in the desert to the south of it. Thus we have Ajalon and Makkedah, Socho and Keilah, Migdol and Beth-anoth. Then we read the names of Azem and Arad, farther to the south, as well as of the Hagaraim or “Enclosures” of Arad, and Rabbith 'Aradai, “Arad the capital.” Next to Arad comes the name of Yurahma, the Jerahme-el of the Old Testament, the brother of Caleb the Kenizzite (1 Chron. ii. 42) whose land was ravaged by David (1 Sam. xxx. 29). But the larger portion of the list is made up of the names of small villages and even Bedouin encampments, or of such general terms as Hagra, “enclosure,” Negebu, “the south,” 'Emeq, “the valley,” Shebbaleth, “a torrent,” Abilim, “fields,” Ganat, “garden,” Haideba, “a quarry,” and the Egyptian Shodinau, “canals.”[8] Among them we look in vain even for names like those of Gezer and Beer-sheba. Jerusalem, too, is conspicuous by its absence, unless we agree with Professor Maspero in seeing it in the last name of the list (No. 133), of which only the first syllable is preserved. Were it not for the record in [pg 109] the First Book of Kings, we should never have known that the campaign of Shishak had inflicted such signal injury on the kingdom of Judah.

Champollion, indeed, the first discoverer of the list and of its importance, believed that he had found in it the name of the Jewish capital. The twenty-ninth cartouche reads Yaud-hamelek, which he explained as signifying “the kingdom of Judah,” while Rosellini made it “the king of Judah.” But both interpretations are impossible. Melek, it is true, means “king” in Hebrew, but “king of Judah” would have to be melek-Yaudah; “kingdom of Judah,” malkûth-Yaudah. In the Semitic languages the genitive must follow the noun that governs it.

Yaud-hamelek is the Hebrew Ye(h)ud ham-melech “Jehud of the king.” Jehud was a town of Dan (Josh. xix. 45), which Blau has identified with the modern El-Yehudîyeh, near Jaffa, and the title attached to it in the Egyptian list implies that it was an appanage of the crown. The faces of the prisoners who surmount the cartouches are worthy of attention. The Egyptian artists were skilled delineators of the human features, and an examination of their sculptures and paintings has shown that they represented the characteristics of their models with wonderful truth and accuracy. For ethnological purposes their portraits of foreign races are of considerable [pg 110] importance. Now the prisoners of Shishak have the features, not of the Jew, but of the Amorite. The prisoners who served as models to the Egyptian sculptors at Karnak must therefore have been of Amorite descent. It is a proof that the Amorite population in southern Palestine was still strong in the days of Rehoboam and Shishak. The Jews would have been predominant only in Jerusalem and the larger cities and fortresses of the kingdom. Elsewhere the older race survived with all its characteristic features; the Israelitish conquest had never rooted it out. Hence it is that it still lives and flourishes in its ancient home. The traveller in the country districts of Judah looks in vain for traces of the Jewish race, but he may still see there the Amorite just as he is depicted on the monuments of Egypt. The Jews, in fact, were but the conquering and dominant caste, and with the extinction of their nationality came also in Judah the extinction of their racial type. The few who remained were one by one absorbed into the older population of the country.

Shishak died soon after his Jewish campaigns. None of his successors seem to have possessed his military capacity and energy. One of them, however, Osorkon ii., appears to have made an expedition against Palestine. Among the monuments disinterred at Bubastis by Dr. Naville for the Egyptian [pg 111] Exploration Fund are the inscribed blocks of stone which formed the walls of the second hall of the temple. This hall was restored by Osorkon, who called it the “Festival Hall” of Amon, which was dedicated on the day of Khoiak, in the twenty-second year of the king's reign. On one of the blocks the Pharaoh declares that “all countries, the Upper and Lower Retennu, are hidden under his feet.” The Upper Retennu denoted Palestine, the Lower Retennu Northern Syria, and though the boast was doubtless a vainglorious one, it must have had some foundation in truth.

In the Second Book of Chronicles (xiv. 9-15) we are told that when Asa was on the Jewish throne, “there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host of a thousand thousand and three hundred chariots.” The similarity between the names Zerah and Osorkon has long been noticed, and the reign of Osorkon ii. would coincide with that of Asa. Dr. Naville, therefore, is probably right in believing that some connection exists between the campaign of Zerah and the boast of Osorkon. It is true that the Chronicler calls Zerah an Ethiopian, and describes his army as an Ethiopian host; but this seems due to the fact that the next kings of Egypt who interfered in the affairs of Palestine, So and Tirhakah, were of Ethiopian descent. In the time [pg 112] of Asa, at any rate, when the twenty-second dynasty was ruling over Egypt, no Ethiopian army could have entered Judah without the permission of the Egyptian monarch. However, Dr. Naville draws attention to the fact that Osorkon seems to have had some special tie with Ethiopia. His great festival at Bubastis was attended by natives of Ethiopia, the Anti came with their gifts from “the land of the negroes,” and are depicted like the priests on the walls of the hall.

But troublous times were in store for Egypt. The twenty-second dynasty came to an end, and a period followed of confusion, civil war, and foreign invasion. The kings of Ethiopia sailed down the Nile and swept the country from Assuan to the sea. Petty princes reigned as independent sovereigns in the various cities of Egypt, and waged war one against the other. Pi-ankhi the Ethiopian was content with their momentary submission; he then retired to his ancestral capital at Napata, midway between Dongola and Khartûm, carrying with him the spoils of the Nile. Another Ethiopian, Shabaka or Sabako, the son of Kashet, made a more permanent settlement in Egypt. He put to death the nominal Pharaoh, Bak-n-ran-f or Bokkhoris, and founded the twenty-fifth dynasty. Order was again restored, the petty princes suppressed, and Egypt [pg 113] as well as Ethiopia obeyed a single head. The roads were cleared of brigands, the temples and walls of the cities were rebuilt, and trade could again pass freely up and down the Nile.

An Egyptian civilisation and an Egyptian religion had been established in Ethiopia since the days of the eighteenth dynasty. For some centuries, even after they had become independent of Egypt, the ruling classes boasted of the purity of their Egyptian descent. But before the age of Sabako the Egyptian element had been absorbed by the native population. We have learned from a monument of the Assyrian king, Esar-haddon, lately found at Sinjerli, in northern Syria, that Sabako and his successors had all the physical characteristics of the negro. But no sign of this is allowed to appear on the Egyptian monuments. With the contempt for the black race which still distinguishes them, the Egyptians refused to acknowledge that their Pharaohs could be of negro blood. In the sculptures and paintings of the Nile, accordingly, the kings of the Ethiopian dynasty are represented with all the features of the Egyptian race.

In spite, however, of all attempts to conceal the fact, we now know that they were negroes in reality. But they brought with them a vigour and a strength of will that had long been wanting among the rulers [pg 114] of Egypt. And it was not long before their Asiatic neighbours found that a new and energetic power had arisen on the banks of the Nile. Assyria was now extending its empire throughout Western Asia, and claiming to control the politics of Syria and Palestine. The Syrian princes looked to Egypt for help. In b.c. 720, Assyria and Egypt met face to face for the first time. Sib'e, the Tartan, or commander-in-chief, of the Egyptian armies, with Hanno of Gaza and other Syrian allies, blocked the way of the Assyrian invaders at Raphia, on the border of Palestine. The victory was won by the Assyrian Sargon. Hanno was captured, and Sib'e fled to the Delta. But Sargon turned northward again, and did not follow up his success. He was content with receiving the tribute of Pharaoh (Pir'u) “king of Egypt,” of Samsi, the queen of Arabia, and of Ithamar the Sabæan.

In Sib'e we must see the So or Seve of the Old Testament (2 Kings xvii. 4). He is there called “king of Egypt,” but he was rather one of the subordinate princes of the Delta, who acted as the commander-in-chief of “Pharaoh.” Pharaoh, it would seem, was still Bak-n-ran-f.

A few years later Sabako was established on the throne. He reigned at least twelve years, and was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Tirhakah, the Tarqû [pg 115] of the Assyrian texts. Under him, Egypt once more played a part in Jewish history.

It was trust in “Pharaoh, king of Egypt,” that made Hezekiah revolt from Assyria after Sargon's death. The result was the invasion of his kingdom by Sennacherib in b.c. 701. Tirhakah moved forward to help his ally. But his march diverted the attention of the Assyrian monarch only for a while. The armies of Sennacherib and Tirhakah met at Eltekeh, and Tirhakah the Pharaoh of Egypt was forced to retire. Both claim a victory in their inscriptions. Sennacherib tells us how “the kings of Egypt and the bowmen, chariots, and horses of the king of northern Arabia, had collected their innumerable forces and gone to the aid” of Hezekiah and his Philistine allies, and how in sight of Eltekeh, “in reliance on Assur,” he had “fought with them and utterly overthrown them.” “The charioteers and the sons of the king of Egypt, together with the charioteers of the king of northern Arabia,” he had “taken captive in the battle.” Tirhakah, on the other hand, on a statue now in the Gizeh Museum, declares that he was the conqueror of the Bedouin, the Hittites, the Arvadites, the Assyrians, and the people of Aram-Naharaim. The battle, in fact, was a Kadmeian victory. Tirhakah was so far defeated that he was forced to retreat to his own dominions, while [pg 116] Sennacherib's victory was not decisive enough to allow him to pursue it. He contented himself with marching back into Judah, burning and plundering its towns and villages, and carrying their inhabitants into captivity. Then came the catastrophe which destroyed the larger part of his army and obliged him to return ignominiously to his own capital. The spoils and captives of Judah were the only fruits of his campaign. His rebellious vassal went unpunished, and the strong fortress of Jerusalem was saved from the Assyrian. Though Sennacherib made many military expeditions during the remaining twenty years of his reign, he never came again to the south of Palestine.

Egypt lay sheltered from invasion behind Jerusalem. But with the death of Sennacherib there came a change. His son and successor, Esar-haddon, was a good general and a man of great ability. Manasseh of Judah became his vassal, and the way lay open to the Nile. With a large body of trained veterans he descended upon Egypt (b.c. 674). The sheikh of the Bedouin provided him with the camels which conveyed the water for the army across the desert. Three campaigns were needed before Egypt, under its Ethiopian ruler, could be subdued. But at last, in b.c. 670, Esar-haddon drove the Egyptian forces before him in fifteen days (from the 3rd to the [pg 117] 18th of Tammuz or June) all the way from the frontier to Memphis, thrice defeating them with heavy loss, and wounding Tirhakah himself. Three days later Memphis fell, and Tirhakah fled to Ethiopia, leaving Egypt to the conqueror. It was after this success that the Assyrian monarch erected the stêlê at Sinjerli, on which he is portrayed with Tirhakah of Egypt and Baal of Tyre kneeling before him, each with a ring through his lips, to which is attached a bridle held by the Assyrian king.

Egypt was reorganised under Assyrian rule, and measures taken to prevent the return of the Ethiopians. It was divided into twenty satrapies, the native princes being appointed to govern them for their Assyrian master. At their head was placed Necho, the vassal king of Sais. Esar-haddon now returned to Nineveh, and on the cliffs of the Nahr el-Kelb, near Beyrout, he engraved a record of his conquest of Egypt and Thebes by the side of the monument whereon, seven centuries previously, Ramses ii. had boasted of his victories over the nations of Asia.

At first the Egyptian princes were well pleased with their change of masters. But in Thebes there was a strong party which sympathised with Ethiopia rather than with Assyria. With their help, Tirhakah returned in b.c. 668, sailed down the Nile, and took [pg 118] Memphis by storm. Esar-haddon started at once to suppress the revolt. But on the way to Egypt he died on the 10th of Marchesvan or October, and his son, Assur-bani-pal, followed him on the throne.

The Ethiopian army was encountered near Kar-banit, in the Delta. A complete victory was gained over it, and Tirhakah was compelled to fly, first from Memphis, then from Thebes. The tributary kings whom he had displaced were restored, and Assur-bani-pal left Egypt in the full belief that it was tranquil. But hardly had he returned to Nineveh before a fresh revolt broke out there. Tirhakah began to plot with the native satraps, and even Necho of Sais was suspected of complicity. The commanders of the Assyrian garrisons, accordingly, sent him and two other princes (from Tanis and Goshen) loaded with chains to Assyria. But Assur-bani-pal, either really convinced of Necho's innocence or pretending to be so, not only pardoned him but bestowed upon him a robe of honour, as well as a sword of gold and a chariot and horses, and sent him back to Sais, giving at the same time the government of Athribis, whose mounds lie close to Benha, to his son, Psammetikhos. Meanwhile Tirhakah had again penetrated to Thebes and Memphis, where he celebrated the festival in honour of the appearance of a new Apis. But his power was no longer what [pg 119] it once had been, and even before the return of Necho he found it prudent to retire to Ethiopia. There he died a few months later.

The Thebaid, however, continued in a state of revolt against the Assyrian authority. Another Ethiopian king, whom the Assyrians call Urd-Aman, had succeeded Tirhakah, and was battling for the sovereignty of Egypt. Urd-Aman is usually identified with the Pharaoh Rud-Amon, whose name has been met with on two Egyptian monuments, but about whom nothing further is known. Some scholars, however, read the name Tand-Aman, and identify it with that of Tuatan-Amon or Tuant-Amon, whose royal cartouches are engraved by the side of those of Tirhakah in the temple of Ptah-Osiris at Karnak. An inscription found built into a wall at Luxor mentions his third year, and a large stêlê erected by him at Napata was discovered among the ruins of his capital in 1862, and is now in the Museum of Gizeh. On this he states that in the first year of his reign he was excited by a dream to invade the north. Thebes opened its gates to him, and after worshipping in the temple of Amon at Karnak, he marched to Memphis, which he captured after a slight resistance. Then he proceeded against the princes of the Delta, who, however, shut themselves up in their cities or else submitted to him.

One day Paqrur of Goshen appeared at Memphis to do him homage, much to the surprise and delight of the Ethiopian king. As Paqrur was the prince of Pi-Sopd or Goshen, who had been sent to Nineveh along with Necho, the date of Tuatan-Amon is pretty clear. How he came to quit Egypt, however, he does not vouchsafe to explain.

Whether Urd-Aman were Rud-Amon or Tuatan-Amon, he gave a good deal of trouble to the Assyrians. Thebes was securely in his hands, and from thence he marched upon Memphis. The Assyrian garrison and its allies were defeated in front of the city, which was then blockaded and taken after a long siege. Necho was captured and put to death, and Psammetikhos escaped the same fate only by flight into Syria. But Assyrian revenge did not tarry long. Assur-bani-pal determined to put an end to Egyptian revolt and Ethiopian invasion once for all. A large army was despatched to the Nile, which overthrew the forces of Rud-Amon in the Delta and pursued him as far as Thebes. Thence he fled to Kipkip in Ethiopia, and a terrible punishment was inflicted on the capital of southern Egypt. The whole of its inhabitants were led away into slavery. Its temples—at once the centres of disaffection and fortresses against attack—were half-demolished, its monuments and palaces were destroyed, and all its [pg 121] treasures, sacred and profane, were carried away. Among the spoil were two obelisks, more than seventy tons in weight, which were removed to Nineveh as trophies of victory. The injuries which Kambyses has been accused of inflicting on the ancient monuments of Thebes were really the work of the Assyrians.

How great was the impression made upon the oriental world by the sack of Thebes may be gathered from the reference to it by the prophet Nahum (iii. 8-10). Nineveh itself is threatened with the same overthrow. “Art thou better than No of Amon, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about it, whose rampart was the sea, (the Nile), and her wall was from the sea? Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite; Put and Lubim were thy helpers. Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity: her young children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets: and they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were bound in chains.” As the destruction of Thebes took place about b.c. 665, the date of Nahum's prophecy cannot have been much later.

In the Assyrian inscriptions Thebes is called Ni', corresponding with the No of the Old Testament. Both words represent the Egyptian Nu, “city,” [pg 122] Thebes being pre-eminently “the city” of Upper Egypt. Its patron-deity was Amon, to whom its great temple was dedicated, and hence it is that Nahum calls it “No of Amon.” Divided as it was into two halves by the Nile, and encircled on either side by canals, one of which—“the southern water”—still runs past the southern front of the temple of Luxor, it could truly be said that its “rampart was the sea.” To this day the Nile is called “the sea” by the natives of Egypt.

The Ethiopians penetrated into Egypt no more. The twenty satrapies were re-established; and Psammetikhos received his father's principality, though the precedence among the vassal-kings was given to Paqrur of Goshen. For a time the country was at peace.

Fifteen years later, however, an event occurred which shook the Assyrian empire to its foundations. A revolt broke out which spread throughout the whole of it. The revolt was headed by Assur-bani-pal's brother, the Viceroy of Babylonia, and for some time the result wavered in the balance. But the good generalship and disciplined forces of Assyria eventually prevailed, and she emerged from the struggle, exhausted indeed, but triumphant. The empire, however, was shrunken. Gyges of Lydia had thrown off his allegiance, and had assisted [pg 123] Psammetikhos of Sais to make Egypt independent. While the Assyrian armies were battling for existence in Asia, Psammetikhos, with the Ionian and Karian mercenaries from Lydia, was driving out the Assyrian garrisons and overcoming his brother satraps. One by one they disappeared before him, and at last he had the satisfaction of seeing Egypt a united and independent monarchy, under a monarch who claimed to be of native race.

The blood of the founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty was, however, mixed. He seems to have been, partly at least, of Libyan descent, and it is even doubtful whether his name is pure Egyptian. Like his father, he surrounded himself with foreigners: the Greeks and Karians, with whose help he had gained his throne, were high in favour, and constituted the royal body-guard. The native Egyptian army, we are told, deserted the king in disgust and made their way to Ethiopia. However that may be, Greek troops were settled in “camps” in the Delta, Greek merchants were allowed to trade and even to build in Egypt, and the Karians became dragomen, guides, and interpreters between the natives and the European tourists who began to visit the Nile.

It was during the reign of Psammetikhos i. (b.c. 664-610) that the great invasion of nomad Scyths, [pg 124] referred to in the earlier chapters of Jeremiah, swept over Western Asia. They sacked the towns of the Philistines and made their way to the Egyptian frontier, but there they were bought off by Psammetikhos. After their dispersion, the Egyptian Pharaoh turned his eyes towards Palestine, with the intention of restoring the Asiatic empire of Ramses ii. The twenty-sixth dynasty was an age of antiquarian revival; not content with restoring Egypt to peace and prosperity, its kings aimed also at restoring the Egypt of the past. Egyptian art again puts on an antique form, temples are repaired or erected in accordance with ancient models, and literature reflects the general tendency. The revival only wanted originality to make it successful; as it is, the art of the twenty-sixth dynasty is careful and good, and under its rule Egypt enjoyed for the last time a St. Luke's summer of culture and renown.

The power of Assyria was passing away. The great rebellion, and the wars in Elam which followed, had drained it of its resources. The Scythic invasion destroyed what little strength was left. Before Psammetikhos died Nineveh was already surrounded by its foes, and four years later it perished utterly.

The provinces of the west became virtually independent. Josiah of Judah still called himself a vassal [pg 125] of the Assyrian monarch, but he acted as if the Assyrian monarchy did not exist. The Assyrian governor of Samaria was deprived of his authority, and Jewish rule was obeyed throughout what had been the territory of the Ten Tribes.

The weakness of Assyria was the opportunity of Egypt. The earlier years of the reign of Psammetikhos were spent in reorganising his kingdom and army, in suppressing all opposition to his government, and in rebuilding the ruined cities and temples. Then he marched into Palestine and endeavoured to secure once more for Egypt the cities of the Philistines. Ashdod was taken after a prolonged siege, and an Egyptian garrison placed in it.

The successor of Psammetikhos was his son Necho, who carried out the foreign policy of his father. The old canal which ran from the Red Sea at Suez to the Nile near Zagazig, and which centuries of neglect had allowed to be choked, was again partially cleared out, and “the tongue of the Egyptian sea was cut off” (Isa. xi. 15). Ships were also sent from Suez under Phœnician pilots to circumnavigate Africa. Three years did they spend on the voyage, and after passing the Straits of Gibraltar, finally arrived safely at the mouths of the Nile. There an incredulous people heard that as they were sailing westward the sun was on their right hand.

But long before the return of his ships, Necho had placed himself at the head of his army and entered on the invasion of Asia. The Syrians were defeated at Migdol, and Gaza was occupied. The Egyptian army then proceeded to march along the sea-coast by the ancient military road, which struck inland at the Nahr el-Kelb. But the Jewish king, pleading his duty to his Assyrian suzerain, attempted to block the way; the result was a battle in the plain of Megiddo, where the Jewish forces were totally routed, and Josiah himself carried from the field mortally wounded. Necho now overran northern Syria as far as the Euphrates, and then returned southward to punish the Jews. Jerusalem was captured by treachery, and Jehoahaz, the new king, deposed after a reign of only three months. The Pharaoh then made his brother Eliakim king in his stead, changing his name to Jehoiakim. The city was fined a talent of gold and a hundred talents of silver, and Necho sent his armour to the temple of Apollo near Miletus as a thank-offering to the god of his Greek mercenaries.

The empire of Thothmes was restored, at all events in Asia. But it lasted hardly more than three years. In b.c. 605 a decisive battle was fought at Carchemish, on the Euphrates, now Jerablûs, between Necho and the Babylonian prince [pg 127] Nebuchadrezzar, who commanded the army of his father Nabopolassar. The Egyptians fled in confusion, and the Asiatic empire was utterly lost. The Jewish king transferred his allegiance to the conqueror, and for three years “became his servant.” Then he rebelled, probably in consequence of a fresh attempt made by the Egyptians to recover their power in Palestine. The attempt, however, failed, and a Babylonian army was sent against Jerusalem. Jehoiakim was already dead, but his son Jehoiachin, along with the leading citizens, the military class, and the artisans—“ten thousand captives” in all—was carried into exile in Babylonia (b.c. 599). His uncle Zedekiah was placed on the throne, and for nearly nine years he remained faithful to his Babylonian master.

Then came temptation from the side of Egypt. Psammetikhos ii., who had succeeded his father Necho in b.c. 594, prepared to march into Palestine, and contest the supremacy over Western Asia with the Babylonian monarch. A Babylonian army was already besieging the revolted city of Jerusalem when the forces of the Pharaoh appeared in sight. The Babylonians broke up their camp and retired, and it seemed as if the rebellion of the Jewish king had been successful (Jer. xxxvii. 5, 11; Ezek. xvii. 15).

But it was not for long. The Egyptians returned to “their own land,” and the siege of Jerusalem was recommenced. At last, in b.c. 588, the city was taken, its king and most of its inhabitants led into captivity, and its temple and palace burned with fire. Judah was placed under a Babylonian governor, and the authority of the Babylonians acknowledged as far as Gaza.

Psammetikhos ii. had died in the preceding year, and his son Uahabra, the Apries of the Greeks, the Hophra of the Old Testament, occupied his place. The army which had gone to the help of Zedekiah had doubtless been sent by him. He had recaptured Gaza, and marched along the coast to Sidon, which he captured, and Tyre, which was in rebellion against the Chaldæans, while his fleet defeated the combined forces of the Cyprians and Phœnicians, and held the sea. A hieroglyphic inscription, erected by a native of Gebal and commemorative of the invasion, has recently been found near Sidon. But the Egyptian conquests were again lost almost as quickly as they had been made.

Palestine became a Babylonian province up to the frontiers of Egypt. Many of the Jews who had been left in it fled to Egypt. Their numbers were reinforced by a band of outlaws, of whom Johanan was the leader, who had murdered the Babylonian [pg 129] governor and had dragged into Egypt with them the prophet Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. Jeremiah in vain protested against their conduct, and predicted that Hophra should be slain by his enemies, and that Nebuchadrezzar should set up his throne on that very pavement “at the entry of Pharaoh's house in Tahpanhes” where the prophet was then standing. Tahpanhes is almost certainly Tel ed-Defneh, the Daphnæ of Greek geography, which stands in the mid-desert about twelve miles to the west of Kantara on the Suez Canal, and where Professor Flinders Petrie made excavations for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886. There he found the remains of a great fortress and camp, which had been built by Psammetikhos i. for his Greek mercenaries. The walls of the camp were forty feet in thickness, and the ruins of the fortress still go by the name of the “Castle of the Jew's Daughter.” In front of it is a brick pavement, just like that described by Jeremiah.

Daphnæ, in fact, was one of the chief fortresses of Egypt on the side of Asia, and it was accordingly the chief station of the Greek mercenaries. It commanded the entrance to the Delta, and was almost the first place in Egypt that the traveller from Palestine who came by the modern caravan road would approach. It was, therefore, the first [pg 130] settlement at which Jewish fugitives who wished to avoid the Babylonian garrison at Gaza would be likely to arrive. And it was also the first object of attack on the part of an invader from the East. Its possession opened to him the way to Memphis.

That Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded Egypt, as Jeremiah had predicted, we now know from a fragment of his annals. In his thirty-seventh year (b.c. 567) he marched into Egypt, defeating the Pharaoh Amasis, and the soldiers of “Phut of the Ionians,” “a distant land which is in the midst of the sea.” The enemies, therefore, into whose hands Hophra was to fall were not the Babylonians. They were, in fact, his own subjects.

He had pursued the Hellenising policy of his predecessors with greater thoroughness than they had done, and had thus aroused the jealousy and alarm of the native population. The Greek mercenaries alone had his confidence, and the Egyptians accused him of betraying the native troops whom he had sent to the help of the Libyans against the Greek colony of Kyrênê. Amasis (or Ahmes), his brother-in-law, put himself at the head of the rebels. A battle was fought near Sais between the Greek troops of Hophra on the one side and the revolted Egyptians on the other, which ended in the defeat of the Greeks and the capture of Hophra himself. [pg 131] Amasis was proclaimed king (b.c. 570), and though the captive Pharaoh was at first treated with respect, he was afterwards put to death.

The change of monarch made little difference to the Greeks in Egypt. They were too valuable, both as soldiers and as traders, for the Pharaoh to dispense with their services. The mercenaries were removed from Daphnæ to Memphis, in the very heart of the kingdom, and fresh privileges were granted to the merchants of Naukratis. The Pharaoh married a Greek wife, and a demotic papyrus, now at Paris, even describes how he robbed the temples of Memphis, On and Bubastis of their endowments and handed them over to the Greek troops. “The Council” which sat under him ordered that “the vessels, the fuel, the linen, and the dues” hitherto enjoyed by their gods and their priests should be given instead to the foreigner. In this act of sacrilege the Egyptians of a later day saw the cause of the downfall of their country. The invasion of Nebuchadrezzar had passed over it without producing much injury; indeed, it does not seem to have extended beyond the eastern half of the Delta. But a new power, that of Cyrus, was rising in the East. Amasis had foreseen the coming storm, and had occupied Cyprus in advance. If Xenophon is to be believed, he had also sent troops to the aid [pg 132] of Krœsus of Lydia. But all was of no avail. The power of Cyrus steadily increased. The empires of Lydia and Babylonia went down before it, and when his son Kambyses succeeded him in July, b.c. 529, the new empire extended from the Mediterranean to India and from the Caspian to the borders of Egypt. It was clear that the fertile banks of the Nile would be the next object of attack.

Greek vanity asserted that the actual cause of the invasion was the Greek mercenary Phanês. He had deserted to Kambyses, and explained to him how Egypt could be entered. That Phanês was a name used by the Egyptian Greeks we know from its occurrence on the fragment of a large vase discovered by Professor Petrie at Naukratis. Here we read: “Phanês the son of Glaukos dedicated me to Apollo of Naukratis.” But the invasion of Egypt by Kambyses was the necessary consequence of the policy which had laid the whole of the oriental world at his father's feet.

Amasis died while the army of Kambyses was on its march (b.c. 526), and his son Psammetikhos iii. had to bear the brunt of the attack. A battle was fought near Pelusium, and though the Greek and Karian auxiliaries did their best, the invading forces gained the day. The Pharaoh fled to Memphis, which was thereupon besieged by Kambyses. The [pg 133] siege was a short one. The city of “the White Wall” was taken, Psammetikhos made a prisoner, and his son, together with two thousand youths of the leading Egyptian families, was put to death. For a while Psammetikhos himself was allowed to live, but the fears of the conqueror soon caused him to be executed, and with his death came the end of the twenty-sixth dynasty and the independence of Egypt.

Chapter V. The Age Of The Ptolemies.

Judah had profited by the revolution which had been so disastrous to the monarchy of the Nile. The overthrow of the Babylonian empire and the rise of Cyrus had brought deliverance from exile and the restoration of the temple and its services. In the Jewish colony at Jerusalem, Cyrus and his successors had, as it were, a bridle upon Egypt; gratitude to their deliverer and freedom to enjoy the theocracy which had taken the place of the Davidic monarchy made the Jewish people an outpost and garrison upon whose loyalty the Persian king could rely.

The yoke of the Zoroastrian Darius and his descendants pressed heavily, on the other hand, upon the priests and people of Egypt. Time after time they attempted to revolt. Their first rebellion, under Khabbash, saved Greece from the legions of Darius and postponed the day of Persian invasion to a time when the incapable Xerxes sat upon the throne of [pg 135] his energetic father. A second time they rose in insurrection in the reign of Artaxerxes i., the successor of Xerxes. But under Artaxerxes ii. came a more formidable outbreak, which ended in the recovery of Egyptian independence and the establishment of the last three dynasties of native kings.

For sixty-five years (from b.c. 414 to 349) Egypt preserved its independence. More than once the Persians sought to recover it, but they were foiled by the Spartan allies of the Pharaoh or by the good fortune of the Egyptians. But civil feuds and cowardice sapped the strength of the Egyptian resistance. Greek mercenaries and sailors now fought in the ranks of the Persians as well as in those of the Egyptians, and the result of the struggle between Persia and Egypt was in great measure dependent on the amount of pay the two sides could afford to give them. The army was insubordinate, and between the Greek and Egyptian soldiers there was jealousy and feud. Nektanebo ii. (b.c. 367-49), the last of the Pharaohs, had dethroned his own father, and though he had once driven the Persian king Artaxerxes Ochus back from the coasts of Egypt, he failed to do so a second time. The Greeks were left to defend themselves as best they could at Pelusium, while Nektanebo retired to Memphis with 60,000 worthless native troops. From thence [pg 136] he fled to Ethiopia with his treasures, leaving his country in the hands of the Persian. Ochus wreaked his vengeance on the Egyptian priests, destroying the temples, demanding a heavy ransom for the sacred records he had robbed, setting up an ass—a symbol in Egyptian eyes of all that was evil and unclean—as the patron-god of the conquered land, and slaying the sacred bull Apis in sacrifice to the new divinity. The murder of Ochus by his Egyptian eunuch Bagoas was the penalty he paid for these outrages on the national faith.

Egypt never again was free. Its rulers have been of manifold races and forms of faith, but they have never again been Egyptians. Persians, Greeks and Romans, Arabs, Kurds, Circassians, Mameluk slaves and Turks, Frenchmen and Englishmen, have all governed or misgoverned it, but throughout this long page of its history there is no sign of native political life. Religion or taxation has alone seemed able to stir the people into movement or revolt. For aspirations after national freedom we look in vain.

The Persian was not left long in the possession of his rebellious province. Egypt opened her gates to Alexander of Macedon, as in later ages she opened her gates to the Arab 'Amru. The Greeks had long been associated in the Egyptian mind with opposition to the hated Persian, and it was as a Greek that [pg 137] Alexander entered the country. Memphis and Thebes welcomed him, and he did his best to prove to his subjects that he had indeed come among them as one of their ancient kings. Hardly had he reached Memphis before he went in state to the temple of Apis and offered sacrifice to the sacred bull. Then, after founding Alexandria at the spot where the native village of Rakoti stood, he made his way to the Oasis of Ammon, the modern Siwah, among the sands of the distant desert, and there was greeted by the high-priest of the temple as the son of the god. Like the Pharaohs of old, the Macedonian conqueror became the son of Amon-Ra, and in Egypt at least claimed divine honours.

Before leaving Egypt Alexander appointed the nomarchs who were to govern it, and ordered that justice should be administered according to the ancient law of the land. He also sent 7000 Samaritans into the Thebaid; some of them were settled in the Fayyûm, and in the papyri discovered by Professor Petrie at Hawâra mention is made of a village which they had named Samaria. Appointing Kleomenês prefect of Egypt and collector of the taxes, Alexander now hurried away to the Euphrates, there to overthrow the shattered relics of the Persian Empire.

It was while he was at Ekbatana that his friend [pg 138] Hêphæstiôn died, and Alexander wrote to Egypt to inquire of the oracle of Ammon what honours it was lawful for him to pay to the dead man. In reply Hêphæstiôn was pronounced to be a god, and a temple was accordingly erected to him at Alexandria, and the new lighthouse on the island of Pharos was called after his name.

When Alexander died suddenly and unexpectedly, the council of his generals which assembled at Babylon declared his half-brother, Philip Arridæus, to be his successor. But they reserved to themselves all the real power in Alexander's empire. Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, chose Egypt as the seat of his government, which was accordingly handed over to him by Kleomenês on his arrival there, a year after the accession of the new king. His first act was to put Kleomenês to death.

Then came the long funeral procession bearing the corpse of Alexander from Babylon to the tomb that was to be erected for him in his new city of Alexandria. More than a year passed while it wound its way slowly from city to city, till at last it arrived at Memphis. Here the body of the great conqueror rested awhile until the gorgeous sepulchre was made ready in which it was finally to repose.

It was plain that Ptolemy was aiming at independent power. Perdikkas, the regent, accordingly [pg 139] attacked him, carrying in his train the young princes, Philip Arridæus, and Alexander Ægos, the infant son of Alexander. But the invading army was routed below Memphis, Perdikkas was slain, and the young princes fell into the hands of the conqueror. From this time forward, Ptolemy, though nominally a subject, acted as if he were a king.

Nikanôr was sent into Syria to annex it to Egypt. Jerusalem alone resisted the invaders, but it was assaulted on the Sabbath when the defenders withdrew from the walls, and all further opposition was at end. Palestine and Cœle-Syria were again united with the kingdom on the Nile.

The union, however, did not last long. In b.c. 315 Philip Arridæus was murdered, and Alexander was proclaimed successor to his empty dignity. The year following, Antigonus, the rival of Ptolemy in Asia Minor, made ready to invade Egypt. But Ptolemy had already conquered Kyrênê and Cyprus, and was master of the sea. Syria and Palestine, however, submitted to Antigonus, and though Ptolemy gained a decisive victory over his enemies at Gaza, he did not think it prudent to pursue it. He contented himself, therefore, with razing the fortifications of Acre and Jaffa, of Samaria and Gaza.

In b.c. 312 the generals of Alexander, who still called themselves the lieutenants of his son, came to a [pg 140] general agreement, each keeping that portion of the empire which he had made his own. The agreement was almost immediately followed by the murder of Alexander Ægos. Cleopatra, the sister of the great Alexander, and his niece Thessalonika alone remained of the royal family, and Cleopatra, on her way to Egypt to marry Ptolemy, was assassinated by Antigonus (in b.c. 308), and Alexander's niece soon afterwards shared the same fate. The family of “the son of Ammon,” the annihilator of the Persian Empire, was extinct.

Two years later, in b.c. 306, an end was put to the farce so long played by the generals of Alexander, and each of them assumed the title of king. Ptolemy took that of “king of Egypt.” To this the Greeks afterwards added the name of Sôtêr, “Saviour,” when his supplies of corn had saved the Rhodians from destruction during their heroic defence of their city against the multitudinous war-ships of Antigonus.

Throughout his rule, Ptolemy never forgot the needs and interests of the kingdom over which he ruled. Alexandria was completed, with its unrivalled harbours, its stately public buildings, its broad quays and its spacious streets. From first to last it remained the Greek capital of Egypt. It was Greek in its origin, Greek in its architecture, Greek in its population; Greek also in its character, its manners, [pg 141] and its faith. Cut off from the rest of Egypt by the Mareotic Lake, and enjoying a European climate, it was from its foundation what it is to-day, a city of Europe rather than of Egypt. From it, as from an impregnable watch-tower, the Ptolemies directed the fortunes of their kingdom: it was not only the key to Egypt, it was also a bridle upon it. The wealth of the world passed through its streets and harbours; the religions and philosophies of East and West met within its halls. Ptolemy had founded in it a university, a prototype of Oxford and Cambridge in modern England, of the Azhar in modern Cairo. In the Museum, as it was called, a vast library was gathered together, and its well-endowed chairs were filled with learned professors from all parts of the Greek world, who wrote books and delivered lectures and dined together at the royal charge.

But the Greeks were not the only inhabitants of the new city. The Jews also settled there in large numbers on the eastern side of the town, attracted by the offers of Ptolemy and the belief that the rising centre of trade would be better worth inhabiting than the wasted fields of Palestine. All the rights of Greek citizenship were granted to them, and they were placed on a footing almost of equality with Ptolemy's own countrymen.

The native Egyptians were far worse treated. [pg 142] They had become “the hewers of wood and carriers of water” for their new Greek masters. It was they who furnished the government with its revenue, but in return they possessed no rights, no privileges. When land was wanted for the veterans of the Macedonian army, as, for example, in the Fayyûm, it was taken from them without compensation. Taxes, ever heavier and heavier, were laid upon them; and every attempt at remonstrance or murmuring was visited with immediate punishment. The Egyptian had no rights unless he could be registered a citizen of Alexandria, and this it was next to impossible for him to be.

It is true that the Egyptians were told all this was done in order that their own laws and customs might not be interfered with. While the Greeks and Jews were governed by Greek law, the Egyptians were governed by the old law of the land. But it was forgotten that the laws were administered by Greeks, and that the higher officials were also Greeks, who, as against an Egyptian, possessed arbitrary power. It was only amongst themselves, as between Egyptian and Egyptian, that the natives of the country enjoyed any benefit from the laws under which they lived; wherever the government and the Greeks were concerned, they were like outcasts, who could be punished, but not tried.

Nevertheless the country for many years remained tranquil. Unlike the Persians, the Greeks respected the religion of the people. Ptolemy did his utmost to conciliate the priesthood; their temples were restored and decorated, their festivals were treated with honour; above all, their endowments were untouched. And with the priesthood disposed to be friendly towards him, Ptolemy had no reason to be afraid. The priests were the national leaders; they it was who had stirred up the revolts against the Persian, and the temples in which they served had been the fortresses and rallying-points of the rebel armies. The Egyptians have always been an intensely religious people; whatever may have been their form of creed, whether pagan, Christian, or Moslem, they have clung to it with tenacity and battled for it, sometimes with fanatical zeal. Religion will arouse them when nothing else can do so; by the side of it even the love of gain has but little influence.

Besides conciliating the priesthood, Ptolemy planted garrisons of Greeks in several parts of the country. Bodies of veterans colonised the Fayyûm, and Ptolemais, now Menshîyeh, in Upper Egypt, was a Greek city modelled in all respects upon Alexandria. The public accounts were kept in Greek, and though the clerks and tax-gatherers were usually [pg 144] natives who had received a Greek education, many of them were Greeks by birth and even Jews. “Ostraka,” or inscribed potsherds, have been found at Thebes, which show that in the days of Ptolemy Physkôn, a Jew, Simon, the son of Eleazar, farmed the taxes there for the temple of Amon. As he did not himself know Greek, his receipts were written for him by one of his sons. After his death he was succeeded in his office by his son Philoklês. The name is noticeable, as it shows how rapidly the Jews of Egypt could become wholly Greek. The religion of his forefathers was not likely to sit heavily on the shoulders of the tax-gatherer of a heathen temple, and we need not wonder at the Hellenisation of his family. Simon was a sample of many of his brethren: in adopting Greek culture the Jews of Egypt began to forget that they were Jews. It required the shock of persecution at Jerusalem, and the Maccabean war of independence to recall them to a recollection of their past history and a sense of the mission of their race.

With the rise of the Greek kingdom in Egypt, the canonical books of the Old Testament come to an end. Jaddua, the last high-priest recorded in the Book of Nehemiah (xii. 7, 22), met Alexander the Great at Mizpeh, and if Josephus is to be trusted, obtained from him a recognition of the ancient [pg 145] privileges of the Jews and their exemption from taxation every Sabbatical year. The First Book of Chronicles (iii. 23) seems to bring the genealogy of the descendants of Zorobabel down to an even later date. But where the canonical books break off, the books of the Apocrypha begin. Jesus the son of Sirach, in his prologue to the Book of Ecclesiasticus, tells us that he had translated it in Egypt from Hebrew into Greek, when Euergetês, the third Ptolemy, was king, and thirty-eight years after its compilation by his grandfather Jesus. Like most of the apocryphal books, it thus had a Palestinian origin, but its translation into Greek indicates the intercourse that was going on between the Jews of Palestine and those of Egypt, as well as the general adoption of the Greek language by the Egyptian Jews.

The translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek about the same period is a yet more striking illustration of the same fact. The name of “Septuagint,” which the translation still retains, perpetuates the legend, derived from the false Aristæas, of its having been made all at one time by seventy (or seventy-two) translators. But internal evidence shows that such could not have been the case. The various books of the Canon were translated at different times, and the translators exhibit very different degrees of [pg 146] ability and acquaintance with the Hebrew language. The Pentateuch was the first to be rendered into Greek; the other books followed afterwards, and it would appear that the Book of Ecclesiastes never found a place in the translation at all. The Greek translation of the book which is now found in the Septuagint was probably made by Aquila.

It was under Ptolemy ii., who justified his title of Philadelphus, or “Brother-loving,” by the murder of his two brothers, that the work of translation was begun. Ptolemy Sôtêr, his father, had resigned his crown two years before his death, and the event proved that his confidence in his son's filial piety was not misplaced. The coronation of Philadelphus at Alexandria was celebrated with one of the most gorgeous pageants the world has ever seen, the details of which are preserved by Athenæus. Under the new king the internal development of the monarchy went on apace. The canal was opened which connected the Nile with the Red Sea, and at its outlet near Suez a town was built called Arsinoê, after the king's sister. The ports of Berenikê and Philotera (now Qoseir) were constructed and fortified on the coast of the Red Sea, and roads made to them from Koptos and Syênê on the Nile. In this way the ivory and gems of the Sudân could be brought to Egypt without passing through the hostile territories [pg 147] of the Ethiopians in Upper Nubia. In the eastern desert itself the mines of emerald and gold were worked until the royal revenue was increased to more than three millions sterling a year.

Though Ptolemy Philadelphus was fond of show, he was not extravagant, and his income was sufficient not only to maintain a large army and navy and protect efficiently the frontier of his kingdom, but also to leave a large reserve fund in the treasury. It was said to amount to as much as a hundred millions sterling. It was no wonder, therefore, that Alexandria became filled with sumptuous buildings. The Pharos or lighthouse was finished by Sôstratos, as well as the tomb of Alexander, whose body was moved from Memphis to the golden sarcophagus which had been prepared for it. The library of the Museum was stocked with books until 400,000 rolls of papyrus were collected together, and men of science and learning from all parts of the world were attracted to it by the munificence of the king. The principal librarianship, however, changed hands on the accession of the new king. Demetrius Phalereus, the ex-tyrant of Athens, who had been the first librarian, had offended Philadelphus by advising that the crown should descend to his elder brother instead of to himself, and he had accordingly to make way for Zênodotos of Ephesus, famous as a critic of Homer.

Among the books which found a place in the great library of Alexandria was doubtless the Greek translation of the Pentateuch. Philadelphus showed remarkable favour to the Jews. The Jewish captives of his soldiers were ransomed by him and given homes in various parts of Egypt. One hundred and twenty thousand slaves were thus freed, the king paying for each 120 drachmas, or 30 shekels, the price of a slave according to the Mosaic Law. It is quite possible that there may be some truth in the legend that the Greek translation of the Old Testament was made at his desire. Whether or not we believe that he sent two Greek Jews, Aristæus and Andræus, with costly gifts to Eleazar the high-priest at Jerusalem, asking him to select fit men for the purpose, he was probably not unwilling that a copy of the sacred books of his Jewish subjects, in a form intelligible to the Greeks, should be added to the library. We must not forget that it was he who employed Manetho, the priest of Sebennytos, to write in Greek the history of his country, which he compiled from the hieroglyphic monuments and hieratic papyri of the native temples.

Ptolemy iii., Euergetês, the eldest son of Philadelphus, succeeded his father in b.c. 246. A war with Syria broke out at the beginning of his reign, and the march of the Egyptian army as far as [pg 149] Seleucia, the capital of the Syrian kingdom on the Euphrates, was one uninterrupted triumph. On his return, Ptolemy laid his offerings on the altar at Jerusalem, and thanked the God of the Jews for his success. The Jewish community might well be pardoned for believing that in the conqueror of Syria they had a new proselyte to their faith.

The Egyptians had equal reason to be satisfied with their king. Among the spoils of his Syrian campaign were 2500 vases and statues of the Egyptian deities which Kambyses had carried to Persia nearly three centuries before. They were restored to the temples of Upper Egypt, from which they had been taken, with stately ceremonies and amid the rejoicing of the people, and Ptolemy was henceforth known among his subjects as Euergetês, their “Benefactor.”

Euergetês, in fact, seems to have been the most Egyptian and least Greek of all the Ptolemies. Alone among them he visited Thebes and paid homage to the gods of Egypt. Their temples were rebuilt and crowded with offerings, and the priesthood naturally regarded him as a king after their own heart. He, too, like the Pharaohs of old, turned his attention to the conquest of Ethiopia, which his predecessors had been content to neglect.[9] It was [pg 150] under Euergetês, moreover, that the so-called Decree of Canôpus was drawn up in hieroglyphics and demotic Egyptian as well as in Greek. Its occasion was the death of Berenikê, the king's daughter, to whom the Egyptian priests determined to grant divine honours. It is the first time that we find the old script and language of Egypt taking its place by the side of that of the Macedonian conqueror, and it is significant that the Greek transcript occupies the third place.

Judah had hitherto remained tranquil and at peace under the government of the Ptolemies. The high-priests had taken the place of the kings, and their authority was undisputed. At times, indeed, the coveted dignity was the cause of family feuds. Jonathan, the father of Jaddua (Neh. xii. 11, 22), had murdered his brother Joshua, whom he suspected of trying to supplant him, and the example he set was destined to have followers. But outside his own family the high-priest ruled with almost despotic power. Simon the Just (b.c. 300), with whom ends the list of “famous men” given by Jesus the son of Sirach (iv. 1-21), repaired and fortified the temple as well as the fortress which guarded it. Jewish tradition ascribed to him the completion of the Canon of the Old Testament which had been begun by Ezra, and it was through him that the oral [pg 151] Mosaic tradition of Pharisaism made its way to Antigonus Socho, the first writer of the Mishna or text of the Talmud, and the teacher of the founder of Sadduceism. The grandson of Simon, Onias ii., imperilled the authority his predecessors had enjoyed. His covetousness led him to withhold the tribute of £3000, due each year from the Temple to the Jewish king, and in spite of an envoy from Ptolemy and the remonstrances of his countrymen, he refused to give it up.

Jerusalem was saved by the address and readiness of Joseph, the brother of Onias. He hastened to Egypt, ingratiated himself with Ptolemy, and succeeded in being appointed farmer of the taxes for Syria and Palestine. The Jews were saved, but a rival power to that of the high-priest was established, which led eventually to civil war. The greed of Onias was the first scene in the drama which is unfolded in the Books of the Maccabees.

Euergetês was the last of the “good” Ptolemies. His son and successor, Ptolemy iv., was the incarnation of weakness, cruelty and vice. He began his reign with the murder of his mother and only brother, taking the title of Philopator—“Lover of his Father”—by way of compensation. Syria was reconquered by Antiochus the Great, but his Greek phalanxes were beaten at Raphia by the Egyptians, [pg 152] now armed and trained in the Macedonian fashion, and the gratitude of Philopator showed itself in a visit to the temple at Jerusalem, where he sacrificed to the God of the Jews and attempted to penetrate into the Holy of Holies. A tumult was the consequence, and the exasperated king on his return to Egypt deprived the Jews of their Greek citizenship, and ordered them to be tattooed with the figure of an ivy-leaf in honour of Bacchus, and to sacrifice on the altars of the Greek gods.

The Jews had hitherto been the staunch supporters of the royal house of Egypt, and had held the fortress of Jerusalem for it against the power of Syria. But Philopator had now alienated them for ever. Nor was he more successful with the native Egyptians. First the Egyptian troops mutinied; then came revolt in Upper Egypt. The Ethiopian princes, whose memorials are found in the Nubian temples of Debod and Dakkeh, were invited to Thebes, and an Ethiopian dynasty again ruled in Upper Egypt. The names of the kings who composed it have recently been found in deeds written in demotic characters.

Philopator died of his debaucheries after a reign of seventeen years (b.c. 204), leaving a child of five years of age—the future Ptolemy Epiphanês—to succeed him. The Alexandrine mob was in a state [pg 153] of riot, the army was untrustworthy, and Antiochus was again on the march against Syria. The Egyptian forces were defeated at Banias (Cæsarea Philippi), the Jews having gone over to the invader, in return for which Antiochus remitted the taxes due from Jerusalem, and not only released all the ministers of the temple from future taxation, but sent a large sum of money for its support. By a treaty with Rome the possession of the country was assured to him (b.c. 188), and colonies of Mesopotamian Jews were settled in Lydia and Phrygia.

Meanwhile Ptolemy v., Epiphanês, was growing up, and in b.c. 196 accordingly it was determined that he should be crowned. The coronation took place at Memphis, and a decree was made lightening the burdens of the country, relieving the fellahin from being impressed for the navy, and granting further endowments to the priests. It is this decree which is engraved on the famous Rosetta Stone.

But the revolt of the Egyptians still continued, and had already spread northward. Reference is made in the decree to rebellion in the Busirite nome of the Delta, and to a siege of the city of Lykopolis, in which the insurgents had fortified themselves. It was at this time, too, that the city of Abydos was taken by storm and its temples finally ruined, as we gather from a Greek scrawl on the walls of the [pg 154] temple of Seti. But in b.c. 185 a decisive victory was gained by the Greek mercenaries over the revolted Egyptians. Their four leaders surrendered on the king's promise of a free pardon, and were brought before him at Sais. There, however, he tied them to his chariot-wheels in imitation of Achilles, and dragged them still living round the city walls, after which he returned to Alexandria and entered his capital in triumph.

The crimes of Epiphanês led to his murder in b.c. 180, and his seven-year-old son, Ptolemy vi., Philomêtor, was proclaimed king under the regency of his mother. While she lived there was peace, but after her death the Syrian king, Antiochus Epiphanês, threw himself upon Egypt, captured his nephew Philomêtor, and held his court in Memphis. Thereupon Philomêtor's younger brother, whose corpulency had given him the nickname of Physkôn, “the Bloated,” proclaimed himself king at Alexandria, and called upon Rome for help. Antiochus withdrew, leaving Philomêtor king of the Egyptians, and Physkôn, who had taken the title of Euergetês ii., king of the Greeks at Alexandria. Thanks to the brotherly forbearance of Philomêtor, the two reigned together in harmony for several years. Antiochus Epiphanês, however, had again invaded Egypt, but had been warned off its soil by the Roman [pg 155] ambassadors. Rome now affected to regard the kingdom of the Ptolemies as a protected state, and the successors of Alexander were in no condition to resist the orders of the haughty republic. Things had indeed changed since the days when Philadelphus in the plenitude of his glory deigned to congratulate the Italian state on its defeat of the Epirots, and the Roman senate regarded his embassy as the highest of possible honours.

The command of the Romans to leave Egypt alone was sullenly obeyed by Antiochus Epiphanês. But he had no choice in the matter. He had more than enough on his hands at home without risking a quarrel with Rome. The Jews were in full rebellion. The Hellenising party among them—“the ungodly” of the Books of Maccabees—had grown numerous and strong, and had united themselves with the civil rivals of the high-priests. Between the party of progress and the orthodox supporters of the Law there was soon open war, and in b.c. 175, Antiochus Epiphanês, tempted by the higher bribe, was induced to join in the fray, and throw the whole weight of his power on the side of innovation. Onias iii. was deposed from the high-priesthood, and his brother Joshua, the leader of “the ungodly,” was appointed in his place, with leave to change the name of the Jews to that of Antiochians. Joshua [pg 156] forthwith took the Greek name of Jason, established a gymnasium at Jerusalem, sent offerings to the festival of Heraklês at Tyre, and discouraged the rite of circumcision. But Jason's rule was short-lived. A Benjamite, Menelaus, succeeded in driving him out of the country and usurping the office of high-priest, while Onias was put to death.

The second Syrian invasion of Egypt took place two years later. The story of the check received by Antiochus Epiphanês came to Judæa with all the exaggerations usual in the East; Antiochus was reported to be dead, and Jason accordingly marched upon Jerusalem, massacred his opponents, and blockaded Menelaus in the citadel. But Antiochus had been wounded only in his pride, and he turned back from the Nile burning with mortification and anxious to vent his anger upon the first who came in his way. The outrage committed by Jason was a welcome pretext. The defenceless population of Jerusalem was partly massacred, partly sold into slavery, and under the guidance of Menelaus he entered the Temple and carried away the sacred vessels, as well as its other treasure. Philip the Phrygian was appointed governor of the city, while Menelaus remained high-priest.

Severer measures were to follow. In b.c. 168 there had been a rising in Jerusalem, which was [pg 157] thereupon captured on a Sabbath-day by the Syrian general, the greater part of it being sacked and burned, and a portion of the city wall thrown down. A garrison was established on Mount Zion, which at that time overlooked the Temple-hill, and a fierce persecution of the Jews commenced. Every effort was made to compel them to forsake their religion, to eat swine's flesh, and to worship the gods of the Greeks. It was then that “the abomination of desolation” was seen in the Holy of Holies, the temples of Samaria and Jerusalem being re-dedicated to Zeus Xenios and Zeus Olympios, and that at Jerusalem befouled with the rites of the Syrian Ashtoreth.

Thousands of the orthodox Jews fled to Egypt, where they found shelter and welcome. Among them was Onias, the eldest son of Onias iii. Philomêtor granted him land in the nome of Heliopolis, and allowed him to build there a temple in which the worship of the Hebrew God should be carried on as it had been at Jerusalem. Excavation goes to show that the temple was erected at the spot now called Tel el-Yehudîyeh, “the Mound of the Jewess,” not far from Shibîn el-Kanâtir. Here was an old deserted palace and temple of Ramses iii., and here the Jews were permitted to establish themselves and found a city, which they called Onion.

According to Josephus, its older name had been Leontopolis. The temple, which was destroyed by Vespasian after the Jewish war, was fortified like that at Jerusalem, and the porcelain plaques enamelled with rosettes and lotus-buds, which had been made for Ramses iii., were employed once more to ornament it. Long ago the fellahin discovered among its ruins, and then broke up, a marble bath, such as is used to-day by the Jewish women for the purpose of purification, and in the adjoining necropolis Dr. Naville found the tombs of persons who bore Jewish names. Onias was not allowed to build his new temple without a protest from the stricter adherents of the Law that it was forbidden to raise one elsewhere than in the sacred city of David. But he was a man of ready resource, and all opposition was overcome when he pointed to the prophecy of Isaiah (xix. 19): “In that day there shall be an altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt.” The Egyptian Jews had already secured their own version of the Scriptures; they now had their own temple, their own priesthood, and their own high-priest. True, their co-religionists in Judæa never ceased to protest against this rival centre of their religious faith, and to denounce Onias as the first schismatic; but their brethren in Egypt paid no attention to their words, and the temple [pg 159] of Onion continued to exist as long as that of Jerusalem.

Onias exercised an influence not only over his own countrymen, but over the mind of the king as well. Philomêtor, like Euergetês, had Jewish leanings, and the high-priest of Onion was admitted to high offices of state. So also was Dositheus, “the priest and Levite,” who, in “The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther” (x. 1), tells us that in the fourth year of Philomêtor, he and his son Ptolemy had brought to Egypt “this epistle of Phurim,” which had been translated into Greek at Jerusalem by Lysimachus, the son of Ptolemy. Philomêtor even acted as a judge in the great religious controversy which raged between the Jews and the Samaritans. They called upon him to decide whether the temple should have been built on Mount Moriah or Mount Gerizim, and which of them had altered the text of Deuteronomy xxvii. 12, 13. Philomêtor decided in favour of the Jews, as his duty towards his numerous Jewish subjects perhaps compelled him to do, and his religious zeal even carried him so far as to order the two unsuccessful advocates of the Samaritan cause to be put to death.

While the king of Egypt was thus acting like a Jew, the king of Syria was engaged in a fierce struggle with the Jewish people. The national party [pg 160] had risen under Mattathias, the priest of Modin, and his five sons, of whom the third, Judas Maccabæus, was the ablest and best-known. One after another the Syrian armies were overthrown, and in b.c. 165 the Temple was purified and repaired, and a new altar dedicated in it to the Lord of Hosts. Two years later Antiochus Epiphanês died while on the march against Judæa, and with him died also the power of Syria. Rival claimants for the throne, internal and external discord, treachery and murder, sapped the foundations of its strength, and in spite of assassinations and religious quarrels, of Edomite hostility and the efforts of the Hellenising party among the Jews themselves, the power of the Maccabees went on increasing. The high-priesthood passed to them from the last of the sympathisers with the Greeks, and Jonathan, the brother and successor of Judas, was treated by the king of Syria with royal honours. Treaties were made with Sparta and Rome, and his successor, Simon, struck coins of his own. After his murder his son John Hyrcanus extended the Jewish dominion as far north as Damascus, annihilating Samaria and its temples and conquering the Edomites, whom he compelled to accept the Jewish faith. Aristobulus, who followed him, took the title of king, and added Ituræa to his kingdom, while his brother Alexander Jannæus [pg 161] attacked Egypt and annexed the cities of the Phœnician coast. But with royal dignity had come royal crimes. Both Aristobulus and Alexander had murdered their brothers, and their Greek names show how the champions of Jewish orthodoxy were passing over into the camp of the foe.

Long before all this happened, many changes had fallen upon Egypt. Philomêtor died in b.c. 145. He had been weak enough to forgive his rebellious and ungrateful brother twice when he had had him in his power. Once he had been compelled to go to Rome to plead his cause before the senate, and there be indebted to an Alexandrine painter for food and lodging; on the second occasion Physkôn had endeavoured to rob him of Cyprus by a combination of mean treachery and intrigue.

The reward of his brotherly forbearance was the murder by Physkôn of Philomêtor's young son Ptolemy Philopator ii. immediately after his death. Onias, the Jewish high-priest, held Alexandria for Philopator, but his uncle Physkôn was favoured by the Romans, whose word was now law. Physkôn accordingly began his long reign of vice and cruelty, interrupted only by temporary banishment to Cyprus. Then followed his widow, Cleopatra Kokkê, a woman stained with every possible and impossible crime. She held her own, however, against all opponents, [pg 162] including her own son Ptolemy Lathyrus, thanks to her two Jewish generals, Khelkias and Ananias, the sons of the high-priest Onias. Palestine and Syria again became a battle-field where the fate of Egypt was decided, and while Cleopatra was aided by the Jews, Lathyrus found his allies among the Samaritans.

It was in the midst of these wars and rumours of wars, when men had lost faith in one another and themselves, and when the Jews after struggling for bare existence were beginning to treat on equal terms with the great monarchies of the world, that that curious Apocalypse, the Book of Enoch, seems to have been composed, at all events in its original form. It is a vision of the end of all things and the judgment of mankind, and it embodies the fully developed doctrine of the angelic hierarchy to which reference is made in the Book of Daniel.

Cleopatra was murdered by her younger and favourite son, and Lathyrus succeeded after all in obtaining the throne of Egypt, which he ascended under the title of Sôtêr ii. (b.c. 87). His short reign of six years was signalised by the destruction of Thebes. Upper Egypt was still in a state of effervescing discontent, and the crimes of the last reign caused it to break into open rebellion. The government was weak and wicked; the Greeks had lost [pg 163] their vigour and power to rule, and their armies were now mere bodies of unruly mercenaries. But the Thebans were not wealthy or strong enough to withstand Alexandria when helped by the resources of the Mediterranean. The revolt was at last suppressed, Thebes taken by storm, and its temples, which had been used as fortresses, battered and destroyed. The population was put to the sword or carried into slavery, and the capital of the conquering Pharaohs of the past ceased to exist. Its place was taken by a few squalid villages which clustered round the ruins of its ancient shrines. Karnak and Luxor, Medinêt Habu and Qurnah, were all that remained of the former city. Under the earlier Ptolemies it had been known as Diospolis, “the city of Zeus” Amon, the metropolis of Upper Egypt; from this time forward, in the receipts of the tax-gatherers, it is nothing more than a collection of “villages.” Its priests were scattered, its ruined temples left to decay. What the Assyrian had failed to destroy and the Persian had spared was overthrown by a Ptolemy who called himself a king of Egypt.

After the death of Lathyrus the internal decay of the monarchy went on rapidly. A prey to civil war and usurpation, it was allowed to exist a little longer by the contemptuous forbearance of the Romans, who waited to put an end to it until they had drained it [pg 164] of its treasures. The kingdom of the Asmonæans at Jerusalem also had tottered to its fall. Family murders and civil feuds had become almost as common among them as among the Ptolemies, and as in Egypt, so too in Palestine, Rome was called in to mediate between the rival claimants for the crown. In b.c. 63 Jerusalem was captured by Pompey after a three months' siege, its defenders massacred, its fortifications destroyed, and its royal house abolished. The Roman victor entered the Holy of Holies, and Palestine was annexed to the Roman empire.

Among the remnant which still retained the faith of their forefathers the Roman conquest and the profanation of the temple gave new strength to the conviction that the Messiah and saviour of Israel must surely soon appear. The conviction finds expression in the so-called Psalms of Solomon, of which only a Greek copy survives. The high hopes raised by the successes of the Maccabean family were dashed for ever, and the temporal power of Judah had vanished away. Henceforth it existed as a nation only on sufferance.

In Egypt it was not long before the Jews discovered how grievous had been the change in their fortunes. They ceased to be feared, and therefore respected: the mob and rulers of Alexandria had for them now only hatred and contempt. Their citizenship [pg 165] was taken away, with its right to the enjoyment of their own magistrates and courts of justice, and they were degraded to the rank of the native Egyptians, whom the lowest Greek vagabond in the streets of Alexandria could maltreat with impunity. They did not recover their old privileges until Augustus had reorganised his Egyptian province, and though they were again deprived of them by Caligula, when Philo went in vain to plead for his countrymen before the emperor, they were restored by Claudius, and even Vespasian after the Jewish war did not interfere with them.

The house of Ptolemy fell ignobly. But it fell amid the convulsions of a civil war which rent the empire of its conquerors to the foundation, and among the ruins of the Roman republic. Cleopatra, its last representative, bewitched not only the coarser Mark Antony but even the master mind of Julius Cæsar. Her charms were fatal to the life and reputation of the one; they nearly proved equally fatal to the life of the other. Besieged with her in the palace of the Ptolemies by the Alexandrine mob, Cæsar's life trembled for a while in the balance. But the Library of Alexandria was given in its stead; he saved himself by firing the docks and shipping, and the flames spread from the harbour to the halls of the Museum. The precious papyri perished in the flames, and the [pg 166] rooms in which the learning and talent of the Greek world had been gathered together were a heap of blackened ruins. It is true that Cleopatra subsequently obtained from Mark Antony the library of Pergamos, with its 200,000 volumes, which she placed in the temple of Serapis, but the new library never equalled the old, either in its extent or in the value of its books.

Cleopatra and Mark Antony died by their own hands, and Augustus was left master of Egypt and the Roman world (b.c. 30). Cæsarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar, was put to death, and Egypt was annexed to the emperor's privy purse. It never, therefore, became a province of the Roman empire: unhappily for its inhabitants, it remained the emperor's private domain. Its prefect was never allowed to be of higher rank than the equestrian order, and a senator was forbidden to set foot in it. Its cities could not govern themselves, and the old Greek law, which restricted the rights of citizenship to the Greeks and Jews and prevented any native Egyptians from sharing them, was left in force. Egypt was the granary of Rome, and the riches of its soil and the industry of its inhabitants made it needful that no rival to the reigning sovereign should establish himself in it. History had shown with what ease the country could be invaded and occupied and [pg 167] with what difficulty the occupier could be driven out. And the master of Egypt commanded the trade between East and West; he commanded also the Roman mob whose mouths were filled with Egyptian corn. It was dangerous to allow a possible rival even to visit the valley of the Nile.

The history of Alexandria under the Romans is the history of Alexandria rather than of the Egyptians. The fellahin laboured for others, not for themselves, and the burdens which weighed upon them became ever greater and more intolerable. Now and again there were outbreaks in Upper Egypt, which were, however, quickly repressed, and in the third century the barbarian Blemmyes made Coptos and Ptolemais their capitals. The reconquest of the Thebaid by Probus (a.d. 280) was judged worthy of a triumph. About eight years later the whole country was once more in rebellion, and proclaimed their leader Akhilleus emperor. The war lasted for nine years, and the whole force of the empire was required to finish it. The emperor Diocletian marched in person into Upper Egypt and besieged Coptos, the centre of the revolt. After a long siege the city was taken and razed to the ground. But the war had ruined the people. The embankments were broken, the canals choked up, the fields untilled and overrun by the barbarians from the Sûdan or the Bedouin of [pg 168] the eastern desert. Diocletian, when the struggle was over, found himself obliged to withdraw the Roman garrisons south of the First Cataract, and to fix the frontier of the empire at Assuan.

The war was followed by the great persecution of the Christians, the last expiring effort of Roman paganism against the invasion of the new faith. Christianity had become a mighty power in the Roman world, which threatened soon to absorb all that was left of the Rome of the past, with its patriotism, its devotion to the emperor, its law and its administration. The struggle between it and the empire of Augustus could no longer be delayed. The edict of Diocletian was signed, and the empire put forth its whole strength to crush its rival and root Christianity out of its midst.

But the attempt came too late. The new power was stronger than the old one, and the persecution only proved how utterly the old Rome had passed away. The empire bowed its head and became Christian; the bishops took the place of the prefects and senators of the past, and theological disputations raged in the halls of philosophy. Nowhere had the persecution been fiercer than in Egypt; nowhere had the martyrs and confessors of the Church been more heroic or more numerous.

The result was one which we should hardly have [pg 169] expected. Hitherto Christianity in Egypt had been Greek. It was associated with Alexandria and the Greek language, not with the villages and tongue of the people. Its bishops and theologians were Greeks, and the school of Christian Platonism which flourished in Alexandria had little in common with Egyptian ideas. With the Diocletian persecution, however, came a change. Even while it was still at its height, martyrs and confessors come forward who bear Egyptian and not Greek names. Hardly is it over before the native population joins in one great body the new religion. Osiris and Isis make way for Christ and the Blessed Virgin, the Coptic alphabet replaces the demotic script of heathenism, and the bodies of the dead cease to be embalmed. It is difficult to account for the suddenness and completeness of the change. The decay of the Roman power, and therewith the barriers between Greek and Egyptian, may have had something to do with it. So too may the revolt in Upper Egypt, which united in one common feeling of nationality all the elements of the population. Perhaps a still more potent cause was the spectacle of the heroism and constancy of those who suffered for the Christian faith. The Egyptian has always been deeply religious, and his very enjoyment of life makes him admire and revere the ascetic. But whatever may [pg 170] have been the reason, the fact remains: before the persecution of Diocletian Egyptian Christianity had been Greek; when the persecution was over it had become Copt. The pagans who still survived were not Egyptians but the rich and highly-educated Greeks, like the poet Nonnus, who was tortured to death by St. Shnûdi, or the gifted Hypatia, whose flesh was torn from her bones with oyster-shells by the monks of St. Cyril.

The literature of Coptic Christianity was almost wholly religious. Little else had an interest for the devoted adherents of the new faith. The romances which had delighted their forefathers were replaced by legends of the saints and martyrs, and Christian hymns succeeded to the poems of the past. We owe to this passion for theology the preservation of productions of the Jewish and Christian Churches which would otherwise have been lost. The Book of Enoch, quoted though it is by St. Jude, would have perished irrevocably had it not been for Coptic Christianity. The Church of Abyssinia, a daughter of that of Egypt, has preserved it in an Ethiopic translation, and portions of the Greek original from which the translation was made have been found in a tomb at Ekhmîm, which was excavated in 1886. It has long been known that the text used by the Abyssinian translator must have differed considerably [pg 171] from that of which extracts have been preserved for us in the Epistle of St. Jude and the writings of the Byzantine historians Kedrenos and George the Syncellus; the newly-discovered fragments now enable us to see what this text actually was like. If the original book was written in Aramaic it would seem that at least two authorised Greek versions of it existed, one of which was used in Europe and Syria, the other in Egypt. Which was the older and more faithful we have yet to learn.

The excavations at Ekhmîm have brought to light fragments of two other works, both belonging to the early days of Christianity and long since lost. One of these is supposed by its first editor, M. Bouriant, to be the Apocalypse of St. Peter; it opens with an account of the Transfiguration, which is followed by a vision of heaven and hell. The book appears to have been composed or interpolated by a Gnostic, as there is a reference in it to “the Æon” in which Moses and Elias dwelt in glory. The other work is of more importance. It is the Gospel known to the early Church as that of St. Peter, and the portion which is preserved contains the narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Throughout the narrative the responsibility for the death of our Lord is transferred from Pilate to the Jews; when the [pg 172] guard who watched the tomb under the centurion Petronius ran to tell Pilate of the resurrection they had witnessed, “grieving greatly and saying: Truly he was the son of God”: he answered: “I am clean of the blood of the son of God: I too thought he was so.” Docetic tendencies, however, are observable in the Gospel: at all events the cry of Christ on the cross is rendered, “My power, (my) power, thou hast forsaken me!”