Part 10 (1/2)

Northward of the colossi was the sacred lake, said to have been formed by Menes, and now a stagnant pond. At its south-eastern corner the foundations have recently been laid bare of small square rooms, the walls of which have been adorned with sculptures. But the waters of the inundation have followed the excavators, and the walls are fast peris.h.i.+ng under the influence of moisture and nitrous salt.

About Sesostris the guides of Herodotos had a good deal to say. But nothing of it was history-not even his conquests in Europe and Scythia, his excavation of the ca.n.a.ls which rendered Egypt unfit for horses and chariots, his equal division of the land among his subjects, or his having been the sole Egyptian monarch who governed Ethiopia. How even a dragoman of Memphis could have imagined that it had ever been possible to cultivate the Egyptian soil without ca.n.a.ls it is difficult to understand, and still more difficult to imagine how a traveller who had seen the Delta could have believed a statement of the kind. The only explanation can be that Herodotos never saw the Delta in its normal condition when the inundation had ceased to cover the land. That Sesostris should have been supposed to have been the only Pharaoh who established his power in Ethiopia is but a proof how little was known of the real history of Egypt by either Herodotos or his informants.

The origin of the name given to this Pharaoh of the dragoman's imagination is still a puzzle. The statues in front of the temple of Ptah, to which the name was attached, were set up by Ramses II., and in a papyrus we find the name Sesetsu given as the popular t.i.tle of the same monarch. Perhaps it means ”the son of Set is he.” We know that Set, the ancient G.o.d of the Delta, was a special object of wors.h.i.+p in the family of Ramses II., and his father Seti was named after the G.o.d. Sesetsu would correspond with fair exact.i.tude to the Sesoosis of Diodoros; for Sesostris we should have to presuppose the form Sesetsu-Ra.

The son and successor of Sesostris, according to Herodotos, was Pheron.

The name is merely a misp.r.o.nounced Pharaoh, the Egyptian Per-aa or ”Great House.” Pheron undertook no military expedition, being blind in consequence of his impiety in hurling his spear at too high a Nile. After ten years of blindness an oracle came to him from Buto that he would be cured if he would wash his eyes in the urine of a woman who had been true to her husband. Trial after trial was made in vain, and when at last the king recovered his sight he collected all the women in whose case he had failed into ”a city now called the Red Mound,” and there burnt them, city and all. He then erected the two obelisks which stood in front of the temple of Ra at Heliopolis.

There are many ”Red Mounds” in Egypt, and the name Kom el-Ahmar or ”Red Mound” is accordingly very plentiful in a modern map of the country.

Wherever kiln-baked bricks have been used in the construction of a building, or where the wall or houses of a city have been burnt, the mound of ruins to which they give rise is of a reddish colour. Such a mound must have existed in the neighbourhood of Heliopolis in the days of Herodotos.

There is still a Kom el-Ahmar close to Tel el-Yehudiyeh, where the Jewish temple of Onias was built. But ”the Red Mound” of the guides was probably one that was visible from the pylon of the great temple of Heliopolis, where the obelisks stood with which the story of it was a.s.sociated. The obelisks had indeed been erected by a ”Pharaoh,” but it was not a son of Ramses II. They had been set up by Usertesen I. of the twelfth dynasty nearly fifteen centuries before Ramses II. was born.

As Pheron was the son of Sesostris it was necessary for Herodotos to introduce him into his list immediately after his father, even though he had left no monument behind him in the temple of Memphis. But after Pheron he returns to his series of ”Memphite” kings. This time it is ”a Memphite whose Greek name is Proteus,” and whose shrine was situated in the midst of ”the Tyrian Camp” or settlement on the ”south side of the temple of Ptah.” The tourist, therefore, walked round the eastern wall of the great temple from north to south, and as the pylon on this side of the sanctuary was connected with the name of a king who was the builder of a brick pyramid seen on the way to the Fayyum, an account of it is deferred till later. The next monument Herodotos came to was accordingly of Phnician and not of Egyptian origin.

Proteus in fact was a Phnician G.o.d, wors.h.i.+pped, Herodotos tells us, along with the foreign Aphrodite, whom he suspects to be the Greek Helen in disguise. The Phnician Aphrodite, however, was really Ashtoreth, which the Greeks p.r.o.nounced Astarte, the Istar of the Babylonians and a.s.syrians.

But the ”priests,” or rather the guides of the traveller, were equal to the occasion, and on his asking them concerning Helen they at once gave him a long story about her arrival and adventures in Egypt. Proteus was at the time the king in Memphis, and not the sea-G.o.d of s.h.i.+ps and prophetic insight, as Homer had imagined, and he very properly took Helen away from Paris and kept her safely till Menelaos arrived after the Trojan war to claim his wife. Accordingly Proteus, the Phnician ”old man of the sea,”

has gone down among the three hundred and forty-one Pharaohs of Egypt whose names were recounted to Herodotos by the ”priests.” There could not be a better ill.u.s.tration of the real character of his ”priestly”

informants, or of the worthlessness of the information which they gave him.

When, however, Herodotos goes on to a.s.sert that ”they said” that Rhampsinitos succeeded Proteus in the kingdom, he is dealing with them unjustly. The supposed fact must have come from his own note-book. After visiting the Tyrian Camp, on the south side of the great temple, the traveller was taken to its western entrance, where he was told that the propylaea had been erected by Rhampsinitos, as well as two colossal statues in front of them. The order in which he saw the monuments determined the order in which the names of Proteus and Rhampsinitos occurred in his note-book, and the order in his note-book determined the order of their succession.

Rhampsinitos represents a real Egyptian king. He is Ramses III. of the twentieth dynasty, the last of the conquering Pharaohs, and the builder of Medinet Habu at Thebes. But Herodotos was never at Thebes, and had consequently never heard of the superb temple and palace Ramses had built there. All that he knows of the architectural works of the Pharaoh are the insignificant additions he made to the temple of Memphis. Of the real Pharaoh he is equally ignorant. In place of the vanquisher of the hordes of the north, the monarch who annihilated the invaders from the aegean and captured or sunk their s.h.i.+ps, the conqueror who carried his arms into Palestine and Syria, we have the hero of a folk-tale. Rhampsinitos and his treasury have become the subject of the story of the master-thief, a story which in various forms is found all over the world, and perhaps goes back to the infancy of mankind. Why this story should have been attached to Ramses III. it is just as impossible for us to know as it is to understand why the name of Neit, the G.o.ddess of Sais and the twenty-sixth dynasty, should have been combined with that of the Theban Pharaoh of the twentieth. Rhampsinitos, Ramessu-n-Neit or ”Ramses of Neit,” indicates the period in which alone the name could have been formed. It must have been the invention of the Karian dragomen who came into existence under the Saitic dynasty.

Ramses III. was, however, as we learn from the great Harris papyrus, one of the wealthiest of Egyptian princes. The gifts he made to the temples of the G.o.ds, more especially to that of Amon of Thebes, are almost fabulous in amount. His trading s.h.i.+ps brought him the wares of the south and north; and the gold-mines of the eastern desert, as well as the copper and malachite mines of the province of Mafkat, the Sinaitic Peninsula of our modern maps, were actively worked in his reign. The chambers of one of his treasuries still exist at Medinet Habu, and we can still see depicted on their walls the vases of precious metal which he deposited in them.

The Rhampsinitos of folk-lore was similarly rich. He built a treasury for his wealth beside his palace, which should secure it against all attempts at robbery. But the architect left in it a stone which could be easily removed by any one who knew its secret, and before he died the secret was communicated to his two sons. To the amazement of the king, therefore, the gold began to disappear, though his seals remained unbroken and the doors fast locked. He set a trap, accordingly, by the side of the chests of gold; and one of the thieves was caught in it. He thereupon induced his brother to cut off his head, so that his body might not be recognised, and to decamp with it. Next morning Rhampsinitos found the headless corpse, which was thereupon exposed to public view under the protection of armed guards, who were ordered to arrest whoever showed any signs of recognising it. The mother of the dead man, frantic at the treatment of his body, which would deprive him of all hope in the next world, threatened to disclose the whole story unless her surviving son could secure his brother's corpse and give it honourable burial. Loading several a.s.ses with wine-skins, therefore, he drove them past the place where the guards sat over the corpse. There he allowed some of the wine to escape, accidentally as it were, and when the guards began eagerly to drink it he craftily encouraged them to do so until they had all fallen into a drunken sleep.

He then seized the body and carried it to his mother. The king was now more than ever desirous of discovering such a master-thief, and ordered his daughter to adopt the Babylonian custom of sitting in public and admitting the attentions of any one who pa.s.sed on condition that he told her the cleverest trick he had ever performed. The thief provided himself with the arm of a mummy, which he concealed under his cloak, and thus prepared presented himself to the princess and disclosed to her all he had done. As she tried to seize him, he left the dead man's arm in her hand and escaped. The king, struck with admiration, determined that so exceedingly clever a youth should be his own son-in-law, and issued a proclamation not only pardoning him but allowing him to marry his daughter. Such was the way in which Egyptian history was constructed by the combined efforts of the popular imagination, the foreign dragomen, and Herodotos!

After all, however, the master-thief did not succeed Rhampsinitos on the throne. After pa.s.sing the western entrance of the temple of Ptah, Herodotos arrived again at the northern side, from which he had started, and, as he was not allowed to enter the sanctuary, there was nothing further for him to see. His next visit, accordingly, was to the pyramids of Gizeh, and the pyramidal builders-Kheops, Khephren, and Mykerinos of the fourth dynasty-are made to follow Ramses III. of the twentieth, who lived more than two thousand years after them. It does not say much for the judgment of our cla.s.sical scholars that before the decipherment of the hieroglyphs they should have preferred the chronology of Herodotos to that of Manetho.

Herodotos, like a true sight-seer, found nothing in Memphis to interest him except the temple. About the city itself he has nothing to say, not even about the stuccoed city-wall which gave to it its name of ”the White Wall.” Portions of this wall are still standing at the northern end of the mounds which cover the site of Memphis. Like all the other city-walls of ancient Egypt, it is built of sun-dried bricks, bound together with the stems of palm-trees, and was once of great thickness. At the southern end of the mounds are the remains of the kilns in which the potters of the Roman and Byzantine age baked their vases of blue porcelain. Some of their failures still lie on the surface of the ground.

Herodotos went to the pyramids of Gizeh by water, across the lake on the western side of the city, which he states had been made by Menes, and then along a ca.n.a.l. At Gizeh his love of the marvellous was fully satisfied. He inspected the pyramids and the causeway along which the stones had been brought from the quarries of Turah for building them, and listened reverentially to all the stories which his guides told him about them and their builders. The measurements he gives were in most cases probably made by himself. But in saying that there were hieroglyphic inscriptions ”in the pyramid” he has made a mistake. There were no inscriptions either in it or outside it, unless it were a few hieratic records left by visitors on the lower casing-stones of the monument. At the same time it is certain that Herodotos saw the hieroglyphs, and that his guide pretended to translate them, since they contained, according to him, an account of the quant.i.ty of radishes, onions, and leeks eaten by the workmen when building the great pyramid, as well as the amount of money which it cost. But the vegetables represented Egyptian characters-the radish, for instance, being probably _rod_, ”fruit” or ”seed,” and the mention of them is a proof that it really was a hieroglyphic text which the dragoman proposed to interpret. It is even possible that the guide knew the hieroglyphic symbols for the numerals; if so, it would explain his finding in them the number of talents spent by Kheops upon his sepulchre, and it would also show that the inscriptions were engraved, not ”in the pyramid,” but in an adjoining tomb. In fact, this seems the simplest explanation of what Herodotos says about them; like many another traveller, he forgot to note where exactly the inscriptions were inscribed, and when he came to write his book a.s.sumed that they were in the pyramid itself.

According to the dragoman's legend, Kheops and Khephren were cruel and impious tyrants, while their successor Mykerinos (Men-ka-Ra) was a good and merciful ruler. The key to this description of them is probably to be found in the statement of Diodorus Siculus that the people threatened to drag their bodies from their tombs after death and tear them in pieces, so that through fear of such a fate the Pharaohs took care to have themselves buried in a secret place. This secret place is the subterranean island, with its chambers, which Herodotos says was made under the great pyramid by means of a ca.n.a.l in order that the king might be entombed there. The myth must have originated in the fact that in the days of Herodotos the mummies of Kheops and Khephren were not to be found in their pyramids, which had been rifled centuries before, and the story of the cruelty and impiety of the two kings accordingly grew up to account for the fact.

The righteousness of Mykerinos was visited with the anger and punishment of the G.o.ds, since it had been destined that the Egyptians should be evil-entreated for one hundred and fifty years, and his piety and justice had averted from them part of their doom. This view of destiny and the action of the G.o.ds was as essentially Greek as it was foreign to the Egyptian mind, and it is not surprising therefore that the decree of heaven was announced to the unhappy Pharaoh through that thoroughly Greek inst.i.tution, an oracle. We are reading in the story a Greek tragedy rather than a history of Egypt.

It was part of the punishment of Mykerinos that he should lose his daughter, and the dragomen thus managed to connect the pyramid at Gizeh with a gilded wooden image of a cow in the palace at Sais, which, since the reign of Psammetikhos, must have been well-known to them. The cow, which was really a symbol of Neit in the form of Hathor, with what Herodotos supposed to be the disk of the sun between its horns, though it was really the moon, was imagined to be hollow, and to be the coffin of the daughter of the Pharaoh. The wooden figures which stood beside it were further imagined to represent the concubines of the king. There were, however, other stories about both the figures and the cow, less reputable to the royal character, but equally showing how entirely ignorant Herodotos's informants were of Egyptian religion and custom. Though they knew that at the festival of Osiris the cow was carried out into the open air, they said this was because the daughter of Mykerinos when dying had asked her father that she might once a year see the sun. Can there be a stronger proof of the gulf that existed between the native Egyptian and the ”impure” stranger, even when the latter belonged to the caste of dragomen? To us the representation of Hathor under the form of a cow with the lunar orb between its horns seems an elementary fact of ancient Egyptian religion; the modern tourist sees it depicted time after time on the walls of temples and tombs, and the modern dragoman has begun to learn something about its meaning. But in the fifth century before our era the dragoman and the tourist were alike foreigners, who were not permitted to penetrate within the temples, and there were neither books nor teachers to instruct them in the doctrines of the Egyptian faith.

Herodotos must have returned to Memphis after his visit to the pyramids, before setting forth on his voyage to the south. Had he gone straight from Gizeh to the Fayyum along the edge of the desert, he would have pa.s.sed the step-pyramid and the Serapeum at Saqqara. It is difficult to believe that, had he done so, he would have told us nothing about the burial-place of the sacred bulls and the huge sarcophagi of granite in which they were entombed. The subterranean gallery begun by Psammetikhos was still open, and each Apis as he died was buried in it down to the end of the Ptolemaic period. At a later date, when the Persian empire had been overthrown, the Serapeum became a favourite place of pilgrimage for Greek visitors to Memphis. A Greek temple was built over the sepulchres of the bulls, Greek recluses took up their abode in its chambers, and Greek tourists inscribed their names on the sphinxes which lined the approach to the sanctuary.

Herodotos knew all about the living Apis, and the marks on the body of the bull which proved his divinity, as well as about the court in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, which Psammetikhos had built for the accommodation of the incarnate G.o.d. He was well acquainted also with the legend which made Kambyses slay the sacred bull and scourge its priests, and he tells us how the latter buried the body of their slaughtered deity in secret. But neither he nor his guides knew where the burial took place, or where the mummies of the bulls had been entombed from time immemorial. Had they done so we should have heard something about it. But, instead of this, we are told that the dead oxen were buried in the suburbs of the town where they had died, their horns being allowed to protrude above the ground in order to mark the spot. When the flesh was decayed the bones were conveyed in boats to a city in the island of Prosopitis, called Atarbekhis, and there deposited in their last resting-place.

It is evident, therefore, that the great cemetery of Memphis was not visited by travellers, and that the guides accordingly knew nothing about it. The Egyptians probably had the same feeling in regard to it as their Moslem descendants; the graves would be profaned if the ”impure” foreigner walked over them. The ”impure” foreigner, moreover, was usually satisfied with the three pyramids of Gizeh; he did not care to make another long expedition in the sun to the western desert in order to see there another pyramid. And, apart from the pyramid, there was little for him to visit.

It is doubtful whether he would have been permitted to descend into the burying-place of the bulls, and the buildings above it were probably of no great size.

But whatever might have been the reason, Saqqara and its Serapeum were unknown to the dragomen, and consequently to Herodotos as well. He must have started for the Fayyum from Memphis and have sailed up the channel of the Nile itself. If he noticed the pyramids of Dahshur and Medum, they would have been in the far distance, and have appeared unworthy of attention after what he had seen at Gizeh. Soon after pa.s.sing Medum, however, it would have been necessary for him to leave the river and make his way inland by the ca.n.a.l which joined the Bahr Yusuf at Illahun. Here he would have been close to the great brick pyramid whose secret has been wrested from it by Professor Petrie, and here too he would have seen, a little to the south, the city of Herakleopolis, the Ahnas el-Medineh of to-day, standing on the rubbish-mounds of the past on the eastern bank of the Bahr Yusuf.

Herakleopolis, called Hininsu in Egyptian and the cuneiform inscriptions, was the capital of a nome which the Greek writers describe as an island.