Part 10 (2/2)
It was, in fact, enclosed on all sides by the water. On the east is the Nile; on the west the Bahr Yusuf, itself probably an old channel of the river; northward a ca.n.a.l unites the two great streams, while southward another ca.n.a.l (or perhaps a branch of the river) once did the same in the neighbourhood of Ahnas. Strabo still speaks of it as a great ”island”
which he pa.s.sed through on his way to the Fayyum from the north.
The route followed by Strabo must have been that already traversed by Herodotos. He too must have pa.s.sed through the island of Hininsu on his way to the Fayyum, and his scheme of Egyptian chronology ought to contain evidence of the fact.
And this is actually the case. Mykerinos, he teaches us, was succeeded by a king named Sasykhis or Asykhis, who built not only the eastern propylon of the temple of Ptah at Memphis, but also a brick pyramid, about which, of course, his guides had a characteristic story to tell him. That the story was of Greek origin is shown by the inscription, which they professed had been engraved by order of the Pharaoh, but which only a Greek could have invented. The brick pyramid must have been that of Illahun. The two brick pyramids of Dahshur would have been invisible from the river, and even to a visitor on the spot the state of ruin in which they are would have made them seem of little consequence. His attention would have been wholly absorbed by the ma.s.sive pyramids of stone at the foot of which they stand.
The brick pyramid of Howara, again, cannot be the one meant by Herodotos.
It formed part of the buildings connected with the Labyrinth, the size and splendour of which overshadowed in his eyes all the rest. There remains, therefore, only the brick pyramid of Illahun, by the side of which, as we have seen, the voyage of Herodotos would have led him.
The pyramid of Illahun, when seen near at hand, is indeed a very striking object. It is the only one of the brick pyramids which challenges comparison with the pyramids of stone, and may well have given occasion for the story which was repeated to the Greek tourist. Its striking character is due to the fact that the brick superstructure is raised upon a plateau of rock, which has been cut into shape to receive it. The excavations of Professor Petrie in 1890 revealed the name of its builder.
This was Usertesen II. of the twelfth dynasty, the king in the sixth year of whose reign the ”Asiatics” arrived with their tribute of antimony as depicted in the tomb of Khnum-hotep at Beni-Ha.s.san. How the guides came to call him Sasykhis is difficult to explain. Perhaps it is the Egyptian Sa-Sovk, ”the son of Sovk” or ”Sebek” the crocodile-G.o.d of the Fayyum, whom the Greeks termed Sukhos. The Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty, as creators and benefactors of the Fayyum, the nome of the crocodile, were specially devoted to its wors.h.i.+p, and in their inscriptions they speak of the works they had undertaken for their ”father Sovk.”
After Sasykhis, Herodotos continues, ”there reigned a blind man named Anysis, from the city of Anysis: while he was reigning the Ethiopians and Sabako, king of Ethiopia, invaded Egypt with a large force, so the blind man fled into the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years.”
After his departure in consequence of a dream the blind man returned from the marshes, where he had lived in an artificial island called Elbo, which no one could rediscover until Amyrtaeos found it again. Anysis, of course, is the name of a city, not of a man, and, in making it both, Herodotos has committed a similar mistake to that which he has made in transforming Pi-Bast, ”the temple of Bast,” and Pi-Uaz, ”the temple of Uaz,” into the names of his G.o.ddesses Bubastis and Buto. It is, in fact, merely the Greek form of the Hebrew Hanes, and the Hebrew Hanes is the Egyptian Hininsu, which, according to a well-known rule of Semitic and Egyptian phonetics, was p.r.o.nounced Hinissu. We learn from the Book of Isaiah (x.x.x. 4) that Hanes was playing a prominent part in Egyptian politics at the very time when Sabako and his Ethiopians occupied the country. The amba.s.sadors of Hezekiah who were sent from Jerusalem to ask the help of the Egyptian monarch against the common a.s.syrian enemy came not only to Zoan in the Delta, but to Hanes as well. Zoan and Hanes must have been for the moment the two centres of Egyptian government and the seats of the Pharaoh's court.
The intermittent glimpses that we get of Egyptian history in the stormy period that preceded the Ethiopian conquest show how this had come to be the case. s.h.i.+shak's dynasty, the twenty-second, had been followed by the twenty-third, which Manetho calls Tanite, and which, therefore, must have had its origin in Zoan. While its second king, Osorkon II., was reigning at Tanis and Bubastis, the first sign of the coming Ethiopian invasion fell upon Egypt. Piankhi Mi-Amon, the king of Napata, descended the Nile, and called upon the rival princes of Egypt to acknowledge him as their head. Osorkon, who alone possessed a legitimate t.i.tle to the supreme sovereignty, seems to have obeyed the summons, but it was resisted by two of the petty kings of Upper Egypt, those of Ashmunen and Annas, as well as by Tef-nekht or Tnephakhtos, the prince of Sais. Ashmunen and Ahnas were accordingly besieged, and Ashmunen soon fell into the invader's hands.
Ahnas and the rest of the south thereupon submitted, and Piankhi marched against Memphis. In spite of the troops and provisions thrown into it by Tef-nekht, the old capital of the country was taken by storm, and all show of resistance to the conqueror was at an end. From one extremity of the country to the other the native rulers hastened to pay homage to the Ethiopian and to accept his suzerainty.
Piankhi caused the account of his conquest to be engraved on a great stele of granite which he set up on Mount Barkal, the holy mountain of Napata.
Here he gives a list of the seventeen princes among whom the cities of Egypt had been parcelled out, and each of whom claimed independent or semi-independent authority. Out of the seventeen, four bear upon their foreheads the royal uraeus, receive the t.i.tle of kings, and have their names enclosed in a cartouche. Two of them are princes of the north, Osorkon of Bubastis and Tanis, and Aupet of Klysma, near Suez. The other two represent Upper Egypt. One is the king of Sesennu or Ashmunen, the other is Pef-dod-Bast of Hininsu or Ahnas. Thebes is wholly ignored.
The conquest of Piankhi proved to be but momentary. The Ethiopians retired, and Egypt returned to the condition in which they found it. It was a nation divided against itself, rent with internal wars and private feuds, and ready to fall into the hands of the first invader with military ability and sufficient troops. Two states towered in it above the rest; Tanis in the north and Ahnas in the south. Tanis had succeeded to the patrimony of Bubastis and Memphis; Ahnas to that of Thebes.
Sabako, therefore, fixed his court at Zoan and Hanes, simply because they had already become the leading cities, if not the capitals, of the north and the south. And to Zoan and Hanes, accordingly, the Jewish envoys had to make their way. The princes of Judah a.s.sembled at Zoan; the amba.s.sadors went farther, even to Hanes. It is noteworthy that a century later the a.s.syrian king a.s.sur-bani-pal still couples together the princes of Ahnas and Zoan in his list of the satraps of Egypt.
Anysis or Hanes was the extreme limit of Herodotos's voyage. As afterwards in the days of Strabo, it was the entrance to the Fayyum, and the traveller who wished to visit the Fayyum had first to pa.s.s through the city which the Greeks called Herakleopolis. The patron-G.o.d of the city was Hershef, whose name was the subject of various unsuccessful attempts at an etymology on the part of the Egyptians. But, like the names of several other deities, its true origin was lost in the night of antiquity. In Plutarch it appears in a Greek dress as Arsaphes. The G.o.d was invested with warlike attributes, and hence it was that he was identified by the Greeks with their own Herakles. His temple stood in the middle of the mounds of the old city, which the _fellahin_ call Umm el-Kiman, ”the mother of mounds.” In 1891 they were partially excavated by Dr. Naville for the Egypt Exploration Fund, but little was found to repay the expense and labour of the work. The site of the temple was discovered somewhat to the north-east of the four columns which are alone left of an early Coptic church. But hardly more than the site can be said still to exist. A few blocks of stone inscribed with the names of Ramses II. and Meneptah, and a fragment of a temple built by Usertesen II., are almost all that survive of its past. Even the necropolis failed to produce monuments of antiquity.
Its tombs had been ransacked by treasure-hunters and used again as places of burial in the Roman era, and Dr. Naville found in it only a few traces of the eighteenth dynasty.
And yet there had been a time when Herakleopolis was the capital of Egypt.
The ninth and tenth dynasties sprang from it, and the authority of the tenth dynasty, at all events, was, as we now know, acknowledged as far as the Cataract. Professor Maspero and Mr. Griffith have shown that three of the tombs in the hill behind a.s.siout (Nos. III., IV., and V.) belong to that age. Hollowed out of the rock, high up in the cliff above the tombs of the twelfth dynasty, their mutilated inscriptions tell us of the ancient feudal lords of the nome, Tef-aba and his son Khiti, the latter of whom won battles for his master, the Pharaoh Mer-ka-Ra. Thebes was in open rebellion; so also was Herakleopolis itself, the home of the Pharaoh's family, and Khiti provided s.h.i.+ps and soldiers in abundance for him. The fleet filled the Nile from Gebel Abu Foda on the north to s...o...b..on the south, and the forces of the rebels were annihilated. For awhile the authority of the Pharaoh was restored; but the power of the Theban princes remained unshaken, and a time came when the Thebans of the eleventh dynasty succeeded to the heritage of the Herakleopolites of the tenth.
Who the ”blind” king of Anysis may have been we do not know. But he was certainly not the legitimate Pharaoh, although Herakleopolite vanity may have wished him to be thought so. According to Manetho, the Tanites of the twenty-third dynasty were followed by the twenty-fourth dynasty, consisting of a single Saite, Bokkhoris, whom the monuments call Bak-n-ran-f. Bokkhoris is said to have been burnt alive by his conqueror Sabako. In making the latter reign for fifty years, Herodotos has confused the founder of the dynasty with the dynasty itself. The length of his reign is variously given by the two copyists of Manetho-Africa.n.u.s and Eusebius-as eight and twelve years; the last cypher can alone be the right one, as an inscription at the gold mines of Hammamat mentions his twelfth year. He was followed by two other Ethiopian kings, the second of whom was Tirhakah, and the whole length of the dynasty seems to have been fifty-two years. The Christian copyists, indeed, with their customary endeavour to reduce the chronology of the Egyptian historian, make it only forty and forty-four years; but the monuments show that Herodotos, with his round half century, is nearer the truth.
From a topographical point of view the introduction of Sabako and the Ethiopian between Ahnas and the Fayyum is out of place. But the story told to Herodotos prevented him from doing otherwise. The blind king is said to have fled to the marshes of the Delta, and there to have remained in concealment until the end of the Ethiopian rule, when he was once more acknowledged as Pharaoh. The legend of Sabako is thus only an episode in the history of the Herakleopolite prince.
From the blind Anysis we ought to pa.s.s to the kings of the twelfth dynasty who created the Fayyum and erected the monuments which the Greek traveller saw there. We do not do so for two reasons. Herodotos had already mentioned king Mris and the lake and pyramids he made when describing the list of kings which the sacred scribe had read to him in Memphis. He could not count the Egyptian monarch twice, at the beginning as well as the end of his eleven topographical Pharaohs. Then, again, the story told him about the Labyrinth connected its origin with Psammetikhos, with whom the Greek history of Egypt began. From this point forward Herodotos no longer derived his information from ”the Egyptians themselves,” that is to say, from his guides and dragomen, but ”from the rest of the world.” By ”the rest of the world” he means the Greeks. The story of the Labyrinth is accordingly relegated to what may be termed the second division of his Egyptian history, and forms part of his account of the rise of the twenty-sixth dynasty.
Between the blind king of Ahnas, therefore, and the supposed builder of the Labyrinth, a folk-tale is interposed which once more takes us back to the temple of Ptah at Memphis. It is attached to an image in the temple, which represents a man with a mouse in his hand, and it is evident that Herodotos heard it after his return from the Fayyum. Had he heard of it when he was previously in Memphis, it would have been recorded in an earlier part of his book. Moreover, the statue stood within the temple, which the tourist was not allowed to enter, so that he would not have seen it at the time of his visit to the great Egyptian sanctuary. Whether he ever saw it at all is doubtful; perhaps he may have caught a glimpse of it through the open gate of the temple like the glimpses of sculptured columns in Mohammedan mosques which the older travellers in the East have boasted of securing. But more probably he heard about it from others, more especially from the dragoman he employed.
The story is a curious mixture of Egyptian and Semitic elements, while the inscription which the dragomen pretended to read upon the statue is a Greek invention. A priest of Ptah, so it ran, whose name was Sethos, became king of Egypt. His priestly instincts led him to neglect and ill-treat the army, even to the extent of robbing them of the twelve acres of land which each soldier possessed of right. Then Sennacherib, ”king of the Arabians and a.s.syrians,” marched against him, and the army refused to fight. In his extremity the priest-king entered the shrine of his G.o.d and implored him with tears to save his wors.h.i.+pper. Sleep fell upon the suppliant, and he beheld the G.o.d standing over him and bidding him be of good courage, for no harm should happen to him. Thereupon Sethos proceeded to Pelusium with such volunteers as he could find-pedlars, artisans, and tradesmen-and there found the enemy encamped. In the night, however, field-mice entered the camp of the a.s.syrians and gnawed their bowstrings and the thongs of their s.h.i.+elds, so that in the morning they found themselves defenceless, and the Egyptians gained an easy victory. In memory of the event the stone image of the king was erected in the temple of Ptah with a field-mouse in his hand.
The statue must have been that of Horus, to whom alone, along with Uaz, the field-mouse was sacred. But it was apparently only in a few localities that such was the case. The figure of the animal is found on coins of Ekhmim, and a bronze image of it discovered at Thebes, and now in the British Museum, is dedicated to ”Horus, the lord of Sekhem,” or Esneh. At ”Buto,” where the two deities were wors.h.i.+pped together, we may expect to find a cemetery of field-mice like that of the cats at Bubastis, and the Liverpool Museum possesses two bronze mice, both on the same stand, which were discovered in the mounds of Athribis near Benha. Horus was the G.o.d of Athribis, where he was adored under the name of Kheti-ti.
The priest-king of the folk-tale has taken the place of the historical Tirhakah. The name of his enemy, Sennacherib, however, has been remembered, though he is called king of ”the Arabians” as well as of the a.s.syrians. But the t.i.tle must be of Egyptian origin. The ”Arabians” of the Greek writer are the Shasu, the Bedouin ”plunderers” of the Egyptian monuments, and none but an Egyptian would have described an Asiatic invader by such a name.
It was in B.C. 701, during his campaign against Hezekiah of Judah, that the a.s.syrian monarch met the forces of Tirhakah. The Ethiopian lord of Egypt had marched to the help of his Jewish ally, and at the little village of Eltekeh the battle took place. Tirhakah was defeated and driven back into Egypt, while Sennacherib was left to continue his campaign and reduce his rebellious va.s.sal to obedience. In the insolence of victory he sent Hezekiah a letter declaring that, in spite of the promises of his G.o.d, Jerusalem should be delivered into the hands of its foes. Then it was that Hezekiah entered the sanctuary of the temple, and, spreading out the letter before the Lord, besought Him to save himself and the city from the a.s.syrian invader. The prayer was heard: Isaiah was commissioned to declare that the a.s.syrian king should never come into Jerusalem; and the a.s.syrian host perished mysteriously in a single night.
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