The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

“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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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.