Part 78

The population of the country must have been large at the earliest period, as one hundred thousand men were employed in the construction of the Great Pyramid alone during the fourth dynasty, nearly 3600 years B. C. It has been placed at seven million under the Pharaohs, distributed in eighteen hundred towns, which had increased to two thousand under Amasis (525 B. C.), and upwards of three thousand under the Ptolemies. In the reign of Nero it amounted to seven million eight hundred thousand. In 1707 it was eleven million, one hundred and forty thousand in Egypt proper, or, including Nubia and other dependencies nearly twenty millions.

HOW WE KNOW THE HISTORY OF EGYPT

Until the last century, what we knew about ancient Egypt was mainly obtained from Greek and Roman historians. At the present time our knowledge of the “land of pyramids and priests” has been greatly increased by the deciphering of the inscriptions on the monuments, and by extended observation of the countless sculptures in which the olden Egyptians have recorded their ways of life, their arts, arms, sciences, religion and customs. In carving or in painting, the obelisks, the temple walls, and temple columns, the inner walls of tombs, the coffins of the dead, artistic objects--all are covered with the strange characters known as hieroglyphics.

THE STORY OF THE HIEROGLYPHICS

This word, of Greek extraction, means “sacred carvings,” given to the sculptures in the supposition that all such characters were of religious import, and known only to the priests of ancient Egypt. The meaning of the characters had been lost for hundreds of years, and the word “hieroglyphics” had long become proverbial for mysteries and undecipherable puzzles, when a keen-eyed Frenchman put into the hands of scholars the clew to their translation.

DISCOVERY OF THE ROSETTA STONE

An artillery officer of Napoleon’s army in Egypt, named Bouchart, discovered near Rosetta, in 1799, an oblong slab of stone engraved with three inscriptions, one under the other. The upper one (half of which was broken off) was in hieroglyphics, the lowest one was in Greek, and the middle one was stated in the Greek to be in the written characters of the country. The Greek inscription told scholars that all three inscriptions expressed a decree of the Egyptian priests, sitting in synod at Memphis, in honor of King Ptolemy V.

Hieroglyphs are representations on stone, wood, or papyrus, of objects or parts of objects, including heavenly bodies, human beings in various attitudes, parts of the human body, quadrupeds and parts of quadrupeds, birds and parts of birds, fishes, reptiles, etc., geometric and fantastic forms, amounting in all to about a thousand different symbols.

More than six hundred are ideographic (idea-writing); i. e., the engraved or painted figure, either directly or figuratively conveys an idea which we express by a word composed of alphabetic signs. Thus, directly, the figure of a man means “man;” figuratively the same figure means “power.”

PHONETIC HIEROGLYPHICS

About one hundred and thirty of the hieroglyphs are phonetic (sound-conveying); i. e., represent words (which are nothing but sound with a meaning attached thereto) of which the first letter is to be taken as an alphabetic sign, and thus phonetic hieroglyphs answer the same end as our letters of the alphabet. For example: in ideographic writing, a bird, a mason, a nest, mean “birds build nests;” in phonetic hieroglyphic the figures of a _b_ull, _i_mp, _r_ope, _d_oor and _s_hip would give the word “birds,” and the words “build” and “nests” would be expressed in the same round-about and clumsy fashion.

THE HISTORY OF EGYPT

From the old Greek writers and from records of the monuments we have a fairly complete story of this wonderful country and people.

FIRST MONARCH OF THE OLD KINGDOM

The first king of Egypt, Menes, whose date is set at 3400 years before Christ, is said to have founded the city of Memphis, near the site of the modern Cairo, which became the capital of Egypt; Thebes, in Upper (or Southern) Egypt, afterwards taking this position.

The building of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, near Cairo, is ascribed to a king named Cheops (_kē´ops_) by Herodotus, otherwise called Khufu (_kōō´fōō_), according to the hieroglyphic royal name found inside the structure. He is believed to have reigned about the twenty-eighth century before Christ. Cheops was the second and most celebrated monarch in the fourth of the dynasties which ruled at Memphis. The third king in this list, Khafra (_khaf´rä_) also founded a pyramid, as did the fourth, Menkaura (_men-kȧ-rä´_) or Nycerinus, a sovereign beloved and praised in poetry for his goodness. His mummified remains are in the British Museum. In the sixth dynasty was a female sovereign noted for her beauty, named Nitocris, who built a pyramid and reigned at Memphis. The monarchy then was for some time divided, the chief power being held by the kings ruling at Thebes, in Upper Egypt, who developed great power, and constructed many notable works.

THE INVASION AND RULE OF THE SHEPHERD-KINGS

About 1800 B. C. the Hyksos or Shepherd-kings, said to be of Arabian race, conquered Lower Egypt, and then subdued the kingdom of Thebes, ruling the whole land down to 1580 B. C. Probably to this period the story of Joseph in Egypt belongs. The shepherd-kings were expelled with the aid of the Ethiopians from the south, and then came the great period of Egyptian history. During this time, Egypt was a great empire with Thebes for its capital. Under Thutmose III., Amenhotep III. and IV., and Seti I., Egypt rose to great heights of development and art.

GREAT EPOCH OF RAMESES II.

The greatest monarch of this, or perhaps of any, age of Egypt’s history was Rameses the Great (called by the Greeks, Sesostris). To him have been attributed many of the monuments and pictures which represent triumphal processions and captives. Rameses the Great reigned for nearly seventy years in the fourteenth century before Christ. Among his many monuments two are chiefly remarkable, the Memnonium or palace-temple at Thebes, and the great rock-cut temple of Abu-Simbel in Nubia. These architectural works possess an interest more historical than that of the pyramids. He is said to have subdued Ethiopia, carried his arms beyond the Euphrates eastward, and among the Thracians in southeast Europe. The monumental sculptures and paintings tell us of war-galleys of Egypt in the Indian seas, and of Ethiopian tribute paid in ebony and ivory and gold, in apes and birds of prey, and even in giraffes from inner Africa. Other sculptures display the Egyptians fighting with success against Asiatic foes. To this monarch was due a vast system of irrigation by canals for conveying the waters of the Nile to every part of the country.

The next sovereign of note was Sheshanq (_Shi´shak_), who, in the latter part of the tenth century before Christ, took and plundered Jerusalem. The empire continued to decline, and was entirely reduced by Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, and became for a time tributary to the Assyrian monarchs. In the early part of the reign of the king Psametik I. (653-610 B. C.)

IMPORTANT REIGN OF PSAMETIK FOLLOWS AN AGE OF DECAY

We find Egypt in connection, for the first time in its history, with foreign countries, otherwise than as conquering or conquered. Psametik I. (653-610 B. C.) had in his pay a body of Greek mercenaries, and sought to introduce the Greek language among his subjects. In jealousy at this, the great military caste of Egypt emigrated into Ethiopia, and left the king dependent on his foreign troops, with whom he successfully warred in Syria and Phœnicia, and likewise succeeded in making Egypt independent of Assyria.

Neku, son of Psametik (610-595 B. C.), was an enterprising prince, who built fleets on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and strove to join the Nile, by a canal, with the Red Sea. Africa was circumnavigated by Phœnicians in his service, who sailed from the Arabian Gulf, and passed round by the Straits of Gibraltar to the mouths of the Nile. He was the king who defeated Josiah, king of Judah, sustaining afterward defeat from Nebuchadnezzar II., king of Babylon, at Carchemish.

In 590 B. C., came Apries (the Pharaoh-Hophra of Scripture), who conquered Sidon, and was an ally of Zedekiah, king of Judah, against Nebuchadnezzar. After being repulsed with severe loss in an attack on the Greek colony of Cyrene, west of Egypt, Apries was dethroned by Aahmes II., who reigned from 570 to 526 B. C. His prosperous rule was marked by a closer intercourse with the Greeks.

EGYPT IS CONQUERED BY PERSIA

Psametik III., son of Aahmes, inherited a quarrel of his father with Cambyses, king of Persia, who invaded and conquered Egypt in 525 B. C. For nearly two centuries afterwards the history of Egypt is marked, disastrously, by constant struggles between the people and their Persian conquerors, and, in a more favorable and interesting way, by the growing intercourse between the land of the Nile and the Greeks. Greek historians and philosophers--Herodotus and Anaxagoras and Plato--visited the country, and took back stores of information on its wonders, its culture, and its faith.

CONQUERED BY ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND PASSES UNDER GREEK RULE

In 332 B. C., Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great; and its new capital, the great Alexandria, destined to a lasting literary and commercial renown, was founded. Subsequently it passed under Greek rule, and the language of the government, and the administration and philosophy, became essentially Greek. The court of the Ptolemies became the center of learning and philosophy; and Ptolemy Philadelphus, successful in his external wars, built the Museum, founded the library of Alexandria. He purchased the most valuable manuscripts, engaged the most celebrated professors, and had the Septuagint translation made of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Egyptian history of Manetho drawn up. His successor, Euergetes, pushed the southern limits of his empire to Axum. Philopator (221-204 B. C.) warred with Antiochus, persecuted the Jews, and encouraged learning. Epphanes, (204-180 B. C.) encountered repeated rebellions and was succeeded by Philometor (180-145 B. C.) and Euergetes II. (145-116 B. C.), by Soter II. and Cleopatra till 106 B. C., and by Alexander (87 B. C.), under whom Thebes rebelled; then by Cleopatra, Berenice, Alexander II. (80 B. C.), and Neos Dionysus (51 B. C.) and finally by the famous Cleopatra who maintained her power only through her personal influence with Julius Cæsar and Mark Antony.

EGYPT BECOMES A ROMAN PROVINCE

On the defeat of Mark Antony by Augustus, B. C. 30, Egypt became a province of Rome. It was still a Greek state, and Alexandria was the chief seat of Greek learning and science. On the spread of Christianity the old Egyptian doctrines lost their sway. Now arose in Alexandria the Christian catechetical school, which produced Clemens and Origen. The sects of Gnostics united astrology and magic with religion. The school of Alexandrian Platonics produced Plotinus and Proclus. Monasteries were built all over Egypt; Christian monks took the place of the pagan hermits, and the Bible was translated into Coptic.

PASSES UNDER MOHAMMEDAN RULE

On the division of the great Roman Empire (A. D. 395), in the time of Theodosius, into the Western and Eastern Empires, Egypt became a province of the latter, and sank deeper and deeper in barbarism and weakness. It was conquered in 640 A. D. by the Saracens under Caliph Omar. As a province of the caliphs it was under the government of the celebrated Abbasides--Haroun-al-Rashid and Al-Mamun--and that of the heroic Sultan Saladin. The last dynasty was, however, overthrown by the Mamelukes (1250); and the Mamelukes in their turn were conquered by the Turks (1516-17). The Mamelukes made repeated attempts to cast off the Turkish yoke, and had virtually done so by the end of the eighteenth century, when the French conquered Egypt and held it till 1801, when they were driven out by the British.

BECOMES A PAWN OF TURKEY, FRANCE AND ENGLAND

On the expulsion of the French a Turkish force under Mehemet Ali Bey took possession of the country. Mehemet Ali was made pasha, and being a man of great ability, administered the country vigorously and greatly extended the Egyptian territories. At length he broke with the Porte, and after gaining a decisive victory over the Ottoman troops in Syria in 1839 he was acknowledged by the sultan as viceroy of Egypt, with the right of succession in his family.

By the Anglo-French agreement of 1904 France formally recognized the predominant position of Great Britain, and agreed in no way to obstruct British action in the government of Egypt. The European War of 1914-1916 has again thrown Egypt into the balance, and its political future seems to be entirely a matter of the fortunes of war and diplomacy.

EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT AND CIVILIZATION

At an early period the form of government in Egypt became an hereditary monarchy, of a peculiar kind. The power of the king was restricted by rigid law and antique custom, and by the extraordinary influence of the priestly class. The soil was held by the priests, the warriors, and the king.

=Their Kings.=--The Egyptian monarchs appear to have used their authority well and wisely; we rarely hear of insurrection or rebellion, and many received divine honors after death for their beneficence and regal virtues. The common title “Pharaoh” is derived from the Egyptian word “Phra,” the sun.

=Social Castes.=--The body of the people were divided into castes, not rigidly separated, as in India. The members of the different orders might intermarry, and the children pass from one caste to another by change of the hereditary occupation. The castes were: (1) priests; (2) soldiers; (3) husbandmen; (4) artificers and tradesmen; (5) a miscellaneous class of herdsmen, fishermen and servants. The priests and warriors ranked far above the rest in dignity and privilege.

=The Priests.=--The hierarchy in Egypt was the highest order in power, influence and wealth. To the priestly caste, however, many persons belonged who were not engaged in religious offices. They were a landowning class, and the solely learned class. In their possession were all the literature and science of the country, and all employments dependent, for their practice, on that knowledge. The priesthood thus included the poets, historians, lawyers, physicians, and the magicians who did wonders before Moses. They paid no taxes, had large landed possessions, exercised immense influence over the minds of the people, and put no slight check even on the king.

=Soldiers and Warriors.=--Egypt had an army of over four hundred thousand men, mainly composed of a militia supported by a fixed portion of land (six acres per man), free from all taxation. The chariots and horses were famous: the foot-soldiers were variously armed with helmet, spear, coat of mail, shield, battle-axe, club, javelin and dagger, for close fighting in dense array; and with bows, arrows and slings for skirmishing and conflict in open order. The soldier was allowed to cultivate his own land when he was not under arms, but he could follow no other occupation.

=The Lower Castes.=--The castes below the warriors and priests had no political rights, and could not hold land; to-wit, The husbandmen who tilled the soil paid rent in produce to the king or to the priests who owned it; and the artisan class, which included masons and the usual tradesmen, whose occupations are recorded upon the monuments. The herdsmen were the lowest class, and of these the swineherds were treated as outcasts, not permitted to enter the temples, or to marry, except among themselves.

RELIGION OF THE EGYPTIANS

In Egypt, life was the thing sacred. Hence all that had life, all that produced and all that ended life, was in a way divine. Hence death, too, was sacred. The Egyptian lived in the contemplation of death. His coffin was made in his lifetime; his ancestors were embalmed. The sovereign’s tomb was built to last for, not centuries, but thousands of years.

The highest form of the religious belief of the Egyptians included the idea that the soul was immortal. In the religion of Egypt were united the worship of Nature, and of the spirit which underlies and animates Nature.

=The Egyptian Gods.=--Having depended on the Nile and the Sun for the vegetation needed for their food, the people conceived human forms for them, and for the prolific Earth, as deities; namely, Osiris as the Nile and the Sun, and Isis as the Earth. These were the only divinities that were worshiped throughout Egypt. In later times they came to be regarded as divinities of the sun and the moon.

Another god, Anubis, worshiped in the form of a human being with the head of a dog, is represented as an Egyptian Hermes.

Whatever higher religious ideas may have been held by learned priests, the worship of the common people was chiefly adoration of animals. The sacred bull, called Apis, was worshiped at Memphis with the highest honors. All Egypt rejoiced on his annual birthday festival, and there was a public mourning when he died. The dog, the hawk, the white ibis, and the cat, were also specially revered. The sparrow-hawk, with human head and outspread wings, denoted the soul flying through space, to animate a new body. Thus we find mingled, in the religion of Egypt, gross superstition in the masses of the people, along with the spiritual conceptions of cultivated minds.

=The Future Life.=--In a papyrus-book, discovered in the royal tombs of Thebes, called the Book of the Dead, we read in pictured writing of a second life, and of a Hall of Judgment, where the god Osiris sits, provided with a balance, a secretary, and forty-two attendant-judges. In the balance the soul is weighed against a statue of divine justice, placed in the other scale, which is guarded by the god Anubis. The assistant-judges give separate decisions, after the person on trial has pleaded his cause before them. The soul rejected as unworthy of the Egyptian heaven was believed to be driven off to some dark realm, to assume the form of a beast, in accordance with a low character and sensual nature. An acquitted soul joined the throng of the blest.

=Embalming.=--The religion of the people was connected with the practice of embalming the bodies of the dead. This art seems to have derived its origin from the idea that the preservation of the body was necessary for the return of the soul to the human form after it had completed its cycle of existence of three or ten thousand years. The art appears as old as 4000 B. C., at least, for the bodies of Cheops, Mycerinus, and others of the age of the fourth dynasty, were embalmed.

EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE

The chief feature of Egyptian architecture is its colossal, massive grandeur, from the use of enormous blocks of masonry, and from the vast extent of the buildings, which produce in the beholder an unequalled impression of sublimity and awe. The approaches to the palaces and temples were paved roads, lined with obelisks and sphinxes; and the temples and the palaces themselves surpassed in size, and in elaborate ornament of sculpture and of painting, all other works of man.

=The Pyramids.=--Of about forty pyramids now left standing in Middle Egypt, the most remarkable are the group of nine at Gizeh, near the site of ancient Memphis. The removal of the vast blocks of stone from distant quarries, and their elevation to heights, which have sorely puzzled modern engineers, were effected, not by the ingenuity of mechanical contrivance, but by the lavish use of human labor. Thousands of men were employed for months in moving single stones.

=The Temple Columns.=--Egyptian columns were formed by their architects on the model of the palm-tree, whose feathery crown of foliage was ever before their eyes, or of the full-blown or budding papyrus. We find constantly in the mural decorations the figure of the famous lotus-plant, or lily of the Nile, beheld by the Egyptians with veneration, and used in sculpture and in painting as no mere ornament, but as a religious symbol. This water-lily of Egypt was consecrated to Isis and Osiris, and typified the creation of the world from water. It also symbolized the rise of the Nile and the return of the sun in his full power.

SCULPTURE AND PAINTING

Egyptian sculpture displays size, simplicity, stiffness, and little of what modern art calls taste or beauty. Neither did the Egyptians become true artists of the pictorial class. They used simple colors of brilliant hue; but of light and shade only little was known; and of perspective, nothing.

Their monuments prove, however, that they practiced the same mechanic arts, and used the same variety of tools, as the moderns. They were adepts at the finest work in every species of handicraft. We have here ample proof that the ancient Egyptians were a highly ingenious, artistic, tasteful, and industrious race.

CITIES AND HISTORIC MONUMENTS

The land of Egypt, teeming with population, abounded in cities and towns. Of these the greatest were Thebes, in Upper Egypt, and Memphis, in Middle Egypt, whose site was near the modern Cairo.

=Abu-Simbel= (_ä´bōō-sim´bel_) on the Nile, in Lower Nubia is the site of two very remarkable rockcut temples, among the most perfect and noble specimens of Egyptian architecture. Here there is no exterior and constructed part; the rock out of which they have been excavated rises too near the river. Still the temples have their façade, as richly decorated and as monumental in its character as those of the most sumptuous edifices of Thebes.

The colossal statues here, instead of being isolated monoliths, are a part of the façade itself, hewn out of the rock, though still forming part of it. The façade of the smaller temple, that of Hathor, is eighty-eight feet long and thirty-nine feet high. It has six colossal figures, about thirty-two feet high, of which four represent Rameses, and the other two his wife, Nefert-Ari. The façade of the great temple is larger, being one hundred and twenty-six feet long and ninety-three feet high.

Most striking are the four colossal figures of Rameses, two to the right, two to the left of the door. These are the largest figures of Egyptian sculpture, being sixty-six feet high. Everywhere are pictures like those at Luxor and Karnak, representing the battles and triumphs of Rameses.

=Abydos= (_a-bī´dos_), next to Thebes the most important city in the ancient kingdom of Upper Egypt. Here was found, 1817, in a corridor of the temple of Seti I. a very important tablet giving a succession of sixty-five kings beginning with Menes, covering a period of about 2,200 years. A similar tablet containing eighteen names, found in the temple of Rameses in 1818, was removed by the French consul-general, sent to Paris, and finally purchased for the British Museum.