The History of Antiquity, Vol. 1 (of 6)

Egypt had excellent natural boundaries. If the forces of the land were once united in a single hand, there could be no difficulty in repelling the tribes of the desert. Thenceforward there would be little reason to fear an enemy on this side of the boundary hills. No rival power could arise in the neighbouring deserts, and should any victorious state arise at a distance, the deserts checked the advance of their armies. It was much more probable that the united forces of the river-valley should subjugate the tribes of the surrounding desert. Hence the position of their land allowed the inhabitants of the valley to develop undisturbed. The culture once obtained could be quietly transmitted to others, and constantly extended. This circumstance, in connection with the domestic peace of the country under a monarchy, allowed the priesthood to extend their lore in unbroken tradition from generation to generation, while quietly amassing stores of knowledge; and with the increase of the population all the hands not required for agriculture – and in Egypt this claims but a small amount of labour – had to devote themselves to trade and manufacture. And even these arts were likely to attain the greater excellence in so far as the artisans and tillers of the ground were less disturbed by war and military service. The more distinct the boundaries of the land, the less to conquer and occupy outside them, the more industrious, amid the growing population, must have been the culture of the ground and the irrigation of it, the more actively must the artisans have pursued their trade, and industry must have developed with a greater vigour as the number of mouths requiring food increased.

So far as our knowledge reaches, the northern edge of Africa, like the valley of the Nile as far as the marshes at the foot of the Abyssinian hills, was inhabited by nations who in colour, language, and customs were sharply distinguished from the negro. These nations belong to the whites: their languages were most closely allied to the Semitic.1 From this, and from their physical peculiarities, the conclusion has been drawn that these nations at some time migrated from Asia to the soil of Africa. They formed a vast family, whose dialects still continue in the language of the Berbers. Assisted by the favourable conditions of their land, the tribe which settled on the Lower Nile quickly left their kinsmen far behind. Indeed the latter hardly rose above a pastoral life. The descendants of these old inhabitants of the valley of the Nile, in spite of the numerous layers which the course of centuries has subsequently laid upon the soil of the land, still form the larger part of the population of Egypt, and the ancient language is preserved in the dialect of the Copts.2

CHAPTER II.

THE ANTIQUITY OF THE CIVILISATION IN THE VALLEY

OF THE NILE

In the eighteenth century B.C., according to their reckoning, the tradition of the Hebrews presents us with a complete picture of court and civic life in the valley of the Nile, and it tells us of the building of cities in the east of the Delta, which, according to the same computation, must have been founded about the year 1550 B.C. The Homeric poems contain accounts of the land of Ægyptus, of the fair-flowing Zeus-born river of the same name, of the very beautiful fields and cities of Egypt, of princes who fought from their chariots, and finally of "Egyptian Thebes, where in the palaces lie the greatest treasures; a city with a hundred gates, from each of which go forth two hundred men with horses and chariots." They also add "that the fruitful earth bears abundance of drugs in Egypt, some mingled for good, others for evil, and there every one is a physician and has acquaintance with men; they are all sprung from the god of healing."3

According to the account given by the Greeks the Egyptians boasted to be the oldest of mankind, and to possess the most ancient traditions.4 Their priests believed that they could compute the history of Egypt by thousands of years. When Herodotus was in Egypt about the middle of the fifth century B.C., the priests at Thebes read to him from a book the names of 331 kings who had reigned from Menes, the first ruler of Egypt, and the founder of Memphis, down to Moeris inclusive; among these were eighteen Ethiopians, and one queen; the rest were Egyptians. After Moeris came Sesostris, Pheron, Proteus, Rhampsinitus, Cheops and Chephren, Mycerinus, Asychis, Anysis, Sabakon, and Sethos, so that from Menes to Sethos 341 kings had reigned over Egypt in as many generations. Herodotus remarks that the priests assured him that they had an accurate knowledge of what they said, for the years were always enumerated and put down. To convince him they carried him into the great temple at Thebes and showed him there 345 wooden colossi of the chief priests who had presided over the temple through as many generations, in regular succession from father to son; for every chief priest placed his statue here during his own life-time. Before these kings and chief priests the gods had ruled over Egypt; first the Eight Gods, then the Twelve, then Osiris the Greek Dionysus, after him Typhon, and, last of all, Horus. From the time of King Amasis (570-526 B.C.) to the time of Osiris 15,000 years had passed, but from the time of the Twelve Gods to Amasis 17,000 years.5

Herodotus does not conceal the doubts raised in his mind by the high antiquity claimed in these accounts by the priests. He found an especial difficulty in the fact that Dionysus Osiris, who, according to his computation, was born 1,600 years at the most before his own time (i. e. about 2050 B.C.), must have lived more than 15,000 years earlier, according to the assertion of the Egyptians. By their account 341 kings reigned from Menes to Sethos; and on this basis Herodotus reckoned the duration and commencement of the Egyptian kingdom. He took 33⅓ years as the length of a generation, and thus Menes must have begun to reign 340 generations, or 11,340 years before the accession of Sethos. Further, Herodotus placed over 150 years between the accession of Sethos and the death of Amasis, and thus according to his data we get the enormous total of 11,500 years for the duration of the Egyptian kingdom from Menes till its overthrow by the Persians. Menes therefore must have ascended the throne before the year 12000 B.C.; the rule of Osiris commenced 15500 B.C.; and that of the Twelve Gods 17500 B.C.

If we leave the gods out of the question, and reduce the length of a generation, which Herodotus has put too high, to its real average of twenty-five years, the 340 generations with those of Sethos, Psammetichus, Necho, Psammetichus II., Apries, and Amasis, make up 8,650 years, and since the Persians took Egypt in 525 B.C., the beginning of the reign of Menes still falls in the year 9175 B.C. This incredible fact is not made more credible because Plato represents an Egyptian priest asserting to Solon that the annals of Sais reached back 8,000 years; or speaks in the "Laws" of works of Egyptian art, ten thousand years old.6

Four hundred years after Herodotus, Diodorus travelled to Egypt.7 He tells that, according to some fabulous accounts, gods and heroes first ruled over Egypt for something less than 18,000 years. The last of these was Horus, the son of Isis. After these came 470 native kings, of whom the first was Menes, before the time of the Macedonian and Persian rule, and also four Ethiopian kings and five queens. The Ethiopians did not immediately succeed each other, but at intervals, and their united reigns amounted to a little less than thirty-six years. "Of all these kings the priests have sketches in their holy books, handed down through successive generations from extreme antiquity, showing how tall each king was, what he was like, and what he accomplished in his reign." If we place the reign of Menes 479 generations before Cambyses, this computation, on the reckoning of Herodotus, would place the accession of Menes in the year 16492 B.C.; taking a shorter average length for the generations, we may bring it to the year 12500 B.C. But Diodorus shows from other accounts that this mode of computation is inadmissible. He tells us that the priests of Egypt numbered about 23,0008 years from the reign of Helius or Hephæstus, who, according to other priests, was the first of the gods to reign,9 till the entrance of Alexander into Asia (334 B.C.). If of this total we allow about 18,000 years to the gods, the accession of Menes would have to be placed about the year 5300 B.C.10 But as Diodorus also says that something less than 5,000 years had elapsed since the first human king to his arrival in Egypt, Menes' reign would fall about the year 5000 B.C. Diodorus fixes the accession of this king even more closely when he remarks, in a third passage, that the Egyptians assured him that, "for more than 4,700 years, kings, mostly natives, had ruled, and the land had prospered greatly under them."11 With this agrees the further account given by Diodorus, that according to some the largest pyramid was built 3,400 years before his time. According to this Menes cannot be carried back further than 4,800 years B.C.

If Menes founded the kingdom of Egypt 4,800 years B.C., it continued for 4,275 years under native kings; and if in this period 346 kings ascended the throne, as Herodotus says, or 479, as Diodorus, the average duration of each reign would be in the first case more than twelve years, in the second less than nine, which contradicts all credible history. The lowest average of oriental reigns is fifteen years.

Still, from these accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus it is clear that the priests of Egypt possessed lists of the kings in long series, and that, according to their view, gods and demigods had ruled over Egypt for thousands of years before the earliest of these kings. After Greek princes had ascended the throne of the Pharaohs, and Egypt with its monuments and writings was opened to the research of the Greeks, Eratosthenes, who was the head of the library at Alexandria in the second half of the third century B.C., studied the history of these old kings – at "the royal request," as Georgius Syncellus tells us – in the old annals and lists of the Egyptians, and transcribed these lists in the Hellenic language.12 This compilation of Eratosthenes contained the names and reigns of thirty-eight kings of Thebes. Syncellus repeats the list, and adds: "Here ended the rule of the thirty-eight kings who were called Theban in Egypt, whose names Eratosthenes collected out of the sacred books of Thebes and translated into the Hellenic language. The names of the fifty-three Theban kings who followed these have been also preserved by Apollodorus; but we consider it superfluous to add them, for even the list of the first is of no use."13 Thus the researches of the Alexandrine Greeks had brought together a list of ninety-one kings, ninety successors of Menes, out of the writings of the priests of Thebes. As early as the time of Eratosthenes the Egyptians assisted the researches of the Greeks. About the middle of the third century B.C., that is, in the time of the second and third Ptolemy, an Egyptian named Manetho (Ma-n-thoth = "loved by Thoth"), of Sebennytus, and apparently scribe to the temple at Thebes,14 composed in Greek a work on the history of Egypt in three books. "Obviously possessed of Hellenic culture" – so we find it in Josephus – "Manetho wrote the history of his country in Greek, translating it, as he tells us, from the sacred writings; he undertook to interpret Egyptian history from the sacred writings."15 This work of Manetho was lost at an early period; all that remains is the list of the dynasties, a third part of the names of the kings, and a few fragments; and even these remnants we possess only in excerpts by a second or third hand. Manetho begins his history of Egypt with the rule of the gods. First came Ptah, the creative god of light, and the great gods, then the demigods, and Manes. After these had ruled over Egypt for 24,857 Egyptian years, according to the excerpt of Africanus, that is for 24,820 Julian years, the rule of human kings begins with Menes, and these continued through thirty dynasties for 5,366 years. As Manetho closes his list of the kings of Egypt with the last year of Nectanebos, who rebelled against Artaxerxes Ochus —i. e. with the year 340 B.C. – Menes must have founded the kingdom in the year 5706 B.C., or rather, if we reduce the Egyptian years of Manetho's reckoning to Julian years, in the year 5702 B.C.16 This statement carries us back to a far less remote antiquity than the computation of the date of Menes by 346 generations previous to Cambyses; on the other hand, it goes 900 years higher than the date which we deduced from Diodorus.

What amount of authority should be ascribed to the lists of Manetho? Did the priests really possess sketches of kings and accounts of their reigns reaching back more than 5,000 years? In order to believe this, must we not allow that at such a remote time as the reign of Menes, or soon after it, writing was known and in use in Egypt? And granting this, must not the first beginning of culture in Egypt be carried back at least 500 years before Menes? Moreover, the lists do not correspond with the number of the kings given by Herodotus, or by Diodorus. Herodotus, as we said, put 346 generations before the time of Cambyses, Diodorus gave 479 kings before the same date. The excerpt of Africanus from Manetho, even if we substitute the smaller numbers given in the excerpt of Eusebius in all the dynasties, of which only the total sum of the rulers is stated, still gives us 388 kings from Menes to Cambyses.17 If these discrepancies awaken the suspicion that the number and the succession of the kings was not agreed upon even by the priests themselves, the suspicion is increased by the fact that the lists do not tally in the various excerpts in which they have come down to us. What weight can be given to a list which, in the excerpt from Africanus, allows 953 years (or 802 at the least) to the rule of the Hyksos, and in the excerpt of Eusebius allows 103 years, and again 511 years in the excerpt of Josephus? Still greater discrepancies appear if we compare the list of Eratosthenes with the names and numbers handed down to us from Manetho's work. Both lists begin with Menes; both allow him a reign of sixty-two years; but Eratosthenes describes his thirty-eight kings as of Theban origin or race, while in Manetho the first Theban dynasty began to reign 2,240 years after Menes.18 Nevertheless the names of the first three or four rulers in Eratosthenes agree with those in Manetho. Then the coincidence breaks off till the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth names in Eratosthenes, to which corresponding names are found in Manetho's list, but in the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth places; and from this point to the end of the list of Eratosthenes there are only two or three names to which corresponding names are found in Manetho, and these occur at far greater intervals in the series. The last name in Eratosthenes nearly corresponds to the name of the king, in Manetho, under whom the invasion of the Hyksos took place. If, therefore, we assume that the list of Eratosthenes was intended to enumerate the kings who ruled over Egypt to this date, we find thirty-eight kings who must have reigned through 1076 years; and, as parallel to these, we find in Manetho fourteen dynasties with at least 241 kings, occupying a period of 3,084 years.

Scarcely less striking are the contradictions in the monuments themselves. In the temple of Ammon at Karnak, which was extended on a magnificent scale by Tuthmosis III. (1591-1565 B.C.),19 the king is delineated twice in a colossal form on the back wall of a chamber. Between the two pictures sit sixty-four kings in four rows one over the other. The inscription, "A royal offering for the kings of both Egypts," as well as the position of Tuthmosis, shows that he is offering prayer and sacrifice to his predecessors in the kingdom. Of these sixty-four kings, three are the immediate predecessors of Tuthmosis, Tuthmosis I., II., and Amosis. Before Amosis this table puts fifty-seven kings; the name of Menes is wanting; but in Manetho's list there are nevertheless no fewer than 284 kings,20 from Menes to Amosis, with whom, in the excerpt of Africanus, the eighteenth dynasty begins. In the great temple built by Sethos I. (1439-1388, B.C.) at Abydus in honour of Osiris, this prince, with his son Ramses, may be seen on the wall of a passage offering prayer and incense to his predecessors in the kingdom. There are seventy-six shields with names, beginning with the shield of Menes. The last is the shield of Sethos, who in this way is represented as offering prayer to himself, among the rest. Down to Amenemha IV., the close of the twelfth dynasty (2179-2171 B.C.), there reigned, according to Manetho's list 104 kings, but the table of Sethos gives sixty-five shields for the interval from Menes to Amenemha IV. From this king to Sethos, the first prince of the nineteenth dynasty, Manetho's list gives 193 kings, excluding the shepherd kings, whereas the table of Sethos shows only ten shields for this interval.21 Nothing in the way of explanation is to be obtained from the monuments of this kind belonging to the time of Ramses II. (1388-1322 B.C.) On the wall of the portico between the first and second court of the Ramesseum, the great temple built by Ramses II. at Thebes, on the left bank of the Nile, there is a picture in which the statues of thirteen predecessors in the kingdom are carried in procession before the king. There are eleven kings up to Amosis; before him is the figure of Mentuophis; then Menes. In the little temple built by Ramses II. at Abydus in honour of Osiris, there is a tablet, on which Ramses is represented offering adoration to the manes of his predecessors. On this we can make out fifty shields, but only about thirty are sufficiently uninjured to be legible; so far as we can tell this table is only a repetition of the table of Sethos in the great temple of Abydus. A third series of the kings of this period has been discovered in the tombs at Sakkarah. In the tomb of Tunari, the kings' scribe and architect, there is a representation of the sacrifice of Ramses II. for the deceased kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. Here we find fifty-seven shields; immediately before Ramses II. is Sethos, Ramses I., and Horus, then six illegible names; and before these Amosis. Before Amosis are forty-six shields, of which the first can perhaps be compared with the king mentioned in the sixth place after Menes in Manetho's list.22

The variations of these tables from the lists may be explained by assuming that it depended on the particular view and peculiar object of the kings who erected these monuments, which of their predecessors they wished to honour, and which they wished to exclude. But even a manuscript list of kings, which has come down to us, exhibits numerous and very considerable variations from Manetho's lists. This list is a papyrus, now in Turin, supposed to belong to the period 1500-1000 B.C. It begins with the rule of the gods; then follow the names of the kings, with the length of their reigns in years, months, and days, down to the time of the Tuthmosis; and thus it includes the first seventeen dynasties of Manetho's list. It has been much damaged, and therefore we can only discover that about 240 names were given, of which, however, about 100 are entirely gone; and of the others the lesser half at least is hardly legible. As has been remarked, Manetho numbers at least 284 kings to the eighteenth dynasty. Moreover, the papyrus does not agree with Manetho in the division of the dynasties; at certain places, which do not coincide with the sections of Manetho, totals are given of the preceding reigns. The first king after the gods is Mena (Menes), but of the names which follow only a few agree with those in Manetho, and a few more with those of the tables of Karnak, Abydus, and Sakkarah.23 But here also the same names occupy different places in the series.

If in addition to all these variations and discrepancies we add the fact that even in the contemporary monuments and inscriptions which have come down to us there is no lack of contradictions to Manetho's statements – if too these monuments have not been erected or preserved in sufficient continuity, nor are of a sufficiently ample kind, to form an adequate check upon the papyrus of Turin, or the tables of kings or the list of Manetho – we must give up the hope of ascertaining the antiquity and course of Egyptian history on such data. One thing only comes out clear and irrefragable from the tables of Karnak, Abydus, and Sakkarah, no less than the Turin papyrus. Long before Herodotus was in Egypt, long before Manetho wrote his Egyptian history, in the fifteenth century B.C. Menes was considered the first king of Egypt. Even then lists of the kings were in existence, and the priests had made a sketch of the history of their land, in which the rule of the gods preceded the rule of human kings.

Modern research has attempted in various ways to find the key to the puzzle of these long and confused series of kings made by the Egyptian priests. Assuming that the names of the kings and the length of their reigns, and the number of reigns belonging to each dynasty, has been handed down correctly by Manetho, but that some of these dynasties were contemporaneous, the attempt has been made to give such a selection from the dynasties of Manetho as would supply a continuous thread for Egyptian history. Thus from the dynasties expressly marked as Memphitic, or Theban, a series may be formed which shortens the calculation of Manetho by at least 1,000 years. We might proceed further in this direction, and reduce Manetho's list by 2,000 or 3,000 years. According to the separate items in the excerpts preserved, Manetho's thirty dynasties include a series of 5,366 Egyptian years (from the year 5702 to the year 340 B.C.); nevertheless, Syncellus, in a passage of his Chronology, has observed that the whole period of history treated by Manetho in his three books covered 3,555 years.24 This observation has been used to prove that Manetho himself arranged several dynasties contemporaneously; and thus, by taking the whole total of years given by Syncellus as a basis, the year 3892 B.C. has been fixed as the first year of the reign of Menes. No doubt a selection may be made from the dynasties of Manetho in such a way that the sum total of the reigns included in it will carry us no farther back than this year.25 But it is clear from the accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus that the series of kings made by the Egyptian priests were strictly successive; and this fact is abundantly confirmed by the Turin papyrus and the excerpts preserved from Manetho himself. The 3,555 years which Syncellus brings forward cannot, in the face of his own excerpt, be taken as a number really derived from Manetho, and with this number all the calculations founded upon it fall to the ground.26

A second path, which has lately been struck out for the reduction of Manetho's dynasties, is based upon the list of Eratosthenes. The thirty-eight kings enumerated in this list are placed beside the first fourteen dynasties of Manetho. It is assumed that only the names quoted in Eratosthenes are the names of real monarchs, and that we must look for similar names in the list of Manetho. By this assumption, it is true, we are compelled to set aside several of Manetho's dynasties, and even to throw away the greater part of the kings of the dynasties which are allowed to count in the series.27 But even when we have overcome all the difficulties in the way of this system, we are still without the means to define accurately the duration of the rule of the alien kings, which, as has been already remarked, according to the various excerpts from the list of Manetho, continued 953, or 511, or 103 years; nor is there any fixed point immediately before the alien monarchy to enable us to succeed in establishing the antiquity and commencement of the Egyptian series of kings.

All attempts to arrive at the antiquity of the civilisation and history of Egypt by these means are the more doubtful, because in Egypt there is no fixed era to form a basis for calculation. The time is reckoned by the reigns of the kings. In such a case even the most cautious inquiry of the priests could hardly have arrived at a satisfactory chronology for the oldest period. Though they had before them far more numerous monuments than we have, and though the lists of the various dominant families began to be kept at a very early period, it was no longer possible at the time when the lists of the Turin papyrus were made out, to discover in what order the families came, or which ruled contemporaneously before the time of the alien kings. The mere arrangement of our materials in the order of succession cannot fail to give an entirely false picture of the history of Egypt, while on the other hand the national pride of the Egyptians, and the vanity of the priests, found a great satisfaction in exaggerating the antiquity of their history by such enumerations, even where it was known that any families of kings were contemporaneous. With what pride and complacency would they exhibit this endless list of kings to the travelling strangers from Greece!