The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos Part 7

Cyril.

The literature of Coptic Christianity was almost wholly religious. Little else had an interest for the devoted adherents of the new faith. The romances which had delighted their forefathers were replaced by legends of the saints and martyrs, and Christian hymns succeeded to the poems of the past. We owe to this pa.s.sion for theology the preservation of productions of the Jewish and Christian Churches which would otherwise have been lost.

The Book of Enoch, quoted though it is by St. Jude, would have perished irrevocably had it not been for Coptic Christianity. The Church of Abyssinia, a daughter of that of Egypt, has preserved it in an Ethiopic translation, and portions of the Greek original from which the translation was made have been found in a tomb at Ekhmim, which was excavated in 1886.

It has long been known that the text used by the Abyssinian translator must have differed considerably from that of which extracts have been preserved for us in the Epistle of St. Jude and the writings of the Byzantine historians Kedrenos and George the Syncellus; the newly-discovered fragments now enable us to see what this text actually was like. If the original book was written in Aramaic it would seem that at least two authorised Greek versions of it existed, one of which was used in Europe and Syria, the other in Egypt. Which was the older and more faithful we have yet to learn.

The excavations at Ekhmim have brought to light fragments of two other works, both belonging to the early days of Christianity and long since lost. One of these is supposed by its first editor, M. Bouriant, to be the Apocalypse of St. Peter; it opens with an account of the Transfiguration, which is followed by a vision of heaven and h.e.l.l. The book appears to have been composed or interpolated by a Gnostic, as there is a reference in it to "the aeon" in which Moses and Elias dwelt in glory. The other work is of more importance. It is the Gospel known to the early Church as that of St.

Peter, and the portion which is preserved contains the narrative of the Pa.s.sion and Resurrection of Christ. Throughout the narrative the responsibility for the death of our Lord is transferred from Pilate to the Jews; when the guard who watched the tomb under the centurion Petronius ran to tell Pilate of the resurrection they had witnessed, "grieving greatly and saying: Truly he was the son of G.o.d": he answered: "I am clean of the blood of the son of G.o.d: I too thought he was so." Docetic tendencies, however, are observable in the Gospel: at all events the cry of Christ on the cross is rendered, "My power, (my) power, thou hast forsaken me!"

What further discoveries of the lost doc.u.ments of early Christianity still await us in Egypt it is impossible to say. It is only during the last few years that attention has been turned towards monuments which, to the students of Egyptian antiquity, seemed of too recent a date. Countless ma.n.u.scripts of priceless value have already perished through the ignorance of the _fellahin_ and the neglect of the tourist and _savan_, to whom the term "Coptic" has been synonymous with "worthless." But the soil of Egypt is archaeologically almost inexhaustible, and the land of the Septuagint, of the Christian school of Alexandria, and of the pa.s.sionate theology of a later epoch, cannot fail to yield up other doc.u.ments that will throw a flood of light on the early history of our faith. It is only the other day that, among the Fayyum papyri now in the British Museum, there was found a fragment of the Septuagint version of the Psalms older than the oldest MS.

of the Bible hitherto known. And the traveller who still wishes to see the Nile at leisure and in his own way will find in the old Egyptian quarries behind Der Abu Hannes, but a little to the south of the city which Hadrian raised to the memory of Antinous, abundant ill.u.s.trations of the doctrine and wors.h.i.+p of the primitive Coptic Church. He can there study all the details of its ancient ecclesiastical architecture cut out of the living rock, and can trace how the home of a hermit became first a place of pilgrimage and then a chapel with its altar to the saints. The tombs themselves, inscribed with the Greek epitaphs of the sainted fugitives from persecution, still exist outside the caves in which they had dwelt.

We can even see the change taking place which transformed the Greek Church of Alexandria into the Coptic Church of Egypt. On either side of a richly-carved cross is the record of "Papias, son of Melito the Isaurian,"

buried in the spot made holy by the body of St. Macarius, which is written on the one side in Greek, on the other side in Coptic. Henceforward Greek is superseded by Coptic, and the numerous pilgrims who ask St. Victor or St. Phbammon to pray for them write their names and prayers in the native language and the native alphabet. With the betrayal of Egypt to the Mohammedans by George the Makaukas the doom of the Greek language and Bible was sealed. Coptic had already become the language of the Egyptian Church, and though we still find quotations from the Greek New Testament painted here and there on the walls of rock-cut shrines they are little more than ornamental designs. Christian Egypt is native, not Greek.

CHAPTER VI. HERODOTOS IN EGYPT.

From Coptic Christianity, just preparing to confront twelve centuries of Mohammedan persecution, we must now turn back to Pagan Greece. The Persian wars have breathed a new life into Greece and its colonies, and given them a feeling of unity such as they never possessed before. Athens has taken its place as leader not only in art and literature, but also in war, and under the shelter of her name the Ionians of Asia Minor have ventured to defy their Persian lord, and the Ionic dialect has ceased to be an object of contempt. The Greek, always restless and curious to see and hear "some new thing," is now beginning to indulge his tastes at leisure, and to visit as a tourist the foreign sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean. Art has leaped at a single bound to its perfection in the sculptures of Pheidias; poetry has become divine in the tragedies of aeschylus and Sophocles, and history is preparing to take part in the general development. The modern world of Europe is already born.

The founder of literary history-of history, that is to say, which aims at literary form and interest-was Herodotos of Halikarna.s.sos. If Greek tradition may be trusted, his uncle had been put to death by Lygdamis, the despot of the city, and the subsequent expulsion of the tyrant was in some measure due to the political zeal of the future historian. Herodotos was wealthy and well educated, as fond of travel as the majority of his countrymen, and not behind them in curiosity and vanity. He had cultivated the literary dialect of Ionia, perhaps during his stay in Samos, and had made good use there of the library of Polykrates, the friend and correspondent of Amasis. What other libraries he may have consulted we do not know, but his history shows that he had a considerable acquaintance with the works of his predecessors, whom he desired to eclipse and supersede. Hekataeus of Miletus, who had travelled in Egypt as far south as Thebes, if not a.s.suan, and had written a full account of the country, its people and its history, Xanthus, the Lydian, who had compiled the annals of his native land, beside numberless other authors, historians and geographers, poets and dramatists, philosophers and physicists, had been made to contribute to his work. Now and again he refers to the older historians when he wishes to correct or contradict them; more frequently he silently incorporates their statements and words without mentioning them by name. It was thus, we are told by Porphyry, that he "stole" the accounts given by Hekataeus of the crocodile, the hippopotamus and the phnix, and the incorrectness of his description of that marvellous bird, which, like Hekataeus, he likens to an eagle, proves that the charge is correct. Reviewers did not exist in his days, nor were marks of quotation or even footnotes as yet invented, and Herodotos might therefore plead that, although he quoted freely without acknowledgment, he was not in any real sense a plagiarist. He only acted like other Greek writers of his time, and if his plagiarisms exceeded theirs it was only because he had read more and made a more diligent use of his note-book.

It is we, and not the Greek world for which he wrote, who are the sufferers. It is frequently difficult, if not impossible, for us to tell whether Herodotos is speaking from his own experience or quoting from others, whose trustworthiness is doubtful or whose statements may have been misunderstood. From time to time internal evidence a.s.sures us that we are dealing, not with Herodotos himself, but with some other writer whose remarks he has embodied. His commentators have continually argued on the supposition that, wherever the first person is used, it is Herodotos himself who is speaking. Statements of his accordingly have been declared to be true, in spite of the contrary evidence of oriental research, because, it is urged, he is a trustworthy witness and has reported honestly what he heard and saw. But if he did not hear and see the supposed facts, the case is altered and the argument falls to the ground.

Herodotos took part in the foundation of the colony of Thurii in southern Italy in B.C. 445, and there, rather than at the Olympic festival, as later legend believed, he read to the a.s.sembled Greeks the whole or a part of his history. His travels in Egypt, therefore, must have already taken place. Their approximate date, indeed, is fixed by what he tells us about the battlefield of Papremis (iii. 12).

At Papremis, for the first time, an Egyptian army defeated the Persian forces. Its leader was Inaros the Libyan, and doubtless a large body of Libyans was enrolled in it. Along with Amyrtaeos he had led the Egyptians to revolt in the fifth year of the reign of Artaxerxes I. (B.C. 460).

Akhaemenes, the satrap of Egypt, was routed and slain, and for six years Egypt maintained a precarious freedom. The fortresses at Memphis and Pelusium, however, remained in the hands of the Persians, and in spite of all the efforts of the Egyptians, they could not be dislodged. Greek aid accordingly was sought, and the Athenians, still at war with Persia, sent two hundred s.h.i.+ps from Cyprus to the help of the insurgents. The s.h.i.+ps sailed up the Nile as far as Memphis, where the Persian garrison still held out.

All attempts to oust it proved unavailing, and the approach of a great Persian army under Megabyzos obliged the Greeks to retreat to the island of Prosopites. Here they were blockaded for a year and a half; then the besiegers turned the river aside and marched over its dry bed against the camp of the allies, which they took by storm. The Greek expedition was annihilated, and Inaros fell into the hands of his enemies, who sent him to Persia and there impaled him. Amyrtaeos, however, still maintained himself in the marshes of the Delta, and in B.C. 449 Kimon sent sixty s.h.i.+ps of the Athenian fleet to a.s.sist him in the struggle. But before they could reach the coast of Egypt news arrived of the death of Kimon, and the s.h.i.+ps returned home. Four years later, if we may trust Philokhorus, another Egyptian prince, Psammetikhos, who seems to have succeeded Amyrtaeos, sent 72,000 bushels of wheat to Athens in the hope of buying therewith Athenian help. But it does not appear to have been given, and Egypt once more sullenly obeyed the Persian rule. We learn from Herodotos (iii. 15) that "the great king" even allowed Thannyras and Pausiris, the sons of his inveterate enemies Inaros and Amyrtaeos, to succeed to the princ.i.p.alities of their fathers.

Papremis was visited by Herodotos, and he saw there the sham fight between the priests at the door of the temple on the occasion of their chief festival. He also went to the site of the battle-field, and there beheld "a great marvel." The skeletons of the combatants lay on separate sides of the field just as they had fallen, and whereas the skulls of the Persians were so thin that they could be shattered by a pebble, those of the Egyptians were thick and strong enough to resist being battered with a stone. The cause of this difference was explained to him by the dragoman: the Egyptians shaved their heads from childhood and so hardened the bones of it against the sun, while the Persians shaded their heads by constantly wearing caps of thick felt.

Not many years could have elapsed since the battle had occurred. The visit of the Greek traveller to the scene of it may therefore be laid between B.C. 455 and 450. The patriots of Egypt must have been still struggling for their liberty among the marshes of the northern Delta.

But the rebellion must have been practically crushed. No Greek could have ventured into Persian territory while his countrymen were fighting against its Persian masters. The army of Megabyzos must have done its work, and the Athenian fleet been utterly destroyed. Moreover, it is evident that when Herodotos entered the valley of the Nile the country was at peace.

His references to the war are to a past event, and when he speaks of Inaros and Amyrtaeos it is of men who have ceased to be a danger to the foreign government. The pa.s.sage, indeed, in which he notices the peaceable appointment of their sons to the princ.i.p.alities of their fathers may have been inserted after his return to Greek lands, but this makes no difference as to the main fact. When he came to Egypt it had again lapsed into tranquil submission to the Persian power.

In B.C. 450, Kimon, the son of Miltiades, had destroyed the naval power of Persia, and in the following year Megabyzos was overthrown at Salamis. It was then that the "peace of Kimon" is said to have been concluded between Athens and the Persian king, which put an end to the long Persian war, freed the Greek cities of Asia, and made the Mediterranean a Greek sea.

The reality of the peace has been doubted, because there is no allusion to it in the pages of Thucydides, and it may be that it was never formally drawn up. But the fact embodied by the story remains: for many years to come there was truce between Greece and Persia, and the independence of the Greek colonies in Asia Minor was acknowledged at the Persian court.

The year 449 marks the final triumph of Athens and the beginning of Persian decline.

Had Herodotos travelled in Egypt a year or two later, the ease and security with which he did so would be readily explained. But in this case we should be brought too near the time when his history was finished and he himself was a resident in Italy. We must therefore believe that he was there before the final blow had been struck at Persian supremacy in the Mediterranean, but when the Athenian invasion of Egypt was already a thing of the past, and the unarmed trader and tourist were once more able to move freely about.

For more than half a century Egypt had been closed to Greek curiosity.

There had been an earlier period, when the Delta at least had been well-known to the h.e.l.lenic world. The Pharos of the future Alexandria is already mentioned by Homer (_Od._ iv. 355); it was there, "in front of Egypt," that Menelaos moored his s.h.i.+ps and forced "Egyptian Proteus" to declare to him his homeward road. Even "Egyptian Thebes," with its hundred temple-gates, is known both to the _Iliad_ (ix. 381) and to the _Odyssey_ (iv. 126), and the Pharaoh Polybos dwelt there when Alkandra, his wife, loaded Menelaos with gifts. Greek mercenaries enabled Psammetikhos to shake off the yoke of a.s.syria, and Greek traders made Naukratis and Daphnae wealthy centres of commerce. Solon visited Egypt while Athens was putting into practice the laws he had promulgated, and there he heard from the priest of Sais that, by the side of the unnumbered centuries of Egyptian culture, the Greeks were but children and their wisdom but the growth of to-day. Before the Ionic revolt had broken out, while Ionia and Egypt were still sister provinces of the same Persian empire, Hekataeos of Miletus had travelled through the valley of the Nile, enjoying advantages for information which no Greek could possess again till Egypt had become a Macedonian conquest, and embodying his knowledge and experiences in a lengthy book.

But the Persian wars had put an end to all this peaceful intercourse between Greece and the old land of the Pharaohs, and the Karian dragomen who had made their living by acting as interpreters between the Greeks and the Egyptians were forced to turn to other work. At length, however, Egypt was once more open to visitors, and once more, therefore, visitors came from Greece. Anaxagoras, the philosopher and friend of Perikles, was among the first to arrive and to investigate the causes of the rise and fall of the Nile. h.e.l.lanikos the historian, too, the older contemporary of Herodotos, seems to have travelled in Egypt, though doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the works in which he is supposed to have recorded his experiences of Egyptian travel. At any rate, Herodotos found a public fresh and eager to hear what he had to tell them about the dwellers on the Nile.

Herodotos must have reached Egypt in the summer. When he arrived, the whole of the Delta was under water. He describes with the vividness of an eye-witness how its towns appeared above the surface of the water, like the islands in the aegean, and how the traveller could sail, not along the river, but across the plain. At the time of the inundation, he says, all Egypt "becomes a sea, above which the villages alone show themselves." The voyage from Naukratis to Memphis was direct and rapid, and the tourists in making it pa.s.sed by the pyramids instead of the apex of the Delta.

In northern Egypt the rise of the Nile begins to be perceptible during the first few days of July. Criers go about the streets of Cairo announcing each day how high it has risen, and in the first or second week of August the ceremony of cutting the Khalig or Ca.n.a.l of Cairo, and therewith declaring that the Nile was once more flooding its banks, used to be observed with great rejoicings. It is, in fact, in August that the land is first covered with the flood. For another month the height of the water continues to increase, and then for a short while to remain stationary.

But towards the end of October, when the ca.n.a.ls of Upper Egypt are emptied, there is again another rise, soon followed by a rapid fall. If the Delta was like a sea when Herodotos saw it, he must have been there between the beginning of July and the end of October.

These are the limits of the time which he could have spent in the country.

That he did not remain till after the fall of the river and the drying up of the land is evident from incidental statements in his work. Thus when he visited the Fayyum it was like the Delta, a sea of waters, and the pyramids of Biahmu, which Professor Petrie's excavations have shown to have always stood on dry land, as they still do to-day, were seen by him in the middle of a vast lake. Nowhere, indeed, is there any hint of his having seen the country in its normal condition. Even his reference to Kerkosoros, at the apex of the Delta, which every traveller to Memphis had to pa.s.s except at the period of high Nile, is derived from "the Ionian"

writers of a previous generation, not from his own experience. Neither in going nor in returning was his boat obliged to pa.s.s that way. We need not be surprised, therefore, at finding that the festivals he witnessed in the Egyptian towns were those which took place in the summer.

Herodotos had not the time to imitate the example of his predecessor Hekataeos and visit Upper Egypt, nor, indeed, was the summer a fitting season for doing so. Consequently, while he lavishes his admiration on the temples and pyramids of the Delta, of Memphis and of the Fayyum, he has nothing to say about the still more striking temples of the south.

"Hundred-gated Thebes," whose fame had already penetrated to the Homeric Greeks, and whose tombs and colossi led the Greek tourists of the Macedonian age to scribble upon them their expressions of admiration and awe, is known to him only by name. The extravagance of his praise is reserved for the Labyrinth; about the n.o.bler and more majestic buildings of the capital of Upper Egypt he is absolutely silent. Against the statues of the Egyptian kings which Hekataeos saw at Thebes, Herodotos can bring only a smaller number which he saw at Memphis.

The monuments even now contain evidence that, after the age of Hekataeos, Greek sightseers did not make their way into southern Egypt until the Macedonian conquest had made travel there easy and safe. At Abu-Simbel in Nubia and Abydos in Upper Egypt are the records of the Greek mercenaries of Psammetikhos and their Greek and Karian contemporaries who visited the oracle of Abydos. But then comes a long blank in the history of Greek writing in Egypt. With the foundation of Alexander's empire a new epoch in it begins. From that time forward the walls of the tombs and temples were covered with the scrawls of innumerable Greek visitors. At Thebes the royal tombs were especial objects of attention, and ciceroni led the inquisitive stranger round them just as they do to-day.

But among all the ma.s.s of Greek names that have been collected from the monuments of Upper Egypt we find neither that of Herodotos nor of any other of his countrymen of the same age. In fact, it was not a time for sightseeing in the southern valley of the Nile. The population were in only half-repressed rebellion against their Persian rulers, and the whole country swarmed with bandits. Persian authority was necessarily weaker than in the north, and the people were more combative and had near allies in the desert, the Bedouin and the Ethiopians. A voyage up the river was even more dangerous than in the anarchical days of the last century: pirates abounded, and out of reach of the Persian garrison at Memphis the traveller carried his life in his hand. As in the time of Norden no Egyptian bey could or would allow the traveller in Nubia to go south of Dirr, so in the time of Herodotos the southern limit of the foreigner's travels was the Fayyum. The "Egypt into which Greeks sail" was, as he himself declares, the Egypt which lay north of the Theban nome and Lake Mris.

Even a visit to the Fayyum was doubtless a bold and unusual undertaking, and on this account Herodotos describes what he saw there at more than ordinary length, and extols the wonders of the district at the expense of the better-known monuments of Memphis and the Delta. But the Oasis had suffered much from the civil troubles which had afflicted Egypt. The d.y.k.es which kept out the inundation had been neglected, and the fertile nome was transformed into a stagnant lake. Herodotos saw it as the French _savans_ saw it at the beginning of the present century; the embankments were broken, and fields and roads were alike submerged.

From the walls of the capital of the province, whose mounds now lie outside Medinet el-Fayyum, Herodotos looked northward over a vast expanse of water. "Nearly in the middle of it," he tells us, "stand two pyramids, each of them rising 304 feet above the water ... and both surmounted by colossal stone figures seated upon a throne." The shattered fragments of the colossi were found by Professor Petrie in 1888, scattered round the pyramidal pedestals, twenty-one feet high, on which they had been placed.

Cut out of hard quartzite sandstone, they represented Amon-em-hat III., the creator of the Fayyum, and their discoverer calculates that they were each thirty-five feet in height. The fragments are now at Oxford in the Ashmolean Museum. The statues faced northward, and the court within which they stood was surrounded by a wall with a gateway of red granite. The pedestals still remain fairly intact, and the road by the side of which they had been erected is still used to-day. The monuments, in fact, were erected high above the inundation, and that Herodotos should have seen them in the midst of the water is but a further proof of the condition of the country at the time. The Lake Mris he describes was not the true Mris of Egyptian geography; it was the Fayyum itself buried beneath the flood.

The total height of the colossi from the ground, according to Professor Petrie, was about sixty feet. Between this and the 304 feet a.s.signed to them by the Greek traveller there is indeed a wide difference. But Herodotos could not have seen them close at hand, and the measurement he gives must have been a mere guess. It warns us, however, not to put overmuch faith in his statements, even when they are the results of personal observation. He was but a tourist, not a man of science, and he cared more for the tales of his dragoman and novel sights than for scientific surveying and exact.i.tude.

Hence comes the a.s.sertion that before the time of Menes the whole country between the sea and Lake Mris was a marsh. Such a statement is intelligible only if we remember that, when Herodotos sailed up the Nile, its banks were inundated on either side. Had he seen the country south of Memphis as the modern traveller sees it when the water is subsiding and green fields begin to line the course of the river, he could never have entertained the belief. But all distinction between the Delta and the rest of Egypt was hidden from him by the waters of the inundation. That he should have made the Fayyum the limit of the marsh is indeed natural; it was the limit of his exploration of Upper Egypt, and consequently he did not know that from Memphis southward to Edfu the valley of the Nile presents the same features.

The strange error he twice commits in imagining that there were vaults under the pyramid of Kheops in an island formed by a ca.n.a.l which the builder had introduced from the Nile is due to the same cause. Doubtless his dragoman had told him something of the kind. A subterraneous chamber in the rock actually exists under the great pyramid, as was discovered by Caviglia, and there are pyramids into whose lower chambers the Nile has long since infiltrated. Professor Maspero found his exploration of the pyramids of Lisht, south of Dahshur, stopped by the water which had filled them, and Professor Petrie had the same experience in the brick pyramid of Howara, though here the infiltration of the water seems to have been caused by a ca.n.a.l dug in Arab times. But the pyramids of Gizeh stand on a plateau of limestone rock secure against the approach of water, and the story reported by Herodotos is more probably the result of misapprehension on his own part than of intentional falsehood on the part of his guides.

His ready credence of it, however, can be explained only by the condition of the country at the time of his visit. The whole land was covered with water, and in going to Memphis he had to sail by the pyramids themselves.

It was in a boat that his visit to them must have been made; and it was easy, therefore, to believe that a ca.n.a.l ran from the water on which he sailed through the tunnelled rock whereon they stood. He did not know that the lowest chamber of the pyramid was high above the utmost level of the flood.

Surprise has often been expressed that Herodotos should make no mention of the Sphinx, which to Arabs and modern Europeans alike has appeared one of most noteworthy monuments of Gizeh. But in sailing along the ca.n.a.l which led from Memphis to the pyramids he would have pa.s.sed by it without notice. As his boat made its way to the rocky edge on which the huge sepulchres of Kheops and Khephren are built, it would have been concealed from his view; and buried as it was in sand his guides did not think it an object of such surpa.s.sing importance as to lead him to it over the burning sand. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great pyramid he was surrounded by monuments more interesting and more striking, which were quite enough to occupy his day and satisfy his curiosity.

South of the Fayyum and the adjoining city of Herakleopolis, whose ruins are now known as Ahnas el-Medineh, all that Herodotos has to tell us is derived from older authors. Now and then, it is true, the first person is used, and we think for a moment that he is describing his own adventures.

But he is merely quoting from others, and there are no marks of quotation in the ma.n.u.script to show us that such is the case. His book is thus like that of another and later Egyptian traveller, Mr. J. A. St. John, whose _Egypt and Nubia_ was published in English only fifty years ago. He too embodies the narratives of his predecessors in the record of his own journey up the Nile without any notice or signs that he is doing so, and it is not until we suddenly light on the name of an earlier writer at the bottom of the page that we become aware of the fact. Herodotos has not given us even this help; and we need not wonder, therefore, that commentators who have never been in Egypt have been deceived by his method of work. But he has preserved fragments of older writers which would otherwise have been lost, and if he has mingled them with the stories he heard from the dragomen of Memphis and Sais, or the answers he received to his questions about Greek legends, we must not feel ungrateful.

Upper Egypt is mentioned only incidentally in his narrative, and, as might be expected in a writer who had to depend upon others for his information, what he tells us about it is very frequently incorrect. Thus he a.s.serts that the hippopotamus was "sacred in the nome of Papremis, but nowhere else in Egypt," although it was also wors.h.i.+pped in Thebes, and he fancies that all the cats in the country were embalmed and buried at Bubastis, all the hawks and mice at Buto, and all the ibises at Hermopolis or Damanhur.

But this was because he had visited these places and had not travelled in the south. Had he done so, he would never have imagined that the body of every cat or hawk that died was carried to a distant place in the Delta.

Indeed, in the hot weather of the summer months, anything of the kind would have been impossible. Cemeteries, however, of these sacred animals are found all up and down the Nile. The mummies of the sacred cats are to be met with in the cliffs of Gebel Abu Foda, at Thebes, and above all at Beni Ha.s.san, where a little to the south of the Speos Artemidos such quant.i.ties of them were recently discovered as to suggest that a commercial profit might be made out of their bones. Tons of them were accordingly s.h.i.+pped to Liverpool, there to be converted into manure; but as it was found that the mummified bones refused to yield to the process, the exportation ceased. Mummies of the sacred hawks were disinterred in equal numbers when the ancient cemeteries of Ekhmim were excavated a few years ago, and the construction of the ca.n.a.l on the eastern bank opposite Abutig has lately brought to light another of their burial-places, thus fixing the site of Hierakon, "the city of the Hawk," the capital of the twelfth nome.

In his geography of the river above the Fayyum Herodotos was similarly misinformed. Thus, he avers that "the country above the Fayyum for the distance of a three days' voyage resembles the country below it." A three days' voyage would mean about eighty miles, since he reckons it a voyage of seven days from the sea to the Fayyum, a distance of about 190 miles.

Dahabiyeh travellers will willingly a.s.sent to the calculation. With a fair wind, a day's voyage is about thirty miles, more or less, so that 190 miles could be easily traversed in seven days. Now eighty miles would bring the visitor from the Fayyum to Qolosaneh and the Gebel et-Ter. For many miles before reaching the Gebel the banks of the Nile wear a very different aspect from that which they present lower down. In place of a dull monotony of sand-banks and level plains, there are picturesque lines of cliff, amphitheatres of desert and rugged headlands. It is only as far as Feshn, twenty miles to the south of Herakleopolis, that the description of Herodotos is correct. It is, in fact, merely based on what he could see from the southernmost point to which he attained.

The view which he had from thence over the flat desert reaches of Libya led him to make another statement equally wide of the truth. It is that for four days after leaving Heliopolis the valley of the Nile is narrow, but that then it once more becomes broad. But such was the case only where the Fayyum and the province of Beni-Suef spread towards the west, and there too only when they are covered with the waters of the inundation.

Elsewhere the cultivated valley is for the most part narrower even than in the neighbourhood of Memphis, where it seemed to the Greek traveller to be so confined; here and there, indeed, as at Abydos and Thebes, it broadens out for a s.p.a.ce, but otherwise the wilderness encroaches upon it ever more and more until at Silsilis the barren rocks obliterate it altogether.

Herodotos knows nothing of the great monuments of Thebes, and the Pharaohs accordingly whose names he records have no connection with the ancient capital of the empire. They belong to Memphis, to the Fayyum, and to the Delta-none of them to Thebes. Even Sesostris, in whom some of the features of Ramses II. may be detected, reigns in the north rather than in the south. Of all the mult.i.tudinous monuments that he has left, two only are known to the Greek traveller, and these are the two statues of himself which stood before the temple of Ptah in Memphis.

Of Thothmes and Amenophis and the other great monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty whose memorials were to be found chiefly in the south, Herodotos had never heard. All that he knew of the kings of Egypt before the age of Psammetikhos was derived from the stories which his guides attached to the monuments which he actually saw. Had he visited the temples and tombs of Thebes and Abydos and a.s.suan we should have been told how Memnon led his troops to Troy or how Osymandyas conquered the world. But we have to turn to others for the dragoman's tales of Upper Egypt; Herodotos could not record them, for he was never there. The Fayyum is the southernmost limit of his historical knowledge, because it is also the southernmost limit of his geographical knowledge.