1 THE NILE GOD: Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, after a statue in the British Museum. The dedication of this statue took place about 880 B.c. The giver was Sheshonqu, high-priest of Amon in Thebes, afterwards King of Egypt under the name of Sheshhonqu II., and he is represented as standing behind the leg of the god.



1 Reproduced from a bas-relief in the small temple of Philae, built by Rajan and his successors. The window or door of this temple opened upon gen, and by comparing the drawing of the Egyptian artist with the view i the end of the chamber, it is easy to recognize the original of this cliff bouette in the piled-up rocks of the island. By a mistake of the modern copyist's, his drawing faces the wrong way.

Several towns were dedicated to him: Hathapi, Nuit-Hapi, Nilo-polis. It was told in the Thebaid how the god dwelt within a grotto, or shrine (tophit), in the island of Biggeh, whence he issued at the inundation. This tradition dates from a time when the cataract was believed to be at the end of the world, and to bring down the heavenly river upon earth. Two yawning gulfs (qoriti), at the foot of the two granite cliffs (moniti) between which it ran, gave access to this mysterious retreat. A bas-relief from Philae represents blocks of stone piled one above another, the vulture of the south and the hawk of the north, each perched on a summit, wearing a panther skin, with both arms upheld in adoration. The statue is mutilated: the end of the nose, the beard, and part of the tray have disappeared, but are restored in the illustration. The two little birds hanging alongside the geese, together with a bunch of ears of corn, are fat quails, and the circular chamber wherein Hapi crouches concealed, clasping a libation vase in either hand. A single coil of a serpent outlines the contour of this chamber, and leaves a narrow passage between its overlapping head and tail through which the rising waters may overflow at the time appointed, bringing to Egypt "all things good, and sweet, and pure," whereby gods and men are fed. Towards the summer solstice, at the very moment when the sacred water from the gulfs of Syene reached Silsileh, the priests of the place, sometimes the reigning sovereign, or one of his sons, sacrificed a bull and geese, and then cast into the waters a sealed roll of papyrus. This was a written order to do all that might insure to Egypt the benefits of a normal inundation. When Pharaoh himself deigned to officiate, the memory of the event was preserved by a stela engraved upon the rocks. Even in his absence, the festivals of the Nile were among the most solemn and joyous of the land. According to a tradition transmitted from age to age, the prosperity or adversity of the year was dependent upon the splendour and fervour with which they were celebrated. Had the faithful shown the slightest lukewarmness, the Nile might have refused to obey the command and failed to spread freely over the surface of the country. Peasants from a distance, each bringing his own provisions, ate their meals together for days, and lived in a state of brutal intoxication as long as this kind of fair lasted. On the great day itself, the priests came forth in procession from the sanctuary, bearing the statue of the god along the banks, to the sound of instruments and the chanting of hymns.



1 From a drawing by Faucher-Gudin, after a photograph by Beato.

"I.—Hail to thee, Hapi!—who appearest in the land and comest—to give life to Egypt;—thou who dost hide thy coming in darkness—in this very day whereon thy coming is sung,—wave, which spreadest over the orchards created by Ra—to give life to all them that are athirst—who refusest to give drink unto the desert—of the overflow of the waters of heaven; as soon as thou descendest,—Sibu, the earth-god, is enamoured of bread,—Napri, the god of grain, presents his offering,—Phtah maketh every workshop to prosper.

"II.—Lord of the fish! as soon as he passeth the cataract—the birds no longer descend upon the fields;—creator of corn, maker of barley,—he prolongeth the existence of temples.—Do his fingers cease from their labours, or doth he suffer?—then are all the millions of beings in misery;—doth he wane in heaven? then the gods—themselves, and all men perish.

"III.—The cattle are driven mad, and all the world—both great and small, are in torment!—But if, on the contrary, the prayers of men are heard at his rising—and (for them) he maketh himself Khnumu,—when he ariseth, then the earth shouts for joy,—then are all bellies joyful,—each back is shaken with laughter,—and every tooth grindeth.

"IV.—Bringing food, rich in sustenance,—creator of all good things,—lord of all seeds of life, pleasant unto his elect,—if his friendship is secured—he produceth fodder for the cattle,—and he provideth for the sacrifices of all the gods,—finer than any other is the incense which cometh from him;—he taketh possession of the two lands—and the granaries are filled, the storehouses are prosperous,—and the goods of the poor are multiplied.

"V.—He is at the service of all prayers to answer them,—withholding nothing. To make boats to be that is his strength.—Stones are not sculptured for him—nor statues whereon the double crown is placed;—he is unseen;—no tribute is paid unto him and no offerings are brought unto him,—he is not charmed by words of mystery;—the place of his dwelling is unknown, nor can his shrine be found by virtue of magic writings.

"VI.—There is no house large enough for thee,—nor any who may penetrate within thy heart!—Nevertheless, the generations of thy children rejoice in thee—for thou dost rule as a king—whose decrees are established for the whole earth,—who is manifest in presence of the people of the South and of the North,—by whom the tears are washed from every eye,—and who is lavish of his bounties.

"VII.—Where sorrow was, there doth break forth joy—and every heart rejoiceth. Sovku, the crocodile, the child of Nit, leaps for gladness;[*]—for the Nine gods who accompany thee have ordered all things,—the overflow giveth drink unto the fields—and maketh all men valiant; one man taketh to drink of the labour of another,—without charge being brought against him.[**]

* The goddess Nit, the heifer born from the midst of the primordial waters, had two crocodiles as her children, which are sometimes represented on the monuments as hanging from her bosom. Both the part played by these animals, and the reason for connecting them with the goddess, are still imperfectly understood.

** This is an allusion to the quarrels and lawsuits resulting from the distribution of the water in years when the Nile was poor or bad. If the inundation is abundant, disputes are at an end.

"IX.—If thou dost enter in the midst of songs to go forth in the midst of gladness,—if they dance with joy when thou comest forth out of the unknown,—it is that thy heaviness is death and corruption.—And when thou art implored to give the water of the year,—the people of the Thebai'd and of the North are seen side by side,—each man with the tools of his trade,—none tarrieth behind his neighbour;—of all those who clothed themselves, no man clotheth himself (with festive garments)—the children of Thot, the god of riches, no longer adorn themselves with jewels,—nor the Nine gods, but they are in the night!—As soon as thou hast answered by the rising,—each one anointeth himself with perfumes.

"X.—Establisher of true riches, desire of men,—here are seductive words in order that thou mayest reply;—if thou dost answer mankind by waves of the heavenly Ocean,—Napri, the grain-god, presents his offering,—all the gods adore (thee),—the birds no longer descend upon the hills;—though that which thy hand formeth were of gold—or in the shape of a brick of silver,—it is not lapis-lazuli that we eat,—but wheat is of more worth than precious stones.

"XI.—They have begun to sing unto thee upon the harp,—they sing unto thee keeping time with their hands,—and the generations of thy children rejoice in thee, and they have filled thee with salutations of praise;—for it is the god of Riches who adorneth the earth,—who maketh barks to prosper in the sight of man—who rejoiceth the heart of women with child—who loveth the increase of the flocks.

"XII.—When thou art risen in the city of the Prince,—then is the rich man filled—the small man (the poor) disdaineth the lotus,—all is solid and of good quality,—all herbage is for his children.—Doth he forget to give food?—prosperity forsaketh the dwellings,—and earth falleth into a wasting sickness."



The word Nile is of uncertain origin. We have it from the Greeks, and they took it from a people foreign to Egypt, either from the Phoenicians, the Khiti, the Libyans, or from people of Asia Minor. When the Egyptians themselves did not care to treat their river as the god Hapi, they called it the sea, or the great river. They had twenty terms or more by which to designate the different phases which it assumed according to the seasons, but they would not have understood what was meant had one spoken to them of the Nile. The name Egypt also is part of the Hellenic tradition; perhaps it was taken from the temple-name of Memphis, Haikuphtah, which barbarian coast tribes of the Mediterranean must long have had ringing in their ears as that of the most important and wealthiest town to be found upon the shores of their sea. The Egyptians called themselves Bomitu, Botu, and their country Qimit, the black land. Whence came they? How far off in time are we to carry back the date of their arrival? The oldest monuments hitherto known scarcely transport us further than six thousand years, yet they are of an art so fine, so well determined in its main outlines, and reveal so ingeniously combined a system of administration, government, and religion, that we infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era. Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bakhu, which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.

Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nutri, the land of the gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.[*]

* The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine Land were celebrated in Egypt. A traveller or hunter, crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of the penetrating scent of the robul (Puliciaria undulata, Schwbine.), which once followed us throughout a day and two nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever." (Golenischeff).

Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta, whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared. The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konusit, was still a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the idea of the four cardinal points. Bakhu and Manu were still the most frequent expressions for the extreme East and West. Nekhabit and Buto, the most populous towns in the neighbourhoods of Gebel Silsileh and the ponds of the Delta, were set over against each other to designate South and North. It was within these narrow limits that Egyptian civilization struck root and ripened, as in a closed vessel. What were the people by whom it was developed, the country whence they came, the races to which they belonged, is to-day unknown. The majority would place their cradle-land in Asia,[*] but cannot agree in determining the route which was followed in the emigration to Africa.

* The greater number of contemporary Egyptologists, Brugsch, Ebers,—Lauth, Lieblein, have rallied to this opinion, in the train of E. de Rouge; but the most extreme position has been taken up by Hommel, the Assyriologist, who is inclined to derive Egyptian civilization entirely from the Babylonian. After having summarily announced this thesis in his Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, p. 12, et seq., he has set it forth at length in a special treatise, Der Babylonische Ursprung der agyptischen Kultur, 1892, wherein he endeavours to prove that the Heliopolitan myths, and hence the whole Egyptian religion, are derived from the cults of Eridu, and would make the name of the Egyptian city Onu, or Anu, identical with that of Nun-H, Nun, which is borne by the Chaldean.

Some think that the people took the shortest road across the Isthmus of Suez, others give them longer peregrinations and a more complicated itinerary. They would have them cross the Straits of Bab el-Mandeb, and then the Abyssinian mountains, and, spreading northward and keeping along the Nile, finally settle in the Egypt of to-day. A more minute examination compels us to recognize that the hypothesis of an Asiatic origin, however attractive it may seem, is somewhat difficult to maintain. The bulk of the Egyptian population presents the characteristics of those white races which have been found established from all antiquity on the Mediterranean slope of the Libyan continent; this population is of African origin, and came to Egypt from the West or South-West. In the valley, perhaps, it may have met with a black race which it drove back or destroyed; and there, perhaps, too, it afterwards received an accretion of Asiatic elements, introduced by way of the isthmus and the marshes of the Delta. But whatever may be the origin of the ancestors of the Egyptians, they were scarcely settled upon the banks of the Nile before the country conquered, and assimilated them to itself, as it has never ceased to do in the case of strangers who have occupied it. At the time when their history begins for us, all the inhabitants had long formed but one people, with but one language.

This language seems to be connected with the Semitic tongues by many of its roots. It forms its personal pronouns, whether isolated or suffixed, in a similar way. One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes. Without insisting upon resemblances which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian. One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same group, had separated very early, at a time when the vocabulary and the grammatical system of the group had not as yet taken definite shape. Subject to different influences, the two families would treat in diverse fashion the elements common to both. The Semitic dialects continued to develop for centuries, while the Egyptian language, although earlier cultivated, stopped short in its growth. "If it is obvious that there was an original connexion between the language of Egypt and that of Asia, this connexion is nevertheless sufficiently remote to leave to the Egyptian race a distinct physiognomy." We recognize it in sculptured and painted portraits, as well as in thousands of mummied bodies out of subterranean tombs. The highest type of Egyptian was tall and slender, with a proud and imperious air in the carriage of his head and in his whole bearing. He had wide and full shoulders, well-marked and vigorous pectoral muscles, muscular arms, a long, fine hand, slightly developed hips, and sinewy legs. The detail of the knee-joint and the muscles of the calf are strongly marked beneath the skin; the long, thin, and low-arched feet are flattened out at the extremities owing to the custom of going barefoot. The head is rather short, the face oval, the forehead somewhat retreating. The eyes are wide and fully opened, the cheekbones not too marked, the nose fairly prominent, and either straight or aquiline. The mouth is long, the lips full, and lightly ridged along their outline; the teeth small, even, well-set, and remarkably sound; the ears are set high on the head. At birth the skin is white, but darkens in proportion to its exposure to the sun. Men are generally painted red in the pictures, though, as a matter of fact, there must already have been all the shades which we see among the present population^ from a most delicate, rose-tinted complexion to that of a smoke-coloured bronze. Women, who were less exposed to the sun, are generally painted yellow, the tint paler in proportion as they rise in the social scale. The hair was inclined to be wavy, and even to curl into little ringlets, but without ever turning into the wool of the negro.



1 Statue of Ranofir in the Gizeh Museum (Vth dynasty), after a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.



The beard was scanty, thick only upon the chin. Such was the highest type; the commoner was squat, dumpy, and heavy. Chest and shoulders seem to be enlarged at the expense of the pelvis and the hips, to such an extent as to make the want of proportion between the upper and lower parts of the body startling and ungraceful. The skull is long, somewhat retreating, and slightly flattened on the top; the features are coarse, and as though carved in flesh by great strokes of the blocking-out chisel. Small frseuated eyes, a short nose, flanked by widely distended nostrils, round cheeks, a square chin, thick, but not curling lips—this unattractive and ludicrous physiognomy, sometimes animated by an expression of cunning which recalls the shrewd face of an old French peasant, is often lighted up by gleams of gentleness and of melancholy good-nature. The external characteristics of these two principal types in the ancient monuments, in all varieties of modifications, may still be seen among the living. The profile copied from a Theban mummy taken at hazard from a necropolis of the XVIIIth dynasty, and compared with the likeness of a modern Luxor peasant, would almost pass for a family portrait. Wandering Bisharin have inherited the type of face of a great noble, the contemporary of Kheops; and any peasant woman of the Delta may bear upon her shoulders che head of a twelfth-dynasty king. A citizen of Cairo, gazing with wonder at the statues of Khafra or of Seti I. in the Gizeh Museum, is himself, feature for feature, the very image of those ancient Pharaohs, though removed from them by fifty centuries.



1 The face of the woman here given was taken separately, and was subsequently attached to the figure of an Egyptian woman whom Naville had photographed sitting beside a colossal head. The nose of the statue has been restored.

Until quite recently nothing, or all but nothing, had been discovered which could be attributed to the primitive races of Egypt: even the flint weapons and implements which had been found in various places could not be ascribed to them with any degree of certainty, for the Egyptians continued to use stone long after metal was known to them. They made stone arrowheads, hammers, and knives, not only in the time of the Pharaohs, but under the Romans, and during the whole period of the Middle Ages, and the manufacture of them has not yet entirely died out.[**]

** An entire collection of flint tools—axes, adzes, knives, and sickles—mostly with wooden handles, were found by Prof. Petrie in the ruins of Kahun, at the entrance to the Fayum: these go back to the time of the twelfth dynasty, more than three thousand years before our era. Mariette had previously pointed out to the learned world the fact that a Coptic Reis, Salib of Abydos, in charge of the excavations, shaved his head with a flint knife, according to the custom of his youth (1820-35). I knew the man, who died at over eighty years of age in 1887; he was still faithful to his flint implement, while his sons and the whole population of El Kharbeh were using nothing but steel razors. As his scalp was scraped nearly raw by the operation, he used to cover his head with fresh leaves to cool the inflamed skin.

These objects, and the workshops where they were made, might therefore be less ancient than the greater part of the inscribed monuments. But if so far we had found no examples of any work belonging to the first ages, we met in historic times with certain customs which were out of harmony with the general civilization of the period. A comparison of these customs with analogous practices of barbarous nations threw light upon the former, completed their meaning, and showed us at the same time the successive stages through which the Egyptian people had to pass before reaching their highest civilization. We knew, for example, that even as late as the Caesars, girls belonging to noble families at Thebes were consecrated to the service of Amon, and were thus licensed to a life of immorality, which, however, did not prevent them from making rich marriages when age obliged them to retire from office. Theban women were not the only people in the world to whom such licence was granted or imposed upon them by law; wherever in a civilized country we see a similar practice, we may recognize in it an ancient custom which in the course of centuries has degenerated into a religious observance. The institution of the women of Amon is a legacy from a time when the practice of polyandry obtained, and marriage did not yet exist. Age and maternity relieved them from this obligation, and preserved them from those incestuous connections of which we find examples in other races. A union of father and daughter, however, was perhaps not wholly forbidden,[*] and that of brother and sister seems to have been regarded as perfectly right and natural; the words brother and sister possessing in Egyptian love-songs the same significance as lover and mistress with us.

* E. de Rouge held that Rameses II. married at least two of his daughters, Bint Anati and Honittui; Wiedemann admits that Psammetichus I. had in the same way taken to wife Nitocris, who had been born to him by the Theban princess Shapenuapit. The Achaemenidan kings did the same: Artaxerxes married two of his own daughters.

Paternity was necessarily doubtful in a community of this kind, and hence the tie between fathers and children was slight; there being no family, in the sense in which we understand the word, except as it centred around the mother.

Maternal descent was, therefore, the only one openly acknowledged, and the affiliation of the child was indicated by the name of the mother alone. When the woman ceased to belong to all, and confined herself to one husband, the man reserved to himself the privilege of taking as many wives as he wished, or as he was able to keep, beginning with his own sisters. All wives did not enjoy identical rights: those born of the same parents as the man, or those of equal rank with himself, preserved their independence. If the law pronounced him the master, nibu, to whom they owed obedience and fidelity, they were mistresses of the house, nibit piru, as well as wives, himitu, and the two words of the title express their condition. Each of them occupied, in fact, her own house, piru, which she had from her parents or her husband, and of which she was absolute mistress, nibit. She lived in it and performed in it without constraint all a woman's duties; feeding the fire, grinding the corn, occupying herself in cooking and weaving, making clothing and perfumes, nursing and teaching her children. When her husband visited her, he was a guest whom she received on an equal footing. It appears that at the outset these various wives were placed under the authority of an older woman, whom they looked on as their mother, and who defended their rights and interests against the master; but this custom gradually disappeared, and in historic times we read of it as existing only in the families of the gods. The female singers consecrated to Amon and other deities, owed obedience to several superiors, of whom the principal (generally the widow of a king or high priest) was called chief-superior of the ladies of the harem of Amon. Besides these wives, there were concubines, slaves purchased or born in the house, prisoners of war, Egyptians of inferior class, who were the chattels of the man and of whom he could dispose as he wished. All the children of one father were legitimate, whether their mother were a wife or merely a concubine, but they did not all enjoy the same advantages; those among them who were born of a brother or sister united in legitimate marriage, took precedence of those whose mother was a wife of inferior rank or a slave. In the family thus constituted, the woman, to all appearances, played the principal part. Children recognized the parental relationship in the mother alone. The husband appears to have entered the house of his wives, rather than the wives to have entered his, and this appearance of inferiority was so marked that the Greeks were deceived by it. They affirmed that the woman was supreme in Egypt; the man at the time of marriage promised obedience to her and entered into a contract not to raise any objection to her commands.

We had, therefore, good grounds for supposing that the first Egyptians were semi-savages, like those still living in Africa and America, having an analogous organization, and similar weapons and tools. A few lived in the desert, in the oasis of Libya, or in the deep valleys of the Red Land—Doshirit, To Doshiru—between the Nile and the sea; the poverty of the country fostering their native savagery. Others, settled on the Black Land, gradually became civilized, and we have found of late considerable remains of those of their generations who, if not anterior to the times of written records, were at least contemporary with the earliest kings of the first historical dynasty.



Their houses were like those of the fellahs of to-day, low huts of wattle daubed with puddled clay, or of bricks dried in the sun. They contained one room, either oblong or square, the door being the only aperture. Those of the richer class only were large enough to make it needful to support the roof by means of one or more trunks of trees, which did duty for columns. Earthen pots, turned by hand, flint knives and other implements, mats of reeds or plaited straw, two flat stones for grinding corn, a few pieces of wooden furniture, stools, and head-rests for use at night, comprised all the contents. Their ordinary pottery is heavy and almost devoid of ornament, but some of the finer kinds have been moulded and baked in wickerwork baskets, which have left a quaint trellis-like impression on the surface of the clay. In many cases the vases are bicolour, the body being of a fine smooth red, polished with a stone, while the neck and base are of an intense black, the surface of which is even more shining than that of the red part. Sometimes they are ornamented with patterns in white of flowers, palms, ostriches, gazelles, boats with undulated or broken lines, or geometrical figures of a very simple nature. More often the ground is coloured a fine yellow, and the decoration has been traced in red lines. Jars, saucers, double vases, flat plates, large cups, supports for amphorae, trays raised on a foot—in short, every kind of form is found in use at that remote period. The men went about nearly naked, except the nobles, who wore a panther's skin, sometimes thrown over the shoulders, sometimes drawn round the waist, and covering the lower part of the body, the animal's tail touching the heels behind, as we see later in several representations of the negroes of the Upper Nile. They smeared their limbs with grease or oil, and they tattooed their faces and bodies, at least in part; but in later times this practice was retained by the lower classes only. On the other hand, the custom of painting the face was never given up. To complete their toilet, it was necessary to accentuate the arch of the eyebrow with a line of kohl (antimony powder). A similar black line surrounded and prolonged the oval of the eye to the middle of the temple, a layer of green coloured the under lid, and ochre and carmine enlivened the tints of the cheeks and lips. The hair, plaited, curled, oiled, and plastered with grease, formed an erection which was as complicated in the case of the man as in that of the woman.



1 Wooden statue in the Gizeh Museum (IVth dynasty), drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Bechard.

2 Statue of the second prophet of Amon, Aa-nen, in the Turin Museum (XVIIIth dynasty).

Should the hair be too short, a black or blue wig, dressed with much skill, was substituted for it; ostrich feathers waved on the heads of warriors, and a large lock, flattened behind the right ear, distinguished the military or religious chiefs from their subordinates. When the art of weaving became common, a belt and loin-cloth of white linen replaced the leathern garment. Fastened round the waist, but so low as to leave the navel uncovered, the loin-cloth frequently reached to the knee; the hinder part was frequently drawn between the legs and attached in front to the belt, thus forming a kind of drawers. Tails of animals and wild beast's skin were henceforth only the insignia of authority with which priests and princes adorned themselves on great days and at religious ceremonies. The skin was sometimes carelessly thrown over the left shoulder and swayed with the movement of the body; sometimes it was carefully adjusted over one shoulder and under the other, so as to bring the curve of the chest into prominence. The head of the animal, skilfully prepared and enlivened by large eyes of enamel, rested on the shoulder or fell just below the waist of the wearer; the paws, with the claws attached, hung down over the thighs; the spots of the skin were manipulated so as to form five-pointed stars. On going out-of-doors, a large wrap was thrown over all; this covering was either smooth or hairy, similar to that in which the Nubians and Abyssinians of the present day envelop themselves. It could be draped in various ways; transversely over the left shoulder like the fringed shawl of the Chaldeans, or hanging straight from both shoulders like a mantle.[**]

** This costume, to which Egyptologists have not given sufficient attention, is frequently represented on the monuments. Besides the two statues reproduced above, I may cite those of Uahibri and of Thoth-nofir in the Louvre, and the Lady Nofrit in the Gizeh Museum. Thothotpu in his tomb wears this mantle. Khnumhotpu and several of his workmen are represented in it at Beni-Hasan, as also one of the princes of Elephantine in the recently discovered tombs, besides many Egyptians of all classes in the tombs of Thebes (a good example is in the tomb of Harmhabi). The reason why it does not figure more often is, in the first place, that the Egyptian artists experienced actual difficulty in representing the folds of its drapery, although these were simple compared with the complicated arrangement of the Roman toga; finally, the wall-paintings mostly portray either interior scenes, or agricultural labour, or the work of various trades, or episodes of war, or religious ceremonies, in all of which the mantle plays no part. Every Egyptian peasant, however, possessed his own, and it was in constant use in his daily life.

In fact, it did duty as a cloak, sheltering the wearer from the sun or from the rain, from the heat or from the cold. They never sought to transform it into a luxurious garment of state, as was the case in later times with the Roman toga, whose amplitude secured a certain dignity of carriage, and whose folds, carefully adjusted beforehand, fell around the body with studied grace. The Egyptian mantle when not required was thrown aside and folded up. The material being fine and soft it occupied but a small space and was reduced to a long thin roll; the ends being then fastened together, it was slung over the shoulder and round the body like a cavalry cloak.[*]

* Many draughtsmen, ignorant of what they had to represent, have made incorrect copies of the manner in which this cloak was worn; but examples of it are numerous, although until now attention has not been called to them. The following are a few instances taken at random of the way in which it was used: Pepi I., fighting against the nomads of Sinai, has the cloak, but with the two ends passed through the belt of his loin-cloth; at Zawyet el-Maiyitin, Khunas, killing birds with the boomerang from his boat, wears it, but simply thrown over the left shoulder, with the two extremities hanging free. Khnumhotpu at Beni-Hasan, the Khrihdbi, the overseers, or the peasants, all have it rolled and slung round them; the Prince of el-Bersheh wears it like a mantle in folds over the two shoulders. If it is objected that the material could not be reduced to such small dimensions as those represented in these drawings of what I believe to be the Egyptian cloak, I way cite our cavalry capes, when rolled and slung, as an instance of what good packing will do in reducing volume.



1 Statue of Khiti in the Gizeh Museum (XIIth and XIIIth dynasties), drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

Travellers, shepherds, all those whose occupations called them to the fields, carried it as a bundle at the ends of their sticks; once arrived at the scene of their work, they deposited it in a corner with their provisions until they required it. The women were at first contented with a loin-cloth like that of the men; it was enlarged and lengthened till it reached the ankle below and the bosom above, and became a tightly fitting garment, with two bands over the shoulders, like braces, to keep it in place. The feet were not always covered; on certain occasions, however, sandals of coarse leather, plaited straw, split reed, or even painted wood, adorned those shapely Egyptian feet, which, to suit our taste, should be a little shorter.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the spinning-women at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. It was restored from the paintings in the tomb of Khnumhotpu at Beni-Hasan.

Both men and women loved ornaments, and covered their necks, breasts, arms, wrists, and ankles with many rows of necklaces and bracelets. The bracelets were made of elephant ivory, mother-of-pearl, or even flint, very cleverly perforated. The necklaces were composed of strings of pierced shells,[**] interspersed with seeds and little pebbles, either sparkling or of unusual shapes.[***] Subsequently imitations in terra-cotta replaced the natural shells, and precious stones were substituted for pebbles, as were also beads of enamel, either round, pear-shaped, or cylindrical: the necklaces were terminated and a uniform distance maintained between the rows of beads, by several slips of wood, bone, ivory, porcelain, or terra-cotta, pierced with holes, through which ran the threads.

** The burying-places of Abydos, especially the most ancient, have furnished us with millions of shells, pierced and threaded as necklaces; they all belong to the species of cowries used as money in Africa at the present day.

*** Necklaces of seeds have been found in the tombs of Abydos, Thebes, and Gebelen. Of these Schweinfurth has identified, among others, the Cassia absus, "a weed of the Soudan whose seeds are sold in the drug bazaar at Cairo and Alexandria under the name of shishn, as a remedy, which is in great request among the natives, for ophthalmia." For the necklaces of pebbles, cf. Maspeeo, Guide du visiteur, pp. 270, 271, No. 4129. A considerable number of these pebbles, particularly those of strange shape, or presenting a curious combination of colours, must have been regarded as amulets or fetishes by their Egyptian owners; analogous cases, among other peoples, have been pointed out by E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 189.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a portrait of Pharaoh Seti I. of the XIXth dynasty: the lower part of the necklace has been completed.

Weapons, at least among the nobility, were an indispensable part of costume. Most of them were for hand-to-hand fighting: sticks, clubs, lances furnished with a sharpened bone or stone point, axes and daggers of flint,[*] sabres and clubs of bone or wood variously shaped, pointed or rounded at the end, with blunt or sharp blades,—inoffensive enough to look at, but, wielded by a vigorous hand, sufficient to break an arm, crush in the ribs, or smash a skull with all desirable precision.[**] The plain or triple curved bow was the favourite weapon for attack at a distance,[***] but in addition to this there were the sling, the javelin, and a missile almost forgotten nowadays, the boomerang, we have no proof however, that the Egyptians handled the boomerang[****] with the skill of the Australians, or that they knew how to throw it so as to bring it back to its point of departure.[v]

* In several museums, notably at Leyden, we find Egyptian axes of stone, particularly of serpentine, both rough and polished.

** In primitive times the bone of an animal served as a club. This is proved by the shape of the object held in the hand in the sign and the hieroglyph which is the determinative in writing for all ideas of violence or brute force, comes down to us from a time when the principal weapon was the club, or a bone serving as a club.

*** For the two principal shapes of the bow, see Lepsius, Der Bogen in der Hieroglypliik (Zeitschrift, 1872, pp. 79- 88). From the earliest times the sign mL portrays the soldier equipped with the bow and bundle of arrows; the quiver was of Asiatic origin, and was not adopted until much later. In the contemporary texts of the first dynasties, the idea of weapons is conveyed by the bow, arrow, and club or axe.

**** The boomerang is still used by certain tribes of the Nile valley. It is portrayed in the most ancient tombs, and every museum possesses examples, varying in shape. Besides the ordinary boomerang, the Egyptians used one which ended in a knob, and another of semicircular shape: this latter, reproduced in miniature in cornelian or in red jasper, served as an amulet, and was placed on the mummy to furnish the deceased in the other world with a fighting or hunting weapon.

v The Australian boomerang is much larger than the Egyptian one; it is about a yard in length, two inches in width, and three sixteenths of an inch in thickness. For the manner of handling it, and what can be done with it, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man, pp. 402, 403.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of Khnumhotpu at Beni-Hasan.



3 The blade is of bronze, and is attached to the wooden handle by interlacing thongs of leather (Gizeh Museum). Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch- Bey.

Such was approximately the most ancient equipment as far as we can ascertain; but at a very early date copper and iron were known in Egypt.[**] Long before historic times, the majority of the weapons in wood were replaced by those of metal,—daggers, sabres, hatchets, which preserved, however, the shape of the old wooden instruments.

** Metals were introduced into Egypt in very ancient times, since the class of blacksmiths is associated with the worship of Horus of Edfu, and appears in the account of the mythical wars of that God. The earliest tools we possess, in copper or bronze, date from the IVth dynasty: pieces of iron have been found from time to time in the masonry of the Great Pyramid. Mons Montelius has again and again contested the authenticity of these discoveries, and he thinks that iron was not known in Egypt till a much later period.

Those wooden weapons which were retained, were used for hunting, or were only brought out on solemn occasions when tradition had to be respected. The war-baton became the commander's wand of authority, and at last degenerated into the walking-stick of the rich or noble.



3 Bas-relief in the temple of Luxor, from a photograph taken by Insinger in 1886.

The club at length represented merely the rank of a chieftain,[*] while the crook and the wooden-handled mace, with its head of ivory, diorite, granite, or white stone, the favourite weapons of princes, continued to the last the most revered insignia of royalty.[**]

Life was passed in comparative ease and pleasure. Of the ponds left in the open country by the river at its fall, some dried up more or less quickly during the winter, leaving on the soil an immense quantity of fish, the possession of which birds and wild beasts disputed with man.[***]

* The wooden club most commonly represented is the usual insignia of a nobleman. Several kinds of clubs, somewhat difficult for us moderns to distinguish, yet bearing different names, formed a part of funereal furniture.

** The crook is the sceptre of a prince, a Pharaoh, or a god; the white mace has still the value apparently of a weapon in the hands of the king who brandishes it over a group of prisoners or over an ox which he is sacrificing to a divinity. Most museums possess specimens of the stone heads of these maces, but until lately their use was not known. I had several placed in the Boulak Museum. It already possessed a model of one entirely of wood.

*** Cf. the description of these pools given by Geoffroy- Saint-Hilaire in speaking of the fahaka. Even at the present day the jackals come down from the mountains in the night, and regale themselves with the fish left on the ground by the gradual drying up of these ponds.



Other pools, however, remained till the returning inundation, as so many vivaria in which the fish were preserved for dwellers on the banks. Fishing with the harpoon, made either of stone or of metal, with the line, with a net or with traps, were all methods of fishing known and used by the Egyptians from early times. Where the ponds failed, the neighbouring Nile furnished them with inexhaustible supplies. Standing in light canoes, or rather supported by a plank on bundles of reeds bound together, they ventured into mid-stream, in spite of the danger arising from the ever-present hippopotamus; or they penetrated up the canals amid a thicket of aquatic plants, to bring down with the boomerang the birds which found covert there.



1 Tomb of Ti. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Dumichen, Besultate, vol. ii. pl. x.

The fowl and fish which could not be eaten fresh, were dried, salted, or smoked, and kept for a rainy day. Like the river, the desert had its perils and its resources. Only too frequently, the lion, the leopard, the panther, and other large felidse were met with there.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting by Beni-Hasan, Lepsius, Denhm., ii. 136.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpu. The dogs on the upper level are of hyenoid type, those on the lower are Abyssinian greyhounds.

The nobles, like the Pharaohs of later times, deemed it as their privilege or duty to stalk and destroy these animals, pursuing them even to their dens. The common people preferred attacking the gazelle, the oryx, the mouflon sheep, the ibex, the wild ox, and the ostrich, but did not disdain more humble game, such as the porcupine and long-eared hare: nondescript packs, in which the jackal and the hyena ran side by side with the wolf-dog and the lithe Abyssinian greyhound, scented and retrieved for their master the prey which he had pierced with his arrows. At times a hunter, returning with the dead body of the mother, would be followed by one of her young; or a gazelle, but slightly wounded, would be taken to the village and healed of its hurt.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bas-relief of Ptahhotpu. Above are seen two porcupines, the foremost of which, emerging from his hole, has seized a grasshopper.

Such animals by daily contact with man, were gradually tamed, and formed about his dwelling a motley flock, kept partly for his pleasure and mostly for his profit, and becoming in case of necessity a ready stock of provisions.[**]

** In the same way, before the advent of Europeans, the half-civilized tribes of North America used to keep about their huts whole flocks of different animals, which were tame, but not domesticated.

Efforts were therefore made to enlarge this flock, and the wish to procure animals without seriously injuring them, caused the Egyptians to use the net for birds and the lasso and the bola for quadrupeds,[*]—weapons less brutal than the arrow and the javelin. The bola was made by them of a single rounded stone, attached to a strap about five yards in length. The stone once thrown, the cord twisted round the legs, muzzle, or neck of the animal pursued, and by the attachment thus made the pursuer, using all his strength, was enabled to bring the beast down half strangled. The lasso has no stone attached to it, but a noose prepared beforehand, and the skill of the hunter consists in throwing it round the neck of his victim while running. They caught indifferently, without distinction of size or kind, all that chance brought within their reach. The daily chase kept up these half-tamed flocks of gazelles, wild goats, water-bucks, stocks, and ostriches, and their numbers are reckoned by hundreds on the monuments of the ancient empire.[**]

* Hunting with the bola is constantly represented in the paintings both of the Memphite and Theban periods. Wilkinson has confounded it with lasso-hunting, and his mistake has been reproduced by other Egyptologists. Lasso-hunting is seen in Lepsius, Denhn., ii. 96, in Dumichen, resultate, vol. i. pl. viii., and particularly in the numerous sacrificial scenes where the king is supposed to be capturing the bull of the north or south, previous to offering it to the god.

** As the tombs of the ancient empire show us numerous flocks of gazelles, antelopes, and storks, feeding under the care of shepherds, Fr. Lenormant concluded that the Egyptians of early times had succeeded in domesticating some species, nowadays rebels to restraint. It is my belief that the animals represented were tamed, but not domesticated, and were the result of great hunting expeditions in the desert. The facts which Lenormant brought forward to support his theory may be used against him. For instance, the fawn of the gazelle nourished by its mother does not prove that it was bred in captivity; the gazelle may have been caught before calving, or just after the birth of its young. The fashion of keeping flocks of animals taken from the desert died out between the XIIth and XVIIIth dynasties. At the time of the new empire, they had only one or two solitary animals as pets for women or children, the mummies of which were sometimes buried by the side of their mistresses.

Experience alone taught the hunter to distinguish between those species from which he could draw profit, and others whose wildness made them impossible to domesticate. The subjection of the most useful kinds had not been finished when the historic period opened.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in a Theban tomb of the XVIIIth dynasty.

The ass, the sheep, and the goat were already domesticated, but the pig was still out in the marshes in a semi-wild state, under the care of special herdsmen,[*] and the religious rites preserved the remembrance of the times in which the ox was so little tamed, that in order to capture while grazing the animals needed for sacrifice or for slaughter, it was necessary to use the lasso.[***]

* The hatred of the Egyptians for the pig (Herodotus, ii. 47) is attributed to mythological motives. Lippert thinks this antipathy did not exist in Egypt in primitive times. At the outset the pig would have been the principal food of the people; then, like the dog in other regions, it must have been replaced at the table by animals of a higher order— gazelles, sheep, goats, oxen—and would have thus fallen into contempt. To the excellent reasons given by Lippert could be added others drawn from the study of the Egyptian myths, to prove that the pig has often been highly esteemed. Thus, Isis is represented, down to late times, under the form of a sow, and a sow, whether followed or not by her young is one of the amulets placed in the tomb with the deceased, to secure for him the protection of the goddess.

*** Mariette, Abydos (vol. i. pl. 48 b, 53). To prevent the animal from evading the lasso and escaping during the sacrifice, its right hind foot was fastened to its left horn.

Europeans are astonished to meet nowadays whole peoples who make use of herbs and plants whose flavour and properties are nauseating to us: these are mostly so many legacies from a remote past; for example, castor-oil, with which the Berbers rub their limbs, and with which the fellahin of the Said flavour their bread and vegetables, was preferred before all others by the Egyptians of the Pharaonic age for anointing the body and for culinary use.[*] They had begun by eating indiscriminately every kind of fruit which the country produced. Many of these, when their therapeutic virtues had been learned by experience, were gradually banished as articles of food, and their use restricted to medicine; others fell into disuse, and only reappeared at sacrifices, or at funeral feasts; several varieties continue to be eaten to the present time—the acid fruits of the nabeca and of the carob tree, the astringent figs of the sycamore, the insipid pulp of the dam-palm, besides those which are pleasant to our Western palates, such as the common fig and the date. The vine flourished, at least in Middle and Lower Egypt; from time immemorial the art of making wine from it was known, and even the most ancient monuments enumerate half a dozen famous brands, red or white.[**]

* I have often been obliged, from politeness, when dining with the native agents appointed by the European powers at Port Said, to eat salads and mayonnaise sauces flavoured with castor-oil; the taste was not so disagreeable as might be at first imagined.

** The four kinds of canonical wine, brought respectively from the north, south, east, and west of the country, formed part of the official repast and of the wine-cellar of the deceased from remote antiquity.

Vetches, lupins, beans, chick-peas, lentils, onions, fenugreek,[*] the bamia,[**] the meloukhia,[***] the arum colocasia, all grew wild in the fields, and the river itself supplied its quota of nourishing plants.

* All these species have been found in the tombs and identified by savants in archaeological botany—Kunth, Unger, Schweinfurth (Loret, La Flore Pharaonique, pp. 17, 40, 42, 43, Nos. 33, 97, 102, 104, 105, 106).

** The bamia, Hibiscus esculentus, L., is a plant of the family of the Malvaceae, having a fruit of five divisions, covered with prickly hairs, and pontaining round, white, soft seeds, slightly sweet, but astringent in taste, and very mucilaginous. It figures on the monuments of Pharaonic times.

*** The meloukhia, Corchorus Olitorius, L., is a plant belonging to the Tilliacese, which is chopped up and cooked much the same as endive is with us, but which few Europeans can eat with pleasure, owing to the mucilage it contains. Theophrastus says it was celebrated for its bitterness; it was used as food, however, in the Greek town of Alexandria.



4 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from the Description de l'Egypte, Histoire Naturelle, pl. 61.

Two of the species of lotus which grew in the Nile, the white and the blue, have seed-vessels similar to those of the poppy: the capsules contain small grains of the size of millet-seed. The fruit of the pink lotus "grows on a different stalk from that of the flower, and springs directly from the root; it resembles a honeycomb in form," or, to take a more prosaic simile, the rose of a watering-pot. The upper part has twenty or thirty cavities, "each containing a seed as big as an olive stone, and pleasant to eat either fresh or dried." This is what the ancients called the bean of Egypt. "The yearly shoots of the papyrus are also gathered. After pulling them up in the marshes, the points are cut off and rejected, the part remaining being about a cubit in length. It is eaten as a delicacy and is sold in the markets, but those who are fastidious partake of it only after baking." Twenty different kinds of grain and fruits, prepared by crushing between two stones, are kneaded and baked to furnish cakes or bread; these are often mentioned in the texts as cakes of nabeca, date cakes, and cakes of figs. Lily loaves, made from the roots and seeds of the lotus, were the delight of the gourmand, and appear on the tables of the kings of the XIXth dynasty.[*]

* Tiu, which is the most ancient word for bread, appears in early times to have been used for every kind of paste, whether made with fruits or grain; the more modern word aqu applies specially to bread made from cereals. The lily loaves are mentioned in the Papyrus Anastasi, No. 4, p. 14. 1. 1.

Bread and cakes made of cereals formed the habitual food of the people. Durrah is of African origin; it is the "grain of the South" of the inscriptions. On the other hand, it is supposed that wheat and six-rowed barley came from the region of the Euphrates. Egypt was among the first to procure and cultivate them.[*] The soil there is so kind to man, that in many places no agricultural toil is required.

* The position which wheat and barley occupy in the lists of offerings, proves the antiquity of their existence in Egypt. Mariette found specimens of barley in the tombs of the Ancient Empire at Saqqarah.



2 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

As soon as the water of the Nile retires, the ground is sown without previous preparation, and the grain, falling straight into the mud, grows as vigorously as in the best-ploughed furrows. Where the earth is hard it is necessary to break it up, but the extreme simplicity of the instruments with which this was done shows what a feeble resistance it offered. For a long time the hoe sufficed. It was composed either of a large stone tied to a wooden handle, or was made of two pieces of wood of unequal length, united at one of their extremities, and held together towards the middle by a slack cord: the plough, when first invented was but a slightly enlarged hoe, drawn by oxen. The cultivation of cereals, once established on the banks of the Nile, developed, from earliest times, to such a degree as to supplant all else: hunting, fishing, the rearing of cattle, occupied but a secondary place compared with agriculture, and Egypt became, that which she still remains, a vast granary of wheat. The part of the valley first cultivated was from Gebel Silsileh to the apex of the Delta.[*]

* This was the tradition of all the ancients. Herodotus related that, according to the Egyptians, the whole of Egypt, with the exception of the Theban nome, was a vast swamp previous to the time of Menes. Aristotle adds that the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the area now occupied by the Delta, formed one sea. Cf. pp. 3-5 of this volume, on the formation of the Delta.



2 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

Between the Libyan and Arabian ranges it presents a slightly convex surface, furrowed lengthways by a depression, in the bottom of which the Nile is gathered and enclosed when the inundation is over. In the summer, as soon as the river had risen higher than the top of its banks, the water rushed by the force of gravity towards the lower lands, hollowing in its course long channels, some of which never completely dried up, even when the Nile reached its lowest level.[*] Cultivation was easy in the neighbourhood of these natural reservoirs, but everywhere else the movements of the river were rather injurious than advantageous to man. The inundation scarcely ever covered the higher ground in the valley, which therefore remained unproductive; it flowed rapidly over the lands of medium elevation, and moved so sluggishly in the hollows that they became weedy and stagnant pools.[**]

* The whole description of the damage which can be done by the Nile in places where the inundation is not regulated, is borrowed from Linant de Bellefonds, Memoire sur les principaux travaux d'utilite publique, p. 3.

** This physical configuration of the country explains the existence at a very early date of those gigantic serpents which I have already mentioned.



In any year the portion not watered by the river was invaded by the sand: from the lush vegetation of a hot country, there was but one step to absolute aridity. At the present day an ingeniously established system of irrigation allows the agriculturist to direct and distribute the overflow according to his needs. From Gebel Ain to the sea, the Nile and its principal branches are bordered by long dykes, which closely follow the windings of the river and furnish sufficiently stable embankments. Numerous canals lead off to right and left, directed more or less obliquely towards the confines of the valley; they are divided at intervals by fresh dykes, starting at the one side from the river, and ending on the other either at the Bahr Yusuf or at the rising of the desert. Some of these dykes protect one district only, and consist merely of a bank of earth; others command a large extent of territory, and a breach in them would entail the ruin of an entire province. These latter are sometimes like real ramparts, made of crude brick carefully cemented; a few, as at Qosheish, have a core of hewn stones, which later generations have covered with masses of brickwork, and strengthened with constantly renewed buttresses of earth. They wind across the plain with many unexpected and apparently aimless turns; on closer examination, however, it may be seen that this irregularity is not to be attributed to ignorance or caprice. Experience had taught the Egyptians the art of picking out, upon the almost imperceptible relief of the soil, the easiest lines to use against the inundation: of these they have followed carefully the sinuosities, and if the course of the dykes appears singular, it is to be ascribed to the natural configuration of the ground. Subsidiary embankments thrown up between the principal ones, and parallel to the Nile, separate the higher ground bordering the river from the low lands on the confines of the valley; they divide the larger basins into smaller divisions of varying area, in which the irrigation is regulated by means of special trenches. As long as the Nile is falling, the dwellers on its banks leave their canals in free communication with it; but they dam them up towards the end of the winter, just before the return of the inundation, and do not reopen them till early in August, when the new flood is at its height. The waters then flowing in by the trenches are arrested by the nearest transverse dyke and spread over the fields. When they have stood there long enough to saturate the ground, the dyke is pierced, and they pour into the next basin until they are stopped by a second dyke, which in its turn forces them again to spread out on either side. This operation is renewed from dyke to dyke, till the valley soon becomes a series of artificial ponds, ranged one above another, and flowing one into another from Grebel Silsileh to the apex of the Delta. In autumn, the mouth of each ditch is dammed up anew, in order to prevent the mass of water from flowing back into the stream. The transverse dykes, which have been cut in various places, are also repaired, and the basins become completely landlocked, separated by narrow causeways. In some places, the water thus imprisoned is so shallow that it is soon absorbed by the soil; in others, it is so deep, that after it has been kept in for several weeks, it is necessary to let it run off into a neighbouring depression, or straight into the river itself.



1 Bas-relief from the tomb of Ti; drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by E. Brugsch-Bey.

History has left us no account of the vicissitudes of the struggle in which the Egyptians were engaged with the Nile, nor of the time expended in bringing it to a successful issue. Legend attributes the idea of the system and its partial working out to the god Osiris: then Menes, the first mortal king, is said to have made the dyke of Qosheish, on which depends the prosperity of the Delta and Middle Egypt, and the fabulous Mceris is supposed to have extended the blessings of the irrigation to the Fayum. In reality, the regulation of the inundation and the making of cultivable land are the work of unrecorded generations who peopled the valley. The kings of the historic period had only to maintain and develop certain points of what had already been done, and Upper Egypt is to this day chequered by the network of waterways with which its earliest inhabitants covered it. The work must have begun simultaneously at several points, without previous agreement, and, as it were, instinctively. A dyke protecting a village, a canal draining or watering some small province, demanded the efforts of but few individuals; then the dykes would join one another, the canals would be prolonged till they met others, and the work undertaken by chance would be improved, and would spread with the concurrence of an ever-increasing population. What happened at the end of last century, shows us that the system grew and was developed at the expense of considerable quarrels and bloodshed. The inhabitants of each district carried out the part of the work most conducive to their own interest, seizing the supply of water, keeping it and discharging it at pleasure, without considering whether they were injuring their neighbours by depriving them of their supply or by flooding them; hence arose perpetual strife and fighting. It became imperative that the rights of the weaker should be respected, and that the system of distribution should be co-ordinated, for the country to accept a beginning at least of social organization analogous to that which it acquired later: the Nile thus determined the political as well as the physical constitution of Egypt.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Dumichen, Resultate, vol. ii. pl. vit

The country was divided among communities, whose members were supposed to be descended from the same seed (pait) and to belong to the same family (paitu): the chiefs of them were called ropaitu, the guardians, or pastors of the family, and in later times their name became a title applicable to the nobility in general. Families combined and formed groups of various importance under the authority of a head chief—ropaitu-ha. They were, in fact, hereditary lords, dispensing justice, levying taxes in kind on their subordinates, reserving to themselves the redistribution of land, leading their men to, battle, and sacrificing to the gods.[*] The territories over which they exercised authority formed small states, whose boundaries even now, in some places, can be pointed out with certainty. The principality of the Terebinth[**] occupied the very heart of Egypt, where the valley is widest, and the course of the Nile most advantageously disposed by nature—a country well suited to be the cradle of an infant civilization. Siaut (Siut), the capital, is built almost at the foot of the Libyan range, on a strip of land barely a mile in width, which separates the river from the hills. A canal surrounds it on three sides, and makes, as it were, a natural ditch about its walls; during the inundation it is connected with the mainland only by narrow causeways—shaded with mimosas—and looking like a raft of verdure aground in the current.[***]

* These prerogatives were still exercised by the princes of the nomes under the Middle and New Empires; they only enjoyed them then by the good will of the reigning sovereign.

** The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to this principality is atf, iatf, iotf: it is only by a process of elimination that I have come to identify it with the Pistacia Terebinthus, L., which furnished the Egyptians with the scented resin snutir.

*** Boudier's drawing, reproduced on p. 31, and taken from a photograph by Beato, gives most faithfully the aspect presented by the plain and the modern town of Siout during the inundation.



The site is as happy as it is picturesque; not only does the town command the two arms of the river, opening or closing the waterway at will, but from time immemorial the most frequented of the routes into Central Africa has terminated at its gates, bringing to it the commerce of the Soudan. It held sway, at the outset, over both banks, from range to range, northward as far as Deyrut, where the true Bahr Yusuf leaves the Nile, and southward to the neighbourhood of Gebel Sheikh Haridi. The extent and original number of the other principalities is not so easily determined.

The most important, to the north of Siut, were those of the Hare and the Oleander. The principality of the Hare never reached the dimensions of that of its neighbour the Terebinth, but its chief town was Khmunu, whose antiquity was so remote, that a universally accepted tradition made it the scene of the most important acts of creation.[*] That of the Oleander, on the contrary, was even larger than that of the Terebinth, and from Hininsu, its chief governor ruled alike over the marshes of the Fayum and the plains of Beni-Suef.[**] To the south, Apu on the right bank governed a district so closely shut in between a bend of the Nile and two spurs of the range, that its limits have never varied much since ancient times. Its inhabitants were divided in their employment between weaving and the culture of cereals. From early times they possessed the privilege of furnishing clothing to a large part of Egypt, and their looms, at the present day, still make those checked or striped "melayahs" which the fellah women wear over their long blue tunics.[***]

* Khmunu, the present Ashmunein, is the Hermopolis of the Greeks, the town of the god Thot.

** Hininsu is the Heraecleopolis Magna of the Greeks, the present Henassieh, called also Ahnas-el-Medineh. The Egyptian word for the tree which gives its name to this principality, is Narit. Loret has shown that this tree, Narit, is the oleander.

*** Apu was the Panopolis or Chemmis of the Greeks, the town of the god Min or ithyphallic Khimu. Its manufactures of linen are mentioned by Strabo; the majority of the beautiful Coptic woven fabrics and embroideries which have been brought to Europe lately, come from the necropolis of the Arab period at Apu.

Beyond Apu, Thinis, the Girgeh of the Arabs, situate on both banks of the river, rivalled Khmunu in antiquity and Siut in wealth: its plains still produce the richest harvests and feed the most numerous herds of sheep and oxen in the Said.



As we approach the cataract, information becomes scarcer. Qubti and Aunu of the South, the Coptos and Hermonthis of the Greeks, shared peaceably the plain occupied later on by Thebes and its temples, and Nekhabit and Zobu watched over the safety of Egypt. Nekhabit soon lost its position as a frontier town, and that portion of Nubia lying between Gebel Silsileh and the rapids of Syene formed a kind of border province, of which Nubit-Ombos was the principal sanctuary and Abu-Elephantine the fortress: beyond this were the barbarians, and those inaccessible regions whence the Nile descended upon our earth.

The organization of the Delta, it would appear, was more slowly brought about. It must have greatly resembled that of the lowlands of Equatorial Africa, towards the confluence of the Bahr el Abiad and the Bahr el Ghazal. Great tracts of mud, difficult to describe as either solid or liquid, marshes dotted here and there with sandy islets, bristling with papyrus reeds, water-lilies, and enormous plants through which the arms of the Nile sluggishly pushed their ever-shifting course, low-lying wastes intersected with streams and pools, unfit for cultivation and scarcely available for pasturing cattle. The population of such districts, engaged in a ceaseless struggle with nature, always preserved relatively ruder manners, and a more rugged and savage character, impatient of all authority. The conquest of this region began from the outer edge only. A few principalities were established at the apex of the Delta in localities where the soil had earliest been won from the river. It appears that one of these divisions embraced the country south of and between the bifurcation of the Nile: Aunu of the North, the Heliopolis of the Greeks, was its capital. In very early times the principality was divided, and formed three new states, independent of each other. Those of Aunu and the Haunch were opposite to each other, the first on the Arabian, the latter on the Libyan bank of the Nile. The district of the White Wall marched with that of the Haunch on the north, and on the south touched the territory of the Oleander. Further down the river, between the more important branches, the governors of Sai's and of Bubastis, of Athribis and of Busiris, shared among themselves the primitive Delta. Two frontier provinces of unequal size, the Arabian on the east in the Wady Tumilat, and the Libyan on the west to the south of Lake Mareotis, defended the approaches of the country from the attacks of Asiatic Bedawins and of African nomads. The marshes of the interior and the dunes of the littoral, were not conducive to the development of any great industry or civilization. They only comprised tracts of thinly populated country, like the principalities of the Harpoon and of the Cow, and others whose limits varied from century to century with the changing course of the river. The work of rendering the marshes salubrious and of digging canals, which had been so successful in the Nile Valley, was less efficacious in the Delta, and proceeded more slowly. Here the embankments were not supported by a mountain chain: they were continued at random across the marshes, cut at every turn to admit the waters of a canal or of an arm of the river. The waters left their usual bed at the least disturbing influence, and made a fresh course for themselves across country. If the inundation were delayed, the soft and badly drained soil again became a slough: should it last but a few weeks longer than usual, the work of several generations was for a long time undone. The Delta of one epoch rarely presented the same aspect as that of previous periods, and Northern Egypt never became as fully mistress of her soil as the Egypt of the south.



These first principalities, however small they appear to us, were yet too large to remain undivided. In those times of slow communication, the strong attraction which a capital exercised over the provinces under its authority did not extend over a wide radius. That part of the population of the Terebinth, living sufficiently near to Siut to come into the town for a few hours in the morning, returning in the evening to the villages when business was done, would not feel any desire to withdraw from the rule of the prince who governed there. On the other hand, those who lived outside that restricted circle were forced to seek elsewhere some places of assembly to attend the administration of justice, to sacrifice in common to the national gods, and to exchange the produce of the fields and of local manufactures. Those towns which had the good fortune to become such rallying-points naturally played the part of rivals to the capital, and their chiefs, with the district whose population, so to speak, gravitated around them, tended to become independent of the prince. When they succeeded in doing this, they often preserved for the new state thus created, the old name, slightly modified by the addition of an epithet. The primitive territory of Siut was in this way divided into three distinct communities; two, which remained faithful to the old emblem of the tree—the Upper Terebinth, with Siut itself in the centre, and the Lower Terebinth, with Kusit to the north; the third, in the south and east, took as their totem the immortal serpent which dwelt in their mountains, and called themselves the Serpent Mountain, whose chief town was that of the Sparrow Hawk. The territory of the Oleander produced by its dismemberment the principality of the Upper Oleander, that of the Lower Oleander, and that of the Knife. The territory of the Harpoon in the Delta divided itself into the Western and Eastern Harpoon. The fission in most cases could not have been accomplished without struggles; but it did take place, and all the principalities having a domain of any considerable extent had to submit to it, however they may have striven to avoid it. This parcelling out was continued as circumstances afforded opportunity, until the whole of Egypt, except the half desert districts about the cataract, became but an agglomeration of petty states nearly equal in power and population.[*]

* Examples of the subdivision of ancient nomes and the creation of fresh nomes are met with long after primitive times. We find, for example, the nome of the Western Harpoon divided under the Greeks and Romans into two districts—that of the Harpoon proper, of which the chief town was Sonti- nofir; and that of Ranunr, with the Onuphis of classical geographers for its capital.

The Greeks called them nomes, and we have borrowed the word from them; the natives named them in several ways, the most ancient term being "nuit," which may be translated domain, and the most common appellation in recent times being "hospu," which signifies district. The number of the nomes varied considerably in the course of centuries: the hieroglyphic monuments and classical authors fixed them sometimes at thirty-six, sometimes at forty, sometimes at forty-four, or even fifty. The little that we know of their history, up to the present time, explains the reason of this variation. Ceaselessly quarrelled over by the princely families who possessed them, the nomes were alternately humbled and exalted by civil wars, marriages, and conquest, which caused them continually to pass into fresh hands, either entire or divided. The Egyptians, whom we are accustomed to consider as a people respecting the established order of things, and conservative of ancient tradition, showed themselves as restless and as prone to modify or destroy the work of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability, which we suspect or know to have been characteristic of most other Oriental nations. One thing alone remained stable among them in the midst of so many revolutions, and which prevented them from losing their individuality and from coalescing in a common unity. This was the belief in and the worship of one particular deity. If the little capitals of the petty states whose origin is lost in a remote past—Edfu and Denderah, Nekhabit and Buto, Siufc, Thinis, Khmunu, Sais, Bubastis, Athribis—had only possessed that importance which resulted from the presence of an ambitious petty prince, or from the wealth of their inhabitants, they would never have passed safe and sound through the long centuries of existence which they enjoyed from the opening to the close of Egyptian history. Fortune raised their chiefs, some even to the rank of rulers of the world, and in turn abased them: side by side with the earthly ruler, whose glory was but too often eclipsed, there was enthroned in each nome a divine ruler, a deity, a god of the domain, "nutir nuiti," whose greatness never perished. The princely families might be exiled or become extinct, the extent of the territory might diminish or increase, the town might be doubled in size and population or fall in ruins: the god lived on through all these vicissitudes, and his presence alone preserved intact the rights of the state over which he reigned as sovereign. If any disaster befell his worshippers, his temple was the spot where the survivors of the catastrophe rallied around him, their religion preventing them from mixing with the inhabitants of neighbouring towns and from becoming lost among them. The survivors multiplied with that extraordinary rapidity which is the characteristic of the Egyptian fellah, and a few years of peace sufficed to repair losses which apparently were irreparable. Local religion was the tie which bound together those divers elements of which each principality was composed, and as long as it remained, the nomes remained; when it vanished, they disappeared with it.



CHAPTER II.—THE GODS OF EGYPT

THEIR NUMBER AND NATURE—THE FEUDAL GODS, LIVING AND DEAD—TRIADS—— THE TEMPLES AND PRIESTHOOD—THE COSMOGONIES OF THE DELTA——THE ENNEADS OF HELIOPOLIS AND HERMOPOLIS.

_Multiplicity of the Egyptian gods: the commonalty of the gods, its varieties, human, animal, and intermediate between man and beast; gods of foreign origin, indigenous gods, and the contradictory forms with which they were invested in accordance with various conceptions of their nature.

The Star-gods—The Sun-god as the Eye of the Shy; as a bird, as a calf, and as a man; its barks, voyages round the world, and encounters with the serpent Apopi—The Moon-god and its enemies—The Star-gods: the Haunch of the Ox, the Hippopotamus, the Lion, the five Horus-planets; Sothis Sirius, and Sahu Orion.

The feudal gods and their classes: the Nile-gods, the earth-gods, the sky-gods and the sun-god, the Horus-gods—The equality of feudal gods and goddesses; their persons, alliances, and marriages: their children—The triads and their various developments.

The nature of the gods: the double, the soul, the body, death of men and gods, and their fate after death—The necessity for preserving the body, mummification—Dead gods the gods of the dead—The living gods, their temples and images—The gods of the people, trees, serpents, family fetiches—The theory of prayer and sacrifice: the servants of the temples, the property of the gods, the sacerdotal colleges.

The cosmogonies of the Delta: Sibu and Nait, Osiris and Isis, SU and Nephthys—Heliopolis and its theological schools: Ra, his identification with Horus, his dual nature, and the conception of Atumu—The Heliopolitan Enneads: formation of the Great Ennead—Thot and the Hermopolitan Ennead: creation by articulate words and by voice alone—Diffusion of the Enneads: their connection with the local triads, the god One and the god Eight—The one and only gods._



THE GODS OF EGYPT

The incredible number of religious scenes to be found among the representations on the ancient monuments of Egypt is at first glance very striking. Nearly every illustration in the works of Egyptologists brings before us the figure of some deity receiving with an impassive countenance the prayers and offerings of a worshipper. One would think that the country had been inhabited for the most part by gods, and contained just sufficient men and animals to satisfy the requirements of their worship.



1 The goddess Naprit, Napit; bas-relief from the first chamber of Osiris, on the east side of the great temple of Denderah. Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

On penetrating into this mysterious world, we are confronted by an actual rabble of gods, each one of whom has always possessed but a limited and almost unconscious existence. They severally represented a function, a moment in the life of man or of the universe; thus Naprit was identified with the ripe ear, or the grain of wheat;[**]

** The word naprit means grain, the grain of wheat. The grain-god is represented in the tomb of Seti I. as a man wearing two full ears of wheat or barley upon his head. He is mentioned in the Hymn to the Nile about the same date, and in two or three other texts of different periods. The goddess Naprit, or Napit, to whom reference is here made, was his duplicate; her head-dress is a sheaf of corn, as in the illustration.

*** This goddess, whose name expresses and whose form personifies the brick or stone couch, the child-bed or -chair, upon which women in labour bowed themselves, is sometimes subdivided into two or four secondary divinities. She is mentioned along with Shait, destiny, and Raninit, suckling. Her part of fairy godmother at the cradle of the new-born child is indicated in the passage of the Westcar Papyrus giving a detailed account of the births of three kings of the fifth dynasty. She is represented in human form, and often wears upon her head two long palm-shoots, curling over at their ends.

Maskhonit appeared by the child's cradle at the very moment of its birth;[*] and Raninit presided over the naming and the nurture of the newly born.[*] Neither Raninit, the fairy godmother, nor Maskhonit exercised over nature as a whole that sovereign authority which we are accustomed to consider the primary attribute of deity. Every day of every year was passed by the one in easing the pangs of women in travail; by the other, in choosing for each baby a name of an auspicious sound, and one which would afterwards serve to exorcise the influences of evil fortune. No sooner were their tasks accomplished in one place than they hastened to another, where approaching birth demanded their presence and their care. From child-bed to child-bed they passed, and if they fulfilled the single offices in which they were accounted adepts, the pious asked nothing more of them. Bands of mysterious cynocephali haunting the Eastern and the Western mountains concentrated the whole of their activity on one passing moment of the day. They danced and chattered in the East for half an hour, to salute the sun at his rising, even as others in the West hailed him on his entrance into night.[**]

* Raninit presides over the child's suckling, but she also gives him his name, and hence, his fortune. She is on the whole the nursing goddess. Sometimes she is represented as a human-headed woman, or as lioness-headed, most frequently with the head of a serpent; she is also the urseus, clothed, and wearing two long plumes on her head, and a simple urous, as represented in the illustration on p. 169.

** This is the subject of a vignette in the Book of the Dead, ch. xvi., where the cynocephali are placed in echelon upon the slopes of the hill on the horizon, right and left of the radiant solar disk, to which they offer worship by gesticulations.

It was the duty of certain genii to open gates in Hades, or to keep the paths daily traversed by the sun.[*] These genii were always at their posts, never free to leave them, and possessed no other faculty than that of punctually fulfilling their appointed offices. Their existence, generally unperceived, was suddenly revealed at the very moment when the specific acts of their lives were on the point of accomplishment. These being completed, the divinities fell back into their state of inertia, and were, so to speak, reabsorbed by their functions until the next occasion.[***]

* Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35.

*** The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expression than our word "absorption" to express this idea. It was said of objects wherein these genii concealed themselves, and whence they issued in order to re-enter them immediately, that these forms ate them, or that they ate their own forms.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from Champollion's copies, made from the tombs of Beni-Hassan. To the right is the sha, one of the animals of Sit, and an exact image of the god with his stiff and arrow-like tail. Next comes the safir, the griffin; and, lastly, we have the serpent-headed saza.

Scarcely visible even by glimpses, they were not easily depicted; their real forms being often unknown, these were approximately conjectured from their occupations. The character and costume of an archer, or of a spear-man, were ascribed to such as roamed through Hades, to pierce the dead with arrows or with javelins. Those who prowled around souls to cut their throats and hack them to pieces were represented as women armed with knives, carvers—donit—or else as lacerators—nokit. Some appeared in human form; others as animals—bulls or lions, rams or monkeys, serpents, fish, ibises, hawks; others dwelt in inanimate things, such as trees,[*] sistrums, stakes stuck in the ground;[**] and lastly, many betrayed a mixed origin in their combinations of human and animal forms. These latter would be regarded by us as monsters; to the Egyptians, they were beings, rarer perhaps than the rest, but not the less real, and their like might be encountered in the neighbourhood of Egypt.[***]

* Thus, the sycamores planted on the edge of the desert were supposed to be inhabited by Hathor, Nuit, Selkit, Nit, or some other goddess. In vignettes representing the deceased as stopping before one of these trees and receiving water and loaves of bread, the bust of the goddess generally appears from amid her sheltering foliage. But occasionally, as on the sarcophagus of Petosiris, the transformation is complete, and the trunk from which the branches spread is the actual body of the god or goddess. Finally, the whole body is often hidden, and only the arm of the goddess to be seen emerging from the midst of the tree, with an overflowing libation vase in her hand.

** The trunk of a tree, disbranched, and then set up in the ground, seems to me the origin of the Osirian emblem called tat or didu. The symbol was afterwards so conventionalized as to represent four columns seen in perspective, one capital overtopping another; it thus became the image of the four pillars which uphold the world.

*** The belief in the real existence of fantastic animals was first noted by Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. i. pp. 117, 118, 132, and vol. ii. p. 213. Until then, scholars only recognized the sphinx, and other Egyptian monsters, as allegorical combinations by which the priesthood claimed to give visible expression in one and the same being to physical or moral qualities belonging to several different beings. The later theory has now been adopted by Wiedemann, and by most contemporary Egyptologists.

How could men who believed themselves surrounded by sphinxes and griffins of flesh and blood doubt that there were bull-headed and hawk-headed divinities with human busts? The existence of such paradoxical creatures was proved by much authentic testimony; more than one hunter had distinctly seen them as they ran along the furthest planes of the horizon, beyond the herds of gazelles of which he was in chase; and shepherds dreaded them for their flocks as truly as they dreaded the lions, or the great felidse of the desert.[*]

* At Beni-Hassan and in Thebes many of the fantastic animals mentioned in the text, griffins, hierosphinxes, serpent- headed lions, are placed along with animals which might be encountered by local princes hunting in the desert.

This nation of gods, like nations of men, contained foreign elements, the origin of which was known to the Egyptians themselves. They knew that Hathor, the milch cow, had taken up her abode in their land from very ancient times, and they called her the Lady of Puanit, after the name of her native country. Bisu had followed her in course of time, and claimed his share of honours and worship along with her. He first appeared as a leopard; then he became a man clothed in a leopard's skin, but of strange countenance and alarming character, a big-headed dwarf with high cheek-bones, and a wide and open mouth, whence hung an enormous tongue; he was at once jovial and martial, the friend of the dance and of battle.[*]